The former Inns of Chancery should also be mentioned before leaving the subject, although they have no present interest for the modern lawyer. Their origin, too, is buried in obscurity, but they arose about the same time as the Inns of Court, with one of which each was connected, and were at first places of preparatory training for young students later to be admitted to the particular Inn. These youthful apprentices, however, were gradually ousted by the attorneys and solicitors--who have always been excluded from the Inns of Court--whereupon the Inns of Chancery fell out of fashion and deteriorated, so that by the middle of the Eighteenth Century they had disappeared and their names are now mere memories. During the period of activity of the Inns of Chancery, Staple Inn (perhaps the best known) and Barnard's Inn, were attached to Gray's Inn; Clifford's Inn, Clement's Inn and Lyon's Inn were intimately related to the Inner Temple; Furnival's Inn and Thavie's Inn to Lincoln's Inn; the New Inn and Strand Inn to the Middle Temple. One block only of quaint Elizabethan buildings, with gables of cross timber and plaster, still overhangs the great thoroughfare of Holborn and marks what is left of Staple Inn. Likewise Serjeants' Inn vanished in 1876, when its valuable realty was sold--for Serjeants-at-law had long ceased to be created--and the proceeds were divided amongst the few survivors; a proceeding much criticized at the time, although one of them gave his share to charity. The serjeants-at-law were once a class of barristers who had in some manner acquired the exclusive right of audience in the Court of Common Pleas and had also secured a monopoly of the then profitable art of pleading. Upon attaining this degree, a serjeant severed his relations with his Inn of Court and attached himself to the Serjeants' Inn. After having occupied several sites since the Sixteenth Century, Serjeants' Inn was finally located on Chancery Lane, and to it belonged all of the Serjeants, and all of the judges of the Common Law Courts, for they, necessarily, had been serjeants before being elevated to the bench. The buildings, which are small and have no pretensions to architectural beauty, have for many years been occupied as offices, chiefly those of solicitors. Thus, of the many Inns of Chancery, of the Serjeants' Inn (and the once powerful societies which they housed), there remain none but the four great Inns of Court, through one of which must pass every barrister called to the English Bar.