In this court, too, is Middle Temple Hall, a fine Elizabethan edifice of 1572, with a handsome oak ceiling, its windows emblazoned with the armorial bearings of the Templar Knights. This Hall was already in Tudor times famous for its feasts, masques, revelries; here Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was performed in 1601, before the queen and her splendid court; "the only locality remaining where a play of Shakespeare's was listened to by his contemporaries." Even in winter Fountain Court is pretty, and its ivied trellises and arches are well kept and tended; a lovely view, too, may be enjoyed from it, down over the verdant grass slopes of "Garden Court" towards the silvery river far below. Lucky, one thinks, are those fortunate beings who have "chambers" in Garden Court! poetically named, and the reality still more charming than the name! More ornate and less attractive, though delightfully placed, are the modern buildings of "Temple Gardens."
Bits of old London, unchanged for centuries, crop up continually in the Temple precincts, and recall the time when this was a city of timbered houses of tortuous, overhanging, insanitary alleys and lanes, easily burned, almost impossible indeed to save when once threatened by fire. Small wonder, indeed, that the great fire of 1666 destroyed so much of the Temple! Middle-Temple-Lane, narrow, crooked, dark, is one of these relics of the past. Here are some picturesque old houses of lath and plaster, with overhanging upper floors, and shops beneath stuffed with law stationery and requirements; the houses somewhat crumbling and dilapidated, and "with an air," like Krook's shop in Bleak House, "of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it were a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law." Every now and then, about the Temple, in odd and unexpected nooks and corners, you come upon the arms of the Knights Templars; in the Middle Temple it is the Lamb bearing the banner of Innocence, and the red cross, the original badge of the order; in the Inner Temple,—the winged Pegasus,—with the motto, "Volat ad astra virtus." This winged horse has a curious history; for, when the horse was originally chosen as an emblem, he had no wings, but was ridden by two men at once to indicate the self-chosen poverty of the brotherhood; in lapse of years the figures of the men became worn and abraded, and when restored were mistaken for wings!
Middle-Temple-Lane is entered from Fleet-Street, just beyond the Temple-Bar Griffin and the imposing mass of the New Gothic Law-Courts, by a dull red-brick gateway, erected by Wren in 1684; and the Inner Temple by an archway under a hairdresser's shop, which shop is inscribed somewhat romantically as "the palace of Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey." (As a matter of fact it was built in James I.'s time, and belonged to Henry, Prince of Wales; it subsequently became "Nando's Coffee-House.") These picturesque, unassuming archways bear the special arms of each Inn, and here, by the winged horse, a wit once wrote the following "pasquinade:"
"As by the Templar's hold you go,
The horse and lamb displayed
In emblematic figures show
The merits of their trade.
"The clients may infer from thence
How just is their profession:
The lamb sets forth their innocence,
The horse their expedition."
But the main interest of the Temple lies in its ancient church, St. Mary's, where in the Middle Ages the Knights Templars worshipped in their strength, and where their effigies, stiff and mailed and cross-legged, as befits returned crusaders, lie until the judgment day. The soldier-monks are gone, their place knows them no more; yet, like their more peaceful brethren and neighbours, the Carthusians, their spirit still inspires their ancient haunts. The Temple Church, begun in 1185, was one of the four round churches built in England in imitation of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, after the Templars' return from the first and second crusades; mercifully escaping the Great Fire, it has not entirely escaped the hardly less dangerous ravages of the "restorer." Through a fine Norman arch, under the western porch, the Round Church of 1185 is entered. In architecture it is Norman, with a leaning to the Transition style, and very rich in decoration. Hence, through groups of Purbeck marble columns, you look into the choir, a later addition of 1240, in the Early English style, with lancet-headed windows and a groined roof. "These two churches," says Mr. Hare, "built at a distance of only fifty five years from each other, form one of the most interesting examples we possess of the transition from Norman to Early English architecture."
In the Round Church are nine monuments of Templars, of the 12th and 13th centuries, sculptured out of freestone, recumbent, with crossed legs, and in complete mail, except one, who wears a monk's cowl. They are probably the "eight images of armed knights" mentioned by Stow in 1598: some few are thought to be identified. Strange, unearthly objects! relics of a bygone order and a vanished faith,—silent witnesses of centuries' changes,—figures ghostly in the twilight of a London winter's day:—effigies of warriors, faithful in the life and unto the death that they knew, recalling Spenser's lines:
"And on his breast a bloudie cross he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living, ever Him adored.
Upon his shield the like was ever scored,
For sovereign hope which in his help he had."
Records of the severity of the Order are not wanting. Here, opening upon the stairs leading to the triforium, is the "penitential cell" (of such painful abbreviation that the prisoner could neither stand nor lie in it), with slits towards the church so that mass might still be heard. Here the unhappy Walter le Bacheler, Grand Preceptor of Ireland,—for disobedience to the all-powerful Master,—was starved to death, and hence also, most likely, culprits were dragged forth naked to be flogged publicly before the altar. Priests, in the robust Middle Ages, did not always err on the side of mercy or humanity!
The preacher at the Temple Church is still named "the Master," as being the successor of the Masters of the Templars. Hooker and Sherlock both held the office, and now Canon Ainger is the most modern representative of the "Grand Master," that dread mediæval potentate. During the Protectorate, however, the order of succession must, one thinks, have fallen into some contempt; for the church became greatly dilapidated, and the painted ceilings (according to the usual Puritan barbarism) were whitewashed, though the effigies themselves mercifully escaped destruction. Lawyers, also, used formerly to receive their clients in the Round Church (as it was their custom to do at the pillars in St. Paul's), occupying their special posts like merchants on 'Change. And thus, that thorough restoration of the church in 1839-42, which antiquaries so deplore, was no doubt very necessary.