London City

by Walter Besant

The Library is an imposing but modern building south of the Hall and garden near the Embankment. It is in an early style of Gothic, the principal room being 86 feet long, 42 wide, and 63 high, designed by H. R. Abraham in 1861. A couple of stories of offices and an external staircase are rather picturesque, and the whole building is by far the best erected in either Temple during the last fifty years. A gateway near, leading to the Embankment, can only be described as an eyesore.

Returning through the gardens to Fountain Court we note several sundials near the Hall, in Pump Court and Brick Court, one in particular near the exit to the Outer Temple—Vestigia nulla retrorsum—which seems to convey a warning to those who seek the lawyers. The largest sundial is, however, in the Inner Temple, the famous “Blackamoor,” removed thither when Clement’s Inn was pulled down. It is of lead, and replaces one mentioned by Lamb which bore the uncivil motto, “Begone about your business.” In Brick Court, near the fountain, with the Middle Temple Hall on one side, memories of three if not four great authors seem to meet. Goldsmith bought the chambers at 2 Brick Court, looking on the fountain and the Hall, about 1765, and lived here till his death in 1774. Here he wrote The Deserted Village and The Traveller, and described in Animated Nature the doings of a rookery in the old trees on which his windows opened. The place is also connected with Thackeray, who describes the chambers in his English Humourists. We have already named Shakespeare and the performance of Twelfth Night in the Hall, but there is direct mention of the gardens and their roses in the First Part of Henry VI. But to most of us it is Dickens who is most clearly remembered when we stand by the fountain. In Martin Chuzzlewit he brings Ruth Pinch here to meet John Westlock. “The Temple fountain might have leaped up twenty feet to greet the spring of hopeful maidenhood that in her person stole on, sparkling through the dry and dusty channels of the Law.” With Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Dickens and Thackeray we might close the list of eminent inhabitants, but the Middle Temple has been very fortunate in this respect. Edmund Burke was here before 1750. Tom Moore was a student in 1799, and Sheridan some twenty years earlier. Among the eminent lawyers may be named the Norths, Rowden, Clarendon, Somers, Cowper, Blackstone, Eldon, Stowell, and Talfourd—a goodly list, though far from complete.

Chancery Lane will be found in the succeeding volume under Holborn, but the liberty of the Rolls is dealt with here.

THE ROLLS AND THE RECORD OFFICE

A fine new building in Chancery Lane, extending to Fetter Lane, stands on the site occupied by an ancient institution called The Rolls. The early history of the Rolls has yet to be written. It is intimately connected from the first with that of the Jewish Colony which came to England from Rouen with William I. At that time the canon law forbade Christians to take usury. The Jews were the licensed usurers of the King. A masterly essay, prefixed to the Catalogue of the Jewish Exhibition in 1887, explains the situation in a few words: “the exchequer treated the money of the Jews as held at the pleasure of the King.” Special Justices were appointed to preside in the Jews’ Exchequer; all deeds, contracts, bonds, and other documents relating to monetary transactions had to be registered and placed in charge of the Rolls Court or Record Office at the King’s palace at Westminster. The Hebrew word Shetár, which means a legal document, gave its name to the Star Chamber, and long after the Jews had left England the court held there retained the old name. We may assume that the chief of the justices of this Rolls Court was the principal controller of the whole colony, and that, when Henry III. opened the House for Converts, it fell naturally under the same jurisdiction. Accordingly we find from the first that the Master of the Rolls was also connected with the House of Converts. A similar house was founded at Oxford, but this one in London owed its continued existence to the fact that the Master of the Rolls lived in it. When the law was relaxed and the Jews ceased to be the only usurers, the Master’s jurisdiction extended to the Lombards and Italian bankers, and when, sixty years after the foundation of the house, the Jews were expelled, the double office continued to exist and in the same place. Converts were still received there till the reign of Charles II. Meanwhile, under the Commonwealth, the laws of 1290 against the Jews had been in great part rescinded; but the Master of the Rolls continued to be called “Keeper of the House of Converts” down to 1873, when Sir George Jessel, himself a Jew, was appointed Master of the Rolls but not Keeper of the House.

The history of the house has been detailed by Mr. W. J. Hardy. It became ruinous early in the eighteenth century, and a new building of good proportions was erected by Colin Campbell in 1717. This, in its turn, was pulled down to make way for the Record Office. With it also perished the chapel, usually called “The Rolls Chapel,” of which Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte, who holds the office of Deputy Keeper, instituted in 1837, has written an account, appended to the Fifty-Seventh Annual Report in 1896.

The first Master of the Rolls who is known to have also been Keeper of the House of Converts was Adam de Osgodeby, appointed in 1307. The next Master was William Ayremyne, who also held both offices, but they were not formally united till 1378. The house stood in Chancery Lane, a little to the north of the present principal entrance of the Record Office. Henry III. endowed it with 700 marks a year, calling it “the house in New Street in the suburbs of London which he had founded for converts from Judaism.” It was rebuilt by William Burstall, Master in 1372, together with the chapel. Here, and in the subsequent house, the successive Masters held their court and also lived. At the opening of the new law courts all the space was surrendered to the Records, the house disappeared, and, though a strong effort was made to save it, the chapel too, except the monuments. The present great building, begun in 1856, from designs by Pennethorne, in a very stiff style of Gothic, was completed in 1897. The Rolls and other documents have gradually been housed in it, comprising all those which were previously in the Tower, the Chapter House, Westminster, Carlton Ride, St. James’s, and the State Paper Office, including the paybooks of the Navy, the registers of the Duchy of Lancaster, and many other sets of manuscripts. The final designs were made by Sir John Taylor of the office of Works, and though the Chancery Lane front harmonises very well with Pennethorne’s work it is a good deal less stiff. Two statues on the inner face of the entrance tower represent Henry III. and Edward III., and the removal was effected in October 1895. All the floors are now fireproof, and the cases to contain the Rolls are of steel with slate shelves. The Chancery Lane front is 225 feet long and 84 feet high. There are two great public reading-rooms where both legal and historical researches are daily carried on, with the learned assistance of a large staff of clerks, trained to decipher the most crabbed writing and to translate mediæval Latin and law French, as well as to calendar thousands of documents bearing on the ancient official correspondence here preserved—such subjects as Chancery and Exchequer proceedings, court rolls, colonial letters and despatches, domestic state papers, accounts, and a hundred other kinds of affairs of public and private interest and importance.

The most interesting part of the Record Office used to be the Rolls Chapel. An arch of the fourteenth century, probably of Burstall’s building, has been set up in the garden against an east wall. The site of the destroyed chapel is on the left as we pass through the principal entrance from Chancery Lane. Here a handsome hall, with five fine windows in the Perpendicular style, has been built for a museum. On the north side very nearly as they stood in the chapel are two most interesting monuments, and a third which was formerly on the opposite side. The rest of the space is taken up with the desks and cases described below. The museum is open free every afternoon.

The monuments comprise those of Masters of the Rolls and of members of their families whose graves were underneath the flooring of the chapel. The most ancient is that of John Yong, Master from January 22, 1508. Three converts, we are told, one man and two women, were received during his keepership of the house, which lasted till his death. Yong was Dean of York, and an eminent diplomatist under Henry VIII. He was a friend of Erasmus, who dedicated a book to him of Colet and the other early reformers. He died of the “sweating sickness” on April 25, 1516, the day on which he had made his will, enjoining upon his executors that he should be buried in the Rolls Chapel. The monument is by Pietro Torregiano, who was employed at Westminster at the time on the effigy of Henry VII. Yong is represented recumbent in a long red gown with tippet and hood and a square cap, such as we see in Holbein’s portraits. Behind the figure are the heads of Christ and two cherubs, all of which show traces of colour and gilding as well as the sarcophagus below, and Yong’s arms, Lozenge vert and argent, on a chevron, azure, 3 annulets, or, on a chief of the second, a goat’s head erased between two scallop shells, gules. This motto is on the sarcophagus: “Dominus firmamentum meum.” In his report (1896) Sir H. Maxwell Lyte proves that the whole monument was removed probably from the chancel of the chapel when it was pulled down in the seventeenth century. The cherubs’ heads he considers later than the rest of the sculpture. A brief inscription mentions the date of Yong’s death and adds that “his faithful executors” placed this monument in 1516, the year of his death. It is curious to observe that there were living in 1516 three men of the same name, John Yong, all scholars of Winchester, all fellows of New College, Oxford, and a fourth who was Norroy King of Arms. Of them one, who was suffragan to Fitzjames, the Bishop of London, who had become blind, and Bishop of Gallipoli, in partibus, is usually confused with his namesake the Dean of York, who was Master of the Rolls; indeed, Sir H. Maxwell Lyte remarks that neither the tomb nor the epitaph gives any indication that “he was titular bishop of Gallipoli.” Bishop Yong, who does not seem to have shared his namesake’s reforming views, survived him for ten years. Two other fine monuments with effigies are to Richard Alington, who died in 1561, and to Edward Bruce, Lord Bruce of Kinloss, who died in 1611. There are several tablets, a statue of George I., and a bust of Lord Romilly.

The cases contain typical manuscripts, many of them finely illuminated. Among them are examples of royal charters, (A); letters patent, (B); volumes like the “Black Book of the Exchequer,” (C); Rolls with pictures, (D); and on the centre table the two volumes which contain the celebrated “Domesday Survey,” completed in 1086. In case E is the great book which contains the agreement between Henry VII. and the Abbot of Westminster concerning the masses to be celebrated “for ever” in the King’s chapel. Some very fine illuminations are in the treaty of peace with Francis I. (Case F). Letters and despatches of interest will be found in the remaining cases, such as the account of Nelson’s death (Case I); Great Seal for Virginia and for New York, and a letter of George Washington to George III. (Case M); besides boxes and coffers made for the preservation of important books or documents.