At this period the Court of Common Pleas had been fixed at Westminster, which brought together the professors of the common law at London; and about the period of the dissolution of the order of the Temple, a society appears to have been in progress of formation, under the sanction of the judges, for the education of a body of learned secular lawyers to attend upon that court. The deserted convent of the Knights Templars, seated in the suburb of London, away from the noise and bustle of the city, and presenting a ready and easy access by water to Westminster, was a desirable retreat for the learned members of this infant legal society; and we accordingly find, that very soon after the dissolution of the religio-military order of Knights Templars, the professors of the common law of England mustered in considerable strength in the Temple. In the sixth year of the reign of Edward the Third, (A. D. 1333,) when the lawyers had just established themselves in the convent of the Temple, and had engrafted upon the old stock of Knights Templars their infant society for the study of the practice of the common law, the judges of the Court of Common Pleas were made KNIGHTS,[579] being the earliest instance on record of the grant of the honour of knighthood for services purely civil, and the professors of the common law, who had the exclusive privilege of practising in that court, assumed the title or degree of FRERES SERJENS or FRATRES SERVIENTES, so that knights and serving-brethren, similar to those of the antient order of the Temple, were most curiously revived and introduced into the profession of the law.