Acknowledgements

Shannon McSheffrey; Ad Putter

Acknowledgements

This book would not have come into being without help and support from others. Many people went above and beyond in their assistance to our foray into the history of hatmaking. Harry Duckworth’s research on the Hatmakers and Feltmakers of early modern London paved the way for us; he unstintingly shared materials with us and provided comments on our efforts to unravel the hatmakers’ history. Charlotte Berry and Chanelle Delameillieure both leaped into answering our queries about their fields of expertise (London guilds in Charlie’s case, the handling of wrongdoing in Dutch and Flemish cities in Chanelle’s) with great generosity. Rachel Frost, John Lee, and Gale Owen-Crocker freely shared with us their impressive expertise in the field of historical costume. We also thank Rachel Frost for supplying us with an image of a reconstructed feltmaker’s bow, reproduced in this book with her kind permission and that of her photographer, Laurence Winram. Many other colleagues kindly answered questions, read drafts, and/or gave us leads and support: Adrian Ailes, Caroline Barron, Stephanie Brown, Giles Darkes, Bart Lambert, Kate McClune, Milan Pajic, Eric Reiter, Remco Sleiderink, Myra Stokes, and Quentin Verreycken.

The language and the manuscript of our Dutch hatmakers presented us with all kinds of technical questions, on which we consulted with subject specialists. Chris de Wulf, Evert van den Berg, and Pieter van Reenen read the section on the scribal dialects and offered both insights and reassurance. We are also grateful to Pieter van Reenen for creating for us various as yet unpublished dialect maps and for his permission to reproduce these and a number of published dialect maps. On matters codicological and palaeographical, we count ourselves fortunate to have had guidance from Erik Kwakkel, Stephanie Lahey, and Daniel Wakelin. The Conservation Studio Manager at the London Metropolitan Archives, Caroline De Stefani, helped us to recover some badly faded text in the manuscript by sending us ultraviolet photographs of relevant pages from the manuscript.

For permission to produce an edition of London, Guildhall Library, MS 15838, and to reproduce images of it, we are obliged to its owners, the Haberdashers’ Company, and in particular to David Bartle, the Company’s archivist.

The anonymous reviewers for Boydell and Brewer gave us invaluable advice that has made this a better book. We thank Caroline Palmer and Elizabeth McDonald from Boydell and Brewer for guiding this book through the publication process.

Ad Putter’s research towards this book was generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Shannon McSheffrey’s by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which together with Concordia University and the University of Bristol also funded Open Access and other publication costs. A grant from the Arts Faculty Research Fund of the University of Bristol also enabled us to employ Gruff Kennedy to provide assistance with formatting and referencing and Tanya Izzard to help with the index. Their help and the financial support of our Universities and external funders are gratefully acknowledged.

Details

The Dutch Hatmakers of Late Medieval and Tudor London

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-259604

At the end of the Middle Ages, a group of hatmakers from the Low Countries migrated across the North Sea to London. These men brought with them new skills and technologies, unknown to English artisans, becoming the first to manufacture brimmed felt hats in England. However, though their wares were immediately popular with English consumers, from courtiers to ordinary people, they faced an economic environment in London that restricted and sometimes completely disallowed the production and retail of their goods. In the early years of the sixteenth century, the hatmakers' desire to remain independent from regulation and governance by London civic guilds led to their formation of a craft association of their own. The Hatmakers' fraternity of St James operated for about a decade, until in 1511 the royal council mandated their amalgamation with and subordination to the powerful London Haberdashers' Company. In their short period of independence, the Hatmakers' guild wrote bilingual ordinances, in English and Dutch, regulating the craft of hatmaking in London. The small parchment booklet in which they wrote the ordinances, now housed in the London Guildhall Library, contains more than a simple list of craft rules: it reveals how these Dutch craftsmen negotiated their immigrant lives in both the specifics of their artisanal practice and the broader social and linguistic realities of their daily interactions.

SHANNON MCSHEFFREY is Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She has written five books and numerous articles and chapters on aspects of English society, culture, and politics between 1400 and 1550.

AD PUTTER is Professor of Medieval English at the University of Bristol, UK, co-director of Bristol's Centre for Medieval Studies, and Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author and editor of numerous books, with particular interests in the works of the Gawain poet, and the literary heritage of Anglo-Dutch relations.

Author

Shannon McSheffrey and Ad Putter

PublisherBoydell Press

Print publication date Aug, 2023

Print ISBN 9781837650804

EISBN 9781805430681

Base text size -

Acknowledgements

The Dutch Hatmakers of Late Medieval and Tudor London

Chapter illustrations ()