Sir Edward Coke, describing the inns of court and chancery in 1602, said they ‘altogether do make the most famous university for profession of law only, or of any human science, that is in the world, and advanceth itself above all others’. This legal university, which Sir George Buck a few years later named ‘The Third Universitie of England’, was not a university in the technical sense; it had no studium generale, its masters did not possess the jus ubique docendi, its regulation was independent of the Church, its members were unincorporated and there was no charter of foundation. Not only was there no central structure or constitution, but the individual societies were not in the legal sense colleges; they were unincorporated associations of lawyers living together in hostels. Yet it would be misleading to regard the inns, except perhaps in their earliest stages, as purely private societies. They constituted one of the foremost institutions of medieval England, an institution which in the later Middle Ages and beyond served much the same function with respect to the lay administrators and governors of England as the two universities did for the Church.

Of the origins of the inns nothing is known, but we do know that they acquired most of their principal characteristics by the end of the fourteenth century.