Here is a very curious note concerning a custom long since forgotten. Before the discovery and importation of Indian nitre, saltpetre was manufactured from animal matter. This stuff was piled in heaps, protected from rain, and watered with stable runnings. Men called saltpetre-men were employed in collecting earth thus impregnated, and were by Act of Parliament (1624) authorised to dig up the floors of stables and any other places where this saturated earth might be found. So important was the manufacture that no dove-house or stable was permitted to be paved. The appearance of the saltpetre-man and his asserted right of digging up and carrying off the earth under stables became a grievance, against which remonstrance was in vain so long as the civil wars lasted. In 1656, however, it was enacted that no saltpetre-man should dig without permission of the householder. During the seventeenth century the ’prentices, as we have seen, became of greater importance than ever; in the eighteenth their power declined. For instance, when in 1643 it was feared that Charles would march on the City, the ’prentices turned out in great force to fortify the entrances and roads all round the City. Four years later they turned out on strike, meeting in Covent Garden, then an open space, in order to compel their masters to give them back the old holidays of which the Puritans had deprived them. These were especially Christmas, with its days of merriment and minstrelsy, Good Friday, Easter Monday, and, I think, Whit Monday. Perhaps the Puritans had also deprived them of Queen Elizabeth’s Day. On Shrove Tuesday the ’prentices demolished, if they could find any, houses of ill fame. Their keepers were locked up in prison during the whole of Lent. This zeal for virtue on the part of the London ’prentice becomes a thing of suspicion when one reads _The English Rogue_. Perhaps it was a custom ordered and maintained by the masters. I conclude this chapter with the history of one of them. It will be seen that the lot of a ’prentice was not always the happiest or the most desirable. The following notes are taken from the autobiography of one of them, a scrivener’s printer, named F. K. To begin with, he was very fond of reading. While he was still a boy he read _The Friar and the Boy_, _The Seven Wise men of Rome_, _Fortunatus_, _Doctor Faustus_, _Friar Bacon_, _Montelion Knight of the Oracle_, _Parismus_, _Palmerin of England_, _Amadis de Gaul_. The boy procured the latter in French, and for the sake of reading it, taught himself French, and made a French dictionary for himself. As he could not afford to buy paper, he cut pages from the middle of the other boys’ copybooks, and, being found out, received a very sound and well-deserved flogging. When he was sixteen he was apprenticed to a scrivener for eight years’ servitude, his father paying £30 and giving a bond for £100 as a guarantee of the boy’s honesty.