Sir John Fortescue, who was chief justice of the King's Bench during half the reign of Henry the Sixth, in his famous discourse _de laudibus legum Angliæ_, tells us that in his time the annual expenses of each law-student amounted to more than 28_l._, (equal to about 450_l._ of our present money,) that all the students of the law were gentlemen by birth and fortune, and had great regard for their character and honour; that in each Inn of Court there was an academy or _gymnasium_, where singing, music, and dancing, and a variety of accomplishments, were taught. Law was studied at stated periods, and on festival days: after the offices of the church were over, the students employed themselves in the study of history, and in reading the Holy Scriptures. Everything good and virtuous was there taught, vice was discouraged and banished, so that knights, barons, and the greatest of the nobility of the kingdom, placed their sons in the Temple and the other Inns of Court; and not so much, he tells us, to make the law their study, or to enable them to live by the profession, as to form their manners and to preserve them from the contagion of vice. "Quarrelling, insubordination, and murmuring, are unheard of; if a student dishonours himself, he is expelled the society; a punishment which is dreaded more than imprisonment and irons, for he who has been driven from one society is never admitted into any of the others; whence it happens, that there is a constant harmony amongst them, the greatest friendship, and a general freedom of conversation." The two societies of the Temple are now distinguished by the several denominations of the Inner and the Middle Temple, names that appear to have been adopted with reference to a part of the antient Temple, which, in common with other property of the Knights Templars, never came into the hands of the Hospitallers. After the lawyers of the Temple had separated into two bodies and occupied distinct portions of ground, this part came to be known by the name of the outward Temple, as being the farthest away from the city, and is thus referred to in a manuscript in the British Museum, written in the reign of James the First.--"A third part, called _outward Temple_, was procured by one Dr. Stapleton, bishop of Exeter, in the days of king Edward the Second, for a residing mansion-house for him and his successors, bishops of that see. It was called Exeter Inn until the reign of the late queen Mary, when the lord Paget, her principal secretary of state, obtained the said third part, called Exeter-house, to him and his heirs, and did re-edify the same. After whom the said third part of the Templar's house came to Thomas late duke of Norfolk, and was by him conveyed to Sir Robert Dudley, knight, earl of Leicester, who bequeathed the same to Sir Robert Dudley, knight, his son, and lastly, by purchase, came to Robert late earl of Essex, who died in the reign of the late queen Elizabeth, and is still called Essex-house."[590]