The Stationers’ Company, who from time to time supplemented the powers conferred upon them by the Star Chamber with regulations of their own on matters such as standing formes, apprentices and prices, would naturally recognise a source of danger in a new foundry starting under the circumstances described, and were prompt to assert their authority. Accordingly we find the following entry in the Index to the Court Books of the Company under date 1597:― “BENJAMIN SYMPSON, letter founder, to enter into a £40 bond not to cast any letters or characters, or to deliver them, without advertising the Master and Wardens in writing, with the names of the parties for whom they are intended.—1597.” {129} Here we have the first historical record of letter-founding as a distinct and recognised trade.[215] Of Benjamin Sympson and his types nothing is known. His name does not occur in any of the lists of printers of the period, nor does it appear that he was even a member of the Stationers’ Company. Whether he was called upon at his own request to qualify as a typefounder, or whether the resolution of the Court was arrived at in consequence of his previous transactions with one or more of the disorderly printers, is equally uncertain. In 1598 the Stationers’ Company made a regulation respecting the price of work, which is also of interest, as indicating the bodies of type at that time most commonly in use for bookwork. It was as follows:― “No new copies without pictures to be printed at more than the following rates: those in pica Roman and Italic and in English (_i.e._, _Black letter_) with Roman and Italic at a penny for two sheets; those in brevier and long primer letters at a penny for one sheet and a half.”[216] A further regulation regarding typefounders shows that in 1622 the trade had more than one recognised representative:― “The Founders bound to the Company by bond, not to deliver any fount of new letters, without acquainting the Master and Wardens—1622.” The Act of 1586, despite the rigour with which, at first at any rate, it was enforced, appears to have fallen into contempt, and to have been openly {130} disregarded by the printers of the first quarter of the seventeenth century. According to the account of the “London Printer,” who wrote his _Lamentation_ in 1660, printing and printers, about 1637, were grown to such “monstrous excess and exorbitant disorder” as to call for the prompt and serious attention of the Court of Star Chamber, who in that same year, because the former “Orders and Decrees have been found by experience to be defective in some particulars; and divers abuses have sithence arisen and been practiced by the craft and malice of wicked and evill disposed persons,” put forward the famous Star Chamber Decree of 1637.[217]