from their first hostel. This theory fortunately presents no difficulty, and it is supported by various facts and indications. The parent house of Lincoln’s Inn would appear to be the Inn of the great Justiciar Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, which stood to the south-east of St. Andrew’s Church. It was natural and necessary for the great Administrators of the Law to gather about their Courts a following of trained lawyers to help them to enunciate the theory, and to perform the business thereof. As the followers of Le Scrope, the great Justice of King’s Bench, settled in Scrope’s Inn, and the followers of De Grey, the Justiciar of Chester, in Grey’s Inn, so about the residence of the great Justice Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, in his Manor of Holborn, congregated the forerunners of the Society of Lincoln’s Inn, students of law and practisers in the Justiciar’s Court. The hostel of the Earl of Lincoln stood at the north end of Shoe Lane, near Holeburn Bridge. The buildings were erected upon the ruins of the Monastery of the Blackfriars. The Blackfriars had settled themselves in Holborn, west of the north end of Chancery Lane, and gradually amassed property that reached down to the house of the Bishops of Chichester. But presently they followed the example of the Knights Templars, and moved nearer the River to the site of what is still called Blackfriars, just within the City Wall. Their Holborn property they sold a few years later (1286) to the Earl of Lincoln, who undertook to pay 550 marks, in instalments, to the Friars, ‘for all their place, buildings and habitation near Holeborn.’[49] Now, of Henry, Earl of Lincoln, tradition says that he developed his new estate by cultivating the gardens and orchards upon it, and that he made large sums by selling the fruit grown there. But it was, no doubt, to the labours of the former monkish owners, the preceding Blackfriars, that the gardens and orchards of the Earl of Lincoln owed their so rich and wonderful harvests.