In our previous chapters we have shown that the Ironmongers’ charter makes no mention of the Guild as specially incorporated for trade purposes or for the trade’s sole benefit, and that the earliest by-laws simply conferred the right of search and inspecting all weights and measures “used in the same feloshippe,” and consequently did not apply to the trade in general. In fact there was, and still remains, no compulsion upon an ironmonger to join the Company, although in ancient times, by charter-rights, he would be compelled to become a freeman of the City, which, as we have already stated, did not constitute him free of a Company as well. The Ironmongers’ charter was confirmed by Philip and Mary, June 20, 1558; by Queen Elizabeth, November 12, 1560; by James I., June 25, 1604; and by James II., November 19, 1687. The grant of this last-mentioned letters patent was made to the Companies generally after the stormy events of the previous four years, and as some reparation for the gross injustice done to his subjects by Charles II., when, under the power of the writ of quo warranto, he seized the City charters and disfranchised the very men who had been his best friends. This act of the “Merry Monarch,” and the shutting up of the Exchequer, the ruin of the goldsmiths and bankers, and the continuous oppression of the citizens by his brother James brought about sooner than royalty expected the destruction of the King, “the glorious Revolution of 1688,” and the accession of William III. on December 12 of that year, from which time, and by special Act in his second year, the Companies have been restored to their ancient position and privileges. And we firmly believe the lessons then learnt by the partisans of Charles and James, and handed down to their descendants, have not been forgotten by those still living in the Jubilee year of Queen Victoria. In addition to these special charters there was yet another grant made, which, as regards their estates, is a complete answer to those who to-day say the Ironmongers’ property is not their own. It is “a perpetuitie” made to them and their successors for ever by James I., dated August 4, 1619.
A Carved Wood Ostrich, as used in the Lord Mayor’s Pageant of 1629. ([See pages 33-35.])
A Bronze Token, representing the Geffery Almshouses, erected 1713-14. ([See page 55.])
Exactly 300 years ago the ancient City of Chester was represented in its Mayoralty chair by an ironmonger, whose son upset the good people of the City by retailing ironmongers’ wares, to the prejudice of the Citizens, who, by a grant from Queen Elizabeth in 1561, had been exempted from a duty of 2s. per ton upon iron imported there. And in the same year of 1589 one Peter Newall, or Newgall, an assistant to his father-in-law, Mr. Bavand, who appears to have enjoyed the distinction of being “an ironmonger, a vintner, a mercer, and a retayler of manye comodities,” complained that David Lloyd, “a retaylinge draper,” had “usurped the name of merchant,” for which wrongdoing the Privy Council, the Secretary of State, the Master of the Rolls, and all the machinery of the law was set in motion that “the drifte of the said Lloyd shalbe ripte upp and viewed into,” and the injury to the Citizens repaired. In Buckingham, both in 1691 and 1706, two members of the Blunt family were admitted into the Mercers’ Company “to follow the trade of an ironmonger,” and both gentlemen were subsequently Wardens of their Company. Others, too, were admitted to follow other trades.
Mr. Herbert, the Guildhall Librarian, in his Historical Essay on the City Companies, published fifty years ago, sums up the exactions on the Guilds by the reigning powers in these words:—“Contributions towards setting the poor to work, towards erecting the Royal Exchange, towards cleansing the City ditch, and towards projects of discovering new countries; money for furnishing military and naval armaments; for men, arms, and ammunition to protect the City; for State and City pageants and attendances; for provision of coal and corn, compulsory loans, State lotteries, monopolous patents, concealments, seditious publications and practices, and twenty other sponging expedients were among the more prominent of the engines by which that ‘mother of her people,’ Elizabeth, and afterwards James and Charles, contrived to screw from the Companies their wealth.” And J. P. Malcolm, in the second volume of his “Londinium Redivivum,” 1803, when giving his most valuable extracts from the Ironmongers’ books (and who speaks of Mr. Sumner, the then clerk of the Guild’s “politeness and attention worthy of an enlightened man,” and so totally different to some other of the Companies’ clerks), remarks “that specie in their hands possessed the faculty of attracting clouds of precepts, and that, if the Company were lavish, the Crown was always ready to receive.” Our last chapter proves the case, but a few more entries of another kind will confirm the views expressed.
In 1562 the Ironmongers were called upon to provide without delay nineteen “good appte and talle persones to be souldiers,” each of whom was to be provided with “corsletts and weaponed with pykes and billes.” This demand meant that if none of the Company’s members cared to serve, then they were to find some other men that would, and accordingly liverymen and yeomen had to assist out of their own pockets to meet the charge. Four years later three more soldiers were provided by the Company out of the 100 fully-armed ordered away from the City for service in Ireland; and, in 1569, no less than twenty-eight “men of honeste behaviour” had to be found “to march against the rebells in the north.” A few years later, in 1577, the demand increased, for an order came for 100 “able men, apprentices, journeymen, or others free of the City, of agilitie or honest behaviour,” between nineteen and forty years of age, and fully armed, for, says Malcolm in his quaint way, “the noble art of man-killing.” The instructions issued out to these “volunteers” are extremely curious to read, for nothing is said in them about evolutions, advancing, retreating, or formation into columns or squares or divisions; and, what is more notable, each man must have been in danger every moment of being blown into the air by his own powder! In 1579 the Ironmongers’ proportion of the 3,000 men wanted of the City for the defence of the realm was 110, of which 72 were to be provided with “shott, calvyʳ, flask, toche, murryn, sword, and dagger, and a pound of powder,” and 38 with “pikes, corslett, sword, and daggʳ.” The Armada year of 1588, and the call to arms upon that occasion will be found fully described in the “Historical Essay,” printed in 1886; but in 1591, in order to provide the 7,000l. required for manning the navy, the Ironmongers lent 344l., having two years previous received notice to have ready 1,920 lbs. of powder. In 1643, when the Committee at Guildhall sent a polite request to Ironmongers’ Hall desiring that fifty barrels of gunpowder should be stored there as “a place of safety,” the Company politely returned answer that they could not oblige, for not only want of room, but that their tenants next door, having Spaniards, Dutchmen, and Frenchmen lodging in the house, might be placed in danger of no ordinary kind.
In 1596 the Companies were charged with 3,500l. for providing twelve ships, two pinnaces, and 1,200 men, and the Ironmongers lent 172l. The next demand made for ships or men was in the year 1639, when 1,000l. was raised. Readers of history will recollect the case of John Hampden and the “Ship Money” impost, and the Companies’ books prove too truly the repeated extortions. The demand on the Ironmongers’ for men alone in the forty years previous to 1600 was something like 300, besides their full equipments, and when we reckon the money lent, the powder provided the other calls upon their purse, it will be fully understood that the good old times with this Company were none of the happiest.
We will now mention another branch of the City Companies’ “business”—the coal and corn custom. The object was twofold: to supply the poor in times of scarcity at a cheap rate, and to defeat the combinations of dealers. And yet, laudable as the custom was, it is astonishing to find from the results that much imposition was inflicted upon the Companies, and that the demands for storage poured in as fast as the money precepts did. As early as 1605 the Ironmongers agreed “to provide a shipp to fetch sea coles from Newcastle, as other of the twelve Companies intende”; and in 1665 (the Plague year) they laid up 255 chaldrons, all the other Companies laying in quantities in proportion. And here we cannot omit to mention one of the bequests made by a worthy benefactor to the Ironmongers’ Company. Margaret Dane, the wife of Alderman William Dane (Sheriff 1569, and twice Master of his Company), by her will, dated in 1579, left in trust to the Company (among other munificent bequests) sufficient money to provide every year 12,000 faggots to be distributed among the poor of each of the twenty-four City Wards, to be used by such poor persons “as fuel to keep them warm.” To this day this bequest of three centuries ago is carried out by the company, a certain sum being distributed to each ward. But it will hardly be believed when we state that the opponents to the City Companies have gone out of their way to magnify this praiseworthy bequest into the horrible tale that this good lady left 12,000 faggots yearly to be used for the burning of heretics!