Chapter 1 Microcosms of membership

Member or not?

Partial payments made by an individual over several years clearly demonstrate some level of investment in the guild, and incomplete membership fees should not preclude a consideration of those who did not fulfil this financial obligation and pay the full 6s 8d. In attempting to understand membership, therefore, it is necessary to consider all those individuals who are entered in these membership accounts. The payment-by-instalment system adopted by the guild in the fifteenth century allowed individuals to take upwards of twenty years to pay their full fee. This, of course, raises a question: did the initiation of payments confer membership status? The answer is not as simple as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Individuals became members, in part, as soon as they began to pay for their membership fee. Two types of evidence support this supposition: social and administrative.

The social benefits attached to membership, for example partaking in the breaking of bread with fellow brothers and sisters (at the feast and in the localities, as will be discussed in the section ‘Building solidarity’) and establishing and utilising social networks formed among guild members, were elements that did not require the completion of payments.³ The guild stewards routinely presented drink and cash to religious houses that had resident regular clergy who were engaged in the process of paying their individual guild fees.⁴ In the eyes of the administration of the guild (which paid for, and organised, such victuals) and in the eyes of fellow brethren, forming relationships – friendship, even, to adopt Gervase Rosser’s terminology – was a worthwhile endeavour that could be realised after an individual had taken the first step of fiscal investment in the fraternity.⁵ This mindset was most clearly embodied in the guild’s recruitment of the officers known as solesters (more on whom in the section ‘Solesters’), who assumed their office before completing payments – a clear indication that a degree of brethren status was initiated, in the eyes of the guild officers, when the process of payment began.⁶

Further administrative practices offer evidence that individuals in the process of paying their fees were indeed considered to be members in some sense. As discussed in the Introduction, once an individual had completed their payments, their name was written on the ‘Register of Admission’, which was used by guild priests as a guide to whom they should pray for. The names therein recorded were not listed under the date of their final payment – the date at which they became a ‘full’ member – but instead for the year that they began payment, which could be up to twenty years previous. This suggests a tacit recognition on the part of the Palmers that engagement with the guild might substantially predate the final payment.

But, if these registers did operate as bede rolls, being read aloud to commend the souls of members to God, then it appears that this aspect of the guild’s activities, the provision of prayers for members’ soul, however, did require full payment. Although this may well have acted as an incentive for members to complete the payment of their membership fee, the fact that many did not hints at the existence of varied reasons for initiating payment. An indulgence obtained by the guild in the sixteenth century (discussed in Chapter 5) may have spurred some additional membership, but this seems unlikely: the spiritual benefits attached to the indulgence were obtained by those who visited the guild chapel, not simply those who joined the guild.⁷ It also required journeying to Ludlow, which a number of Palmers may have done, but a large number may not have; the guild’s devolved system of recruitment, collection of fees and organised social activities was one of convenience for its far-flung members and did not exactly encourage individuals to journey to Ludlow.

Building solidarity

The Palmers’ Guild deployed a range of strategies to build an infrastructure that gave weight to the bonds between members and Ludlow, and between members themselves. Substantial sums of money were expended on recruiting members across Wales and England (and beyond) but over and above that, the guild spent money on bringing local groups of brethren together over food and drink. This section examines the importance of guild officers and the financial investment of the guild in creating microcosms of membership.

Large guilds deployed two methods for administering their widespread membership: using their own officers to collect fees or farming the right of collection of fees to individuals. Fee-farming for large guilds was a common practice in late medieval England. The Jesus Guild, based in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, operated a system in which the collection of fees was farmed out to proctors across the country, each active in certain dioceses.⁸ Farming could become highly complex as farms became subleased to other individuals. Inevitably, this practice led to litigation, as when Nicholas Smith sued William Kynston for 7s due for the collections at Lenton (Nottinghamshire) for the Jesus Guild.⁹ In the case of the guild of St Mary, Boston, a combined method brought in membership fees. Guild chamberlains, similar to the Palmers’ stewards, were allocated areas of the country from which to collect fees. Unlike the Palmers, however, the collection of fees was delegated even further through the role of the vice-chamberlain, who was given a more specific area, within a chamberlain’s oversight, to collect money. It has, however, been noted that this structure was similar to fee-farming, like that of the Jesus Guild.¹⁰ The full-blown process of fee-farming, as manifested in the Jesus Guild, or the partial process chosen by the Boston guild, resulted in the individual guild member interacting with an associate of the guild but not with the main governing structure.

The Palmers’ stewards, on the other hand, were members of the governing council and were directly involved in both the administration and governance of the guild.¹¹ Each Palmer possessed an unmediated relationship to the guild through their contact with one of the stewards on their annual journeys throughout the country. Direct links between members and guild officers almost certainly created the potential for interpersonal relationships in the Palmers’ Guild. The retention of control over guild fees, and the money spent on the stewards’ necessary expenses on journeys to collect them, communicate a sense of the guild’s investment in its members. Creating microcosms of the guild across Wales and England was expensive, as well as a being a significant undertaking by the guild’s officers: each steward spent anywhere from 75 to 163 days a year travelling.¹² Each steward was allocated 14d per day for expenses on the road, and so in 1538/9, the two stewards were reimbursed £12 7s 4d (excluding their fee for holding the post).¹³ Further expenses arose. In 1519/20, the warden was given £5 for his journey to Walsingham (Norfolk), when he recruited brethren from the abbey there, as well as more broadly from East Anglia.¹⁴ Significant financial outlay such as this gives weight to the importance the guild placed in curating an active community of members.

In addition to their role as collectors of money owed to the guild, the stewards took the opportunity on their journeys to spend money in the localities on members. Each year, when the steward arrived in villages, towns or cities, he diverted guild funds towards brethren. These expenses in the clerk’s receipt books are interspersed among the recording of the collection of fees from the stewards’ journeys. The lack of detail precludes definitive understanding of the nature of the dispersal of money by the stewards; the guild’s accounts were created for its own use, to balance the books, not for the historian seeking precise information.¹⁵ Yet what is possible to ascertain is that the steward disbursed funds on gathering new and existing brethren together over food and drink. While never explicitly stated in the guild documents that the stewards were expected to do this, the responsibility can be discerned from receipts, partial bills and formal accounts. The frequent use of the blanket term of ‘brethren’ by the stewards on their rides suggests a communal aspect. One entry in the clerk’s receipt book records that the steward spent 3d on a quart of Romney wine for the brethren of Oswestry.¹⁶ Members in other locations were brought together over food paid for by the steward, which is discussed in more detail in the next section.¹⁷ The stewards rarely specified the names of individual brethren, or even how many brethren they met with. We know, however, that the stewards did spend money on certain members and they occasionally specified it in their accounts. Diane, the wife of the dyer Richard Wymfold of Alcester, received 6d from the steward Walter Rogers (with no recorded cause); the rector of Lindridge (Worcestershire) was given half a gallon of wine; an interaction with the archdeacon of Lichfield set the guild steward back 6d; in addition to 8d for Master Treford of Oswestry and Master Baker (described simply as ‘of Dorsetshire’).¹⁸ Such a meeting of brethren and guild officers was an indication that membership, for those outside of Ludlow parish, was not simply a transactional relationship of the payment of money in return for prayers.

In total, the amount spent each year was comparable to that claimed by stewards for their expenses on the road: in 1538/9, the stewards, as mentioned, spent over £12 to which was added a further expense of £9 12s 9d – the latter solely expended on brethren.¹⁹ Broken down, only small amounts were spent at each location: in the receipt book for membership fees from 1501, the steward paid 4d for the brethren of Shrewsbury and 4d for unspecified brethren.²⁰ Between 1511 and 1520, the stewards spent money on brethren in Shrewsbury, Coventry, Birmingham, Hereford, Leominster, Bristol, Worcester, Bath, Brecon, Chester, Oswestry and, on many occasions, unspecified ‘dyvers brethren’.²¹ There may well have been members in other locations that accounted for a steward’s costs: a number of scribbles in the clerk’s receipt book speak of the steward’s expenses on brethren ‘as it apperet in a byll’.²² Certainly by the 1530s, the stewards were incurring this kind of outlay in every location in which they stopped. In 1538/9, William Phelypps’ accounts noted expenses on brethren in each of the places on his circuits: Thornbury, Bath, Bristol, Westbury, Keynsham, Wells, Glastonbury, Burton, Reading, Shaftesbury, Salisbury, Amesbury, Wherwell, Marlborough, Marshfield, Painswick, Bishops Cleeve, Cirencester, Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Pershore, Evesham, Worcester, Hanley and Bodenham. His counterpart, Richard Hoore, meanwhile, took the remainder of England and the entirety of Wales and likewise accounted for expenses on brethren there.²³ The steward’s arrival into a town therefore heralded meeting of brethren. The social aspect of a guild – the community, the networks available – materialised in the localities, on a more or less formal basis, each time the guild official arrived. The gathering of brethren over food and drink was, therefore, a vital component in the creation, and maintenance, of an active guild community. Justification for the payments is distinctly absent throughout the accounts: they were evidently commonplace, a routine activity that the guild council expected to spend on members.

In comparison to itinerant meetings of brethren, regular feasts were held each year in Ludlow itself. Wine was brought in from Bristol, pepper imported, and breads, ales, fish and meats sourced more locally, and actors provided entertainment for the attending brethren.²⁴ The feast at Pentecost was the primary celebration and its importance is reflected in the expenses paid for the guild in preparation each year: in 1377/8, over £5 was expended.²⁵ The absence of records detailing those who attended the main guild feast at Pentecost prevents us from knowing the scope of attendance, in terms of both the geographical catchment of those present and the numbers of people involved. There is no record of fines for absence, nor specific travel costs for the invitation of members from the localities, as found in Stratford where the Holy Cross guild paid for its officers to go to Warwick, specifically with the intent to invite its brethren there to the feast.²⁶ Those who did not attend the feast (and the Mass that preceded it) would incur a fine, suggesting that the regular formal assembly of brethren, and the community it fostered, was a noticeable priority of the Holy Cross guild and it was not alone in this approach.²⁷ The key explanatory difference between the two guilds may be the type of membership. Unlike the Palmers, the Stratford guild had mostly ‘short-range contacts’ who resided within fifteen miles of the town.²⁸ Is it realistic to assume that Ludlow’s members in distant counties, such as Cornwall, Sussex, Norfolk and Yorkshire, attended the Pentecostal feast every year? It is highly improbable and, moreover, the guildhall was not suitably sized to accommodate thousands of members.²⁹ A smaller gathering from the Midlands, the Cotswolds and the Marches was more likely to have made up the core of attendance each Pentecost.

Yet the Palmers embraced the prevailing guild ideology of solidarity in spite of its extensive national reach. Guild feasts may have been the most common way to forge relationships between members in other organisations. Indeed, they were ‘tangible expression[s]’ of the companionship commensurate with guild membership;³⁰ but the Palmers facilitated solidarity in other ways. In the towns which the stewards visited, their arrival activated the collective bodies of local Palmers. The meeting of brethren with the stewards was another opportunity (after the feast) for members to gather together. Because of the guild’s practice of annual rides to collect fees, rather than collecting at the annual feast as was the case with many guilds, members in each town could meet under the auspices of the guild more regularly than the Pentecostal feast.

In addition, there was sporadic fostering of support and solidarity undertaken by the guild on their brethren outside of the routine of annual fee collection as evinced by payments recorded separately from the accounting of the steward for his normal expenses on brethren while collecting.³¹ On two occasions in 1511, the stewards Thomas Clonton and Walter Rogers spent money on ‘men’ of Shrewsbury, in addition to a separate meeting with the ‘brethren’ of Shrewsbury.³² The use of different terms to note who the guild was spending money on is significant. ‘Men’ might refer to potential members that the guild wanted to recruit, or to important men within the city that they wished to forge links with. The lack of any names of these ‘men’ thwarts any attempt to tease out more precise significance of this word choice. Elsewhere, however, the guild’s officers were slightly more specific in noting the recipients of their financial outlay. In July 1534, the accounts note payments to brethren in Denbigh, Carmarthen and Monmouth; the brethren of Tenbury Wells (Worcestershire) and Eardisley (Herefordshire) were also the focus of guild spending in the following month.³³ In December, two guild officers spent 9d on Cardiff brethren, before three officers then spent 12d on the bailiff and the brethren of Brecon in the same month.³⁴

The stewards’ visit and the disbursal of money not only fostered a sense of community among brethren in towns, where members came from a varying selection of crafts, trades and social statuses, but were also practices that extended into clerical and monastic spheres. In 1511, the steward Thomas Clonton spent 4s 9d on the priory of Ranton (Staffordshire), the priests of Battlefield (Shropshire), and an unspecified priest who brought in a ‘nobull … as it apperith in a byll’, while his counterpart, the steward Walter Rogers, spent 10d on the canonesses of White Ladies (Shropshire) and purchased a gallon of wine to give the priory at Worcester in the same year.³⁵ Twenty years later, Thomas Whelar accounted for guild expenses on the college of priests in Ruthin (Denbighshire) in 1533/4.³⁶ These religious communities were already arenas of solidarity between members, and indeed households, whether regular or secular in nature, were important microcosms of the Palmers in the localities.³⁷ While the commitment of each member was reconfirmed each year with the payment of membership fees, the gathering on the steward’s arrival operated in much the same way. The steward, in his wide-ranging and varied role, as a member of the guild council and as an itinerant official, was a key figure in connecting centre and locality. The Palmers were geographically dispersed yet also concentrated in particular towns. In this way, guild membership could still stimulate and enact the performance of community. Members did not need to travel to Ludlow to participate actively in the Palmers’ communal life.

Solesters

Stewards were not the only guild officials to represent guild interests further afield than Ludlow. Similar to the Ludlow-based officers, ‘solesters’ were officers of the guild but were resident in locations across Wales and England. The exact purpose of the solesters is not outlined in any surviving documentation but the definition and etymology of the word points towards their role. Solester is a form of the Middle English word ‘solicitour’ (solister, solester), defined as either an ‘instigator’ or an ‘agent, representative’.³⁸ These officials, then, were either placed to encourage (or ‘instigate’) membership and/or to act as the guild’s representative in their respective locations. Upon closer inspection, however, the solesters were at the very heart of the Palmers’ infrastructure for their members, supporting membership and fostering a sense of community.

The first mention of solesters operating on behalf of the Palmers is found in 1504, and their office was still in existence in the 1540s.³⁹ While it is entirely possible that the role was created by the guild in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their first appearance in the early sixteenth suggests that solesters were a product of the sudden and dramatic increase in membership during the last years of the fifteenth century, coinciding with (and perhaps prompted by) the arrival of Prince Arthur and the Council of the Marches in Ludlow.⁴⁰ The solesters were partially responsible for handling the financial side of membership. When members opted to pay their fee with goods (such as fish, chicken and brass), rather than coin, solesters arranged the carriage of those goods from their respective locations to Ludlow.⁴¹ While it has been suggested previously that solesters collected guild fees and thereby reduced the number of villages around Ludlow that the stewards had to include on their collection routes, the guild’s records make it clear that stewards nevertheless visited towns in which the solesters resided.⁴² They paid the solester a nominal fee, usually between 2d and 4d, and purchased food for each solester while simultaneously meeting with brethren of the guild.⁴³ The stewards spent a number of days in each place; for example, Richard Hoore spent three days in Leicester and four days in Derby meeting with brethren and solesters.⁴⁴ The existence of solesters did not negate the need for the stewards to visit those towns, nor did it appear to shorten the length of time there. In Nottingham, where there is no surviving evidence of a solester, Hoore likewise tarried three days, collecting fees and spending money on members.

The solesters were, more importantly, part of the process of building a community of the guild that stretched across the expanse of Wales and England. Although solesters’ locations can be established only through a few surviving sources, a sense of the scale of the Palmers’ permanent presence is clear. In the 1530s, Richard Hoore paid for the meat and drink for solesters in Birmingham, Coleshill, Atherstone, Nuneaton, Derby, Burton, Leicester and Coventry.⁴⁵ The accounts from 1534 record payments to Marcher solesters in Kingsland, Hanley, Yarpole, Worfield, Tenby, Oswestry, Ombersley, Martley, Claverley, Holt and Wigmore.⁴⁶ The heartland of the guild’s membership was the West Midlands, and solesters were present among the towns and cities that joined the Palmers in force. Yet solesters were still appointed in rural locations of Yarpole, Wigmore (both in Herefordshire), Ombersley and Martley (both in Worcestershire), who were small contributors to the Palmers’ membership: only thirty-one members joined from those four manors between 1497 and 1515.⁴⁷ Coventry, Birmingham, Derby, Burton and Leicester, on the other hand, were hives of membership. Coventry was the city with the highest contribution to membership in 1505/6.⁴⁸ The size of the village, town or city, and the number of paying members does not appear to have had any bearing on the decision of the guild to employ a solester there.⁴⁹ Just like their membership, the Palmers employed solesters across England and Wales and they could be found across Gloucestershire, Suffolk and North Wales.⁵⁰ There was a clear commitment to establish infrastructure to support their members in each location, not only the ones local to the guild’s base in Ludlow.

Gathering of brethren, as discussed earlier, augmented feelings of solidarity and was therefore a key aspect in the social function of a guild. While the visitation of the steward prompted a gathering of brethren, it was still simply an annual gathering, like the Pentecostal feast. While the benefits of this localised gathering have already been discussed, the absence of a guildhall, or even an occasion to meet, was an issue the Palmers had to overcome in the localities if they were to create a sense of community. The significance of solesters, therefore, lay in their permanent presence and potential to encourage the social activity the steward would otherwise only generate each visit. Despite the somewhat obscure references in the surviving documentation, it is apparent that the solesters were the ‘face’ of the Ludlow Palmers for the majority of members. The guild was evidently concerned with the type of person suitable to act as their representative from afar, as it was noted that a new recruit from Suffolk in 1518 would make a ‘good’ solester, while the Gloucestershire solesters ‘promysed to be good’.⁵¹ The Palmers sought to create and sustain a positive presence across the country, devolving the usual structures of fraternity to create microcosms of membership. The continued existence of the role into the 1540s is testament to the need for their services to cater to the extensive membership.

Although a national guild, the Palmers’ actions in the sixteenth century demonstrate an attempt to consolidate the bonds of fraternal support characteristic of localised fraternities. Stewards and solesters provided a direct link to the guild as an institution and the opportunity for membership of a national fraternity to be more than a transactional and occasional relationship in return for spiritual benefits. This was not, of course, a one-way relationship. The structures put in place by the guild reveal nothing of the reciprocal investment of the brethren, raising the question of to what extent individuals far from Ludlow were demonstrating their commitment to guild membership?

Gifts

Gifts, either in the form of post-mortem bequests or lifetime donations, are a fruitful avenue by which to investigate the levels of members’ engagement with the Palmers’ Guild. By taking a broad approach and using a range of surviving source material available (wills, inventories and membership records), we can look at gifts to the guild in whatever form they came in.

In 1509, John Browne bequeathed eight marks to the warden and brethren of the Palmers to make a ‘salt [cellar] therwith’ for their use.⁵² A Ludlow man with many pious testamentary provisions relating to the local parish church of St Laurence and the Palmers’ Guild, including for a month’s mind and an annual obit, both to be performed by guild priests, his bequest is characteristic of membership of a local guild. Over thirty extant wills, drawn from over the guild’s lifetime, illustrate Ludlow parishioners’ requests for daily Masses or annual obits to be performed by the Palmers’ guild priests.⁵³ The Palmers provided an opportunity for bequests, often in return for prayers or obits, but acting upon that was optional. As ever, the voluntary aspect of guilds must be stressed.⁵⁴ Remembering a parish fraternity in one’s last will and testament was a choice made by an individual benefactor and, as such, they have often been used by historians to demonstrate levels of personal investment in guilds.⁵⁵ Bequests to parish fraternities were, in one form or another, a method of commemoration within an immediate sphere and local members would be confronted on a more regular basis with divine services or donated items such as chalices and vestments.⁵⁶ These bequests served the dual purpose of providing spiritual benefits as well as acting as visible reminders of an individual’s relationship with local guilds. At first glance, Ludlow members stood to gain most from visible recognition within the community through their bequests. Yet the Palmers were much more than a local parish fraternity.

The wills of seventy guild members, proven in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, were sampled from Bristol, Worcester, Gloucester, Coventry, Reading, Shrewsbury, Lincoln, Abergavenny, Alyesbury and Wiston, offering an approximate representation of areas where membership was pronounced. Only three wills mentioned the Palmers’ Guild and each featured a slightly different bequest. Thomas Eyton, bailiff of Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire) bequeathed 6s 8d to the Palmers in his will of 1504.⁵⁷ While his will does not specify a purpose for this money, it was likely intended for membership as it aligns with the normal admission fee. This is confirmed, as his name appears in the 1504 riding book, which notes both that he was deceased and that his fee had been paid in full.⁵⁸ The other two wills relate to merchants of Bristol and are from the mid-fifteenth century: Thomas Aisshe (1457) and Robert Sturmy (1458). Aisshe bequeathed 20s to the Palmers in 1457 while Sturmy left a legacy to the guild priests in 1458.⁵⁹ The guild was collecting 4d of rent from ‘Sturmy’s grownde’ in 1513 and 1514, presumably as part of Sturmy’s legacy from over fifty years previous.⁶⁰

Although three testamentary bequests to the guild might not indicate much in the way of active involvement, this is perhaps more of an issue with the nature of the source base than an accurate reflection of how brethren interacted with the guild. The limitations of wills are the subject of continuing scholarly debate among historians of the later Middle Ages.⁶¹ The lack of bequests in the sample should not be taken as a complete absence of interest. Even those members for whom the Palmers were the primary parish guild – not possessing the regional or national context in which others might view it – were not a guaranteed source of bequests for the guild. Comparisons with other fraternities in other parts of England confirm this: in Louth, a mere six wills between 1450 and 1550 mention one or two of the town’s major guilds.⁶² Wills are not, therefore, indicative of an individual’s relationship with the guild. In general, wills alone rarely reveal membership of particular fraternities. In Cambridgeshire, Bainbridge’s study of 150 wills before 1547 found that only 14 per cent mentioned guilds or fraternities.⁶³ Significant attention has been paid to mercantile bequests to guilds, which were often low as well. Only fifteen per cent of York’s merchants left bequests to guilds, while Hull and Beverley guilds were even less likely to receive legacies.⁶⁴ Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire guilds were frequently overlooked by merchants in favour of deathbed contributions to their parish church.⁶⁵ The exception might lie with certain major trading centres, which tended to have a higher contribution from merchant members, as seen through fifty-four per cent of Boston’s merchants bequeathing money or items to guilds, and forty-three per cent in Bishop’s Lynn.⁶⁶ The Palmers, however, were not the only major guild that did not receive a substantial number of bequests from members outside of its immediate community. Even the gentry members of Stratford’s guild of the Holy Cross who were active in the guild during their lifetime refrained from remembering the guild in their will.⁶⁷ Christine Carpenter’s study concludes that substantial gentry families did not see the Stratford guild as a viable option for religious patronage, opting instead to endow their own chantries for remembrance.⁶⁸ We should not, therefore, take the lack of testamentary bequests to the Palmers as an indicator of either the pious inclinations of its members or the involvement of its members through gift giving.

Other sources complement our understanding of gifts to the Palmers. A memoranda book dating from the 1510s and 1520s contains miscellaneous information primarily relating to the guild’s financial activities and obligations. Reckonings and ‘acownting’ happened on at least an annual basis and are recorded here. So, too, are the rent collections, expenses and obligations relating to obits, and other financial transactions of guild business. Amid repetitive pages of rental collections are a few inventories of items ‘yn the treasour of gold’ and the ‘tresour of gages’.⁶⁹ These inventories provide a glimpse into the wealth of the guild as well as implying a sense of gifts given to the guild. Several items within the treasury certainly fall into this latter category. A red girdle ‘of the gifte of Thomas Williams’ was one such item in the treasury in the early sixteenth century. With no further information about this gift, it is hard to identify Thomas Williams. There are two men of that name in the extant records who were members contemporaneous to this inventory; one from Stamford (Lincolnshire) and the other from Lugwardine (Herefordshire).⁷⁰ The donor could be one or neither of these men. Within the accounts in the memoranda book is an item listed in a reckoning of the ‘treasure of gold’: ‘And also there ys yn a nothir litle bag of the gifte of John Brown together 5 libras vi s. viii d.’⁷¹ It is plausible that a gift of such value was from the steward John Brown (in office 1505–9), who was a wealthy draper of Ludlow. As already has been noted, Brown gave eight marks for the guild to have a salt cellar commissioned, but his will also bequeathed £10 for a tenement to be bought and given to the guild for a perpetual obit.⁷² His testamentary provisions are arresting enough, especially when compared with the lack, and low value, of other bequests to the Palmers, yet evidently they were not his only gifts to the guild. The numerous gifts by officers, both in life and after death, are indicative of investment in, and a strong attachment to, the Palmers. Brown’s fellow steward, Richard Bragott (in office 1505–9), gifted the guild items that were recorded on the same folio. Unlike Brown’s, these items are clear in their function and religious nature, being ‘abassen a yewer and a dyaburue [diaper] towell’.⁷³ Sir Hugh Cheney, a local member of the gentry and one of the guild’s elders in the fourteenth century, gifted the guild a gilt and enamelled nut cup (known as the ‘Warden’s Nut’) and a goblet with his arms engraved on the bottom.⁷⁴ John Hosier, likewise involved in the guild, gifted another nut cup in the fifteenth century.⁷⁵ Those intimate with the guild’s governance, as these men were, lavished material wealth on the Palmers in ways that are perhaps unsurprising.

The guild accounts and membership records reveal gifts from non-local members as well. Elizabeth Peke, a widow from London, gave the Palmers a tapestry that depicted the ‘story’ of the guild in lieu of payment for her membership, although the tapestry was undoubtably more costly than the 6s 8d entry fee.⁷⁶ The ‘story’ shown on the tapestry was likely the same one that was memorialised in the fifteenth-century stained-glass window in the guild’s chapel, depicting a version of the Golden Legend where two Ludlow pilgrims feature almost as much as Edward the Confessor.⁷⁷ This tapestry continued to reinforce the identity of the guild and demonstrate the guild’s supposed ties with the English crown. Of course, not all lifetime gifts to guilds were imbued with such significance: those given to the Jesus Guild often took the form of money.⁷⁸

Meanwhile, the majority of gifts from other members outside of Ludlow materialised in the form of plate, such as a gilt cup and cover ‘of the gifte of my lady Newton of Pembroke’ recorded in an inventory of the guild’s treasury in 1517/18.⁷⁹ The same inventory describes another gilt cup and cover from one ‘Master Bagot’ of Bristol. This is almost certainly a reference to John Bagot, merchant and member of the civic elite in Bristol, who became a Palmer in 1489 with his wife, Elizabeth.⁸⁰ Charles Booth, Bishop of Hereford, had given the Palmers a gilt standing cup with a cover by 1517/18.⁸¹ Two other gifts – amounting to three spice plates in total – are recorded in the same inventory: two by the gift of one ‘mistress Lane’ (location unknown) and one from Sir John Bristowe of Bristol.⁸² These gifts to the Palmers were each given by members who, unlike the officers discussed earlier, were not intimately involved in running the guild and are therefore of note. They were voluntary in a different way from those of local members. For although each of these members, from Ludlow or afar, gave material goods, it is worth acknowledging the differences of their geographic locations and therefore the initiative behind the gift. The immediacy and intimacy that existed in small market towns such as Ludlow were strong enticements to donate. Yet the voluntarism of guild activity was most marked in the actions of Elizabeth Peke, Lady Newton, John Bagot, Bishop Charles Booth and Sir John Bristowe. All of these gifts were likely to have been used within the Palmers’ guildhall, with the tapestry hung and the drinking and food vessels deployed at feasts. The ‘Warden’s Nut’ was reserved for the sitting warden and the other nut cup likely for an individual that held a particular office: nut cups were primarily for individual ceremonial use, rather than the communal use of mazers and gilt cups.⁸³ Elements of the medieval nut cup tie in with the unique characteristics of the Palmers’ Guild. Firstly, while the presence of a nut cup (also known as the Nut of India) was not extraordinary in medieval England, it invoked the idea of movement beyond Ludlow: the nut had travelled, like the pilgrims who had founded the guild, and like the more recent and regular travels of the guild officers too.⁸⁴ Secondly, there were known medicinal properties of nut cups, certainly in terms of the coconut’s ability to purify, and it was also believed that the nut cup might be able to counteract poison.⁸⁵ One wonders if the warden or officers ever referenced another legend associated with their patron saint, John the Evangelist, who banished poison from his chalice before drinking.

Meanwhile, the gifted gilt cups and spice plates were deployed more generally at the feasts, placed either on the table or circulated during the course of the dinner.⁸⁶ Such gifts were analogous to individual bequests to parish churches which were clearly meant to invoke presence or memory of the donor, or mazers gifted to religious houses with an implicit or explicit request that those who drank from the vessel should pray for the soul of the benefactor.⁸⁷ Alongside this remembrance, use of a donated cup was a way of ‘participating’ in the guild’s activities for those who were absent, either from the earthly world or simply physically removed from Ludlow. Both types of absence were pertinent with a membership as widely dispersed over geography and time for the Palmers by the sixteenth century. The guild clearly took pains in recording from whom such gifts originated, an act of remembrance in and of itself, but also an action that highlights recollection of the donor. This theme of remembrance through objects is further underlined by the form of the proceedings of guild feasts – the lighting of candles, praying for the souls of members and partaking in acts of eating and drinking – all of which Gervase Rosser has described as ‘paraliturgical’ as they invoked elements of the Mass.⁸⁸ The Palmers’ feasts blurring of materiality, commemoration and feasting had biblical precedents, echoing Christ’s admonitions at the Last Supper and the very institution of the Eucharist: ‘this is my body which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me’; and ‘this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me’ (1 Corinthians 11:24–5).⁸⁹ In the Mass itself, the body and blood of Christ were physically manifest as participants were urged to remember Christ’s sacrifice, just as the presence of benefactors was invoked through the use of their bequests: there was no mistaking the liturgical parallels invoked in the circulation of wine in a common drinking cup during the feast.⁹⁰ These bequests, particularly those of gilt cups used communally, serve as stark reminders that the Palmers’ Guild was not simply the recipient of the membership fees but an organisation in which individuals wholeheartedly engaged.

The scope of gift giving to the guild was no doubt larger than the few examples previously offered, partly due to the patchy survival of guild documents, but also due to the type of sources that survive. The working nature of these documents results in somewhat obscure references, and our modern reading of the text does not always pick up on the nuances apparent to the guild officers. These accounts were written for the warden and stewards, whose roles necessitated an intimate knowledge of the guild’s inner working and every activity, and, as such, explanatory and exhaustively descriptive lists were not always necessary. Any description provided is clearly for identification purposes only, when two or more similar items are in possession of the guild. One such issue arises from the language used by the scribes writing these memoranda. The items in the treasury are, with some regularity, described as ‘of’ someone. Does this vocabulary denote that the item was a gift? Or was it, in fact, being held there as a pledge, as the term ‘gages’ implies? When Roger Robyns was in debt to the Jesus Guild (St Paul’s, London) for £7, he gave four goblets, a salt cellar with cover, and a standing mazer as a pledge.⁹¹ But it is also possible that the guild chest was used as a safe deposit for its members, for some guilds already acted in the manner of a banking institution with frequent loans to their members.⁹² But equally the descriptions could also denote the gift of these items to the guild from the individuals mentioned within the inventory. For example, inventories list:

a demysent of Richard Tibbottes

A redde gurdyll of John Frongk the younger

A pece of a Cors of John Wall goldsmytthe⁹³

No other information is given about these individuals, and it is not possible to confirm if they were all members. None of the men’s names are present in the extant membership lists, but that does not preclude their membership. The chantry certificate for the Palmers notes that in addition to the valued plate of the guild, there were goods and ornaments that appear in an inventory but separate from the surviving certificate.⁹⁴ It is likely here that these potential items would be found, if they were indeed gifts to the guild.

While inventories are frequently used to inform understanding of guild wealth, property and ceremony, the aim here has been to use them as tools to view engagement with the guild.⁹⁵ The act of gifting an item to the Palmers is evidence of active thought and acknowledgement of the guild by the individual member. While the extant wills leave little indication of explicit investment in the Palmers, the guild inventory illuminates a wider effort by members to bestow material wealth upon the fraternity.

Microcosms of guild activity

Active engagement can be assessed beyond an examination of the payment of membership fees or gifting practices, through evidence for group activity between guild members within their respective locations. This illuminates the character of guild community afforded to members in as far as the utilisation of guild connections demonstrates the potential social benefits offered by membership within disparate communities that possessed a concentration of brethren.

Of the seventy non-Ludlow wills sampled, only eight turned to fellow Palmers as executors or supervisors.⁹⁶ For example, a Palmer from Bristol, John Meysam, appointed fellow guild member John Drewis as his executor.⁹⁷ Both were merchants, likely one of the reasons for appointment. Richard Mayhew, Bishop of Worcester, likewise appointed an executor who operated in the same sphere: the archdeacon of Hereford, who was also a Palmer.⁹⁸ Testators frequently chose their executors from those closest to them, such as their wives and children, emphasising the gravity of the responsibility. John Meysam bequeathed the residue of his goods (after his debts and funeral expenses were paid) to John Drewis so ‘that he doo for my soule according to his conscyence’. Meysam evidently trusted Drewis to act in his best interests for the care of his soul and conferred on Drewis freedom to act on his behalf.⁹⁹ Their devotional practices during life were already aligned through membership of the Palmers’ Guild, so it can be presumed Meysam felt confident that Drewis would spend the residue money wisely in accordance with preferences expressed while alive. In these cases, membership of the guild is one aspect of the close relationship illustrated by appointment as executor, while occupational ties were likewise highly influential. In the Jesus Guild at St Paul’s, London, there are a few examples of members looking to their brethren as executors and witnesses where guild membership reinforced pre-existing connections to secure the level of trust necessary for involvement in testamentary procedures.¹⁰⁰ In some cases, then, mutual membership of the Palmers may have impacted the choice of overseer and executor in testamentary evidence.

One case of a fellow Palmer acting as an overseer of a will is suggestive of a relationship fostered more heavily through guild membership than occupational or parochial relations. John Thomas, merchant of Bristol, appointed Abbot Morgan Blethyn of Llantarnam Abbey as one of his overseers.¹⁰¹ John Thomas’ will suggests a connection with the Welsh Marches, for he left £10 to the parish church of Abergavenny for an obit to pray for the souls of his mother and father, along with his own. The relationship Thomas had with Llantarnam Abbey is not explicit, as is often the case with testamentary evidence. Among a variety of pious bequests, Llantarnam was one of the primary benefactors, receiving £5 for building works with the possibility of a further £30 should Thomas’ children predecease him. If Thomas grew up in Abergavenny, where evidently his parents must have resided, or were buried, there may have been good reason for Thomas to establish a relationship with Llantarnam; it was fewer than twenty miles from Abergavenny and situated on a route between that settlement and Bristol, where Thomas lived. Yet it certainly was not the closest religious house to Abergavenny (notably, Llanthony Prima was only ten miles away). Was the strength of this relationship due to their shared membership of the Palmers’ Guild? Thomas joined the guild in 1507/8, and Blethyn joined in 1515, fourteen years prior to the proving of Thomas’ will in 1529.¹⁰² Their respective residencies in Bristol and Llantarnam were not so unreasonably far from Ludlow that they would not have encountered each other at guild events; it is possible that they both attended Masses or feasts in the years following Blethyn’s enrolment. Prominent and appropriate friends were carefully selected to be responsible for carrying out the wishes of a testator, as a certain level of trust was required of an overseer.¹⁰³ One had to be trustworthy, possessing a good reputation and status to fulfil the required role in the testamentary process. For Blethyn, who did not dwell in Bristol, where the testator resided and where a number of his testamentary wishes had to be fulfilled, the possession of enough social capital and the ability to work cordially with the executors of the will was a necessity. It was not unusual for abbots to occupy the role of supervisor; in this case, the abbot’s trustworthiness was derived not only from his ecclesiastical status but from Blethyn’s and Thomas’ mutual membership of a prominent religious guild.¹⁰⁴ Thomas’ executors would have known of his membership of the guild, and the reputation that accompanied it; they would assume that Blethyn possessed a similar reputation. Regardless of whether the Palmers were the primary source of a connection between Blethyn and Thomas, or a secondary one that reinforced a pre-existing relationship, common membership of a fraternity can only have strengthened their bond and reinforced Thomas’ decision to appoint Blethyn as overseer.

There were, on occasion, groups of Palmers present in other parts of the testamentary process. John Ednam of Leicester utilised two fellow members as witnesses to his last will and testament; so, too, did John Hadden, Nicholas Burwey (both of Coventry) and William Lendall I of Reading.¹⁰⁵ Witnesses held an important role in the verification process of testamentary provision and were rarely part of the testator’s family, due to their obvious vested interests if the contents of the will were disputed.¹⁰⁶ William Marlow and John Chamber were two of Hadden’s witnesses. Marlow’s occupation is not listed in the guild registers, but Chamber, as a merchant, may have known the draper Hadden in a professional context. Two of three witnesses of Burwey’s last will and testament were Palmers and fellow members of the civic elite: Henry Wall and Thomas White.¹⁰⁷ Lendall’s two Palmer witnesses were both shoemakers, while Lendall himself was a dyer, suggesting further possible connections through business. The examples are relatively few in the context of the extensive membership of the guild and probably reflect findings elsewhere on the sociability of witnessing. It was common, if not preferable, to call on neighbours to perform this task of witnesses as part of ‘their duties of neighbourliness’.¹⁰⁸ The limited occurrences of Palmers witnessing fellow brethren’s wills may be a result of the prominence of neighbours as witnesses.

If we turn to membership records, there are further glimpses of members supporting each other. The evidence is limited but there are a few tantalising examples of relationships between Palmers across England. For example, the Palmer John Soket of Bristol paid for the membership of both Thomas Harry of St Ives (Cornwall) in 1503/4 and Nicholas and Joan Young of Easton in Gordano (Somerset) in 1504/5.¹⁰⁹ John Ketilsby of Coventry paid for John and Elizabeth Portar of Balsall (West Midlands), who are described as ‘late of Coventry’ – perhaps a relationship formed from their mutual residence in Coventry.¹¹⁰

However, support for fellow members and, indeed, collective action by guild members can be viewed more clearly through a larger corpus of extant sources: deeds. In a property deed of 1500, John Hunt of Brimfield (Herefordshire) presented Walter Morton, warden of the Palmers, thirteen named men (two recognisably stewards and the others most likely elders) and ‘the Brethren of the Gild’ with land in the liberty of Richards Castle (which straddles the Herefordshire–Shropshire county border).¹¹¹ Hunt may have begun the process of joining the guild in 1497/8, as a man of his name was entered in the riding book for that year.¹¹² The folio has been torn and the exact location of this John Hunt is missing from the surviving portion of the folio. However, it is likely that it was him: the riding books are arranged topographically and the next folio is labelled ‘Leominster’ and includes places such as Richards Castle, Orleton and Stockton – all neighbouring villages to Brimfield. Membership of the guild would certainly be probable, given Hunt’s gift of land to the guild.¹¹³ Definitely two, possibly three, of the witnesses were Palmers: John Tomkes alias Weaver, John Higgons and William Newman.¹¹⁴ Tomkes and Higgons resided within a thirty-five-mile radius of Ludlow, while Newman lived almost twice that distance from Ludlow. They were likely in Ludlow for guild-related activities. Common membership of the Palmers apparently informed personal connections that were manifest in the formal process of land transfer, and vice versa.

In similar situations, witnesses were drawn from further afield. On 12 August 1499, Robert Somerfeld of Marlborough granted three tenements in the same town to Richard Malebroke and John Heriettes (also both of Marlborough).¹¹⁵ A second deed, dated 31 August 1499, witnessed the land being returned to Robert by the two grantees with the condition that upon his death the land shall be passed onto Walter Morton, warden of the Palmers’ Guild, his successors and the brethren.¹¹⁶ While ensuring his possession of the tenements for the duration of his life, it allowed the gift of land – an act of pious charity – to the Palmers. Throughout the sixteenth century, the guild received between 6s 4d and 10s 4d annually from rents there.¹¹⁷ The reason for this transfer of land to a group of feoffees was ostensibly an attempt to avoid certain dues and taxes that fell on property endowments – as the land ultimately was to go to a religious guild, it was specifically to avoid falling foul of the Mortmain laws.¹¹⁸ As a benefactor, Robert would have been remembered by name by the guild’s priests, both during his lifetime and after his death. What this case more interestingly demonstrates, at least for this study, is the connections within the Palmers’ membership. The initial grantor, Robert Somerfeld, was most likely a member. Someone with the name of Somerfeld from Marlborough was certainly enrolled in 1498/9, but that membership list has deteriorated in such a way that the given name is not legible.¹¹⁹ The two grantees, Richard Malebroke and John Heriettes, were both members of the guild and joined in 1485 with their wives.¹²⁰ The first deed at the beginning of August was witnessed by one Palmer, among others: John Stodham joined in 1485 with his wife, Margaret.¹²¹ John Fryse, constable of Marlborough, was also a witness, and was posthumously enrolled by his widow, Alice, in 1503/4.¹²² The second deed, allowing Robert the right to hold those tenements until his death, was witnessed by a group of men that again included John Stodham. One William Skern also witnessed the deed, and a Thomas Skern of Marlborough and his wife, Juliana, had joined the guild in 1486/7.¹²³ It is possible they were related and that this is another tie to the guild, but there is no trace of a William Skern in the extant membership lists.

What can be learned about membership from this one example of land transfer in fifteenth-century Marlborough? The majority, if not all, of these men were local to Marlborough. Yet it was not only their shared locality that bound these men together: at the very least, four shared mutual membership to the Palmers’ Guild. Somerfield’s choice of two men who were members and implicitly tied to the guild may have been an act to ensure the successful transition of the property to the guild after his death. It certainly appears that this group of Palmers was operating within Marlborough to support the guild through an endowment from afar. The cooperation and inter-reliance of these four men suggest the existence of a circle that encouraged guild membership – two joining the same year, one a decade later and the other posthumously by his widow – and may have strengthened pre-existing links within the town itself. Acting in close conjunction with various brethren, as illustrated through the legal transaction under examination here, Fryse must have been aware of the existence and active nature of the Palmers’ Guild, although not yet himself a member. We have already seen that the steward spent money on the brethren of Marlborough while on his annual visit to collect fees from existing members and recruit new ones. The rent collectors of the guild integrated Marlborough into their purview upon receipt of this property, as the property was rented out as a source of income, and the collection of the rent from there can be seen as late as 1533/4.¹²⁴ Ultimately, this pair of deeds resulted in the Palmers maintaining an active presence in Marlborough. If Fryse’s associates were members, it is likely his wife would know of their existence and activities. Alice Fryse joining the guild and simultaneously enrolling her deceased husband is an example of the widespread knowledge of the Palmers and their activities in Marlborough.¹²⁵ That these Palmers were calling upon others who were not only their neighbours but also shared a common association with the guild suggests that their membership was more than nominal, despite Marlborough being located some hundred miles from Ludlow. The social capital gained from membership (especially in the eyes of other brethren) could have facilitated the choice of witnesses and feoffees. Guild membership itself was assisted by local connections – John Fryse may have been enrolled by his wife after his death precisely because they both evidently knew members of the Palmers who lived in Marlborough.

Two separate but interrelated land transfers to the Palmers within the lordship of Eastham (Worcestershire) are indicative of the activities of guild members in both fostering a community among themselves and supporting the guild from afar. In January 1499, William Glover of Eastham demised his properties within the lordship to a group of four men: William Hereford, Thomas Walker, Richard Nassh and John Walker.¹²⁶ Following a similar model to the Marlborough case, these four men granted the land and tenements back to Glover on the condition that they be granted to the warden of the Palmers’ Guild upon his death.¹²⁷ It is highly probable that Glover was a Palmer although his name does not appear in the surviving records. In return for this grant of land, the guild agreed to grant him a weekly stipend of 5d for the duration of his life and bear the expense of his burial.¹²⁸ At least two of the men to whom Glover initially devised the land were Palmers (Thomas Walker and Richard Nassh),¹²⁹ and were evidently responsible for overseeing the transaction after Glover’s death. The transfer of land from Glover to this group of men, and the enfeoffment back to Glover, before being given to the guild, served a practical, legal purpose, yet there were further effects for the guild, as an institution, and the members themselves. Most clearly, Glover had the reassurance that his gift would enter the guild’s possession upon his death, overseen by fellow brethren who had a vested interest in the guild. The Palmers benefited in an obvious way through the acquisition of land that would bring them an increased annual income.¹³⁰ Strikingly, these interactions demonstrate that a group of guild members was active in a village outside of Ludlow and was taking the assurance of a gift to the guild under its own purview. The guild was the cause of bringing these men together and this gift is evidence of a pocket of guild activity initiated by individual members, which, in this case, continued until Glover’s death and the transfer of the property to the Palmers.

Gifts bestowed upon the guild were in constant flux. Indeed, the fortunes of any guild was dependent on support from individuals, which could be unpredictable. While there was an active group of Palmers in Eastham in 1499 with the Glover case, the guild did not receive any further property there for almost twenty years. In 1518, William Nichols and John Owens quitclaimed six selions (arable land) in Eastham to Richard Downe, warden of the Palmers.¹³¹ The investment by both men in the Palmers is clear from the joint passing of land, but the community of Palmers in Eastham is, once again, arresting in its activity. A few weeks later, William Nichols gave Richard Downe a messuage and half a virgate of land in Eastham, which he himself had received in 1503.¹³² While this deed was endorsed in Ludlow, it was witnessed by none other than John Owens, who had quitclaimed the selions to the guild jointly with Nichols only three weeks before.¹³³ Another witness was the Eastham Palmer Thomas Walker. Was this Walker the same man who was part of the group that William Glover endowed with his land, with the view to gift it to the Palmers, back in 1499? William Nichols had previously been employed by Richard Nassh, one of Walker’s fellow Palmers and an active member in the land transfer of 1499. Nassh may have introduced Nichols to the Palmers (Nichols joined in 1503/4, after Nassh’s involvement in the Glover case, and it is at that stage that Nichols was employed by Nassh) and to Thomas Walker. Walker continued paying his membership fee until 1511, when he completed the required sum of 13s 4d for him and his wife. If it was indeed the same man, his involvement with the Palmers was long and sustained, and far beyond the annual payment of membership fees, which is often the only relationship discernible between the guild and the individual. On the same day of Nichols’ gift of land to the Palmers, another deed was drawn up appointing Thomas Walker as Nichols’ attorney, to receive seisin of the land and to deliver it to Richard Downe.¹³⁴ Walker was clearly trusted by Nichols, and presumably by Downe, and his appointment is suggestive of a well-established relationship of some longevity between himself and Nichols.

The Nichols gift highlights two spheres of participation in the Palmers and demonstrates the vitality of the guild’s social function. First, it provides an insight into the interaction between groups of Palmers from different villages. A deed was, first and foremost, a legal document. Yet these deeds can be read against the grain to expose the guild ideal of cooperation between members, despite the differences in the witnesses’ geographic locations. The witness list for Nichols’ gift comprised two Eastham men and two Ludlow-based Palmers. This deed, along with the other Eastham deeds, reveals a community of Palmers in a village that was not dominated by the guild’s infrastructure.¹³⁵ This is equally true of the Marlborough microcosm, which is perhaps even more striking considering the almost certain existence of other guilds in the more urbanised Marlborough, compared to the village of Eastham.¹³⁶ The Palmers were more than a mere annual visitor who arrived to collect fees: they were present in the very fabric of village society, sustained through the layers of interpersonal relationships between its members.

While the nature of the surviving documents relating to the Palmers’ Guild makes locating and defining matches between the names in the membership lists and those in the guild deeds a difficult task, these examples have shown how the guild permeated the activities of its members. These examples are representative of the more widespread phenomenon of devising or bequeathing goods or property to a church, monastery or guild as an act of devotion and piety. The choice of witnesses and feoffees holds value in illuminating the social ties that existed between members of the guild. The prevalence of fellow brethren in these examples is striking. It is clear from these case studies that when brethren gifted property to the Palmers in towns other than Ludlow, they were utilising their fellow members that lived nearby. For the insurance of property transfer, it is perhaps unsurprising that benefactors wished for witnesses in the local area to back their claim should the need arise, but the implications of choosing fellow members (and the wider suggestions of how membership worked, especially outside of Ludlow) give this issue a more tantalising relevance. Those who gave land to the Palmers did not exist in isolation. While the land may ultimately appear to come from one or two individuals, there was a network of guild members behind that specific man or group.¹³⁷ The layers of connection reveal the Palmers of Eastham and Marlborough who gifted land to the guild were working within a community of brethren that existed in their own geographical- and trade-based communities. The process the Palmers’ Guild undertook in order to engage and maintain an active and enlarging brethren was a collective endeavour that included both its brethren and its governing council.

Landlords

The guild owned significant property outside of Ludlow, acquired through investments and from donations.¹³⁸ The majority of the guild’s land was gifted to them, and, in turn, it created a long-lasting relationship between a guild and a village or town. The transaction between the original giver and the guild endured, of course, with the guild no doubt required to pray for the soul of their benefactor, but the gift of land had an effect that permeated well beyond the individuals involved in the transfer. As the guild acquired land, they shouldered a responsibility that required them to continually reinforce their relationship with a place, and by extension, the surrounding community. The guild became as any other wealthy member of a community might and rented out their land. The stewards may have been the primary agents involved in this process, taking account of the guild’s properties while on their annual circuits to collect membership fees from new and current members alike. In 1503, a memorandum was noted in the steward’s riding book, in between pages recording what membership fees had been collected, of the tenements and lands (including their acreages) in five places nearby to where he was collecting fees.¹³⁹ The obligations of the guild persevered throughout the year and was not reliant on the steward’s annual visit. They employed men to repair properties: Michael Pikthorne was paid for fourteen days for his labour in Eastham in 1533/4.¹⁴⁰

Ownership of land was a natural avenue through which the Palmers were present in communities outside of Ludlow, which also materialised in the receipt of heriots from tenants. For those tenants outside of Ludlow, a beast or the cash equivalent was due to the guild upon their death.¹⁴¹ The amount of cash (if given in lieu of their best beast) varied between properties. In an indenture from 1518, John Owens of Eastham was bound to pay 6s 8d upon his death if he did not provide his best beast; almost twenty years later, William Hill, also in Eastham, agreed that his heirs would pay 13s 4d as his heriot if an animal was not provided.¹⁴² In 1514/15, the guild received 8s for heriots from tenants in Ashford and Hopton (both in Shropshire).¹⁴³ Further heriots were collected on behalf of the guild in 1517/18 from Hopton.¹⁴⁴ While cash was the more common method of fulfilling a deceased tenant’s obligation to the Palmers, John Russell of Brockhampton (Herefordshire) delivered a horse to the guild in fulfilment of his father’s obligation.¹⁴⁵

Ownership of property also came with the requirement for the guild itself to fulfil obligations – social and financial – to the local lord. In 1532, the guild obtained a license to hold lands in Eastham from its lord, Richard Cornwall, for the sum of 20s per annum.¹⁴⁶ Alongside the annual fee, the guild also gifted Richard Cornwall half-gallon measures of wine throughout the 1530s and also paid for half a gallon of wine to the court at Eastham in 1533/4 and 1538/9.¹⁴⁷ Likewise in 1538/9, the guild paid 19d for wine for their ‘business’ in Eastham, and then a further 27d was spent by the stewards on their ‘business’ at Eastham on behalf of the guild.¹⁴⁸ What exactly the business was that brought the stewards there is not made explicit in the surviving records. Yet what is clear is that the Palmers’ Guild was unequivocally present in Eastham. Men arrived to repair tenements, to provide wine to the local court and to the lord, and to bring together guild members over potations. Over and above that, the guild had a relationship with the manor’s priest: in 1516/17, Sir Richard Paige was gifted membership in return for releasing his part of an unidentified indenture.¹⁴⁹

Other locations across Herefordshire and Shropshire experienced similar interactions with the guild, usually as the Palmers sent men to repair the properties they owned. In the 1530s and 1540s, expenses were recorded for building materials and men to labour at the guild’s properties in Thonglands and Diddlebury (both in Shropshire).¹⁵⁰ In Herefordshire, in the small village of Kingsland, the guild took on small but regular costs associated with maintenance throughout the sixteenth century.¹⁵¹ Sometimes men were employed by the guild for days on end to repair properties in their extramural locations, like in Ashford (Shropshire) in 1540.¹⁵² The guild’s ownership of properties also led to local employment: men of Leominster were paid to bring the rent money (from the guild’s properties there) to Ludlow.¹⁵³ Further financial obligations were due to the bailiffs of Richards Castle each year, as the guild owned property there, and each year, the guild duly paid the required sum.¹⁵⁴

The guild’s presence as a landowner outside of Ludlow came with further causes for them to interact with other communities. In 1330, the parson of Bitterley (Shropshire) granted lands in multiple locations in Shropshire to the Palmers, with the stipulation that they pay a 20s annuity to a chaplain in Bitterley.¹⁵⁵ Over two hundred years later, the guild was still fulfilling this obligation, delivering 10s twice yearly to the churchwardens of Bitterley.¹⁵⁶ The guild had a presence in many places outside of Ludlow, permeating the interactions of a village, manor or town, providing employment and changing the physical environment.

Conclusion

Membership of the Palmers’ Guild was pervasive, holding significance across medieval Wales and England. For many, the guild was not a distant entity that only arrived once a year to collect fees but instead was present in the very fabric of members’ lives. Annual gatherings, static agents representing the guild, the presence of the guild as a landlord, collecting rent, employing men to undertake repairs, regular interaction with local governing structures (courts and lords) and with local religious communities combined to create a potent reminder of the guild for its members. Every action, be it a gift of material goods, a monetary donation, a bequest of land, the utilisation of fellow members in their local area or the sharing of food and drink with the steward and fellow brethren, demonstrates that distance was not a deterrent for participation in the social community fostered by the guild.

Mobility was a characteristic of the Palmers’ Guild: one that was cemented in its foundation myth and then regularly reinforced over the course of the guild’s existence. The guild visibly celebrated their pilgrimage origins with the commissioning of a stained-glass window in the fifteenth century and, indeed, in naming their organisation ‘Palmers’, which referenced the palm leaves brought back from the Holy Land by pilgrims in the Middle Ages (harking back to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey). This consistent reference to pilgrimage reinforced the idea of mobility (alongside the obvious spiritual association) and advertised the guild as such. The idea of a mobile community was then reinforced by the guild stewards’ regular rides across Wales and England to meet with brethren and recruit new members, with often up to a third of the year spent outside of Ludlow. Even abnormal visitations by the warden to places outside of the standard areas of guild activity, such as a visit to Walsingham (Norfolk) in the sixteenth century, served to reinforce an image of mobility and a community that stretched across space – and, of course, across time with centuries of predecessors.¹⁵⁷

The medieval guild ethos, as Gervase Rosser has argued, placed a high premium on active participation, but it was not forced by the Palmers: there was neither a fine for lack of attendance at the Pentecost feast nor a financial reprimand for missing a payment at the annual collection of membership fees. Instead, active involvement was encouraged through mechanisms that enabled members to have easy access to guild officers. The guild was a constant presence in certain villages, towns and cities via the office of the solester, regardless of how much money they received from individuals there, revealing an investment in its wide community of members. In fact, the devolved infrastructure of the guild helps explain why individuals chose to become members. In certain places, it must have been difficult not to interact with the guild, thanks to expenditure by the guild in the localities, solesters and the guild’s presence as a landlord.

The Palmers promoted connectivity, a sense of belonging and community, even at distances some hundreds of miles from Ludlow. Despite the obstacles presented by a geographically diverse membership, the Palmers’ Guild was an organisation where the conscious decisions of the guild officers and the members themselves promoted solidarity among their ranks. The meanings attached to membership and its form was influenced by the members themselves, creating communities of brethren that were suited to local circumstances and needs. As will be seen in the remainder of the book, membership took on an active life in locations across Wales and England.

Notes

1. 1.  Gervase Rosser, ‘Communities of parish and guild in the late Middle Ages’, in Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350–1750, ed. Susan Wright (London, 1988), 35. Indeed, Rosser’s scholarship regularly emphasises the cyclical and reciprocal nature of fraternities: Gervase Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England, 1250–1550 (Oxford, 2015), 76; Gervase Rosser, ‘Big Brotherhood: Guilds in Urban Politics in Late Medieval England’, in Guilds and Association in Europe, 900–1800, ed. Ian A. Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London, 2006), 27–42; Gervase Rosser, ‘The Ethics of Confraternity’, in A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Leiden, 2019), 91–108.

2. 2.  The Palmers operated, within Ludlow, as a typical parish fraternity: they possessed characteristics such as a cursus honorum with town government, provided spiritual benefits and were an outlet for local power. Rachael Harkes, ‘Joining a Fraternity in Late Medieval England: The Case of the Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow, c. 1250–1551’ (PhD diss., University of Durham, 2021), chapter 1. These characteristics are typical of a fraternity in a small town: Rosser, ‘Big Brotherhood’, 27–42; 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.

3. 3.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

4. 4.  For example, the Palmers gave one gallon of wine to Worcester Priory in 1511/12, while monks such as William Fordham and William Barnysley were still paying their admission fees. SA: LB/5/3/40; LB/5/3/9, f. 49r.

5. 5.  Rosser, The Art of Solidarity, chapter 3.

6. 6.  The solesters were expected to pay their membership fee – their role as a representative did not equate the gift of brotherhood. Cases when an individual was gifted brotherhood are clearly illustrated and an example can be found in LB/5/3/40, along with the lack of completed fine for the solesters recruited.

7. 7.  The indulgence was granted by Pope Leo X and therefore can be dated to between 1513 and 1521. The Bodleian Library, Arch.A.B.8 (6).

8. 8.  Elizabeth A. New, 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), 7–8.

9. 9.  Robert Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge, 2007), 216. See also an unspecified suit involving the proctors recorded in the guild’s accounts for 1523: New, Records of the Jesus Guild, 159.

10. 10.  Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England, 35.

11. 11.  The stewards and the warden were the primary officers. The stewards held the heavy burden of responsibility for the guild’s finances and were therefore involved in many aspects of the guild’s activities.

12. 12.  For example, SA: LB/5/3/32.

13. 13.  SA: LB/5/3/32.

14. 14.  For his reimbursement see SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 27r. For the names of those recruited, see LB/5/3/12.

15. 15.  The money spent on brethren was not the distribution of alms. The sums of money that the Palmers were spending on ‘brethren’ and ‘men’ of the guild were paltry, ranging from 1d to 20d, distributed annually. Even the highest amount, 20d, would not have been enough to sustain one member of the guild. For a full discussion see Harkes, ‘Joining a Fraternity’, 226–8.

16. 16.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

17. 17.  SA: LB/5/3/19.

18. 18.  SA: LB/5/3/40; LB/5/3/31, mm. 4–5; LB/5/3/32, m. 5.

19. 19.  SA: LB/5/3/32.

20. 20.  SA: LB/5/3/38.

21. 21.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

22. 22.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

23. 23.  SA: LB/5/3/32, m. 5. For later years, such as 1544/5, see the warden’s accounts for expenses on men of Coventry, Churchstoke, Oswestry and so on. SA: LB/5/3/34.

24. 24.  For example, SA: LB/5/3/24.

25. 25.  SA: LB/5/3/23. There is evidence that feasts were also held at All Saints (SA: LB/5/3/24, m. 5), and others have suggested that feasts were held at Michaelmas and Christmas as well: Madge Moran, The Guildhall, Ludlow (Ludlow, 2011), 5. Further interrogation of the guild’s accounts might reveal whether four feasts were indeed held each year, or if the Pentecostal feast was the only consistent feature over the guild’s lifetime. It is certainly unusual that the guild did not have an annual feast on one of their patron saints’ days, such as 27 December for St John the Evangelist, and instead chose a moving feast such as Pentecost.

26. 26.  Gervase Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33, no. 4 (October 1994), 438.

27. 27.  Rosser, ‘Communities of Parish and Guild’, 33. Eight guilds in Cambridgeshire included the punishment of a fine for non-attendance in their guild ordinances: Virginia Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350–1558 (Woodbridge, 1996), 65.

28. 28.  Rosser, ‘Communities of Parish and Guild’, 34.

29. 29.  Moran, The Guildhall, 1–6.

30. 30.  Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast’, 437.

31. 31.  SA: LB/5/3/31, m. 4.

32. 32.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

33. 33.  SA: LB/5/3/31, mm. 3–4.

34. 34.  SA; LB/5/3/31, m. 4.

35. 35.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

36. 36.  SA: LB/5/3/31, m. 4.

37. 37.  See Chapter 2.

38. 38.  Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘solicitour’; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘soliciter’.

39. 39.  Michael Faraday, Ludlow, 1085–1660: A Social, Economic and Political History (Chichester, 1991), 81; SA: LB/5/3/33.

40. 40.  See Chapters 2 and 4. Guild ‘procurators’ do appear in guild accounts for the 1420s, but only as limited examples. The accounts do not reference what sort of work they undertook for the guild, and the fees they pay them are higher than the money given to ‘solesters’ in the sixteenth century (for example, 3s 4d was paid to the guild’s procurator in Gloucester in 1426/7). It seems likely that these were men employed to act as agents for specific guild business.

41. 41.  SA: LB/5/3/31, m. 5.

42. 42.  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; Faraday, Ludlow, 81.

43. 43.  For an example of solester fees: SA: LB/5/3/31.

44. 44.  SA: LB/5/3/19.

45. 45.  SA: LB/5/3/19.

46. 46.  SA: LB/5/3/31, m 5. These locations were in the Marcher lordships of Oswestry and Bromfield and Yale, and the counties of Worcestershire, Shropshire and Herefordshire.

47. 47.  SA: LB/5/3/2–10.

48. 48.  SA: LB/5/3/7.

49. 49.  Previous suggestions that the solesters were present only in important market towns would imply that the guild was concerned with catering to places where they had a large membership. Angold et al., ‘Religious Guild’, 134–40.

50. 50.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

51. 51.  SA: LB/5/3/40.

52. 52.  TNA: PROB 11/16/659.

53. 53.  Angold et al., ‘Religious Guild’, 134–40.

54. 54.  Gervase Rosser, ‘Parochial Conformity and Voluntary Religion in Late-Medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1 (1991), 173–89.

55. 55.  Claire Kennan, ‘Guilds and Society in Louth, Lincolnshire c. 1450–1550’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2018); Sally Badham, ‘Mercantile Involvement in Religious Guilds’, in The Medieval Merchant: Proceedings of the 2012 Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, ed. Caroline Barron and Anne F. Sutton (Donington, 2014), 221–41; Christine Carpenter, ‘Town and Country: The Stratford Guild and Political Networks of Fifteenth-century Warwickshire’, in The History of an English Borough: Stratford-upon-Avon 1196–1996, ed. Robert Bearman (Stroud, 1997), 62–79; Jenny Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1998); David Crouch, Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, 2000), 137.

56. 56.  Clive Burgess, ‘Obligations and Strategy: Managing Memory in the Later Medieval Parish’, Monumental Brass Society Transactions, 18, no. 4 (2012), 289–310.

57. 57.  TNA: PROB 11/14/169. It has been mislabelled on the catalogue as ‘Thomas Eyton of Ashbury’.

58. 58.  SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 80r.

59. 59.  TNA: PROB 11/4/193; Thomas Procter Wadley, Notes or Abstracts of the Wills Contained in the Volume Entitled the Great Orphan Book and Book of Wills: In the Council House at Bristol (Bristol, 1886), 138. For rent gathered from ‘Sturmy’s grownde’ see SA: LB/5/3/36, ff. 6v, 7r.

60. 60.  SA: LB/5/3/36, ff. 6v, 7r.

61. 61.  Clive Burgess, ‘Late Medieval Wills and Pious Convention: Testamentary Evidence Reconsidered’, in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks (Gloucester, 1990), 14–33; Clive Burgess, The Right Ordering of Souls: The Parish of All Saints Bristol on the Eve of the Reformation (Woodbridge, 2018); Richard Asquith, ‘Piety and Trust: Testators and Executors in Pre-Reformation London’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2022); Rob Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge, 2006); Rob Lutton and Elisabeth Salter, Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c. 1400–1600 (Aldershot, 2007).

62. 62.  Kennan, ‘Guilds and Society’, 27.

63. 63.  Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside, 91.

64. 64.  Kermode, Medieval Merchants, 137; Badham, ‘Mercantile Involvement’, 229–30.

65. 65.  Badham, ‘Mercantile Involvement’, 231–9.

66. 66.  Badham, ‘Mercantile Involvement’, 225–7.

67. 67.  Carpenter, ‘Town and Country’, 73.

68. 68.  Carpenter, ‘Town and Country’, 74.

69. 69.  It is unclear exactly what sense of ‘gages’ the guild was referring to here. It could be that of payments, security or bonds, but some of the items listed under the ‘tresour of gages’ explicitly state that they are the gift of an individual.

70. 70.  SA: LB/5/3/10, ff. 26v, 36v.

71. 71.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 6r.

72. 72.  TNA: PROB 11/16/659.

73. 73.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 6r.

74. 74.  Nut cups were so named due to their construction from a coconut. SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 17v.

75. 75.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 17v.

76. 76.  SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 80r. Peke had connections with the Marches through her role as supplying torches for Prince Arthur’s funeral. TNA: LC 2/1.

77. 77.  As discussed in detail in the Introduction.

78. 78.  As those given by Thomas Rogers, Richard Forthingfolde, Henry Ogell, Master Hosyer and William Stathum. See also the addition of money given by Elizabeth Reed when dispensing with her deceased husband’s bequest to the guild. New, Records of the Jesus Guild, 12, 102, 126, 148.

79. 79.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 17v.

80. 80.  SA: LB/5/1/4, m. 6. For Bagot’s involvement in Bristol’s governance see James Lee, ‘Political Communication in Early Tudor England: The Bristol Elite, Urban Community and the Crown, c. 1471 – c.1553’ (PhD diss., University of the West of England, 2006), 110 and appendix 2.

81. 81.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 18v.

82. 82.  SA: LB/5/3/36, ff. 17v, 18r. It has not been possible to identify Sir John Bristowe in other records.

83. 83.  Kathleen E. Kennedy, ‘The Coconut Cup as Material and Medium: Extended Ecologies’, in Old Media and the Medieval Concept: Media Ecologies Before Early Modernity, ed. Thora Brylowe and Stephen Yeager (Montreal, 2021), 79–102.

84. 84.  They were simultaneously ‘familiar and unusual, exceptional and common’: Kathleen E. Kennedy, ‘Gripping It by the Husk: The Medieval English Coconut’, The Medieval Globe, 3, no. 1 (2017), 21.

85. 85.  Kennedy, ‘Gripping It by the Husk’, 18.

86. 86.  The guild purchased spices that would have been used for cooking, certainly, as in SA: LB/5/3/24, but the spice plates would have held spiced foods, such as spiced cookies or candies, or spices that were used to sprinkle on top of food to enhance flavour.

87. 87.  For example, the hearse cloth for general use at All Saints, Bristol, was inscribed the donor’s initials, while Jane, Viscountess Lisle, willed her executors to provide twenty-four sets of vestments with her arms on them for twenty-four parishes ‘to haue my soule remembred and prayed for’. Burgess, The Right Ordering of Souls, 229; TNA: PROB 11/12/213. For mazers and requests for prayers see C.M. Woolgar, ‘Mazers and the Drinking Culture of Late Medieval England’, Journal of Medieval History, 49, no. 5 (2023), 750. For drinking vessels as a commemorative object in religious houses, see Sheila Sweetinburgh, ‘Remembering the Dead at Dinner-Time’, in Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings, ed. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (Burlington, 2010), 278–88.

88. 88.  Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast’, 435.

89. 89.  The verses in 1 Corinthians are the only account that emphasises active remembrance associated with both the bread and wine, although it is nevertheless implied in the synoptic gospels; indeed, only Luke explicitly states that the eating of bread was to be done ‘in remembrance’.

90. 90.  For the Mass in pre-Reformation England see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 2005), 91–130.

91. 91.  This was the total of items that were given as pledge across three occasions. New, Records of the Jesus Guild, 177, 185, 210–11.

92. 92.  Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside, 117; loans were not limited to individuals but also to institutions. The leading fraternities in Louth, Lincolnshire, loaned money on two occasions to the churchwardens of the parish church – a striking demonstration of the support that fraternities provided the parish. Kennan, ‘Guilds and Society’, 180.

93. 93.  A demysent (demi-cent) was a type of girdle (belt) that fastened with a hook at the front. Cors could refer to either ordinary, coarse wool or a material woven in strips, richly adorned with silver and gold, that was often used as a ceinture or belt. SA: LB/5/3/36, ff. 5v, 6r; Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘cors’.

94. 94.  A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘Certificates of the Shropshire Chantries, Under the Acts of 37 Henry VIII, Ca IV., and I Edward VI., Ca XIV’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, Ser. 3, 10 (1910), 328.

95. 95.  Rosser, The Art of Solidarity, 142–3; Kate Giles, ‘A Table of Alabaster with the Story of the Doom’: The Religious Objects and Spaces of the Guild of Our Blessed Virgin, Boston (Lincs)’, in Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings, ed. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (Farnham, 2010), 267–88.

96. 96.  TNA: PROB 11/18/327 (Richard Mayhew/Mayo); PROB 11/18/61 (John Meysam); PROB 11/22/545 (Nicholas Hyde); PROB 11/23/170 (John Thomas); PROB 11/17/471 (Robert Corbett); PROB 11/15/461 (John Wilcox II); PROB 11/19/347 (Nicholas Burwey); PROB 11/19/312 (William Pisford).

97. 97.  TNA: PROB 11/18/61; SA: LB/5/1/3, m. 4; LB/5/1/4, m. 4.

98. 98.  TNA: PROB 11/18/327; SA: B/5/3/7, f. 46v.

99. 99.  The trust placed in executors to deploy the residue of estates for the good of the soul is discussed in Richard Asquith, ‘Piety and Trust: Testators and Executors in Pre-Reformation London’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2022), chapter 4; Richard Asquith, ‘Rebuilding St Andrew Undershaft: A Study in Executorial Discretion in Early Tudor London’, The London Journal, 49, no. 2 (June 2024), 123–46.

100. 100.  New, Records of the Jesus Guild, 12–3.

101. 101.  TNA: PROB 11/23/170.

102. 102.  SA: LB/5/3/9, f. 36v; LB/5/3/10, f. 20r.

103. 103.  Asquith, ‘Piety and Trust’, chapter 5.

104. 104.  Examples of heads of religious houses as executors or supervisors can be found in Martin Heale, The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford, 2016), 241.

105. 105.  TNA: PROB/11/18/523; PROB/11/19/241; PROB/11/19/374; PROB/11/18/232; SA: LB/5/1/3, m. 4; LB/5/3/7, f. 28r; LB/5/3/6, f. 19v; LB/5/3/7, f. 58v.

106. 106.  Justin Colson, ‘Local Communities in Fifteenth Century London: Craft, Parish and Neighbourhood’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010), 273.

107. 107.  TNA: PROB/11/19/374; SA: LB/5/3/2, f. 38r; LB/5/3/7, f. 29v.

108. 108.  Craig Muldrew, ‘The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 926–7. Justin Colson’s research on fifteenth-century London revealed typical patterns of reliance on neighbours or even those who were present in the location in which the writing of the will took place. Colson, ‘Local Communities’, 273–6.

109. 109.  This happened with some regularity for both living and dead members of the guild. In the case of Thomas Harry, he was entered while alive, while Nicholas and Joan Young were dead. John Soket and his wife Joan entered the guild between 1485 and 1489. SA: LB/5/1/2; LB/5/3/5, f. 55r; LB/5/3/6, f. 37v.

110. 110.  John and Elizabeth Portar were both alive when joining the Palmers. SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 28v.

111. 111.  SA: LB/5/2/1357.

112. 112.  SA: LB/5/3/2, f. 69r.

113. 113.  This land was used as a source of income for the guild. For example, they rented it to Roger Daccus of Richards Castle in 1536 for a biannual fee of 10s. SA: LB/5/2/1358.

114. 114.  John Tomkes alias Weaver of Worcester joined the Palmers in 1503/4: SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 71r. The John Higgons who acted as witness was one of two possible Palmers, either located in Lingen, Herefordshire, or Preston, Shropshire (just outside Shrewsbury). Both joined the guild in 1505/6: SA: LB/5/3/7, f. 11r; LB/5/1/3, m. 3. Less likely is William Newman, who may be the William Newman of Caerleon who joined the Palmers in 1427, although that date suggests he may have been deceased by 1500 when this land transfer took place – perhaps the man named in this deed was a son or grandson of the Palmer: SA: LB/5/3/13, f. 2v.

115. 115.  These last names are spelled either Malebroke or Malybrok and Heriettes or Heryott. SA: LB/5/2/1437–8.

116. 116.  SA: LB/5/2/1438.

117. 117.  E.G.H. Kempson, ‘A Shropshire Gild at Work in Wiltshire’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 57, no. 206 (July 1958), 20, states that the guild should have received 33s 4d, with a reduction for annual repairs, equating to 28s. Where this information comes from is unclear – the source is not cited. In the rental accounts of 1529/30, the guild received 10s 4d, and then 6s 4d in 1533/4. SA: LB/5/3/29, f. 7; LB/5/3/61.

118. 118.  The devising of land between members and the guild was common practice. Rachael Harkes, ‘Building Success: Property Investment and Development in Ludlow’, in Fourteenth Century England, vol. 13, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Helen Lacey (Woodbridge, 2025), 87–105.

119. 119.  SA: LB/5/3/2, f. 177v.

120. 120.  SA: LB/5/1/2, mm. 1–2.

121. 121.  SA: LB/5/1/2, m. 1.

122. 122.  SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 60r.

123. 123.  SA: LB/5/1/2, m. 3.

124. 124.  SA: LB/5/3/61. It may have continued later but the renter’s accounts do not survive beyond 1534.

125. 125.  It is also an action undertaken by many widows: Rachael Harkes, ‘Remembering the Dead: Postmortem Guild Membership in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 63, no. 2 (April 2024), 337.

126. 126.  SA: LB/2/1421.

127. 127.  SA: LB/2/1422. A confirmation of this transfer was drawn up and survives as LB/5/2/1423.

128. 128.  SA: LB/5/2/1450.

129. 129.  Richard Nassh’s daughter also joined in 1503/4, and his wife in 1505–9. SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 76r; LB/5/1/4, f. 4. For Thomas Walker’s entry, see LB/5/3/5, 77r. The other two men could have been Palmers but no documentary evidence survives to determine their involvement with the guild beyond these transactions.

130. 130.  Land the Palmers owned in Eastham was worth £1 6s at their dissolution. Arthur Willis, A Short Account of the Ludlow Palmer’s Guild Estate (Ludlow, 1845), 10.

131. 131.  SA: LB/5/2/1425.

132. 132.  SA: LB/5/2/1424.

133. 133.  SA: LB/5/2/1427. John Owens continued his active involvement with the guild well beyond this date. In 1524, the guild received 2s from John Owens for rent. A few years later, the stewards noted that Owens owed money for rent that was used to pay for Thomas Cook’s chantry. SA: LB/5/3/36, ff. 39r, 51r.

134. 134.  SA: LB/5/2/1428.

135. 135.  Christine Carpenter has likewise, on a much smaller scale, used guild deeds to suggest involvement by individual members in Stratford’s Holy Cross guild. The gentry families who put their names to property transactions were involved in the guild. Carpenter, ‘Town and Country’, 71–3.

136. 136.  While there has been no major scholarship on Marlborough’s religious guilds, we can assume that there was indeed at least a handful, thanks to Gervase Rosser’s estimation of the number of parish guilds in late medieval England. The craft guilds possessed a social and religious element to their institutions, as discussed in: ‘Salisbury: Merchant and Craft Guilds to 1612’, in A History of the County of Wiltshire, vol. 6, ed. Elizabeth Crittall (London, 1962), 132–6.

137. 137.  There were eight guild members from Eastham and eighty-two from Marlborough. SA: LB/5/3/2–9; LB/5/1/1–4.

138. 138.  Many of these are detailed in the extensive collection of property deeds that survive in SA: LB/5/2 series, as well as in the rental rolls of the guild: SA: LB/5/3/46–71.

139. 139.  SA: LB/5/3/5, f. 10v.

140. 140.  SA: LB/5/3/31, m. 2.

141. 141.  SA: LB/5/2/1017, 1043, 1080, 1088, 1096, 1345, 1358, 1426, 1432. Regional patterns of heriot practices are traced in Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom: From Bondage to Freedom (Woodbridge, 2014), 289.

142. 142.  SA: LB/5/2/1426, 1432.

143. 143.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 10v.

144. 144.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 21v.

145. 145.  SA: LB/5/3/36, f. 35v.

146. 146.  SA: LB/5/2/1431.

147. 147.  As the guild paid for a half gallon of wine to the court in both 1533/4 and 1538/9, it is possible that this was an annual expense, although the records do not survive to confirm this. SA: LB/5/2/31, mm. 3, 5; LB/5/3/32, m. 3.

148. 148.  SA: LB/5/3/32, mm. 3, 5.

149. 149.  SA: LB/5/3/40, f. 214v. The nature of the indenture is unknown, with only a chance reference to it surviving in the membership receipt book.

150. 150.  SA: LB/5/3/32, m. 3; LB/5/3/33, m. 2.

151. 151.  SA: LB/5/3/32, m. 3.

152. 152.  SA: LB/5/3/33, m. 2.

153. 153.  SA: LB/5/3/34, m. 2.

154. 154.  SA: LB/5/3/33, m. 2.

155. 155.  SA: LB/5/2/1370.

156. 156.  SA: LB/5/3/71.

157. 157.  SA: LB/5/3/12. The receipt booklet is undated, but it can be dated to between 1514 and 1538, as Richard Vowell, prior of Walsingham, enrolled during that time.