The petition showed that the Mercers were indebted more than L100,000.
The annuities then out amounted to L7,620 per annum, and the
subscriptions for future amounts reached L10,000 a year; while to answer
these claims their present income only amounted to L4,100 per annum. The
Company was therefore empowered by Act of Parliament, 4 George III., to
issue new bonds and pay them off by a lottery, drawn in their own hall.
This plan had the effect of completely retrieving their affairs, and
restoring them again to prosperity.

Strype speaks of the mercers' shops situated on the south side of
Cheapside as having been turned from mere sheds into handsome buildings
four or five storeys high.

Mercers' Hall and Chapel have a history of their own. On the rough
suppression of monastic institutions, Henry VIII., gorged with plunder,
granted to the Mercers' Company for L969 17s. 6d. the church of the
college of St. Thomas Acon, the parsonage of St. Mary Colechurch, and
sundry premises in the parishes of St. Paul, Old Jewry, St. Stephen,
Walbrook, St. Martin, Ironmonger Lane, and St. Stephen, Coleman Street.
Immediately behind the great doors of the hospital and Mercers' Hall
stood the hospital church of St. Thomas, and at the back were
court-yards, cloisters, and gardens in a great wide enclosure east and
west of Ironmonger Lane and the Old Jewry.

St. Thomas's Church was a large structure, probably rich in monuments,
though many of the illustrious mercers were buried in Bow Church, St.
Pancras, Soper Lane, St. Antholin's, Watling Street, and St. Benet
Sherehog. The church was bought chiefly by Sir Richard Gresham's
influence, and Stow tells us "it is now called Mercers' Chappell, and
therein is kept a free grammar school as of old time had been
accustomed." The original Mercers' Chapel was a chapel toward the street
in front of the "great old chapel of St. Thomas," and over it was
Mercers' Hall. Aggas's plan of London (circa 1560) shows it was a little
above the Great Conduit of Cheapside. The small chapel was built by Sir
John Allen, mercer and mayor (1521), and he was buried there; but the
Mercers removed this tomb into the hospital church, and divided the
chapel into shops. Grey, the founder of the hospital, was apprenticed to
a bookseller who occupied one of these shops, and after the Fire of
London he himself carried on the same trade in a shop which was built on
the same site. Before the suppression, the Mercers only occup