SMITHFORD STREET
The priests of the merchant guild, as was meet, occupied from the beginning the most honourable place of all. They sang their "solemn antiphonies" in the lady-chapel of S. Michael's, the great parish church of the Earl's-half, a practice which was still continued after the title of the guild became merged in the society of the Trinity;[156] while the guild of the Corpus Christi, composed, it would seem, of the prior's tenants, occupied the corresponding chapel in the parish church of the Trinity.[157]
One guild, that of the fullers and tailors, called after the Nativity, carried on an obscure existence in connection with the since demolished chapel of S. George outside the Gosford gate. The formation of this society was violently opposed by the powers that were in 1384 on the ground that the purpose of its members—"labourers and artificers of the middling sort" and strangers—was to withstand the mayor and officers of the city, and not to promote the welfare of souls.[158] After 1400, further guild-making had come to have little favour with the ruling men of the city. Three several times did the mayor and bailiffs obtain patents forbidding the formation of guilds other than those already existing within Coventry.[159] While the close alliance of the older fraternities and the corporation is shown in the fact that the meetings of the guilds of S. Anne and S. George, formed by journeymen tailors in the first quarter of the century, were suppressed by royal command under the pretext that their meetings were to the manifest destruction of the ancient foundations, the guilds of Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi.[160]
FOOTNOTES:
[128] See above, page 70.
[129] Cf. the expression "queen's-chamber" as applied to Bristol, where the ferm was paid to the queen-consort.
[130] The "Casteldich" is mentioned Corp. MSS. C. 61.
[131] On the belfry as continental symbol of independence, see Round, Commune of London, 244.