THE INNS OF COURT AND OF CHANCERY

The four Inns of Court -- the Middle Temple, the Inner Temple, Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn -- were at the height of their glory in Elizabeth's reign. Whatever their true origin, it is certain that at that date they formed, along with the more humble Inns of Chancery, a set of colleges for the study of the law, linked together (in imitation of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge) into what would have been a University if they had been incorporated. The Benchers represented the Master and Fellows of a college, the Utter or Outer Barristers (the Junior Bar of today) the Masters of Arts, and the Inner Barristers (now the students) the Bachelors and undergraduates. To make the analogy with Oxford and Cambridge more complete, each Inn of Court had its dining hall, its library, and its chapel; except that the two Temples shared the beautiful old church of the Templars between them. Like a college, too, each Inn was enclosed, and had its garden. All these features survive to the present day, except that the halls and libraries of Lincoln's Inn and the Inner Temple, and the libraries of the Middle Temple and Gray's Inn, were rebuilt during the last century. The Middle Temple Hall dates from 1572, and that of Gray's Inn from 1556.

Legal education seems to have been without much method, consisting of readings and moots, and the period of probation was extraordinarily long. 'For the space of seven years or thereabouts', says Stow, 'they frequent readings, mootings, boltinges, and other learned exercises, whereby, growing ripe in the knowledge of the lawes, and approved withal to be of honest conversation, they are selected and called to the degree of Utter Barristers.'

Every year the Benchers chose from among their own number two 'Readers' whose election was the occasion of a mighty feast. These learned persons occasionally delivered a reading -- a lecture as we should call it now -- on some single point, after which the Utter Barristers would debate it, and finally some of the Bench would give their views.

This does not seem to be a very hopeful system of teaching the law. Coke lamented the inferiority of the 'Readings' in his day to those of the past, saying (1 Inst. 280 h):

Dugdale, in his Origines, mentioned that some of the Utter Barristers were also appointed to assist the younger students, much as is done now by the Council of Legal Education; and one may make a shrewd guess that it was (as it is still) by the labour of these gentlemen, coupled with invaluable practical experience in the chambers of counsel in good practice as pleaders and conveyancers, and by attendance at the Courts, that the young barrister of Shakespeare's day got his real professional education. Textbooks were few and invariably in Latin.

The Inns were very exclusive in those days, admitting none except 'gentlemen of blood', and this was enjoined by a royal command of James I. There were numerous sumptuary and disciplinary regulations enforced by fines, putting out of commons, and even apparently by imprisonment. Thus, attendance at chapel, shaving 'at least once in three weeks', the wearing of gowns even outside the Inns, the renunciation of swords and bucklers, boots and spurs, great hose, great ruffs, silks and furs, were all insisted on.

On certain feast days there were revels. At Christmas, for instance, according to Dugdale, there were revels and dancing every night from Christmas Day to Twelfth Night, even the Justices, Serjeants, and Benchers (the two former must have been guests) dancing apparently pas seuls. But the world was younger then than now, when such performances by the sages of the law are scarcely imaginable.

The early Elizabethan drama owed much stimulus to the performance by barristers of plays in their halls at festive seasons. It was in the Hall of the Inner Temple on Twelfth Night, 1561, that the first English tragedy, Gorboduc, which was written by two members of the Inn, was first acted. Again, the first regular English comedy, Supposes, was first acted in Gray's Inn Hall, five years later, the authors, George Gascoigne and Francis Kilwelmershe, being both students of the Society; in both these plays the actors as well as the authors belonged to the legal profession. Instances of like procedure abound throughout the period of Shakespeare's professional career, although the pieces which were presented in the halls of the Inns were not always from lawyers' pens. It was for a Christmas revel at the Middle Temple that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night; and The Comedy of Errors certainly played in Gray's Inn Hall in 1594 in the intervals of 'dancing and revelry with gentlewomen'.

The origin of the eight lesser Inns of Chancery -- Thavies', Furnival's, Barnard's, Staple, Clifford's, Clement's, New, Lyon's -- is even more obscure than that of the four Inns of Court. They appear, however, to have been resorted to by the clerks in Chancery, and by students who were unable to gain access to the Inns of Court, and, at all events at one time, were considered as preparatory schools. When, however, in 1557 the Inner Temple refused admission to attorneys and solicitors, and in 1574 expelled such as still remained on their books, they seem to have taken refuge in the Inns of Chancery, which, by the middle of the seventeenth century, had been abandoned to them. Shakespeare makes no mention of them collectively, although he mentions individual Inns such as Clement's Inn, to which Justice Shallow belonged:

And later on, in the same scene (24-5):

And still further (34-7):

The Serjeants had Inns of their own, and were with much ceremonial dismissed from their Inn of Court upon being promoted to the coif. This was a most expensive proceeding, involving the presentation of gold rings to all the other Serjeants and divers other great persons, and a feast at the Inn of Court to which the newly made Serjeant belonged, which is said to have cost sometimes over £600. With the virtual abolition of the Order in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, all this of course came to an end, and Serjeants' Inn in Chancery Lane was sold and demolished.

On the whole the constitution of the Inns of Court remains much what it was in the year 1600; but the readings, the revellings, the 'boltinges', even (with the exception of Gray's Inn) the moots, the dancings of Lord Chancellors and judges round the hall fire at Christmas time, nay, even the social life, have for the most part vanished.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY. -- The chief legal work by a contemporary of Shakespeare is COKE'S Institutes of the Laws of England, in four parts (1628, 1642, 1644). FERDINANDO PULTON'S Statutes at Large (1618) is the standard authority for the text of the statutes in force at the time of publication. A special branch of legal procedure is fully treated in WILLIAM LAMBARDE'S Eirenarcha, or Of the Office of the Justice of Peace (1581-8,1610). A more popular account of the common law is ABRAHAM FRAUNCE'S Lawiers Logike (1588).

The chief law reports of the period are those by EDMUND PLOWDEN, of which the first part came out in 1571 and the second part in 1579; by SIR EDMUND ANDERSON, whose work, covering the period 1574-1603, was first published in 1664; COKE'S Reports, in thirteen parts, 1600-15. An elaborate account of all the Inns of Court of the time in London is given in SIR GEORGE BUCK'S The Third Universitie of England (London, 1631) -- an appendix to STOW'S Annales.

The chief works on the history of law and law-courts of Shakespeare's day are: POLLOCK and MAITLAND'S History of English Law; STEPHEN'S History of the Criminal Law, CARTER'S English Legal Institutions, DUGDALE'S Origines Judiciales; FORTESCUE'S De Laudibus legum Angliae; INDERWICK'S The King's Peace; PULLING'S Order of the Coif; HEARD'S Curiosities of the Law Reporters, BLACKSTONE'S Commentaries; Select Legal Essays, published by the Association of Law Schools of the United States of America.

The chief works on Shakespeare's knowledge of law are: LORD CAMPBELL'S Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered, 1859; C. K. DAVIS'S The Law in Shakespeare, New York, 1884; F. F. HEARD'S Shakespeare as a Lawyer, New York, 1883; and CHARLES ALLEN'S Notes on the Bacon-Shakespeare Question, Boston, 1900.