The Manor presently escheated to the King, and licence was granted to the previous tenants to alienate to the House of Jesus of Bethlehem at Shene (i.e., Richmond) in Surrey, both the Manor of Portepoole and the lands in the parish of St. Andrew of Holborn, and the advowson of the chantry pertaining thereto, to be held to the annual value of ten marks (£6 13s. 4d.). Then, in 1516, occurs the first distinct mention of a Society of Lawyers settled in these four messuages, with their gardens, windmill, and chapel. For an association consisting of two Serjeants and four Barristers, representatives of a Society of Students of Law, took out a lease in that year of the Manor of Portpool from the Prior and Convent of Shene at a rent of £6 13s. 4d. This lease was renewed, at the same rent, by Henry VIII. when, at the dissolution of the monasteries, the Inn, together with the whole of the Priory of Shene, passed into the hands of the Crown. The rent was commuted into a freehold by the Commissioners of the Commonwealth in 1651, upon payment of a heavy fine. It was resumed by Charles II., the sale being declared null and void, and was sold to Sir Philip Matthews. Gray’s Inn thenceforth paid the old rent to him and his heirs, until, in 1733, the Benchers bought the freehold of the property from them. It is now the absolute legal property of the Society of Gray’s Inn.
By the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Gray’s Inn had risen into great popularity. The Inns of Court now formed one of the leading Universities of England—‘the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the Kingdom,’ Ben Jonson declared. And chief among the Colleges of Law, with almost double the number of students in any other Inn, stood Gray’s Inn. The great Lord Burghley always refers to it with the deepest affection, mentioning it as ‘the place where myself came forthe unto service.’
Its popularity, however, can hardly have been due to the luxuriousness of its chambers, which, we are told, were ‘disagreeably incommodious.’
Dugdale remarks that there was ‘not much of beauty or uniformity’ in the buildings, ‘the structure of the more ancient having been not only very mean, but of so slender capacity that even the Ancients of this House were necessitated to lodge double’—as, for instance, in Henry VIII.’s day, Sir Thomas Nevile wrote to say that he would accept of Mr. Attorney-General to be his bedfellow in his Chamber there.
In 1688, it appears, the Inn was divided into three Courts—Holborn, Coney, and Middle or Chapel Court. Coney and Chapel Courts were afterwards converted into Gray’s Inn Square—a title conferred upon them in 1793.
Holborn Court must have included South Square and Field Court, the latter so called from its being a passage into the Red Lion Fields,[60] where a Bowling-Green was laid out in the seventeenth century. When, at the close of that century, Dr. Barebone, the great builder, bought Red Lion Fields and began to build upon that site, ‘the Gentlemen of Graies Inn took notice of it, and thinking it an injury to them, went with a considerable body of 100 persons, upon which the workmen assaulted the gentlemen, and flung bricks at them, and the gentlemen at them again, so a sharp engagement ensued, but the gentlemen routed them at last.’[61]
The principal entrance to Gray’s Inn was formerly from Gray’s Inn Lane. It was not till the end of the sixteenth century that, as Stow puts it, ‘the Gentlemen of this House purchased a messuage and a curtillage situate upon the south side of this House, and thereupon erected a fayre gate and a gatehouse, for a more convenient and more honourable passage into the High Street of Holborne, whereof this house stood in much neede, for the former gates were rather posterns than gates.’
By Gray’s Inn Gate, Jacob Tonson, Pope’s publisher, kept his shop before moving to Fleet Street. Soon after Holborn Gate was erected, the shop underneath was taken by another bookseller, one Henry Tomes by name, who, appropriately enough, published the first edition of Bacon’s ‘Advancement of Learning.’
The Entrance Gate from Holborn leads us from the throng and bustle of the streets, the din and rush of the City, and the noisome fumes of twopenny tubes and motor-buses, through a dull and narrow alley into South Square—a large, irregular quadrangle of pleasing, harmonious eighteenth-century houses. Opposite the entrance passage a detached block faces us (No. 10), containing the Common Room, admirably rebuilt in 1905. This is connected by an archway with the Hall, Chapel, and Library.