This Act of Parliament must have proved of great benefit to the Horners; but with it came greater demands from the Company on the part of the King and the City. The frugal minds of the Craft rulers at once saw the advantage of paying one set of assessments instead of two, and asked that in future the Horners and Bottlemakers might be treated as one Company, and not be called upon to pay the shares of two separate Companies. Thus the prosperity of the Horners, coupled with the increasing demands for money made on the City Gilds, led to the union of the Horners and Bottlemakers just twelve years after the passing of the Horners’ Act, _i.e._, in 1477 (sixteenth year of Edward IV), facts indicating in no uncertain way that the Horners must have been very firmly established and legally constituted at the time, both in order to make the assessments possible as well as to give them the right to absorb the Bottlemakers. [Sidenote: Deeds of Agreement.] [Sidenote: Deed of 1590.] [Sidenote: Deed of 1599.] In the reign of Elizabeth we find the Horners’ Company carrying on its work as a Joint Stock Company. The stock being held in shares or half-shares, it therefore became necessary to place the Wardens, who alone had under the Act just mentioned, power to purchase horns, under some agreement to do so only for and on behalf of the members of the Gild. No doubt many such deeds were executed, but amongst the archives of the Company there are still two extant, the one dated 1590 and the other 1599. The parties to the deed are the Wardens and the rest of the members. The Wardens therein bind themselves to buy, and the other members not to buy, horns in London or twenty-four miles round. The horns bought by the Wardens are to be purchased for the use of the whole Company and to be divided equally between them by the Wardens. In the deed of 1599 the limit within which the purchase and sale of horns was prohibited was altered from twenty-four to one hundred miles “next in and about the City of London.” [Sidenote: Horn industry an English secret.] From a document in the possession of the Company it would appear that the horn industry was, during the fifteenth century at least, an English monopoly, and from the official documents of Germany, Holland and France the writer has been unable to discover a single record of such an industry existing before 1600. The following interesting sentence from a document which is dated 1455 (thirty-third year of Henry VI), illustrates the contention:—