Let us now take a rapid review of the Company’s history as applicable to the trade. If they did not possess the right of search or the power over the trade generally, like some of the other Guilds, they by advice and action with the Corporation and Companies have upon many occasions proved most beneficial and valuable. The earliest ordinances of the Guild are of the date 1498. They provide for the elections of the Master and Wardens “wᵗʰ tokens of garlands on their heds,” the charge of purchasing “clothing or lyvery” for the brotherhood at the drapers’ shops at Blackwell Hall (on or near the site of the present Guildhall Library); the settling of the dinners, when the member paid 2s., “and for the wyf if she be att the dyner xiid.” (which is not an ironmonger’s wife’s privilege at the present time); those freemen warned to attend the Hall and disobeying to be fined 4d., and the wardens 2s.; none to offer insult to their brethren; “no member to sue a brother for debt without leave of the wardens”; apprentices to be admitted to the fellowship “having served his tyme well and truly”; “straungers or foreigners (that is to say, those not already of the City) may be elected if introduced by four creditable liverymen”; “the Wardens, once in every two years at least, to search all manner of weights and measures that be used in the same felashippe, and when they find any default to levy fines at the discression of the master and wardens”; apprentices to be enrolled at Guildhall within the first year, and to be registered in the Company’s book; “no person in the felashippe shall take noon apprentice excepte he have sewertie and bond for him in Cˡⁱ sterling”; and no apprentice to be “under 14 years of age, and for no lesse terme than X yeres, except it be his first apprentice taken for necessitee, and for him he shel ax licence of the wardeyns,” and every apprentice his master shall advise to be “resonable and honest,” and shall see that he have clean and sound “hosyn, doblett, shirtis, and other necessaries,” ... “to kepe hym from colde and wete,” and by no means to suffer “his here to growe to long.” Finally, every member of the fellowship, whether in or out of the clothing (that is to say, liveryman or freeman), was required “to appear iiij. tymes in the yeere at the foure principal Courts, and these iiij. Courts ben ordeyned alway to endure to Goddes pleasir principally, and to redresse the maters that be not wele used, and to kepe pece and gode rewle among us,” and at these Courts all arrearages were to be paid—the master, 12d.; the present or past wardens, 8d.; the clothing (or liveryman), 6d.; and the yeomanry (or freeman), 4d.; and the wardens not to see the yeomanry decay.
Such then is an abstract of the earliest ordinances of the Ironmongers. At the present time the Company consists of a master, two wardens, the livery (all of whom comprise the Court, and, therefore, unlike any other City Company, who have a livery and a court of assistants as well), and the yeomanry, or freemen generally, over which presides a warden chosen by and from themselves at Easter, yearly. Of these we shall speak in another chapter.
The ordinances were revised and approved by the Lord Chancellor and Justices in February 1581, when the rules were either modified or extended. The elections are set forth; the four quarterly courts were settled, and at which the master paid his quarterage money of 16d.; the warden, 12d.; the liveryman, 9d. and the freemen, 4d. The apprentice always to be of the age not exceeding twenty-four when his term expired. The stranger or foreigner when admitted to pay 20l. The search of weights and measures to be once a year, or oftener, in the shops of the fellowship, and false ones destroyed, and fines of 40s. to the Company to be inflicted. Other special ordinances will be alluded to in another chapter.
The Company in 1549 interested themselves in the passing of the Act against the forging of iron gads instead of gads of steel, and six years later there are several entries relating to the coal meterage, which the Company had to superintend until the reign of James I. In 1557, when the rules of the newly-founded Bridewell at Blackfriars were made, and to which prison rogues and apprentices formerly, and of late years unmanageable City apprentices only, have been sent by the Chamberlain, it was specially provided in the governing of “the nail-house” that “to you is given authority to make sale of all such nayls as shall be made in this house, so the same be done according to the order taken with the Company of Ironmongers, which is, that (they giving to this house as the people of the same may by their travail reasonably live) shall before all men have all the nails that are made therein, and have one month’s day of payment for the same.” An inventory of all iron and nails, smithies, hammers, anvils, bellows, and tools to be truly kept, &c., and proper workmen appointed to oversee the idle apprentices’ work. In 1579 there were at Bridewell what in 1597 were called “art masters,” or those who had charge of trade apprentices, and among these were the naylors and pinmakers. In 1598 “Spanish needles” were made in the prison; in 1602 the pinners’ boys numbered fourteen, and in 1604 there were to be forty.
In the first year of Queen Elizabeth, 1558, the new Timber Act received special consideration from the Company, for it concerned the ironworks. In 1561 they took action against one of the freemen, Clement Cornwall, about whom a complaint was lodged for selling inferior goods at Lewes Fair, and three years later, at the instance of the yeomanry, the Court ordered that at fairs or elsewhere their members must sell nails six score to the hundred, and not five score as formerly. In 1569 the Founders’ Company fell out with the wardens of the Ironmongers’, which was settled by the aldermen, and ten years later three members of each Company of Ironmongers and Grocers were ordered to attend between the hours of 7 A.M. and 6 P.M. at the Bishop Gate of the City, to inspect and search every person and see that their “apparil, swords, daggers, or bucklers, wᵗ long pikes, great ruffs or long cloakes, or carry thear swordes close under their armes or the poyntes upward” were as by the late proclamation provided. In 1612 the Ironmongers, Blacksmiths, and Carpenters had many meetings, and passed special resolutions jointly on the then serious question of the importation of rod iron and a newly granted patent, and it is interesting to note that the then senior warden of the Company was the young gentleman who misbehaved himself at Lewes Fair in 1561, as already mentioned. In 1623 the Cutlers joined the Ironmongers, and obtained from the Corporation the by-law that all strangers or others should be compelled, as heretofore, to bring cutlery and iron wares to Leadenhall to be examined. This new by-law caused the Corporation and Companies much trouble to carry out, but it continued a City ordinance down to the year 1665.
In 1636 another trouble arose. A petition to the King by the shipwrights complained of the making of nails “of the worst iron, of lesse weight, strength and goodnes then in former tyme.” As the petitioners stated the deceits were committed by “wholesale men who employed poor smiths,” there was evidently a case of “sweating” in those days. For this the Company were called upon to appear before the Privy Council, where, of course, they would plead that they had no power over the trade generally. Four years afterwards the old complaint of the strangers, Leadenhall, underselling, &c., the Ironmongers were brought before the Corporation, and it was ordered that the Company should, when necessary, take possession, &c. The same year, too, the Company had to take notice of a monopoly granted by the King to his gunfounder, of cast-iron goods, which the Company were fortunate enough to get “called in and overthrown.” In 1657 John Richardson, a pinmaker by trade and Ironmonger by Company, prayed to be translated to the newly-formed Company of Pinmakers; but as by his copy of freedom he was to hold chiefly of the fellowship of Ironmongers, the Court of the Company refused assent. This custom is a peculiar one to the Ironmongers, and has often proved a bar to progress to those desiring to join other Guilds where promotion is more rapid.
CHAPTER V.
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF THE IRONMONGERS’ HISTORY.—II.
It has been asserted by some of the most violent opposers to the Corporation of London and the City Guilds that the Companies are part and parcel of the Corporation, that they were incorporated for the special benefit of the trades the names of which they are known by, that they once were, and should still be, solely composed of such trades’ members, and their property devoted to the artisans of such trades. Now, with all due respect to such arguments and those who may argue on these grounds, we must at once point out what is always considered to be the most sensible view of the question—that circumstances alter cases, and the merits of each case deserve to be considered separately. Were it otherwise there would be at once an end of our freedom and birthright, Magna Charta, and everything else.