The Saturday Table

Truck, the paying of wages over a table in a drinking room, is the oldest grievance in Sarrum after the conduits. The Articles of the Halls forbade it in 4522, and it was abolished again in 4558, in 4591 and once more two years before Guildmaster Prudence Kerrow's address of 4616, and each time the ban reached only the hall trades, leaving the wharf gangs, carters and tip men, most of the city's labour, untouched. The Saturday Table, by the water on the Long Wharf, is one of the houses that outlasted all four abolitions, and its name says plainly what it is for.

The Long Wharf runs two miles down the eastern bank of the Sarr, the barges moored three deep or four when trade is heavy, and the Saturday Table is a truck house among the crews' and gangs' houses along it. Licensee Barney Goodbody keeps it. On a Saturday the gangs are paid there on the slate: the foreman, a friend of the house, takes each man's tab off the top before any coin reaches his hand, and the rest is spent in a city that makes spending easy. Most who sit at its table are carriers' men. The house is one of four that each insist the Cinder Lark, Nell Vetch, sang her first shift songs on its steps and was paid for them in ale; the histories say only that it was the steps of a truck house, which the Saturday Table regards as settling the matter.

The present quarrel is the Weavers'. Guildmaster Kerrow's clerk tells her that some employer is paying yard gangs short of the rate in the Articles and topping the wage up with beer here. Goodbody holds that what is on his slate concerns nobody else. Twice the Weavers' Hall has sent Clerk Josiah Weatherill to read it, and twice he has heard that the slate was being washed. The hall now offers a company money to sit through four paydays in the house, counting the men, the pints and the coin; the gangs have let it be understood that any stranger doing the counting will be counted himself. The only remedy that ever worked was Ninefields', which from 4599 to 4610 paid members a shilling a week to collect their wages at the association room instead.

A company hired by the day on the wharf will be paid at a table like this one, among strangers, with no slate of its own, and will be expected to drink whatever is put in front of it. Saying no carries no danger, though people mark it. Two of the city's three resident companies have settled on a rule, to pocket the wages, stand a single round and leave; the third draws its pay at the Ninefields room instead, the better course, though it wants a member willing to vouch.