Volume II 1603-1660 - The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple

INTRODUCTION. xxiii
their asylum in favour of life, enforced a certain amount of discipline
upon the crowd who took advantage of the privilege which was
thus extended to them. A statute of Henry VI I provided that
there should for the future be no sanctuaries except in parish
churches, their churchyards and cemeteries. But places which had
formerly been consecrated to these pious uses appear to have still
retained the privilege of sanctuary. They thus became the refuge
of dissolute and evil disposed persons, and festering plague spots in
the centre of an otherwise healthy community. Thus stood the law
on the accession of King James, and among the many places suffering
from the evils of this system was the Inner Temple. The
church and its burying ground were, or were at least reputed to be,
antient sanctuaries. Access to them appears to have been surreptitiously
effected through houses built on land forming part of the
New Temple, which had their front entrances in Fleet Street, with
backways into the churchyard. Ram Alley and Mitre Court, standing
between Fleet Street and King's Bench Walk, were also claimed by
the outlaws as places of sanctuary, and at a later date Fuller's
Buildings or Rents, for many years the residence of Sir Edward
Coke, was also treated as a privileged place of refuge. On the east,
with access through a gate, then, as now, standing in the centre of
King's Bench Walk, with a second entrance for a short time through
the King's Bench Office, and with occasional means of incursion
through the dilapidated wall of the kitchen garden of the Inner
Temple, stood the sanctuary of Whitefriars. The bounds of this
locality, formerly the home of the Carmelite Friars, are set out in
the old maps. They appear to have comprised a large church
with a lofty spire, which, however, was destroyed about 1540, the
full establishment of a religious house, with gardens, and also a
mansion belonging to the Greys, formerly Earls of K ent, one of
whom had his home there in the seventeenth century. Whitefriars,
commonly known as Alsatia, a name borrowed from the border and
debatable land between Germany and France, is described by Lord
Macaulay 2 as it existed in the reign of King Charles I I. Although
the date to which the historian refers is somewhat later than that
now under consideration, it is probable that the description of this
I 32 Henry VIII., C. 12.
Macaulay's " History of England," London, 1836, vol. i., p. 362.