churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left
impressions on my memory as distinct and quaint as any it has that way
received. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there
is not a line but made some hearts leap, or some tears flow, in their
day. Still and dry now, still and dry! And the old tree at the window,
with no room for its branches, has seen them all out. So with the tomb
of the old master of the old company, on which it drips. His son
restored it and died, his daughter restored it and died, and then he had
been remembered long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and
his name cracked out."

The Salters, who have anchored in Cannon Street, have had at least four
halls before the present one. The first was in Bread Street, to be near
their kinsmen, the Fishmongers, in the old fish market of London,
Knightrider Street. It is noticed, apparently, as a new building, in the
will of Thomas Beamond, Salter, 1451, who devised to "Henry Bell and
Robert Bassett, wardens of the fraternity and gild of the Salters, of
the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Church of All Saints,
of Bread Street, London, and to the brothers and sisters of the same
fraternity and gild, and their successors for ever, the land and ground
where there was then lately erected a hall called Salters' Hall, and six
mansions by him then newly erected upon the same ground, in Bread
Street, in the parish of All Saints." The last named were the Company's
almshouses.

This hall was destroyed by fire in 1533. The second hall, in Bread
Street, had an almshouse adjoining, as Stow tells us, "for poore decayed
brethren." It was destroyed by fire in 1598. This hall was afterwards
used by Parliamentary committees. There the means of raising new
regiments was discussed, and there, in 1654, the judges for a time sat.
The third hall (and these records furnish interesting facts to the
London topographer) was a mansion of the prior of Tortington (Sussex),
near the east end of St. Swithin's Church, London Stone. The Salters
purchased it, in 1641, of Captain George Smith, and it was then called
Oxford House, or Oxford Place. It had been the residence of Maister
Stapylton, a wealthy alderman. The house is a marked one in history, as
at the back of it, according to Stow, resided those bad guiding
ministers of the miser king Henry VII., Empson and Dudley, who, having
cut a door into Oxford House garden, used to meet there, like th