The Final Class: Middle Temple

Today we took our last tour as a whole group as the 2019 LIS British Studies course. After a scenic bus ride (tip: take the 139 and forget the hop-on-hop-off tour bus!), we wandered into a quiet space in the middle of Fleet Street, a place where Shakespeare put on plays, where barristers learned about the precedents they needed to win trials, and where a lady in a shark-print dress keeps 300-year-old books safe from the world.

Middle Temple Law Library serves one of four (what I'm going to call) houses of law. If you want to practice law in the UK, you have to pick a house, and there's no sorting hat. Instead, as our wonderful guide Renee told us, people pick a house based on where they like to have dinner, what kind of law they might specialize in, where their friends practice law, etc. It's up to them, so the need for the four houses was a little out of my understanding. However, having different houses means more libraries, and more libraries means more books, and that's just better for everyone.

This particular library was founded on the donation of roughly 3700 books by Robert Ashley, back in 1641. Ashley was a self-proclaimed bad lawyer, and because of this, most of the books he donated to were not about law. In turn, the original "law" library had very little to do with law books. About 40 years later, some other folks added to the extensive (but not so practical) collection, and the library was truly established at that point, around 1680. It now houses over 50,000 titles in a quarter of a million volumes.

On top of that, it's home to a few nifty things: it is the only place in the world where you can see a pair the earliest made English globes—both a celestial and terrestrial globe together in one spot. It also boasts the largest double hammer beam roof (in the world, perhaps?).

Notably, Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" was first performed here, in a hall that was built in 1570 (below). The table in the hall is said to have been sailed down the river Thames—it is unique in that the lengthy table is just four solid beams. The wall to the hall had already been closed up when the table arrived, so they removed the wall, put the table in place, and put the wall back together. That was one important table.

We moved on to one more important table post-tour: The Old Bank of England Pub's back corner, where we shared stories over pies and fizzy drinks to celebrate our final class meeting. That's me on the left with the awesome utility belt!

With just a week and a half left to explore, I'm feeling the pressure to squeeze in a million more moments.