Let us now take a rapid review of the Company’s history as applicable to the trade. If they did not possess the right of search or the power over the trade generally, like some of the other Guilds, they by advice and action with the Corporation and Companies have upon many occasions proved most beneficial and valuable. The earliest ordinances of the Guild are of the date 1498. They provide for the elections of the Master and Wardens “wᵗʰ tokens of garlands on their heds,” the charge of purchasing “clothing or lyvery” for the brotherhood at the drapers’ shops at Blackwell Hall (on or near the site of the present Guildhall Library); the settling of the dinners, when the member paid 2_s._, “and for the wyf if she be att the dyner xii_d._” (which is not an ironmonger’s wife’s privilege at the present time); those freemen warned to attend the Hall and disobeying to be fined 4_d._, and the wardens 2_s._; none to offer insult to their brethren; “no member to sue a brother for debt without leave of the wardens”; apprentices to be admitted to the fellowship “having served his tyme well and truly”; “straungers or foreigners (that is to say, those not already of the City) may be elected if introduced by four creditable liverymen”; “the Wardens, once in every two years at least, to search all manner of weights and measures that be used in the same felashippe, and when they find any default to levy fines at the discression of the master and wardens”; apprentices to be enrolled at Guildhall within the first year, and to be registered in the Company’s book; “no person in the felashippe shall take noon apprentice excepte he have sewertie and bond for him in Cˡⁱ sterling”; and no apprentice to be “under 14 years of age, and for no lesse terme than X yeres, except it be his first apprentice taken for necessitee, and for him he shel ax licence of the wardeyns,” and every apprentice his master shall advise to be “resonable and honest,” and shall see that he have clean and sound “hosyn, doblett, shirtis, and other necessaries,” ... “to kepe hym from colde and wete,” and by no means to suffer “his here to growe to long.” Finally, every member of the fellowship, whether in or out of the clothing (that is to say, liveryman or freeman), was required “to appear iiij. tymes in the yeere at the foure principal Courts, and these iiij. Courts ben ordeyned alway to endure to Goddes pleasir principally, and to redresse the maters that be not wele used, and to kepe pece and gode rewle among us,” and at these Courts all arrearages were to be paid—the master, 12_d._; the present or past wardens, 8_d._; the clothing (or liveryman), 6_d._; and the yeomanry (or freeman), 4_d._; and the wardens not to see the yeomanry decay.