The Haberdashers themselves may not have envisaged the relative independence of the hatmakers that the wording of the 1511 agreement allowed for, expecting, perhaps, the establishment of a more conventionally subordinate relationship between the guild’s masters and these stranger artisans. Certainly, within two or three years the Haberdashers had begun to take a hard line stance. It is important to note that the terms of the relationship between the hatmakers and the Haberdashers’ Company were not dependent solely on the 1511 agreement; the 1514 Consistory suit refers also to an oath the hatmakers swore to the Haberdashers’ Company upon their initial registration in the guild, a mass swearing-in of the hatmakers that presumably occurred shortly after the 1511 agreement.
1 The testimony in the Consistory court case does not reference the 1511 agreement explicitly; rather the witnesses refer in 1514 to oaths having been sworn three years before. The swearing of such an oath was a standard procedure for guild members throughout Europe.
The terms of the Hatmakers’ oath were the subject of the 1514 suit in the Consistory court, The Haberdasher wardens contended that some of the hatmakers had violated the oath (that is, committed perjury, bringing it under the jurisdiction of the church court) because they were not paying the quarterage fees of 4d for each of their servants, which the haberdashers claimed they had sworn to do. The hatmakers, in their own defence, claimed that the oath they swore referred only to their duty to pay quarterage for themselves, not for anyone else, and that they had faithfully done so. As the text of the oaths they swore no longer survives,
2 Though the Haberdashers’ oath for its stranger artisans has not survived, the oath for stranger goldsmiths has: London, Goldsmiths’ Hall, WACM, Book B, pp. 237–43 (thanks to Charlotte Berry for providing photographs). we cannot be certain whose characterisation is more accurate. Two clauses added to the merger agreement sometime after the initial 1511 text was written – perhaps occasioned by this 1514 suit – suggest, however, that the hatmakers won the case. Articles 5 and 6, written in a different hand and ink than the main body of that document,
3 See below, pp. 72, 130. lay out the individual responsibilities of hatmakers’ servants; if such a servant ‘shal be wilfull or obstinat, and pay not his duties accordyng as other of his saide brotherne done’, they are to be fined by the Haberdashers’ wardens.
4 Similarly, the Goldsmiths’ ‘othe of the Aliaunt Straungers’ specified only that the oath-taker was to pay his own quarterage. London, Goldsmiths’ Hall, WACM, Book B, pp. 237–43. No mention is made of masters being responsible for those servants’ quarterage.
This deceptively minor matter, worth a few shillings in revenue for the Haberdashers’ Company, was a stand-in for the extent to which the Haberdashers had the authority to supervise and regulate the hatmakers and their workshops. Though this Consistory court suit is the most detailed evidence we have found for the relations between the hatmakers and the Haberdashers’ guild in the years following the 1511 agreement, other records survive indicating that in the 1510s the Haberdashers pursued, through a range of legal mechanisms, perceived violations of their authority over hatmakers and the buying and selling of their wares. There is an echo in a Chancery bill from around this same time of an apparently similar perjury suit in the London Consistory against three other hatmakers,
5 TNA, C 1/302/25. The hatmakers involved in this altercation were named John Vyllers, Adryan van Doyt, and William Norwiche. The surname of the latter interestingly suggests an English origin, but perhaps William had lived in Norwich before, and simply adopted the town’s name as his cognomen. Dutch immigrants evidently accommodated their names to suit Anglophones. A colourful case (recorded in the Eyre of London, 1321) is that of Manneken Brummen (a common Dutch surname derived from a placename in Gelderland) who assumed the name ‘John the Fleming’. Indicted of homicide, ‘Mannekin le Brumman’ had to persuade a jury that he had been acquitted, even though the record of that acquittal carried his English name ‘John le Fleming’: ‘Mannekin himself said that Mannekin is a Flemish name, and he was a Fleming, and John was (his) English name and they are both one name. And the jurors say that he is the same person and therefore he goes quit’: Helen M. Cam, ed., The Eyre of London, Pt. 2: 14 Edward II (1321), Selden Society 85 (London: Quaritz, 1968), p. 80. Our thanks to Sir John Baker for this reference. and in addition the Haberdasher wardens employed the might of the civic government to shut down shops, seize goods, and arrest and imprison both hatmakers and haberdashers who refused to subordinate themselves to the Company’s authority.
The hatmaker Anthony Leveson both signed the 1511 agreement as one of the four wardens of the hatmakers that year and then appeared in 1514 as one of the defendants in the Consistory lawsuit refusing to pay quarterage for his servants. Possibly Leveson had initially agreed to the merger with the Haberdashers but then changed his mind when he saw the practical effects of the subordination. The testimony in the Consistory case where he appeared as defendant suggests that the hatmakers had begun to ‘work to rule’: though they had paid the relatively small quarterage payments for their servants in the first year or so following the merger, they had begun by 1513 or 1514 to follow the letter of their oath (at least as they characterised it) by paying only for themselves. Though they believed that the agreement had given them effective self-governance as regards the work of their craft and that it was no business of the Haberdashers whom they hired as servants, the Haberdashers wanted to be able to regulate the hatmakers’ hiring and at least formally to administer the process of establishing credentials and supervising the quality of wares.
These were indeed two key areas of authority London guilds usually did control as regards their members and their stranger associates, so the Haberdashers may well have assumed that this was part of the deal when the hatmakers came under their governance. The text of the oath of the stranger goldsmiths, for instance, which, unlike that of the Dutch hatmakers’ oath, does survive, clearly indicates both that the stranger artisans were to submit themselves wholly to the authority of the wardens and that all alien servants were to be presented to, and approved by, the wardens.
6 London, Goldsmiths’ Hall, WACM, Book B, pp. 237–43. But the hatmakers rejected the Haberdashers’ authority over them in these areas: as hatmaker John Pawpe said in the 1514 Consistory suit, in his judgment the Haberdashers did not have the ‘authority and power’ to regulate or approve his hiring of servants, because the ‘master and wardens do not have skills in the craft of hat making’.
7 ‘Habuit et habet quatuor servientes occupantes artem hatmakyng non admissos neque probatos per magistrum et gardianos predictos, quia non credit quod ipsi habent auctoritatem vel potestatem habilitandi sive approbandi ipsos servientes suos quia in illa arte anglice le hatmakyng ipsi magister et gardiani non habent periciam ut dicit’. LMA, DL/C/0206, fol. 301r. One can imagine that these craftsmen with specialist knowledge disdained the claims of the English haberdashers whose training and expertise were in an entirely different realm of import and retail. The Haberdashers, by contrast, may have found the different training practices and more fluid artisanal labour culture the hatmakers brought with them from the Low Countries strange and unrigorous. A mutual contempt pervades the witnesses’ testimony in the Consistory suit.
The hatmakers’ attitude, while understandable in one sense, was arguably unrealistic. Their counterparts in the Goldsmiths’ Company had for some decades been subject to supervision and search by the guild’s wardens; indeed right around this same time in the mid-1510s, the Goldsmiths successfully implemented procedures by which newly arrived stranger goldsmiths could demonstrate their skills to the guild through testimonial letters from guild or town officials of their place of origin overseas.
8 Charlotte Berry, ‘Guilds, Immigration, and Immigrant Economic Organization: Alien Goldsmiths in London, 1480–1540’, Journal of British Studies 60 (2021), 545–49. As discussed in chapter 2, the hatmakers had previously instituted a similar system of letters attesting to migrants’ training and skills, but the 1511 agreement with the Haberdashers does not mention them. By implication – though not explicit statement – the agreement left the process of ascertaining ability in hatmaking to the hatmakers and their wardens.
Although by the monopolistic logic of English craft regulation all the stranger hatmakers in London and its environs were subject to the 1511 agreement, possibly not all hatmakers in the London area would have recognised or welcomed the Blackfriars fraternity’s wardens as their representatives. Before 1511, some stranger hatmakers may have remained unaffiliated with the Fraternity of St James, preferring to work independently: unlike London civic guilds, the Hatmakers’ association had had no mechanism to enforce their control of the craft. After the merger, there certainly were some hatmakers, and indeed some haberdashers, who sought to avoid its terms. A few hatmakers continued (or began?) to work in the precinct of the liberty of St Katherine by the Tower, outside the purview of the Haberdashers’ guild, and some haberdashers continued to buy hats from them. A citizen haberdasher, John Atkynson, complained to the chancellor that in 1515–16 the London mayor and the master and wardens of the Haberdashers’ company had shut down his shop because he was illegally buying hats from those St Katherine’s hatmakers.
9 TNA, C 1/462/38. A previous altercation in 1514 between Atkynson and three other haberdashers on the one hand and the master of the Haberdashers’ Company on the other, which had resulted in the former’s imprisonment, was likely related. TNA, C 1/277/12. Atkynson’s disputes with the wardens of the Haberdashers continued until 1517, resulting in the temporary stripping of his citizen status in 1516 before he abjectly and publicly submitted himself in humility to the wardens in 1517. LMA, COL/CA/01/01/003, Repertory 3, folios 5v, 32v, 89v, 98r, 112v, 151rv; COL/CC/01/01/011, Journal 11, folios 260v, 269v, 271v. Atkynson was not a lucky man: in 1503 his haberdashery shop on London Bridge – which he said was ideally situated to capture the passing retail trade – burned down. LMA, COL/CC/01/01/010, Journal 10, fol. 301rv. It is worth noting that in his petition Atkynson contended that the directives of the Haberdashers’ Company forbidding its members from acquiring hats made in the liberty of St Katherine was ‘agayne the comen profett of the peaple and againste the comen weall’, using the same language of public utility that the Company itself used in its legal arguments.
10 TNA, C 1/642/38; cf. LMA, DL/C/0206, fol. 320v. Haberdashers, in other words, themselves by no means formed a united front, some finding more benefit in working with stranger hatmakers with shops in the liberties, presumably because the price or quality (or both) of the hats made ‘illegally’ was advantageous for the consumer as well as profitable for the rebel haberdashers.