By 1500, the most prominent London guilds had their own company halls, but lesser guilds did not – and those without halls often used parish churches and the London friaries as their headquarters.
1 On the London mendicant houses, see Nick Holder, The Friaries of Medieval London: From Foundation to Dissolution (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017). The Upholders (who bought and sold second-hand goods), for instance, were in Austin Friars; the Cobblers (who mended shoes) were in Crossed Friars (also known as Crutched Friars).
2 LMA, COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, folios 5v, 32v. Thus, there was nothing unusual about the stranger hatmakers creating their craft fraternity in the Blackfriars’ priory precinct. London’s mendicant houses also catered to the religious and linguistic needs of the stranger communities in the City. The friars had themselves arrived as immigrants in thirteenth-century England and in the later medieval period friars continued to come from abroad.
3 Proportions and countries of origin are given in Jens Rörhkasten, The Mendicant Houses of Medieval London, 1221–1539 (Münster: LIT, 2004), p. 536. More than the secular clergy, they understood the need to know the vernacular languages of the city-dwellers whom they served and who in turn served the interests of the friars. When interpreters or confessors who could speak languages other than English were needed, a friary was the place you went to find them.
4 Michael Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1979), pp. 177–79, and Rörhkasten, Mendicant Houses, p. 133, and, with specific reference to Dutch-speaking friars, p. 458. It is thus no coincidence that other alien religious fraternities whose statutes survive also met in friaries.
5 Justin Colson, ‘Alien Communities and Alien Fraternities in Later Medieval London’, London Journal 35 (2010), 111–43; and W. Mark Ormrod, Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman, Immigrant England, 1300–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 232–33. The Austin Friars and Crossed Friars welcomed German, Dutch, and French-speaking religious fraternities in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and Austin Friars in addition had Italian- and Spanish-speaking confessors with whom migrants might feel more comfortable.
6 LMA, DL/C/0206, folios 47rv; Colson, ‘Alien Communities’; Holder, Friaries, p. 143. In 1550 the former priory of the Austin Friars officially became the home of the Dutch Church (with services given in Dutch).
Blackfriars, too, had at least four fraternities associated with aliens in the early sixteenth century. One was a francophone fraternity of the Immaculate Conception, strictly religious and social in nature, which included as members court historian Bernard André, high-status merchants, and skilled artisans such as goldsmiths and printers.
7 Colson, ‘Alien Communities’, pp. 121–24. An elaborate book survives of ordinances of the fraternity, founded in 1503, with an opulent full-page illumination as a frontispiece.
8 See below, chapter 4. The manuscript, now Oxford, Christ Church, MS 179, is digitised here: <https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/e68477c0-ac65–4c5c-bac8-ce0c01a65202>. See an English translation of the ordinances in Colson, ‘Alien Communities’, pp. 136–41. Two other confraternities were associated with Dutch migrants. One was dedicated to St Barbara, the patron saint of strangers, and approved by the bishop of London in 1511.
9 LMA, DL/A/A/005/MS09531/009, Register of R. Fitzjames, Bishop of London, folios 29r–30v; Minnie Reddan and Jens Röhrkasten, ‘The Black Friars’, in The Religious Houses of London and Middlesex, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Matthew Davies (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2007), p. 119. St Barbara was a common dedicatee of Dutch migrant fraternities: the church of St Martin le Grand, ministering to the many Netherlanders living in the liberty precinct, had one attested in 1525, as did the Dutch-speaking community in Florence. See TNA, PROB 11/21/620, Will of Henry Stale, London, 1525; Mario Battistini, ed., La Confrérie de Sainte-Barbe des Flamands à Florence. Documents relatifs aux tisserands et aux tapissiers (Brussels: Commission royale d’histoire, 1931). The records edited by Battistini show that this, too, was a religious guild, which brought together members of various crafts. It was made up of men of diverse artisanal trades living in different parts of the City; the common thread was evidently their ethnic and linguistic identity, as the members who testified in a 1523–24 lawsuit involving one of their own were from Brabant (Leuven and Brussels) and the duchy of Cleves, now in Germany, but historically Dutch-speaking.
10 LMA, DL/C/0207, folios 198v–99r, 218r, 251v–252v, 253v–255v. Like the other alien fraternities described by Colson, it appears to have been strictly religious and social. The third was the Fraternity of the Holy Trinity, commemorated in the bequest of Godfrey Spering, a beer brewer, who left money in his will (1489) to the fraternity ‘kept by Dutchmen (
teuthonicos) at the Friars Preacher (i.e. Blackfriars) in London’.
11 TNA, PROB 11/11/708.The fourth brotherhood in Blackfriars, the Fraternity of St James of the Hatmakers, was different from these other alien fraternities in that it was clearly a craft association rather than a solely religious organisation. In contrast to the ordinances of the French Immaculate Conception fraternity, with which they were roughly contemporaneous, the purpose of the St James’ ordinances was primarily to regulate the training, supervision, and accreditation of hatmakers in London. Nonetheless, the Fraternity of St James also had religious functions (fraternity masses, funeral observances for brothers and their wives, charity towards indigent members). The dedication to St James the Less – the patron saint of hatmakers
12 David Gowler, James through the Centuries (Chichester: Wiley, 2014), p. 58. – epitomised the thorough intertwining of occupational and spiritual purposes of the guild; the amalgamated London guild of the Hurer [Capper]-Hatter-merchants, whose 1501 union lasted only for a year before their absorption by the Haberdashers’ Company in 1502, also had a fraternity dedicated to St James.
13 LMA, COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, folios 28r–29r. Though not all religious fraternities were associated with a particular craft, before the Reformation almost all craft organisations in England, the Low Countries, and elsewhere in Europe were in some ways religious. They were usually associated with a particular church, dedicated to a particular saint, held special masses associated with that saint’s feast day. This coupling of religious and economic functions became, if anything, stronger in the later fifteenth century.
14 Matthew P. Davies, ‘The Tailors of London and Their Guild, c.1300–1500’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1994), pp. 1–43; Guido Marnef and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘Civic Religion: Community, Identity, and Religious Transformation’, 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. 144; Gervase Rosser, ‘Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town’, Past & Present 154 (1997), 21.If the location of the hatmakers’ fraternity in Blackfriars and its mixed economic and religious functions were in no way unusual, their guild was different from both other London citizen craft associations and alien religious guilds. The location in the liberty of the Blackfriars precinct facilitated the alternative structures that the hatmakers who formed it envisaged. London craft guilds were usually subject to the authority of the mayor and aldermen and of the crown, not to ecclesiastical authorities.
15 Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 9; 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. As the example of the Stranger Weavers discussed in chapter 1 indicates, in earlier decades it had seemed possible for aliens to have a craft association integrated to some extent into the London civic environment; in 1441, the Mayor and Aldermen approved and registered the Stranger Weavers’ ordinances. But the Stranger Weavers’ separate existence was extinguished in 1497.
16 See pp. 26–28 above. When the Dutch hatmakers were considering the formation of their fraternity in these same years, they would have needed both to locate their guild outside the jurisdiction of the City of London and to place their organisation into a line of authority other than the London civic hierarchy.
This need for an alternative political and legal structure was yet another reason why the hatmakers established their organisation in Blackfriars, which was not only a religious house suitable for a fraternity, but a liberty, a territory independent in a political, legal, and economic sense from the City of London’s jurisdiction.
17 On the Blackfriars Liberty especially after the dissolution, see Anthony Paul House, ‘The City of London and the Problem of the Liberties, c1540-c1640’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation., Oxford University, 2006), pp. 115–52; and Christopher Highley, Blackfriars in Early Modern London: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 35–55. For more generally on the medieval convent and its precinct, see Holder, Friaries, pp. 27–56. They were, in fact, not the only rogue craft association to do so: in 1503, the journeymen (or ‘yeomanry’) of the London Fullers’ Company, in defiance of the senior members of their guild, also established an unauthorised guild at Blackfriars. All we know about it is that it had elements of a religious fraternity – it had a funeral cloth and a common box – but its suppression by the mayor and aldermen indicates clearly that it was seen as an attempt to develop a craft organisation separate from the main Fullers’ guild. One important aspect of the suppression of the Fullers’ yeomanry was that henceforth they were never to meet as a group outside the Fullers’ Hall in the City.
18 LMA, COL/CA/01/01/001, Repertory 1, fol. 136r.The Blackfriars’ convent had from the late thirteenth century occupied a large precinct at the southwest corner of the City, south of Ludgate and bounded by the wall and the Fleet and Thames Rivers (see fig. 6). As in most ecclesiastical precincts in London by 1500, there were tenements and shops leased to laypeople, though the character of the precinct in the decades around 1500 is surprisingly hard to determine. Because of its separateness, little is known about the scope of the Blackfriars’ liberty privileges in practical terms: by analogy with other ecclesiastical liberties it would likely have had its own courts, both secular and ecclesiastical, but no records have survived and only a few administrative records from before the dissolution are extant, mostly in later copies.
19 See the Loseley manuscripts, MSS L.b.185, 361, 384, 385, 402, 468, 470, now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC <https://findingaids.folger.edu/dfoloseley.xml>. In the later fifteenth century the heads of religious houses with liberty jurisdictions and substantial precincts experimented with different constellations of their privileges: both Westminster Abbey and the collegiate church of St Martin le Grand, just to the northeast of Blackfriars, had through the fifteenth century emphasised their privileges as sanctuaries. The Abbey hosted a substantial population of sanctuary-seeking felons and debtors, while in the later fifteenth century St Martin’s began to turn more towards leasing shops and houses to alien artisans to work outside London guild regulation, attracting a dense population of stranger craft workers. Another London-area liberty, the hospital of St Katherine by the Tower, was a messy combination of charitable foundation, sanctuary for debt, haven for immigrant artisans, and semi-tolerated prostitution zone.
20 See Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Liberties of London: Social Networks, Sexual Disorder, and Peculiar Jurisdictions in the Late Medieval English Metropolis’, in Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain, ed. Krista J. Kesselring and Sara M. Butler (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 216–36; also Seeking Sanctuary, esp. chapters 4, 5, 6. It is not clear where Blackfriars stood around the year 1500 in this universe of experimentation with liberty jurisdictions. It made no claim to sanctuary privileges (a lucrative but potentially troublesome sideline some religious houses, notably Westminster Abbey, claimed). There are some hints that the Dominican prior had farmed out the administration of some of its privileges to the prior of the Hospitaller order of the Knights of St John. The Hospitallers themselves vigorously explored various income-producing franchises and perquisites throughout their properties in the kingdom in these decades, including at the Hospitaller priory at Clerkenwell.
21 Folger MS L.b.468; Godfrey Anstruther, ‘The Last Days of the London Blackfriars’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 45 (1975), 214. On the Hospitallers and jurisdiction, see McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary, ch. 4.~
Fig. 6 The Blackfriars’ Precinct in 1520 – Extract from A Map of Tudor London, 2nd edition, 2022, ed. C. Barron and V. Harding. © Historic Towns Trust, UK.
The friars rented out tenements in the precinct from the fourteenth century,
22 Holder, Friaries, p. 55. though how many residents lived in the Blackfriars precinct around 1500, and who they were, is unclear. Fifteen years later, the picture is somewhat less fuzzy: the Blackfriars liberty, or at least sections of it, had become a pleasant and upscale neighbourhood, something like a gated community at the edge of the City, attractive in particular to elite non-citizens.
23 See most recently, Highley, Blackfriars, pp. 14–34. Along with the non-citizens, Anthony House counted as a resident one prominent citizen – indeed, alderman, sheriff, and (in 1532–33) mayor – the haberdasher Stephen Pecocke, potentially significant for this study because of his involvement in Consistory court litigation against the hat makers in 1514 (House, ‘City of London’, p. 115; on the Consistory suit, see below chapter 3.) Pecocke leased a tenement from the prior from 1510; the terms of his lease and evidence that he paid for special permission for his property to have a door opening into the precinct suggest, however, that the property on which his dwelling house stood adjoined, but was not seen to comprise part of, the liberty. TNA, PROB 11/25/516, Will of Stephen Pecocke, 1536; TNA, PROB 11/32/637, Will of Dame Margaret Pecocke (1549); Medieval Londoners Database (New York: Fordham University, 2020) <https://mld.ace.fordham.edu/s/mld/person?id=539>; Raymund Palmer, ‘The Black Friars of London’, Merry England 13 (1889), 279; Anstruther, ‘Last Days’, 217; Folger, MS L.b.366 <https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/pu735u>. Emperor Charles V stayed in Blackfriars ‘in great royaltie’ when he visited London in 1522; Parliament was held there a number of times between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, including in 1514 and 1523; and the 1529 papal legates’ inquiry regarding the marriage of Henry VIII and Queen Katherine of Aragon took place there.
24 Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, ed. Henry Ellis (London: J. Johnson, 1809), p. 640; William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: A History of the Abbies and Other Monasteries, Hospitals, Frieries, and Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, with Their Dependencies, in England and Wales, ed. Henry Ellis, 6 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1817), VI, 1487. A 1522 record lists as residents of the precinct Lord Zouche, Lord Cobham, Sir William Kingston, Sir Henry Wyatt, Sir William Parr, and other court notables.
25 L&P, III, no. 1053.By the later sixteenth century, the precinct had also become one of the more notable enclaves of stranger artisans, similar to St Martin le Grand and St Katherine by the Tower. Our question is whether that population of stranger artisans went back to the beginning of the century. Scholarship on the London liberties after the dissolutions has argued that this immigrant population post-dated the mid-sixteenth century.
26 House, ‘City of London’, pp. 146–47; Highley, Blackfriars, pp. 20–21, 47–49. Holder similarly does not mention aliens as residents in his discussion of the pre-Reformation Blackfriars precinct, Friaries, 52–55. This is probably, but not certainly, correct: there is relatively little evidence for stranger artisans in the precinct before the 1560s. But there is
some evidence, and it hints at the possibility of archival lacunae rather than absence of a community of alien residents. In 1562 John Vandart,
27 The name is an anglicisation of the common Dutch surname ‘Van den Aerde’ (first documented in 1392). See Nederlandse Familienamenbank, s.v. ‘Aart, van’). a seventy-five-year-old stranger hatmaker who testified regarding his knowledge of the precinct, gave an interesting formulation to describe his residence: he said that he had lived in the parish of St Andrew by the Wardrobe ‘within the liberty of the Blackfriars’ for over forty years, from the 1510s.
28 Anstruther, ‘Last Days’, 224; he specified he was living there in 1517. In a technical sense, the precinct was outside the diocese of London’s parochial system, but those technicalities were not wholly observed. Some inhabitants of the precinct – the elite residents – did use one of the chapels of the priory as a parish church, labelled in some records as St Ann Blackfriars or St Ann Ludgate,
29 L&P, III, no. 1053, XIX, no. 37; R. G. Lang, ed., Two Tudor Subsidy Rolls for the City of London, 1541 and 1582 (London: London Record Society, 1993), pp. 37–42; John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), I, 341; Joseph Quincy Adams, ‘The Conventual Buildings of Blackfriars, London, and the Playhouses Constructed Therein’, Studies in Philology 14 (1917), 64–87. A 1502 will of a citizen founder in the City, John Bailles, asked for burial in St Anne’s chapel in Blackfriars, but he lived in a City parish, St Benet Gracechurch. LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09717/08, fol. 251v. but Vandart’s example indicates that not all did: the most extensive listing of London residents of the first half of the sixteenth century, the 1541 subsidy returns, registered Vandart in St Andrew’s parish rather than in the parish of St Ann. This raises the possibility that others besides Vandart, listed as parishioners of St Andrew’s, were actually resident in the liberty precinct rather than within the City proper. Though we know little about Vandart, his name does appear on a 1531 list of hatmakers (see chapter 3); in that year he was a master of a hatmaker shop and had in his employ twenty people who worked at various stages of the hatmaking process.
30 London, Archives of Parliament, MS HL/PO/JO/10/3/178/4.Vandart was not the only hatmaker parishioner of St Andrew’s: for instance, Anthony Leveson, who (as ‘Antony Levyson’) was a signatory of the 1511 merger agreement to be examined in chapter 3, also lived in that parish. If he did not live in the Blackfriars precinct, he certainly lived near it. Neither St Ann Ludgate nor St Andrew by the Wardrobe had an extraordinary number of strangers, though, even in mid century; in 1541 nearby St Martin le Grand, though rather smaller in area than the Blackfriars precinct, had nearly seven times as many strangers as St Ann’s and St Andrew’s combined.
31 Lang, Two Tudor Subsidy Rolls, pp. 5–9, 39–40, 74–75. At mid century, St Martin’s clearly had a much denser concentration of alien artisans and it is highly likely that would also have been true in 1500.
Yet in 1500 when the hatmakers were seeking to maintain independence from the supervision of London guilds, it made sense to settle and open workshops inside liberty jurisdictions like Blackfriars and St Katherine by the Tower to avoid searches by the various guilds wishing to establish dominance over them: the Cappers, the Hatter-merchants, and the Haberdashers. Blackfriars also had the attraction of aristocratic customers in the neighbourhood and the king’s wardrobe, another important client, right next door. Following the agreement of 1511 by which the hatmakers came under the broad aegis of the Haberdashers’ Company, however, living in the liberty to escape London jurisdiction and the supervision of its guilds became largely a moot point. Evidently men like John Vandart continued to live there, presumably for its other attractions. In any case, there is no need to assume that the Dutchmen who created the Fraternity of St James lived within the Blackfriars’ precinct: other fraternities in the friaries attracted members from all over the City and beyond, and the Hatmakers’ organisation likely did also.