time published made ordained or provided notwithstanding IN WITNESS whereof, we have caused these our letters to be made patent. WITNESS myself at Westminster the twenty-fourth day of February in the first year of our reign. PEKHAM. By writ of privy seal, and of the date aforesaid, by authority of Parliament, and for ten pounds paid into the hanaper. (Endorsed.) Inrolled in the Court of the Lord the King, in the chamber of the Guildhall of the City of London in the book marked with the letter l. folio thirteen in the third year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth from the Conquest. The chief point which strikes us on reading the foregoing Charter is, that it contains a great deal relative to Surgery, and little, indeed nothing, concerning Barbery, and yet it is granted ostensibly to the Barbers! Now the Surgical side being the more important one of the craft, and the _raison d’être_ of the Charter being in a great measure to provide for the regulation of Surgery and the correction of abuses in that profession, this silence as to Barbery and recognition of Surgery would seem to be an evidence that the practice of the latter, more or less, was the rule rather than the exception with members of the Company of Barbers; and, as the Masters or Governors were empowered to make “statutes and ordinances” (by-laws) for the governance of the mystery, it was doubtless considered unnecessary to descend into any details concerning shaving and the like in a Royal Charter. The preamble of this Charter is exceedingly quaint and interesting, reciting how through the “ignorance, negligence and stupidity” of various Barbers and other practitioners in Surgery, many of the King’s lieges had “gone the way of all flesh.” Then at the request of “our beloved, honest and free men of the said Mystery of Barbers,” the King grants to them, to be one body perpetual, etc., that two of the chief men of the Company (no doubt the two then existing Masters “exercising the faculty of Surgery”) may with twelve or at least eight other skilled Barber-Surgeons, elect two Masters annually: this provision in itself is singular, as it would seem to imply that the body then incorporated was to be ruled by two Masters only; but a reference to our list of Masters and Wardens will shew that from the year 1448 the Company has been ruled by four Masters, and so on in unbroken succession to the present time[48]; these other two Masters therefore were Masters of the Barbers proper, about whom nothing was said in the Charter, but who were chosen annually in accordance with ancient custom, the Chief or First Master being alternately a Barber, and a Barber-Surgeon. [48] The term “Wardens” is a more modern designation used for convenience sake; the Master and the three Wardens are, strictly speaking, the four “Masters or Governors.”