The fourth of the great Inns of Court--Gray’s Inn--derived its name from the noble family of the Greys of Wilton, having been originally their dwelling, just as Lincoln’s Inn had been the dwelling of an Earl of Lincoln, and several of the Inns of Chancery were originally the homes of other well-known personages. The society seems first to have used the arms of the Grey family; afterwards they adopted the Griffin’s Head[57] as their device, and it still adorns the pillars of the gateway from Field Court into those delightful gardens which were first planted, it is thought, under the direction of no less a man than Francis Bacon. Once they were the resort of fine ladies, but fashion has long since deserted them. The trees, however, are still fine, the aspect of the place ‘reverend and law-abiding.’ Here there is, or was, a rookery, which has given pleasure to generations of Londoners. Early last summer (1892) the Benchers, anxious to utilize so eligible a site, erected a corrugated iron structure some 90 feet long, at the south-west corner of the gardens. They have tried to make it look beautiful by partly covering it with trellis-work, and by having the wooden roof painted tile colour. The rooks, however, showed their resentment by flying off in a body, and it remains a question whether they will again make the gardens their permanent home; for now I hear that this erection, which has the negative merit of being easily removable, is to be replaced by a chapel ‘in the Elizabethan or late Tudor style,’ the windows to be fitted--or misfitted--with glass from the present chapel, which will be turned to secular use. A little more than a century ago Gray’s Inn was quite on the outskirts of London,[58] ‘with an uninterrupted prospect of the neighbouring fields as far as Highgate and Hampstead.’ Centuries before the Great Fire, carved shields of arms were doubtless common in London on public buildings and the houses of great people, as decorations, and as guides to the unlettered class, which then formed a vast majority of the population. Sometimes--at any rate, in the earlier days--these arms were not carved in stone, but painted and hung out, as we learn from the evidence of the poet Chaucer[59] in the Scrope and Grosvenor dispute, which also gives us an interesting glimpse of the early history of one of our noble families. He says that, in walking up Friday Street, he once saw a sign hung out with ‘arms painted and put there by a knight of the County of Chester, called Sir Robert Grosvenor’; and that was the first time he ever heard of Sir Robert Grosvenor, or his ancestors, or anyone bearing the name of Grosvenor.