The adjustment period following the 1511 agreement between the Haberdashers and the hatmakers was rough, but there is also evidence that the two decades that followed the amalgamation of the hatmakers into the Haberdashers’ Company saw substantial expansion of the hatmaking industry in the metropolitan area. The clearest evidence of this is a 1531 document, now in the Archives of Parliament, comprising a petition evidently organised by the London Haberdashers’ Company on behalf of all the craft workers, both citizen and non-citizen, who worked in the production of hats and caps in the City, Southwark, and environs. It lists masters in those trades and the number of people each employed.
1 London, Archives of Parliament, HL/PO/JO/10/3/178/4. This document is incorrectly catalogued by the Archives of Parliament as a petition from the cap and hatmakers of the Borough of Southwark: the petition itself indicates that the document came from the London Haberdashers’ Company (who, as above, had governance over the cappers and the hatmakers); the petition itself names both London and Southwark craftworkers. The petition itself indicates that the Haberdashers’ Company was willing to make efforts on behalf of both citizen and non-citizen workers and associates, although one might cynically note that the impetus likely came from citizen cappers whose large-scale domestic manufacture of caps was threatened by imports.
The London document was related to seven other similar petitions from outside London that were submitted to the king and council around the same time. All of them argued that enforcing a 1529 statute banning imports of headgear (similar to the earlier 1512 statute) would be beneficial to the king’s subjects and would foster the domestic cap and hat industries.
2 The London petition is bundled now with seven other petitions from master cappers in other capmaking centres in the west of England (London, Archives of Parliament, HL/PO/JO/10/3/178/1 to 3, 5 to 8). Though they are clearly all related, sharing much of the language, the London petition differs in that it is addressed to the Mayor and Aldermen of London rather than to the king and his council. As it ended up in the Archives of Parliament, there may have been a cover document that has since been lost. The 1529 statute is 21 Hen. VIII, c. 9 (SR, III, 290). As the petitioners complained, disregard for the 1529 statute was to the detriment of large numbers of ‘pore artificers’ who made their living from the many crafts involved in the cap and hat industry (carders, knitters, fullers, etc.). The second part of the London document records the action taken by the City’s mayor and aldermen in response to the initial complaint: they ordered the gathering of the names of all those who operated workshops as haberdashers, cappers, thickers, and hatmakers in London and Southwark. The list, divided into those four categories, names 82 citizen haberdashers and cappers in the London guild, 35 cappers of Southwark, 34 thickers and dressers of Southwark, and 35 hatmakers. The last three categories were likely all or mostly non-citizens and thus not full members of the Haberdashers’ Company; the Southwark cappers and thickers/dressers appear to be a mix of English and non-English names, while the hatmakers’ names are, as far as can be determined, all Dutch.
Even more remarkable than this list of names is a record next to most entries of the number of ‘persons’ in the artisan’s employ. The gender-inclusive language there was evidently deliberate, as the petition above had specified that all manner of men, women, and children worked in the industry. The numbers of employed workers suggest very substantial operations, with numerous masters employing workers in the hundreds. At the damaged tail of the document is a total, which is 5,000 and some (it is not entirely legible); of the workshop figures that are visible, the total is more than 4,500 workers.
The hatmakers’ operations were somewhat smaller in scale than those of many of the citizen cappers, but they were still impressive: a total of at least 1,261 people were employed by the master hatmakers in various aspects of the manufacture of hats. The first named hatmaker was Anthony Leveson – signatory of the 1511 merger agreement and defendant in the 1514 Consistory lawsuit – who had clearly prospered in the years that followed the early 1510s. He had one hundred people in his employ. Only one of his colleagues, Roet Langer, had more workers, with 120. John Vandart, who, as we saw in the previous chapter, testified in the 1560s about his long residence in the Blackfriars precinct, had twenty people working for him.
The 1531 petition presents a very different picture of hatmaking in London than do the ordinances of c.1500, the 1511 agreement, or the 1514 lawsuit. Instead of the workshop on the ground floor of the master’s house, where he worked with and closely supervised a small number of servants, we see proto-industrial piecework, a labour structure that cappers and tailors had been using since the later fifteenth century. This was certainly not what the ordinances c.1500 or the 1511 agreement envisaged. The ordinances prohibited members of the hatmakers’ fraternity from outsourcing work outside their own shops, and the 1511 agreement specified that hatmakers were to have no more than four servants at any one time, a standard clause limiting the size of workshops of both stranger artisans and citizen guild members. There was some testimony both from the strangers and from the representatives of the Haberdashers’ Company in the 1514 Consistory litigation about the number of servants the stranger hatmakers hired; at that point Leveson himself said that he had a single journeyman servant, and both the hatmakers and the haberdashers agreed that none of the hatmakers had more than four servants.
3 LMA, DL/C/0206, folios 293r–294r, 301r–302r, 317r–321v.These descriptions and regulations accord with a household-based workshop model; presumably the deponents meant that these were the servants who worked in the master’s workshop in his dwelling. As Matthew Davies has observed, however, guild records and ordinances, which emphasise the workshop model of craft production, conceal a more complicated structure of urban artisanal production in many trades in England, a situation also true of the Low Countries.
4 Davies, ‘Tailors of London’, pp. 192–213; 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), pp. 48–49, 53–54; Bruno Blondé, Frederik Buylaert, Jan Dumolyn, and Peter Stabel, ‘Living Together in the City: Social Relationships Between Norm and Practice’, 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), pp. 69–70; Bert De Munck, ‘One Counter and Your Own Account: Redefining Illicit Labour in Early Modern Antwerp’, Urban History 37 (2010), pp. 29–32. The numbers given in the 1531 document do not imply the operation of vast workshops with one hundred or more people working in them; sixteenth-century English cities simply did not have suitable infrastructure for that. Rather, the workers laboured in their own chambers. We know that the late medieval capping and tailoring industries involved workers for the different production stages from raw wool to finished cap or garment.
5 Davies, ‘Tailors of London’, pp. 192–213; Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 44; Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 50–52; Donald Leech, ‘Stability and Change at the End of the Middle Ages: Coventry, 1450–1525’, Midland History 34 (March 2009), 19–20. We are less informed about the different production stages of hatmaking, but we can infer from the 1531 petition that discrete tasks were in the hands of workers doing their piece work in their own dwellings, leaving the coordination and the most specialised and skilled aspects (the ones that made hatmaking the preserve of strangers) for the hatmakers themselves.
It is hard to know whether this putting-out system for felt hatmaking had fairly suddenly blossomed between the 1510s and 1531, or whether it simply suited the political agenda of the petition to expand the range and numbers of ‘persons’ in a craftsman’s employ. The petition’s object was to argue that protecting the domestic manufacture of headgear ensured the welfare of thousands of the king’s subjects, and that expanding it would bring more of the idle poor to useful and productive lives. This made it expedient to emphasise the large numbers this industry employed. Though in other contexts the master-led household workshop as the basic unit of craft work continued to dominate the conceptualisation of the artisanal economy in guild ordinances, civic policy, and even social thought (as, for instance, in Thomas More’s Utopia [1516]), here it was advantageous for the petitioners to emphasise and perhaps even to exaggerate the more complex reality.
Despite the complaints in the 1531 document about the damage inflicted on ‘English workers’ by the import of headgear, it is clear from the document itself that many of those it included, both employers and workers, were immigrants. This was especially so for the hatmakers, whose names were all Dutch; their employees and those working for their fellow artisans associated with the Haberdashers almost certainly also included a large number of immigrants. Their substantial operations indicate that the hatmakers of the Fraternity of St James did ultimately benefit from, or at least were not much weakened by, the 1511 merger, however unhappy they might have been with its implementation in the early years.
This is not to say, however, that they benefited to the same extent as the Haberdashers. It is instructive to compare the careers of Anthony Leveson, the hatmaker who appears most frequently in the records during the reign of Henry VIII, and a prominent citizen haberdasher, Nicholas Spakeman, whose business centred on caps. In the 1531 petition Spakeman was labelled one of the four ‘chief Capp Makers’ in the Haberdashers’ Company while Leveson was named first among the hatmakers. Leveson had come to England from Zeeland,
6 TNA, C 1/1021/44. though we don’t know when. He first appears in the 1511 Agreement as one of the hatmaker wardens and signatories, so by then already he had achieved some prominence in the craft. Spakeman first appears in civic records not long after, in 1514.
7 LMA, COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, fol. 220rv. The two men are named in tax records in 1523, when both were doing well, though not outstandingly: Anthony Leveson was evaluated as having £40 in goods, while Spakeman had £66.
8 R. E. G. Kirk and Ernest F. Kirk, Returns of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London from the Reign of Henry VIII. to That of James I, 2 vols, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London 10 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1900), I, 1; TNA E 179/251/15b, fol. 61. In the 1531 petition, Leveson was listed as having 100 employees and Spakeman 160: again, Spakeman’s business was larger, but they were still in the same ballpark. By 1541, Leveson’s tax assessment had actually decreased somewhat, to £30; he was elderly by that point (he would die the following year) and perhaps his business had fallen off. In comparison, Spakeman’s wealth had skyrocketed and he was assessed on £1000 in goods: he had become one of the wealthiest merchants in London.
9 R. G. Lang, ed., Two Tudor Subsidy Rolls for the City of London, 1541 and 1582 (London: London Record Society, 1993), pp. 40, 81. Other haberdashers had also thrived over the decades that followed the mergers of 1502 and 1511: one of the wardens who represented the Company as plaintiffs in the 1514 Consistory suit, Stephen Pecocke, for instance, went on to become Sir Stephen upon his elevation to the mayoralty in 1532–33 and left his widow a very rich woman.
10 TNA, PROB 11/25/516, Will of Stephen Pecocke, 1536; Medieval Londoners Database (New York: Fordham University, 2020) <https://mld.ace.fordham.edu/s/mld/person?id=539>.Neither Anthony Leveson nor any other London hatmaker could match the status and wealth of those prominent haberdashers. As immigrants, the hatmakers were structurally barred from the paths to fortune and success open to citizens. Leveson was nonetheless still well-off in relative terms with a £30 assessment in 1541. He died in 1542. The witnesses to his will included a scrivener with a Dutch name, Thomas Fryse, and two citizens of London, William Stones, a merchant tailor, and a haberdasher, William Roo, who had also been among the cappers listed in the 1531 petition.
11 LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/011, fol. 75v, Will of Anthony Levenson, 1542. Thus Leveson had forged an important social relationship with a citizen haberdasher despite his early run-ins with the Company. He left as widow his second wife, Elizabeth; her surname at their marriage, Newton, suggests that she was English or that her earlier husband had been an Englishman. Anthony and Elizabeth married in the late 1520s. We do not know the name or origin of Anthony’s first wife, though he had children by both marriages, including son John and an unnamed daughter from the first marriage and a daughter, Barbara, from the second.
12 LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/011, fol. 75v; TNA, C 1/1021/44; TNA, PROB 11/42B/194. Barbara later married a merchant tailor, Robert Harpenny. The unnamed daughter of the first marriage may be the Elizabeth Grene who received a bequest alongside John Leveson’s wife in Elizabeth Leveson’s 1558 will. Another daughter named in Elizabeth Leveson’s will, with married name Sybil Ellis, might also have been the offspring of Elizabeth’s marriage to Anthony, though equally she could have been Elizabeth’s daughter by a previous marriage; Sybil was named as the wife of Thomas Ellis, also a merchant tailor. John and his father were evidently estranged at the time of Anthony’s death; John was not mentioned in Anthony’s will, which notably revoked a previous testament. Following Anthony’s death John challenged the probate in Chancery. He implicitly invoked in his petition the custom of London by which children were entitled to a third of their father’s estate, even though Anthony was not a citizen of London to whom such customs applied.
13 TNA, C 1/1021/44.It is interesting to note that both Anthony’s son and his grandson became hatmakers, the craft handed down the generations. John Leveson identified himself as a hatmaker in the 1540s Chancery submission. By 1565 he was living in Southwark, on Bermondsey Street, leasing a tenement with a garden from Magdalen College, Oxford; his trade was then given as ‘feltmaker’, increasingly the term used for the hatmaking trade. The Robert Levinson, feltmaker, who succeeded John as tenant in the same Southwark property in 1575 was presumably his son, and thus a third-generation feltmaker.
14 TNA, C 1/1021/44; Magdalen College, Oxford, MS EL/6 folios 109, 116, 250, <https://archive-cat.magd.ox.ac.uk/records/EL/INDEX7>.John and Robert followed Anthony in another way: neither became citizen members of the Haberdashers’ Company. Though John was probably born in the realm, there was no path to citizenship for hatmakers, English or stranger, during most of his career, just as there had not been for his father.
15 Though the men of the Leveson family were not citizens, Anthony’s daughter Barbara married a merchant tailor, Robert Harpenny, so his grandchildren were raised in a citizen household. LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/011, fol. 75v; TNA, PROB 11/42B/194. Even decades beyond the merger in 1511, hatmakers did not become full members of the Haberdashers’ Company: the Haberdashers’ Freedom Register, which from 1526 onwards records the entry into citizenship of its members, does not name any of the Levesons. Nor do any of the hatmakers in the 1531 petition appear, either as those being sworn into the freedom or as apprentice-masters of new citizens.
16 GL, MS 15857/001, Haberdashers’ Freedom Register, 1526–1642. This accords with the London logic of citizenship: one became a freeman of the City by apprenticing to a citizen guild member and, if no hatmakers were citizens, their trainees were not eligible for the freedom. That vicious cycle of exclusion could continue in perpetuity if no hatmakers were ever admitted as citizen guild members. There was a path through which the cycle could be broken: though almost all London citizens in the sixteenth century entered through apprenticeship, it was possible to enter by redemption – that is, the paying of a substantial fee in place of an apprenticeship. Up to the 1560s, however, there is no evidence in the Haberdashers’ register that any hatmakers made the transition to full citizen guild membership through that route, even though at least some of the hatmakers working in the London area mid century were born in England.
It was in the first decade of Elizabeth I’s rule that a legislative change forced the Haberdashers to find a way to offer hatmaker apprenticeships to potential citizens. First, the 1563 Statute of Artificers mandated that the practice of artisanal trades was to be regularised, with only those who had served seven-year apprenticeships under a guild master permitted to work. This legislation especially affected industries in which alien and other kinds of non-citizen labour were integral to the enterprises, but it was confusingly worded and variously interpreted in the following decades.
17 5 Eliz. c 4, SR, IV 414–22; Harry Duckworth, The Early History of Feltmaking in London 1250–1604, Research Paper No. 1 (London: Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, 2013), pp. 25–27; Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 131–40. Ambiguity regarding hatmaking, however, was removed in 1566 with an ‘Acte for true makinge of Hattes and Cappes’, which confirmed specifically that henceforth no one could make felt hats without undergoing an official apprenticeship. For London hatmakers, this was to be regulated by the Haberdashers’ Company. Aliens and other non-citizens already working in the trade were exempted, but henceforth the training of new artisans in the craft was to be regularised according to the usual London guild rules.
18 8 Eliz c. 11, SR, IV, 494–95.The 1566 Act was no doubt welcomed by the Haberdashers’ Company generally but nonetheless created a logistical problem: at the time of the Act’s passing, there were no guild members who could supervise hatmaker apprentices. The Company’s response was to admit by redemption a group of eight hatmakers the following year, thereby creating a cadre of apprentice masters and a path to full guild membership for the following generations. Several more such groups of hatmakers entered in the 1570s and 1580s, also by redemption, a total of forty-three men between 1567 and 1583; as a sign that these were not the usual processes for swearing in new Haberdasher citizens, their entrances were recorded separately from the other freedom records.
19 GL, MS 15857/1, Haberdashers’ Freedom Register, 1526–1642, folios 104v, 117r, 119r, 123r.These new hatmaker guild members were, however, not the strangers who had dominated the industry in the first half of the century or apparently their descendants, but men born in the king’s realm eligible for the freedom of London. We can only guess how these new hatmaker guild members had been trained: they could well have been unofficially apprenticed to the Dutchmen who still dominated the craft in 1531 and likely for some decades after. Though English-born, such trainees would still not have been able to enter the company before this point as they had not served a guild-authorised apprenticeship. The continued exclusion of aliens is confirmed not only by their English or Welsh names and the general logic of London citizenship in the later sixteenth century, but also by a further list of nine strangers whose names were submitted by the Haberdashers’ Company to the mayor in 1583 in response to an enquiry regarding how many strangers had been admitted to each of the London guilds over the previous six years. The Haberdashers were keen to emphasise how strictly they had held the line against aliens:
The Master and Wardens of the said Companie of Haberdashers haue licensed but onlye ix straungers to vse the trade of making feltes, and haue taken of them but ij s. vj d. a peece for their admission, viz. James Johnson. Bartholomew Aviser. Lewys Valley. James Eves. Andwew [sic] Jacob. Ellyce Berne. Roberte le John, alias Young. John Gibson. Nicholas Iller.
20 Kirk and Kirk, Returns of Aliens, II, 307.These men were not named in the Haberdashers’ Freedom Register either among the hatmakers admitted by redemption or among the more ordinary entrants; their ‘licence’ was not admission to full guild membership. It is also clearly not a complete list of stranger hat- or feltmakers working in the metropolitan area; John Levison is not among them, nor his son Robert. In the later sixteenth century there were still hatmakers migrating from the Continent to England, increasingly from northern France rather than the Low Countries; their alien birth continued to disadvantage them.
21 Archer, Haberdashers’ Company, pp. 61–70. Searching ‘Hatmakers’ and ‘Hatters’ in the occupation field and London in the place field of England’s Immigrants online database indicates a shift from overwhelmingly ‘Teutonic’ (Dutch) immigrants to Norman or French origins in the mid-sixteenth century. The data comes from letters of denization and alien subsidy assessments. Indeed, the careers of John and Robert Leveson illustrate how, increasingly, alien descent rather than birth disqualified artisans whose roots lay outside the kingdom from full participation in London civic and economic life.
22 See above, pp. 64–65.Tensions regarding stranger artisans and the making of hats and caps, and the place of hatmakers in the Haberdashers’ Company, thus endured through the sixteenth century and beyond. Though the relationship between the hatmakers and the Haberdashers’ guild remains relatively obscure in the middle years of the century, in the 1560s the Haberdashers made considerable strides to bring the hatmakers more firmly under their supervision and into line with the seven-year apprenticeships and workshop supervision that were the norm in English guilds. The hatmakers and feltmakers who entered the guild, even those who did so as citizens, chafed under these circumstances; over the ensuing decades they lobbied the royal council for a charter that would give them status as a separate guild, finally achieving incorporation as the Feltmakers’ Company in 1604.
23 George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (London: Methuen, 1908), pp. 304–6; Weinstein, Worshipful Company, pp. 4–14; Archer, Haberdashers’ Company, pp. 61–70, and especially Harry Duckworth’s papers: Early History, pp. 25–32; The Feltmakers’ Wool Adventure, 1610–24, Research Paper No. 2 (London: Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, 2015); and The Struggle for Recognition, 1604–1667, Research Paper No. 3 (London: Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, 2019). Nonetheless, some of the same problems as had affected the Dutch hatmakers of the early sixteenth century continued to plague the Feltmakers, as they were often still not conferred full status as citizens of London even following the formation of their own company in the early seventeenth century. Finally in 1650 the Feltmakers received full recognition and were admitted as freemen of the City of London.
24 Duckworth, Struggle, pp. 51–55.