They were exempted, moreover, from the particular service of keeping watch against the Pirates, who from the 13th to the 16th Centuries infested the Channel and the mouth of the Thames. This exemption is all the more remarkable since the Alemanes or Alemans--another of their many designations--having practically the monopoly of the sea-borne commerce, were the first to benefit by that vigilance. How dangerous these Pirates were, can be easily understood from the fact that when Henry the Fourth crossed the Thames from Queenborough in Sheppey to Leigh in Essex, in order to escape a pestilence which was raging in London, one of his ships, containing his baggage and some of his retinue, fell into the hands of Pirates, while the King narrowly escaped capture himself. The power of the Stillyard was thus a formidable thing, and its governors had surrounded it by such precautions and safeguards as made it doubly difficult to destroy. The Members of the Steelyard or Stillyard--spelling was never an exact science until a very recent date--lived, for instance, upon the Monastic plan. No guild or corporation or trades union which ever existed set so strict a limit to the number of its members. Its great yards and buildings stood upon the bank of the Thames where to-day the arches of the South Eastern Railway carry the lines into Cannon Street Station. They were known first of all as the “Stapelhof,” the Stapel House; this name was contracted into “Staelhof”; the Staelhof in its turn became anglicised into “Stilliards,” and then, by a change which had nothing to do with the meaning of the institution, was transmuted in common parlance into “the Steelyard.” The Steelyard, which had subsidiary houses at Boston and Lynn, was the great storage building of England. The raw products for exportation, of which tin, hides and wool were the chief, were assembled there. Thither, too, came the imports from abroad--wheat, rye, grain, cables, wax, steel, linen, cloth and tar in particular. The walls were fortified against attack--a very necessary precaution considering the ill-feeling which the Yard aroused amongst British Londoners. No member of the Stillyard was allowed to marry or even to visit any person of the other sex. At a fixed hour in the evening, all had to be at home, and the gates were rigidly closed; and at a fixed hour in the morning the gates were opened again. All meals were taken in common, and the members submitted themselves to a Government which consisted of a Master, two assessors and nine common councilmen. This committee held office for a year, the election taking place upon New Year’s Eve, and the new Master, with his council, solemnly took oath upon the following day to uphold all the rights and privileges entrusted to his vigilance. It can be easily imagined, therefore, what power a body of this kind possessed, a body without home life or any interests except its commerce, having besides not only