At present the number of the Livery is 100; their Corporate Income is £310; their Trust Income is £130; they have no Hall. Their former Hall, which stood in Red Cross Street, was sold to the Corporation.
THE FRUITERERS
The date of the foundation of the Company or Society of the Fruiterers is uncertain, but they were incorporated by charter, granted by King James I. in the third year of his reign “for the better order, government, and rule of them,” by the name of “Master, Wardens, and Commonalty of the Mystery of Fruiterers of London,” with perpetual succession and power “to purchase, have, receive, and enjoy manors, messuages, lands, tenements, liberties, privileges, jurisdictions, franchises, and other hereditaments” “to them and their successors in fee and perpetuity,” or for years or otherwise; “and also all manner of goods, chattels, and things whatsoever,” with power to grant, let, alien, assign, etc., and to sue and be sued, and to have a common seal. And that there should be a Master, and 2 Wardens, and 5 or more of the said Company, not exceeding 20, to be called the Assistants of the said Company, with power to make bye-laws for the good rule and government of the said Corporation.
Bye-laws were afterwards made, and they were allowed by the Lord Keeper and Chief Justices in 1759.
These bye-laws relate chiefly to the constitution of the Court of the Company. There are also regulations (long since obsolete) affecting the trade, and some rules as to apprentices.
The present number of the Livery is 90; their Income is stated to be £90 a year; and they have no Hall. Strype, 1720, vol. i. bk. iii. p. 13, asserts that the Fruiterers had a Hall in premises rebuilt on the site of Worcester House; the Fruiterers Company, however, agree with Hatton, 1709, and Maitland, 1756, in stating that the Company had no Hall after the Fire.
This little Company is chiefly known by their custom of presenting the Lord Mayor, on October 7 every year, with an offering of English fruit. The custom is said to have arisen in memory of the commutation of an old civic right to a toll on all fruit brought into the City. The Company also came forward some years ago in giving lectures on the culture of fruit.
THE GARDENERS
Incorporated by James I., 1606, for a Master, 2 Wardens, and 18 Assistants. There is no return of property; the Livery now consists of 44 members. They have no Hall. The gardens of London have always until the last two hundred years been a remarkable feature of the City, which, in its northern and less densely populated parts, was filled with gardens and trees, amidst which the industries of the City were carried on; and many of the crafts had their Halls. It is quite certain that some form of Fraternity or Gild must have been formed among the large class of gardeners who cultivated these grounds. Stow, however, gives no account of them. Their existence, however, is clearly indicated by Riley (Memorials, p. 228), when he produces the petition of the “Gardeners of the Earls, Barons, Bishops and Citizens” of London. The petition set forth that they were formerly entitled to stand in front of the Church of St. Augustine, by the gate of St. Paul’s, “there to sell the garden produce of their said masters and make their profit.” Were the Earls, Barons, and Bishops, then, market-gardeners? If not, did the gardeners cultivate the land for their own exclusive profit? “And they prayed permission to continue the custom.” The mayor and aldermen resolved in reply that they had made themselves so great a nuisance by their “scurrility and clamour” while the priests of St. Augustine were singing mass that the permission must be withdrawn, and that they must set up their market in the space between the south gate of St. Paul’s Churchyard and the garden wall of the Black Friars, in other words, on the space between Godliman Street and St. Andrew’s Hill, not nearly so central a spot as that which they had formerly used.
There are other references in Riley to gardens. There was one called the King’s Garden, near the Hermitage in London Wall. And in 1276 there is the case of a man who fell from a pear-tree in the garden of one Lawrence, in the parish of St. Michael, Paternoster Royal, then, as now, the most crowded part of the City. There is also given the lease of a “garden situate in Tower Ward, near London Wall.” Since there was an open space all along the wall in which houses were not allowed to be built, this space was without doubt mainly devoted to gardens, just as the north bank of the ditch became afterwards a row of what we should now call allotments, cultivated for vegetables and fruit.