In most craft-gilds it was considered sufficient for an apprentice to serve for seven years before he was free of the gild; but in the Armourers’ Company we frequently find entries of apprentice bonds for nine years, and in some instances ten and fourteen. There are records of misbehaviour of one of the apprentices, who is ordered “honest correction as that a Servant shall be used.” This correction was sometimes administered in the Hall before the Gild-Court, and is described as being “indifferently well” carried out. The case of the Sussex smith who produced unworkmanly armour has been referred to above. In a letter from the Lord Mayor in 1560 we read that the apprentices are not to use “swearing and blaspheming, haunting evil women or Schools of Fence, Dancing, Carding, Dicing, Bowling, Tennis play, using of Ruffs in their shirts, Tavern haunting or Banqueting, and if any shall be found faulty the same be forwith punished by whipping openly in your Hall in the sight of other Apprentices, and ye shall give in charge that the said Masters shall not permit nor suffer any of their Apprentices to wear in their hosen any cloth of other colours than are here expressed, that is to say, White, Russet, Blue, Watchet, and the said Hosen to be made without great Breeches in most plain manner without stitching of Silk or any mannar of Cuts.” The most valuable of the possessions of the Armourers’ Company from the technical point of view is the suit of armour made by Jacobe, who is now considered to be the same as Jacob Topf, an Innsbruck craftsman who was Master Armourer at Greenwich in 1590. The design for this suit appears in the _Almain Armourer’s Album_, which is noticed under the heading of German Armourers. There is also a “locking-gauntlet,” which is sometimes erroneously called the “forbidden gauntlet,” by the same craftsman (Fig. 32). The Company at one time possessed a model suit of armour made in 1567 by John Kelk, a naturalized German member, which, when completed, was brought into the Hall with much ceremony and laid upon the high table. It was intended to be a pattern of the armour made by the Company. There are various entries in the Company’s Records of payments for repairing and keeping up this “Mannakine,” as it was called. It has since disappeared; but Hewitt, the noted authority on medieval armour, seemed to think that it was in the Tower in 1855 (II, 52). FOOTNOTES: [132] Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer. [133] William Pickering was Master of the Company 1608-9. [134] In September, 1575, “Hopkins, a maker of coining irons in the Mint, has also been making calivers and great iron pieces.”--State Papers, _sub ann._ LISTS OF EUROPEAN ARMOURERS