Such early records as do exist of the Inn as a corporate institution in its early days do not amount to convincing evidence, but they do point to the existence of Gray’s Inn as an Inn of Court in the fourteenth century. A list of the Readers of the Inn, with their Arms, from the year 1359, compiled in the reign of Henry VIII. (Harleian MSS.), we may take for what it is worth. It is said that William Skipwith, a Serjeant-at-Law in 1355, belonged to Gray’s Inn, and was the first Reader. Again, in 1589, Sir Christopher Yelverton, in resigning his membership of Gray’s Inn, as it was compulsory for him to do on being appointed a Serjeant-at-Law, made a farewell speech to his brother members, stating that ‘I doe acknowledge myself deeplie and infinitely indebted unto this House for the singular and exceeding favours that I and myne ancestors have received in it ... _for two hundred years agoe at least_ some of them lived here.’ This statement, if accurate, would prove the Inn to have been a corporate institution at least as early as 1389. Again, we gather from the ‘Paston Letters’ that Sir William Byllyng, Chief Justice in 1464, told William Paston that he had been ‘a felaw in Gray’s Inn,’ and also mentioned one Ledam as a ‘felaw’ there. This is the first, and for many years the last, mention of any Fellows in Gray’s Inn. It may either be considered to be a confirmation of the view that the Lawyers’ Society was in possession in the fifteenth century, or merely a proof that Byllyng himself and Ledam were fellow-lodgers in some part of Lord Grey’s tenement. But there is, in fact, no indubitable mention of the Lawyers’ settlement here until the time of Henry VIII. However, the great-grandson of the Justiciar, Reginald de Wilton, leased out the _hospitium_ in Pourtepole in 1343. And in 1370 Lord Grey de Wilton let ‘a certain Inn in Portepole’ for 100 shillings. Stow, on the authority of one Master Saintlow Kniveton, says that gentlemen and professors of the Common Law were Lord Grey’s tenants. At any rate, before the end of the fourteenth century (1397) the records show that the Lords de Grey had enfeoffed others--who possibly represented the Society of the Inn--with the use of their property. Then, in 1506, Edmund, Lord de Grey, decided to part with it altogether. He was perhaps persuaded to adopt this course by the fact that the suburban villa of the De Greys was by this time already being swamped by the rising tide of houses that was flowing westward from the City. He sold to Hugh Denys and others ‘the Manor of Portpoole, otherwise called Gray’s Inn, four messuages, four gardens, the site of a windmill, eight acres of land, ten shillings of free rent, and the advowson of the Chantry of Portpoole aforesaid.’