To pray for the souls of John and Anne, else they be to blame:
The which John afore-rehearsed to this town hath been full kind,
Three hundred marks for this town hath paid, no penny unpaid behind.
Now we have informed you of John Smith’s will in writing as it is,
And for the great gifts that he hath given, God bring his soul to bliss. Amen.”[345]
The example set by this donor to the Candlemas Guild at Bury was followed by many others in the later part of the fifteenth century. For instance, a “gentlewoman,” as she calls herself, one Margaret Odom, after providing by will for the usual obit and for a lamp to burn before “the holie sacrament in St. James’s Church,” desires that the brethren of the guild shall devote the residue of the income arising from certain houses and lands she has conveyed to their keeping, to paying a priest to “say mass in the chapel of the gaol before the prisoners there, and giving them holy water and holy bread on all Sundays, and to give to the prisoners of the long ward of the said gaol every week seven faggots of wood from Hallowmass (November 1) to Easter Day.”[346]
Intimately connected with the subject of the guilds is that of the fairs, which formed so great a feature in mediæval commercial life, and at which the craft guilds were represented. For the south of England, the great fair held annually at Winchester became the centre of our national commerce with France. The following account of it is given in Mr. W. J. Ashley’s most interesting Introduction to English Economic History: “A fair for three days on the eastern hill outside Winchester was granted to the bishop by William II.; his immediate successors granted extension of time, until by a charter of Henry II. it was fixed at sixteen days, from 31st August to 15th September. On the morning of 31st August ‘the justiciars of the pavilion of the bishop’ proclaimed the fair on the hilltop, then rode on horseback through the city proclaiming the opening of the fair. The keys of the city and the weighing machine in the wool market were taken possession of, and a special mayor and special bailiffs were appointed to supersede the city officials during the fair time. The hilltop was quickly covered with streets of wooden shops: in one, the merchants from Flanders; in another, those of Caen or some other Norman town; in another, the merchants from Bristol. Here were placed the goldsmiths in a row, and there the drapers, &c., whilst around the whole was a wooden palisade with guarded entrance, a precaution which did not always prevent enterprising adventurers from escaping payment of the toll by digging a way in for themselves under the wall.… In Winchester all trade was compulsorily suspended, and within ‘a seven league circuit,’ guards being stationed at outlying posts, on bridges and other places of passage, to see that the monopoly was not infringed. At Southampton nothing was to be sold during the fair time but victuals, and even the very craftsmen of Winchester were bound to transfer themselves to the hill and there carry on their occupations during the fair. There was a graduated scale of tolls and duties: all merchants of London, Winchester, or Wallingford who entered during the first week were free from entrance tolls.… In every fair there was a court of pie-powder (of dusty feet) in which was decided by merchant law all cases of dispute that might arise, the ordinary jurisdiction being for a time suspended in the town; at Winchester this was called the Pavilion Court. Hither the bishop’s servants brought all the weights and measures to be tested; here the justices determined on an assize, or fixed scale, for bread, wine, beer, and other victuals, adjudging to the pillory any baker whose bread was found to be of defective weight; and here every day disputes between merchants as to debts were decided by juries upon production and comparison of the notched wooden tallies.”[347]
A few words must be said about the final destruction of the English guilds. At the close of the reign of Henry VIII. an act of Parliament was passed vesting the property of colleges, chantries, fraternities, brotherhoods and guilds in the Crown (38 Hen. VIII., c. 4). The king was empowered to send out his commissioners to take possession of all such property, on the plea that it might be “used and exercised to more godly and virtuous purposes.” Henry died before the provisions of the act could be complied with, and a second act was passed through the first Parliament in the reign of Edward VI. (1 Ed. VI., c. 14). This went beyond the former decree of destruction, for after providing for the demolition of colleges, free chapels, and chantries, it proceeded not only separately by name to grant to the king all sums of money devoted “by any manner of corporations, guilds, fraternities, companies or fellowships or mysteries or crafts,” to the support of a priest, obits or lights (which may be taken under colour of religion), but to hand over to the crown “all fraternities, brotherhoods and guilds, being within the realm of England and Wales and other the king’s dominions, and all manors, lands, tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to them, other than such corporations, guilds, fraternities, &c., and the manors, lands, &c., pertaining to the said corporations, &c., above mentioned.”
The Parliament of Henry VIII. assigned as a reason for this seizure of the property of the corporate bodies the need “for the maintenance of these present wars,” and cleverly put into one group “colleges, free chapels, chantries, hospitals, fraternities, brotherhoods, and guilds.” “The act of Edward VI.,” writes Mr. Toulmin Smith, “was still more ingenious, for it held up the dogma of purgatory to abhorrence, and began to hint at grammar schools. The object of both acts was the same. All the possessions of all the guilds (except what could creep out as being mere trading guilds, which saved the London guilds) became vested by these two acts in the Crown; and the unprincipled courtiers who had advised and helped the scheme gorged themselves out of this wholesale plunder of what was, in every sense, public property.”[348]
It is clear that in seizing the property of the guilds the Crown destroyed far more than it gained for itself. A very large proportion of their revenues was derived from the entrance fees and the annual subscriptions of the existing members, and in putting an end to these societies the State swept away the organisation by which these voluntary subscriptions were raised, and this not in one or two places, but all over England. In this way far more harm was in reality done to the interests of the poor, sick, and aged, and, indeed, to the body politic at large, than the mere seizure of their comparatively little capital, whether in land or money.