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

xxiv INTRODUCTION.
community, with its rescues, its bravoes, its bullies, its highwaymen,
and its termagant hags, was equally applicable to the one period and
the other.
The habits of these neighbours were naturally distasteful to the
benchers as invading the privacy of their college and tempting the
young bloods among the students and the barristers to indulge in riot
and debauchery. Over the main entrance to Whitefriars they seem
to have had no control beyond the power of temporarily closing the
eastern gate when occasion arose. Over the other entrances they
exercised summary jurisdiction. Access to the church, the master's
garden, and the churchyard was obtained by these outlaws chiefly
through a shop occupied by one Davies a tailor in Falcon
Court. From Fleet Street and through this house came " a disorderly
crew of outlawed persons which dare not shew themselves
abroad in the streets." Here they made their daily sanctuary, and
a member of the Middle Temple in a petition to the benchers of the
p. 56 two houses, prayed them " for the honor of God and the church to
take order that the churchyard be not, as now it is, made a common
and most noysome lestal." 1 The benchers called upon the master
P• 57 of the Temple to show by what right such shop was built, and in
default of any satisfactory answer from him they ordered the house
to be forthwith pulled down and the door into the churchyard to be
p. 59 mured up " before the treasurer's going forth of town." Mr. Badger
p. 36 having a chamber with double entrances, his door into the master's
garden or churchyard was mured up, and thus all access to the
church and churchyard, except from the Temple itself, was effectually
prohibited. Another entrance to the Temple from Fleet
Street was through either M itre Court or Ram Alley, two narrow
passages running in parallel lines from the street to the back of
Fuller's Rents. At the southern end of these lines were gates
separating them from the Temple. In Ram Alley the inn owned
five shops, if not more. One of these was occupied by Tailor
and his successors, a stationer, one by Anthony Gibbes, a cook,
and one by Hans, a tailor, and there were " 2 little shops " occupied,
one by Webbe, at a rent of los. per annum, and one by Saunderson.
The benchers, thus having property in Ram Alley, were met by
Lestall, a dung-pit.