Only the benchers and members of Lincoln’s Inn may use the elm-shaded gardens. They not only fulfil Pepys’ prophecy that they would be very pretty, but they had a useful war record, as a memorial tablet shows.
I am told that the Curfew is still rung at Lincoln’s Inn. At a quarter to nine each evening the chief porter climbs to the tower of the chapel and when the hour has struck he sounds the curfew fifty times. The bell used was brought from Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1596.
Record Office
“Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.”
Wordsworth.
Coming out into Chancery Lane once more and turning down towards Fleet Street, you will see on your left a huge grey building in Tudor style, where once stood the House of the Converts.
It was called by that name when Henry III. founded a House in 1232 to receive converted Jews. I hardly like to tell you that the present name is the Record Office. It is too pompous and official-sounding, and perhaps that is why people pass the House of the Converts never suspecting the presence of the entrancing, memory-evoking things within.
You enter the enchanted room by descending a short flight of stone steps, after going through a forbidding portal and along a green sward into a modern grey building in one of the very busiest of the London streets.
You will know why I call it an enchanted room as soon as you see the beautiful chapel-like precincts named the House of the Converts nearly 700 years ago, before it was used from Edward III.’s time as the Chapel of the Rolls.
The stained glass windows give a mellow light to the admirable Torrigiano monument of a sixteenth century Master of the Rolls and the delicately carved alabaster tomb of Richard Alington and his wife Jane. Near by is the recumbent figure of another Master, with the little figures of his children kneeling below, one of them the little daughter born on Christmas Day and married when she was only twelve years old, “a pretty red-headed wench,” to William Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire, in the year of grace 1608.
There are all sorts of other treasures in this mysterious room, that is open to all comers between the hours of two and four, any day in the week except, alas, Saturday or Sunday.