An Inn of Chancery, Furnival’s Inn was apparently founded late in the fourteenth century and was purchased by Lincoln’s Inn in 1547. Situated between Portpool Street (later Gray’s Inn Road) on the west and Ely House (later Hatton Gardens) on the east, its imposing facade (Figure 1) loomed over High Holborn. Having survived the Great Fire of London (1666), the Inn was dissolved in 1817 and replaced in 1897 by the Royal Assurance Society, whose building still stands.
Furnival’s Inn Accounts in a History of Lincoln’s Inn (AC)
Furnival’s Inn, which has no archive of its own, is represented here by a single manuscript housed in the library of the Middle Temple. The full volume contains transcriptions from various sources, all dealing with Lincoln’s Inn and its associated Inns of Chancery. The unidentified compiler may have assembled his materials with an eye to publication. Furnival’s Inn is treated ff 83–93v, while the source documents are described (f 84) as ‘the Auncyent Books of this house, bothe faire and legible in a Court hand.’ Foliation of the MS suggests the source material was out of order and this was not corrected by the compiler. Chronological order requires that the leaves be read in this sequence: ff 89, 90v, 90, 91v, 91, 89v, and 92.
The MS was given to the Middle Temple (rather than to Lincoln’s Inn, where it would more logically belong) in 1910 by Sir Rufus D. Isaacs (Lord Reading). A full transcription is in D.S. Bland (ed), Early Records of Furnival’s Inn (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1957).
Access Furnival's Inn Accounts by year: 1407-8, 1411-2, 1412-3, 1416-7, 1417-8, 1471-2, 1481-2, 1485-6, 1494-5, 1497-8, 1498-9, 1503-4, 1533-4