A A Portrait of the Inner Temple in 1722

A PORTRAIT OF THE INNER TEMPLE IN 1722

By the Archivist

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. 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.

Attempts to address the issue of the qualifications necessary for Call to the Bar were considered at various points during this period. On 5 May 1733, Gray’s Inn and the Inner Temple set out the very minimal proposals necessary for Call:

Become aware of what triggers you. Use self-affirmations. Write down your achievements (what you focus on, you s “Five years’ admittance. Sixteen Terms commons. To have chambers in their own right and hold the same for at least five years after their Call or to pay £20 to the Society in lieu thereof To perform six moot cases. To receive the sacrament and take the oaths to the Government. To discharge all arrears of duties and to give new bonds. All gentlemen coming from any other Inns of Court and having a certificate from the Treasurer of that Society specifying when admitted, what commons and what exercises performed, to be allowed when called to the Bar. These qualifications to be communicated to the other Inns of Court and to be altered or enlarged as may be agreed upon. In the existing qualifications of the Inner Temple Chambers must be held for three years after Call only; six clerks’ commons cases were to be performed and no communication of qualifications to other Inns was made”.

Yet in 1722, the reality of life at the Inns would still have been closer to this description by Roger North, a law student in the 1670s:

“Of all the professions in the world that pretend to book learning, none is so destitute of institute as that of the common law. Academic studies which take in that of the civil law have tutors and professors to aid them, and the students are entertained in colleges under a discipline… but for the common law however there are societies which have the outward show or pretence of a collegiate institution, yet in reality nothing of that sort is now to be found in them; and whereas in more ancient times there exercises used in the hall, they were more for probation than instruction [and now even those are shrunk into mere form… But none of those called Masters and distinguished as Benchers, with the power of ordering and disposing all the common affairs of the society, ever pretended to take upon them the direction of the students either to put them or lead them in any way, but each is left himself to enter at which end he fancies, or as accident, inquiry or conversation prompts…”

It was not until 1854, following a formal inquiry by a royal commission into the arrangements at the Inns of Court, that a system of education with examinations was instituted (though even the exams were not compulsory until 1872).

The students who did manage to navigate their way to achieve a Call to the Bar could study in the new library built in 1708. The new facility housed a growing collection of books aided by Petyt’s £150 legacy and an increase in the annual book budget from £20 to £50, with books chosen by the Treasurer and four named Benchers. The Chief Butler also took on the role of Librarian for the sum of £20 per annum, with an additional £5 for creating a catalogue, which was examined by two junior Benchers. An order appears that wine was allowed in the library but only after 7pm and no more than one pint, which must have relieved the students from their dreary studies.

Their meals were taken in the small 14th-century Hall, with lunch at 2pm and supper at 8pm, except on Saturdays when there was no supper. A horn was blown to announce the meals an hour before they would be served. In 1729, an account of commons for the Michaelmas and Hilary terms provides us with the appetising daily fare:

“Sunday: Roasted beef, six pounds when raw and a baked pudding. Monday: Boiled beef, six pounds when raw and a fowl. Tuesday: Roasted beef and an “applepye”. Wednesday: Boiled beef and a loin of mutton roasted. Thursday: Roasted beef with an apple pie or baked pudding. Friday: Salt and fresh fish half one, etc, and a loin of mutton roasted.

Saturday: Shoulders of mutton.” Fasting days the same as Fridays, except 30th January, the same as usual and no suppers.

Thankfully, it was not all commons; there were “battling and exceedings” available to “members for a price, which made a substantial addition to the annual accounts. For a price, members could also vary the simple diet of above with more appetising additions such as:

“Fish of sortts. Poultry of sortts. Pyes, puddings and pastry. Butter, eggs and bacon. Peas, beans, fruite, rootts, herbs, oranges etc. Pickles, anchovies, salt, oyle, vinegar etc. Sugar, spice, plumbs etc at an annual total of £153.”

At the Benchers’ table, copious quantities of alcohol were also available, with the Benchers building their own brewhouse in 1725. Junior members of the Bar were tasked with setting it up.

The spiritual needs of our members were cared for by the Temple Church and its Master Dr Thomas Sherlock (1705–1753) and the Rev Henry Jackson as Reader. The morning service on Sunday began at 10am until 1742, when it changed at the request of several gentlemen, with visiting preachers giving the sermon. In the accounts, a regular payment of £54 for 27 sermons seems to show that there were several visiting preachers. Additionally, a morning service was read every weekday.

However, the Inn’s original role as set out in the 1608 Charter, “We will and by these selves, our heirs and successors strictly command shall serve for the education of the students and professors of the laws” , seemed almost forgotten in 1722.

Despite the image of formality and industry depicted in this engraving, its buildings were in the most part decayed. This picture of the Inn is summarised perfectly by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers:

“Low-roofed, mouldy rooms, where innumerable rolls of parchment, which have been perspiring in secret for the last century, send forth an agreeable odour, which is mingled by day with the scent of the dry rot, and by night with the various exhalations which arise from damp cloaks, festering umbrellas, and the coarsest tallow candles.”

The Pickwick Papers (p 271), 1836

The Inn continued to exist in this state of semi-somnolence until the mid-19th century, when radical changes to the legal system and its entire fabric would take place. It was at this point that buildings in the Inn were pulled down and rebuilt – a perfect depiction of how the Inner Temple’s history reflects the development of the British legal system.

Celia Pilkington

Archivist

Note: The plan, entitled This View of the Temple, as it appeared in 1722, was re-engraved (from a print presented to The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple in the year 1831. This has been found to be incorrect, as it appears in John Strype’s Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster published in 1720