The document which the Masters found amongst their records made in “the time to which memory runneth not” probably ends here, and the following Items (see the third one) were doubtless additional Ordinances made circa 1387.
Item. That each brother of the said Fraternity pay in pledge for his livery, when he has the same, forty pence at the least.
Item. That each brother keep the livery two whole years before he may give, or sell, or alienate it in any manner, under pain of paying to the Company for their pardon, a noble of gold.
Item. It is ordained that on the Sunday following the Assumption of our Lady in the 11th year of King Richard the Second,[35] that the Surveyors of the said Mystery be elected by the assent of all the Fraternity, and no longer by the Masters.
Item. That none of the said Fraternity hereafter pay more than fourteen pence for his feast.
Item. It is ordained that each Master who shall choose any other man to be in his place, that is to say for to be Master; he who shall choose such man to be Master for the year shall be bound by himself for him, in an obligation to the Company for the money.[36]
It agrees with the Record,
William Colet.
Coeval with our Company of Barbers there existed in the City of London, another Fraternity or Guild, that of the Surgeons, in no way connected with the Barbers, but, like them, existing by prescription only and unincorporated. It is not to be expected that these two Companies would, in the days of so much trade protection and jealousy, exhibit an over-friendly feeling towards one another, and the records of the period, though meagre, show that this was the case. The Surgeons’ Guild at no time appear to have been a numerous body, indeed there is reason to believe that frequently their numbers were less than a dozen, and they possibly never exceeded twenty.
In the researches undertaken for the purpose of this work, various references to the Surgeons’ Guild have turned up, and although at this early period there was much in common between the two Fraternities, I have considered it quite apart from the subject in hand to go into any detail concerning that Guild, more especially as it has recently been so ably and fully dealt with by Mr. D’Arcy Power in his “Memorials of the Craft of Surgery.”