The Inns of Court

by Cecil Headlam

Of these ten lesser Inns, mentioned by Fortescue as having, in his day, each one hundred students studying the first principles of the Law and preparing to pass into the four Inns of Court, all have been now dissolved, and many of them have been destroyed.

In the days when Clerks of Chancery and Attorneys dwelt in these Inns, together with embryo Barristers who were learning the rudiments of their legal craft, Stow neatly describes them as Provinces, for they were severally subject to one of the Inns of Court. Their relationship is obscure. Mr. Inderwick[72] compares it to that which the smaller seaport towns of the Kent and Sussex coast bore to the more important Cinque Ports.

An Inn of Court appointed Readers for its Inns of Chancery, settled the precedence of their Principals, admitted their members at a reduced fee, and entertained their Ancients at grand feasts and festivals. Each Inn of Chancery had its own Hall for meetings, moots, readings, and festivity, but none could boast of a Chapel of its own. It was only after having studied the necessary exercises at these ‘provincial’ Inns, including boltings, moots, and putting of cases, that the young students or apprentices were admitted as students at one of the four Inns of Court.

Of the Inns of Chancery, Staple Inn and Barnard’s Inn were attached to Gray’s Inn; Clifford’s Inn, Clement’s Inn, and Lyon’s Inn to the Inner Temple; Furnival’s Inn and Thavie’s Inn to Lincoln’s Inn; and to the Middle Temple, New Inn and Strand Inn.

Of these by far the most interesting and picturesque at the present time is Staple Inn.

It was of this ‘little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles’ that Dickens wrote in ‘Edwin Drood’:

‘It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another: “Let us play at country,” and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings.’

Nothing could be more striking or delightful than the block of quaint old buildings, with its overhanging stories of timber and rough-cast, and its gabled roof. The preservation of this delightful specimen of Elizabethan domestic architecture, which stands at Holborn Bars like an island of art in an ocean of crude ugliness, we owe to the wisdom and good taste of the Directors of the Prudential Assurance Company, to whom the site now belongs. It is a pleasure to express one’s gratitude to them.

Staple Inn Hall, which forms the south side of the first Court within the old entrance archway facing Holborn, was built and embellished between 1580 and 1592. The frontage dates from about the same time, so that Sir George Buck, writing in 1615, could describe it as ‘the fayrest Inn of Chancery in this University.’ The Hall is now used for the Institute of Actuaries. It retains a delightful little louvre, with a bell in a cupola. Mullioned windows and a charming Gothic doorway (1753) open, on the far side of the Hall, upon the garden front.

Beyond this old sunk garden, which is bounded by a terrace and iron railing, the Patent Office occupies part of what was once the property of the Inn. To the west the garden is overshadowed by the flamboyant atrocity of a gross Bank building. The houses which form these quiet courts were for the most part rebuilt in the eighteenth century. No. 10, in the second Court, is that immortalized by Dickens in ‘Edwin Drood’ (Chapter XI.). It was rebuilt in 1747, and the initials over the doorway do not stand for Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler, nor for any other of the phrases the humourist suggests, but for plain Principal John Thomson, who ruled in that year.