The site of this Inn may possibly have been included in the Old Temple property, which the Templars sold to the Bishopric of Lincoln when they moved South (Chapter I.). However that may be, some time in the fifteenth century Staple Inn ceased to have any claim to be a Customs-house,[74] and was given over to the Lawyers. It was not a surprising change, for the conduct of the King’s wool-trade and the settlement of the disputes that must have arisen in connection with the clearing of woollen merchandise for export were likely to have made ‘Le Stapled Halle’ long ere this a home of clerks and apprentices of the Law.[75] The steps by which this home of lawyers passed into the control of the ‘Grand Company and Fellows’ of Staple Inn, with a Principal and Pensioner at their Head, are not known. They must, at least, have been taken long before ‘the first Grant of the inheritance thereof to the Ancients of Gray’s Inn’ mentioned by Dugdale as being dated in the twentieth year of Henry VIII. The transaction referred to would seem to have been rather in the nature of the creation of a trust. At any rate, Staple Inn became an appendance of Gray’s Inn. But by the end of the last century it had long ceased to fulfil the functions either of a Customs-house or of an Inn for Law-students. Finally, in 1884, the Society of Staple sold their property, and the Prudential Assurance Company presently acquired it. Under their public-spirited and artistic care, Mr. Alfred Waterhouse made a practical and scholarly restoration, displacing from [Illustration: STAPLE INN HALL AND COURTYARD THE Hall was built between 1580 and 1592, and has a fine hammer-beam roof, and some old stained glass in its windows.] the frontage the plaster with which the eighteenth century had disfigured it. The most famous occupant of rooms in Staple Inn was Dr. Johnson (1759), who came here after he had completed his ‘Dixonary.’ It was here that he wrote his little romance of ‘Rasselas,’ in order to pay for his mother’s funeral. The Mackworth coat-of-arms over a modest doorway between 22 and 23 Holborn used to indicate until recently the entrance to Barnard’s Inn, the other Inn attached to Gray’s Inn. This was the residence of Dr. John Mackworth, who was Dean of Lincoln in the reign of Henry VI. When leased by his successor to Lyonel Barnard, it took the name which it now bears. The Inn was let to students of Law as early as 1454, for in that year Stow records that there was a great affray in Fleet Street between ‘men of Court’ and the inhabitants there, in the course of which the Queen’s Attorney was slain. As punishment, the principal Governors of Clifford’s Inn, Furnival’s Inn, and Barnard’s Inn were sent to prison.