One at least, the Merchant Taylors’, the largest hall of all, which faces Threadneedle Street, stands as originally erected, with its little crypt beneath it, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, for though the roof and walls were damaged by the Great Fire, the main building is still intact. This is a rich and proud company, with its income of £60,000 a year, and its fine gallery of royalties and distinguished personages, numbering many kings among its freemen. Yet not so proud as the Mercers’, first on the list, which will not admit visitors to its hall in 87 Cheapside. Whittington and Sir Thomas Gresham were mercers. Within the walls is kept the famous Legh cup (1499), always used at City banquets and supposed to be one of the finest pieces of English mediæval plate in existence. The chapel adjoining the hall, whose handsome front, erected immediately after the Great Fire, you may inspect at any rate, is on the site of Thomas à Becket’s house.

Close by in Prince’s Street, opposite the Bank of England, is the hall of the Grocers, once called the Pepperers, a guild with advanced notions for the Middle Ages, for they apparently believed in the equality of women. The wives of the Grocers were members as well, and were even fined if they were absent from the banquets for any avoidable reason. “Grocer” is one of those words that have grown less honourable with time, for a grocer formerly meant one who dealt en gros (wholesale).

The halls of the Goldsmiths’ and the Fishmongers’ Companies have so many mediæval relics that they well repay a visit, and a card of admission is usually granted on application. The Goldsmiths are in Foster Lane, Cheapside, just behind the G.P.O., and amongst their plate you may see the cup from which Queen Elizabeth is said to have drunk at her coronation. In the Court Room is an old Roman altar, found when the present foundations were dug. The Goldsmiths still keep their ancient privilege of assaying and stamping all articles of gold and silver manufacture in Great Britain, just as the Fishmongers still have the less remunerative right to “enter and seize bad fish.” The hall of this guild is, appropriately enough, on the banks of the river, just at the north end of London Bridge, and in one of the rooms is a chair made out of the first pile driven in the construction of Old London Bridge, said to have been under the water for 650 years.

The hall of the Stationers’ Company in Paternoster Row was stone-faced a mere 121 years ago, but the attics still have horn-paned windows and part of it was built before the Great Fire. Visitors are shown the hall and the old relics, and every good American likes to see the compositor’s stick that Benjamin Franklin used when he came to London as a journeyman printer and lived in Bartholomew Close.

Stationers’ Hall is the headquarters of the Royal Literary Fund for assisting Authors in Distress, and among their treasures are the daggers used by Col. Blood and his accomplice when they tried to steal the crown jewels in Charles II.’s reign.

Most of the bare facts about the other chief companies can be found in any London guide-book, but if a reader wants to know more of these interesting survivals of the day when the craftsman loved his craft, he will find a detailed account in Mr. P. H. Ditchfield’s The City Companies of London, 1904, and Mr. George Unwin’s The Gilds and Companies of London.

CHAPTER VI
ROUND ABOUT HOLBORN

“Yet London lacks not poetry,
She has her voices, whose deep tones
Are human laughter and human moans,
And all her beauty, all her glory,
Spring from or blend with man’s strange story.”
Maxwell Gray.

Take that chilly-sounding gateway, the Marble Arch, as a point de départ for a walk some idle afternoon, and I will show you what I found the day I turned my back on it. It looks as bored by its inactivity as Théophile Gautier’s Obélisque; perhaps it regrets the days when it faced Buckingham Palace and feels it came down in the world when it was moved to its present position some seventy years ago.

And that, too, is another indignity. Very many people ask why the Marble Arch is stranded all by itself, like a rock from which the flood has receded. The reason is as simple as most utilitarian things. The press of traffic at the Marble Arch was so great that the space had to be widened. It would have been too costly a matter to move the Marble Arch back, so the park railings were moved and the Arch left high and dry, no longer a gateway but only an object of interest.