By the middle of the fourteenth century, then, we find the students of what we may call a London University of National Law established in their Inns or Hostels, which clustered about the boundaries of the City, from Holborn to Chancery Lane, from Fleet Street to the River. The Schools of Law, of which this University was composed, were distinctively English, and the University itself developed upon the peculiarly English lines of a College system, closely similar to that of Oxford and Cambridge. The Inns of Court and Chancery were the Colleges of Lawyers in the London University of Jurisprudence. Here dwelt, and here were trained for the Courts those guilds or fraternities of Lawyers, according to a scheme of oral and practical education which they gradually evolved. Trade Guilds were the basis of medieval social life, and medieval Universities were, in fact, nothing more nor less than Guilds of Study.[7] The four Inns of Court survive to-day as instances of the old Guilds of Law in London, and the lawyers, in their relations with the Courts, the public and solicitors, seem to represent still a highly organized Trade Union. The Inns of Court, then, have always exhibited, and still retain, the salient features of a University based upon the procedure of the medieval Guild. Just as, in other Universities, no one was allowed to teach until he had served an apprenticeship of terms, and, having been duly approved by the Masters of their Art, had received his degree or diploma of teaching; just as no butcher or tailor was allowed to ply his trade until he had qualified himself and had been duly approved by the Masters of his Guild, so in the Masters of these Guilds of Law was vested the monopoly of granting the legal degree, or call to practise at the Bar, to apprentices who had served a stipulated term of study and passed the ordeal of certain oral and practical preparation. And as though to emphasize beyond dispute the Collegiate nature of these Societies, we find that each one of them made haste to provide itself with buildings and surroundings, which still present to us, in the midst of the dirt and turmoil of busy London, something of the charm and seclusion and self-sufficiency of an Oxford College, with its Hall and Chapel, its residential buildings, its Library, and grassy quadrangles, and its Gateway to insure its privacy. The same system of discipline, of celibate life, of a common Hall, of residence in community, and of compulsory attendance at the services of the Church, which marked the ordinary life of a medieval University, was repeated at the Inns of Court.