The Gate House forms the offices of the Norwich Union Fire and Life Assurance Society. The whole Inn was burnt down in the Great Fire, and was afterwards rebuilt (1670) by means of voluntary subscriptions on the part of the Serjeants. But upon the expiration of the lease then granted to them, the Serjeants abandoned their Inn, with its fine chapel, hall, and houses that surrounded the Court, and united with their brethren in Chancery Lane. The Inn was afterwards pulled down and rebuilt from the designs of Adam, the architect of the Adelphi, for private houses and Assurance offices. The ‘elegant building,’ as Herbert calls it, in the classical style, which was erected on the site of the old Hall, formed at first the offices of the Amicable Assurance Company, and is now occupied by the Church of England Sunday School Institute. The quiet quadrangle is surrounded by pleasing eighteenth-century houses, with decorated porches and fine iron-work. Some of them have extinguishers for the links in front of their porches. Loftie noted the initials “S. I.” and the date 1669 upon one survivor of the Serjeants’ rebuilding.

The Inn, which the Serjeants joined when they left Fleet Street, had been occupied by their brethren since the end of the fourteenth century. But, though leased to their representatives by the Bishops of Ely, who held the freehold, or their lessees, it was not called Serjeants’ Inn until 1484. Prior to that date it was known as Faryngdon’s Inn in Chancellor’s Lane. Here all the Judges, as having been Serjeants-at-Law before their elevation to the Bench, had chambers assigned to them.

A plain, unpleasing, stuccoed, Early Victorian building now faces Chancery Lane, and drops as a screen of ugliness across the old brick buildings within. This we owe to Sir Robert Smirke, who rebuilt the Inn (1837-1838), with the exception of the old Hall, which was ‘approached by a handsome flight of stone steps and balustrade.’ So Herbert, who says that in his day (1804) all the buildings were modern. He describes the Inn as then consisting of two small Courts, the principal entrance from Chancery Lane fronting the Hall, and the second Court communicating with Clifford’s Inn by a small passage. As there is an exit from Clifford’s Inn to Fetter Lane, it is thus possible to pass from Chancery Lane to Fetter[82] Lane without going into Fleet Street. When, in 1877, the Brotherhood of Serjeants dissolved, they sold the Inn for some £60,000 to Serjeant Cox, and divided the proceeds, but gave the twenty-six valuable portraits of their predecessors, that had adorned the walls of the Hall, to the National Portrait Gallery. The tiny Hall, the single, narrow Court of plain stuccoed houses, and some trees and turf behind some railings, remain to remind us of the Serjeants’ Inn and the Serjeants’ Garden, where Lord Keeper Guildford would take his ease, and where the great roll of English Judges have had chambers. But the beautiful old stained glass windows of the Hall and Chapel, which bore the arms of the various members, together with the heraldic device of the Order—an ibis proper on a shield or—were removed by the purchaser to his residence of Millhill, where he built a chamber, the facsimile of the Hall, for their reception.

Such is the story of the Inns of Court, which have gone on from strength to strength, and of the Inns of Chancery and the Serjeants’ Inns, which have almost vanished, together with the Societies which made them famous, from off the changing face of London. It is a story which, though briefly told, and told by a layman who makes no claim to originality of material, can hardly fail to be of interest to those who are alive to the charm of the old things of the Capital.

It brings before us, not only the vision of the great Justiciars who transacted the business of the King’s Courts, of the great Lawyers who built up the mighty fabric of English Law, and the great Judges who defended the rights and liberties and progress of the people, but also many of the greatest names in literature and architecture. The precincts of the Temple remind us of the Order of the Red-Cross Knights, and near at hand are the vacated Inns of that other Order which has been likewise dissolved. For we see no more, save in the light of imagination, either the mail-clad figures of the Templars in their white cloaks stamped with the red cross, or the Serjeants in their white lawn coifs and parti-coloured gowns, wending their way from the Temple Hall to the shrine of St. Thomas.

The silver tongue of Harcourt is mute as the impassioned eloquence of Burke and Sheridan, yet these buildings seem to echo with their voices, with the sonorous declamation of Dr. Johnson, or the witty stammer of Charles Lamb. There, in Gray’s Inn, we still seem to see the figure of Francis Bacon, pacing the walks with Raleigh, talking of trees and politics and high adventure; from the Gateway of Lincoln’s Inn, and past the red bricks laid by Ben Jonson, when Wolsey was Cardinal, the form of Sir Thomas More emerges; and across the way the thin, alert figure of Sir Edward Coke steps briskly from his tiny garden into Old Serjeants’ Inn.

Here Dickens talks with Thackeray, and Blackstone scowls at Goldsmith; there, in the Middle Temple Hall, Queen Elizabeth leads the dance with Sir Christopher Hatton, and the rafters ring with the music of Shakespeare’s voice and Shakespeare’s poetry. And the buildings themselves are the works of a noble army of English Architects, admirable creations and memorials of the genius of Sir Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones, Adam, Hardwick, Street, and of the unknown builders of Norman, Gothic, and Elizabethan things. These facts once known, not all the dirt and fog of London air, not all the noise and distraction of City business and legal affairs, can ever again wholly obscure the charm, the romance, the historical and literary associations, which haunt these homes of so many great English Lawyers, Writers, and Administrators.

APPENDIX

The following is a list of the chief authorities referred to in the foregoing pages: