‘Apprentice’ is a term that smacks of the Guild, and though in the fifteenth century it came to be applied to the Serjeants themselves, it must originally have denoted the students who sat at the feet of some recognized teacher of the Law. But, in truth, we have not enough evidence to enable us to trace the developments of the relationship between the Serjeants, the Students, and the Inns. The fact that the Serjeants, or Doctors of Law, upon attaining that degree, entirely severed their connection with their Inns, and that it was the Masters, and not they, who formed the governing bodies of the Inns, may be significant of some early difference or antagonism between the original Serjeants-and Apprentices-at-Law. The custom of tolling a newly-elected Serjeant out of Lincoln’s Inn by ringing the chapel bell--‘a half-humorous, half-serious reminder that hence-forward he was dead to the Society’--may be considered to support this view.[79] The obscurity of this question is enhanced, not only by the lack of documentary evidence, but also by the fact that the technical terms of the profession had no stationary significance. _Apprenticii ad legem_ was a fluid phrase; it came to be applied to the genuine junior apprentices of the law in the Inns of Chancery, to the senior students who instructed them, as well as to those who had completed the eight years’ curriculum of the University, and, having passed their examinations, were admitted to practise as advocates in Court, to the very Serjeants and Judges themselves.