Now, in the early Norman period the _aula regis_, or Supreme Court, was simply the King acting as judge with the assistance of his great officers of state. In time there developed therefrom among much else the three old common law courts; whereof the Common Pleas settled the disputes of subjects, the King’s Bench, suits concerning the King and the realm, the Exchequer, revenue matters. Though the last two by means of quaint fictions afterwards acquired a share of private litigation, yet such was more properly for the Court of Common Pleas. It was peculiarly the Serjeants’ court, and for many centuries, up to fifty years ago, they had the exclusive right of audience. Until the Judicature Acts they were the body of men next to the judges, each being addressed from the bench as “Brother,” and from them the judges must be chosen, also until 1850 the assizes must be held before a judge or a Serjeant of the coif. A clause in Magna Charta provided that the Common Pleas should not follow the King’s wanderings, but sit in a fixed place; this fixed place came to be near the great door of the Hall at Westminster. With the wind in the north the spot was cold and draughty, so after the Restoration some daring innovator proposed “to let it (the Court) in through the wall into a back room which they called the treasury.” Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the Chief Justice, would on no account hear of this. To move it an inch were flagrant violation of Magna Charta. Might not, he darkly hinted, all its writs be thus rendered null and void? Was legal pedantry ever carried further? In a later age the change was made without comment, and in our own time the Common Pleas itself has gone to the Lumber Room. No doubt this early localising of the court helped to develop a special Bar. Other species of practitioners--barristers, attorneys, solicitors--in time arose, and the appointment of Queen’s Counsel, of whom Lord Bacon was the earliest, struck the first real blow at the Order of the Coif; but the detail of such things is not for this page. In later days every Serjeant was a more fully developed barrister, and then and now, as is well known, every barrister must belong to one of the four Inns of Court--the two Temples, Gray’s Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn to wit, whose history cannot be told here; suffice it to say they were voluntary associations of lawyers, which gradually acquired the right of calling to the Bar those who wished to practise.