Definition
Faryndon Inn is the historical name for Serjeants' Inn, Chancery Lane, London — one of the inns associated with the order of serjeants-at-law, the senior rank of the English legal profession before its abolition in the nineteenth century. The name derives from the medieval ward of Farringdon, within which the inn was situated. It has no operative legal meaning in modern law and appears in legal literature exclusively as a historical designation.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter this term almost exclusively in older English legal history, biography, and commentary on the Inns of Court and their satellite institutions. The key navigational point is that Serjeants' Inn had two distinct locations over its history — one in Chancery Lane and one in Fleet Street — and sources do not always specify which is meant. Faryndon Inn refers specifically to the Chancery Lane site. Conflating the two locations can introduce error when tracing the institutional history of the serjeants-at-law or the physical geography of the early English legal profession.
Because Faryndon Inn is a purely historical reference with no living legal doctrine attached to it, it will not appear in modern case law or statutory material. Corpus researchers should expect to find it in treatises, legal histories, and antiquarian commentary — particularly works dealing with the order of serjeants-at-law, the organization of the English bar before the Judicature Acts, or the topography of legal London.
The term also surfaces as an incidental reference in sources that are primarily about something else, such as entries on Inns of Court more broadly or biographical notices of prominent serjeants. Bouvier's entry is representative: it mentions Faryndon Inn only in passing, immediately redirecting the reader to the main entry on Inns of Court.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the substance: Faryndon Inn is the ancient appellation of Serjeants' Inn, Chancery Lane. Black's (both editions) states this in identical language. Bouvier adds the geographic qualifier "London" and cross-references the Inns of Court entry, which is the more substantive treatment. None of the sources offers additional detail about the name's origin, the inn's history, or its institutional role — a gap consistent with the treatment of proper-name historical references in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries, which tended to record such terms for completeness rather than exposition.
Researchers seeking fuller treatment should look beyond legal dictionaries to legal-historical scholarship on the serjeants-at-law and to antiquarian accounts of the Inns of Court. The historical dictionaries are useful here only to confirm the identification of the term; they supply no independent historical analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
Faryndon Inn is an institution of English legal history with no counterpart in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. It is irrelevant to any non-English legal system and to English law post-dating the effective dissolution of the order of serjeants-at-law in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Inns of Court; Serjeants-at-Law.