Chapter 2 The Formation of the Hatmakers’ Fraternity

Shannon McSheffrey; Ad Putter

Chapter 2

The Formation of the Hatmakers’ Fraternity

Amid the manoeuvres and mergers among London craft associations at the turn of the sixteenth century, a group of stranger hatmakers formed a guild. Given the labour circumstances of late fifteenth-century London, they presumably hoped thereby to gain a more secure position through collective representation to avoid the fate of other stranger artisans in the metropolitan region, unable to operate their own shops or hire servants according to the needs of their business. As non-citizens, the hatmakers could not form a guild through the usual structure of London civic authority (the mayor, aldermen, chamberlain, and Common Council), so instead they placed their association at least nominally under the authority of the bishop. The Fraternity’s home – the Dominican priory of the Blackfriars – may well also have been chosen specifically because Blackfriars was a liberty, a territory within London’s walls but outside the purview of the civic government.

The first part of this chapter will examine the early sixteenth-century Blackfriars precinct and the role it played as a space ‘in and yet not of the City’, as contemporaries put it,1 Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 61. allowing for exceptions to London’s restrictions on alien labour and retail. The second section will consider what the ordinances drawn up by the hatmakers tell us about the different practices of craft work and labour organisation in the Low Countries and England: when the Dutch hatmakers came to London, they brought with them assumptions about training, master-servant relations, and guild governance that diverged substantially from those held by their London counterparts.2 It should be noted that guild cultures were not homogenous in the Low Countries. On some distinctions between the southern and northern Low Countries in this period, see Wim Blockmans, Bert De Munck, and Peter Stabel, ‘Economic Vitality: Urbanisation, Regional Complementarity and European Interaction’, in City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600, ed. Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone, and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 51.

1 Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 61. »

2 It should be noted that guild cultures were not homogenous in the Low Countries. On some distinctions between the southern and northern Low Countries in this period, see Wim Blockmans, Bert De Munck, and Peter Stabel, ‘Economic Vitality: Urbanisation, Regional Complementarity and European Interaction’, in City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600, ed. Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone, and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 51. »

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

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Chapter 2 The Formation of the Hatmakers’ Fraternity

The Dutch Hatmakers of Late Medieval and Tudor London

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