Legal London in 1900: Chancery Inns

The Inns of Chancery still exisiting in 1900 were perhaps the most fascinating oases in the great central desert of modern houses.

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Serjeant's Inn, once the exclusive property of the greatest in the legal hierarchy, was non-existent.

Furnival's Inn, off Holborn, had gone.

Lyon's Inn, Strand, had shared the same fate, having long since been incorporated with Bishop's Court and Chichester Rents in Chancery Lane.

Thavies Inn was but a name.

Five of the Inns still remained, but not one of them had any institutional being.

Danes Inn, Wych Street, Strand, still existed in name and in fact as a narrow stone corridor of lawyers' residential chambers.

Off Wych Street was New Inn, a delightfully quiet spot, approached through an archway wherein dingy red-brick buildings with high­pitched roofs and clustered chimneys surrounded a grass enclosure and a miniature Hall, where the "Antients," as the members of the Society were called, used periodically to assemble for business.

Outside this Hall used to be an old sun-dial with the somewhat inappropriate motto for lawyers to contemplate­

"Time and tide tarry for no man."

Clement's Inn, adjoining, had been shorn of its fair proportions ever since the new Law Courts were erected; but there was left the well-known patch of turf where knelt the leaden figure of a boy, supposed to be a negro because painted black; and there was the Hall, a plain brick structure built in 1715.

The Inn's device, that of the sailor's patron saint, was an anchor without a stock, bearing upon it a C. couchant.

Clifford's Inn was completely hidden away behind St. Dunstan's Church, Fleet Street, but was approachable through an old iron gateway in Fetter Lane, and by narrow passages in Fleet Street and Chancery Lane.

In its Hall the Committee sat after the Great Fire to adjudicate in disputes that necessarily arose about boundaries, etc., etc.

Staple Inn - supposed to derive its name from the Woolstaplers' Company who formerly owned it - was reached either through the picturesque gabled houses in Holborn or by way of Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane.

It was one of the pleasantest bits of older London left to us.

In the first court from Holborn was a fine shady plane tree with the rare adjunct of seats beneath it, which Arthur H. Beavan strongly recommended to foot-wearied sight-seers.

Its Hall was interesting, with a small clock-turret, armorial window-glass dating to 1500, a few old portraits, and at the dais end, a woolsack, the arms of the Inn.

From Chancery Lane the approach was through elaborate iron gates, past the lodge, and along a terrace with open­work parapet, almost Italian in appearance.

Up Holborn, eastward, and on the same side as Staple Inn, was a very narrow alley that led to Barnard's, smallest of all the original fourteen Inns of Court, a perfect gem of dull quaintness, which, though hard to find, no-one should miss seeing.

One Barnard, ages ago, converted it into an Inn of Chancery, and it immediately became tenanted by lawyers, alchemists, and other queer people resembling the incongruous tenants of the prairie dog burrows in the Far West.

The Inn had a diminutive hall, thirty-six feet long, a library, kitchen, porter's lodge, and a pump which had long ceased to poison people with its tainted water.

Chapel it had not.

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