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 A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE built as a concert or entertainment room, and converted it into a printing establishment. The old gallery, now extended round the building, is devoted to the composing and block - making departments. The ground floor constitutes the machinery hall, and is replete with equipments for colour printing, letterpress and lithography, including three- colour-process work, bookbinding, etc. Some of the machinery is of the new American type, and in the west gallery is a monotype plant worked on the typewriter principle. About 300 hands are employed, and the managing director is Mr. Benjamin Petty. The firm has branch establishments at London, Bristol and Southsea. Picture posters, fashion cata- logues, commercial printing and the manu- facture of account books are some of the specialities of the firm. Reading produces, in addition to the two already mentioned, two other newspapers, the Reading Observer and the Reading Standard. The former is owned by Messrs. Charles Slaughter & Son, who also undertake some general printing, and publish the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Archtzological Journal. The Berkshire Printing Company, Messrs. Black- well & Gutch, Messrs. Bradley & Son, electric power printers, Messrs. Knill & Sons, printers and bookbinders whose works were founded in 1853, and numerous other printers have established their presses in the town and made Reading an important centre of this particular industry. BREWING Brewing and malting have been for many years the staple industries of the county. Parts of the district are especially suitable for the growing of good barley, and an abundant supply of grain suitable for malting has always been available. Facilities of transit along the river Thames, assisted by the numerous canals that intersect the county, have also contributed largely to the encour- agement of the trade. The English monasteries were remarkable for the strength and purity of their ales, brewed from malt prepared by the monks with great care and skill, and the abbeys of Abingdon and Reading were doubtless no exception to this rule, as in the book De Consuetudinibus Abbendonia we find numerous references to the use of ale in the monastery : ' Cervisia copiose per cellarium propinabitur ' at and after dinner and after compline. The cellarer had numerous duties with regard to providing the monks with ale, and he might have for his own use ' oblatam cervisiae,' a jugful of ale. A similar amount is ordered to be given to various persons for divers duties, and abundant evidence is afforded of the use of ale in the monastery, 1 brewed in the monastic vats. Large sums were derived from malt, but the greater part, 383 quarters, was assigned to the cellarer ' to brew for the convent,' its ale being evidently great in quantity and good in quality. 2 ' Item de debili cervisia vis viiid ' shows that weak ale was brewed in the monastery, and is con- trasted with ' bona cervisia.' Few industries appear more often in the records of municipal government than that of brewing, except perhaps that of baking bread. The Assize of Bread and Ale appears very frequently in the statutes of England, the earliest known example being the Assiza Panis et Cerevisics of 51 Henry III. 3 Each borough also enacted frequent orders for the regulation of the trade, and the ale-taster appears frequently as a responsible officer in most of the corporations. So important was the industry that Charles I. contemplated the formation of an Incorporated Company or Society of Maltsters for Berkshire, for the reforming of abuses and the regulating of the trade. The king issued to the authorities of the county certain articles directing them to read the same to the maltsters ; but doubt- less the troubles of the Civil War prevented the carrying out of the proposal. In the Rawlinson MSS. preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford these Maltsters' Articles have been discovered and are as fol- lows : * ' Articles to be propounded to the maules- ters in the county of Berks. ' First that noe person after six munthes next comming shall buy any corne to conuerte to maulte butt in the open markitts to sell agayne. ' Seccondly that noe brewer or other person useing any other traide mistery or occupacon shall conuerte any graine to maulte to sell the same either to theire use or with theire stock by breweing of beere or ale. 'Thirdly that noe maulster Whatsoeuer shall conuerte any graine into Maulte in the 1 Abingdon Chronicle, ii. 402, etc. a Accounts of the Obedientiars, Int. xiii. 3 Gibbins, Industrial Hist, of England, p. 229. Rawlinson MSS. D. 399, f. 153. 404