Over four hundred readings are known to have been given in the hall of Gray's Inn over the course of two and a half centuries, though only a small proportion have survived in writing or in lecture-notes. By chance, however, both the earliest and the latest surviving readings in the inns of court are from Gray's Inn, and this evidence casts some light on the history of readings in general.

Professor Thorne has produced a conjectural list of readers of the inn from 1435 to 1470, and has shown how their lectures were given on a cycle of statutes from Magna Carta up to the legislation of Edward I and the undated ‘statute’ Prerogativa Regis. A few texts from this period are yet extant, and Professor Thorne has printed those of Henry Spelman (c. 1452) and Thomas Brugge (c. 1469). That of Miles Metcalfe (d. 1486), a future recorder of York, is the earliest which can be dated, since the reader puts a case concerning a bond payable in three years' time at Christmas 1462; this date of 1459 helps towards the assignment of conjectural dates to several of the others. Another interesting reading is that of John Baldwin (d. 1469), who became common serjeant of London in 1463; it includes what may be the fullest account since the thirteenth century of English criminal law.