As is the case with regard to the origin of the Inns of Court, the first beginnings of the Inns of Chancery are buried in obscurity, from which they can only be retrieved by the discovery of new documents. It seems probable, in the absence of definite evidence, that there was at first no distinction between Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery, but that, all alike, Inns of Court and the ten lesser Inns called Inns of Chancery, mentioned by Fortescue, were originally mere Hostels where Students of the Law congregated, lived and learned. Then, in course of time, the natural laws of differentiation and development came into play, and these Inns or Hostels gradually resolved themselves into two classes. The four great Inns of Court developed, as we have seen, from small associations in small hostels into great and wealthy institutions upon lines of aristocratic monopoly. The other Inns, taking their names from the Clerks of the Chancery who chiefly studied there, passed through different stages of development into subjection under the Inns of Court, and after a period, during which they partly performed the function of preparatory schools for the preliminary training of young students who were afterwards admitted as members of the Inns of Court, crystallized into close corporations of Solicitors and Attorneys. Then all official connection between the two kinds of Inns came to an end. Thus, whilst the Inns of Court became aristocratic Schools of Law, reserved for lawyers of gentle birth, the Inns of Chancery were gradually monopolized by Writ clerks, both of the Court of Chancery and of the Court of Common Pleas, and by other minor officials. These gradually ousted the well-born Apprentices who were training on for the Inns of Court. On the one hand Attorneys and Solicitors were excluded from the Inns of Court. In 1557, for instance, they were refused admission to the Inner Temple, and ordered to repair to their Inns of Chancery. In 1574 such as remained were expelled the House. The Middle Temple soon followed the example of the Inner. On the other hand, in spite of the remonstrances of the Benchers, the Attorneys, who had gained an ascendancy over the Inns of Chancery, set themselves to secure a monopoly of them. Without definitely excluding students for the Bar, they received them so ungraciously that, for instance, Sir Mathew Hale passed straight from Magdalen College, Oxford, to Lincoln’s Inn (1629). Indeed, John Selden, the antiquary (1584-1654), seems to have been the last of the great lawyers to be trained at these schools for the larger Societies. Thus one step in the ladder of education, so much approved by Coke and Fortescue, was eliminated. The Inns of Chancery were abandoned to the Attorneys.[71] They then gradually fell out of fashion and deteriorated in discipline as in prestige. By the middle of the eighteenth century they had become obsolete. But if they fell early into decline, their decadence was long drawn out.