It was a system that was found ‘cumbersome, painful, and chargeable to the people,’ as Stow[1] puts it, and one of the provisions of Magna Charta accordingly enacted that the Court of Common Pleas should no longer follow the King, but be held in some determined place. The place determined was Westminster. The Court was held, though not at first, in the famous Hall, which William Rufus had erected and Richard II. rebuilt. It was to be expected that the fixing of the Courts would be followed by the settlement of ‘Students in the Law and the Ministers of each Court,’[2] as Dugdale has it, somewhere near at hand. Advocates had been drawn at first from the ranks of the clergy. This was natural enough, seeing that they formed the only educated class of the day. _Nullus clericus nisi causidicus_, the historian complains. It was equally natural that in the course of time objection should be taken to the spectacle of the professors of Christianity wrangling at the Bar, and monopolizing the power born of legal knowledge. Dugdale notes the first instance of an attempt to check their presence in the Courts as occurring at the beginning of the reign of Henry III. The clergy were at length excluded from practising in the Civil Courts, and a privileged class of lay Lawyers came into existence. Edward I. specially appointed the Justices of the Court of Common Pleas to ‘ordain from every County certain Attorneys and Lawyers of the best and most apt for their learning and skill, who might do service to his Court and People, and who alone should follow his Court and transact affairs therein.’ And at this date, or shortly after it, we may assume that ‘students in the University of the Laws’[3] began to congregate in Hostels, or Inns, of Court, in order to study as ‘apprentices’ in the Guild of Law. For, as at Oxford or Cambridge, an Inn, or Hostel of residence, was the natural necessary requirement of such students when they began to come in numbers to sit at the feet of their teachers, the Masters of Law. The earliest mention of an Inn for housing apprentices of the Law occurs in 1344, in a demise from the Lady Clifford of the house near Fleet Street, called Clifford’s Inn, to the _apprenticiis de banco_, the lawyers belonging to the Court of Common Pleas. And Thavie’s Inn was similarly leased from one John Thavie, ‘a worthy citizen and armourer,’ of London, who died in 1348. In such hostels, leased to the senior members, voluntary associations, or guilds of teachers and learners of law would congregate, and gradually evolve their own regulations and customs. Other references occur to the ‘apprentices in hostels’ during this same reign (Edward III.). And from about this date the four Inns of Court--Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, and the Inner and Middle Temple--‘which are almost coincident in antiquity, similar in constitution, and identical in purpose,’[4] begin to emerge from the mists of the past.