This patent of James I. is the only existing formal document concerning the relations between the Crown and the Inns, though it would be strange indeed if no other grant or patent ever existed. It is preserved in the Church in a chest kept beneath the Communion Table, which can only be opened by the keys held by the two Treasurers. The importance of the patent is, for the purpose of our investigation, that it is based almost certainly upon documents that have disappeared, but which reached back to the original conveyance, and it shows that there were two separate parcels, exacting two separate rents. Moreover, it provided that _each_ Society should continue to pay a rental of £10. Now, if these two Societies represented a division of the one parent body which had come from Thavye’s Inn and held the _whole_ Inner and Middle Temple at a rent of £10, it is hardly conceivable that when this supposed division took place, each Society should have continued to pay the whole rent. The first thing they would have divided, after dividing themselves, would surely have been that rent of £10.[16] That the theory of a division having taken place early caused much wonderment is shown by a report that was rife in the seventeenth century. This ‘report’ was to the effect that the division arose from the sides taken by the Lawyers in the Wars of the Roses. Those wars, however, took place after the date when there is evidence of the existence of the two Societies. The ‘report’ represents an attempt to explain the existence of the two Societies when their origin was already forgotten, and was perhaps suggested by the fact that it was in the Temple Gardens that Shakespeare placed the famous incident that led to the Wars of the Roses: ‘PLANTAGENET. Let him that is a true-born gentleman, And stands upon the honour of his birth, If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, From off this briar pluck a white rose with me. ‘SOMERSET. Let him that is no coward, nor no flatterer, But dare maintain the party of the truth, Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me. ‘WARWICK. This brawl to-day, Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden, Shall send, between the red rose and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night.’ In 1732, in order to put an end to many questions of property, an elaborate deed of partition was agreed to by the two Inns, and forms the final authority upon what belongs to each. CHAPTER III THE TEMPLE CHURCH It is natural to turn from this story of the Templars to the Round Church in the Temple, which is their chief memorial. We leave the roar and rattle of Fleet Street, and pass through the low Gateway of the Inner Temple into the narrow lane which leads us between the gross modern buildings, called after Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson, to the west end of the Church--the west end, which is formed by the round building which we have already mentioned.