The foundries of the craftsmen, workers, and casters of brass, latten, and kindred alloys in London were chiefly in and near Lothbury, among their most noted products being candlesticks and spice mortars--two staples which have become nearly obsolete, although none would say that the founding of metal is as yet an obsolete craft. Thus it is change and development are seen everywhere in production. The chief privileges of the Founders have gone, although they still take some little part in the stamping of weights and measures; but that, too, has become a Government duty. The Founders have some interesting pieces of plate, but not much copper. Their best example of their own craft is the ancient poor-box of copper which was presented to the Company by Mr. Stephen Pilchard in 1653, the year in which he was Upper Warden. The feeding of man has always been the first duty of those who took charge of domestic arrangements, and we can readily understand that the caldron or cooking-pot was the earliest vessel. Its use may be regarded as universal, for it is found to have existed everywhere (see Chapter VIII). In mediæval England the feasting of the poor and the feeding of scores of retainers in the baronial halls and in the great ecclesiastical buildings, where hospitality and charity were rife, necessitated immense boiling-pots. Some of those referred to under "Domestic Utensils" (Chapter VIII) seem to some too large for practical purposes. It may, however, be pointed out that there are many large cooking-pots in use even at the present time; and copper caldrons of large size are used in hospitals and infirmaries. Quite recently there appeared in the public Press photographs of a well-known Countess making an Irish stew at Liberty Hall, Dublin, stirring round the contents with a wooden stirrer and lading out bowlfuls of soup with a metal scoop; it was food for the sufferers through the strike at that time going on in Dublin. It is thus that the poor of all ages have been fed. As kitchen operations were confined to lesser areas and smaller vessels were needed by individual families when patriarchal systems were broken up, they were but replicas in miniature of the larger caldrons and vessels which had become too large. [Illustration: FIG. 11.--BRASS AQUAMANILE (SEVENTEENTH CENTURY). (_In the British Museum._)]