men and women. A version of this, in form a close-fitting hood that covered all but the face, was adopted as a symbol for those barristers who had been recognized as serjeants-at-law, and thus formed the narrow pool of legal practitioners who could be appointed judges of the Court of Common Pleas or, later, of the King's Bench. With this distinctive apparel, the serjeants-at-law became known as "serjeants of the coif" and their group within society as the original Order of the Coif; this predecessor inspired the name and markings of the American Order, although beyond inspiration there is no legal connection between the two. White wigs were so often sewn onto the coif that their usage became conjoined. One of the earliest known (English) serjeants of the coif was a man named Geofrey Ridel, named so in the year 1117. The early writer, Geoffrey Chaucer made mention of Serjeants at Law in the preface to his novel, The Canterbury Tales. Through the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries, important English jurists were so recognized: Bacon, Blackburn, Blackstone, Campbell, Cavendish, Coke, Coleridge, Fortesque, Glanville, and Littleton, may be the best known. But in the 18th century, rumblings of dissatisfaction in this arrangement grew. The English Order's privileged hold on the court was finally ended when a Crown Warrant was issued 1839 which commanded Common Pleas to permit “gentlemen of the bar generally” be allowed to practice before it. Objections were litigated briefly, but by the following year the matter had been settled with the power of the Order broken. Its last meeting was held in 1877. The wig and coif remain standard courtroom attire in England and Commonwealth countries today. At the time of the demise of the English Order, several leading American law schools had already seen development of honors fraternities to recognize scholarship and distinction within the ranks of Juris Doctors in the United States. One of these, at the University of Illinois was originally named Theta Kappa Nu. It inspired several additional chapters at Nebraska, Missouri and Wisconsin. A local legal honor society had formed in 1907 at Northwestern University, adopting the name Order of the Coif, but three years later, in 1910, would accept a charter from Theta Kappa Nu. Even with this charter the Northwestern group apparently retained use of the earlier name, which was one of the factors which necessitated a discussion and eventual negotiation