Introduction

The Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow

Despite the grandiose claims made by the window in the Palmers’ chapel, it is generally agreed that a foundation date of about 1250 is more reasonable than one that pre-dated the Norman Conquest.¹² This still ranks the guild as one of the longer-lived of such organisations, as it was not formally dissolved until 1551, several years after the Chantry Acts of 1545 and 1547, its demise forestalled by complex debate in the Court of Augmentations, where the guild argued that its operations did not fall under the aegis of the acts.¹³ In many ways, throughout this long existence the guild at Ludlow functioned in very similar terms to many fraternities during the same period. A guild’s raison d’être was to bring a group of lay men and women together with a particular devotional focus, although their purposes and practices in reality extended well beyond that, primarily through facilitating a number of religious and social activities for their members. While the most basic guilds might only possess the wherewithal to maintain a single light in a chapel or at an altar, the majority also assisted in the provision of a suitable funeral for deceased members, performed masses for their souls, hosted feasts and provided varying degrees of charity. Guilds permeated communities, often contributing large sums of money and administrative support to building projects in the parish church, enhancing the liturgical capacity of the parish through the employment of guild priests (who assisted parish priests while not engaged in guild duties), organising festivals and ales for the community and stimulating the local economy with their material requirements, particularly in relation to annual feasts and repairs of guild properties.¹⁴ This range of operations and the associated benefits made guilds numerous, popular and widespread, with an estimated 30,000 being founded in medieval England alone.¹⁵ The flexibility and protean nature of religious guilds in different communities led Derek Keene to aptly describe them as ‘shell organisations’, adapting to the needs and desires of their community.¹⁶ Most fulfilled these functions within a relatively restricted geographical area, providing spiritual and financial support, along with social and moral benefits, for individuals who lived in reasonably close proximity to the guild’s base.

Evidence for activity of this nature abounds for the Palmers’ Guild. For example, a common function of guilds (the Palmers included) was the performance of obits (annual services performed in remembrance of a deceased individual) for those members who left bequests for such a purpose. Over thirty obits were requested of the guild priests by brethren in Ludlow between 1397 and 1530, and the guild diligently recorded the payments spent on these occasions each year.¹⁷ The guild’s bellman was paid 2s 8d for alerting local members that their presence was required at obits, and the services were conducted by the guild’s priests, who at any time numbered between three and ten.¹⁸ Alongside the duties of commemorating certain individuals, the priests were also paid to pray for the souls of all deceased brothers and sisters.¹⁹ A number of men and children were engaged by the guild as singers, and the chantry certificate in 1546 states that the guild supported an additional six choristers to sing the divine service.²⁰ The guild’s janitor handled more practical matters: in charge of general maintenance within the church, he was, for example, paid for his labour at ‘diverse’ obits.²¹ Within the parish church, the guild contributed to its material upkeep, supplying building materials and funding, as well as supporting the church’s capacity to perform the liturgy.²² Such an example can be found in 1446/7, when the Palmers set aside a portion of their income to purchase 100 wainscot boards from Bristol to make choir stalls, which remain in the church to this day.²³ Such a commission not only served the practical purpose of providing seating for the choristers but did so in a way that elevated the setting through the presence of elaborate carving and craftsmanship and enhanced the reputation of both guild and church. Each year, the guild noted the money spent ‘for the makyng of St John’s light’ (for example, 16d was spent in 1532), presumably in the guild chapel, honouring their patron saint.²⁴ Governed by a council of elders, a warden and two stewards, the guild also became integrated into the local community’s secular activities, particularly its political structures: its officers were usually members of Ludlow’s common council and held the positions of bailiffs and aldermen.²⁵ In these aspects, the Palmers differed little from all but the smallest guilds.

Where the Palmers’ Guild departs is in its membership, at least in the latter years of the guild’s existence. From the earliest days, probably in the mid-thirteenth century, the nature of its brethren was largely unremarkable, in that membership was primarily clustered within Ludlow, where the guild was based (a small, compact, walled town as illustrated in Map 0.1), and the surrounding region (which, given Ludlow’s location, included north Herefordshire, south Shropshire and the Marcher lordships of Clun, Bishop’s Castle, Wigmore and Richards Castle), with a few outliers in areas with which the town’s inhabitants had historic trading links, such as Bristol.²⁶ But in the second half of the fifteenth century the membership reach of the Palmers’ Guild, both geographically and socially, changed dramatically, and by the turn of the sixteenth century it was recruiting over a thousand new members each year. By 1521, the last year for which dedicated membership documents survive, at least 18,731 individuals had at some point committed their names to the books of the Palmers – over 15,000 of them between 1497 and 1521.²⁷ These members were from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, ranging from a beggar and labourers to merchants, gentlemen and royalty, and were drawn from across England and Wales.

How did the Palmers achieve such widespread popularity? Why were thousands of men and women drawn towards the guild in Ludlow in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? What influenced an individual’s decision to become a member and what does that reveal about the influence of communities upon individual decision-making in late medieval society? These are the questions this study seeks to answer.

Guild recruitment and membership

First, however, it is necessary to outline exactly how the guild affected this profound transformation and to take a closer look at the demographics of membership that followed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The earliest surviving evidence suggests that – during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – membership of the guild was predicated on the provision of rent charges; that is, the gift of a portion of a rent from a property (usually in Ludlow) to the guild.²⁸ It should be noted, however, that only a few receipts of membership survive for this period. Regardless, the mid-fourteenth century certainly saw a shift in the Palmers’ membership recruitment policy, perhaps stemming from the fact that they began to develop through enfeoffment a substantial property portfolio of their own, which offered a more lucrative income and both encouraged a more proactive membership policy and provided the means to pursue it.²⁹ Accordingly, it is in the later fourteenth century that the first membership lists survive, and these demonstrate that by this date the guild had expanded the horizons of its operation and was what might be termed a regional guild, soliciting membership from as far afield as Bristol in return for the payment of a fee of 6s 8d.³⁰ This became the standard entrance fee, although later records demonstrate that there were exceptions to the total payable amount – deceased members were enrolled at a reduced rate of 3s 4d, while deceased Ludlow natives cost their relatives only 2s.³¹

Further developments followed, and these represent an active and sustained interest in cultivating and increasing the reach of the guild. The Palmers continually adapted their payment policies to suit the changing nature of the guild in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The early to mid-fifteenth century saw the fixed fee of membership usually being paid in two or three parts.³² From the 1440s, the same documents begin to include occasional payments of much smaller sums, indicating that exceptions were being made depending on individual circumstances: this was a shift that precipitated the Palmers’ later successes.³³ It is perhaps no coincidence that this was around the same time the guild was so forcefully expressing its own sense of identity in the rebuilding of the chapel. By the early sixteenth century, however, this system was taken even further as most people took to paying these small sums in instalments until the full sum was settled.³⁴ This practice questions the general view of the restrictive nature of guild admission fees, as 1d or 2d (the lowest recorded payments) was arguably a relatively attainable sum to provide yearly, or even less frequently, for those of more limited means. Small payments, suited to each individual’s financial circumstance, allowed a more heterogeneous make-up than other leading town guilds with one-off admission fees, such as the Holy Trinity in Bishop’s Lynn which charged the substantial sum of £5.³⁵ The Palmers provided a means by which even the poorer members of society could enjoy the benefits of belonging to a guild. The entrance fee, at 6s 8d per person,³⁶ was a fairly standard sum (if perhaps on the lower end) for national or regional guild admission fees: Boston’s St Mary’s guild also charged 6s 8d, but Stratford’s Holy Cross charged 13s 4d for men and 6s 8d for women, while it has been suggested that Coventry’s Holy Trinity – like the guild of the same dedication in Bishop’s Lynn – had a £5 admission fee.³⁷ The key departure of the Palmers, however, was the overwhelmingly common trend of staggered payments – very few people entered into the guild having paid the full amount in a single sum.

In total, almost 5,000 individuals completed their payments – approximately twenty-eight per cent of those who began contributions. Reasons for failing to pay the full membership fee (which is further explored in Chapter 2) were probably diverse: death, bankruptcy and personal choice were all factors. Moreover, these attitudes towards payment and membership can be partially explained by the absence of a fine for missing a payment. No charge was levied for a pause in regular payments or for ceasing payments completely. For example, John and Agnes Peenlloyod of Lady Halton (Shropshire) halted their membership contributions between 1507 and 1511 before resuming payments until 1517.³⁸ Allowing individuals to contribute to their membership fee as they wished, or as their circumstances allowed, provided a flexibility not found with other institutions and created a socially and economically diverse community of brothers and sisters.³⁹

This system of payment was coupled with a willingness by the guild to travel to collect membership fees. Each year, the guild’s two stewards, each accompanied by a clerk, embarked on separate journeys across the kingdom, taking payments and recording names in various locations as they went. These two factors permitted the guild to both promote and manage an extensive base of membership, maintaining a presence in most counties and towns in England and Wales, transforming the Palmers from a primarily regional guild to one of the kingdom’s furthest reaching. By the sixteenth century, the guild counted members from as diverse locations as Sussex in the south-east, up into East Anglia, through the East Midlands up to Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire, across to Westmorland, down through the Midlands, Wales and through parts of the West Country and back to central England. Part of this success was almost certainly down to the fact that the stewards’ rides eliminated the need for members to journey to Ludlow to pay membership contributions each year.

The maps here (Maps 0.2–0.11) demonstrate the point clearly, representing the years for which extensive and relatively complete membership records survive. Every new member whose enrolment is recorded between 1497/8 and 1515/16 is plotted, covering a total of 822 locations. Identifying the locations of members from the records is, at times, challenging: some places, such as Egerton (Shropshire), no longer survive, and archaeological reports were used to determine the most suitable easting and northing coordinates.⁴⁰ Two further challenges arise: firstly, many places have the same name (Newport, for example, can be found in Gloucestershire, Shropshire and Montgomeryshire); secondly, English scribes did not always spell Welsh places as expected. To overcome both these challenges, contextual information offered by the manuscript must be used to determine the location in question: the places listed before and after in the guild’s collection routes prove helpful in making a correct identification.

The maps serve to illustrate the breadth of membership of the Ludlow guild. While it is not possible to include the thousands of individuals whose names, locations and personal information were transcribed and entered into a database for this project, the maps plot each of those individuals as a point (or as part of proportionate circle that represents a large number of individuals from that place) and allows the quantitative data underpinning this study to be represented in a productive way for the reader. Over and above that, these are the first maps to plot the full extent of membership from surviving sources of any late medieval fraternity. They allow membership to be visualised and understood in a new manner, particularly in allowing us to understand the effect of the topography of Wales and England upon recruitment patterns.

Turning to Map 0.2, which contains the places of all members noted in the membership accounts for 1497–1516, a few important patterns emerge. Wales, the Welsh Marches and the Midlands were naturally the strongest regions for membership, with the overall density of membership thinning the greater the distance from Ludlow. Sometimes recruitment appears to have followed main trade routes, such as the clustering of membership along the Thames Valley down into London. Individual manors, villages, towns and cities exhibited varying degrees of consistency in their enrolment each year. For instance, with the exception of 1501/2, Machynlleth (Powys) – famously the site of Owain Glyndŵr’s Welsh Parliament in 1404 – provided up to twenty new Palmers each year (Maps 0.3–0.11).⁴¹ Carmarthen (Carmarthenshire) was similarly fairly steady in its recruitment, ranging between eight and thirty-one new members a year. As might be expected, the Palmers regularly found many new recruits in urban centres like Shrewsbury, Hereford, Gloucester, Derby, Coventry and Bristol. Slightly smaller settlements, such as Denbigh (Denbighshire) and Oswestry (Shropshire), were also relatively strong centres of recruitment. Many rural locations, however, did not consistently recruit new members each year. Sandford St Martin (Oxfordshire) only contributed two members in 1515/16 (Map 0.10) and is otherwise absent from the guild’s recruitment lists.⁴²

Complementing the geographical spread of the guild was its social make-up, and the two were a dual result of the administrative policy pursued by the guild as described above. Historians have largely assumed that guild membership generally was exclusive in nature, limited to the wealthier members of the parish.⁴³ Urban guilds especially are seen as an outlet for the rise of what early modernists call the ‘middling sort’, and as a form of distinctly mercantile religious expression. Indeed, large numbers of the mercantile elite from across the kingdom are accounted for in the surviving records of the Palmers. As the mercantile elite strove to forge an identity, the institutions they constructed, whether in the form of a town government or a guild, can be (and have been) seen as oligarchical, self-reciprocating and defined by selection from among members of their own community.

While there is no doubt as to the level of sustained investment in guilds by the mercantile elite, the involvement of the gentry has been a source of contention. The traditional view of gentry piety as largely self-interested, with investment taking the form of private chantries, chapels and altars, has been called into question.⁴⁴ Rather, it is now generally accepted that the gentry integrated themselves wholeheartedly and genuinely into the parish, spurred by wider commemorative and devotional impulses, and that this involvement was not just an arbitrary token of their status. This revisionist view is compounded by the evidence that the lesser nobility and gentry tended to join large guilds with some frequency.⁴⁵ The Palmers further prove instructive, with extraordinary numbers of the aristocracy joining in force. For example, Sir Richard Sacheverell, MP and receiver-general to Edward Hastings, second baron Hastings, joined in 1501/2, alongside his master’s brother, Sir William Hastings.⁴⁶ Local gentry are entered in the records as having paid membership fines, such as Elizabeth, wife of Philip Basterfeld of Hereford, but so, too, are gentry from further afield, like William Kaye and his wife, of Lincoln, whose epithet in the stewards’ ‘riding book’ (see below for a discussion of the guild’s records) described him as gentleman.⁴⁷ Kaye was one of several hundred individuals recorded in guild documents whose status was invoked in this way.

Noble involvement in the guild encompassed both secular and ecclesiastical lords. It was not unusual for large town guilds to rank among their members great men and women who could be considered token noble patrons. Two successive queens on opposite sides of the Wars of the Roses, Margaret of Anjou (widow of Henry VI) and Elizabeth Woodville (wife of Edward IV), joined the Assumption Fraternity attached to London’s Skinners’ Company in the 1470s and both were pictorially depicted in the guild’s register.⁴⁸ The guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford was clearly proud to admit George, Duke of Clarence (brother to Edward IV), and his family in 1477/8, as the scribe employed particularly extravagant handwriting for their entry in the register.⁴⁹ In the same year, the Corpus Christi Guild in York recorded the entry of Clarence’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and his wife, Anne Neville, into the guild.⁵⁰ The Palmers, on the other hand, had a longer and arguably more prestigious association with the house of York. George and Richard’s father, Richard, Duke of York, joined the Palmers in 1438, and his son, Edward IV, gifted the guild £5 in 1472/3 as his membership fee.⁵¹ It is likely that all of this was much in the same vein – guild membership could act as a gesture on the part of the greater nobility to ensure their position in the heart of the lands that constituted their power: the house of York’s Mortimer inheritance made Ludlow castle one of their most important seats.⁵²

Although the large numbers of the nobility and gentry who joined the guild represent an important social dimension of guild historiography, they were, like the merchants, people of means who could easily afford to pay the fees that entitled membership to the guild. Indeed, it is often the price of membership that is cited as the exclusionary factor of late medieval guilds.⁵³ But the social composition of the Palmers’ membership compels us to move beyond these traditionally held views: the guild was in fact extraordinarily inclusive. To demonstrate this point, an extremely poignant case is the entry of John Tasler, described as a beggar, recorded in 1428/9.⁵⁴ Another example of note is Alice Barker, a midwife from Coventry who began payments in 1501.⁵⁵ Numerous small-scale agricultural and manual workers, such as husbandmen and labourers, also joined.⁵⁶ These individuals do not immediately spring to mind as members of a guild that admitted the likes of the civic elite, the gentry and the nobility, including royalty. Even the ‘poor people’s guild’ of St Austin, Norwich, was not so inclusive, as it purposely offered its poor members a dignified status to distinguish them from the transient beggar, who was viewed as the ‘real outsider’.⁵⁷

An overview of the members of the Palmers therefore makes clear the guild’s curious nature and demonstrates the need to understand how the guild was embedded in rural and urban landscapes across late medieval England and Wales. In thinking about the motivation for, and significance attached to, membership of this fraternity, the social heterogeneity of the guild cautions against straightforward, generalising explanations. The inclusion of regular and secular clergy, labourers and husbandmen, servants, apprentices and masters, gentry and nobility within the ranks of the guild underlines the importance of examining the motivations of joining a guild and the resulting multifaceted meanings attached to guild membership.

In terms of the size and spread of membership, the Palmers’ Guild should therefore be considered a ‘national’ or ‘great’ fraternity, and numbered among the kingdom’s leading guilds, such as those of St Mary, Boston, and the Jesus Guild at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.⁵⁸ Throughout this study, the Palmers will be compared with other guilds of a similar standing, alongside those which, although still substantial in relative terms, had a lesser membership reach. The issue here is largely one of terminology, as these are modern epithets applied retrospectively which, in any case, have never been precisely defined. Here I will use the term ‘regional guild’ to refer to institutions whose membership was relatively extensive but largely confined to its home county or those immediately surrounding. On the other hand, a ‘national guild’ was one whose membership (like the Palmers) extended beyond this reach and was distributed widely (if not evenly) across the kingdom. Indeed, the Palmers exceeded even this definition, by virtue of the enrolment of several aliens (non-denizens) over the course of its lifetime, as well as actively recruiting in English outposts on the Continent.⁵⁹

Historical approaches to guilds and communities

Putting the membership of a national guild under the microscope departs from the established routes of studying religious guilds in medieval England. Many studies have taken a localised focus and tend to centre on a single institution – or a group of institutions – within a certain geographical range (such as a county or region), asking questions about their charitable, pious and political activities.⁶⁰ As a result, institutional studies are plentiful, simultaneously capturing the socio-economic impact of guilds in carefully delineated geographical regions.⁶¹ Scholarship of this type enjoyed a marked popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s and, while now less prolific, remains an important current in discussion on late medieval guilds.⁶²

Notable exceptions to this trend are the work of Ben McRee and Gervase Rosser, who have both approached guilds from a more conceptual perspective. McRee’s studies have surveyed guilds across England to ask precisely how charitable these organisations were and how they regulated the behaviour of their members.⁶³ This represents an ambitious attempt to capture a broad range of experiences from the perspective of guilds and fraternities. Rosser likewise self-consciously diverges from traditional guild histories in both his essays and his monograph The Art of Solidarity, which, in his words, is interested ‘not in the guilds as structures, but in the social, political, and moral processes which were catalysed by participation in these diverse associations’.⁶⁴ His emphasis, therefore, lies in how guilds can be used as a medium through which we might understand the intersection of individuals and society in the Middle Ages. Taking a thematic approach hinged on ethics, morality, friendship and community, Rosser implicitly calls for scholars to think more critically about the relationship and tensions between individuals and the historic society of which they were a part.

The present study is a conscious response to the new direction forged by Rosser’s conceptual overview of the aspirations and ideals of medieval guilds. The purpose is to uncover and chart the connections between individual guild members, both with the Palmers as an institution but also among one another, viewed under the umbrella of the shared experiences of guild membership. In this sense, and by deploying the extraordinarily rich records of the Palmers’ guild (as outlined below), it presents a close examination of one particular institution but framed not as a traditional institutional study; rather it is an investigation of the real relationships forged and utilised between individuals and a specific community to which they belonged. It therefore adds contours and depth to Rosser’s more conceptual overview.

Where this study departs most dramatically from accepted notions of guild membership, however, is in its conception of their ‘voluntary’ nature. To join a guild, it is normally argued, was a voluntary act.⁶⁵ It was not – as far as we know – an action taken under duress or threat of physical or pecuniary punishment, and neither was its membership conferred or imposed externally, as was the case in membership of a parish, which was automatically dictated by the location of one’s residence. The choice inherent in electing to become part of a guild community bound one to others within society, generating obligations to fellow members as well as offering earthly and spiritual rewards. But this decision was not an isolated one: the surrounding environment (in social, political and economic terms) nudged some, and pushed others, into fraternal membership. As will become clear as each chapter unfolds, it is possible to reconstruct some of these pressures and it is necessary to account for them in our understanding of what motivated guild membership and what its impact was in terms of the role it played in the lives of its members. This is not to argue that a particular set of circumstances or experiences set one on an inevitable path towards guild membership, but rather that the decision to engage in a community of this nature was subject to certain influences and that, within this, there were opportunities for different levels of involvement, subject to conditions such as geography, familial and social relations and, indeed, a degree of personal preference and inclination. In other words, some people that joined a national fraternity such as the Palmers’ Guild were encouraged to do so by their environment, but they were not compelled to engage wholeheartedly with either their brethren or the structures of the guilds itself. Yet, for those that wished to, there were bountiful opportunities for involvement with a community that repaid interaction to the mutual benefit of both.

Guild records and social history

The main body of materials used throughout this book comprises the guild’s own archive, consisting of deeds, membership records (in the form of notes of debt, receipts and lists of names), financial accounts (detailing both income and expenditure), inventories and indulgences. This is an astonishing range of documentation for any medieval institution, let alone one that was largely religious in purpose. When the guild was dissolved in 1551, the civic responsibilities that it had held for over a century (such as maintaining a school and an almshouse) were transferred to the Corporation of Ludlow.⁶⁶ Although the most important class of document in this respect was property deeds, given that the endowments of these institutions were financed through rents from properties gifted originally to the guild, and so the evidence relating to ownership, maintenance and tenants were transferred with a view to evidence the Corporation’s claim should the need arise, it is apparent that a large proportion of the guild’s muniment chest was preserved.

The guild owned extensive property within Ludlow and the surrounding area, as well as further afield in Shropshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Wiltshire. As many as 1,462 deeds survive in the guild’s archive, often as series which trace a property’s ownership prior to the guild’s acquisition. Some deeds detail the gift of rent from properties (rather than ownership) to the guild.⁶⁷ These deeds are used throughout the book to uncover small communities within the guild’s membership, as they record the grantors, grantees, feoffees and witnesses in a wide range of localities in which the guild operated, and therefore offer valuable insights into specific social interactions between the guild and its members.⁶⁸

Annual accounts from officers of the guild (stewards, wardens and rental officers) survive in relative abundance, totalling forty-one across the period 1344 to 1547. In comparison to the 300-year lifetime of the guild, this leaves the historian attempting to reconstruct the guild’s activity with a significant lacuna to overcome. Nonetheless, the nature of a fraternity, as an organisation that was at once religious and secular, is embodied in these accounts. The guild’s role as a landlord resulted in detailed recording of rents, overseen by two officers, with each property accounted for with the names of the tenants and the sums received. Rents were the primary source of income for employing guild priests and, as the perpetual obits for which the guild was responsible were funded by landed endowments, payments to the guilds’ priests, as well as to the rector and deacons of the parish church, for their attendance at obits were recorded in the rental accounts.⁶⁹ Other facets of the guild’s activity are revealed through the recording of payments to those lords who owned the moiety or lordship in which the guild held property, namely Ludlow itself, Shrewsbury, Richards Castle, Stoke and Eastham.⁷⁰ Expenses for repairing property and hosting feasts, along with gifts to the guild from benefactors, can also be found. These rolls are therefore invaluable in detailing both the shape and substance of the guild’s economic relationships with ecclesiastical and secular authorities, in addition to the religious activities that were funded by rents.

For the study of membership, with which this book is primarily concerned, there are a number of fundamental sources. With changes to the guild’s administrative structure throughout the fifteenth century, as discussed above, the system of fee collection developed into a highly complex procedure, the aim of which was to keep track of membership. Inference has already been made to some of these records: lists of debt for payments (known as debitoria), ‘riding books’, clerks’ receipt books and registers of admission. The debitoria record payments from fifteenth-century guild members, surviving in fragmentary form from 1423 to 1443, allowing a glimpse of both the social composition of membership during this period and the evolving administrative structures that supported it.⁷¹

On their rides to collect membership fees, the guild stewards were naturally compelled to process and record great volumes of information, particularly at the apogee of the guild in the early decades of the sixteenth century. These journeys involved the recruitment of new members and the collection of fees from existing members, and the recording of these details were delegated to the clerks that accompanied the stewards. Two types of documents were produced as part of this process: the clerks’ receipt books and the so-called ‘riding books’. The former were working documents created on the journey itself, the information subsequently being copied into the riding books upon the return to Ludlow (‘riding books’ therefore being something of a misnomer). The clerks’ receipt books are arranged in two sections: the first records the enrolment of new brothers and sisters, noting details such as their name, location, occupation and value of their initial payment; the second is briefer and captures payments made by existing members, referring only to the initial year of enrolment (delineated by name of the steward at that time, so that the individual can be looked up in the correct year in the riding books), the name, location and payment for that year. These are working documents: shorthand is used at all times for stewards’ names, individuals are grouped under wide geographic areas (that is to say, those from small villages would be recorded under large towns, rather than their own village) and only strictly necessary information is recorded. For example, as illustrated in Figure 0.2, ‘Marget ferch Llywelyn 4 Bra[gott] 4d’ was listed under the heading of Caernarfon. This informed the steward and the clerk that Margaret joined in the fourth year of Richard Bragott’s stewardship (1508/9) and so they should find her name in the riding book for that year, on the folio(s) for Caernarfon, and update it to show that she had paid 4d.

The riding books, on the other hand, are a much fuller resource as they include all of the information that the stewards’ collected when individuals first joined the guild, and are therefore a valuable membership record and will be used extensively across this study. The entries do vary in the level of detail provided about each guild member, but the most complete examples include a member’s name (and social status, if relevant), place of residence, occupation (and master if the payee was a servant or apprentice) and the total fee to pay. Then, under each name, a guild officer would list payments the individual had made towards their membership fee – updated each year after the steward and clerk returned to Ludlow.⁷² Taking into account the fact that each riding book might contain entries for at least 1,000 individuals (and often more), at no more than a dozen individuals per folio (at the high end), these manuscripts are bulky and were clearly unsuitable for the stewards to carry around with them on their rides. Their purpose was to ensure that only individuals who had paid the required entry fee in full would have their names entered on the registers of admission.

This sophisticated documentary system is a result of the guild’s practice of payment-by-instalment, recording individuals and their portfolio of payments. Some entries in the riding books are lengthy, such as that of Hugo ap Thomas of Oswestry (Shropshire), who made twenty-two separate payments towards his joint membership with his wife Katherine over many years.⁷³ Husbands and wives might sign up at the same time; in which case the wife’s name would be written at the end of the entry, for example ‘John Dee of Bristol, tailor, and Katherine his wife, 13s 4d’.⁷⁴ Some individuals were given descriptors not associated with an occupation, and instead were assigned their social position: ‘wife of’, ‘singlewoman’ or ‘singleman’.⁷⁵ Examples include Henry Cutt, singleman from Warwick, Eleanor Wright, singlewoman from Birmingham and Elisabeth Coton, widow, who could be found ‘at the sign of the unicorn’ in Lichfield.⁷⁶

The riding books and the receipt books are arranged geographically, reflecting the course of the stewards’ rides. Usually headed by a town, the members listed thereunder would either be from that specific location or neighbouring villages and manors. For cities, particularly Bristol, Coventry and London, a parish might be given as an additional identifier. Oxford colleges were included in the entries for those studying and working there, as was the clerical college in Warwick.⁷⁷ Some headings simply note counties or extranei – a generic heading that grouped various ‘strangers’ from a range of places.⁷⁸ The location of each member was a vital piece of information for the stewards, not least for the practical purpose of locating members to collect fees. It may also have worked for the stewards to be able to bring together groups of local Palmers on their annual visits, as will be explored in Chapter 1. Yet in the mobile society of the late Middle Ages, circumstances could change as people moved; the Palmers’ administrative system could therefore be adapted to cater for this mobility. The importance of keeping current records of a member’s location must have been present in the minds of the guild officers as the riding books record locational changes in the margin next to the appropriate entries. When Edward Doen paid 8d in 1515, the clerk assisting the steward Henry Capper recorded that Doen had moved from Castle Ashby (Northamptonshire) to Codington (Cheshire).⁷⁹ Richard Longley and his wife moved from Bridgnorth, Shropshire (where they initially signed up), to Chester, and this change of residence is reflected in their entry.⁸⁰ These emendations happened with a certain degree of regularity, providing yet another example of the meticulous administration of the guild – a necessity for any organisation dealing with thousands of individuals at any one time.

Remarkably, transience and impermanence are also visible in the guild’s records. For example, in 1511, Roger Towres paid 4d to the steward of the guild while in Chester, and is noted in the receipt book under that city as ‘Roger Towres sub Stafford 3 Dyer’ (Figure 0.2).⁸¹ This note provided a means of navigating the riding books in Ludlow by referring the user first to the third year in which Richard Dyer was steward (1499–1500) and second to the heading under that year for Stafford (not Chester, as would be the case for all other entries in that section). This suggests that Towres was only in Chester temporarily and is revealing of the efficacy of the Palmers’ administrative processes. A consultation of the relevant riding book shows that this charge was duly recorded under his name (Figure 0.3).⁸² It is tempting to speculate from this evidence the extent of Towres’ dedication in completing his admission fee: he was consistent in annual payments ranging from 4d to 8d for a period of nine years, although he never completed the 13s 4d fee for himself and his wife.⁸³ The Palmers’ presence in the town must have been well advertised to the extent that their members knew to pay their dues, and clearly that knowledge was disseminated even to those visiting the town. Towres was not alone in paying his fees in a location different from that to which he lived. When John Kene made a payment of 3s 4d in Tenby (Pembrokeshire) in 1511, a note in the receipt book reminded the steward Thomas Clonton to look under Bristol when transferring his payment to the riding books.⁸⁴ It is unusual for this level of granular detail about individual lives to have survived. While these documents showcase the mobility of late medieval society, they also underscore how guild records are a valuable resource for enhancing our understanding of medieval society in general. The mobility of the Palmers and its stewards suited individuals who were similarly mobile and provided members with the distinct advantage that they could continue contributing to their fee no matter their location.

The final class of document to be noted are the registers of admission. Once individuals had paid the full 6s 8d of their membership fee, their name would be transferred to a register, indicating that they were now fully enrolled in the guild. There are notably fewer registers relating to the Palmers’ Guild than other extant records, surviving only for the years 1412–22, 1485–9 and 1505–9.⁸⁵ Each register is headed with a preamble, outlining that the ensuing names became brothers and sisters of the Palmers in a certain year, along with the names of the wardens and stewards of that year (Figure 0.4). Importantly, names were enrolled under the year that an individual began paying their fee, not the year that they completed. Cross-referencing the riding books and registers confirms this is the case. For example, William Veyll began payments in 1505/6 and completed his 6s 8d fee in 1514 but his name can be found in the 1505/6 register.⁸⁶ The registers ostensibly served as a final record of guild members, although may also have acted akin to a bede roll, in which capacity the list of names would have been recited by guild priests as a prayer for members and to commend others to do the same. Nevertheless, these registers can be frustratingly opaque documents, little more than a list of names organised by year; Robert Swanson wryly likened them to telephone directories.⁸⁷

When it comes to the purpose of these documents and how they were used by the guild’s officers, it is not just the written words that provide answers: the materiality of the records is equally revealing. Within the guild’s administration there was a clear divide between working and finished documents. From the 1460s onwards, working accounts – membership contributions, rental and operational costings – were produced on paper. These survive in various formats. Receipts of fee collection, as well as expenditure while on the road collecting fees, survive as loose sheets of paper, with clear fold marks and discolouration on what must have been the exterior of the folded paper bundle.⁸⁸ The majority of receipts from the sixteenth century (written by guild clerks) survive in a small but thick volume (approximately 4 cm deep without its boards, containing 263 folios), which was bound after creation.⁸⁹ Several folios are of differing sizes, while others bear evidence of being folded into small squares.⁹⁰ Each year of membership receipts are headed with a title page, of which many are darker and discoloured compared to the pages for the remainder of that year, which suggests that they were the front pages of pamphlets.⁹¹ The clerk’s writing within confirms the manuscript’s mobile nature, as it is riddled with remembrances regarding individuals and circumstances of their repayment. For example, the entry of a deceased couple, William ap Madoc and Gwenllian ferch Dafydd of Welshpool (Powys), was accompanied by a note to look for them in the records back in Ludlow to see if they were already brethren or not. These remembrances were also accompanied throughout the receipt book by scribbles at the bottom of folios that note when a page of new recruits was ‘entered and registered’ or a page of receipts from existing members had been ‘corrected and registered’ in the riding books.⁹² Furthermore, as discussed above, the list of members for each town contains notations beside each name and payment: the name of the steward and his corresponding year of his term (one through four) under which they had originally enrolled. This information was necessary to collect in order for the clerk to find the corresponding riding book when he returned to Ludlow, to update the payment record for the individual as required. In the case of these receipt books, then, their physical nature is a crucial element in understanding the activities of the guild and reinforces their extensive activities outside of Ludlow. The guild’s commitment to travelling to recruit and engage with members is evinced in the materiality of their archive.

All surviving riding books are likewise made of paper, in varying states of preservation, with most pages suffering decay on the edges and some missing almost half of the outer portion of the folios. Near complete folios measure 22.4 × 28 cm and each riding book may have originally contained upwards of 82 folios.⁹³ A number of folios throughout the riding books have watermarks which vary within and across each book, suggesting that the guild built up a reserve of paper that it drew on as needed, rather than using the same run of paper for each riding book. They are consistently a variation of a glove with a six-point trefoil arising out of stem from the middle finger.⁹⁴ For example, one watermark in an early sixteenth-century riding book contains the initial ‘B’ in the centre of the glove, while later accounts have a glove with a crown suspended above them.⁹⁵

In comparison, final copies of accounts (often compiled from multiple officers), along with lists of those brethren who completed their membership fees, were written on parchment. So when the steward Richard Hoore noted down the money he spent on brethren in locations across England, he wrote it on paper.⁹⁶ This sum was then recorded in the final accounts for the year, written on parchment.⁹⁷ The final surviving document created by the guild in 1544/5, in the form of the warden’s account, was written on parchment.⁹⁸ Parchment was reserved for those documents which the guild felt confident were in their final form.

This book places individuals at its heart: if we are to understand the types of people who chose to join a fraternity in late medieval society, it is natural that prosopography is central. Issues of course arise when attempting to discern such details from any pre-modern source, and here we are faced with the uneven survival of all classes of guild documents, as well as the uncertainties inherent in attempting to identify and cross-reference individuals from a list of names (however detailed that list might be) with other sources created for an entirely different set of circumstances and with an entirely different purpose. This issue is neatly illustrated by one example: three servants of Thomas Smyth of Bristol joined the Palmers in 1501/2.⁹⁹ Could their master be the same Thomas Smyth who joined the Palmers two years later, with his wife Margaret, and who resided in the parish of St. Nicholas, Bristol?¹⁰⁰ Corroborating evidence would be required to confirm this supposition, and so any conclusions of this nature presented in this study err on the side of caution and only those of which we can be reasonably certain have been pursued.

This methodological challenge is primarily overcome through intense record-linkage work across manorial, lordship, civic, ecclesiastical and central government records alongside guild records. The array of membership records produced by and for the guild are put to use productively to uncover and reconstruct the social forces at work in the later Middle Ages, supplemented with information drawn from other archival sources. The guild records delineate interpersonal, familial and economic relationships, allowing connections to be drawn between individuals, whether they enrolled at the same time or on different occasions. From this, pressures motivating enrolment may be inferred and used as an explanatory model of how guild membership spread through late medieval society. Social groupings are identified, for instance by occupation, neighbourhood or household. Sometimes this information provides a view of the social make-up of the guild, but at others it can also be identified as another force that caused men and women to join the guild. If used alone, these sources would paint an uneven picture of the guild’s intersection with society and so individuals have been identified from non-guild records, extracting further details of their lives and experiences in order for the circumstances of their membership to be placed in a wider context. Together, the dual approach used here is significant: it permits a new interpretation of how guild membership was conceptualised and the meanings that were attached to it, changing the way we think about medieval communities, domesticity and politics, as well as governmental bodies and religious houses, and more ephemeral concepts such as the urban cursus honorum. The significance is particularly striking in an examination of the relationship between the Palmers’ Guild and the Council of the Marches (for which limited documentary evidence survives in comparison with other governmental bodies in the Tudor period), as the guild records reveal how the Palmers integrated themselves into the region’s society through their associations with this local offshoot of royal authority. Here, the Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow acts as a window into medieval and Tudor society, politics and international relations.

This study contends that national guild membership was pervasive and important in late medieval Wales and England. The meanings attached to membership were varied and flexible, assigned by localised groups of members as suited their specific needs and circumstances. Due to this conceptual malleability, membership of the guild could, for instance, be employed as a local benchmark of the suitability of an individual for involvement in urban and rural governance. Yet alongside this, the Palmers’ Guild never became an exclusive organisation and instead inducted individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds. Throughout, the actions of individuals and the institution of the Palmers are studied in conjunction, illuminating the nuances and tensions inherent in the working relationship between a corporate body and its members.

While the draw of spiritual provision and sociability as an explanatory factor for the membership of medieval guilds should not be overlooked, this book approaches the study of guild membership through an examination of issues of motivation and intention (as far as can be ascertained) among different groups. The first chapter considers exactly what it meant to be actively involved in the Palmers’ Guild. The size of the Palmers’ membership, moreover, presents an opportunity to study both those geographically proximate to the guild and those physically far removed. What measures, if any, did the guild take to ensure that a community of brethren existed in locations far from Ludlow? How did individual men and women take advantage of guild networks and foster social relations amongst themselves? The chapter ultimately addresses the question that hangs over any study of a regional, or national, institution: to what extent did membership manifest itself in the everyday lives of brethren?

Building on this foundation, the second chapter focuses on the different manifestations and mutations of membership by individuals through the lens of domesticity, politics and regionality, identifying the prevalence of guild membership among noble, gentle and mercantile households. This is a multilayered topic, which brings together themes of domesticity, service, affective relationships and retainer networks alongside guild studies. Four patterns are broadly identified to explain the trends found amongst the Palmers’ brethren: the life cycle of the servant, the internal influences within a household, external pressures and, finally, the resulting benefits of household membership. The sum total of this analysis accounts for the deep social currents, specific to households, that manifested in the large-scale presence of masters, families and servants among the Palmers’ membership lists.

The following two chapters turn towards the intersection of a national guild with urban and regional politics. Chapter 3 extends a well-trodden topic of research surrounding guilds – the relationship between local civic politics and guilds – but turns this on its head to consider the relationship between the Palmers and local power structures outside of Ludlow. Using Worcester, Gloucester, Coventry, Bristol and Shrewsbury as five main case studies, augmented by a discussion of Reading and London, it argues that the Palmers’ Guild could be a proving ground for aspiring members of the provincial urban elite, generally attracting men at an early stage of their political careers. Grounded in ideas of ‘civic Catholicism’, the role of the Palmers in urban politics was limited to the regional centres of the Midlands, Welsh Marches and the south-west of England – Reading and London are shown to present a different picture. Moving to wider governance structures, the fourth chapter is inspired by historical studies of county community and politics. Why were so many men involved in governance at a county level also members of the Palmers? By exploring the membership patterns, geographical spread, and career progression of this group, it is clear that the integration of the Palmers’ Guild with the regional royal governance of the Council of the Marches in the late fifteenth century served to enhance the political benefits of membership. This discussion is then inverted in the final chapter to consider the role of pre-existing networks in enhancing a national guild to one with an international presence. Following the guild’s journey to Rome and Tournai in the early sixteenth century, in the wake of Henry VIII’s short-lived invasion and occupation of the French city and the guild’s attempts to secure an indulgence, it argues that the universality of fraternities both transcended and was shaped by geo-political borders.

Notes

1. 1.  For the best analysis of the imagery in St John’s chapel, focusing primarily on the eastern window and, to a lesser extent, on the carved reredos, see Christian Liddy, ‘The Palmers’ Guild Window, St. Lawrence’s Church, Ludlow: A Study of the Construction of Guild Identity in Medieval Stained Glass’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, 72 (1997), 26–37.

2. 2.  For accounts of the building work, see Michael Faraday, Ludlow 1085–1660: A Social, Economic and Political History (Chichester, 1991), 54; Liddy, ‘The Palmers’ Guild Window’, 26; John Newman and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Shropshire (New Haven and London, 2006), 354–61; David Lloyd, Margaret Clark and Chris Potter, St Laurence’s Church, Ludlow: The Parish Church and People, 1199–2009 (Almeley, 2010), 39–43.

3. 3.  As argued by Liddy, ‘The Palmers’ Guild Window’.

4. 4.  Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden legend, or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, vol. 6, ed. Frederick Startridge Ellis (London, 1935), 26–8. The potency of this legend, with its royal and divine connections, is evinced by its inclusion in the antiquarian John Leland’s Itinerary in the sixteenth century. Lucy Toulmin Smith, ed., The Itinerary of John Leland In or About the Years 1535–1543, vol. 2 (Carbondale, 1964), 76.

5. 5.  Gervase Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33, no. 4 (October 1994), 445.

6. 6.  Liddy, ‘The Palmers’ Guild Window’, 27.

7. 7.  SA: LB/5/3/28.

8. 8.  Only ‘fenestram fieri fecerunt’ remains, but see Liddy, ‘The Palmers’ Guild Window’, 27.

9. 9.  The contract commissioning the reredos made between the guild’s warden and Robert Watkynson of Lilleshall, carver, is preserved among the guild’s records. SA: LB/5/5/3. See the discussion and conjectural plan of the reredos, in addition to a transcription of the contract, in Liddy, ‘The Palmers’ Guild Window’, 33–5.

10. 10.  For belonging to a guild to set oneself apart, and their exclusivity, see: Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 2005), 152–3; Virginia Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350–1558 (Woodbridge, 1996), 137; Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989), 287; Ken Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c.1470–1550 (Woodbridge, 2001), 131.

11. 11.  Gervase Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England, 1250–1550 (Oxford, 2015).

12. 12.  For this suggestion see Faraday, Ludlow, 91.

13. 13.  Faraday, Ludlow, 91–3.

14. 14.  For a brief overview of the functions of late medieval guilds and their place within the Church hierarchy, see Rosser, The Art of Solidarity, 2–7.

15. 15.  Rosser, ‘Going to a Fraternity Feast’, 431.

16. 16.  Derek Keene, ‘English Urban Guilds c.900–1300: The Purposes and Politics of Association’, in Guilds and Association in Europe, 900–1900, ed. Ian A. Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London, 2006), 3, 9–10.

17. 17.  For example, in 1493, the stewards paid the guild priests 24s 4d for diverse obits. Obits were still being performed in 1532, although the system for recording payments had changed, breaking down the expenses, recording 2s 5d for ‘offeryng of obittes’ and specific obits, like 20s for John Hosyer’s obit. SA: LB/5/3/53; LB/5/3/30. The money collected from lands endowed for obits is found in the renter’s accounts, like the collection of 14s 6d for Geoffrey Baugh’s obit in 1533/4: SA: LB/5/3/61.

18. 18.  For examples of payment to the guild’s bellman, see SA: LB/5/3/58, m. 3; LB/5/3/9, m. 3. The priests fluctuated in number: the guild rental accounts of 1284 suggest there were four. In 1349, there were seven and then only four in 1364 and 1377. In the 1530s, the guild’s expenses note that there were nine. They resided in a college in the churchyard. SA: LB/5/3/61.

19. 19.  SA: LB/5/3/59, m. 4.

20. 20.  A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘Certificates of the Shropshire Chantries, Under the Acts of 37 Henry VIII, Cap. IV., and I Edward VI., Cap. XIV’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, Ser. 3, 10 (1910), 355–7.

21. 21.  This varied each year but was usually around one mark. For examples, see SA: LB/5/3/56, m. 2; LB/5/3/58, m. 3; LB/5/3/59, m. 3.

22. 22.  For further discussion on the construction of the church in the fifteenth century, see Gabriel Byng, Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2017), 59–60.

23. 23.  M.J. Angold et al., ‘Religious Guild: Ludlow, Palmers’ Guild’, in A History of the County of Shropshire, vol. 2, ed. A.T. Gaydon and R.B. Pugh (London, 1973), 134–40.

24. 24.  For example, in several instances in SA: LB/5/3/61. These are a compilation of unpaginated loose receipts of the early sixteenth century.

25. 25.  Faraday, Ludlow, 93.

26. 26.  For example, see the receipts for membership contained in SA: LB/5/3/23.

27. 27.  This number has been determined by recording the name of every individual who contributed towards a membership fee from the following sources. SA: LB/5/3/1–10; LB/5/1/1–4; LB/5/3/13–16; LB/5/3/37–45.

28. 28.  Faraday, Ludlow, 88; Rachael Harkes, ‘Building Success: Property Investment and Development in Ludlow’, in Fourteenth Century England, vol. 13, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Helen Lacey (Woodbridge, 2025), 89–92.

29. 29.  As outlined in more detail in Harkes, ‘Building Success’, 87–105.

30. 30.  SA: LB/5/3/46; LB/5/3/23.

31. 31.  Rachael Harkes, ‘Remembering the Dead: Postmortem Guild Membership in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 63, no. 2 (April 2024), 342–3.

32. 32.  The earliest examples (generally payments of 3s 4d) are in 1423–4. SA: LB 5/3/13.

33. 33.  A debitoria roll covering the years 1428–9, 1433–4, 1434–5, 1437–8, 1438–9, 1439–40, 1440–1 and 1442–3 generally demonstrates individual payments of 2s or 3s 4d (6s 8d for a couple), but in 1440–1 a few payments are as low as 4d. SA: LB/5/3/15.

34. 34.  It is seen most clearly in the riding book that covers 1497–1506, where portfolios of payments are written out for individuals. But the clerk’s receipt book for 1472/3 contains small payments (such as 4d or 6d) from many members which suggests that paying by small instalments was well underway in the 1470s. For the riding book see SA: LB/5/3/2. For the clerk’s receipt book see SA: LB/5/3/37.

35. 35.  Ben R. McRee, ‘Charity and Gild Solidarity in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 32, no. 3 (July 1993), 214.

36. 36.  This cost remained the same throughout the guild’s lifetime and applied to both women and men. There was no discounted rate for couples.

37. 37.  Sally Badham, ‘ “He Loved the Guild”: The Religious Guilds Associated with St. Botolph’s Church, Boston’, in ‘The Beste and Fairest of Al Lincolnshire’: The Church of St. Botolph Boston, Lincolnshire, and Its Medieval Monuments, BAR British Series 554, ed. Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham, (Oxford, 2012), 60; Rosser, The Art of Solidarity, 56; Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), 122.

38. 38.  SA: LB/5/3/6, f. 2v.

39. 39.  The only other guild discussed in secondary literature that uses a system of payments by instalments was that of St John the Baptist, Walsall. The difference there is that the guild at Walsall still expected an annual fee in addition to an entrance fee, which was normal practice for guilds in England. Robert Swanson, ‘A Medieval Staffordshire Fraternity: The Guild of St. John the Baptist, Walsall’, in Staffordshire Histories: Essays in Honour of Michael Greenslade, ed. Philip Morgan and Anthony David Murray Phillips (Keele, 1999), 56–9.

40. 40.  P. Everson and R. Wilson-North, ‘Fieldwork and Finds at Egerton, Wheathill’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 68 (1993), 65–71.

41. 41.  It is interesting that Machynlleth, as a place closely associated with Welsh independence, was continually reinforcing networks with Ludlow, which had connotations of being a centre of ‘English’ ruling but was firmly within the March of Wales. I am exploring this tension in my current research as part of ‘Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, c. 1282–1550’, which was selected for funding by the ERC (101054383), funded by the UKRI Horizon Guarantee scheme (EP/X027880/1), and led by Professor Helen Fulton at the University of Bristol.

42. 42.  A note on the maps: although there are four different types of membership records that survive, only the riding books have been used to plot locations. The riding books are the largest and most consistently surviving source and therefore allow a more robust and concentrated study of recruitment. It does mean that, for the most part, only areas where the guild steward regularly visited are noted and does not capture exceptions. For example, East Anglia was not part of the guild steward’s annual route, but the guild must have made a trip there after 1514, for thirty-five men and women enrolled in Walsingham in an undated membership receipt. It can be dated to between 1514 and 1538, as Richard Vowell, prior of Walsingham, became a member: LB/5/3/12. Finally, the maps do not capture individuals who were recorded under a broader geographical heading such as ‘The Prince’s Household’ or ‘Lancashire’.

43. 43.  Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 152–3; Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside, 137; Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989), 287; Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community, 131. Caroline Barron explains parish fraternities as essentially communal chantries and argues that, during the second half of the fourteenth century, it was the ‘middling’ Londoners who contributed to guilds. Caroline M. Barron, ‘Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F.R.H. Du Boulay, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1985), 13–37.

44. 44.  Richmond espoused this view, while Carpenter and Saul argue that it was not the case. Colin Richmond, ‘Religion and the Fifteenth-Century Gentleman’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Barrie Dobson (Gloucester, 1984), 199; Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992), 242; Christine Carpenter, ‘Religion of the Gentry in the Fifteenth Century’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), 63–6; Nigel Saul, Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2017), 110; Nigel Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex 1280–1400 (Oxford, 1986), 159.

45. 45.  Badham, ‘He Loved the Guild’, 58.

46. 46.  SA: LB/5/3/3, f. 15r.

47. 47.  SA: LB/5/3/6, f. 35; LB/5/3/7, f. 35r.

48. 48.  John James Lambert, ed., Records of the Skinners of London: Edward I to James I (London, 1933), 83, 88, 237.

49. 49.  Carpenter, ‘Town and Country’, 69.

50. 50.  David Crouch, Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389–1547 (York, 2000), 273.

51. 51.  SA: LB/5/3/25, m. 1; LB/5/3/37, f. 6r.

52. 52.  Faraday, Ludlow, 12.

53. 53.  Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 282; Barbara A. Hanawalt and Ben R. McRee, ‘The Guilds of Homo Prudens in Late Medieval England’, Continuity and Change, 7, no. 2 (August 1992), 167.

54. 54.  When the guild referred to friars, who might be considered ‘beggars’, they referenced their religious status, opting to call them ‘friar’. Examples of this can be found in SA LB/5/3/40, while Tasler’s partial payment in the debitoria can be found in SA: LB/5/3/15, m. 1.

55. 55.  SA: LB/5/3/3/, f. 14r.

56. 56.  For example, Robert Hichecokes of Stratford-upon-Avon. SA: LB/5/3/7, f. 67v.

57. 57.  Rosser, The Art of Solidarity, 56.

58. 58.  For the former, see Robert Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge, 2007), 52, 90, 412, 441, and, for the latter, Elizabeth A. New, ed. Records of the Jesus Guild in St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1450–1550: An Edition of Oxford, Bodleian MS Tanner 221, and Associated Material, London Record Society, vol. 56. (Woodbridge, 2022).

59. 59.  See Chapter 5.

60. 60.  This focus on religious action of guilds was not done in order to construct a picture of a homogenous pious community, as Ken Farnhill makes clear: Ken Farnhill, ‘Guilds, Purgatory, and the Cult of the Saints: Westlake Reconsidered’ in Christianity and Community in the West: Essays for John Bossy, ed. Simon Ditchfield (Aldershot, 2001), 59–71.

61. 61.  David Crouch, Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389–1547 (York, 2000); Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside; Farnhill; ‘Guilds, Purgatory and the Cult of the Saints’, 59–71; Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community; Joanna Mattingly, ‘Medieval Parish Guilds of Cornwall’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 10, no. 3 (1989), 290–329. See also Guilds and Association in Europe, 900–1900, ed. Ian A. Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London, 2006).

62. 62.  Claire Kennan, ‘Guilds and Society in Louth, Lincolnshire, c. 1450–1550’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2018).

63. 63.  Ben R. McRee, ‘Religious Gilds and Civic Order: The Case of Norwich in the Late Middle Ages’, Speculum, 67, no. 1 (January 1992), 69–97; Hanawalt and McRee, ‘The Guilds of Homo Prudens’, 163–79; McRee, ‘Charity and Gild Solidarity in Late Medieval England’, 195–225.

64. 64.  Rosser, The Art of Solidarity, 7.

65. 65.  Rosser, The Art of Solidarity.

66. 66.  Faraday, Ludlow, 91.

67. 67.  Harkes, ‘Building Success’, 87–105.

68. 68.  They can also be used to construct a linear history of the Palmers’ Guild, which has been done in Michael Faraday, ed., Deeds of the Palmers’ Gild (2012), xv–xvii.

69. 69.  For example, see SA: LB/5/3/56, m. 2.

70. 70.  For example, they paid the bailiffs of Ludlow 19s 3d ob. and the Priory of Wenlock 6s 8d in 1502. SA: LB/5/3/60, m. 4.

71. 71.  SA: LB/5/3/13–16.

72. 72.  SA: LB/5/3/2–10.

73. 73.  It must be noted that the current state of riding books is such that some have folios from other riding books added in and so checking the top of each folio for the correct year (rather than the title page of the manuscript) is of vital importance. It also means that the numbers written on the top of each folio (by a later hand) are incorrect, with doubling of, for example, folio ‘1’. The folio numbers that are provided throughout are the true folio numbers and so may not align with the numbers written on each folio.

74. 74.  SA: LB/5/3/7, f. 53r.

75. 75.  These descriptors were usually written in English. For examples see SA: LB/5/3/5, ff. 22r, 67v, 76r.

76. 76.  SA: LB/5/3/10, f. 23v; LB/5/3/2, f. 36v; LB/5/3/9, f. 19r.

77. 77.  For an Oxford example, see the entry of John Stevyns of Oriel College, SA: LB/5/3/40. An example from Warwick can be found in SA: LB/5/3/10, f. 24r.

78. 78.  Multiple examples of this can be found throughout the riding books but these specific examples can be found in SA: LB/5/3/9, f. 9v and LB/5/3/6, f. 54v.

79. 79.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

80. 80.  SA: LB/5/3/9, f. 22v.

81. 81.  SA: LB/5/3/40, f. 5v.

82. 82.  SA: LB/5/3/2, f. 133v.

83. 83.  SA: LB/5/3/2, f. 133v.

84. 84.  SA: LB/5/3/7, f. 53v; SA: LB/5/3/40.

85. 85.  SA: LB/5/3/1–4.

86. 86.  For his entry in the riding book, see SA: LB/5/3/2, f. 38r. For his name in the register, see SA: LB/5/1/3, m. 6.

87. 87.  Robert Swanson, ‘Books of Brotherhood: Registering Fraternity and Confraternity in Late Medieval England’, in The Durham Liber Vitae and its Context, ed. David Rollason, Alan J. Piper, Margaret Harvey and Lynda Rollason (Woodbridge, 2004), 237.

88. 88.  For example, SA: LB/5/3/40, f. 75v.

89. 89.  SA: LB/5/3/40. The largest folios are approximately 14.5 × 23 cm. I am grateful to Kerry Evans, archivist at Shropshire Archives, for providing me with these measurements.

90. 90.  For example, see the size difference of folios 70–75 compared to the folios on bookending them. SA: LB/5/3/40.

91. 91.  See SA: LB/5/3/40.

92. 92.  For example, SA: LB/5/3/40, ff. 32–7. For the entry of William ap Madoc and Gwenllian ferch Dafydd see f. 69v.

93. 93.  The most complete surviving riding book is SA: LB/5/3/7, which contains eighty-two folios recording new recruits in 1505/6. The stewards had a regular collection route by the early sixteenth century (which is reflected in LB/5/3/7).

94. 94.  They are similar but not identical to the twinned watermarks found in the Gravell Watermark Index, HND.104.1 and HND.105.1: https://memoryofpaper.eu/gravell/record.php?&action=GET&RECID=2193.

95. 95.  For example, SA: LB/5/3/7, f. 48; LB/5/3/29, f. 8.

96. 96.  SA: LB/5/3/19.

97. 97.  SA: LB/5/3/32.

98. 98.  SA: LB/5/3/34.

99. 99.  SA: LB/5/3/3, ff. 50v, 51r.

100. 100.  SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 55r.