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Coordinates: 51°31′01.65″N 00°06′52.48″W / 51.5171250°N 0.1145778°W / 51.5171250; -0.1145778
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Revision as of 18:23, 1 November 2008

For the Lincoln's Inn Society at Harvard Law School, see Lincoln's Inn Society.

51°31′01.65″N 00°06′52.48″W / 51.5171250°N 0.1145778°W / 51.5171250; -0.1145778

File:Lincoln coat of arms.gif
Lincoln's Inn Coat of Arms
Library (left) and Bencher's rooms (right)
Chancery Lane entrance

The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn. Lincoln's Inn is able to trace its official records to 1422 (i.e. beyond those of the other three); however, by tradition, none of the Inns claims to be the oldest of the four.

Overview

The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is said to take its name from Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln who died in 1311. His own great house was adjacent and he is credited with being the Society's patron. Although the other three Inns of Court are of comparable antiquity, having evolved from uncertain origins in the fourteenth century, Lincoln's Inn can claim the oldest extant records, the Black Books, which record its principal activities from 1422 to this day.

The present character of Lincoln's Inn owes much to the fact that its precincts and buildings - the medieval Hall and Gateway abutting onto Chancery Lane, the late seventeenth century New Square in the centre, and the magnificent Victorian gothic Great Hall and Library beside Lincoln's Inn Fields - survived nearly unscathed the devastations of the Blitz. Striking as they are, these buildings however are not merely architectural and historical tourist attractions but provide the professional home for the practising bar and many of the educational facilities for the training of students. It is to meet those needs that the Inn exists and on which it expends the bulk of its resources.

It is near Holborn, in the London Borough of Camden, just on the border with the City of London and the City of Westminster, near the Royal Courts of Justice. The Inn lies to the north of the Strand (and the two Temples) and to the south of High Holborn (and Gray's Inn); Chancery Lane being the nearest tube station.

Architecture

The Inn originally occupied the site from at least 1442, leasng it from the the Bishop of Chichester and the freehold was acquired in 1580. The oldest surviving structures at the Inn are the Gatehouse on Chancery Lane (1518 and later refurbishments) and the Old Hall (1489-92) replacing the episcopal hall. The Old Hall's roof beams are notable as original but were hidden by a Georgian plaster ceiling, being rediscovered when the Hall was reconstructed using its existing materials in 1924-28. The group of Chambers west of the Old Hall are from circa 1535, being numbered 16, 18, 19 and 20 Old Buildings and 12 and 13 New Square which they were not originally part of.

The New Chapel replaced the previous one and was consecrated in 1623 with John Donne reading the address - he had just been promoted from Inn Preacher to Dean of St Paul's. It is elevated above an Undercroft which is unusual but may be a replication of the 'Chichester' chapel's featur; episcopal and conventual chapels did have this design. The Chapel was extended to the west by a bay and also added the entrance porch and steps, by Edmund Becket Denison (Lord Grimthorpe, Treasurer 1876) in 1881-83, replacing the Vice-Chancellor's Court which had been relocated to the Strand. Denison also made the mechanism for the clock on the Great Hall.

New Square (or Serle Court) was created in 1689-93 as a private development with a formal association with the Inn and is now fully incorporated as part of it, although a number of Chambers have 'flying' Freehold tenures.

Stone Buildings were designed by Sir Robert Taylor as part of a grander scheme which was never fulfilled. The intention was to include a new Hall as well as Chambers and a new library (at No2). The scheme also included the accommodation for The Six Clerks of Chancery in the Chancery Lane range (Nos 9-11) they relocated to the RCJ in 1885 and today No 10 is the home of the Inns of Court and City Yeomanry. The Taylor project was left incomplete in 1785, Nos 3-6 of the western side, but was finished off sympathetically a century later.

The Great Hall, Council Rooms for the Benchers and new Library are by the father and son architects, Philip (his initials are shown on the southend of the Hall 'P.H. - 1843') and Philip Charles Hardwick and opened in 1845. Hardwick had already 'completed' the west range of Stone Buildings by replicating Taylor's style for the southern end, No 7. Another famous architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott, extended the Library by three bays eastwards in 1871-72 and also adopted the style for the replacement block of Chambers at 8, 9 and 10 Old Square, opposite in 1878, completed by his son George Oldrid Scott.

General refurbishment of Listed Buildings is all that the Benchers can do today, after some serious controversy in the mid-1970s to create ranges of Chambers on the North Garden along the northern and western perimeters of the Inn. The Fountain in New Square is a commemorative display to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002. However, the Hardwick Great Hall was subject to a major structural renewal completed in 2006, by inserting a Mezzanine in the kitchen undercroft a new venue, available to all entitled members and commercial tenants 'The Members Common Room', has been provided. The fireplace/ cooking range hood is a retained feature within the bar.

Membership

The three ranks of membership of the Inn are students, barristers and benchers. The lowest rank, that of student (once known as "inner barrister"), is open to all of good character who satisfy certain educational requirements, which nowadays include acceptance by a British university for a degree course. On obtaining a law degree, passing the Bar Vocational Course, and "keeping" the requisite number of terms by dining in hall sufficiently often during the seven dining periods in the year, the student qualifies for call to the Bar. The Inn plays a vigorous part in supplementing a pupil's formal training by arranging debates, moots, instruction and exercises in advocacy, and experience as a judge's marshal. There is also a system of sponsorship whereby practising barristers give general assistance to students on an individual basis. Call to the Bar is made by the Treasurer of the Inn on one of the five call days in the year. The student then becomes a barrister, or, as it was once called, an outer or "utter" barrister. In order to attract new members of the highest calibre, the Inn provides scholarships, bursaries, awards and prizes worth over £1.1 million ($2 million).

Famous Members and Benchers

Names famous in the law naturally feature among its benchers and members, such as Sir Matthew Hale and Lord Mansfield, Chief Justices of the Kings Bench in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or more recently, Lord Denning and Lord Hailsham, but it has also served as a training ground for those whose achievements were in other fields. Fifteen Prime Ministers, from Pitt to Tony Blair, have been benchers. The names of the novelists Charles Reade, Charles Kingsley, Wilkie Collins, Rider Haggard, and John Galsworthy will all be found in the membership records. Of literary figures, perhaps standing rather higher than those is John Donne, who was Preacher to the Society and laid the foundation stone of the present Chapel, built in 1623. And perhaps the most famous name of them all, Thomas More, admitted as a student in 1496, he went on to become a bencher of the Inn.[1]

Statesmen

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as a young lawyer.

Politicians, Ministers and Law Officers

Judges

Lawyers

  • Anthony Grabiner, former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the London School of Economics
  • William Garrow, established cross-examination as a cornerstone of the adversarial trial system
  • Frank Lockwood, represented the English Bar at the 19th meeting of the American Bar Association
  • Cherie Blair, wife of Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
  • Fidelis Oditah, prospective Governor of Delta State, Nigeria
  • James Hope-Scott, famous ecclesiastical lawyer
  • Peter Prescott, intellectual property law specialist

Jurists and Scholars

Writers, Poets and Philosophers

Other



Lincoln's Inn Library

East end of the Library

The Lincoln's Inn Library is of ancient foundation - it is first mentioned in the Inn's records in 1471. The Library holds about 150,000 volumes, the core of which is a comprehensive range of English legal materials for the practitioner and bar student including important collections of rare books and manuscripts; by no means all connected with the law. The most important are the Hale Manuscripts. They take their name from Sir Matthew Hale, Chief Justice of the King's Bench and great antiquary, who bequeathed his large personal collection on his death in 1676. The collection includes most of the Library's 63 medieval manuscripts.

The present library building stands at the north end of the Great Hall. It is approached by the staircase which also leads to the Benchers' Rooms; and beneath them are the offices of the Inn. These structures were built at the same time as the Great Hall, in 1843-45, though the library was extended eastwards in 1872, to the design of Sir George Gilbert Scott, R.A. Before the present building was erected, the library was at No.2 Stone Buildings; and before 1787 there was a library close to the Old Hall. As a collection of books, the library has been in continuous existence for over five centuries. In addition to law reports, statutes, legal textbooks and all the usual material of a working law library, there are many other books on a wide range of subjects, including topography, local records, parish registers and many branches of literature.

Apart from an outstanding collection of English legal treatises and extensive collections of early civil and continental law, the Library has a large collection of pamphlets and tracts, over two thousand of which date from before 1700, and which contain important material of interest to many apart from legal historians.

The Library also holds extensive collections of Commonwealth legislation and law reports (though relatively few textbooks and journals). The Library's current acquisitions policy is to concentrate mainly on Australia and New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Pacific, and Africa, with Inner Temple Library having primary responsibility for Canada, Hong Kong, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, though the Library does hold some materials from those jurisdictions.

The Library holds a virtually complete set of all Parliamentary papers and debates from 1801. The main exception is House of Commons Standing Committee debates (published separately from the main Hansard) which, other than for a small selection for sessions 1954-55 to 1971-72, are held only from 1983-84.


Preachers of Lincoln's Inn

The office of Preacher of Lincoln's Inn or Preacher to Lincoln's Inn is a clerical office in the Church of England.[2] Past incumbents include:



Other organisations based in the Inn

68 Signal Squadron

68 Signal Squadron is a British Army unit of the Royal Corps of Signals. It operates out of two locations: a townhouse in Lincoln's Inn, Central London, and (some thirty kilometers away) a more barrack-style premises in Whipps Cross, Leytonstone in East London. It is attached to 71 (Yeomanry) Signal Regiment (Volunteers).

Notes

  1. ^ Curriculum vitae, p.84
  2. ^ This illustration shows the Hall (now the Old Hall), the Chapel and Chancery Court.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lincoln's Inn.
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