Such then is an abstract of the earliest ordinances of the Ironmongers. At the present time the Company consists of a master, two wardens, the livery (all of whom comprise the Court, and, therefore, unlike any other City Company, who have a livery and a court of assistants as well), and the yeomanry, or freemen generally, over which presides a warden chosen by and from themselves at Easter, yearly. Of these we shall speak in another chapter. The ordinances were revised and approved by the Lord Chancellor and Justices in February 1581, when the rules were either modified or extended. The elections are set forth; the four quarterly courts were settled, and at which the master paid his quarterage money of 16_d._; the warden, 12_d._; the liveryman, 9_d._ and the freemen, 4_d._ The apprentice always to be of the age not exceeding twenty-four when his term expired. The stranger or foreigner when admitted to pay 20_l._ The search of weights and measures to be once a year, or oftener, in the shops of the fellowship, and false ones destroyed, and fines of 40_s._ to the Company to be inflicted. Other special ordinances will be alluded to in another chapter. The Company in 1549 interested themselves in the passing of the Act against the forging of iron gads instead of gads of steel, and six years later there are several entries relating to the coal meterage, which the Company had to superintend until the reign of James I. In 1557, when the rules of the newly-founded Bridewell at Blackfriars were made, and to which prison rogues and apprentices formerly, and of late years unmanageable City apprentices only, have been sent by the Chamberlain, it was specially provided in the governing of “the nail-house” that “to you is given authority to make sale of all such nayls as shall be made in this house, so the same be done according to the order taken with the Company of Ironmongers, which is, that (they giving to this house as the people of the same may by their travail reasonably live) shall before all men have all the nails that are made therein, and have one month’s day of payment for the same.” An inventory of all iron and nails, smithies, hammers, anvils, bellows, and tools to be truly kept, &c., and proper workmen appointed to oversee the idle apprentices’ work. In 1579 there were at Bridewell what in 1597 were called “art masters,” or those who had charge of trade apprentices, and among these were the naylors and pinmakers. In 1598 “Spanish needles” were made in the prison; in 1602 the pinners’ boys numbered fourteen, and in 1604 there were to be forty.