Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/449

 9 th S. II. DEC. 3, '98.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

441

LONDON, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1898.

CONTENTS. -No. 49.

NOTES : Furnival's Inn, 441 The Real ^Eneas, 444 Scott' Brother's Grave Type Errors Poe and Puckle Patro nymics, 445 William de Welde, 446.

QUERIES : Hertfordshire Midsummer Gillyflower "Melt" Characters in Fiction "Money is a good ser vant," &c. Earl of Carnwath " Buoy " Goddard, 447 Local Society in Devon Henrietta M. Price 29, Upper Grosvenor Street Tete-a-Tete Portraits Cogan : Barry Roche Bird Author of Poem Portraits of Genera Desborough and Lady Claypole Spango Gibbet Irons- Michael Arnold Charles I. Rings, 443 Habakkuk Lowley, 449.

REPLIES i-Black Images of the Madonna, 449-Louvre Pictures Bury Head Alexandre the Ventriloquist, 450 Maelstrom Parnell Portrait* W. Doddington Thomas Keyes, 451 Note of Gray's, 452 Three Sisters' Marriage French Verses " Helpmate" Prediction to Newly Elected Pope, 453 Curious Misquotation Algernon- Patches Robert Burton on Tobacco Philip Thicknesse, 454 Mrs. Sheridan Clerical Knights Shakspeare and the Sea, 455 " Horse-Marine," 456 Tolstoi Acorus calamus" Fennel " Jelf and Slingsby Arms of Grigson, 457 Thomas Fielding Valentines Authors Wanted, 458.

NOTES ON BOOKS: Lee's 'Life of Shakespeare 'Slater's ' Romance of Book Collecting ' Cowper's ' Canterbury Marriage Licences ' Aitken's ' The Taller.'

Notices to Correspondents.

gobs,

FURNIVAL'S INN.

ONE cannot but feel some regret in wit- nessing the constant destruction of ancient landmarks in London streets. One of these landmarks, and one of the few that remained in Holborn, was Furnival's Inn. I write of it in the past tense, as there can be little, if any part, of it still standing. As in the case of many famous London buildings, nothing appears to be known of its original founda- tion. Stow, writing in 1598, says :

" Next beyond this manor of Ely House is Lither Lane, turning into the field. Then is Furnivalles Inn, now an inn of chancery, but sometime belong- ing to Sir William Furnivall, Knight, and Thomesin his wife, who had in Oldborne* two messuages and thirteen shops, as appeareth by record of Richard II., in the sixth of his reign."

It is generally stated that it was in 1408 that certain professors and students of the law first occupied the Inn under a demise from the Lords Furnivall, but the exact date appears less certain :

be an invention by Stow, unsupported by any autho- rity. See note by T. E. T. in Gentleman's Magazine for May, 1856, p. 487, where the name is traced from the "Ad Holeburne" of Domesday; also an article in the June number of the same volume by Mr. Waller, entitled ' London in the Olden Time.'
 * This etymology of the name Holborn appears to

" Fur nival s Inn is first noticed as a law seminary in its steward's account books, written about the ninth of Henry IV."*

This statement does not show that the Inn had been just acquired for the lawyers, or that they had not possessed it still earlier. Mr. Jeaffreson in 'A Book about Lawyers' describes the character of the Inns of Chan- cery as follows :

" The Inns of Chancery for many generations maintained towards the Inns of Court a position similar to that which Eton School maintains towards King's at Cambridge, or which Winchester School holds to New College at Oxford. They were seminaries in which lads underwent preparation for the superior discipline and greater freedom of the four Colleges. Each Inn of Court had its own Inns of Chancery, yearly receiving from them the pupils who had qualified themselves for promotion to the status of Inns of Court men."

Fortescue, who was Chief Justice in the reign of Henry VI., states that there were then ten Inns of Chancery :

"As the expense of education at an Inn of Court was equivalent to about four hundred and fifty pounds a year, money of present value, the students were sons of the wealthy gentry, those of inferior rank not being able to bear the expense of maintain- ing and educating their children in this way."f

The fifteenth century was a period of transition, during which the great middle class was struggling upwards and asserting its rights, or wnat it claimed as its rights, with vehemence, and even, at times, with violence. It was also a period of great barbarity, especially so amongst the highest class, so that a modern historian has described those days as " violent and ferocious times," and "monstrous and horrible times." f

" 'The English population,' says a writer of about 1453, 'consists of churchmen, nobles, and craftsmen, as well as common people.' It was a novel and sig- nificant division. Traders and manufacturers took their places somewhat noisily beside their fellow- politicians of older standing, filling the whole land till it seems for a moment as if nothing counted any more in English life save its middle class a busy, aard, prosperous, pugnacious middle class, slowly emerging from its early obscurity ; in this century it had arrived at power definitely, ostentatiously, carrying a proud look and a high stomach, intent on its own affairs, heedless of the Court, regardless of ministers save when it had to bribe them, rreverent to the noble, the ' proud penniless with lis painted sleeve,' tolerant of ecclesiastics and monks only so long as they could be kept rigidly within their allotted religious functions."!


 * Herbert, ' Antiquities of the Inns of Court and

hancery,' 1804, p. 324.

f Denton, ' England in the Fifteenth Century,' quoting Fortescue, ' De Laud. Legum Anglise,' cap.

lix.

J Gairdner, 'Life and Reign of Richard III.,' p. 2.

' Town Life in the Fifteenth Century,' by Mrs. J. R. Green, vol. i. p. 60.