Livery Companies Research Articles

Dentists, Their Handicraft Hobbies and City of London Livery Companies.

Many successful dentists also spend much time on hobbies. Unsurprisingly many of them involve the use of their hands, often but not always honing skills learned in dentistry. All the people discussed have another essential skill, the ability to design. The paper demonstrates clearly that striving for professional success leaves room for other activities.

Unmaking Apprenticeship in Early Modern London: Goldsmiths’ Apprentices and the Lord Mayor’s Court, 1597–1720

Apprenticeship in London was the concern of both livery company and city institutions. In this article, we connect evidence about the petitions submitted by apprentices to the Lord Mayor’s Court for early discharge from their indentures with the entries recording their apprenticeship and freedom surviving in the records of Goldsmiths’ Company. Each contains a distinct set of complementary information about apprenticeship in London. By positioning appeals to the Lord Mayor’s Court against the company’s records of youths’ trajectories through apprenticeship, we can expand our understanding of the contractual framework of training and associated enforcement mechanisms in early modern London. As we show, the Court was used to negotiate with masters, as well as to terminate contracts. Quitting an apprenticeship through the court did mildly ‘scar’ the chances of youths (not masters), but the Court process appears to have largely protected reputations. Finally, we provide the first estimate of gaps in livery company registration of apprentices, particularly female apprentices.

Women and the Construction Industry in Georgian Britain and Ireland

ABSTRACTWhile the role of women as designers and/or patrons of architecture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland is increasingly recognised, their role in the making of architecture remains contested. This article sheds light on the subject by drawing not just on the extensive secondary literature, but also on records of livery companies and other primary sources in London and Dublin. It begins with the building site, focusing on female apprenticeship. Here substantial evidence is provided showing that girls bound to bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers as apprentices — the so-called ’lost labourers’ of recent scholarship, recorded in guild registers and court minutes — did not in fact acquire craft skills or work as on-site operatives in those trades. The article then turns to those areas of the building process to which women did make a substantial contribution: first the practical realm, including brickmaking, lime-burning and the cleaning and preparation of carved and moulded work for painters and decorators; then the organisational realm of business, including property development, house-building and estate management. Taken together, these stories from the margins of architectural and labour histories make clear the distinction between competence in skills and competence in business, giving a more accurate picture of the multifarious nature of female participation in the construction industry in the Georgian era.

The Politics of Starch: Guilds, Monopolies, and Petitioning in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart London

Using petitioning campaigns to express their discontent to both civic and central authorities, London’s livery companies emerged as powerful opponents of monopolies in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article focuses on one campaign launched by the Grocers’ Company in response to the monopolisation of the production of starch from 1588, analysing a petition by the company and a counter-response offered by the newly incorporated Starchmakers’ Company in 1608. It highlights not only the politics surrounding starch, but also the careful utilisation of specific rhetorical devices by both groups in their attempts to persuade the state to favour their cause. It thus contributes to understandings of the sophistication of Jacobean manuscript petitioning culture. The article concludes by suggesting the potential power of such petitioning campaigns, utilised by subjects to respond to the growing presence of powerful projectors and ‘odious’ patents of monopoly in the realm.

A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London by Scott Oldenburg

Reviewed by: A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London by Scott Oldenburg Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (bio) A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London Scott Oldenburg Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. vii + 275 pp. $99.95 cloth. William Muggins is far from a canonical poet, and Scott Oldenburg's absorbing study of his life and work serves as a powerful argument for the value of investigating obscure authors and marginal texts. A weaver by trade, Muggins authored a 1603 printed pamphlet called London's Mourning Garment, comprised of a 679-line elegiac poem about plague-time London, a prose prayer, and a list of fatalities by parish for four months in 1603. Oldenburg ends the book with a short profile of one of Muggins's early readers, a soldier living during the Great Plague of 1665–1666, and notes that this reader must have found comfort in Muggins's pamphlet despite medical and social advances since the early seventeenth century. Little did Oldenburg know how relevant a work written in quarantine during a time of widespread illness would be once again in 2020. Limited evidence makes Oldenburg hesitant to call A Weaver-Poet and the Plague a biography. Instead, he considers it to be "part literary criticism, part microhistory" (38). It indeed attends to the micro: one little-known writer, one short text, and one brief period of time (1595-1603). Yet the book uses its narrow focus to cover much broader terrain, offering important insights into the lives of craftsmen, early modern London, a radically Protestant parish, lived experiences during the plague, and the middling sort. For Oldenburg, Muggins is only one example of a class of writers he calls "weaver-poets" (15) including John Careless and Thomas Deloney. He argues that the early moderns associated weaving with poetry and weavers with poverty and zealous Protestantism, making Muggins and other weavers uniquely appropriate spokesmen for social reform. Oldenburg's introduction includes a helpful section on methodology that could serve as a model for future scholars interested in uncovering less-documented lives. Oldenburg uses parish records, wills, records of the lay subsidy, and records of the Company of Weavers to track the activities of Muggins and those in his networks. One particularly interesting section in the introduction analyzes available evidence to ascertain what Muggins might have read. At several moments in the book, Oldenburg discusses not only what he has found, but also what has been lost and what the archives do not reveal. Each of the book's chapters identifies one element of Muggins's life that [End Page 216] offers important context for London's Mourning Garment. While Oldenburg guides readers through these four readings of the poem, the book's structure implicitly claims that London's Mourning Garment is rich with interpretive possibilities. The first chapter argues that Muggins's brief time in prison informed the poem's class consciousness. Together with fourteen other dissatisfied silk-weavers, Muggins petitioned for greater enforcement of the company's ordinances in 1595. These men's complaints primarily targeted the influx of immigrant weavers, whom they claimed were compromising the company's integrity. The petitioners presented their document to the ministers of the French and Dutch churches, who took offense. In response, the mayor of London had Muggins and his co-petitioners arrested. I would have liked Oldenburg to analyze further the petition's "animosity toward strangers" (70)—a xenophobia he does not find in London's Mourning Garment—but I appreciate how clearly he describes the livery company's history and the divisions between its leaders and rank-and-file members. The next two chapters move to the social bonds and personal tragedy that underpin Muggins's poem. Chapter two examines social issues in Muggins's neighborhood around the time he composed London's Mourning Garment, including childbirth, mortality rates, and debt. Chapter three explores Muggins's personal experiences with grief. Three of his children and three of his apprentices died between 1598 and 1603. These histories are interspersed with close reading of the poem, which Oldenburg interprets as semi-autobiographical. The book's fourth...

Publicity as a Factor in the Formation of City Authority in England in the 14th — 15th Centuries (Based on London)

In the 14—15th Centuries the city community of London becomes an active participant in the public socio-political space in England, acting as a new social subject of power relations. The formation of the city community of Freemen took place in the 12—13th Centuries in the context of the institutionalization of social and political processes in London. It is one of the most important characteristics of publicity authority. The city community of Freemen was a social institution consisting exclusively of citizens who were allowed to enjoy city privileges, including the right to participate in city government and the election of city officials. Exactly they were not just included in the publicity space of power, but also became its active actors. Municipal government was in the hands of the Aldermen and elected from among their other officials, including the highest — the Mayor and Sheriffs. The Aldermen constituted the wealthiest and most influential part of the Freemen, and they were part of the merchant top of the livery of the "Twelve Great Livery Companies" of London. The publicity of authority is most clearly manifested in the electoral principles in relation to the highest officials of the city magistrate. The City officials had to act on behalf of the community of citizens within their delegated authority based on the principle of electability. However the principle of electability had limitations that reflected the contradictoriness of the publicity space of authority in the period under review. In electing Aldermen the last and decisive word was actually left to the Aldermen themselves, who in practice elected the Mayor and Sheriffs. The Community of London was removed from the election. Urban uprisings that shook the capital in the 14—15th Centuries and directed against the government are a sign of the expansion of participants in the publicity space of authority. Representatives of the London ruling elite not only had to represent the interests of the Freeman's upper class of the city community, but also acted as a kind of channel of the connection between a certain part of the capital's society and the Royal authority. The Mayor and Sheriffs were elected by the townspeople, though a limited part of them, and from among the townspeople, but at the same time they officially considered as Royal officials. Some of the Aldermen were directly in the service of the King. The King could interfere in the electoral process at any time and remove even the Mayor from his office. Representatives of citizens, all the same Aldermen, took part in the discussion of the most important issues of state life in the Parliament, which is evidence of the expansion of the field for publicity dialogue between the government and society.

Item, pur escrivyng et enrollynge in Englyshe: From Latin and French to English in the medieval business records of the Grocers of London

ABSTRACT This paper diachronically analyses code-switching and language maintenance and shift between Latin and French, on the one hand, and English, on the other hand, in the earliest business accounts of the Grocers’ livery company during medieval London. Linguistic methods used here have been successfully applied to manuscripts of another company: the Mercers of London. The new findings, first, confirm that the earlier the account was recorded, the more present Latin and French are, whereas the later the account was kept, the more present English is; however, second, they reveal an unnoticed period of code-switching into Latin and French before English monolingualism, whose evolution stages seem to occur in reverse order.

The diffusion of English in late medieval social networks: Henry V, Robert Chicheley, London Grocers, and London Brewers

ABSTRACT English regained its position as the preferred base language of administrative record to the detriment of Latin and French in England at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. Henry V has been traditionally considered as one of the main sources of the shift to vernacular official writing in other official institutions of a diverse nature. Historical sociolinguistic network research has attempted to establish a direct connection between the king’s Signet Office and the Grocers’ and the Brewers’ London livery companies, as far as their respective use of English is concerned. The article evaluates the validity of this particular case study by focussing on the underexplored micro-level of ties and social networks between individuals potentially involved in the process of innovation and early adoption of English in the different types of records. The research outcome supports the hypothesis that Robert Chicheley was the loose-knit linguistic innovator and bridge responsible for introducing the use of English into the London Grocers’ and the London Brewers’ archives, a change which subsequently percolated through the tight-knit networks of grocer-wardens and brewer-administrators in charge of keeping their companies’ records during the Late Middle Ages.

The Erber: tracing global trade through a London building

AbstractThrough a case-study of one significant courtyard house owned by the Drapers’ Company and known as ‘The Erber’, this article argues that mercantile livery companies supported London's growing centrality within an expanding network of trade through the use and development of corporate properties. The micro-history at the heart of this article reveals that the ‘everyday’ built environment of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London was shaped not just by the city elite. Also relevant to that process were the different sorts of tenants of the Drapers’ Company, who benefited from the expansion at all levels of London's mercantile activity. The trickle-down effects of global mercantilism affected spaces small and large. The investigation of the Erber highlights the domestic implications of global commercial expansion.

Diachrony of code switching stages in medieval business accounts

AbstractThis article presents the results of a diachronic survey on the multilingual account books authored by the wardens of the Mercers’ premier livery company of the City of London from 1390 to 1464. The study deployed here applies an extended version of Wright’s three-stage model of code switched business writing that introduces a previous phase of Romance monolingualism and a later phase of English monolingualism. It is found that the change from Latin and French to English as the new language of business record in the London Mercers’ archives was orderly and gradual rather than straightforward, and characterised by a less predictable intervening code switching period. The analysis is of considerable value for expanding our knowledge of medieval written multilingualism, as well as for the development of English as an administrative language.

Corporate Management, Labor Relations, and Community Building at the East India Company’s Blackwall Dockyard, 1600–57

Abstract This essay offers a social history of the labor relations established by the English East India Company at its Blackwall Dockyard in East London from 1615–45. It uses all of the relevant evidence from the company’s minute books and printed bylaws and from petitions to the company to assemble a full account of the relationships formed between skilled and unskilled workers, managers, and company officials. Challenging other historians’ depictions of early modern dockyards as sites for class confrontation, this essay offers a more agile account of the hierarchies within the yard to suggest how and why the workforce used its considerable power to challenge management and when and why it was successful in doing so. Overall, the essay suggests that the East India Company developed and prioritized a broader social constituency around the dockyard over particular labor lobbies to preempt accusations that it abdicated its social responsibilities. In this way, the company reconciled the competing interests of profit (as a joint stock company with investors) and social responsibility by, to some extent, assuming the social role of its progenitor organizations—the livery company and the borough corporation.

Merchant Taylors of London’s shift to business English: New insights on the languages of record in their Master and Wardens’ Accounts

Abstract French and Latin used to be the two main languages of record in the Merchant Taylors, as well as other London livery companies, as late as the fifteenth century, at least. From the fourteenth century onwards, English was becoming more and more present in this guild’s business accounts, until it replaced both Romance languages as their new official medium of written communication. Seen the inconsistent dates of adoption of English in the Merchant Taylors’ Master and Wardens’ Accounts suggested in the literature, this article applies two different approaches to language shift in the late medieval period in order to analyse and illustrate when exactly the whole Company is supposed to have substituted French and Latin for English forever. As the search of that permanent and communal shift leads to the necessary consultation of financial manuscripts kept as late as the seventeenth century, it is concluded that the construction of a unitary framework for the study of the different language shifts in the London livery companies at different periods would yield more comprehensive results.

Laura Branch . Faith and Fraternity: London Livery Companies and the Reformation, 1510–1603. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. 275. $127.00 (cloth).

Laura Branch . Faith and Fraternity: London Livery Companies and the Reformation, 1510–1603. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. 275. $127.00 (cloth). - Volume 57 Issue 1

Faith and Fraternity: London Livery Companies and the Reformation, 1510–1603. Laura Branch. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Leiden: Brill, 2017. xii + 276 pp. $127.

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‘The Grocers Honour’: or, Taking the City Seriously in <i>The Knight of the Burning Pestle</i>

The Knight of the Burning Pestle famously flopped when first performed c. 1607. Critical debate over its so-called ‘privy mark of irony’ has subsequently oscillated between those who argue that the play did not satirize the London citizenry trenchantly enough, and those who prefer the interpretation that the ‘irony’ was only too apparent, and that this alienated the audience. Few have fully interrogated the play’s complex engagement with the early Jacobean citizen class and the City of London’s livery companies. This paper argues that The Knight’s presentation of citizens takes place in the context both of a theatre much more involved in civic structures, and of a city more imbued with performance, than is usually presumed.

GIFTING CULTURES AND ARTISANAL GUILDS IN SIXTEENTH- AND EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

AbstractThis article reconsiders the gift within London's sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century livery companies. Previous research into guild gift-giving cultures has focused exclusively upon substantial bequests of money and property by mercantile elites to the ‘great twelve’ livery companies. Through charitable gifts, citizens established godly reputations and legacies, perpetuated through the guild institution. It is argued here that a rich culture of material gift-giving, hitherto overlooked by historians, also thrived within London's craft guilds. Drawing on company gift books, inventories, and material survivals from guild collections, this article examines typologies of donors and gifts, the anticipated ‘returns’ on the gift by the recipient company, and the ideal spatial and temporal contexts for gift-giving. This material approach reveals that master artisans negotiated civic status, authority, and memory through the presentation of a wide range of gifted artefacts for display and ritual use in London's livery halls. Moreover, this culture of gift-giving was so deep-rooted and significant that it survived the Reformation upheavals largely intact. Finally, the embellishment of rituals of gifting, and the synchronization of gifting and feasting rites from the second half of the sixteenth century, are further evidence for the resurgence of English civic culture in this era.

Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery: Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonOctober 1, 2016–February 5, 2017CatalogueEnglish Medieval Embroidery: Opus AnglicanumEdited by Clare Browne, Glyn Davies, and M. A. MichaelNew Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2016.336 pp.; 270 color ills.Cloth $75.00ISBN 9780300222005The Age of Opus AnglicanumEdited by M. A. MichaelLondon: Brepols

<i>Opus Anglicanum</i>: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery: Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonOctober 1, 2016–February 5, 2017Catalogue<i>English Medieval Embroidery: <i>Opus Anglicanum</i></i>Edited by Clare Browne, Glyn Davies, and M. A. MichaelNew Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2016.336 pp.; 270 color ills.Cloth $75.00ISBN 9780300222005<i>The Age of <i>Opus Anglicanum</i></i>Edited by M. A. MichaelLondon: Brepols

"Their labour doth returne rich golden gaine": Fishmongers' Pageants and the Fisherman's Labor in Early Modern London

Audiences for early modern English plays inhabited an island kingdom. Therefore the drama's preoccupation with the sea comes as no surprise. Maritime settings abound in comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. Even the most ostensibly land-bound genres, such as city comedy, incorporate the ocean in ways that signal its importance to the nation's identity and, more specifically, its economy. (1) Indeed, A. F. Falconer speculates that the period's most famous playwright, Shakespeare, spent time at sea himself--so diverse and plentiful are the maritime references in Shakespeare's canon. (2) The ocean also figures prominently in the London Lord Mayors' shows, civic pageants staged to commend one citizen's ascendancy to the City's highest office. Oceanic images typically play an allegorical or a mythological role in these productions. The shows regularly incorporate of state metaphors into visions of civic governance. (3) Neptune makes occasional appearances to convey his mightiness, only then to submit to the new mayor's superior virtues. (4) Pageants sometimes call for the mayor to arrive by barge, a custom that recruits the Thames into the shows' penchant for waterworks. (5) Such imaginative features serve the general purpose of providing counsel for the incoming mayor and inspiring him to cultivate the qualities needed to see the City through the perilous waters of inevitable change. The successful mayor, these productions suggest, will distinguish himself as an upright, judicious, and knowledgeable captain of his proverbial ship and its charges. (6) The Lord Mayors' shows represent the mayor's leadership as critical to the capital's--and by extension the nation's--social, economic, and political health. But London's livery companies--those ancient institutions that commissioned the shows and, indeed, conferred the prestige of urban citizenship in the first place--also viewed themselves as critical to those ends. Scholars have characterized the Lord Mayors' shows as promoting among various civic interests. (7) However, these perspectives tend to leave underexplored the reality of competition among London's industries and, by extension, the ways in which guilds' specific interests registered in the pageants they commissioned. (8) This paper complicates the unity aesthetic by analyzing representations of English fishing in pageants commissioned by the Fishmongers' Company. I will home in on the three early modern shows surviving in print (9)--Thomas Nelson's The Device of the Pageant: Set forth by the Worshipfull Companie of the Fishmongers (1590), Anthony Munday's Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing: Or, Honour of Fishmongers (1616), and Elkanah Settle's The Triumphs of London (1700)--to analyze how one company used the civic pageant to argue for its industry's continued relevance in an economy increasingly dependent on the long-distance trade of luxury goods, goods different in value and kind from those yielded by the humble fishermen who supplied the Company. I argue that these productions affirm fishing, and sea labor in general, in a way that anticipates the maritime foundation of the British Empire and argues for the Fishmongers' importance within that economic scheme. I will suggest further that the London guilds, although sometimes viewed as fossilized in nostalgia, (10) in fact were highly responsive to change and, more specifically, attuned to the representational possibilities of the pageant for imagining a specific industry's role in a prosperous national future. The Fishmongers' wealth and position derived in part from their ability--or, more precisely, the ability of the fishermen with whom they worked--to extract fish from the surrounding waters. Significantly, the English fisherman's skill in sailing and navigation would one day become central to the success of the British Empire, a project that David Armitage characterizes as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free. (11) Armitage roots these four interrelated ideals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when figures such as John Dee, Richard Hakluyt, and Thomas Mun began to conceive of the oceans as highways for the kinds of large-scale trade and colonization that would ensure Britain's prosperity for centuries to come. …

Guild will offer friendship for all.

A group of eight nurses have formed the Guild of Nurses, which joins the ranks of the historic City of London livery companies.

Ballads, Journeymen, and Bachelor Community in Shakespeare's London

Taking as touchstone Benedick's claim in Much Ado About Nothing that he “will live a bachelor,” this essay explores what a single life entailed for the denizens of Shakespeare's London and argues that singleness was an important metric for identifying and classifying London laborers, specifically, the journeymen of the City's livery companies. In asserting his bachelor identity, Benedick attempts to imagine a subjectivity not scripted by comedy, and he cites ballads as a type of literature conducive to imagining the single life he desires. Following Benedick's lead, this essay turns to paratexts and ballads to uncover what the aristocratic world of Much Ado mostly occludes about the single life: that it had material connections with the livery companies of London, institutions that both fostered and frustrated the formation of bachelor communities. As contemporary texts about bachelors alluded to the realities of living as one, they also imagined a more expansive and egalitarian community of men in which differences of rank were bridged by a common marital status. Returning a semantic density to an ostensibly generic term, I argue that while the bachelor life Benedick imagines living exceeds the generic framework of Much Ado, the play's representations of the single life would nonetheless prove resonant to an urban population of single laborers, many of whom were journeymen.