LEGAL LONDON.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4881, 23 September 1925, Page 3

LEGAL LONDON.

LINCOLN’S INN OLD HALL. REBUILDING IN HAND. Lincoln’s Inn old hall is now and >•- going complete restoration, the benchers having decided to maintain as far as possible the ancient baaiqueting hall of the Inn for posterity (states the city correspondenct'pf the Manchester Guardian). The hall dates from 1489, but has none of the beauty and majesty of the younger Tudor Hall of the Middle Temple. The handsome and richly-carved oak screen (circa 1565), the large picture by Hogarth of St. Paul before Felix, and the Gothic windows are being carefully preserved from damage, and the interior is npw a mass of scaffolding. Here Charles Dickens is supposed-to have reported cases when it was used as a court of chancery sitting in the sunken well which still runs in front of the benches occupied of late years by Bar students for lectures, and here the immortal case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was supposed to have wound its weary length along. For centuries-, however, the hall represented the hub of the corporate life of the legal society of Lincoln’s Inn. Here they learned law (and in former times the legal teaching of the Inns of Ccurt was a very protracted and thorough business for those young gentlemen who cared to take advantage of it), they took .their meals, they revelled and diced ,and, as the black book of the Inn shows., engaged in more intemperate brawls than would be considered tolerable nowadays), Charles IL, who seldoms seems to have missed any jollity that was going, was present at the masque and revels held in hall in 1661 and 1671, and ■the coatjs-of-arms of James 11. (then Duke of York) and Prince Rupert, among others, still adorn the walls of the hall. During the building operations in 1881 some of the benchers’ beer-pots of the sixteenth century came to light. It will be interesting to see if the present renovations will result in any such discoveries. The new hah dates from 1845.