the Rolls Office, and in after times, when the Master
of the Rolls became head of the Chancery clerks, the street became known
as Chancery Lane.

The Old Temple was in Holborn, and the property extended from the
north-eastern corner of Chancery Lane to Staple Inn, and possibly
further. The Knights Templars sold it about the year 1160 to the
Bishopric of Lincoln. Their round chapel, of which the round of the
present Temple Church is a replica, still retained its chaplain in 1222,
and its ruins were still existing in Queen Elizabeth's reign, quite
close to Staple Inn. In 1547 the bishopric had to resign the property to
John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Great Chamberlain of England, afterwards
Earl of Northumberland,[89] who conveyed it in 1549 to the Chancellor,
Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. The eastern part of the
property was built upon in 1580 by William Roper, of Lincoln's Inn; and
in 1638 the then Earl received licence to demolish his house to make way
for eighty smaller houses and one tavern. The rotunda of the Birkbeck
Bank occupies the site of what was once Northumberland Court, and
Southampton Buildings now cover the grounds of Southampton House.

On the west side of Chancery Lane, or New Street, Ralph Nevill, the
Bishop of Chichester, possessed a house which became part of the third
and present Lincoln's Inn; but his garden was on the east side of
Chancery Lane, and was bounded on the north by a ditch, known in 1262 as
Chanceleresdich. This ditch separated his garden from certain property,
occupied one hundred years later by serjeants and apprentices of the
law, which may be conveniently designated the second Lincoln's Inn. It
was situated to the east of Staple Inn, where now is Furnival Street.

Dugdale describes Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, as a person well
affected to the study of the laws, who had gathered around him numbers
of students. This statement is probably correct, for in 1292, only six
years after the earl had bought the houses of the Black Friars, Edward
I. urges the same course upon his Chief Justice of Common Pleas. He
enjoins John Metyngham and his fellows, _et sociis suis_, to provide a
certain number of every county of the better and more legally and
liberally learned for the purpose of being trained to practise in the
Courts.[90] If the Earl of Lincoln had already brought students to
London, we may be fairly certain that many of them would have come from
his lands in Lincolnshire