The name of the Fellowship-Porters which Dickens adopted for the sign of Miss Abbey Potterson's public-house was that of one of the old City Guilds. For over 800 years the City of London successfully claimed and exercised the sole right to unload grain vessels arriving in the Thames, and realised enormous revenues from the privilege. In 1155, the Guild or Brotherhood of Fellowship-Porters was incorporated and a charter was granted. It was reincorporated in 1613, and appointed by the City to carry or store corn, salt, coals, fish, and fruit of all kinds. The Fellowship-Porters at one time numbered 3,000 members, and the Guild had the power granted by act of Council in 1646 to choose twelve rulers, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen reserving the right to appoint one of the number. The company had a hall of its own which stood near to the Waterman's Hall in St. Mary's Hill, Billingsgate, but had no livery or arms, and ranked the nineteenth in the order of procedure. Membership carried with it the freedom of the City by payment of £2 18s. 6d., and five guineas to Fellowship Hall--these fees being demanded before they could work as dock labourers. When Millwall Docks were built, the City challenged the docks on the matter of their privilege, and the case went to the Law Courts. It was then discovered that the Charter could not be produced, it having been destroyed by the Great Fire of London, so it was supposed. This blow ruined the Guild, and some thirty years ago the organization was wound up, the then present members being deprived of work, pensions, and everything else their Charter entitled them to as Freemen of the City. Another notable tavern in _Our Mutual Friend_ is the Ship, at Greenwich, where two memorable little dinners were given. The first was the occasion when, Bella Wilfer having been presented with a purse and a fifty-pound bank-note by Mr. Boffin, took her dear old father, the cherub, to Greenwich by boat on a secret expedition, as she called it, and entertained him to dinner there. First calling for her father at his City office, where the messenger described her to her father as "a slap-up gal in a bang-up chariot," she handed him the purse with instructions, not to be disregarded, to "go to the nearest place where they keep everything of the very very best, ready made; you buy and put on the most beautiful suit of clothes, the most beautiful hat, and the most beautiful pair of bright boots (patent leather, Pa, mind!) that are to be got for money; and you come back to me." After half an hour he came back "so brilliantly transformed that Bella was obliged to walk round him in ecstatic admiration twenty times before she could draw her arm through his and delightfully squeeze it."