Lincoln's Inn Fields

“ The clock had not struck nine when they passed through the spacious area of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the trees in which had already become leafless, and gave an air of desolation to the dingy scenery. What a crowd of reflections do our Inns of Court give rise to—and yet how few who pass through them ever bestow one thought on the thousands who are toiling daily, and many nightly, within those walls to render perfect and secure for others the property which without the aid of the law would be unsafe! ”

“ I first saw Procter's friend, John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and Dickens, in his pleasant rooms, No. 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was then in his prime, and looked brimful of energy. His age might have been forty, or a trifle onward from that mile-stone, and his whole manner announced a determination to assert that nobody need prompt him. His voice rang loud and clear, up stairs and down, everywhere throughout his premises. When he walked over the uncarpeted floor, you heard him walk, and he meant you should. ”

“ BEN JONSON AND LINCOLN'S INN.
Our fancy to speak of books, and their writers and sellers, has led us aside from the area marked out by Mr. Thornbury for his own explorations, so we must return to bounds, within which we find Lincoln's-Inn Fields. These inns were originally established as places of entertainment, where pilgrims and other travellers were hospitably attended by the monks. The town houses of noblemen were also called inns, just as in Paris they were styled hostels. ”

“ LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS. IN no part of London is there felt such a mixture of sensations as when we enter Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There is a tone of old-fashioned repose mixed with quaintness, and a “large air of neglect” too. There are ancient houses enough and decayed chambers. The Square itself has a certain pleasant old fashion, and is not trimmed up as are the modern ones. It is rather an old garden run to seed. There is a tradition that it is the exact area of the base of one of the Pyramids ”

“ Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a berry, and they do say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to London (eighty miles or so away) , and then I'm told there is a sound in Lincoln's Inn Fields at night, as of men laughing, together with a clinking of knives and forks, and wine-glasses. ”

“ It is somewhat outside the scope of this book to deal with the dwellers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but mention may be made of Thomas Campbell, the poet, who had chambers at No. 61, whilst No. 58 was the House of Forster, the biographer of Dickens, which is described in ‘Bleak House’: ‘Formerly a house of State ... in these shrunken fragments of its greatness lawyers lie, like maggots in nuts.’
More fascinating than all is that ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ which still survives upon a tiny triangular plot amidst the ruin of tenements that have been lately razed to the ground. ”

“ The Temple, Chancery Lane, Serjeants’ Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn even unto the Fields are like tidal harbours at low water, where stranded proceedings, offices at anchor, idle clerks lounging on lop-sided stools that will not recover their perpendicular until the current of Term sets in, lie high and dry upon the ooze of the long vacation. ”

“ His residence in Gate Street, then known as Lincoln’s Inn Fields, seems to date from the latter part of 1658 or the very commencement of 1659. A letter from him is extant written from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, dated 9th February, 1658–9, while one dated 20th July, 1658 is written from “Graies Inn.” [56] Apparently he took the house on the occasion of his marriage, as in an undated letter, after mentioning certain family bereavements, he proceeds: “I was [thus] driven to meditat on a settlement of myself ”

“ In Chancery Lane, almost facing Carey Street, is an arch, through which we get a glimpse of the old Rolls Chapel, which seems a ghostly place and abandoned.{97}
Lincoln’s Inn itself is an attractive building enough. The old heavy brick gateway, grimed and encrusted with the dirt of centuries, has an air of impressive gloominess. ”

“ A monastic silence reigns, and in the grass-grown square of Lincoln's Inn, all is silent as the grave, and in the dim passages of Clifford's and Clement's Inns, it is very difficult to believe that the densely-packed Strand and thronged Fleet street are so near. ”

“ Richard, emerging from the heavy shade of Symond’s Inn into the sunshine of Chancery Lane—for there happens to be sunshine there to-day—walks thoughtfully on, and turns into Lincoln’s Inn, and passes under the shadow of the Lincoln’s Inn trees. On many such loungers have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on the like bent head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the lingering step, the purposeless and dreamy air, the good consuming and consumed, the life turned sour. ”

“ Boys and girls went a-Maying where balls and suppers are now held; and within about a quarter of a mile of Lincoln's Inn, a small, tall-chimneyed house, four stories high on one side, and two on another, with a round tower of brick-work added to contain the staircase, which seemed to have been forgotten in the original construction, rose in the midst of a garden, very near the spot where gentlemen in curious wigs and black gowns now hurry about to plead the cause of the rich, but not in general of the poor, if they can help it. ”

“ But, for a week or two, matters at 176, New Square, Lincoln's Inn, went on as if nothing out of the common had happened, or was likely to happen. Francis Eversleigh, his son Ernest, the head-clerk Williamson, and the other clerks, occupied their accustomed seats in their accustomed rooms. People came and went as usual; deeds were prepared, documents drawn up, and all the machinery of the office seemed to be in excellent running order. No shadow of approaching doom darkened the firm's doors. ”

“ As by reference to our article on Tavern Signs it will be seen how the word Inn originally denoted a private mansion, it will suffice to state here that the various colleges of the law students in London are styled Inns because the chief of them were at one time the residences of the nobility whose family names they still bear. Thus, Lincoln’s Inn was the town mansion of the Earls of Lincoln, Gray’s Inn, of the Earls Gray, Furnival’s Inn, of the Lords Furnival, and Clifford’s Inn, of the Lords Clifford. ”

“ It may be doubted whether the quality of law and land management they get on this principle is quite equal to their wine and horses. At any rate, my friends of Lincoln's Inn, like others of the same class, are distinguished by their courteous manners, deliberate proceedings, innocence of legal technicalities, long credit, and heavy charges. Leasem, the elder partner, wears powder and a huge bunch of seals, lives in Queen-square, drives a brougham, gives the dinners and does the cordial department. ”

“ Along the walls directly in front of us, a blaze of purple bloom, stretches the [Pg 375] “largest wisteria in England,” one hundred and eighty feet in length, its stem like a good-sized tree. It has been thus with so many of the old-time inns; each has had some peculiar charm. But surely no architect ever planned the Red Lion Inn; it is a rambling building that seems to have grown up with the years. No straight line curbs its walls; none of its floors maintain the same level; it is a maze of strangely assorted apartments, narrow, winding hallways and odd nooks and corners. ”

“ After leaving Lincoln's Inn, we looked at Gray's Inn, which is a great, quiet domain, quadrangle beyond quadrangle, close beside Holborn, and a large space of greensward enclosed within it. It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city's very jaws, which yet the monster shall not eat up,—right in its very belly, indeed, which yet, in all these ages, it shall not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest of its bustling streets. ”

“ The establishment and building of roads, bridges, and opening of inns show that mutual interest which marks civilization, and separates us from the lonely, selfish life of a savage. Soon inns were found everywhere in the Northern colonies. In New England, New York, and Pennsylvania an inn was called an ordinary, a victualling, a cook-shop, or a tavern before we had our modern word hotel. ”

“ Miracle plays and moralities, dancing and music, fantastic processions and mad pranks, spurred on the hours that were not devoted to heavy meals and deep potations. In the merriments of the different Inns there was a pleasant diversity—with regard to the duration and details of the entertainments: and occasionally the members of the four societies acted with so little concert that their festivals, falling at exactly the same time, were productive of rivalry and disappointments. Dugdale thinks that the Christmas revels were not regularly kept in Lincoln's Inn during the reign of Henry VIII. ”

“ In such hostels, leased to the senior members, voluntary associations, or guilds of teachers and learners of law would congregate, and gradually evolve their own regulations and customs.{6}
Other references occur to the ‘apprentices in hostels’ during this same reign (Edward III.) . And from about this date the four Inns of Court—Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, and the Inner and Middle Temple—‘which are almost coincident in antiquity, similar in constitution, and identical in purpose,’ [4] begin to emerge from the mists of the past. ”

“ Lincoln’s Inn is one of the principal inns of court.{22}
SWEEP!—SOOT OH!
This trade was, until of late, performed by small boys, who used to climb up chimneys, brushing away the soot as they went, until they arrived at the top, where they performed a rattle of triumph on the sides of the pot. Poor little sweep! your “occupation’s gone;” the term “climbing boy” will soon become obselete, for chimneys are now swept by machines, such as the one on the shoulders of the boy in our picture. ”

“ The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down the yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much chipped, dirty, and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room of the present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular apartments adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the curious may find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts and hatches to upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a vanished generation of John Bulls. ”

“ Or wait for customers between
The pillar-rows in Lincoln’s Inn.”
The cross-legged knights, it is almost needless to add, are the effigies of the mailed warriors, which still remain in fine preservation. The “pillar-rows in Lincoln’s Inn,” I apprehend, refer to the crypt, or open vault, beneath Inigo Jones’s chapel in Lincoln’s Inn, originally designed for an ambulatory. [519] It is singular to reflect on the entire change in the public manners within two centuries. ”

“ Only the benchers and members of Lincoln’s Inn may use the elm-shaded gardens. They not only fulfil Pepys’ prophecy that they would be very pretty, but they had a useful war record, as a memorial tablet shows.{130}
I am told that the Curfew is still rung at Lincoln’s Inn. At a quarter to nine each evening the chief porter climbs to the tower of the chapel and when the hour has struck he sounds the curfew fifty times. The bell used was brought from Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1596. ”

“ Leaping from the window of the inn, a man clothed in a close-fitting coat, and hose of Lincoln green, with a sword by his side, a narrow buckler on his shoulder, a sheaf of arrows under his left arm, and a leathern bracer just below the bend of the elbow, sprang forward, with a pole some six feet long in his hand, and at three bounds cleared the space between the inn and the disputants. ”

“ The traveller with an eye for such things may still identify these inns retired from business, chiefly by their old archways and entries into stable-yards, but to the expert, even when those features are absent, there is generally some indefinable air about a house once an inn that singles it out from others. Such an one is the immense, four-square, red-brick farm-house midway between Lichfield and Burton-on-Trent, once a coaching- and posting-house famous in all that countryside as the “Flitch of Bacon” ”

“ I had married beneath me, as people would say; but the only moments of happiness I have had in my life connect themselves with my wife and child. It matters not how I met and came to marry her. No one of our class dreamed I was other than Cooper Silwood, solicitor, of Lincoln's Inn. But I was also James Russell at Stepney. I experienced no difficulty in being both; I had my disguise, and having also the keys of the two iron gates opening into Chancery Lane, at the top of Stone Buildings, I was able to let myself out or in at pleasure. To lead this double life was easy, I say ”

“ The hosteller remains as the ostler, who now usually confines his attention to four-footed visitors; the chamberlain has changed his sex (though only since the days of Sir Roger de Coverley) and has become the Chambermaid. In most old manor-houses provisions, wine and ale were served from a special department close to the porch and called the “bower,” from Norse Bür, meaning buttery. Frequenters of a modern inn resort for the same purpose to the “bar.” Lastly, the presiding genius in every hotel or tavern, no matter how humble, is invariably referred to as “the Landlord.” ”

“ Let us admit and welcome the efforts of the old Georgian coaching inns to keep abreast of the times. Let us cheerfully accept the [Pg 226] attempts of mine host to put life into an old musty coffee-room and bar parlour. Conservatism is not without value at the inn with a history, and the landlord for his own sake must step warily. Let no iconoclast interfere too violently with the worm-eaten glories of old oak and mahogany or seek to disparage the solid virtues of the great round of beef, or the appetising ingredients of the game pie. Tradition in such things is well worth preserving. ”