The Stationers’ Company, the City livery company for the Communications and Content industries, is best known for helping its members keep up to speed with the technological advances that those industries are constantly facing and for its support of educational projects ranging from Saturday Schools for young children to bursaries for Masters degrees. However, at 2.00 pm on Wednesday 22 February, it will uphold one of its more ancient traditions and will run the gauntlet of the Occupy the City camp at St Paul’s Cathedral.
The Stationers will meet at Stationers’ Hall at 12.30 to partake of Cakes and Ale and in particular to adhere to the will of John Norton who died in 1612. He left a sum of money in his will to provide an Ash Wednesday sermon, 2d a week and a loaf of bread for 12 poor people and, from the residue, cakes, wine and ale for those members of the Company who attended the Ash Wednesday Service in St Faith’s chapel under St Paul’s. Today, as they have done down the centuries, members of the Company will gather for that lunchtime feast to which it has now become traditional to invite the widows of deceased members.
At 2.00 pm headed by the Beadle, the Court of the Company, fully gowned, would normally process from Stationers’ Hall through Temple Bar to the cathedral followed by the members of the Company and their guests. Today, another route will have to be taken as Temple Bar is blocked off as part of the measures taken to prevent occupation of Paternoster Square.
With the decision on the appeal by the protesters against their eviction also due today, the 1612 legacy of John Norton will come face to face with the current affairs of 2012.
