The Inner Temple Yearbook 2021–2022
A Portrait of the Inner Temple in 1722
A PORTRAIT OF THE INNER TEMPLE IN 1722 By the Archivist
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This engraving of the Inn in 1722 depicts a place of industrious order and calm with its formal layout, neat walkways, shady squares and fruit trees, where one can easily imagine learned lawyers and students wandering and discussing complex, knotty legal problems. At first glance, the Inn of 1722 is entirely recognisable to its members of today. Its buildings are in many cases earlier versions of those that exist now. 1–9 King’s Bench Walk had been recently completed in 1678 following a fire the year before. Crown Office Row, birthplace of Charles Lamb, was in an extremely decayed state, with the question of wholly rebuilding being seriously considered at a cost of £17,000. The small 14th-century Hall, soon to be outgrown by the burgeoning membership, was situated exactly where our current Hall is now. The Garden is smaller, with the river lapping behind the Garden wall at the end of Paper Buildings. In 1703, a storm lasting over a week (which had left a death toll in England of between 8000 and 15,000) had devastated the Garden and toppled the trees in King’s Bench walk. It was recreated in 1708 by the Gardener Charles Gardiner, and the plan shows his creation in the style of Queen Anne, which includes rows of small fruit trees and turf laid out in formal geometric patterns, interspersed with gravel paths and pots containing holly, yew and box. In 1771, it was to be almost doubled in size by the building of Blackfriars Bridge (1769) and was again enlarged with the creation the Embankment a century later in 1869.
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Yet 1722 was a period of deep moribund decline at the Inn. Students would still enrol, eat their dinners, keep their terms and be called to the Bar etc, but legal education had declined. Readings were no longer being given – readers would simply pay a fee to be considered ‘to have read’. Of the 60 members admitted that year, only 12 were called to the Bar. This decline could be traced back to 1640s, when provision for legal education had collapsed and students were left largely to fend for themselves, forming groups in coffee houses with barristers to try and learn some rudiments, such as mooting. One commentator lamented that “in other professions and sciences there are able and experienced tutors to direct the pupils in the pursuit of such studies as are most suitable for the sphere of action for which they are designed. But gentlemen embark on the law just as the caprice of their friends, or their own imagination dictates…yet the difficulties they meet with, for want of a guide to point out the readiest way to knowledge and to assist them in the pursuit of it, soon dampens their imagination and makes them sink into a supineness which renders them both useless to society and a torment to themselves.” J Simpson, Reflections on the Natural and Acquired Endowments Requisite for Study of the Law (1764)
Of the sixty members admitted that year only twelve were called to the Bar.
