We have seen how the topography of the Inns of Court--and of London itself--is bound up with the history of the Crusades and the Order of Templars who sprang from them. It is supposed that the Order of Serjeants, these Professors of the Common Law, who acquired the exclusive privilege of practising in the Court of Common Pleas, imitated the second degree of the Old Templars, and derived their name from the ‘free serving brethren’ of the Order of the Temple. The word Serjeant is said to translate the Latin _Servientes_, and the King’s Servants-at-Law, _Servientes domini Regis ad legem_, were, it is suggested, the lineal descendants of the _fratres servientes_, the servant brethren, of the Knights Templars. The peculiar dress of the ‘Order of the Coif’ is advanced as an argument in support of this fascinating pedigree. The Serjeants-at-Law marked their rank, it is suggested, by wearing red caps, under which, as in the East, a linen cap, or coif, was worn. Did the Templars bring this habit from the East, and were their first ‘servants’ Mohammedan prisoners? At any rate, the coif proper was a kind of white hood made of lawn (later of silk), which completely covered the head like a wig, and whilst the later black patch represented the cornered cap worn over it, the true vestigial representative of the coif is to be found in the white border of the lawyer’s wig.[80] A connection may be traced between the white linen thrown over the head of a Serjeant on his creation and the white mantle in which the novice was clothed when, in the Chapel of St. Anne, he was initiated into the Order of the Knights Templars, and declared a free, equal, elected and admitted brother. In this connection it is at least noteworthy that the Serjeants had a cult for St. Thomas of Acre (Thomas à Becket), and that in the Chapel of their patron Saint, adjoining the Old Hall of the Temple, they used to pray before going to St. Paul’s to select their pillars. The Knights of St. Thomas in Palestine were placed at Acre under the Templars in the Holy Land, and a Chapel dedicated to St. Thomas of Acre was built for them. Can it be that the Serjeants trace from the subservient Order of the Knights of St. Thomas? There is some trace of an ecclesiastical origin, not only in their ‘long, priest-like robes,’ which Fortescue describes, ‘with a cape, furred with white lamb about their shoulders, and thereupon a hood with two labels,’ but also in their performance of a rite, which none but priests might offer, in a solemn ceremony that lasted down to the Reformation. When feasts were held in the Temple Hall, the Serjeants, in the middle of the feast, went to the Chapel of St. Thomas of Acre in Cheapside, built by Thomas à Becket’s sister after his canonization, and there offered; and then to St. Paul’s, where they offered at St. Erkenwald’s shrine; then into the body of the Church. Here they were appointed to their pillars by the Steward of the feast, to which they then returned.