There is evidence of a guild of Pepperers in London as early as 1180. As a company they appear to have been ruined by the demands of Edward III for subsidies for his French and Scottish campaigns. From their ashes, including those of the Spicerers, arose the Grocers, the sellers “en gros.” They are heard of in the fourteenth century, and were apparently incorporated by letters patent from Edward III in 1345, but their first known charter was granted by Henry VI in 1429, while in 1453 that King conferred on them the charge of the King’s beam, by which all imported merchandise was weighed, a charge of 1d. per 20 lbs. being authorised for the service. In 1457 they were given the exclusive power of garbling (cleansing and separating) drugs, spices, and other imported merchandise, and they also had the duty of examining the drugs and medicinal wares sold by the apothecaries. The law requiring certain drugs to be officially “garbled” before they could be sold was repealed by an Act passed in the sixth year of Queen Anne’s reign. The earliest record of the exercise of their authority over apothecaries is found in 1456, when the minutes of the Company show that they imposed a fine on John Ashfield “for making untrue powder of ginger, cinnamon, and saunders.” Other similar items appear from time to time. In 1612 Mr. Lownes, apothecary to Prince Charles, complained to the Company that Michael Easen, a grocer-apothecary, “had supplied him with divers defective apothecaries’ wares,” and the offender was committed to the Poultry Comptoir. BUCKLERSBURY. Bucklersbury was the centre and headquarters of the London drug trade, at least from the Tudor to the Hanoverian periods. Shakespeare in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” makes Falstaff refer to “the lisping hawthorn buds that come like women in men’s apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury in sample time.” Stow (1598) says of this thoroughfare that “This whole street on both sides throughout is possessed of grocers and apothecaries.” Ben Jonson calls it “Apothecarie Street.” This dramatist in “Westward Ho!” makes Mrs. Tenderhook say “Go into Bucklersbury and fetch me two ounces of preserved melons; look there be no tobacco taken in the shop when he weighs it.” Later in a self-asserting poem to his bookseller, Ben Jonson says of one of his books, objecting to vulgar advertising methods, If without these vile arts it will not sell, Send it to Bucklersbury, there ’twill well.