Guilds

January 2024 MLD Blog

Posted on January 21, 2024 by Maryanne Kowaleski

Welcome to the Medieval Londoners Blog. Please subscribe to receive updates on new material added to the Medieval Londoners Project and other items of interest to those working on medieval London. Since the last post, MLD has added over 1000 new records: 600 on Jewish Londoners, 308 on the Pinners and Wiresellers, 103 records of lawyers active in the central courts, and 58 records for clerks and lawyers serving in the courts of Common Pleas and King’s Bench. For other forthcoming datasets, see What’s New in MLD?

Medieval Jewish Londoners

There is a surprising amount of documentation about the Jews who resided in London before their expulsion from England in 1290, particularly for the wealthier Jews who paid the regular tallages assessed by the crown. Many of the new MLD records come from these royal levies in 1189, 1194, 1239 and 1241, along with other sources such as deeds, the Pipe Rolls, and debt disputes. Secondary sources, particularly by Joe Hillaby, proved an especially important source of records on London Jews. Also noteworthy are the biographies of Jews who were incarcerated or sought refuge in the Tower of London. Compiled by Historic Royal Palaces for The Jewish History of the Medieval Tower of London, this project also produced a catalogue of archival sources for studying medieval English Jews. We have included in MLD only those biographies relating to Londoners: 48 of the total 245 biographies.

The entries for Jewish Londoners relate some powerful stories about the difficulties they faced. Elijah le Blund, for example, was a member of the wealthy le Blund family, who were so harshly taxed by the crown that in 1252 Eijah, his wife Flora, his brother Aaron and his wife Pigona, and their son Samuel attempted to flee England. They were caught, their properties were confiscated, and the men were imprisoned in the Tower of London, released only on payment of very large sums that considerably reduced their wealth. In 1264, Elijah fled to the Tower on his own, this time seeking protection from a violent attack on the London Jewry led by supporters of Simon de Montfort in which many were killed and properties burnt to the ground. Elijah died in the Tower, likely of wounds he acquired during the attack. His nephew Samuel had difficulty paying his tallage arrears and seems to have also been a victim of the Montfortian civil war and anti-Jewish riots. Samuel’s properties were destroyed, and after he died, his treasure was supposedly dug up and taken away from his house.

^{Detail from a miniature showing the expulsion of the Jews. From the chronicle of Rochester cathedral priory. England, c.1100-c.1650 (BL Cotton MS Nero D II, f. 183v).}

Inclusion of this dataset in MLD required adoption of naming protocols that differed from our usual practice. Jews in medieval England had Hebrew names, but usually spoke French, yet scribes recorded their names in Latin, often christianizing Hebrew names. Modern translators have also tended to anglicize Jewish names. Further difficulties arise because Jews relied heavily on matronymics and patronymics, which makes awkward MLD’s usual reliance on putting surnames first in the Standard Name field. In light of these issues, although we follow MLD practice for standardizing forenames by anglicizing them, we start the Standard Name with the individual’s forename, which mirrors current practice by scholars of editions of medieval Jewish sources. We have made exceptions, however, for individuals in well-known families that normally use a surname, such as Crespin, Le Blund, and L’Eveske. For more discussion of these issues, plus a searchable table of Jewish forenames, see MLD Naming Protocols for Jewish Londoners.

The 600 records in this dataset were entered by Rachel Podd and Maryanne Kowaleski. MLD now contains references to 313 different Jews who resided in London between 1155 and 1290. We hope to continue building this dataset by using the many other printed sources available for this work: volunteers to help are welcome!

Pinners and Wiresellers

^{Pin used in the head-covering of a townswoman. By Robert Campin, c. 1435. National Gallery of Art.}

The Pinners officially became a craft in 1356 when their ordinances were approved by the mayor and aldermen of London. Metal pins were a ubiquitous dress accessory in medieval London, especially in the later middle ages when the elaborate head-coverings worn by wealthy women (and men) were held together by pins, as were the veils worn by nuns and most other kinds of loose or draped clothing.

The Pinners were a small and low-status craft that faced increasingly stiff competition from the massive numbers of pins imported from overseas, particularly high-quality pins from the Low Countries. In 1462 they joined other crafts in attempting to secure a ban on foreign imports. Edward IV responded with protectionist legislation that forbade the importation of a large range of manufactured goods, including pins. This favorable charter may have been the impetus behind the Pinners’ decision to start an audit book, which began with the Pinners’ 1356 ordinances and Edward’s charter of 1463. Most of the book, however, recorded the expenditures and revenues of the craft and its affiliated relgious fraternity of St James, stretching over a period of almost fifty years. The Pinners book (BL MS Egerton 1142) has been translated by Barbara Megson, was published by the London Record Society in 2009, and is now avaialble on British History Online.

The fortunes of the Pinners did not, however, continue to thrive. Beset by financial challenges such as repair bills for the premises they rented for their meetings, unpaid loans they made to craft members, and continuing competition from foreign imports, the Pinners chose in the late 1490s to amalgamate their craft with the Wiremongers (who had joined with the Chapemakers in 1479), calling the new craft the Wiresellers.

Dr Marija Blaskovic has created a dataset of 308 records taken from the Appendices to Megson’s edition, which include the wills of 32 testators (1352-1529) and a list of the craft wardens (including the umper, the senior warden) for the period 1356-1510/11. She is now working on a second dataset that will include references to the expenses and members of the Pinners’ fraternity of St James.

London Lawyers

Lawyers, clerks, and litigants in the Court of King’s Bench. Copyright Inner Temple Library.

With the consent of Sir John Baker and the Selden Society, MLD has started a project to extract biographies of London lawyers in John Baker, The Men of Court 1440 to 1550 : A Prosopography of the Inns of Court and Chancery and the Courts of Law, Selden Society, supplementary series, vol. 18 (London, 2012). Although most medieval lawyers would have resided in London while studying at the Inns of Court, the majority eventually left London and conducted the bulk of their legal practice elsewhere. A good part of the work in constructing this dataset therefore lies in determining which lawyers continued to reside in London or spent enough of their working life in the city to justify inclusion in MLD. This work is being done by Dylan Warnasiri, a senior at Fordham University who is interested in a legal career.

An initial dataset of 103 entries (Acton to Carpenter) has been uploaded, with a second installment (C thru H) due to be uploaded in the coming months.

Clerks and Lawyers of the Courts of Common Pleas and King’s Bench

Prof. Malcolm Richardson continues to add records for the professional clerks and lawyers of the central courts in Westminster. His starting point this time was Linda Clark’s section on “Clerks and Officials of the Courts if King’s Bench and Common Pleas,” in The History of Parliament. The Commons 1422-1461, vol. 1, pp. 446-50. His dataset includes 58 men, all of whom served as MPs, but usually for constituencies outside of London. Most were lawyers who had trained at the London Inns of Chancery as young men. Although most young lawyers left London to practice law in the provinces, a number of them continued to practice law in the central courts at Westminster. MLD counts as “Londoners” those who not only had their main residence in London, but also those who we can show regularly worked in London (or Westminster or Southwark) and owned property or were buried there.

This group includes men like Thomas del Rowe, who served as a clerk of the court of Common Pleas and keeper of writs, a position he lost to a rival claimaint who also accused him of removing writs from the great hall of Westminster. He did eventually rise to become a filazer in Common Pleas from 1449 to 1452 (a filazer was the clerk who wrote out and enrolled judicial writs, a lucrative position). Work as a filazer would have kept him in London for many months of the year. Although he served as a MP for Horsham (sussex), he held property in St George’s Lane (outside Newgate) through his wife, Thomasia, a daughter and the heir of Peter Pope, a London draper. Del Rowe also accused several prominent Londoners of being involved in the murder of his brother James (called a ‘gentleman of London’) in Yorkshire.

Another filazer, Richard Bruyn, leased property in St Clement Danes and St Dunsan in the East and likely held other properties through his wife, Joan Rickhill, a Kentish heiress. He apparently married her in c. 1431 when she divorced her first husband. For almost twenty years he provided legal counsel to the abbot of Wesminster; he was also admitted to the Merchant Taylors, perhaps for his legal help. He served as under-sheriff of London but also MP for Newcastle-under Lyme and for Stafford. He had Lancastrian sympathies since in 1460, he was pardoned for attacking the city from the Tower.

A New Book

The Medieval Hospital: Literary Culture and Community in England, 1350-1550 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023) by Nicole R. Rice, analyzes the role played by late medieval hospitals as sites of literary production and cultural contestation. Three of the chapters focus on St Bartholomew’s hospital in London. Chapter 2 explores how the late medieval literary history of St Bartholmew’s centered around the treatment of women, highlighting the themes of corruption and purification. Chapter 3 examines the reading practices of the lay community in the hospital’s close, particularly the texs that the bibliophile and scribe, John Shirley, himself a resident, copied and assembled for his neighbors. Chapter 4 looks at collaborative devotional reading at St Bartholomew’s and St Mark’s hospital in Bristol for clerical and lay, female and male hospital residents.

Papers on London at the November 2023 NACBS meeting

Among the eight medieval sessions at the annual conference of the North American Conference on British Studies, held this year in Baltimore in November 2023, the following papers focused on London. If you are interested in giving a paper on a medieval topic at the 2024 conference, to be held in Denver, November 15-17, contact kowaleski@fordham.edu.

John McEwan (St Louis University): London and the Expedition of Louis of France to England: Consequences for the Men in London’s Civic Government
Bethany Donovan (University of Michigan): Counterfeit Leather and Craft Competition in Late Medieval London
Caroline M. Barron (University of London, Royal Holloway): The Drawings of the Aldermen of London in 1446
Nicole R. Rice (St John’s University): Widows Reading at the Late Medieval Hospital: The Case of Joan Astley
Katherine L. French (University of Michigan): All that Glitters is not Gold: Women Goldsmiths in Late Medieval London
Martha Carlin (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): An Emperor Visits London: Lodging and Feeding the Entourage of Charles V, June 1522
Shannon McSheffrey (Concordia University): Stalled Careers, Masculinity, and Xenophobia in the Early Sixteenth-Century London Skinners’ Company
Vanessa A. Harding (Birkbeck, University of London): Early Modern London Families: Beyond the Household

April 2023 MLD Blog

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Maryanne Kowaleski

Welcome to the Medieval Londoners Blog. Please subscribe to receive updates on new material added to the Medieval Londoners Project and other items of interest to those working on medieval London. Since the last post, MLD has added 1558 records on London Skinners and others who appeared in the printed accounts of their fraternity, as well as 612 records on London saddlers and their contacts. For other forthcoming datasets, see What’s New in MLD?

New Export and Print Functions for MLD

MLD is pleased to announce a new feature that allows users to download data in PDF format or an Excel spreadsheet. Simply click on the blue Export button located at the top of the Browse Londoners or Browse Records screen to see a drop-down menu with both options.

You can choose which columns/fields that you want to appear on your exported report by selecting fields from the Show/Hide Columns button and by clicking on one or more of the filters on the left side of the search screen (or by using the search boxes at the top of each column) to focus your search on particular records. For example, if you go to Browse Londoners and click the Occupation filter for goldsmith (which produces 468 records) and then Parish filter for St Peter Westcheap, 28 records for goldsmiths fit this parameter; the beginning of this selected dataset is shown below in an Excel spreadsheet.

To use another example, a search of Browse Records for all female orphans yields 20 records, the first three of which are shown on this PDF download.

Remember too that Londoner Profile View for each individual can also be printed out using the Print Summary button at the top of the profile view, as below.

The Skinners

Skinners, also called peleters or pelliparii in Latin, were responsible for scraping and curing raw animal skins with alum, salt, grease, and other materials to produce furs that were primarily used to line clothing. At the high end of the trade, merchant skinners focused their efforts on importing skins from overseas, especially luxury furs of ermine, fox, marten, and squrrel from the Baltic, and selling and exportng the finished fur products. They hired other skinners, who generally were not part of the livery, to dress and finish the skins. Tawyers also dressed skins, as did Greytawyers, who specialized in dressing squirrel skins.

Merchant skinners become more prominent in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the wealth and political status of skinners ranked them above all the other leather crafts, although well below that of purely mercantile companies like the Fishmongers and Mercers. The Skinners craft, which was counted among the Great Twelve of the city livery companies, grew out of a religious fraternity which by the fourteenth century was called the Fraternity of Corpus Christi and began receiving royal charters that augmented the economic and political powers of the merchant skinners. Other freemen skinners formed the fraternity of Our Lady’s Assumption, which became associated with the working skinners or yeomanry, although its membership grew to include small masters and their wives in other crafts, as well as artisans and even gentry from beyond London. Their early accounts are extracted in J. J. Lambert, Records of the Skinners of London (1933), which provided 234 records for this dataset. See also Elspeth Veale, The English Fur Trade in Later Medieval England (1966) for more on the skinners (and for the image above).

Cliff Webb has generously contributed his transcriptions of apprenticeship entries to the Worshipful Company of Skinners, taken from two sources. The main source is the Register of Apprentice Bindings and Freedom Admissions, which provided 990 records to the new dataset; they list the name and enrollment date of the apprentice, the name of his master, and usually the name, residence, and occupation of his father. The second source, the Receipts and Payments Book, was used to fill gaps (1515-21) in the Regiser of Apprentices because it covers the periods 1491-1510 and 1510-35, although the 305 records they contribute do not reference the father of the apprentice and only give the calendar year of the entry.

The information on apprentices’ fathers is especially valuable and was exploited by Sylvia Thrupp in Appendix C of The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1948) for 1496-1500 to compare the geographical reach of the Skinners Company to the narrower catchment area at of the Tailors. John Wareing, in a 1980 article in the Journal of Historical Geography, “Changes in the Geographical Distribution of The Recruitment of Apprentices to the London Companies 1486-1750,” used an even wider tranche of the Skinners evidence (along with evidence from other companies) to argue that the recruitment area for London apprentices contracted significantly from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries at the same time as the proportion of apprentices coming from London itself grew. By making available the medieval evidence for the migration field of Skinners apprentices, Cliff Webb and MLD now facilitate a more detailed examination of not only the geography of recruitment, but also of the family status and success of individual recruits whose records of wealth and political position are also recorded in MLD.

Saddlers and Associated Crafts

^{https://mittelzeit.blogspot.com/2015/11/saddle-labelled.html}

The base of a medieval saddle was a wooden “tree” padded with wool or horsehair on the top and bottom and covered in leather or some type of fabric. It had a high back (called the cantle) and front (the pommel) to prevent the rider from slipping, and usually had various leather straps to help hold the saddle onto the horse. Because of the different materials and components used, several different crafts were involved in making saddles, including fusters who made the wooden frame, joiners who put together the different wooden parts of a saddle, lorimers who made the metal bits for harnesses, tanners who provided tanned leather, and painters who decorated the final product. The saddlers covered the saddles with padding and leather and coordinated the work of the other crafts. The cooperation required, however, often led to disagreements, some of which ended in violence. In May 1327, for example, violent clashes between the saddlers and the joiners, lorimers, and painters in Cheapside led to several deaths, which in turn generated petitions against the saddlers for their unfair trading practices and attempts to control the other crafts (Memorials, 156-62). The Saddlers also experienced internal disputes, as in 1396, when the masters of the Saddlers tried to break up the fraternity organized by their serving men or yeomanry (Memorials, 541-4).

Records for 175 saddlers and 438 of their family members and associates who appeared in the Calendars of Letter Books and Ancient Deeds (TNA E40) were recently entered into MLD by Petyton Seabolt, whose doctoral research has centered on medieval equine culture. Many of these records show peaceful interactions between the saddlers and other artisans associated with the manufacture of saddles. For example, in 1336 the saddler John de Shoredych and his wife Hawisia leased a tenement in St Alphege to a fuster named William Payn and his wife Juliana. Hawisia was herself the daughter of a fuster, Hugh de Blithe. Another saddler, Gilbert de Tauntone, entrusted the guardianship of his seven-year old son Thomas to a fellow saddler, William Pikerel, along with household goods including a silver cup, nine silver spoons, a dish and ewer, a brass pot, and a gilt girdle; his sureties included two saddlers, a lorimer, and a goldsmith. This dataset, when combined with other records on the saddlers and their associated crafts, offer many opportunities to explore the interlocking commercial, financial, and personal relationships of the crafts centered on the manufacture of saddles in medieval London.

Building Accounts and Contracts

A new sub-section listing building accounts and contracts has been created under the Trade and Finance section of Written Resources. It includes recent editions of the building accounts of St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, 1292-1316 (Boydell, 2020) and of the Savoy Hospital, 1515-20 (Westminster Abbey Record Series, 2015), as well as the well-known Westminster Abbey building accounts in Howard Colvin’s Building Accounts of Henry III (1971), and less-known extracts about medieval glazing from a variety of accounts for London and Westminster buildings. The section also lists building contracts involving carpenters, masons, an alabasterer, and a marbler who were employed to construct domestic, commercial, and ecclesiastical buildings, as well as for work on paving, plaster work, roofing, tombs, and wharves. If you know of other London, Southwark, or Westminster building accounts and contracts in print or online, please contact us with the details.

Forthcoming Book

Shannon McSheffrey and Ad Putter, The Dutch Hatmakers of Late Medieval and Tudor London (Boydell and Brewer, August 2023). This volume focuses on migrant hatmakers from the Low Countries who introduced new techniques for making brimmed felt hats in England. In the early sixteenth century, the so-called ‘Dutch’ hatmakers formed their own London craft association, the fraternity of St James, although within ten years they were forced to submit to the powerful London company of the Haberdashers. This volume includes an edition of the texts in the Hatmakers’ guild book, including their bilingual ordinances, which regulated their craft. This book can be pre-ordered in advance in hardback and paperback, but will also become available via open access.

December 2022 MLD Blog

Posted on December 27, 2022December 30, 2022 by Maryanne Kowaleski

Welcome to the Medieval Londoners Blog. Please subscribe to receive updates on new material added to the Medieval Londoners Project and other items of interest to those working on medieval London. Since the last post, MLD has added 114 records about London nuns (mostly prioresses) and c. 1150 records of Mercers who were Staplers or Merchant Adventurers. For other forthcoming datasets, see What’s New in MLD?

Nuns and Prioresses

_{Seal of Matilda, Prioress of Holywell, c. 1220 x 1230. From John McEwan, Seals in Medieval London 1050-1300: A Catalogue (London Record Society extra series vol. 1, 2016) citing TNA E42/419, pt.I, verso.}

MLD recently added a dataset of London nuns compiled by Olivia Geraci (with contributions by Morgan McMinn); most of these records relate to prioresses in four female religious houses: St Mary Clerkenwell, Holywell (Haliwell), St Helen’s Bishopsgate, and the Minoresses without Aldgate. The references to prioresses were taken primarily from listings in the three volumes of The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, edited by David M. Smith and others (Cambridge, 2001-2008). But the Calendars of Letter Books also provided some interesting references to London nuns. In 1363, for example, the executor of the Tailor Robert Westmelne was summoned to the Guildhall to answer for money bequeathed by Robert to his three under-age sons and his two daughters; Margaret married a Mercer, and Isabella, a minor, was a nun at Holywell priory, an Augustinian house in Shoreditch, outside the city walls. In rendering his account, the executor, John Madefrey, a Pepperer, noted that he had paid to Dame Elena, the Prioress of Holywell [Ellen Gossham], the sum of £46 13s. 4d, £40 of which was bequeathed to Isabella by her father, plus 10 marks that she inherited on the death of one of her brothers. But there was a condition attached to this bequest: if at the age of 14 Isabella wanted to leave the convent, all this money should be returned to her, minus the cost of her expenses while residing at Holywell. If she died before reaching 14, then one-half of the money was to be returned and expended for the good of her father’s soul, and the other half was to be distributed to the remaining children of Robert. Since medieval nuns were cloistered, the extant records for nuns below the rank of prioress are very scarce, so we do not know if Isabella stayed in the convent or left, but this entry does provide insight into how young girls of the merchant class could be when they entered the convent.

The Get to Know Medieval Londoners Project

Please check out a new Medieval Londoners digital project called Get to Know Medieval Londoners, which uses a crowdsourcing platform called Zooniverse to bridge the gap between the academy and popular enthusiasm for the middle ages while simultaneously advancing the study of London. Created by Grace Campagna, a Contributing Editor of MLD, as part of her master’s thesis in Medieval Studies at Fordham University, this project draws on over 3000 medieval property records from London’s Husting Court that were part of a project called The Social and Economic Study of Medieval London c. 1100-1666. This initiative ran from 1979 to 1988 and examined the history of property ownership in thirteen London parishes, especially those centered on the market area of Cheapside. The lead researchers, Derek Keene and Vanessa Harding, with help from Martha Carlin, David Crouch, Joanna Mattingly, and John Stedman transcribed and translated property transactions onto large index cards that were recently digitized in a collaboration between Fordham and the Institute of Historical Research.

Volunteers on the project help with data collection through workflows, which provide prompts to identify people and geographic locations in the property transaction. One task, for example, asks volunteers to record the name, gender, occupation, citizenship status, and other identifying characteristics of each person recorded on the index card. Zooniverse is an ideal platform for this work because it is free of cost for both participants and researchers, runs on all major browsers, and already has an extensive and dedicated volunteer base. All of the data produced during the course of the project will become part of the Medieval Londoners Database, which also governs many of the data collections standards used in this project. Volunteers will receive credit for their work through a cataloguer field in each database record they contribute.

^{Example of a digitized index card with an English transcription of the Latin text in a Husting Court plea dated 26 February 1397, regarding property in the parish of St Christospher, as used in the Get to Know Medieval Londoners crowdsourcing project (Husting Court roll 125, case no. 78).}

After several months of testing and development, Get to Know Medieval Londoners officially launched on June 28th, 2022. In its first few months, the project attracted over 1,300 volunteers who have made nearly 17,000 data classifications. The site features extensive discussion boards for asking questions and sharing findings. Through dialogue with each other and the project team, participants have added dozens of new abbreviations to reference guides, helped each other translate phrases from Anglo-Norman, found rare examples of women admitted to the freedom of the city, and much more.

The project has already garnered considerable attention. Indeed, Get to Know Medieval Londoners has been asked to partner with Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, the UK’s premier genealogical magazine, to participate in their annual Transcription Tuesday event on Jan. 31, 2023. In prior years, this event has helped projects transcribe over 100,000 pages of historical material. For instructions on how to join in, head over to the project event page.

If you are interested in participating, you can also check the Get to Know Medieval Londoners announcement board for more updates.

Anne Sutton and the Mercer-Staplers and -Merchant Adventurers

Those of us at MLD were sad to hear that Anne Sutton passed away in June 2022. Anne was our first major contributor, giving MLD over 3500 biographies that she had assembled for her book on The Mercery of London (2005). With the help of Liz Duchovni, we have recently processed another dataset of over 1150 records donated by Dr Sutton: 255 refer to Mercers who were wool merchants or members of the Merchant Staplers, a special group of merchants given exclusive right by the crown to purchase English wool for export through and to appointed markets (or staples). Most of the staples on the continent were in the Low Countries; the best known and longest serving staple was at Calais. About 930 of the new records deal with Mercers who were members of the Merchant Adventurers, a regulated company that exported cloth in exchange for a variety of imports from northern Europe. The London company received a royal charter in 1407, but smaller companies of Merchant Adventurers also formed in other ports, such as Bristol and York. The London Mercers who dominated the company focused most of their trade on Antwerp and the cloth fairs in the Low Countries in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. In later centuries the London company came to focus more on Hamburg.

For MLD, we have included only those Staplers and Merchant Adventurers who resided in London before 1520. We have also expanded many of the abbreviations to make the information more user-friendly; see Sutton lists: Abbreviations, Sources, Editorial Practice for details. The lists are especially valuable for the references to the overseas trade of individual Mercers, as detailed in the national port customs accounts (TNA E122). Although Sutton’s list gives only the accounting year when the Mercer appeared as wool exporter or as an importer of cloth and other goods, users can now access a complete transcription of the entries in the online editions of TNA E122 medieval London customs accounts edited by Dr Stuart Jenks for the Hansischer Historical Society.

^{MLD records for the Mercer John Abbot, compiled from information provided by Anne Sutton in her lists of the Mercers who were also Staplers and Merchant Adventurers.}

Many of the obituaries for Anne Sutton emphasize her work on behalf of the Richard III Society, especially her long tenure as the editor of The Ricardian, the Society’s journal, and her many publications about Richard III, including her last monograph, The King’s Work: The Defence of the North under the Yorkist Kings 1471-85 (2021). But let’s not forget that Anne was a formidable scholar of medieval London who served as assistant archivist of the Corporation London from 1973 to 1980 and as archivist of the Mercers Company from 1981 to 2002, when she retired. She authored many books and articles about medieval London, especially material on the Mercers and women, including her magnum opus, The Mercery of London : Trade, Goods and People, 1130-1578 (2005) and Wives and Widows of Medieval London (2016). She was also co-editor with Caroline Barron of Medieval London Widows 1300-1500 (1994), and one of her most recent articles was “Nicholas Alwyn, Mayor of London: A Man of Two Loyalties, London and Spalding,” in Medieval Londoners: Essays to Mark the Eightieth Birthday of Caroline M. Barron (2019).

^{Anne Sutton at a 2001 conference in Durham [photo: M. Kowaleski]}

As an archivist, Anne Sutton was especially skilled at finding new records and hunting down multiple sources and references; her footnotes were themselves a work of art and offered a comprehensive bibliography to readers of her work. As a trustee of the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, Anne was an enthusiastic supporter of its grants to support research and publications on the period of the late middle ages.Donations in Anne’s memory can be given to the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust (to whom cheques should be payable) and sent to: PO Box 6302, Newbury, RG14 9QU. To Gift Aid your donation, please download the form from the Trust’s website. Queries can be emailed to christian.steer@york.ac.uk.

Presentations on Medieval London at the NACBS

The following talks on medieval London were delivered at the annual conference of the NACBS (North American Conference on British Studies) in Chicago, Nov. 10-12, 2022.

Kate Kelsey Staples (University of West Virginia): Appraising Reputation in the Secondhand Trade in Late Medieval London

Bethany Donovan (University of Michigan): All that Glitters is Not Gold: Fraudulent Goods in Late Medieval London

Grace Campagna (Fordham University) and Maryanne Kowaleski (Fordham University): Crowdsourcing the Medieval Londoners Project

Katherine French (University of Michigan): The Afterlives of Apprentices in Late Medieval London

Shannon McSheffrey (Concordia University): Strangers in the City: Dutch Hatmakers and their Rogue Guild in London circa 1500

September 2022 MLD Blog

Posted on September 6, 2022September 8, 2022 by Maryanne Kowaleski

Welcome to the September 2022 posting of the Medieval Londoners Blog. Please subscribe to receive updates on new material added to the Medieval Londoners Project and other items of interest to those working on medieval London. Since our last post, Medieval Londoners has added a new page on London Family Trees, and we have uploaded three new datasets to MLD: all of the merchant biographies compiled by Sylvia Thrupp, records dealing with embroiderers and their associates, and records dealing with properties: mostly deeds, but also c. 80 entries from the 1461-2 rental of London Bridge. To see the datasets we plan to upload in the coming months, see What’s New in MLD?

Sylvia Thrupp’s Merchant Biographies

Sylvia Thrupp in 1943-44, when she was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Scholars of medieval London have long mined the some 400 biographies compiled by Sylvia Thrupp for her classic book, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, c. 1300-1500 (Ann Arbor, 1948). With the help of Frances Eshleman, the full text of Thrupp’s biographies are now available in MLD. This is the third set of records that we have culled from Thrupp’s work. Two years ago, we included her list of London taxpayers in 1436 (appendix B in The Merchant Class) and the names of masters and clerks of the Bakers in Appendix III of her A Short History of the Worshipful of Bakers of London (Croydon, 1933). Other important works on London by Thrupp include “The Grocers of London, a Study of Distributive Trade,” Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century, ed. E. Power and M. M. Postan (London, 1933); and “Aliens in and around London in the 15th Century,” Studies in London History Presented to P.E.Jones, ed. A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (London: Hodder, 1969).

Thrupp was born in Surrey in 1903 but grew up in Canada from the age of five. She received her BA and MA from the University of British Columbia, and after teaching high school for two years, moved to England to study at the University of London, where she received her Ph.D. in 1931 and stayed until 1935 as a post-doctoral researcher. After teaching at the University of British Columbia (1935-1944) and the University of Chicago (1945 to 1968), she was named to the newly established Alice Freeman Palmer Chair at the University Michigan. In 1958 she founded the journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History, in 1973-4 she served as president of the Economic History Association, and in 1981 she received the AHA’s Award for Scholarly Distinction. Well after her retirement from Michigan she moved to Princeton when she married a fellow medievalist, Joseph Strayer, and after he died, moved to California, where she passed away in 1997.

For full details on Thrupp’s career and scholarship, see the 2006 issue of Medieval Feminist Forum, which drew on papers given at a session on Thrupp at the 2004 meeting of the Medieval Academy of America. It includes articles by Caroline Barron on “The Making of an Early Social Historian;” Joel Rosenthal on “The Chicago Years 1946-61;” Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Feminism? If I Made It, So Can You,” and Michelle M. Sauer “Finding Syvlia Thrupp.”

The Embroiderers

Detail from the 14th century Syon Cope, an example of *opus anglicanum* that used gold and silver thread with the underside couching technique to make the threads shimmer. Victoria and Albert Museum.

A type of English embroidery called opus anglicanum achieved international renown in the high middle ages. Usually employed in church vestments, this elegant embroidery used rich materials like damask and velvet fabrics, gold and silver thread, and precious or semiprecious stones. Embroiderers added decorations and designs to an otherwise finished piece of cloth, such as church copes, orphries, and chasubles. Gold thread was carefully sewn by embroiderers into the design to catch the light using the couching technique, as illustrated in the fourteenth-century Syon Cope, which can be explored in detail here.

Some of the most well-known and accomplished embroiders worked for the royal household. Henry III, for example, commissioned Mabel of Bury St Edmunds at least twenty-four times. She created a chasuble and orphrey that Henry later requested to have ornamented with pearls and gold. These vestments were completed only after other embroiderers appraised and approved her work. She last appeared in 1256 when the king gifted Mabel a rabbit fur for her service. In later centuries, Queen Philipa and Elizabeth of York ordered bedspreads that required large teams of embroiderers and designers that were headed by a chief embroiderer.

A dataset with 180 records referring to professional embroiderers in London and another 140 records of Londoners associated with these embroiderers (such as their spouses, children, and business associates) was recently uploaded to MLD. The dataset draws on printed collections, including the Plea and Memoranda Rolls, Letter-Books, and Calendars of Close and Patent Rolls, among other sources. One of the earliest entries is from 1244, when Henry III commissioned Edward Fitz Odo to create a red silk dragon embroidered with gold and a tongue that “should be made to resemble burning fire and appear to be continually moving.” The majority of the records, however, are from the fifteenth century when the embroiderers became a recognized Lesser Mistery, called the Broiderers.

Foreign expertise is also evident in the craft. There were six alien embroiderers residing in Southwark in 1436: two from the Netherlands, two from Austria, and two from France (Liege and Picardy. In the mid fifteenth-century alien subsidies, four other German and Dutch embroiderers were recorded, two in Cripplegate ward, and one each in Castle and Cheap wards. In 1444, the Dutch embroiderer William Outcamp, who resided in Southwark, formally became a denizen of England.

The dataset is predominantly male, except for one female apprentice, Alice Catour, and a few known female royal embroiderers like Mabel. The data are likely skewed because female embroiderers often operated under different occupations, such as seamstress and silkwoman, who specialized in decorating fine linen, or they were servants in the households of embroiderers who took on some craft work. Women embroiderers in the workshops often conducted specific tasks, such as lining, trimming, and mounting, as illustrated in the woodcuts below from an early sixteenth-century pattern book, showing women transferring embroidery designs (Alessandro Paganino, Il Burato, Libro de Recami (1518, from 1527 reprint), Leiden, Textile Research Center).

Embroiderers worked closely with other cloth trades, particularly tailors, haberdashers, mercers, and drapers. These working relationships could cause confusion. In 1395 foreigners William Tiller and Terry Drypsteyn requested translation to the Broiderers after they mistakenly entered the Tailors craft. Embroiderers also provided social and professional security to others within and without their craft. In 1364 John Hyndale mainperned to protect the goods of the tailor Richard Pecock. In 1496 John Maidenwell entered into a bond with a pewterer, a butcher, and a grocer to provide for the three girls of the deceased John Uttersall, a stationer. A small number of embroiderers also took part in civic governance. Robert Ashcombe, for example, served as the Broiderers’ representative on the common council and later as a representative for Cripplegate. While employed as the king’s embroiderer (1396-99), Ashcombe was elected as a MP for London and also served as an auditor for the city. The expertise of embroiderers was also recognized by other crafts, as when John Daunde, as a warden and master of the Mistery, testified on the condition of silk in a skinner’s complaint against a Florentine merchant.

-Morgan McMinn

London Family Trees

In addition to providing biographies of individual merchants, Sylvia Thrupp also sketched out three family trees in a narrative format. She is only one of the scholars and family historians who have created a wide range of useful family trees and histories about individual kin groups in medieval London. We have attempted to disambiguate this material for entry into MLD, but have now created a London Family Trees page to provide links to the full family histories so that users can see the material as presented by the original compilers. These family trees come in a variety of formats, but are usually diagrams showing kinship ties through marriage and progeny. The family trees noted below include redrawn and newly drawn diagrams, as well as copies of the original family trees when we have permission to reproduce them. We welcome contributions of other family trees or histories that cover the period c. 1100 to 1520 for those residing in London, Southwark, or Westminster; please use the contact form to send us the material or the link.

Detail of a scene of Thomas Becket and his family journeying on foot, after the family was banished from England by the king. From the Queen Mary Psalter, British Library, Royal 2 B VII, f. 293v .

Family of Abigail of London (from Hillaby, Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History)
Cely/Sely family (from Thrupp, Merchant Class of Medieval London)
Frowick/Frowyk family (from Thrupp, Merchant Class of Medieval London)
Gisors/Gisorz, Jesors family (from Thrupp, Merchant Class of Medieval London)
L’Eveske family (from Hillaby, Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History)
Family of Leo I le Blund (from Hillaby, Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History)
Family of Master Moses of London (from Hillaby, Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History)
Family of Rabbi Josce (from Hillaby, Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History)
Shordych family (compiled by M. Kowaleski)
Tate family of St Dunstan in the East parish (from Sutton, A Merchant Family… The Tates
Tate family of All Hallows Barking parish (from Sutton, A Merchant Family… The Tates)
Tate family of St Dionis Backchurch parish and St Anthony’s Hospital (from Sutton, A Merchant Family… The Tates)

Search Tips for MLD—or How to Find Girdles and Hermits

MLD’s Search for Londoners page lists four different ways to search the database. Most users go straight to the Browse Londoners or Browse Records options, both of which allow you to search on names or a whole other range of fields, some of them conveniently filtered on the right-hand pane. But these options only allow you to find Londoners for whom we have made a separate record. It is important to know that MLD does not make a separate record for each person named in all records (particularly wills); to do so would unduly lengthen the time needed for data entry as well as the space reserved for records on the MLD platform. For deeds, for example, we often omit the names of witnesses. So the quickest way to find these individuals is to enter their name in the white text box above the Activity field in the Browse Records screen, which will find all names mentioned in the master record, not just those for whom we have made a separate record.

But searching on the Activity field can also be used to look for types of people (like hermits) or things (like girdles). Placing the word ‘hermit’ in the white box above the Activity column yields 23 records, most of them bequests to hermits. Placing ‘girdle’ in this box produces 147 records from a variety of sources, as noted in the screenshot below.

Users can also search the Activity field with words like ‘dower’ (272 records) or ‘jewel’ (81 records) or ‘quitclaim’ (84 records). But there are limits to this type of search. For example, a search on ‘rape’ brings up 25 records, but they mostly include references to drapers because the search just looks for the string of letters in the word, not the word by itself. Similarly, the search on ‘girdle’ also brings up records with ‘girdler’ in the Activity field.

New Publications on Medieval London

Records of the Jesus Guild in St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1450-1550. An Edition of Oxford, Bodleian Ms Tanner 221, and Associated Material, ed. Elizabeth A. New, London Record Society 56 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2022). Prints the extant records of the fraternity of the Holy Name, known as the Jesus Guild, which was based in the crypt of St Paul’s cathedral. Founded in the mid-fifteenth century, the guild was re-organised in 1506 after problems involving the misuse of funds. Accompanied by a thorough introduction, this edition prints (1) licences, two sets ordinances (the earliest is dated 1506 ) and letters of protection gramted to the Guild and (2) the Guild’s annual accounts from 1514/15 to 1534/5. The bulk of the Guild’s income came from farming out its right to collect membership fees and donations for prayers and pardons (indulgences). Expenses were more varied and included the costs of its lavish liturgical celebrations and work on the Jesus Chapel. The appendices contain the 1555 inventory of St Faith’s church, which included items that may have belonged to the adjoining Jesus Chapel, and short biographies of the guild wardens in this period. The text is in Middle English, with a select glossary.

Marcus Meer, “Heraldry, Corporate Identity, and the Battle for Symbolic Capital in Late Medieval London,” The London Journal (Aug. 2022)DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2059232. Abstract: This article analyzes grants of arms obtained by London guilds between 1439 and 1530 to argue that corporate heraldry was not just a convenient means of identification but was meant to be seen as a semantically dense visual communication of corporate identity. The heraldic signs conferred by such grants, confirmations, and augmentations of arms served as official acknowledgments and visual representations of their recipients’ symbolic capital of honour. By prominently displaying corporate arms on central stages of corporate self-representation such as halls, churches, and rituals, guilds reinforced the connection between heraldry, identity, and corporate honour. This proud heraldic display of corporate identity, just like the pursuit of grants of arms, reflected a need for weapons in an intensifying battle for symbolic capital that the guilds of late medieval London faced, perhaps as a result of economic difficulties that marked the later fifteenth century.

David Mason, “The Role of London’s Urban Foundation Legends in Late-Medieval Historical and Political Cultures,” The London Journal (Feb. 2022). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.2028451. Abstract: In 1442, the authorities of London issued a formal prohibition against the spread of a lie that the first and best mayor of London was a cordwainer (shoemaker) named Walsh. This article investigates the context for this story by examining contemporary uses of foundation narratives for important institutions of London life, including the city, corporation and mayoralty. These foundation legends grew from a distinctive urban ‘historical culture’. This article argues that historical culture and foundation legends were important means of cultivating cultural prestige, defining the purposes of institutions, discussing the power relationships between different political institutions and engaging in political communication. By comparing the ‘Walsh’ legend to other variants of the London mayoral origin story, we can discern contemporary political debates about the purpose, powers and political control of key institutions in London life.