Preface

Their guild Ordinances are fascinating and unique for reasons at once historical and linguistic. Historically, they are, to our knowledge, one of the few surviving statutes of an ‘alien’ fraternity in England that operated not just as a social and religious guild but as a craft association. The reasons why this is so unique are explained more fully below, but the long and the short of it is that legally and conceptually the existence of an alien craft association was an anomaly in this period. The guilds of London regulated the production and retail of artisanal produce: to engage in such business you needed to belong to a guild and, in the years around 1500, to be a guild member, be it apprentice or master, you were normally expected to be a native of England or the crown’s other appurtenances (Wales, Ireland, Calais, and so on). Those born outside the realm – aliens or strangers in the English lexicon of the day – were thus usually excluded from guild membership, and if they founded fraternities of their own these fraternities were generally religious and social ones and not craft associations. The Dutch Hatmakers, however, broke this rule. The fraternity they founded was a craft guild (though like most other such guilds, they made ample provision for religious and social observances too). How they managed this and how they were eventually brought into line are topics for a later chapter.

If the Ordinances of the Dutch Hatmakers are unique on historical grounds, they are also unparalleled for linguistic reasons, for the document was drawn up in 1501 in two languages, English and Dutch. By ‘Dutch’ here and in the rest of the book we refer to the West Germanic language spoken and written in the area approximately covered by the present-day Netherlands and the Flemish-speaking region of Belgium.

On the borders of the Netherlands and Germany, Dutch is hard to distinguish from varieties of Low German, and in medieval usage ‘Dutch’ in fact included speakers of both these languages. It is only in more modern parlance that ‘Dutch’ came to refer to a citizen of the Netherlands. To avoid confusion, we need to emphasize that when ‘Dutch’ is used of a person in this book it refers to a speaker of Dutch (including the dialect of Flemish and the Low Saxon dialects spoken in the borderlands of present-day Germany and the Netherlands). ‘Dutch’ or ‘Belgian’ in the modern sense is anachronistic for this period, since the modern nation states of The Netherlands and Belgium were yet to be born. The Hatmakers came from what was at the time a patchwork of principalities, including, among others, the counties of Flanders, Holland and Zeeland, the Duchy of Brabant (stretching roughly from the modern province of North Brabant to that of Flemish Brabant) and the Duchy of Gueldres, which at the time extended beyond present-day Gelderland into parts of Germany and Limburg. In the later fourteenth century, the Dukes of Burgundy began to bring many of these territories under their jurisdiction, but they continued as semi-autonomous lands with their own cultures, laws, and dialects. As we shall see, the Dutch Hatmakers, too, came from different regions in the Low Countries ranging from Zeeland in the west to Gelderland in the east.

There were, as is well known, many Dutch-speaking immigrants living in late medieval and Tudor England but of their language we possess very little evidence before the second half of the sixteenth century. A Dutch inscription on a tombstone on English soil, a promissory note written in Dutch for an English merchant, the odd code-switched word embedded in Latin or English texts: these are the kinds of scraps on which scholars interested in the social history of the Dutch language in England before 1550 have had to feed. The Ordinances offer something quite different. It is a substantial document that gives historical linguists and dialectologists plenty of material to work with, and it is also the earliest document to have been drawn up bilingually in English and Dutch.

For these historical and linguistic reasons, Guildhall Library, MS 15838 deserves to be much better known than it is. In addition to the bilingual Ordinances, which were copied down in 1501, the Guildhall manuscript contains the agreement, dated 1511, by which the Dutch Hatmakers joined the Haberdashers and so lost their independence as an alien craft guild. To put the manuscript and the Dutch Hatmakers back on the map, we have provided in the first part of this book (Part I: Study) a microhistory of the community whose language and practices are codified in the Ordinances, and in the second part (Part II: Texts) a complete edition of the Ordinances and of some other shorter texts contained in the manuscript.

However, the Guildhall manuscript is not the only source that can bring back to life the experiences of this migrant community. Some of the hatmakers who are named in the Ordinances and the 1511 agreement made wills which have survived, and some appear as signatories in various other archival documents, including, as we shall see, a petition to Parliament of 1531. They also left a paper trail in the London diocesan consistory court records. According to the Haberdasher wardens who brought a case against four hatmakers in 1514, the latter failed to observe the agreement that was signed by the Haberdashers and Hatmakers when the two merged in 1511. Careful study of all these archival remains has allowed us to piece together the story of the Dutch hatmakers in far greater detail than we had thought possible when we first became interested in them.

Their lives and the records they left behind raise a host of questions which we attempt to answer. First, since London evidently afforded these Dutch hatmakers opportunities for improving their lot, we need to ask what skills and techniques they could offer that London craftsmen did not already possess. What made hatmaking in particular an occupation that tempted craftsmen from the Low Countries to uproot themselves and their families to emigrate to London? Second, how did these new immigrants work around the exclusionary politics of the City of London? To what extent did they adapt to the practices and customs of their new working environment or continue to work as they had done in their home country? Third, what happened to the Dutch Hatmakers when the Fraternity of St James, which they founded, was taken over by the Haberdashers? Was this a happy union or a hostile take-over? What do we know about the fortunes of the Dutch Hatmakers after their merger?

In addition to these broader historical issues, there are codicological and philological questions which can, to some extent, be solved through close analysis of the manuscript and the language it contains. What kind of manuscript is this, and who wrote the bilingual Ordinances? As we shall see, two scribes worked on this bilingual text. Did an English scribe write the English text and a Dutchman the Dutch, or was the Dutch and English text copied by two bilingual scribes? If so, where were they from? What, if any dialect characteristics can we tease out of their Middle English and Middle Dutch writings, and do the language and the handwriting of the scribes mark them out in any way as foreigners? The remarkable fact that the Ordinances are bilingual also raises questions: how fluent and idiomatic is the Dutch and the English language of this document? If words and constructions are not typical of the language of the period, are they innovations or aberrations? Did these two languages influence each other, and, if there are signs of interference, can we tell which language was the dominant one? In the five chapters of our study (Part I) we address all these questions, more or less in the order we have put them here.

Chapter 1 considers the factors that made the Dutch hatmakers so competitive in the crowded English marketplace for headgear in this period. Most contemporary people – except for children and unmarried women – wore some kind of headcover, and London had its own guilds that sought to meet the intense demand. These guilds included the Cappers or Hurers, the Hatter-merchants and the Haberdashers, the latter intent on establishing a near-monopoly on the retail of fashion accessories, which hats had certainly become by the later medieval period. And yet despite this competition and the protectionist policies of the City of London, the Dutch Hatmakers managed to corner a lucrative area of the market. As we argue, their success depended on multiple factors. The demand for fashionable clothes and headgear rose steeply following the Black Death, because the resulting labour shortage drove up wages – which in turn fuelled the ‘consumer economy’ of the fifteenth century. Hatmaking was a good line of business to pursue in this economic climate, and all the more so because changes of fashion were driving prosperous English people away from close-fitting caps towards felt hats with high crowns and wide brims. Producing this newly fashionable headgear necessitated the use of different materials – the best being beaver fur – and different techniques and tools, most notably the feltmaker’s bow. Hatmakers of the Low Countries had already by the late fourteenth century developed a special reputation for making fashionable hats. They were initially imported into England, but from about the second quarter of the fifteenth century it was not just hats that were making the North Sea crossing from Low Countries to England but also hatmakers. They settled in cities such as York and London, and it was in London that they set up their own trade association, the Fraternity of St James, in defiance of the rule that aliens could not run a craft guild.

The Fraternity met at Blackfriars, in the Dominican friary, and in Chapter 2 we consider the role that Blackfriars and the ‘liberties’ of London played in the lives of alien workers, and examine the extent to which they adapted their practices to fit their new working environment. Because the liberties lay outside of the jurisdiction of the city, they gave immigrant craftsmen the freedom to set up shops and workplaces. The friaries of late medieval and early Tudor London also catered for the spiritual needs of the immigrant community: many friars themselves were immigrants from the continent and so friaries could supply pastors and confessors that could communicate with aliens in their mother tongue. In other ways too, the brothers of the Fraternity of St James clung to their social identities as Dutchmen. The Ordinances, while comparable to those of other London guilds in some respects, also have some peculiarities that betray their Dutchness. They suggest, for example, a shorter apprenticeship period, a regionally and professionally mobile workforce, and they contain one of the earliest mentions in English of ‘letters of attestation’, which journeymen coming from abroad were expected to bring in order to prove that they had completed their training to their former masters’ satisfaction. They further set forth measures for settling violent disputes between members of the Fraternity. These procedures for internal arbitration or expulsion and the finely graded system of fines (commensurate with the nature and severity of the injury and harm) were normal in the Low Countries but not in England.

The anomalous existence of the Fraternity of St James as an alien craft guild came to an end in 1511 when the Dutch Hatmakers were absorbed into the ever-expanding Company of the Haberdashers. In Chapter 3 we consider the market forces that explain this merger and follow the changing fortunes of the Dutch hatmakers after the merger. The text of the 1511 agreement, which directly follows the bilingual Ordinances in the Guildhall manuscript, may give the impression that the Hatmakers and the Haberdashers entered into this new arrangement as equal partners, but the reality seems to have been rather different. The register of enrolments into the Haberdashers’ Company shows that the Dutch hatmakers never entered the Company as equal members. Cases brought by several haberdashers against particular Dutch hatmakers in the consistory court in the years following the merger lay bare the tensions that arose between the Hatmakers and the Haberdashers as the latter sought to extend their control from retail – their traditional sphere of operation – into matters of production, which the hatmakers, with good reason, regarded as their own area of expertise and jurisdiction.

Another commercial revolution to which the Hatmakers had to adapt was the gradual shift from traditional workshop production, where the master and his small household oversaw the entire manufacturing process, to proto-industrial production methods. The Ordinances already register this shift in modes of production in the form of an explicit prohibition against the outsourcing of piecework, but we can see the commercial revolution very clearly in the 1531 petition of the cappers and hatmakers to parliament. The petition records the numbers of workers employed by individual hatmakers, and these numbers suggest dramatic increases in scales of production. They further show that some of the Dutch Hatmakers of the former Fraternity of St James had thrived and had become ‘industry leaders’ of the hat business.

The historical changes that confronted the hatmakers are also evidenced in the physical manuscript. The codicological aspects and bilingual format of this manuscript are central in Chapter 4. Unlike printed books, which can be produced in multiple copies in a single day, handwritten manuscripts often took shape over a much longer period, and it was normal for them to acquire later additions and accretions. The Guildhall manuscript contains precisely this kind of historical layering, and the layers are closely intertwined with the changing fortunes of the Hatmakers. The bulk of the manuscript was written in 1501 by two scribes, but some ordinances were added later by the second scribe. Then in 1511 a third scribe added the agreement with the Haberdashers. At some later point, probably after the manuscript had come into the hands of the Haberdashers, yet another hand added the final item in the manuscript: the oath of office to be sworn by newly elected wardens of the Haberdashers. This item of business concerned the Haberdashers rather than the Hatmakers, and so the Hatmakers appear to have lost control over the contents of the manuscript, just as they had ceded control of their Fraternity to the Haberdashers. The bilingual layout of the Ordinances is also discussed in this chapter. The writing of guild records was often entrusted to local scribes. The Dutch Fraternity had a clerk who may have started off the writing, but the second hand was trained in the writing of English documents and was probably that of a local professional. However, it is very clear from the dialect features that both scribes were themselves Dutch speakers, the first probably originating from Gelderland, the second from the southwest, perhaps Flanders.

Both scribes were bilingual and in the last chapter, Chapter 5, we look at their linguistic competence and take a closer look at the relationship between the texts in the two languages: was one a translation from the other or were they, as we believe, more or less independent formulations of the same ideas? We also look at words and constructions that appear in this document for the first time. The evidence suggests that the English language of the Ordinances was not just competent but linguistically innovative.

Finally, a complete edition of the three texts in the Guildhall manuscript is given in Part II of this book. The edition has glosses and notes to explain Middle English and Middle Dutch words and constructions that might otherwise cause readers difficulty.

This book has been, from start to finish, a collaboration between a historian (Shannon McSheffrey) and a specialist in medieval languages and literature (Ad Putter), and there is a rough division of historical and philological matters between Chapters 1–3 and Chapters 4–5 plus Part II. We hope, however, that readers of this book will come away from reading this book, as we have come away from writing it, with an appreciation that these are not separate disciplines but ones that inform and need each other.