BARNARD INN and London corporate institutions

The well-endowed and nodal position of London had helped it to become the premier port of England by the mid-fourteenth century, supplanting Boston in wool exports by 1306, ousting foreign interests in the wine trade by 1330, and taking over merchant banking after the ruination of the Italians by Edward III's early campaigns against France. Nor is there much evidence of the decay or retrenchment in trade that affected most other English towns during the fifteenth century. Also, the royal palace at Westminster had become the centre of government and law administration by the mid-fourteenth century. At the same time that specialist craftsmen and trading merchants were beginning to establish trade and craft guilds to protect their interests and control their communities, lawyers and law students were similarly organising themselves into associations. In neither case did they initially build special meeting places; they simply took leases or purchased substantial houses or inns where they could meet, administer their rules, and dine in common.

Initially the craft guilds used the houses of prominent members or hostelries for their meetings, but they soon preferred to acquire their own properties. Only four craft guilds – the Goldsmiths, Cordwainers, Merchant Taylors, and Saddlers – had their own premises by 1400, but this had risen to twenty-eight companies by 1485 and thirty-eight companies by 1520. The process was nearly always the same. A prominent member would bequeath his house to the guild, or it would purchase suitable premises, nearly always a courtyard house, which could be adapted and expanded for their purposes.

THE majority of medieval houses in England and Wales are still in private hands but their interiors essentially reflect the living circumstances of the last 200 years. One or two museums or publicly owned properties have tried to reinstate a medieval character through their furnishings (Leeds Castle, Gainsborough Old Hall), but I know of only one private residence in Shropshire that has made such an attempt. Medieval secular culture has to be drawn from a broad range of sources, though in the past this was essentially limited to documentary and manuscript illustrations. More recently, it has been appreciated that some houses are able to make a major contribution to the subject, together with a range of fittings and furnishings that have survived little-known in museums and institutions.

CULTURAL CHANGES DURING THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Culture aspires to standards of taste in the arts, humanities, and behaviour. It is a reflection of a particular time and place, but whereas it changes with considerable rapiditytoday, the time span of change during the middle ages took rather longer. At the extreme, it took over a hundred years before the first manifestations of the Italian-based Renaissance reached England. Until the time of Edward I, the centralisation of the church and the powerful cultural forces coming from Europe throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries meant that English culture tended to be French-based, though there was also an Italian element in the first flowering of arts in England under Henry III.

THE earliest historical resources for London reveal considerable evidence of the medieval city before the progressive rebuilding after the fire of 1666. For Wyngaerde's panorama of 1543 and the Agas map of the 1560s, P. Glanville, London in Maps (1972). The major edition of John Stow's A Survey of London of 1603 is by C. L. Kingsford, (2 vols., 1908). For the engravings by Hollar of the 1630s, A. M. Hind, Wenceslaus Hollar and His Views of London (1922). H. T. Riley (ed.), Memorials of London Life in the XIII, XIV, and XV Centuries: 1276–1419 (1868), includes many extracts from the extensive city records, subsequently summarised by P. E. Jones and R. Smith, A Guide to the Records in the Corporation of London Records Office and the Guildhall Library Muniment Room (1981).

Extensive research on London houses has been published by John Schofield in The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (1984) and his well-illustrated and detailed Medieval London Houses (1995). See also C. Thomas, The Archaeology of Medieval London (2002); and C. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages (2004). Valuable earlier studies include E. Beresford Chancellor, The Private Palaces of London (1908), C. L. Kingsford, ‘Historical notes on medieval London houses’, London Record Society 10 (1916) 14–144; 11 (1917) 28–81; 12 (1920) 1–66, and his reports in Archaeologia 71 (1921) 17–54; 72 (1922) 243–77; 73 (1923) 1–54; 74 (1924) 137–58. There are also the volumes of the Survey of London (1900 and ongoing); RCHM, London (5 vols., 1924–30); and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London, 2nd edn, 6 vols. (1998 – in progress).