Stationers Hall
This building is called Stationers’ Hall because it is the home of the Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. This is a “livery company”. There are 108 livery companies in the City – each connected to a particular job or trade.
The livery companies started before 1066 in England when people with the same job or trade began to live and work together in the same areas, and sit together in church. The names of local streets here tell us the jobs that went on there: Milk Street, Bread Street, Ironmonger Lane and so on. The idea of the companies was to protect the work of the members, by controlling who could do the work and the prices they could charge. They also began to collect money to look after the widows and orphans of members who had died, and to pay for people to be buried. Later they began to wear special clothes - a sort of uniform. This is what “livery” means.
Sometimes there would be arguments about which company was more important. The young apprentices from different companies would get into fights about which company was best. So the Lord Mayor decided to fix the order of importance of the companies in 1515, based on how much money and power each company had. The Mercers were the richest and most powerful and became the number one company. The Stationers are number 47, but they have still had more members chosen to be Lord Mayor than any other company.
The Stationers formed the Guild of Stationers in 1403. Then, of course, there were no printed books, and the members were people who copied books by hand, stitched the pages together or sold the manuscripts. In 1557 they were recognized by the Queen and given a Royal Charter and, two years later, the right to wear a livery.
By now, printing had come to London, and William Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster, with his assistant Wynken de Worde. Wynken later moved Caxton’s press to nearby Fleet Street, and also set up a book stall in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
The Stationers were given exclusive rights (patents) to print certain types of books. The most profitable was the right to print almanacs, including the famous Old Moore’s Almanack, which you can still buy today.
They also kept a register called the Entry Book of Copies. In it they kept a record of every book that was copied and who had the right to do it. This is where we get the word copyright.
Stationers moved here 1606, when they bought Abergaveny House. Unfortunately it burned in 1666 in the Great Fire of London. £40,000 worth of books burned with it.
The current building and hall date from about 1670. The interior is mostly unchanged since then, but the outside was remodelled in the 1880s.