A PERSONAL COLLECTION OF 15TH CENTURY DOCUMENTS
MASTER IGOR JUDGE
A Personal Collection of 15th Century Documents with promptings by William Shakespeare. Excerpt of a talk given to the Historical Society in December 2019. Master Igor Judge was Called to the Bar in 1963. He was made a Bencher in 1987. He was President of the Queen’s Bench Division and then Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales 2008-13. In 2013 he became a Distinguished Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London. Between 2015 and 2017 he was Chief Surveillance Commissioner. Since 2017 he has been Commissary of Cambridge University. From 2007-2013 he was President of the Selden Society. He was Treasurer in 2014.
I really cannot quite remember when I became interested in collecting documents. To begin with, however, we could not afford to buy them. I remember the seal of Ranulph de Blundeville, Earl of Chester, who graciously made way for William Marshal to be elected as Regent for the boy king, Henry II, when King John died; another that got away was a letter from one merchant to another on his way to the Council of Constance in 1415 setting out the details of a great victory by King Henry V at a village called Agincourt. The fatality details given by him pretty well coincided with Shakespeare and would not have supported President Macron’s recently expressed analysis of that battle. At that time, however, Judith, my wife, thought that our children needed carpets and curtains in their bedrooms rather more than they needed ancient documents.
Here we are today standing on land owned and occupied by the Knights Templar, the greatest crusading knights and probably the richest organisation in mediaeval Europe, other perhaps than the Church. Almost exactly 100 years after Magna Carta, in 1312, the Knights Templar were suppressed. Twenty, or even ten years earlier, the possibility that this great Order might disappear would have been laughable. But it did, for political reasons, on trumped charges. Nothing is ever certain; ‘what’s to come is still unsure’ is not merely one of Shakespeare’s greatest lines, but in giving those lines to the Court Jester or Fool, he is surely laughing at the human condition. The land was then given to the Knights Hospitaller, the Order of St John, and the lawyers moved in, and quickly. They were certainly here by 1340 or thereabouts and they have
never left. The Inns were invaded and all records then available were destroyed in 1381 in Wat Tyler’s rebellion. They were re-invaded by Jack Cade in 1450, when again, all our records were destroyed, thus giving Shakespeare, in all the blood and horrors of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard II, his only joke, ‘the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’. Laughing at the joke, audiences forget the wild destruction and the murders of the residents. One result is that at Middle Temple we have no domestic or administrative documents from before 1501. So I could not resist the earliest document in this collection, a donation to the Knights, no doubt for the benefit of his immortal soul, by a clerk in Yorkshire of a bovate of land, that is, as much as an ox could plough in a day. It provides a direct link between those far off, pre-lawyer, days at the Temple, and demonstrates how that Order was still flourishing just a few years before, when out of the blue, it was destroyed. I found that document in a very uninteresting job lot, and it was sold to me at a nominal price. Some years after I presented it to the Inn, the bestseller, The Da Vinci Code was written, and I understand that our insurers said that as anything to do with the Knights Templar had become fashionable and valuable, the original must be kept in the Archive, and that only a facsimile should be put on display. There it is, in the Prince’s Room. This document, like all of them, reminds me, and us, that with any document we are in touch with the human beings who wrote them, or are described in them, and handled them, and their lives, and that we should pause to reflect on how and in what circumstances they were created and how delivered, by what means of transport, or retained, and
2020 Middle Templar
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