"Three 'caps of maintenance' are then brought in. The old master puts one on. It will not fit him. He hands it to another, and he to another, and both declare that it does not fit. Then it reaches the skinner who is to be master for the year. Wonderful to relate it fits him to a nicety. The trumpeters flourish their trumpets, the skinners and the almsmen shout for joy. The wardens next find out whom the cap fits, with the other two caps of maintenance, and so the high authorities of the guild are installed for the year."
The most expensive and magnificent of the feasts ever given by the united companies was that given to the Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia and the Prince Regent in 1814, in celebration of the end of the Napoleonic wars. The associated merchants of London, whose gold had made these wars possible, invited to their table the three most powerful monarchs in Europe, and spent upon a single entertainment the sum of £25,000, while the gold and silver plate upon which the food was served was valued at equal amount, the larger part of it being the gift of kings, and some of it the work of Benvenuto Cellini's own hands.
All of the most important of the companies possess halls of their own, and there are more than fifty of these halls in London, each of which contains something beautiful and curious. Most of them, as we have said before, were burned in the great fire, but were rebuilt upon the same sites. The fact that the interiors of these halls are so little known is due to the exclusiveness of the companies, which do not invite sight-seers.
| PLATE LXV | COACHMAKER'S HALL: BOARD ROOM |
In exterior they are generally plain and the door which leads to them is not labeled or in many cases to be distinguished from the doors of offices or warehouses near it. "In a few cases," writes Mr. Moore, "a small and insignificant brass plate near a bell-handle bears the word 'Beadle,' or sometimes even lifts the veil of mystery a little higher and records a name, as 'Weavers' Hall.' To ring the bell requires nearly as much courage as that of Jack the Giant-killer when he blew the horn that hung at the giant's gate. The beadle, or more often the sub-beadle,—for the beadle himself is too great to be lightly disturbed,—appears. You feel instantly that you are intruding, that you had no right to ring, and that you are in much the position of a man who has impertinently rung at the door of a private house and asked to see the drawing-room. If you have an introduction, above all, if you know any one on the court of the company, as its governing body is called, the beadle unbends a little, and you are admitted. You enter a great paneled hall decorated with armorial bearings, with portraits, and with banners. You are in the very heart of the city of London, where land is worth £100,000 or more an acre, yet there is a delicious garden, a court-yard recalling Italy, a splashing fountain, or a noble old tree. This element of surprise, of contrast between the rushing crowd in the street outside and the perfect fourteenth century stillness within the halls of these ancient guilds, adds much to the pleasure of seeing curious things at which you are not asked to look. You feel in a few minutes how great a thing it is to be a merchant tailor or a cloth-worker or a grocer, superlative and unattainable; and you walk round the hall with the beadle in a deferential, humble frame of mind only comparable to the sensation of a pilgrim who is just about to kiss or has just finished kissing the toe of his holiness the Pope.
