Livery Companies - The Project

About Records of London's Livery Companies Online (ROLLCO).

Introduction
Historical Context
The Database
The Sources
Project Contributors

Introduction

The Records of London's Livery Companies Online (ROLLCO) project has been established to create a fully searchable and freely accessible online database of membership information for the City of London's Livery Companies, from their earliest surviving records until c.1900. Initially the project has digitised the apprenticeship and freedom admission records for several Companies that retain their own archives in situ.

The project began in 2008 with the creation of the ROLLCO database and the digitisation of The Clothworkers' Company extant Apprenticeship and Freedom records. In 2010, work began on the records of The Drapers' Company and The Goldsmiths' Company; and as of summer 2012 work has begun to enter the records of The Mercers’ Company into the database. Generous funding from the respective Companies has made possible the digitisation of the records as well as the development of the website and API.

Historical Context

The Freedom

The Livery Companies of the City of London originate from medieval trade guilds, established to regulate particular crafts. Guilds supervised the training of apprentices, controlled standards of craftsmanship, and protected craftsmen from unfair competition. They also provided financial support to their members in old age and in times of poverty and bereavement. Up until the nineteenth century, Freedom of the City of London (or Citizenship) and the right to exercise one's trade there could only be obtained through membership of a Livery Company.

There were a variety of routes for someone to become a member of a Livery Company, or to be admitted to the Freedom as it is known. Chief amongst these were Servitude, by which a person gained the Freedom after serving an apprenticeship; Patrimony, by which children of Freemen qualified for membership through their parents; and Redemption whereby the Freedom was obtained through the paying of a fine (often quite substantial). Other methods of gaining the Freedom are described in the Glossary.

Over time many Companies' direct involvement with their original craft declined, but membership has continued to be important. Today, Freedom of a Livery Company confers few tangible benefits; however, members continue to take pride in the history and traditions of their Companies and many present day Company families have generations' long connections with their Company.

Apprenticeship

Sixteenth-century facsimile of a wood engraving of a medieval clothworker, published in 'Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period' by Paul Lacroix, 1847

The institution of apprenticeship has a long history, one which has been central to the development of London as a major economic power. The earliest apprenticeships in the City date from the thirteenth century, with the practice of masters taking apprentices being regulated by the City's Courts of Aldermen and Common Council in conjunction with the Livery Companies, from the very beginning. A number of Companies (such as the Fishmongers’, Loriners’ and Cordwainers’ for example) established ordinances with the assent of the Mayor which detailed the particular rights and obligations pertaining to masters and apprentices. The City ordained that the Companies had to keep registers of their members, and although the minimum term of apprenticeship was officially seven years, it has been estimated that a quarter of apprentices served longer terms (up to over a dozen years in some cases) in the first decade of the fourteenth century.

By the sixteenth century apprenticeship had become the principal method of acquiring citizenship in London, with over 90% of admissions to the Freedom taking this route in the early 1550s, for example. Interestingly, and unlike later periods, the majority of apprentices in this period were not the sons of Londoners, but were the sons of gentry, yeomen and husbandmen from the country.

In 1516 a list drawn up by the Corporation to manage disputes in the processional precedence of the Livery Companies during civic ceremonies identifies 48 'misteries' or 'crafts', each regulating an aspect of the economic and industrial life of the City. The formation of these Companies in many cases embodied several centuries of development and definition, reflecting the merging and splintering of associated trades and craft activities. Even by the sixteenth century, though, membership of a Livery Company did not necessarily signify that an individual followed the actual trade of that Company, even for those who had served a term of apprenticeship (although these individuals were more likely to follow the trade). As the data in the Records of London's Livery Companies Online project show, many freemen in a Company pursued a business or profession entirely beyond the sphere of the activities regulated by their Company.

The Database

The records of membership held by the Livery Companies constitute a richly detailed historical resource which can be used in wide range of historical and genealogical research, from the identification of networks of individuals through to an analysis of a variety of broad social and economic trends. When taken together, data drawn from a number of Companies provide the opportunity to look at patterns about living and working in London beyond the often restricted community of a single trade or profession. Questions about the size and popularity of Companies, about where and what kind of backgrounds apprentices came from, about the costs and regulation of Company membership, and so on, can all be addressed through the data gathered by the ROLLCO project.

Data from the Livery Companies' freedom and apprenticeship registers have been entered into a database by a team of freelance data inputters. In order to maintain the integrity of the sources, records were entered into the database in exactly the form that they appeared in the manuscripts - even in cases where abbreviations had been used, or where it was suspected that a mistake had been made by the clerks, or where incidental additional information was recorded.

The information gathered from the Companies' sources was the same in each case, the difference in sources notwithstanding (see The Sources below), making the data suitable for inter-Company searching and analysis. The types of information recorded in the database include:

Volume/archival information - including period covered and archival references
'Event' information about the individual apprenticeship binding or admission to the Freedom - including folio reference, dates and any additional biographical information supplied by the clerk
Specific information about the apprenticeship - including the length and value of the apprenticeship bond, the payments of any premium, the start date of the apprenticeship, any turnover information
Specific information about the admission to the Freedom - including the method of admission and any associated payments
Personal information - including names (where the original orthography has been preserved), gender, occupation, residential location (including county), the role that the individual played in a particular apprenticeship or Freedom, and their social and economic status.

All dates in the database have been recorded as they appear in the source, with a standardised and where appropriate modernised version to aid chronological searching. A Glossary of terms is provided on the Help page to help with some of the terms used in the data.

The Sources

The Clothworkers' Company

Registers of Freemen, 1545-1727
These registers record the date of the admission to the Freedom, the name of the new Freeman as well as those of his father and/or Master/Mistress' name. It is believed that these registers are indexes to more detailed registers that no longer survive.

Registers of Freemen, 1727-1900
These registers are more detailed that those from the earlier period, and typically record the new Freeman's occupation and address. Freedoms by servitude may also give the occupation and address of the Master and/or Mistress, whereas Freedoms by patrimony often record the name and date of the Freedom of the father. Details of 'tests' (witnesses) to the Freedom may also be provided. In the later nineteenth century, dates of birth are occasionally given.

Registers of Apprentices, 1606-1908
Apprenticeship records typically record the name of the new apprentice, the name, place of origin and occupation or status of the father, the name of the Master or Mistress, the date of the apprenticeship and the length of the term. The payment of bonds and premiums may also be recorded. From the 1640s, the Company's registers become more detailed and often give the occupation and address of the Master or Mistress.

Records for the period 1606-1641 exist in Latin only. A glossary of names, occupations and abbreviations is provided in the Glossary.

It is also worth noting that due to circumstances of archival practice and survival, there is some overlap in the Apprenticeship register volumes for the period 1639-1641, and a similar overlap in the Freedom records for the period 1725-1727. This may mean that a particular apprenticeship binding or Freedom admission appears more than once in the records, although different information may be available about the event in each case.

A detail from an Apprenticeship Register

The Drapers' Company

The source used for data entry of The Drapers' Company membership information is known as 'Boyd's Roll', a holograph calendar of manuscript sources created by P. Boyd in the 1930s. It covers the Company records from the thirteenth century to 1934, and provides biographical information about Drapers' members, and indeed often detailed accounts of their careers, organised in alphabetical order. Much of this information is in note form, and Boyd used his own system of abbreviations and codes. Only information directly relating to an individual’s apprenticeship or admission to the Freedom has been entered into the database.

Boyd's Roll is available in the Guildhall Library Printed Books Section, as P. Boyd, Roll of the Drapers' Company, 1934.

A sample of a Boyd’s Roll entry

The Goldsmiths' Company

The sources used to obtain information on the membership of The Goldsmiths' Company include Apprenticeship Registers, Court Books and a biographical calendar known as The Black Book. The data available in ROLLCO was originally created during the course of another project, the 1682 Mark Plate project being undertaken by Dr David Mitchell, which has been investigating the membership of The Goldsmiths’ Company during the seventeenth century. Information about individual members’ apprenticeships and Freedoms were extracted from the material gathered by this project, and the data were restructured for incorporation into ROLLCO. At the moment the data cover the period 1600-1700.

The Mercers' Company

The records of apprenticeship bindings and Freedom admissions to the Mercers' have been created from two main sources: the Index of Apprentices, and Index of Members. The Index of Apprentices (which runs up to the 1880s when apprenticeships were abolished) is derived from the Warden’s Account books (from 1390), the Acts of Court (from 1453) and apprenticeship registers.

The Freedom admissions are derived firstly from a document called Names of Freemen of the Mercers' Company from 1347 (also known as the 'Coke’s List') which was first compiled in 1528 by the clerk John Coke and was updated by successive clerks until 1915. Information is also derived from members registers which date from the 18th century to the present day, and the Acts of Court. A number of early medieval freemen (dating before the earliest Company records) have been identified by Dr Anne Sutton, a former archivist of the Mercers' Company, during her research into the medieval company.