Again, certain orders, made for the better government of the Inns of Court and Chancery in 1624 provided that not more than eight members of any one inn should be called to the Bar in any one year, and that no Utter-Barristers, except such as had been Readers in Houses of Chancery, should begin to practise publicly at any bar at Westminster until they had been three years at the bar. As regards the Inns of Court, their precise origin cannot be clearly ascertained. We hear of them in the reign of Edward III., mention being made in the Year Book of 1354 of "les apprentices en Hostells." In the opinion of Lord Mansfield they were at the outset "voluntary societies," for they "are," he says, "not corporations and have no charter from the Crown." Serjeant Pulling holds that the smaller houses were hired by the apprentices, and then by lease or purchase possession became permanent. The greater houses, he thinks, had a similar history. This belief is borne out by what happened in the case of the Temple. In 1324, when the King granted the Knights Hospitallers the New Temple, the latter let the Temple to "divers apprentices of the law that came from Thaveis Inn in Holborn." This was evidently in existence at the time. How long it had existed prior to 1324 cannot be stated, but in his will dated 1348, and enrolled in the Court of Hustings of the City of London, John Tavye, citizen and armourer, devised to his wife Alicia "illud hospitium, in quo apprenticii legis habitare solebant." In all probability, therefore, the existence of the inn did not go back farther than the lifetime of the armourer. The notice seems to show also that the inns received their names not from Serjeants, as fathers of the apprentices, but from the actual owners. Till about the commencement of the sixteenth century we are wholly in the dark as to the management of the inns. We then hear of governors, treasurers, and the control of affairs in the different houses lay with the senior members of the societies, who were styled ancients or benchers. The apprentices may be regarded as inchoate Serjeants--Serjeants in the making, persons on the way to become Serjeants. The Serjeants had their own inns; and, on joining the brotherhood, the newly-appointed dignitary was rung out of the inn to which he had previously belonged by the chapel bell.