Barnard’s Inn was governed by a Principal and twelve Ancients. The study of legal forms was insisted on with great strictness. Fines were imposed of one halfpenny for every defective word, one farthing for every defective syllable, and one penny for every improper word in writing the writs according to the form of the Chancery, in the moots of the House.[76] A Reader was appointed by Gray’s Inn, and great respect was paid to him. The Principal, accompanied by the Ancients and Gentlemen in Commons in their gowns, met him at the rails of the House on his coming, and conducted him into the Hall. This is a delightful fifteenth-century building. The original timber and rough-cast exterior was cased in red brick in the eighteenth century. It has a high-pitched roof and louvre in the centre, and, within, an open timber roof, and some heraldic glass in the windows (1500). It stands in a small courtyard, beyond which there used to be another Court, wherein were the Library and Kitchen, and, beyond, houses grouped about a railed-in garden. Portraits of Lord Chief Justice Holt, the most distinguished Principal, and of Lord Burghley, Bacon, Lord Keeper Coventry, and Charles II. once hung upon the walls. In 1854 the Society consisted of a Principal, nine Ancients, and five Companions. The Companions were chosen by the Principal and Ancients. The advantage of being a Companion was, in the evidence given before the Royal Commission in 1855, stated to be ‘the dining’; the advantage of being an Ancient ‘dinners and some little fees.’ Barnard’s Inn is now the property of the Mercers’ Company, who moved their School hither in 1894. Only the Hall now (1909) remains of the old buildings. Even the passage from Holborn has been altered, and an imposing block of offices, fronting Holborn, is in course of erection, behind which lie the Hall and modern School buildings. Furnival’s Inn, which Stow says belonged to Sir William Furnival and Thomasin, his wife, in the reign of Richard II., lay to the west of the Bishop of Ely’s Palace in Holborn. It was brought by the heiress of the Furnivals to the Earls of Shrewsbury, from whom it passed to the Society of Lincoln’s Inn, and was by them leased to the Principal and Fellows of the Inn of Chancery there inhabiting (1548).