I have been asked to provide a survey of the early-modern inns of court and chancery in the period 1450–1550. Perhaps I may be allowed to begin that task in the first person. I am currently engaged in two projects relating to the Third University. One is an edition of the statutes of the inns of chancery. When I first undertook this, only two sets of statutes out of the nine were known; now we have four, which is almost half, and they contain many mutual similarities. They offer our best hope of finding out how the lesser inns worked, though I fear we shall never know as much about them as we do about the inns of court. But that is a subject I will pass over today. The other project, on which I have been engaged for a very long time, is a prosopography of the inns of court and chancery, and of what I loosely call the ‘men of court’, for the period 1440 to 1550. It will include all relevant people mentioned in that period – which means that some of the biographical material runs back to 1400 and some runs forward to 1600. There are at least 10,000 names, and inevitably many of the entries are obscure or ambiguous. It is, nevertheless, a substantial sample from which some general conclusions may be drawn.