The Tilers had also acquired what was presumably their first Hall. Whether this was before or after 1468 is not known. Certainly the Company does not appear in the well known list of Companies owning halls, prepared by the Brewers Company in 1422, but the records of the Leathersellers Company showed that they used the halls of other Companies including that of the Tilers before they built their own first hall in 1476 under London Wall in the Parish of All Hallowes, and they used Tilers Hall in 1473 and possibly earlier. The site of this hall is known. First there is among the Harleian MSS a “List of Publicke Halls in London in 1483”, which contain references to 24 Company Halls, including those of all the great Twelve Companies except the Ironmongers, and among the 13 minor Companies shown as having halls only the Carpenters and Tilers appear among the building crafts gilds, both of which are described as “in the Paryssh of all Hallowyn in London Wall”. Secondly there is among the records of the London Court of Husting details of a sale in 1555 by John Small, grocer, and his wife of “one great capitall messuage or tenement called the tylershall” in the parish of All Saints London Wall, and from which it is clear that the wall was in what is now Wormwood Street, one house back from the end of Broad Street. This site is identifiable on the map known as the “Agas” map, published c1570, which has been reproduced in the “A to Z of Elizabethan London” published by the London Topographical Society in 1979. This hall cannot have been owned by the Company as such, since it was not incorporated until 1568, but would have been owned by Trustees for the Company. As we shall see, the Company’s second hall must have been acquired shortly before 1555, so that unless John Small and his wife were such Trustees, or the personal representatives of a trustee, the first hall would have ceased to be occupied by the Company some time before the 1555 sale.

However, we must now go back to 1477 in which year the Statute 17 Edward IV Cap 4 reached the Statute book, or rather the handwritten parchment Parliament Role. It may never now be possible for us to know just how “Our Lord of the Kind, for the general profit of his realm by the Advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and at the request of the Commons in Parliament assembled” came to concern themselves with the finer points of tile making, nor how what then passed for Parliamentary draftsmen acquainted themselves with the technical terminology of the Tilers craft. It seems probable however that although the scope of the Statute was not confined to London, there must have been some connection with the events of the 1461 and 1467/8 and the dialogue between the Court of Aldermen and the Tilers of London. The evil which the Statute addressed is explained in the preamble as follows:

“Whereas in divers Parts of this realm great damage hath been and daily is, and by likelihood in time to come will much increase, for Default of true, seasonable, and sufficient making, whiting and anealing of Tile, called Plain Tile, otherwise called Thak- tile, Roof-tile, or Crest-tile, Corner-tile, and Gutter-tile, made and to be made within this Realm.”