Staple, or Stapled Inn, has been so called since the beginning of the fourteenth century (1313). The Staple Inn, or House, was the Warehouse in which commodities, especially wool, chargeable with export duties, might be stored, weighed, and taxed. It was the business of the Company of Staplers, established in the reign of Edward III., ‘to see the Custom duly paid.’[73] The proximity of Portpool Market—or Ely Fair, as it was called, after the Bishops of Ely, whose large property lay on the North side of Holborn—doubtless added much to the importance of this Staple Inn.
The site of this Inn may possibly have been included in the Old Temple property, which the Templars sold to the Bishopric of Lincoln when they moved South (Chapter I.). However that may be, some time in the fifteenth century Staple Inn ceased to have any claim to be a Customs-house,[74] and was given over to the Lawyers. It was not a surprising change, for the conduct of the King’s wool-trade and the settlement of the disputes that must have arisen in connection with the clearing of woollen merchandise for export were likely to have made ‘Le Stapled Halle’ long ere this a home of clerks and apprentices of the Law.[75] The steps by which this home of lawyers passed into the control of the ‘Grand Company and Fellows’ of Staple Inn, with a Principal and Pensioner at their Head, are not known. They must, at least, have been taken long before ‘the first Grant of the inheritance thereof to the Ancients of Gray’s Inn’ mentioned by Dugdale as being dated in the twentieth year of Henry VIII. The transaction referred to would seem to have been rather in the nature of the creation of a trust. At any rate, Staple Inn became an appendance of Gray’s Inn. But by the end of the last century it had long ceased to fulfil the functions either of a Customs-house or of an Inn for Law-students.
Finally, in 1884, the Society of Staple sold their property, and the Prudential Assurance Company presently acquired it. Under their public-spirited and artistic care, Mr. Alfred Waterhouse made a practical and scholarly restoration, displacing from
STAPLE INN HALL AND COURTYARD
The Hall was built between 1580 and 1592, and has a fine hammer-beam roof, and some old stained glass in its windows.
the frontage the plaster with which the eighteenth century had disfigured it.
The most famous occupant of rooms in Staple Inn was Dr. Johnson (1759), who came here after he had completed his ‘Dixonary.’ It was here that he wrote his little romance of ‘Rasselas,’ in order to pay for his mother’s funeral.
The Mackworth coat-of-arms over a modest doorway between 22 and 23 Holborn used to indicate until recently the entrance to Barnard’s Inn, the other Inn attached to Gray’s Inn.