Prior to 1637, letter-founding is not specifically mentioned as a distinct industry in any of the Public Documents. We are not on that account however, (as we have endeavoured to point out), to assume either that the restrictive provisions of previous enactments which regulated printing did not apply to letter-founding, or that, as a trade, it had no separate existence before that date. The divorce of letter-founding from printing was in all probability a long and gradual process; and although it would be difficult to fix any precise date to the completion of that process, we may yet infer from the fact that the Decree of 1586 (which includes by name almost every other branch of industry connected with printing) makes no mention of letter-founding, while the Decree of 1637 particularly names it, that between these two dates printers ceased generally to be their own letter-founders. As we have elsewhere noticed, the Stationers’ Company as early as 1597 took cognisance of letter-founding as a distinct trade, when it called upon Benjamin Sympson to enter into a bond of £40 not to cast any letters or characters, or to deliver them, without previous notice to the master and wardens. And that there was a certain body of men known in the trade as “founders” owning the authority of the Stationers’ Company in 1622, is evident {165} from the fact that in that year the Court called upon “the founders” to give bond to the Company not to deliver any fount of new letters without notice. It would be erroneous, therefore, to imagine that the Star Chamber Decree of 1637 in any sense created letter-founding as a distinct trade. Its purpose, as in the case of printing, was to restrict the number of those engaged in it, which had probably grown excessive under the milder regime of the Decree of 1586. In the curious little tract, to which allusion has already been made, entitled _The London Printer, his Lamentation_,[297] the author, writing in 1660, after highly commending the Decree of Elizabeth (23 June, 1586), limiting the number of printers, says that about 1637, notwithstanding the above Decree, “printing and printers were grown to monstrous excess and exorbitant riot,” and that the law was infringed at all points. In this “monstrous excess and exorbitant riot,” it is highly probable that the letter-founders of the day figured. And it seems equally probable that John Grismand, Thomas Wright, Arthur Nicholls (or Nichols[298]) and Alexander Fifield, who were appointed by the Decree of 1637 as the four authorised founders, had already been founding types for several years, with or without the sanction of the authorities. In the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, the names both of John Grismand and Thomas Wright occur as publishers of certain works, the former in 1635, the latter in 1638; from which it would appear that both before and after 1637 they may have combined the trade of bookseller and printer with that of letter-founder.[299]