site of its predecessor. This is another of those heavy, would-be-palatial buildings which attest the bad architectural taste of the first half of the present century.
It has long been customary to enroll as honorary members of the civic companies many royal and noble personages; and when, in 1750, Frederick, Prince of Wales, was admitted as a freeman, the clerk of the Fishmongers’ Company, Mr. Tomkyns, proudly reminded him that “this company, sir, is famous for having had near threescore lord-mayors of the city of London, besides many of the most considerable merchants and eminent citizens, free of it.”
King James I. incorporated himself with the guild of cloth-workers in 1607, and Stow’s Chronicle, continued by Howes, gives the following description of the occurrence:
“Being in the open hall, he [the king] asked who was master of the company, and the lord-mayor answered, ‘Sir William Stowe,’ unto whom the king said: ‘Wilt thou make me free of the cloth-workers?’ ‘Yea,’ quoth the master, ‘and think myself a happy man that I live to see this day.’ Then the king said: ‘Stowe, give me thy hand; and now I am a cloth-worker.’”
Sir Samuel Pepys was master of the company seventy years later, and presented them with a rich loving-cup, which is still used on solemn occasions. The Winthrops, ancestors of the famous governor of the Massachusetts Company, were hereditarily connected with this cloth-workers’ guild, several of them becoming members by regular apprenticeship to the trade; and Adam Wyntrope, the governor’s grandfather, is mentioned as master of the company in 1551, having previously held all the minor offices leading to that dignity.
Intimately connected with the system of the companies was the status of the London apprentices. Both have been materially modified, and their representatives have ceased to exercise the tangible power they once possessed. But when the system was in full operation, every trade having its separate guild; and when, in order that any one might exercise a trade, it was necessary he should have the freedom of the guild, this freedom could only be obtained by serving an apprenticeship to a member of the company. In old times the apprentices were a superior class of men, and it was not permitted to every one to exercise the chief trades. Under Henry IV. an act was passed containing a clause to the effect that no one should put his son or daughter apprentice to a handicraft trade, “except he have land or rent to the value of 20s. by the year,” which in those days would be a fair competency. The regulations of the city of London forbade any to be admitted to be bound apprentice except such as were “gentlemen born,” by which was understood freeborn, and not in a state of villeinage—the son of a free-holder or a yeoman. In the days of the Tudors and Stuarts even the younger sons of gentlemen often served in the commercial establishments of rich citizens. The chronicler Stow attributes to this cause their “costly apparel, their wearing weapons, and frequenting schools of dancing, fencing, and music.”
But this very pretension to “gentility” it was which Ben Jonson rebuked in his Eastward Hoe, a comedy, the counterpart of Hogarth’s subsequent caricatures in pencil. The old goldsmith boasts that he made his wealth by “hiring
me a little shop; bought low; took small gain; kept no debt-book; garnished my shop, for want of plate, with good, wholesome, thrifty sentences, as, ‘Touchstone, keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee’; ‘Light gains make heavy purses,’ etc.”
The apprentices were very clannish, and ready to defend each other to the death, and this spirit often led to riots and serious disturbances, but a curious poem published in 1647, called The Honor of London Apprentices, mentions that this bravery had led them to distinguish themselves in a nobler field than a city brawl—namely, in the Crusades and on the field of Crécy.
Their duties, it seems to us, corresponded in their way to the service required from youths of good birth as pages and esquires in the house of a knight, before they themselves could aspire to the honor of knighthood. These waited at table, served the ladies, and performed many offices now termed menial; and, as a tract published in London in 1625 avers, so too did the apprentices: