There was a good deal of aggressive manoeuvring among the different occupational groups in London involved in making and selling headgear in the years immediately around 1500. In 1501, the year in which the bulk of the bilingual ordinances of the Fraternity of St James were written down, the London guild of Hatters or Hatter-merchants – who sold, but did not themselves make, hats – amalgamated with (or perhaps took over) the London guild of Hurers-Cappers, who both made and sold caps.
1 CPR 1494–1509, p. 243; the incorporation of the new amalgamated guild of ‘Hurers alias cappers and hatter-merchants’ was dated 27 Apr. 1501; as the new year was reckoned from 25 March, this was only one month into 1501, so the Hatmakers’ ordinances probably dated from after this move. The establishment of the united guild of the Cappers and Hatter-merchants seems to have been a bid by the wholesalers and retailers to control the production line and sale of headgear in the London market, likely in rivalry with other more powerful guilds. Particularly threatening to the headgear specialists were the Haberdashers, who sold accessories of all kinds, including hats and caps. The fifteenth-century consumer revolution had brought both significant growth in the haberdashery trade and a concomitant increase in stature for the London Haberdashers’ guild, which moved from decidedly junior status in the London craft hierarchy in 1400 to a secure place among the Great Twelve Companies by the 1510s.
2 Archer, Haberdashers’ Company, pp. 11–18.If this union of the Cappers and Hatter-merchants was indeed an attempt to stave off the Haberdashers, it failed, for the following year, in 1502, the Haberdashers in turn absorbed the amalgamated guild, bringing the Hatter-merchants and Cappers under their aegis. The politics of these mergers and acquisitions are obscure and likely complex; possibly some citizen hatter-merchants and cappers were keen to join the more powerful Haberdashers’ Company while others may have lost independence and authority by the merger. Among the issues at stake in any case were the stranger artisans working both as cappers and as hatmakers in the London area: in 1500, before any of the mergers had taken place, the Cappers’ and the Haberdashers’ guilds clashed over which had the right to ‘search’ the shops (that is, assess the quality of goods and the number and training of servants) of stranger cappers.
3 LMA, COL/CA/01/01/001, Repertory 1, fol. 75rv. In these years some guilds, notably the Haberdashers and the Tailors (in 1503 re-branded as ‘Merchant Tailors’), found advantage both in subduing and absorbing lower-ranked citizen guilds and in more firmly establishing supervision over non-citizen pieceworkers who contributed to the making of accessories and garments.
4 Matthew Davies, ‘Crown, City and Guild in Late Medieval London’, in London and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Derek Keene, ed. Matthew Davies and James A. Galloway (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2012), pp. 247–68 (at 265–66).Haberdashers sold both imported and domestically produced goods. There was no strong reason for haberdashers to prefer to sell goods made by London artisan guild members rather than by strangers, or English non-citizens, or workers overseas; their interests lay in finding the most profit for themselves as importers and retailers, not in fostering domestic industry for its own sake.
5 Archer, Haberdashers’ Company, pp. 8, 21–22; Davies, ‘Tailors of London’, pp. 114–32; and for near-contemporary commentary, Clement Armstrong, ‘A Treatise Concerning the Staple and the Commodities of This Realme’, in Tudor Economic Documents, Being Select Documents Illustrating the Economic History of Tudor England, ed. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Edna Power, 3 vols (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), III, pp. 109–10. Their focus was on cornering the supply of goods and controlling retail in the face of competition from other merchant guilds, especially the Tailors and the Mercers. In the very early years of the sixteenth century, haberdashers established more clearly their ownership of the retail sector in accessories; the political writer Clement Armstrong in the 1530s looked back on this decade as the point at which haberdashery shops began to proliferate in the City.
6 Armstrong, ‘Treatise’, p. 111; Archer, Haberdashers’ Company, p. 21. A major part of that move was first their amalgamation with the Capper and Hatter-merchant guilds, bringing both cap production and headgear retail more clearly under their control. The next step would be the incorporation of the Hatmakers’ guild, which the Haberdashers were able to bring about in 1511, as we will see in more detail in chapter 3.
Before that happened, however, the hatmakers resisted. Though some citizen hatter-merchants and cappers may have benefited from their guilds’ absorption into the more powerful Haberdashers’ company, the stakes were different for the hatmakers: as strangers, their status in any London guild would have been inevitably subordinate. The disputes between the pre-amalgamation Haberdashers’ and Cappers’ guilds over who would govern alien cappers would have signalled to the stranger hatmakers their need to join forces to resist a similar imposition. The hatmakers had much more leverage than the stranger cappers, due to their unique skills and luxury product and (probably not incidentally) their aristocratic clientele. Possibly borrowing from the example of the Stranger Weavers, they created their own guild. They could not form a citizen guild, because as strangers they were ineligible for the freedom of London; they nonetheless decided in the late fifteenth century to form a craft association in the form of a religious fraternity dedicated to St James, outside London civic jurisdiction in the Dominican convent, Blackfriars, at the western end of the city.