The buildings were purchased by the Leathersellers’ Company, who converted the Nuns’ Hall into their Common Hall, and so it continued until the demolition of all the ancient buildings in 1799. It appears from Malcolm that he believed the Nuns’ Hall to have been demolished, and a new hall built in 1567. These are his words:— “We will suppose the monastery of St. Helen demolished, the materials disposed of, and the purchase of the site compleated by the Company. The architect finds a foundation far superior to any their funds would supply, and therefore cases the basement walls with brick, and makes the pavement (ready for his purpose) serve as the floor for the new Hall. And thus far he acted wisely; for his work of 1567 became too ruinous and expensive for repair in 1797, was taken down, and will be forgotten. What remains to be said of the antient crypt? That it would not have required repair for 500 years to come. Had the enormous masses of fungous webs, which depended from the arches of this beautiful work, been carefully swept away, and the walls rubbed with a dry broom, the antient windows re-opened, the earth that clogged the pavement removed, and its other defilements cleared off, these crypts, now scattered in piles of rubbish, would have formed a church how infinitely superior to forty I could name! The regret with which I saw those slender pillars torn from their bases, and the strong though delicate arches sundered in masses, is still warm to my remembrance. The angles were filled with white sand, a layer of earth, another of sand, a layer of oak chips; one now lays before me. Six hundred years have passed since this wood was cut, and the mark of the axe is fresh upon it, and so on till the spaces were filled.” (Vol. iii. pp. 562-563.) The representation of the hall given by Wilkinson and that given by Malcolm do not seem to agree in all particulars. Malcolm adds a view not presented by Wilkinson showing the ruins of the cloisters. I have elsewhere called attention to the remarkable fact that London possessed, down to the end of the eighteenth century, a greater collection of mediæval ruins than any city of Europe, and that no one, poet, historian, antiquary, essayist, took the least notice of them. Wilkinson, however, does remark that the group of ruins “reminds us rather of some romantic fragment of antiquity to be found in distant countries than of one situated in the very centre of populous London, and were it not for the modern buildings made out in the background, a spectator might be led to imagine the scene many miles distant from the Metropolis of England.”