young Templars, fresh from the universities, would
be uneasy and irritable under strict domestic control; and as men with
beards and five-and-twenty years' knowledge of the world, they would
resent any attempt to draw them within the lines of domestic control.
But in Elizabethan and also in Stuart London, law-students were
considerably younger than they are under Victoria.

Moreover, the usage of the period trained young men to submit with
cheerfulness to a parental discipline that would be deemed intolerable
by our own youngsters. During the first terms of their eight, seven, or
at least six years of pupilage, until they could secure quarters within
college walls, students frequently lodged in the houses or chambers of
near relations who were established in the immediate vicinity of the
inns. A judge with a house in Fleet Street, an eminent counsel with a
family mansion in Holborn, or an office-holder with commodious chambers
in Chancery Lane, usually numbered amongst the members of his family a
son, or nephew, or cousin who was keeping terms for the bar. Thus placed
under the immediate superintendence of an elder whom he regarded with
affection and pride, and surrounded by the wholesome interests of a
refined domestic circle, the raw student was preserved from much folly
and ill-doing into which he would have fallen had he been thrown
entirely on his own resources for amusement.

The pecuniary means of Inns-of-Court students have not varied much
throughout the last twelve generations. In days when money was scarce
and very precious they of course lived on a smaller number of coins than
they require in these days when gold and silver are comparatively
abundant and cheap; but it is reasonable to suppose that in every period
the allowances, on which the less affluent of them subsisted, represent
the amounts on which young men of their respective times were just able
to maintain the figure and style of independent gentlemen. The costly
pageants and feasts of the inns in old days must not be taken as
indicative of the pecuniary resources of the common run of students; for
the splendor of those entertainments was mainly due to the munificence
of those more wealthy members who by a liberal and even profuse
expenditure purchased a right to control the diversions of the colleges.
Fortescue, speaking of his own time, says: "There can no student bee
mayntayned for lesse expenses by the yeare than twentye markes. And if
hee haue