Definition
In English legal usage, "the Temples" refers collectively to the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, two of the four Inns of Court located in London on the north bank of the Thames. These institutions have, since the medieval period, served as the professional home of barristers — providing legal education, admission to the bar, and collegiate community for practitioners of the English common law. The name derives from the site's original occupants, the Knights Templars, whose suppression in the early fourteenth century left their London precincts available for acquisition by common lawyers. The two Temples are legally distinct institutions, each governed independently by its own governing body (called Masters of the Bench, or Benchers), but they share the Temple Church and certain common grounds.
As Inns of Court, the Inner Temple and Middle Temple retain the exclusive right, alongside Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn, to call candidates to the Bar of England and Wales. Membership in one of the four Inns remains a prerequisite to practice as a barrister.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surname.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A building dedicated to religious worship; an edifice consecrated to one or more deities.
The ordinary English word "temple" carries exclusively religious or anatomical associations (the sides of the forehead) for most readers. In English legal sources, "the Temples" is a term of institutional art referring to specific legal societies, not places of worship. A researcher encountering the phrase in historical legal texts should not read it as a reference to a religious site.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal history, common law procedure, or the history of the legal profession will encounter references to "the Temples," "the Temple," "Inner Temple," and "Middle Temple" throughout primary and secondary sources. Several navigational points matter:
First, the two Temples are distinct institutions. A record, admission register, or legal biography that places a figure at "the Temple" may require disambiguation — Inner and Middle Temple maintained separate admission records, and membership in one did not confer membership in the other.
Second, historical sources frequently use "the Temple" as shorthand for the geographic precinct shared by both Inns, creating ambiguity about which institution is meant in any given context. Burrill's entry reflects this looseness, referring to "the two English Inns of Court" collectively under the single heading Temples.
Third, the suppression of the Knights Templars (1312) and the subsequent conversion of the site to legal use represents a significant break in the documentary record of the precinct itself. Researchers interested in property history of the Temple site must cross the boundary between ecclesiastical and legal institutional records.
Fourth, the reference in Burrill to Essex House as a third portion of the original Templar precinct is historically significant: the outer portion of the house was at various points distinct from what became the recognized Inns, and the boundaries of the Templar property were disputed in later conveyancing history.
For researchers using the Law Mind corpus, references to "the Temple" in English case law, pleading records, or legal biography from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries almost always refer to one or both of these Inns of Court rather than to any religious structure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is concise but accurate on the essentials: the Inner and Middle Temples take their name from the Knights Templars, were converted to legal use after the order's suppression, and function as Inns of Court. Burrill's reference to Essex House correctly situates the Temples within the broader geography of the former Templar precinct, noting that "Inner" and "Middle" are positional designations relative to that larger property.
What Burrill does not address — and what historical dictionaries generally omit — is the governance structure, the function of call to the Bar, or the distinction between the two Inns in terms of their separate records and traditions. Legal dictionaries of this period treat the Temples primarily as a geographic and institutional designation rather than examining their constitutional role in regulating access to the profession.
Jurisdictional Note
The Temples are institutions of English law specifically. The Scottish bar, the Irish bar, and legal systems of other common law jurisdictions developed separate professional structures. Historical references to the Temples in American legal biography typically reflect the English training of early American lawyers prior to the establishment of domestic bar institutions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Inns of Court
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Legal Profession (England)
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Knights Templars (Legal History)