y Lane, near Serjeants' Inn, was ready for
their use. On Nov. 15, 1666,--the year of the fire of London, in which
year Hyde had his town house in the Strand--Glyn died in his house, in
Portugal Row, Lincoln's Inn Fields. On June 15, 1691, Henry Pollexfen,
Chief Justice of Common Pleas, expired in his mansion in Lincoln's Inn
Fields. These addresses--taken from a list of legal addresses lying
before the writer--indicate with sufficient clearness the quarter of the
town in which Charles II.'s lawyers mostly resided.

Under Charles II. the population of the Inns was such that barristers
wishing to marry could not easily obtain commodious quarters within
College-walls. Dugdale observes "that all but the benchers go two to a
chamber: a bencher hath only the privilege of a chamber to himself." He
adds--"if there be any one chamber consisting of two parts, and the one
part exceeds the other in value, and he who hath the best part sells the
same, yet the purchaser shall enter into the worst part; for it is a
certain rule that the auntient in the chamber--_viz._, he who was
therein first admitted, without respect to their antiquity in the house,
hath his choice of either part." This custom of sharing chambers gave
rise to the word 'chumming,' an abbreviation of 'chambering.' Barristers
in the present time often share a chamber--_i.e._, set of rooms. In the
seventeenth century an utter-barrister found the half of a set of rooms
inconveniently narrow quarters for himself and wife. By arranging
privately with a non-resident brother of the long robe, he sometimes
obtained an entire "chamber," and had the space allotted to a bencher.
When he could not make such an arrangement, he usually moved to a house
outside the gate, but in the immediate vicinity of his inn, as soon as
his lady presented him with children, if not sooner.

Of course working, as well as idle, members of the profession were found
in other quarters. Some still lived in the City; others preferred more
fashionable districts. Roger North, brother of the Lord Keeper and son
of a peer, lived in the Piazza of Covent Garden, in the house formerly
occupied Lely the painter. To this house Sir Dudley North moved from his
costly and dark mansion in the City, and in it he shortly afterwards
died, under the hands of Dr. Radcliffe and the prosperous apothecary,
Mr. St. Amand. "He had removed," writes Roger, "from his great house in
the City, and came to that in the Piazza which S