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My Home Is a Temple By Benet Brandreth KC
Benet Brandreth is a barrister, an expert on rhetoric and Shakespeare’s use of language, a performer and, occasionally, an actor. He is also the author of two novels which speculate on William Shakespeare’s younger days, The Spy of Venice and The Assassin of Verona.
Home – it’s where the heart is, where everybody knows your name, where the wi-fi connects automatically. From the sublime to the ridiculous the common theme is not possession, not comfort but connection. Think of it in those terms and home is no longer simply where you lay your head but where you feel, most keenly, the links to history and to other people.
I have had the same professional home for all my working life, Middle Temple. One of the four Inns of Court; the ancient institutions responsible for the training of barristers. My own Inn, Middle Temple – so called because it is the middle part of the old estates of the Knights Templar just outside the walls of the City of London – is both the most magnificent and the most welcoming. Its centrepiece is the Great Hall completed in 1573. A touch of the Renaissance hidden behind Fleet Street and the Strand. You will have seen it without knowing so because it features so often as the backdrop to period film and television shows. Its sixteenth century charms belie the fact that it is still the fully functioning base for hundreds of barristers, solicitors and clerks.
It’s here that I feel most at home. It’s a lonely business being a barrister; in the end it is you, on your own, standing up before the judge or the jury, making the case. So to be surrounded by a group of people who know that experience themselves, its stresses and strains but also its thrills and triumphs, is both relief and pleasure. The Hall is where we gather, hearts uplifting at sight of the splendours of artistic craftsmanship intricately carved into its doors. Sensing the golden thread of history, we gaze at the hundreds of armorial panels that decorate its walls. It was here that Shakespeare first performed Twelfth Night, here that Raleigh raised the funds for his voyages to the New World, here that countless barristers have learned the law.
Since the beginning, however, Middle Temple has understood it was more than just a place of learning but also one of connections, a home for all its members. At the grand dinners that still fill the Hall with conversation and laughter, the evening ends with the echo of three toasts: to the King, to Absent Members, and the last is simply to the Latin word for home – Domus.
