Try the Pie, It’s Delicious 7/24

We spent the morning at the Middle Temple Law Library. Lawyers in England need to belong to one of four Inns, and one is Middle Temple. There is a record of a library there from as far back as the Tudor Era, and it now encompasses three floors, two basements, and a loft for rare books. The library was moved into its current quarters after WWII, when the previous location was bombed.

The Inns share libraries, and each has its own specialty. Middle Temple focuses on EU and American law, and has ties with the United States. The American Ambassador to the UK becomes an honorary member of the college. They have exchange students come from American legal universities, and even had four alumni sign the Declaration of Independence. There’s a lithograph of the Declaration with those four names starred in the library.

Because English law is based on precedent, almost nothing is thrown out, which can lead to some storage issues for the librarians. Another difficulty is that there is no classification system for the collection, in part because it was believed to be unseemly to have labels on the spines of the books. Can you imagine the headache in managing that collection?

The Inns are run by a group known as Benchers, who are retired and distinguished members of the Inns. Each Inn is expected to have two honorary Royal Benchers. Middle Temple had had Princess Diana and the Queen Mother. After the loss of Princess Diana, Prince William was eventually made a Bencher for Middle Temple, but they had to wait for him to be old enough, first. There’s hope of Princess Katherine becoming their second Royal Bencher, but she’s a little busy right now.

We heard a lot about the history of the buildings and artwork from Middle Temple. Middle Temple and Inner Temple share responsibility for Temple Church, and the rivalry between the two resulted in a statute of the Knights Templar in the Church courtyard with its derrière pointed at Middle Temple. Both Inns claim to be the one mentioned in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

After Middle Temple, we made our way to a pub called the Bank of England. The pub stands between where according to legend, Sweeney Todd ran his barber shop and the place where his victims were baked into pies. The specialty of the Bank of England? You guessed it. I got the chicken and sweet corn pie, which was really good, but the clear pie winner was the beef and venison in a red wine sauce pie. It was heavenly. It was a great lunch, and it felt very British as our trip was winding down.