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

INTRODUCTION. X X V
constant objections from their tenants when they ordered the permanent,
or even temporary closing of these gates. Orders had been
made under Elizabeth permitting the door from Fuller's Buildings to
Ram Alley to be used in the daytime, provided children and idle
persons were kept out, but to be locked from io p.m. to 5 a.m., and if
any inconvenience arose, to be stopped up for ever. Now the house
was " greatly grieved and exceedingly disquieted by many beggars
vagabonds and sundry idle and lewd persons who daily pass out of
all parts of the city into the garden through the same door and there
have stayed and kept all the whole day as their place of refuge and
sanctuary," and by persons sick of infectious diseases whose presence
was dangerous to the health of the inn. An order was accordingly
made that if the inhabitants of Ram Alley would at their own cost
build a new door and keep a porter to exclude disorderly persons, the
door might be opened in term time only, unless the reader should permit
it being opened in vacation, and in case of further complaint the
door to be walled up for ever. In the meantime, Mr. Gibbes having
made an entrance from his cook's shop in Ram Alley into the Temple,
it was ordered to be mured up forthwith. And some building having
been erected near Sir Edward Coke's chambers in Fuller's Rents,
order was given to inspect it with a view to its being removed.
The door through the wall of the King's Bench office into
Whitefriars, after being bolted and barred on several occasions
against the dwellers in the sanctuary, and having as many times been
broken open and the bolts and bars carried away, was finally closed
" and strongly mured up with bricks," in 1631. The broken wall near
the kitchen garden was also repaired, and the Temple was thus made
as secure as circumstances would admit against the incursions of its
unruly neighbours, This right of sanctuary, which could be pleaded
in bar to most indictments for felonies and misdemeanours, became,
however, so great a scandal, that in the year 1624 it was abolished for
ever. " No sanctuary or privilege of sanctuary," it was declared by
an Act of 21 James I., " shall be hereafter admitted or allowed in any
case."' From that time no claim of sanctuary could be pleaded, but
these antient privileged places still remained for a considerable time
as houses of refuge for malefactors and debtors. They relieved, to
some extent, the cruelty of perpetual imprisonment for debt, and they
11.
Cap. 28, sec. 7.
Vol. i., p. 283
P. 3
p. ISS