Called to the Bar: Lincoln's Inn, London WC2, part I The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn

This year, Lincoln's Inn celebrates a remarkable 600th anniversary. In the first of two articles, John Goodall examines the origins of this celebrated society of lawyers  

- John Goodall

IN December 1422, an anonymous lawyer put his pen to a fresh quire of paper to record the names of 23 fellows who were required to be present 'here'-no place name is given-over Christmas. This great feast separated two terms in the legal year and there was a stiff fine for absence.

He wrote in French and annotated each name with the number of previous occasions that that individual had attended 'Nowell', some once, some twice and some three times.

In this list, written almost exactly 600 years ago, is to be found the first documentary evidence for the existence of the society of lawyers familiar today as Lincoln's Inn.

To judge from the attendance at previous Christmases, the society had, in fact, been constituted since at least 1420. Other documentary evidence pushes that date back slightly to 1419 and possibly 1417, but whether it was already long-established at that time is not certainly known.

The list is the opening entry in a long series of administrative records compiled by the Inn and collectively known as the Black Books.

They don't appear to have been methodically written up until 1427. In that year, under the heading 'Lyncolnesyn'-significantly, the first unambiguous use of the name as the home of the lawyers in question-there is for the first time a fulsome entry in a new hand, with a prefatory note that speaks of the 'ordinances of the same society'.

It's not clear what those ordinances were or when they were drawn up, but then almost everything about the origins of the four medieval societies of lawyers known as the Inns of Court that have survived to the present day -Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, Middle Temple and Inner Temple is slightly mysterious. So, too, are the origins of the smaller Inns of Chancery, so-called, that they eventually swallowed up.