pretensions, shut the doctor out from their dinners. In the reign of Charles I., the doctor complained to the king that he received no tithes, was refused precedence as Master of the Temple, was allowed no share in the deliberations, was not paid for his supernumerary sermons, and was denied ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The doctor thereupon locked up the church and took away the keys; but Noy, the Attorney-General, snubbed him, and called him "elatus et superbus;" and he got nothing, after all, but hard words for his petition.
The learned and judicious Hooker, author of "The Ecclesiastical Polity," was for six years Master of the Temple — "a place," says Izaak Walton, "which he accepted rather than desired." Travers, a disciple of Cartwright the Nonconformist, was the lecturer; so Hooker, it was said, preached Canterbury in the forenoon, and Travers Geneva in the afternoon. The benchers were divided, and Travers being at last silenced by the archbishop, Hooker resigned, and in his quiet parsonage of Bishopsbourne renewed the contest in print, in his "Ecclesiastical Polity."
When Bishop Sherlock was Master of the Temple, the sees of Canterbury and London were vacant about the same time (1748); this occasioned an epigram upon Sherlock, —
- "At the Temple one day Sherlock taking a boat,
- The waterman asked him, ' Which way will you float?'
- 'Which way?' says the Doctor; 'why, fool, with the stream!'
- To St. Paul's or to Lambeth was all one to him."
The tide in favour of Sherlock was running to St. Paul's. He was made Bishop of London. Most of his successors in the Mastership have been men of eminence.
During the repairs of 1827 the ancient freestone chapel of St. Anne, which stood on the south side of the " Round," was removed. The upper storey communicated with the Temple Church by a staircase opening on the west end of the south aisle of the choir: the lower joined the "Round"' by a doorway under one of the arches of the circular arcade. The chapel anciently opened upon the cloisters, and formed a private way from the convent to the church. Here the Papal legate and the highest bishops frequently held conferences; and on Sunday mornings the Master of the Temple held chapters, enjoined penances, made up quarrels, and pronounced absolution. The chapel of St. Anne was in the old time much resorted to by barren women, who there prayed for children.
In Charles II.'s time, according to "Hudibras," "straw bail" and low rascals of that sort lingered about the Round, waiting for hire. Butler says: —
- "Retain all sorts of witnesses
- That ply i' the Temple, under trees;
- Or walk the Round with Knights o' th' Posts,
- About the cross-legg'd knights, their hosts;
- Or wait for customers between
- The pillar rows in Lincoln's Inn."
In James I.'s time the Round, as we find in Ben Jonson, was a place for appointments; and in 1681 Otway describes bullies of Alsatia, with flapping hats pinned up on one side, sandy, weather-beaten periwigs, and clumsy iron swords clattering at their heels, as conspicuous personages among the Knights of the Posts and the other peripatetic philosophers of the Temple walks.
We must now turn to the history of the whole precinct. When the proud Order was abolished by the Pope, Edward II. granted the Temple to Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who, however, soon surrendered it to the king's cousin, the Earl of Lancaster, who let it, at their special request, to the students and professors of the common laws; the colony then gradually became an organised and collegiate body, Edward I. having authorised laymen for the first time to read and plead causes.
Hugh le Despenser for a time held the Temple, and on his execution Edward III. appointed the Mayor of London its guardian. The mayor, by closing the water-gate, caused much vexation to the lawyers rowing by boat to Westminster, and the king had to interfere. In 1333 the king farmed out the Temple rents at £25 a year. In the meantime, the Knights Hospitallers, affecting to be offended at the desecration of holy ground — the Bishop of Ely's lodgings, a chapel dedicated to à Becket, and the door to the Temple Hall — claimed the forfeited spot. The king granted their request, the annual revenue of the Temple then being £73 6s. 11d., equal to about £1,000 of our present money. In 1340, in consideration of £100 towards an expedition to France, the warlike king made over the residue of the Temple to the Hospitallers, who instantly endowed the church with lands and one thousand fagots a year from Lillerton Wood to keep up the church fires.
In this reign Chaucer, who is supposed to have been a student of the Middle Temple, and who is said to have once beaten an insolent Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, gives a eulogistic sketch of a Temple manciple or purveyor of provisions, in the prologue to his wonderful "Canterbury Tales."
- "A gentil manciple was there of the Temple,
- Of whom achatours mighten take ensample,
- For to ben wise in bying of vitaille;
- For, whether that he paid or toke by taille,
