Chapter 3 The Hatmakers and the 1511 Agreement

The hatmakers could not hold out long, however, especially when the regime of the new king Henry VIII (r.1509–47) proved friendly to the Haberdashers’ Company: the guild received a royal charter in 1510 and, as Ian Archer notes, by 1515 it had solidified its place at eighth among the Great Twelve Companies in the City.2 Ian W. Archer, The History of the Haberdashers’ Company (Chichester: Phillimore and Co., 1991), pp. 57–62. In 1511, soon after receiving their charter, the Haberdashers convinced the royal council to order the hatmakers’ fraternity to come under the rule of the Haberdashers.3 LMA, DL/C/0206, fol. 319r. This was the last piece of the puzzle, in a sense, for the Haberdashers’ control of the headgear market from production to retail. This was not simply about curbing the independence of the stranger hatmakers but also involved rivalry with other London citizen guilds, especially the Mercers and the Merchant Tailors, who also imported and sold hats and caps (and would continue to do so).4 See for instance merchant tailor William Bonyvaunt who in 1550 had a large array of headgear (caps, hats, night-caps) in his shop. Matthew P. Davies, ‘The Tailors of London and Their Guild, c.1300–1500’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1994), p. 237. The Haberdashers nonetheless presumably henceforth largely controlled the sourcing of domestically-produced hats by controlling the London hatmakers, especially in tandem with a 1512 Act forbidding the import of hats from overseas.5 The legislation was re-enacted in 1529: 3 Hen. VIII, c.15; 21 Hen. VIII, c. 9; SR, III, 33–34, 290. On this and other protectionist legislation, see Christopher John Heal, ‘The Felt Hat Industry of Bristol and South Gloucestershire, 1530–1909’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bristol, 2012), pp. 49–51.

The absorption of the stranger hatmakers into the Haberdashers’ Company was not without parallel: the stranger goldsmiths worked under the umbrella of the Goldsmiths’ Company as skilled practitioners of a luxury craft, while the Stranger Weavers had experienced amalgamation with their London citizen counterparts. There were also, of course, differences. English and stranger goldsmiths and weavers practised the same craft, but the stranger hatmakers had no English peers. The Haberdashers’ Company, with which the hatmakers were merged, were primarily merchants, not artisans; the citizen cappers who had become part of the company in 1502 also fabricated headgear, but by different processes and skills. Haberdashers sold goods that artisans in a broad spectrum of trades produced: caps, hats, purses, pouches, pins, ribbons, girdles, points, and so on. It was crucial for their business model to control access to the goods those artisans produced: as Archer notes, the rise of the Haberdashers was predicated on their ability to annex the artisanal crafts whose wares they sold.6 Archer, Haberdashers’ Company, pp. 12–13, 29.

Caps and hats were central to haberdashery; as we have seen, hats especially were a high-end luxury commodity attractive to the desirable aristocratic market. Taking over the Dutch hatmakers would have been strategically useful to the Haberdashers, though the advantage it brought to the hatmakers, beyond the promise of enhanced retail opportunities, is less clear. Nevertheless, by 1511 the hatmakers could no longer hold out and were taken over by the Haberdashers. Historians of the Haberdashers’ Company have presented the 1511 agreement between the Haberdashers and the hatmakers as a mutually advantageous deal, suggesting that it gave the latter the status of full and equal membership of the Company,7 Rosemary Weinstein, The History of the Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, 1604–2004 (Chichester: Phillimore, 2004), pp. 5–6; Archer, Haberdashers’ Company, p. 61. but that could not have been the case as the hatmakers were strangers and thus ineligible to become citizen guild members.

It is true that the 1511 document reads as a merger between two equal groups (and that itself is important, as discussed below). Later evidence shows, however, that the union was forced: multiple lawsuits between the Haberdashers’ Company and hatmakers in the years that followed indicate that the relationship was not a happy one. In a 1514 lawsuit brought to the bishop’s Consistory court by the Haberdashers’ Company against four hatmakers over quarterage fees,8 Master and Wardens of the Haberdashers contra Everard Presson, Anthony Leveson, John Pawpe, and John Nicoll, 1514–1515, LMA, DL/C/0206, folios 293r–294r, 301r–302r, 317r–321v. one of the Haberdashers’ wardens, future Lord Mayor Stephen Pecocke, testified about the circumstances that led to the amalgamation: he and several other leading Haberdashers had presented their grievances about the alien hatmakers and cappers to the king’s council. As a result, he said, ‘the strangers were enjoined and mandated [by the council] to adhere and conform to the statutes and ordinances of the Haberdashers’.9 ‘Interfuit quando ex parte Magistri et Gardianorum dicte fraternitatis proposita erat querela contra diversos extraneos et alienigenas hatmakers et capmakers coram quibusdam consilariis domini nostri regis, et tunc injunctum et mandatum fuit eisdem extraneos quod adhererent et conformarent se statutis et ordinacionibus illius artis seu fraternitatis anglice le haberdasshers’. LMA, DL/C/0206, fol. 319r. Records of the king’s council in this period survive only in partial later copies at the Henry E. Huntington Library; unfortunately, this matter between the Haberdashers and the Hatmakers was evidently not of interest to the later copyists and does not appear in those records. See San Marino, CA, Henry E. Huntington Library, MSS EL 2652, 2654, 2655, 2768. In other words, a royal order was issued that stranger hatmakers would have to comply with the labour statutes that forbade their work outside guild structures and to place themselves under the Haberdashers’ supervision. There is also evidence in that same 1514 lawsuit that further coercion was necessary in 1511 to enforce adherence to this order of the king’s council: hatmaker John Pawpe testified that ‘before he was sworn, his goods were seized and distrained by the wardens of the [Haberdashers’] guild and officers of the lord mayor for the payment of the quarterage’, and that in order to have his goods back again he had had to swear an oath to the Haberdashers.10 ‘Antequam sic juratus fuit, bona sua erant capta et districta per gardianos ipsius artis et officiarios domini maioris pro huiusmodi le quarterage videlicet iiii d pro singulis anni terminis solvendos et ut rehaberet illa bona sua juramentum predictum prestitit’. LMA, DL/C/0206, fol. 301r.

This oath did not make those hatmakers members of the Haberdashers’ guild, however, either in their own estimation or that of the Company itself. Anthony Leveson, one of the signatories of the 1511 agreement, testified in the 1514 lawsuit that he was ‘not a brother or member of that fraternity or society [the Haberdashers’ Company]’, but rather an artifex extraneus, a stranger artisan. He was bound to pay quarterage fees to the Master and Wardens of the Haberdashers, but in his view that was as far as the relationship went.11 ‘Iste juratus non sit frater sive socius illius fraternitatis sive societatis ut dicit, tamen ipse pro seipso solvit eisdem Magistro et Guardianis iiii d singulis anni terminis tanquam artifex extraneus’. LMA, DL/C/0206, folios 293v–294r; see also Everard Presson’s testimony (fol. 293r). Henry Hill, one of the Haberdasher wardens, concurred in his testimony, saying that the stranger artisans paid only quarterage, bearing none of the other ‘burdens [onera]’ of membership, and thus did not have full status in the guild as London citizens did.12 LMA, DL/C/0206, fol. 318r. This was normal for strangers associated with London citizen guilds. Even in what appears to have been a friendly relationship between stranger goldsmiths and the London Goldsmiths’ Company, the alien artisans were not included in the memorial masses and other collective observances that fostered the solidarity and conviviality historians have associated with guild life.13 See the lists of those who attended obits of guild members in London, Goldsmiths’ Hall, WACM, Books 4C and 4D, passim (e.g. 4C, 122, 124, 132, 133, 135, 149, etc.). On guild solidarities, see Gervase Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994), 430–46. See also Gervase Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England 1250–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). And in the case of the hatmakers and the Haberdashers, it does not appear that relations were friendly at all.

It is, of course, possible that some hatmakers were more inclined than others to enter into the 1511 agreement: perhaps Pawpe had had to be dragged kicking and screaming, while other hatmakers thought that alliance with this powerful guild would be of benefit to both parties. In fact, when Stephen Pecocke described the union as being ‘for the public good of both crafts’, he characterised the alliance in these positive terms.14 ‘pro bono publico utriusque artis videlicet tam haberdasshers quam hatmakers’. LMA, DL/C/0206, fol. 320v. Both the tone and the terms of the 1511 agreement have an appearance of equality and mutual respect. The hatmakers, by the terms of this agreement, were to retain considerable independence: the agreement refers to their continuing to have their own ‘masters and wardens’, for instance, who were to keep ‘good order and rule’. Although the wardens were reduced in number from four to two, this was nonetheless a significant concession for stranger artisans in London in the 1510s. And the hatmakers were – as the witnesses in the 1514 suit put it – still to be considered a separate ars or societas. The 1511 agreement indeed bears out the interpretation that the hatmakers advanced in their defence of the 1514 Consistory suit, that the main relationship henceforth between the hatmakers and the Haberdashers’ company would be pecuniary: most of the clauses in that agreement dealt with the fees hatmakers would pay on establishing their workshops or entering into service, to be split equally between the Hatmakers’ Fraternity and the Haberdashers’ Company. Though one clause limited to four the number of servants a hatmaker could employ at any one time, no other parts of the agreement referred to other common aspects of guild authority, such as the right of the Haberdasher wardens to inspect shops or wares.

So, for the master hatmakers at least, this might have seemed like an agreement they could live with. It may have had advantages: hatmakers could live and operate their workshops in City jurisdiction, rather than being confined to the liberties. Just possibly they also received a quid pro quo in the 1512 statute, ‘An Act concerning Hattis and Cappis’, which forbade the importation of hats and caps to England.15 3 Hen. VIII, c.15, SR, III, 33–34. Though ostensibly the statute addressed the labour problems of English workers in the capping industry, it also had the function of forbidding the import of ready-made hats as well as caps. As there was as yet no significant production of felt hats by English artisans, one important effect of the statute was to give a monopoly to the stranger hatmakers in London and elsewhere in England, who henceforth were in theory to provide all the hats for the domestic English market. Although the importation of headgear by no means stopped – merchants were granted special licences to import hats and caps16 E.g. L&P, I, nos 821, 841, 947; II, nos 18, 419; LCA, 4.10, 442; LCA, 4.11, 556–57; LCA, 4.13, 364. and there were complaints from cappers and hatmakers in the 1520s and 1530s that this and a subsequent 1529 statute reiterating the ban on imports were being ignored17 London, Archives of Parliament, HL/PO/JO/10/3/178/1–8; the subsequent statute was 21 Hen. VIII, c. 9 (SR, III, 290). Revealing evidence for the continuing import of hats from the Low Countries comes from the testimony of the Antwerp-based merchant Bernart Tymbert, who (he says) had spent many years in England. When asked ‘what merchandise the English need from this land’ (‘Gevraecht wat coopmanschap den Inghels behoeven van dese lande’), he listed merchandise including ‘hats and bonnets, sculptures and paintings’ (‘hoyen ende bonetten, beelden, scilderien’). See H. J. Smit, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van den handel met Engeland, Schotland en Ierland 1150–1585 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1942), p. 417, no. 534. – nonetheless there are indications that the 1512 statute did indeed stimulate a domestic industry in the production of both caps and, perhaps especially, hats.