The Printers’ Chapel

Randle Holme wrote in 1688 that every printing house was called a chapel, with the eldest freeman as father of the chapel and its own laws, whose breach cost a fine called a solace. Swearing, fighting, drunkenness, leaving a candle burning at night and letting a composing stick fall for another to pick up all earned one, as did a stranger coming into the king’s printing house to ask for a ballad, or bringing a wisp of hay directed to a pressman. A man who would not pay was laid on his belly over the correcting stone and given eleven blows with a paper board. A new workman paid half a crown benvenue before he was a member, a journeyman paid on marrying and on the birth of a son or daughter, and when his wife first came to the chapel she paid sixpence and the men joined twopence each to make her drink.