Exactly 300 years ago the ancient City of Chester was represented in its Mayoralty chair by an ironmonger, whose son upset the good people of the City by retailing ironmongers’ wares, to the prejudice of the Citizens, who, by a grant from Queen Elizabeth in 1561, had been exempted from a duty of 2_s._ per ton upon iron imported there. And in the same year of 1589 one Peter Newall, or Newgall, an assistant to his father-in-law, Mr. Bavand, who appears to have enjoyed the distinction of being “an ironmonger, a vintner, a mercer, and a retayler of manye comodities,” complained that David Lloyd, “a retaylinge draper,” had “usurped the name of merchant,” for which wrongdoing the Privy Council, the Secretary of State, the Master of the Rolls, and all the machinery of the law was set in motion that “the drifte of the said Lloyd shalbe ripte upp and viewed into,” and the injury to the Citizens repaired. In Buckingham, both in 1691 and 1706, two members of the Blunt family were admitted into the Mercers’ Company “to follow the trade of an ironmonger,” and both gentlemen were subsequently Wardens of their Company. Others, too, were admitted to follow other trades. Mr. Herbert, the Guildhall Librarian, in his Historical Essay on the City Companies, published fifty years ago, sums up the exactions on the Guilds by the reigning powers in these words:—“Contributions towards setting the poor to work, towards erecting the Royal Exchange, towards cleansing the City ditch, and towards projects of discovering new countries; money for furnishing military and naval armaments; for men, arms, and ammunition to protect the City; for State and City pageants and attendances; for provision of coal and corn, compulsory loans, State lotteries, monopolous patents, concealments, seditious publications and practices, and twenty other sponging expedients were among the more prominent of the engines by which that ‘mother of her people,’ Elizabeth, and afterwards James and Charles, contrived to screw from the Companies their wealth.” And J. P. Malcolm, in the second volume of his “Londinium Redivivum,” 1803, when giving his most valuable extracts from the Ironmongers’ books (and who speaks of Mr. Sumner, the then clerk of the Guild’s “politeness and attention worthy of an enlightened man,” and so totally different to some other of the Companies’ clerks), remarks “that specie in their hands possessed the faculty of attracting clouds of precepts, and that, if the Company were lavish, the Crown was always ready to receive.” Our last chapter proves the case, but a few more entries of another kind will confirm the views expressed.