Inner Temple
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 Corporation 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 new Hall. Many other parts of the Inn are Victorian.
The Temple is often used as a location for both television and cinema.
Famous members
- Geoffrey Chaucer (reputed)
- Thomas de Littleton
- William Catesby
- Sir Edward Coke
- Sir Francis Drake
- Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester
- Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex
- Christopher Hatton
- 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
- Bram Stoker
- Mohandas Gandhi (called 1891, disbarred 1922, reinstated 1988)
- John Maynard Keynes
- Clement Atlee
- Jawaharlal Nehru
- Mohammed Ali Jinnah
- Cecil Rhodes
- 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
- Michael Howard
- John Mortimer (whose best-known creation, Horace Rumpole, was also an Inner Templar)
- Richard Searby
- Malcolm Bishop
- Thomas Willing
- Musa Alami
- Tuanku Abdul Rahman ibni Almarhum Tuanku Muhammad
- Tunku Abdul Rahman
- Sir Nicholas Slanning
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City of London (includes the enclaves Inner Temple and Middle Temple) |
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| Inns of Court |
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| Gray's Inn | Lincoln's Inn | Inner Temple | Middle Temple |
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