The Third University of England is the collective name at one time used for the law school represented by the inns of court and chancery. The name was in use before the end of the Tudor period, and was made familiar by Coke and Blackstone: for Coke an apt enough description of a school still thriving, though for Blackstone a retrospective and rather wistful term used to describe the inns in their already distant heyday. As a residential university, the inns belong to a world long past. In this case it is a world so remote that it has seemed until recently almost beyond historical reach: certainly it has received less than its fair share of attention in the bulky literature on the inns of court.

I need hardly inform members of the Selden Society, meeting in Lincoln's Inn hall, that for untold generations before the Court of Chancery began its vacation sittings here, this was a law school; and I hope it is not unduly pious to say it was a great law school. Certainly it heard some distinguished lecturers. Here in 1662 William Prynne, earless but with voice restored to favour, lectured on the Petition of Right: a reading remarkable for its detailed historical learning. Prynne described graphically to his audience how he had turned over ‘many hundred thousands of writts, petitions and other records cast aside as useless and buried altogether in a confused heape for many yeares past in a darke corner of Caesar's Chapell in the White Tower of London under cobwebs, dust and rubbish…’.