The wardens are also entitled to certain bequests and allowances which amount on an average to £106 : 4 : 10 per annum. This sum is not paid to them, but goes towards the cost of the election dinner in August, which in ancient times was provided by the wardens.
The members of the governing body, as such, have no direct pecuniary or other advantages.
Freemen and liverymen of the Company receive no fees.
The fees paid to the master, wardens, and other members of the governing body, for their attendance at courts and committees during the last ten years, average £3225 : 12 : 6 per annum.
No pensions or donations are paid to liverymen. Liverymen who have become reduced in circumstances, and have applied for and received the return of their livery fine, are then eligible to receive charitable assistance as freemen.
Assistance by way of pension or donation is not granted to any member of the Company except on full inquiry into his circumstances, to ascertain that he is in need of assistance, and that his necessity is not occasioned by his own improvidence or misconduct.
The number of the livery of the Drapers is 300; their Corporate Income is £50,000; their Trust Income is £28,000.
The Drapers have had several places of meeting. The first is said to have been the Church of St. Mary Bethlehem outside Bishopsgate; the next, where Nos. 19 to 23 St. Swithin’s Lane now is. This was formerly the house of Sir John Hend, draper, Lord Mayor 1391 and 1404, who materially assisted towards the rebuilding of St. Swithin’s Church in 1420. In 1479 the Company’s annals have this entry respecting tithes: “Paid to the parson of St. Swithin for our place for a year VIs. VIIId.,” implying that it had now regularly passed into the Company’s hands. Herbert, in his History of the London Livery Companies, has sifted out information regarding this hall, which tells much concerning its apartments, and the brave feasts held therein on election days and other occasions. The great hall was strewed with rushes and hung mostly with tapestry, but the upper end, above the dais for the high table, with blue buckram. It must have been of large dimensions, capable of dining two to three hundred persons, and here assembled bishop and prior and parson, Lord Mayor and Mayoress, to feast with the master and wardens and brethren and sisters of the Drapers Company all seated at table in due order of rank. The sisters had a dining-room of their own, “the ladies’ chamber,” and there was a “chekker chamber” laid with mats and set apart for “maydens,” but both married and unmarried ladies usually dined in hall with the brothers of the fraternity. Besides the refectory, there was a large kitchen with its three fire-places, and there were buttery and pantry, a store-house for cloth, and “a scalding yard”; also a court-room, a “great chamber” or livery-room, and parlours hung with tapestry or painted green, and all contained beneath the shelter of leaded roofs. The Drapers continued to feast and transact their business here until 1541, when they bought the house in Throgmorton Street which had belonged to Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex.
The Earl had suffered attainder under Henry VIII. This estate formed the finest hall that any City Company had hitherto obtained. It contained, besides the buildings, a large garden at the back. This garden was still preserved until a few years ago, when the greater part of it was sold and converted into offices.
The hall, after the Fire, was rebuilt, but a hundred years afterwards, in 1774, it was greatly damaged by another fire. The present hall was altered and remodelled, with the addition of a screen, in 1866-70.