Map E. New Inns Leased by Chancery Clerks, 1425-1500
Click here to download a 1200 dpi version of this map.
This map is most interesting for what’s not there. While the previous map showed the lively Chancery clerk investment in property and inns over about seventy-five years after 1350, this map shows that over the next seventy-five years such investments simply stopped. By 1500 the Inns of Chancery as they are known to history were formed and attached to one of the Inns of Court.
The only Chancery clerk inns here are anomalous:
- Harflete/Harfeu Inn is directly across Chancery Lane from the Chancery headquarters at “The Rolls,” and was leased by the aged Ricardian clerk Nicholas Wymbyssh about 1450 as either a training location, as headquarters for the Six Clerks, an increasingly important group of second-tier clerks, or both. It was later known as “Six Clerks Inn.” The inn was therefore not a freestanding legal society at any point but restricted to Chancery clerk use.
- Lyons Inn was a functioning Inn of Chancery when the property itself was bought by John Naylor, a Chancery clerk, about 1450. Nonetheless, Naylor was merely the property owner who leased to the law society, not a member or principal.