23 April 2024: We are investigating problems with ecommerce on Cambridge Core. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to have full functionality restored shortly.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2017
This article reconsiders the gift within London's sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century livery companies. Previous research into guild gift-giving cultures has focused exclusively upon substantial bequests of money and property by mercantile elites to the ‘great twelve’ livery companies. Through charitable gifts, citizens established godly reputations and legacies, perpetuated through the guild institution. It is argued here that a rich culture of material gift-giving, hitherto overlooked by historians, also thrived within London's craft guilds. Drawing on company gift books, inventories, and material survivals from guild collections, this article examines typologies of donors and gifts, the anticipated ‘returns’ on the gift by the recipient company, and the ideal spatial and temporal contexts for gift-giving. This material approach reveals that master artisans negotiated civic status, authority, and memory through the presentation of a wide range of gifted artefacts for display and ritual use in London's livery halls. Moreover, this culture of gift-giving was so deep-rooted and significant that it survived the Reformation upheavals largely intact. Finally, the embellishment of rituals of gifting, and the synchronization of gifting and feasting rites from the second half of the sixteenth century, are further evidence for the resurgence of English civic culture in this era.
I am very grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. I am indebted also to Bernard Capp, Danielle van den Heuvel, Angela McShane, and Robert Tittler for looking at earlier drafts of this text.
1 Guildhall Library (GL), MS 7164, fos. 5r–13r.
2 Tittler, Robert, ‘Sir Thomas White of London: civic philanthropy and the making of the merchant-hero’, in idem, Townspeople and nation: English urban experiences, 1540–1640 (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp. 100–20Google Scholar; Archer, Ian, ‘The livery companies and charity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in Gadd, Ian Anders and Wallis, Patrick, eds., Guilds, society and economy in London, 1450–1800 (London, 2002), pp. 15–28 Google Scholar; Ward, Joseph, Culture, faith and philanthropy: Londoners and provincial reform in early modern England (New York, NY, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Heal, Felicity, Hospitality in early modern England (Oxford, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The power of gifts: gift-exchange in early modern England (Oxford, 2014)Google Scholar; Ben-Amos, IIana Krausman, The culture of giving: informal support and gift-exchange in early modern England (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Heal, The power of gifts, pp. 63–82.
5 Durning, Louise, ‘The Oxford college as household, 1580–1640’, in Cavallo, Sandra and Evangelisti, Silvia, eds., Domestic institutional interiors in early modern Europe (Farnham, 2009), p. 90Google Scholar.
6 Peck, Linda Levy, Court patronage and corruption in early Stuart England (London, 1990), pp. 18–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heal, The power of gifts, pp. 31–59; Lawson, Jane A., ed., The Elizabethan New Year's gift exchanges, 1559–1603 (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Mauss, Marcel, The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, trans. Halls, W. D. (London, 1990), p. 3Google Scholar.
8 GL, MS 5817, fos. 7–8.
9 Brigden, Susan, ‘Religion and social obligation in early sixteenth-century London’, Past and Present, 103 (1984), pp. 67–112 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 94–102.
10 Ward, Joseph, ‘Godliness, commemoration, and community: the management of provincial schools by London trade guilds’, in McClendon, Muriel, Ward, Joseph, and MacDonald, Michael, eds., Protestant identities: religion, society and self-fashioning in post-Reformation England (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 141–57Google Scholar; Ward, Culture, faith and philanthropy; Ben-Amos, The culture of giving, pp. 242–55.
11 Archer, ‘The livery companies and charity’, p. 15; idem, The pursuit of stability: social relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 120–3Google Scholar; Rappaport, Steve, Worlds within worlds: structures of life in sixteenth-century London (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 195–201 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ben-Amos, The culture of giving, pp. 95–104.
12 Ward, Culture, faith and philanthropy.
13 Tittler, Robert, ‘Portraiture, precedence and politics amongst the London liveries, c. 1540–1640’, Urban History, 35 (2008), pp. 349–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 355.
14 The distinguishing features are mapped out in Tittler, Robert, The face of the city: civic portraiture and civic identity in early modern England (Manchester, 2007), pp. 3–7 Google Scholar.
15 Tittler lists only nine ‘civic portraits’ acquired by companies outside the ‘great twelve’, all but one in the early seventeenth century (The face of the city, pp. 174–5).
16 Compared to the ‘great twelve’, these guilds had much more modest charitable endowments; in some cases, none at all. See Ben-Amos, The culture of giving, pp. 102–4.
17 GL, MS 12105, fo. 10.
18 GL, MS 4326/6, fo. 39r. This number represented just over a third of all guild members.
19 Rosser, Gervase, ‘Going to the fraternity feast: commensality and social relations in late medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), pp. 430–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Heal, Felicity, ‘Food gifts, the household and the politics of exchange in early modern England’, Past and Present, 199 (2008), pp. 41–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Hunt, John Dixon, ‘The sign of the object’, in Lubar, Steven and David Kingery, W., eds., History from things: essays on material culture (Washington, DC, and London, 1993), pp. 293–8Google Scholar; Grassby, Richard, ‘Material culture and cultural history’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35 (2005), pp. 591–603 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 592–4.
22 Material survivals are limited as a consequence of the Reformation, the Great Fire of 1666, and the aerial bombardment of the City of London in the early 1940s.
23 GL, MS 6152/1, fo. 70r; GL, MS 7110, fo. 15r.
24 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, in idem, ed., The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Igor Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process’, in Appadurai, ed., The social life of things, pp. 64–91.
25 GL, MS 7110, fo. 1v.
26 Ibid., fo. 13v.
27 Goldsmiths’ Hall Archive (GHA), T, fos. 29v–30r.
28 See Spufford, Margaret, ‘The limitations of the probate inventory’, in Chartres, Joan and Hey, David, eds., English rural society, 1500–1800: essays in honour of Joan Thirsk (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 139–74Google Scholar.
29 Riello, Giorgio, ‘Things see and unseen: the material culture of early modern inventories and their representation of domestic interiors’, in Findlen, Paula, ed., Early modern things: objects and their histories, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 129Google Scholar.
30 The literature on consumption in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England is extensive, see Thirsk, Joan, Economic policy and projects: the development of a consumer society in early modern England (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; Shammas, Carole, The pre-industrial consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Overton, Mark et al. , Production and consumption in English households, 1600–1750 (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Peck, Linda Levy, Consuming splendor (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar.
31 GL, MS 12071/2, fos. 474v–475r.
32 Typical was the announcement in 1622 by the assistants of the Plumbers’ Company ‘that the hall and house which is our usuall place of resort…to be repayred and made decent and comely’ (GL, MS 2208/1, fo. 4r).
33 GL, MS 14357.
34 GL, MS 5817, fos. 7–37.
35 GL, MS 5618/1–2.
36 GL, MS 12105.
37 Archer, Ian, ‘The arts and acts of memorialization in early modern London’, in Merritt, Julia, ed., Imagining early modern London: perceptions of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 90, 97–8Google Scholar.
38 Ibid., p. 99.
39 GL, MS 6155/1–2; Monier-Williams, M. F., eds., Records of the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers (2 vols., London, 1897–8), ii, p. 255Google Scholar.
40 Prideaux, Walter Sherburne, ed., Memorials of the Goldsmiths’ Company (2 vols., London, 1896–7), i, p. 125Google Scholar.
41 Davis, Natalie Zemon, The gift in sixteenth-century France (Oxford, 2000), pp. 14–15 Google Scholar.
42 Glanville, Philippa, Silver in England (New York, NY, and London, 1987), pp. 308–9Google Scholar.
43 GL, MS 7110, fo. 6r.
44 Hibbert, William N., History of the Worshipful Company of Founders of the City of London (London, 1925), p. 274Google Scholar; Hadley, Guy, Citizens and founders: a history of the Worshipful Company of Founders, London, 1365–1975 (London, 1976), pp. 72–3Google Scholar.
45 GL, MS 12065/2, fo. 15v; GL, MS 12071/2, fo. 663.
46 A parallel argument has been made in relation to the ‘symbolic or representational meaning’ of gifts of silver plate within the Oxford colleges, see Durning, ‘The Oxford college as household’, p. 90.
47 The assistants of the Armourers’ Company lamented in 1610 that as a result of the ‘neglect’ of quarterly dinners, ‘discords have arisen and brotherly love decreased’ (GL, MS 12071/2).
48 GL, MS 7164, fo. 61r.
49 Prideaux, ed., Memorials of the Goldsmiths’ Company, i, p. 150.
50 Ibid., pp. 156–7.
51 Sweetinburgh, Shelia, ‘Remembering the dead at dinner-time’, in Hamling, Tara and Richardson, Catherine, eds., Everyday objects: medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (Farnham, 2010), pp. 257–66Google Scholar, at pp. 264–5.
52 GL, MS 4332, fo. 2; GL, MS 5817, fo. 13.
53 GL, MS 7164, fo. 6r (Cutlers’ Company); GL, MS 12107, fo. 3r (Armourers’ Company); GL, MS 7110, fo. 32v (Pewterers’ Company).
54 GL, MS 7110.
55 GL, MS 7110, fos. 32v–33r; GL, MS 7164, fo. 5v.
56 There is a parallel here with the intellectual ‘labour’ associated with the gift of a manuscript or poem presented to a court patron, see Heal, The power of gifts, pp. 46–9.
57 Bert De Munck has argued that every hallmarked product was in a sense a gift offering, ‘anchoring the spirit of the giver to the product’. See ‘Artisans, products and gifts: rethinking the history of material culture in early modern Europe’, Past and Present, 224 (2014), pp. 39–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 64. For Mauss's original formulation of the ‘spirit’ of the gift, see The gift, pp. 14–16.
58 Welch, Charles, History of the Cutlers’ Company of London and of minor cutlery crafts (2 vols., London, 1916–23), i, p. 208Google Scholar; GL, MS 7164, fo. 6v.
59 Welch, History of the Cutlers’ Company, ii, p. 116.
60 GL, MS 7164, fo. 6r.
61 Welch, History of the Cutlers’ Company, i, pp. 222–4. Richard Mathew was Master of the Cutlers’ Company three times during the 1580s.
62 Cited in ibid., p. 224.
63 Withington, Phil, ‘Company and sociability in early modern England’, Social History, 32 (2007), pp. 291–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 300.
64 GL, MS 5817, fo. 11.
65 GL, MS 12105, fo. 14.
66 GL, MS 6155/2, fos. 42v–43r.
67 GL, MS 7110, fo. 11. Curtis was the first member of the Pewterers’ Company to serve as lord mayor in 1557–8.
68 For ‘paraliturgical’ features of the late medieval guild feast, see Rosser, ‘Going to the fraternity feast’, pp. 433–7.
69 GL, MS 7110, fo. 11.
70 GL, MS 7164, fo. 7r; GL, MS 12105, fo. 9.
71 Alford, B. W. E. and Barker, T. C., A history of the Carpenters’ Company (London, 1968), pp. 62, 150Google Scholar, 225–7.
72 Thomas, Keith, The perception of the past in early modern Europe: Creighton Trust Lecture (London, 1983), p. 2Google Scholar; Archer, Ian, ‘Discourses of history in Elizabethan and early Stuart London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), pp. 205–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 206.
73 Systemic tensions between the yeomanry and the livery should not be exaggerated, see Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, pp. 219–32; Archer, The pursuit of stability, pp. 106–11.
74 Robert Tittler, ‘Faces and spaces: displaying the civic portrait in early modern England’, in Hamling and Richardson, eds., Everyday objects, pp. 179–87.
75 GL, MS 5817, fos. 11–12.
76 GL, MS 12105, fo. 13.
77 GL, MS 7164, fo. 69r.
78 GL, MS 7164, fo. 69v. For spectacular surviving examples of early modern Netherlandish guild altarpieces, which combine craft imagery and patron saints, see From Quinten Metsijs to Peter Paul Rubens: masterpieces from the Royal Museum reunited in the cathedral (Antwerp, 2009), pp. 13–43 Google Scholar.
79 GL, MS 12105, fo. 13.
80 Griffiths, Paul, ‘Secrecy and authority in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 925–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 934–5.
81 Mendelson, Sara and Crawford, Patricia, Women in early modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), p. 223CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weatherill, Lorna, ‘A possession of one's own: women and consumer behaviour in England, 1660–1740’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), pp. 131–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 143.
82 Klein, Lisa M., ‘Your humble handmaid: Elizabethan gifts of needlework’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), pp. 459–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 471–6.
83 GL, MS 5817, fo. 37.
84 Female testamentary bequests were also targeted at women: see Schen, Claire, Charity and lay piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (Aldershot, 2002), p. 244Google Scholar.
85 GL, MS 5817, fo. 18; GL, MS 12105, fo. 11.
86 Schofield, John, Medieval London houses (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995), p. 131Google Scholar.
87 The display of portraits upon ‘tables’ in company halls could also be immensely competitive, see Tittler, ‘Faces and spaces’, pp. 184–5.
88 GL, MS 7110, fo. 4v.
89 Welch, Charles, History of the Worshipful Company of Pewterers of the City of London (2 vols., London, 1902), i, p. 274Google Scholar.
90 Algazi, Gadi, ‘Introduction: doing things with gifts’, in Algazi, Gadi, Groebner, Valentin, and Jussen, Bernhard, eds., Negotiating the gift: pre-modern figurations of exchange (Göttingen, 2003), p. 18Google Scholar; Archer, ‘The arts and acts of memorialization’, p. 105.
91 Rosser, ‘Going to the fraternity feast’, pp. 436–7; Ben-Amos, The culture of giving, pp. 173–4.
92 Glover, Elizabeth, Men of metal: history of the Armourers and Brasiers of the City of London (Huddersfield, 2008), p. 65Google Scholar.
93 GL, MS 12071/2, fo. 474v.
94 Muir, Edward, Ritual in early modern Europe (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2005), p. 272Google Scholar.
95 GHA, K I, fo. 220.
96 For civic regalia in the post-Reformation urban provincial context, see Tittler, Robert, The Reformation and the towns in England: politics and political culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 272–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
97 GL, MS 5817, fo. 20. St Laurence (d. 258) the Girdlers’ patron saint was said to have been roasted to death on the gridiron. See Harmer, David Hugh, The Oxford dictionary of saints (Oxford, 1982), pp. 237–8Google Scholar.
98 Prideaux, ed., Memorials of the Goldsmiths’ Company, i, p. 63. The Bowes Cup is still within the Goldsmiths’ Company's plate collection.
99 GL, MS 6152/1, fo. 31r; GL, MS 7110, fo. 12r; GL, MS 15868, fo. 8r.
100 GHA, P1, fo. 28r.
101 GL, MS 12071/2, fo. 33; GL, MS 16960, fo. 65v.
102 Prideaux, ed., Memorials of the Goldsmiths’ Company, i, p. 63.
103 Berlin, Michael, ‘Civic ceremony in early modern London’, Urban History, 13 (1986), pp. 15–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 18–19.
104 Barry, Jonathan, ‘Bourgeois collectivism? Urban association and the middling sort’, in Barry, Jonathan and Brooks, Christopher, eds., The middling sort of people: culture, society and politics in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1994), pp. 84–112 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
105 Withington, Phil, The politics of commonwealth: citizens and freemen in early modern England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 129–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Company and sociability’, pp. 297–300; idem, Society in early modern England: the vernacular origins of some powerful ideas (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 102–33Google Scholar.
106 Tittler, Robert, ‘Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in English provincial towns’, Urban History, 24 (1997), pp. 283–300 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 286.
107 Tittler, The Reformation and the towns, ch. 13. Tittler was chiefly responding to the established narrative of the decline of sixteenth-century urban society and economy: see Clark, Peter and Slack, Paul, ‘Introduction’, in Clark, and Slack, , eds., Crisis and order in English towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972), pp. 1–56 Google Scholar.
108 Aston, Margaret, England's Iconoclasts, i: Laws against images (Oxford, 1988), pp. 254–7Google Scholar.
109 GHA, I, fos. 7, 16, 22; GL, MS 12105, fo. 2; Parsloe, Guy, ed., Wardens’ accounts of the Worshipful Company of Founders of the City of London, 1497–1681 (London, 1964), p. 413Google Scholar.
110 Clode, Charles M., ed., Memorials of the Guild of Merchant Taylors of the Fraternity of St. John the Baptist, in the City of London (London, 1875), pp. 84Google Scholar, 92–6.
111 GL, MS 6152/1, fo. 97v.
112 GL, MS 6155/1.
113 Rosser, ‘Going to the fraternity feast’, p. 444.
114 Hamling, Tara, Decorating the ‘godly’ household: religious art in post-Reformation Britain (New Haven, CT, and London, 2010)Google Scholar; Spraggon, Julie, Puritan iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), ch. 1Google Scholar.
115 GL, MS 12105, fo. 10.
116 GL, MS 12107, fos. 2r, 6r.
117 Sherlock, Peter, ‘The reformation of memory in early modern Europe’, in Radstone, Susannah and Schwarz, Bill, eds., Memory: histories, theories, debates (New York, NY, 2010), pp. 30–40 Google Scholar, at p. 31; Archer, ‘The arts and acts of memorialization’, pp. 91, 113.
118 Withington, The politics of commonwealth.
119 Reddaway, Thomas F., The rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (London, 1951), p. 26Google Scholar.
