Although the origins of the inns of court and chancery are lost in mystery, and likely to remain so, more information is now being found in the public records than might have been foreseen a few years ago. Among the treasures in store are some fifteenth-century lists of members of Gray's Inn; but the present note is concerned with formal structure rather than with biography.

When the first extant pension book begins (in 1569), the society is found to be governed not by benchers but by readers. The style of pensions was ‘coram lectoribus’, and decisions were often expressed to have been made by the readers, never by the masters of the bench. There are, it is true, references to benchers even in Henry VIII's reign; but these refer to the fellows of the inn appointed to preside at moots, and even in Elizabeth I's time there were some learning exercises (the library moots) at which relatively junior fellows occupied the bench. There is no evidence of calls to the bench in a formal, permanent sense before Francis Bacon was admitted to the high table (‘where non ar but reders’) in 1586. There are also references to barristers, and by the 1570s there were clearly defined qualifications for election to the utter bar. It is clear, however, from the pension book – and from the earlier lost records extracted by Segar – that election as a barrister had far less significance than election to the grand company (magna societas).