THE ORIGINS & EARLY HISTORY
OF LIVERY COMPANIES

For more than five hundred years, the livery companies were at the heart of the commercial, social and religious life of the merchants and manufacturers of London. Indeed, it was largely through those companies that London could once boast that it was indisputably the greatest trading metropolis in the world. Whilst nearly four hundred years have passed since the companies have been able to lay claim to that sort of power, they have endured, in the face of many vicissitudes, so that they still occupy a position of consequence and pride within the City of London.

The origins of the livery companies are lost in the mist of scholastic debate. Learned writers have spilt oceans of ink debating whether the medieval guilds, the ancestors of these companies, were, or were not, a survival of the Roman Collegia, or related to groups found in ancient Chinese civilization. Others have detected a Near Eastern link in the Islamic notion that the guilds may be traced back to the days of the Prophet, who is believed to have belonged to the Guild of Merchants.

Be that as it may, it is certainly historically correct to say that some of the existing London Companies flourished in Anglo-Saxon days, in the guise of voluntary associations formed for the mutual aid and protection of members, known as “Guilds”. The title derived from the Saxon word “gildan” meaning to pay, as members had to pay to belong. Nor were guilds peculiar to London. They dominated civil life in all the major towns in feudal England but, given the pre-eminence of that City, it is London’s guilds which feature so strongly in the history books.

They emerge from obscurity with the consolidation of the Norman settlement. Voluntary associations of persons with a community of interests were established in all grades of society throughout Europe, but the first records of fraternities founded on the triple basis of religion, benevolence and commerce, the three forces that to a certain extent still drive today’s companies, come from England. Indeed, it has been said that:

“The livery companies, with their political and municipal power, are peculiar to London. No other City has permitted such a development of its misteries and trades, nowhere else in England have chartered associations of the kind attained such wealth and power.”

The word “mistery”, incidentally, is of Latin origin, and implies skilled knowledge or mastery of a branch of industrial art.

There are two peculiarities that set the London guilds apart from their fellow fraternities elsewhere in the country. Firstly, it was the craft guilds, composed of ordinary tradesmen and workmen combined together for their mutual protection and support, who had gained the upper hand by the time of Edward II, and not the more aristocratic merchant guilds who were to dominate many of the provincial towns. Secondly, and perhaps ironically given the debate about this country’s relationship with Europe, the early development of the London guilds in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was stimulated by “foreigners” from the highly organized continental cities. These foreigners brought with them novel and progressive business methods which inspired the English craftsmen to improve their trade organizations. Indeed, it would seem that the Spectacle Makers of London (who were not to appear on the scene until 1629) owed much to their Dutch counterparts.

The older guilds, however, were rarely founded merely for the protection of trade. They were formed by groups of neighbours for the promotion of social and religious intercourse. In medieval London, persons engaged in the same trade lived in the same area of the City. The grocers, for example, occupied Soper’s Lane, which is now Queen Street. The tailors were in Birchin Lane, the drapers in Candlewick, the butchers in Eastcheap, the founders in Lothbury and the fishmongers on the banks of the Thames. It was only natural that these traders, closely related in commercial rivalry by day and in friendly association in the evening, should unite into semi-religious fraternities for “the support of the body and salvation of the soul”.

The welfare of members, both spiritual and material, was always a major concern for the guilds. Each member would contribute to his guild’s funds, and could therefore expect relief from it in sickness and old age and, in extreme cases, admittance to one of its almshouses. There was also a strong religious ethos, with each guild having a patron saint, and a link with a church or a monastery where regular guild services would be held, and prayers said for departed members. Not the least concern of the early liveryman was to ensure that his soul should move from this world to the next in a proper and fitting manner. One of the prime roles of the companies, therefore, was to see to it that their members received their full funereal dues, and that their bodies were interred in accordance with the rites of the Church. Not surprisingly, their religious fervour abated with the coming of the Reformation, although it is interesting to note that Article 7 of the Ordnances of the Spectacle Makers’ Company, which were drawn up in 1630, states:

“that if Request at any Time shall be made to the Master and Wardens of the said Company to have the Livery of the said Company to accompany to the Grave within the Circuit of London Liberties and Suburbs thereof or within three Miles compass the Dead Corps of any of the Livery deceased or of his Wife at the Time of the Funeral Then the Master and Wardens if they shall think it fit shall cause a warning of the whole said Livery accordingly and every of the said Livery shall upon reasonable warning attend with his Livery at the Time and place appointed upon Pain and Forfeiture of ten shillings by every particular Person of the said Livery who shall make Default upon any such Warning (except he shall have some reasonable Excuse for his Absence and that be allowed by the Court of Assistants.”

Fellowship has always been a key factor in the growth of the livery movement, and it is not difficult to appreciate why the feelings of brotherhood and mutual help and esteem that they engendered were so highly prized in primitive society. Being a member of a Worshipful (Worthy) Company gave the individual a sense of dignity and importance, and his livery hall gave him somewhere to escape to from the confines of his room over the shop, and the opportunity to relax over a pot of beer or a flagon of malmsey surrounded by his friends.

Although they may originally have been organized as semi-religious bodies, the guilds steadily acquired more and more powers over the crafts and trades that they represented. They were not so much trading cartels as trade societies instituted to represent the interests of three distinct, and often antagonistic groups – the employers, the workman and the consumer. To quote from a petition of the Carpenters’ Company of 1681, “The fundamental ground of incorporating handicraft trades and manual occupations into distinct companies was to the end that all persons using such trades should be brought into one uniform government and corrected and regulated by expert and skilful governors, under certain rules and ordinances appointed to that purpose.” Early emphasis on quality control can be seen in the modern expression “a baker’s dozen”. In the days when a man could at best be pilloried and at worst expelled from the guild, and so loose his livelihood, for giving his customers short measure, the prudent baker tended to add an extra loaf to an order to ensure his continuing comfort.

As the guilds established themselves, it became a matter of course that the leading craftsmen of the City should be entrusted with the power and duty of seeing that neither they themselves nor their competitors should lower the standard of production. Then, as society evolved, it naturally followed that these men should become officers of the municipality itself. Once that had happened, the power of the guilds was assured so long as London remained the dominant part of the Kingdom. It was the wealth, power and prestige of the livery companies and some of their individual members that enabled London to maintain a degree of independence from the Crown, and so exert its own influence on national events. Their new eminence and prestige occasioned a change in the nature of the guilds. They began to adopt distinctive gowns and hoods known as “Livery”, and to be known generally as livery companies. This form of dress owed something to their religious associations, the livery being based on the habits of the various monastic orders, although it would usually be brightly coloured.

Liverymen came to monopolize the Court of Aldermen, the governing body of London, and it was through the Court of Aldermen that the companies obtained the authority to regulate their crafts. And they ruled them with an iron hand. They regulated the rates of pay and the admission of apprentices, and no one could work outside the Guild or indeed for anyone else except by order of his company. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that in the relatively primitive society of medieval England, they held the power of life or death over many of its citizens.

Unsurprisingly, the extent of the companies’ growing wealth and power soon began to arouse the suspicions of the Crown. Medieval England was a difficult enough place to rule at the best of times, so it was only natural that the King should look askance at such strong and independent bodies whose rituals smacked of the secret, and thus possibly the subversive. It was not until the time of Edward III (1327-1377) that this tendency to regard the companies with suspicion was removed. Appreciating that the guilds were the mainspring of all the trade in his realm, he decided that it would be better to have them as friends rather than enemies. Accordingly, he began granting charters to the guilds (for a fee), recognizing them and incorporating them into the body politic, to the advantage of both parties. For the first time, the companies were legitimised, and granted the right to hold land, property and funds. Unfortunately for them, however, the King not only ensured the loyalty of potentially formidable foes but, in securing a new source of much needed funds for the national exchequer, he pointed the way for his successors to weaken them.

For the first real check to the power of the City companies came in the sixteenth century with an attack on their money rather than their commercial pre-eminence. It took the form of the introduction of the concept of the forced loan by King Henry VIII. Over the next 150 years, this was to reduce some of the companies to near penury. Henry opened the bidding with the demand for the then enormous sum of £21,000 to pay for his war in Scotland. His elder daughter, Mary, later took more than £100,000 for war with France, and after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Mercers’ Company alone poured some £4,000 into the national account. By that time, “Good Queen Bess”, had come to regard the livery companies as little more than a herd of milch cows able to supply a regular flow of revenue, whether or not the Country was faced with an emergency.

Some historians have traced the slow decline of the City of London as a force of real power within the Kingdom to the Great Refusal of 1630, when the City Fathers declined the invitation to extend their jurisdiction to the whole of London, which had long ceased to be confined within the old walls of Roman Londinium. Regarding the ever-expanding suburbs as nothing more than places of racketeering and lawlessness, they passed up the opportunity for the London livery companies to extend their professional control over the new trades and businesses that were springing up beyond those walls. However, this is not the place to expand on that theme. The key issue here is the Crown’s insatiable demands for money.

Where the Tudors had trod, the Stuarts were quick to follow, particularly as their belief in the “Divine Right of Kings” eventually lead them to try to govern without a Parliament. This bore heavily on the existing livery companies, but it did present a wonderful opportunity to those who wished to found new ones – amongst whom were a group of spectacle makers trading under the auspices of the Brewers’ Company. In 1628, led by one Robert Alt, who practised from a shop on London Bridge, they decided to petition the Monarch for authority to establish their own Company. Unfortunately, there is no record of what they paid Charles Stuart for the privilege, but the King signified his royal pleasure “to grant to the petitioners their humble suite according to his certificate” and, on 16 th May 1629, the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers was incorporated by Royal Charter. That document is now preserved in the Guildhall Library.