There are also the old dining tables and benches; these are as plain and simple as possible.  In the court room, is a table, which was formerly in the Company’s barge, with some good inlaid work in the arcading which connects the two end standards, and some old carved lions’ feet; the top and other parts have been renewed.  There is also an old oak fire-screen of about the end of the seventeenth century.

Another city hall, the interior woodwork of which dates from just after the Great Fire, is that of the Stationers’ Company, in Ave Maria Lane, close to Ludgate Hill.  Mr. Charles Robert Rivington, the present clerk to the Company, has written a pamphlet, full of very interesting records of this ancient and worshipful corporation, from which the following paragraph is a quotation:—­“The first meeting of the court after the fire was held at Cook’s Hall, and the subsequent courts, until the hall was re-built, at the Lame Hospital Hall, i.e., St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.  In 1670 a committee was appointed to re-build the hall; and in 1674 the Court agreed with Stephen Colledge (the famous Protestant joiner, who was afterwards hanged at Oxford in 1681) to wainscot the hall ’with well-seasoned and well-matched wainscot, according to a model delivered in for the sum of L300.’  His work is now to be seen in excellent condition.”

[Illustration:  The Master’s Chair. (Hall of the Brewers’ Company.)]

Mr. Rivington read his paper to the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society in 1881; and the writer can with pleasure confirm the statement as to the condition, in 1892, of this fine specimen of seventeenth century work.  Less ornate and elaborate than the Brewers’ Hall, the panels are only slightly relieved with carved mouldings; but the end of the room, or main entrance, opposite the place of the old dais (long since removed), is somewhat similar to the Brewers’, and presents a fine architectural effect, which will be observed in the illustration on p. 117.

[Illustration:  Carved Oak Livery Cupboard.  In the Hall of the Stationers’Company.  Made in 1674, the curved pediment added later, probably in 1788.]

[Illustration:  Carved Oak Napkin Press Lent to the S. Kensington Museum by H. Farrer, Esq.  Early XVII.  Century.]

There is above, an illustration of one of the two livery cupboards, which formerly stood on the dais, and these are good examples of the cupboards for display of plate of this period.  The lower part was formerly the receptacle of unused viands, distributed to the poor after the feast.  In their original state these livery cupboards finished with a straight cornice, the broken pediments with the eagle (the Company’s crest) having most probably been added when the hall was, to quote an inscription on a shield, “repaired and beautified in the mayoralty of the Right Honourable William Gill, in the year 1788,” when Mr. Thomas Hooke was master, and Mr. Field and Mr. Rivington (the present clerk’s grandfather) wardens.