Combined coat of arms of the four Inns of Court. The Inner Temple's arms are at bottom-left
Inner Temple Library, 1892, by Herbert Railton
The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple is one of the four Inns of Court around the Royal Courts of Justice in London which may call members to the Bar and so entitle them to practise as barristers. (The other Inns are Middle Temple, Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn.)
The Temple was occupied in the twelfth century by the Knights Templar, who gave the area its name, and built the Temple Church which survives as the parish church of the Inner Temple and Middle Temple. The Inner Temple was first recorded as being used for legal purposes when lawyers' residences were burned down in Wat Tyler's revolt. It is an independent extra-parochial area, historically not governed by the City of London Corporation (although geographically within the boundaries and liberties of the City of London) and equally outside the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishop of London.
The Inn suffered heavily from wartime bombing between September 1940 and May 1941, because of its proximity to the Thames. The buildings destroyed included the Library and the Hall although others, such as 2 King's Bench Walk, were fortunate to survive.
The oldest surviving buildings in the Inner Temple date from the seventeenth century and are on King's Bench Walk (named after the King's Bench Office which was there until the nineteenth century), though the first storey of the Knights Templars' medieval buttery (where food was served) survives as part of the larger building that contains the rebuilt Inner Temple Hall. Many other parts of the Inn are Victorian.
The Temple is often used as a location for both television and cinema.
Inner Temple is also one of the few remaining liberties, an old name for a geographic division. Middle Temple is another.
Famous members
- Baron Henry de Worms, First Lord of Pirbright
- Geoffrey Chaucer (reputed)
- Cecil Rhodes
- Bram Stoker
- Mohandas Gandhi
- Prince Constantin Karadja[1], Romanian diplomat and Righteous Among the Nations
- John Maynard Keynes
- Clement Atlee
- Jawaharlal Nehru
- Thomas de Littleton
- William Catesby
- Sir Edward Coke
- Sir Francis Drake
- Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester
- Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
- Christopher Hatton
- Sir Ernest de Silva
- Thomas Morton, a member of the associated Inn of Chancery Clifford's Inn
- William Wycherly
- Judge Jeffreys
- James Boswell
- Samuel Johnson (resided at the Inner Temple for a period, though not a member)
- William Paca
- Karl Pearson, and his father William Pearson, QC
- George Phillippo
- Thomas Hughes
- William Schwenk Gilbert
- Francis William Reitz, president of the Orange Free State
- Ivy Williams, the first female barrister
- A.J.P. Taylor
- Seretse Khama, president of Botswana (admitted 1946)
- Derry Irvine
- Lord Woolf
- Elizabeth Butler-Sloss
- Jack Straw
- Sir Albert Margai, second Prime Minister of Sierra Leone
- Michael Howard
- John Mortimer (whose best-known creation, Horace Rumpole, was also an Inner Templar)
- Richard Searby
- Thomas Willing
- Musa Alami
- Tuanku Abdul Rahman ibni Almarhum Tuanku Muhammad
- Tunku Abdul Rahman
- Sir Nicholas Slanning
- Roger Ludlow
External links
Coordinates: 51°30′49″N 0°06′40″W / 51.51361, -0.11111
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