s, equivalent to the gaudy days, or feast
days, or audit days of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of
Court still retain the last vestiges of their ancient jollifications,
but the uproarious riot of the obsolete festivities is but faintly
echoed by the songs and laughter of the junior barristers and students
who in these degenerate times gladden their hearts and loosen their
tongues with an extra glass of wine after grand dinners, and then hasten
back to chambers for tobacco and tea.

On the discontinuance of the revels the Inns of Court lost their chief
attractions for the courtly pleasure-seekers of the town, and many a day
passed before another royal visit was paid to any one of the societies.
In 1734 George III.'s father stood amongst the musicians in the Inner
Temple Hall; and after the lapse of one century and eleven years the
present queen accepted the hospitality of Lincoln's Inn. No record
exists of a royal visit made to an Inn of Court between those events.
Only the other day, however, the Prince of Wales went eastwards and
partook of a banquet in the hall of Middle Temple, of which society he
is a barrister and a bencher.

PART VII.

LEGAL EDUCATION.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

INNS OF COURT AND INNS OF CHANCERY.

Schools for the study of the Common Law, existed within the bounds of
the city of London, at the commencement of the thirteenth century. No
sooner had a permanent home been assigned to the Court of Common Pleas,
than legal practitioners fixed themselves in the neighborhood of
Westminster, or within the walls of London. A legal society speedily
grew up in the city; and some of the older and more learned professors
of the Common Law, devoting a portion of their time and energies to the
labors of instruction, opened academies for the reception of students.
Dugdale notices a tradition that in ancient times a law-school, called
Johnson's Inn, stood in Dowgate, that another existed in Pewter Lane,
and that Paternoster Row contained a third; and it is generally thought
that these three inns were amongst the academies which sprung up as soon
as the Common Pleas obtained a permanent abode.

The schools thus established in the opening years of the thirteenth
century, were not allowed to flourish for any great length of time; for
in the nineteenth year of his reign, Henry III. suppressed them by a
mandate addressed to the mayor and sheriffs of the city. But though this
king broke up t