Furnival's Inn was an Inn of Chancery which formerly stood on the site of the present Holborn Bars building (the former Prudential Assurance Company

Prudential plc

Prudential plc is a multinational financial services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom.Prudential's largest division is Prudential Corporation Asia, which has over 15 million customers across 13 Asian markets and is a top-three provider of life insurance in mainland China, Hong...

 building) in Holborn

Holborn

Holborn is an area of Central London. Holborn is also the name of the area's principal east-west street, running as High Holborn from St Giles's High Street to Gray's Inn Road and then on to Holborn Viaduct...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, England.

History

Furnival's Inn was founded about 1383, and was attached to Lincoln's Inn

Lincoln's Inn

The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn. Although Lincoln's Inn is able to trace its official records beyond...

. Although it survived the Great Fire of London

Great Fire of London

The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of the English city of London, from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666. The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Wall...

, the Inn, together with the other Inns of Chancery, ceased to exist in the 19th century. The Inn was dissolved as a society in 1817 when Lincoln's Inn did not renew its lease; the building was rebuilt by a new owner, and that building was demolished in 1897. A plaque marks the site where it stood.

Sir Thomas More was Reader at the Inn from 1504 to 1507 http://www.histparl.ac.uk/thomas-more.html, and Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

 rented rooms here between 1834 and 1837, and began to write the Pickwick Papers whilst a tenant. http://www.ludgatecircus.com/prudential.htm, http://www.hiddenlondon.com/dickensbust.htm.

Governance

Furnival's Inn was an area for local government partly in the City of London

City of London

The City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...

 and partly in Middlesex

Middlesex

Middlesex is one of the historic counties of England and the second smallest by area. The low-lying county contained the wealthy and politically independent City of London on its southern boundary and was dominated by it from a very early time...

. It was an extra-parochial area

Extra-parochial area

In the United Kingdom, an extra-parochial area or extra-parochial place was an area considered to be outside any parish. They were therefore exempt from payment of any poor or church rate and usually tithe...

 and became a civil parish in 1858 within the Holborn Poor Law Union

Poor Law Union

A Poor Law Union was a unit used for local government in the United Kingdom from the 19th century. The administration of the Poor Law was the responsibility of parishes, which varied wildly in their size, populations, financial resources, rateable values and requirements...

. The part within the City of London was transferred to St Andrew Holborn

St Andrew Holborn

St Andrew Holborn was an ancient parish that until 1767 was partly within the City of London and partly in Middlesex, England.-History:In 1723 part of the Middlesex section of the parish became St George the Martyr. This was recombined with the remaining Middlesex portion of St Andrew Holborn in...

 in 1900. The remaining parish was part of the Metropolitan Borough of Holborn

Metropolitan Borough of Holborn

The Metropolitan Borough of Holborn was a Metropolitan borough in the County of London between 1900 and 1965, when it was amalgamated with the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras and the Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead to form the London Borough of Camden....

from 1900 and was abolished as a civil parish in 1930. It was unpopulated after the construction of Holborn Bars.

Year	1881	1891	1901	1911	1921
Population	121	121	0	0	0

External links

• Contemporary note of the demolition in 1897: http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/issue_pdf/frontmatter_pdf/s9-II/49.pdf