"Although there be two several societies, yet in sundry places they are promiscuously lodged together without any metes or bounds to distinguish them, and the ground rooms in some places belong to the new house, and the upper rooms to the old one, a manifest argument that both made at first but one house, nor did they either before or after this division claim by several leases, but by one entire grant. And as they took their diet apart, so likewise were they stationed apart in the church, viz. those of the Middle Temple on the left hand side as you go therein, and those of the old house on the right hand side, and so it remains between them at this day."[587] Burton, the antiquary, who wrote in the reign of queen Elizabeth, speaks of this "old house" (the Inner Temple) as "the mother and most antient of all the other houses of courts, to which," says he, "I must acknowledge all due respect, being a fellow thereof, admitted into the same society on the 20th of May, 1593."[588] The two societies of the Temple are of _equal antiquity_; the members in the first instance dined together in one or other of the antient halls of the Templars as it suited their convenience and inclination; and to this day, in memory of the old custom, the benchers or antients of the one society dine once every year in the hall of the other society. The period of the division has been generally referred to the commencement of the reign of Henry the Sixth, as at the close of that long reign the present _four_ Inns of Court were all in existence, and then contained about two thousand students. The Court of King's Bench, the Court of Exchequer, and the Court of Chancery, had then encroached upon the jurisdiction of the Common Pleas, and had taken cognizance of civil causes between subject and subject, which were formerly decided in that court alone.[589] The legal business of the country had consequently greatly increased, the profession of the law became highly honourable, and the gentry and the nobility considered the study of it a necessary part of education.