[411] How little freedom was left to far the most powerful craft of all—the dyers—we see from the law of 1530, that if any masters and journeymen of the dyers can be proved before the mayor and justices to have hindered any one from becoming a dyer, they are to be fined. If the journeymen refuse to work for the new dyers, then, without hindrance from the craft or the journeymen, they may hire others not inhabitants. In 1530 it was ordered that a certain Robert Perkins was to become a dyer without “let or hindrance” from craft and journeymen. In general the corporation resisted the tendency of the lesser crafts to prevent the setting up of new masters—a policy which is easy to understand in the rule of merchants, as opposed to that of the manufacturers.
[412] Posted up on the door of S. Michael’s in 1494:—
“Be it knowen and understood
This cite should be free and now is bond
Dame Goode-Eve made hit free
And now the’ be customes for woll and the drap’ie.
Also hit is made that no prentice shall be
But XIII. penies pay shall he,
This act did Robert Grene
Therefore he had many a curse I wene.”
(Sharp’s Antiquities, 235.)
“This city is bond that shuld be free,
The right is holden from the ̄C̄īalte.
Our cōins that at Lamas open shuld be cast
They be closed in and hegged full fast....
If ever ye have nede to the cōīalte
Such favour as ye show us such shall ye see.
We may speke fair and bid ye good morwe
But luff from our herts ye shall have nevr....
Cherish the cōīalte and so they have their right
For drede of a worse chance by day or by night.
The best of all littel worth shuld be
And ye had not had help of the cōīalte.”
(Sharp, 235.) Perhaps it was from the talk of the streets in some such local disturbance that Langland quoted when he wrote the lines quoted in Vol. I. p. 26.
[414] The Coventry craft-masters’ apprentices paid their fines to the mayor “for the use of the city,” not of the guild; the “searchers” for the trades were appointed and the regulations made at the Leet Court, not at meetings of a guild; the same officials attended, but they had to act as representing the municipality.
[415] As in Lynn, Bristol, and, later, Norwich.
[416] It is a subject for inquiry whether any Guild Merchant gave its name to a municipality unless it had been made responsible for the payment of the ferm, and held openly and to the knowledge of the exchequer some property or rents or tolls for the purpose.