The hatmakers’ ordinances leave the governance structure of the fraternity mostly implicit, though the basic outline is clear. ‘Maisters’, ‘kepers’, and ‘wardens’ (‘meysters’ and ‘ouersienders’ in Dutch) are mentioned in various articles; though in many London guilds, masters and wardens were two separate offices, for the hatmakers they were synonyms (see art. 2, 3, 9, 25).
1 Somewhat confusingly, the word ‘maister’ was also used to mean a brother of the guild who operated a shop and employed servants, though as art. 3 and 5 suggest, it may not have been confusing in context. There were four masters or wardens. The 1511 agreement mandated – and this was consonant with practice in London guilds – that on or near the guild’s feast day, the feast of St James the Less (1 May),
2 In England, St James the Less was celebrated together with St Philip on 1 May. C. R Cheney, A Handbook of Dates for Students of British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 89. the wardens were ‘elected and chosen’ from amongst the members of the craft. The vagueness of language – leaving unstated how such elections were conducted and who made the choices – was typical of London craft ordinances as well as these ones. The office of guild warden was in general both prestigious and burdensome in England in the years around 1500; many guilds mandated fines for those who refused to take on the office of warden, a problem the hatmakers also legislated for, as indicated by article 26.
Unlike the governors of most London guilds, however, the hatmakers’ wardens were not responsible to the City Chamberlain and the Mayor and Aldermen. Instead, in articles 5, 26, and 27, reference is made to ‘the bishop or ordinary [bishop’s delegate]’ as the next-level authority beyond the guild officials themselves. Placing a craft association under episcopal authority was unusual in the English context which, in general, saw such supervision as one of the basic functions of city and town governments, but there were precedents. A few London guilds – the Blacksmiths in 1434 and the Shearmen in 1452, for instance
3 Henry Charles Coote and John Robert Daniel-Tyssen, ed., Ordinances of Some Secular Guilds of London, from 1354 to 1496 (London: Nichols, 1871), pp. 41–44, 47–56; Marc Fitch, ed., Index to Testamentary Records in the Commissary Court of London, 1374–1570, Historical Manuscripts Commission, JP 12–13, 2 vols (London: HMSO, 1969, 1974), I, 208; II, 302; originals, LMA, MS DL/C/B/004/MS09171/003, fol. 455r; MS DL/C/B/004/MS09171/005, folios 101v–107v. – had registered their ordinances with both City and bishop. In the Shearmen’s case, the duality of authority – ‘the law spirituall and temporalle’ – that the religious and civic functions of the guild entailed was acknowledged in some clauses by recourse both to the ‘officers of the Bisshope of London’ and to the City’s chamberlain when internal measures did not suffice.
4 Coote and Daniel-Tyssen, ed., Ordinances, p. 54; the Blacksmiths’ ordinances, by contrast, do not refer to any authority, civic or ecclesiastical, superior to the guild (ibid., pp. 41–44). Though London citizen guilds invariably also had religious functions, there is little evidence that others submitted their ordinances to the bishop or his delegates. An exception that may prove the rule is the Fraternity of St Christopher of the Water Bearers, the ordinances of which were registered in the bishop’s records in 1496;
5 Coote and Daniel-Tyssen, ed., Ordinances, pp. 79–81. the water bearers, sometimes called holy water clerks, were laymen who assisted in parish upkeep and administration. Though the ordinances did address occupational regulation, the Water Bearers were not a recognised guild in the civic sense and members of the fraternity were not citizens; moreover, their parochial function may have made it natural to ask for ratification of their regulations in the bishop’s court. The ordinances of London citizen craft guilds registered in the civic records around 1500, on the other hand, do not mention diocesan officials alongside the chamberlain, mayor, and aldermen in the line of authority, as the Shearmen had in 1452.
The hatmakers, like the Water Bearers, were not freemen of London. They were aliens, and so had good reason around 1500 to think the civic hierarchy unlikely to welcome a stranger guild. The obvious alternative was to put the Fraternity of St James under the bishop’s aegis. There is nothing in the ordinances themselves that indicate, however, that they were submitted to the bishop or his ordinary for approval, as the Water Bearers had done or as London citizen guilds did to the mayor and aldermen. There is, moreover, nothing about the formation of the Fraternity of St James in the surviving diocesan records, though the London bishop’s registers for this period survive only in part.
6 The ordinances of some other fraternities are in the records of the Commissary Court that mostly probated wills. There were also some in the main bishop’s register, though the register for the years around 1500 is missing. Bishop Richard Fitzjames’s register, 1506–22 (LMA, DL/A/A/005/MS09531/009), does not have any entries relating to the hatmakers but does record ordinances for two religious fraternities (folios 12v–13r and 29r–30v), including the Dutch fraternity dedicated to St Barbara at Blackfriars, discussed above, p. 35. It is notable that though the articles indicate generically the ‘bishop or ordinary’ as the ultimate authority, they do not specify which diocese they mean. As the fraternity was located in his diocese it would presumably be the bishop of London; perhaps it was left unspecified as some brothers of the fraternity likely lived across the Thames in Southwark, which was in the diocese of Winchester. But possibly those who founded the Fraternity of St James conceptualised their organisation as more or less independent of external authorities of any kind.
The ordinances written into Guildhall Library, MS 15838 show how a group of stranger artisans negotiated the significant differences between London and their cities of origin in the Low Countries. Both the structures and customs of artisan labour and the legal and political environment in which guilds operated were significantly different in late medieval Netherlandish cities than they were in London. Whether the hatmakers purposely maintained or simply unconsciously assumed their home country practices is impossible to know. Nor, unfortunately, do we have any evidence about how the newly organised hatmakers used their ordinances or conducted their guild in the decade or so the Fraternity of St James operated as an independent craft organisation. In 1511, the hatmakers’ guild was brought under the governance of the Haberdashers’ Company.