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Charity and Gild Solidarity in Late Medieval England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Ben R. McRee
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Extract

When officers of Ludlow's Palmers' Gild composed their reply to a royal inquiry into the state of English gilds in 1388–89, they included the following description of their organization's plan for assisting indigent brothers and sisters:

When it happens that any of the brothers or sisters of the gild shall have been brought to such want, through theft, fire, shipwreck, fall of a house, or any other mishap, that they have not enough to live on; then once, twice, and thrice, but not a fourth time, as much help shall be given to them, out of the goods of the gild, as the rector and stewards, having regard to the deserts of each, and to the means of the gild, shall order; so that whoever bears the name of this gild, shall be upraised again, through the ordinances, goods, and help of his fellows.

The same gild also offered aid to sick, aged, and wrongfully imprisoned members and set aside money for dowries so that daughters of families that had experienced unexpected misfortune might marry or enter nunneries.

The Palmers' Gild was a religious fraternity, a type of voluntary association that enjoyed tremendous popularity during the late Middle Ages. These gilds were lay associations of men and women that devoted themselves to a variety of religious and social undertakings. Unlike the more well known craft fraternities, religious gilds drew their members from a variety of professions and made no attempts at industrial regulation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 195 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1993

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References

1 Public Record Office. London (hereafter PRO), c.47/45/392a–b. The translation from the original Latin has been taken from Smith, Toulmin, ed., English Gilds, Early English Text Society, original ser., no. 40 (1870; reprint, London, 1963), p. 193Google Scholar. Some words have been modernized.

2 Some “craft” gilds of the fourteenth century also lacked statutes aimed at industrial regulation. To determine whether an organization without such statutes was a craft or a religious gild, it is necessary to examine its social composition, where that is possible.

3 Lucy Toulmin Smith, writing in the introduction to her father's nineteenth-century edition of gild documents: see Smith, T., English Gilds, pp. xiv, xix–xx, xxviii–xxixGoogle Scholar. Lucy Toulmin Smith helped to publish this book after her father's death. In composing her introduction to the volume, she claimed that she had done her best to present her father's opinions, and she frequently quoted from his published work.

4 Walford, Cornelius, Gilds: Their Origin, Constitution, Objects, and Later History (London, 1879), p. 5Google Scholar.

5 This view has been popular with medievalists, early modernists, and students of Mediterranean countries since the beginning of the last decade. See, e.g., Gottfried, Robert S., Bury St. Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290–1539 (Princeton, N.J., 1982), p. 186Google Scholar. where he described the religious fraternities of that East Anglian borough as the community's “principal secular outlet for social security.” A similar line of thinking led A. L. Beier to conclude that the dissolution of gilds and chantries in sixteenth-century Warwick crippled that town's system of poor relief and left it ill-equipped to face the pressures of Tudor poverty: “The Social Problems of an Elizabethan Country Town: Warwick, 1580–90,” in Country Towns in Pre-industrial England, ed. Clark, Peter (New York, 1981), pp. 66–68Google Scholar. Marjorie K. McIntosh and Gervase Rosser, as discussed below, have expanded on Beier's view by showing how medieval gild charity was transformed in the sixteenth century into early modern parish relief: see McIntosh, Marjorie K., “Local Responses to the Poor in Late Medieval and Tudor England,” Continuity and Change 3 (1988): 209–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosser, Gervase, Medieval Westminster: 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 310–24Google Scholar. Scholars studying late medieval and early modern Italy and Spain have been even more emphatic about the charitable activities of fraternal organizations. The classic work is Brian Pullan's study of charity in early modern Venice: Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar. For more recent explorations of the issue, see Flynn, Maureen, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), pp. 44–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Black, Christopher F., Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 130–233Google Scholar. Although Black cautioned that “in dealing with philanthropic activities and institutions we should not be seeing this as the origins of a modern welfare state or society,” he quickly added that “these activities and institutions did condition the eventual formation of modern social welfare” (p. 10). A recent review essay by Andrew Barnes provides a valuable introduction to the literature on Spain and Italy: “Poor Relief and Brotherhood,” Journal of Social History 24 (1991): 603–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 McIntosh, taking rural as well as urban communities into account, wrote, e.g., that in some parts of England assistance provided by gilds eased “a considerable share of life-cycle or accidental poverty,” and suggested that gild programs of aid provided a precedent for poor laws of the Tudor age; see pp. 216, 229–30. A similar point was made by Rosser, pp. 310–24. Rosser pointed out, however, that aid administered by Westminster's Gild of Our Lady of Rounceval, his principal example of gild charity, went almost solely to nonmembers.

7 PRO C.47/38/43.

8 Rubin, Miri, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987), p. 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Barron, Caroline M., “The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London,” in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society, ed. Barron, Caroline M. and Harper-Bill, Christopher (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1985), pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

10 Hanawalt, Barbara A., The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), pp. 262–66Google Scholar; Dyer, Christopher, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 246–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hanawalt wrote that “the close-knit community of the Middle Ages began to break down by the beginning of the fifteenth century. Gilds may have been formed to meet the perceived decline in community ties” (p. 266). On this point, also see Rubin, who saw gilds and gild charity as part of a late medieval shift from “communal and cooperative” forms of charity to forms that expressed “a more personal and individual search for religious and social benefits” (p. 295).

11 Westlake, H. F.. The Parish Gilds of Mediæval England (London, 1919), p. 36Google Scholar; T. Smith (n. 1 above), pp. 127–29.

12 A total of 519 gild returns survive; after the obvious craft associations are eliminated from the pool, 473 returns from religious gilds remain. On the political background to the inquiry that produced the returns, see Tuck, J. A., “The Cambridge Parliament, 1388,” English Historical Review 84 (1969): 234–35Google Scholar. and “Nobles, Commons and the Great Revolt of 1381,” in The English Rising of 1381, ed. Hilton, R. H. and Aston, T. H. (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 208–11Google Scholar. A number of the returns have been published. Those in English, along with translations of a small number of those in Latin and French, appear in T. Smith, A useful tabular summary of the returns was issued as an appendix to Westlake. Since Westlake's work was published, nine new returns have been discovered; all are in extremely poor condition. The summaries provided by Westlake are generally accurate but inconsistent in the amount and type of detail provided. He recorded whatever he found most interesting in each gild's return, often leaving out other important information.

13 In computing these averages, gilds that reported no land holdings have been excluded. Organizations that recorded land of unspecified value have also been left out. Forty-four percent of the gilds promising aid to impoverished members reported holdings in land; among other gilds (those that did not include charitable provisions in their returns), the rate was 29 percent. Information on the value of movable goods and on entry fees cited below has been handled in a similar fashion; organizations not reporting the relevant data have been left out of the calculation of averages. Seventy-seven percent of the gilds promising assistance reported having movable goods; among other gilds, the rate was 72 percent. Twenty-eight percent of the gilds promising aid reported their entry fees; 23 percent of the other gilds did so. Including organizations that did not report financial information in their returns in the calculations changes the resulting averages but not the pattern shown in the table. If gilds that did not report land holdings are included, e.g., the average annual income from real property becomes 628d. for gilds promising charitable assistance to their members and 102d. for fraternities that made no mention of charity. Similarly, if gilds reporting no movable goods are included in the averages for the value of movable goods, the figures become 1,549d. for gilds promising assistance and 457d. for other gilds. If gilds that did not report entry fees in their returns are included in the entry fee averages, the figures become 19d. for gilds promising charity and 7d. for other gilds.

14 It is notoriously difficult to classify medieval settlements according to their sizes. Fortunately, in the case of the gilds, the poll tax of 1377. one of the few national indicators of late medieval population, was collected only a dozen years before the gild returns were made. This tax was meant to be levied on every lay resident over fourteen years of age who was not indigent. Choosing a somewhat arbitrary minimum of one thousand taxpayers as the criterion for the status of a large urban settlement, twenty-one places represented in the 1389 returns qualify. The relationship between the number of taxpayers recorded for each of these localities and its total population can only be estimated. A reasonable multiplier that allows for children, the poor, and underenumeration probably lies between 1.6 and 2.2. Using these figures, the large urban threshold of one thousand taxpayers translates to a total population of between 1.600 and 2,200 residents. As this range suggests, the classification scheme has the disadvantage of separating a number of substantial market towns from the large urban category and grouping them with the rural settlements. With the limit fixed at one thousand, places such as Warwick, Lancaster, and Cirencester fall into the small town and village category. Although this is awkward and surely distorts the results, it should only work to reduce the contrast between urban and rural gilds, making the two groups look more alike. Differences that remain despite the presence of small-town gilds among the village organizations are all the more likely to represent real contrasts between urban and rural fraternities. Tinkering with the large urban threshold. I have discovered, produces small changes in the resulting percentages, but does not alter the basic pattern. The list of cities whose populations exceed the minimum for large urban settlements embraced seventeen of England's twenty-five largest 1377 settlements, including London, York, Coventry, and Norwich. Significantly absent because no gild returns survive for them were Bristol, Salisbury, and Colchester, among others. A total of 191 gilds qualified as large urban associations, and 104 of these promised some form of assistance to their members. Of the remaining 282 gilds, only 41 mentioned relief provisions. (Due to damaged returns, it was impossible to determine whether or not several of the 191 urban gilds had assistance programs. These organizations have been left out of the calculation, accounting for the small discrepancy between a percentage calculated using the figures quoted here and the percentage cited in the text.) Taxpayer totals and the ranking of towns have been taken from Hoskins, W. G., Local History in England (London, 1959), p. 176Google Scholar. London has been added to the top of Hoskins's list for the purposes of this analysis. For discussions of multipliers, see Hatcher, John, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (London, 1977), pp. 13–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Richard, “Human Resources,” in The Countryside of Medieval England, ed. Astill, Grenville and Grant, Annie (Oxford, 1988), p. 190Google Scholar. The number of taxpayers is not the only criterion that can be used to separate urban and rural communities, of course, nor is it necessarily the best. The possession of a charter, the privilege of parliamentary representation, or the occupational distribution of the inhabitants might also serve, and each has found its adherents at one time or another. The resort to the taxpaying population, while admittedly crude, is well suited to classifying the long list of places whence gild returns came in 1389.

15 The inability to carry on one's trade or profession seems, in fact, to have been the principal criterion for deciding who deserved gild assistance. Members who met this criterion would have been classed with the deserving poor, a group that included orphans, widows, the aged, the sick, the maimed, and otherwise self-supporting men and women who had fallen on hard times due to events beyond their control. Relieving victims of such predicaments was the explicitly stated goal of at least one gild. Coventry's Gild Merchant reported in 1389 that it spent more than £35 each year to maintain thirty-one of its members who were unable to work: see PRO C.47/46/439a, b. For other organizations, similar policies can be inferred from the text of their statutes, as shown in the discussion that follows.

16 PRO C.47/38/45a–f. The translation is from T. Smith, p. 166. For another example, see the return for the Corpus Christi Gild at Stretham, PRO C.47/38/31.

17 PRO C.47/38/43. The gild also offered assistance in more prosaic circumstances: its return mentioned victims of fires, floods, robberies, and illnesses as deserving of aid.

18 The Corpus Christi Gild in Stretham; see PRO C.47/38/31.

19 For example, the Gild of Saint Thomas of Canterbury in Lynn (PRO C.47/43/271). the Gild of Saint Leonard in the same city (C.47/43/260), the Gild of Saint John the Baptist in Wisbech (C.47/38/39a, b). and the Pater Noster Gild in York (C.47/46/454).

20 Hatcher, pp. 26–30, 58–62; Razi, Zvi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 128–29, 150–51Google Scholar; Carmichael, Ann G., Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 1986), chaps. 2, 4Google Scholar.

21 Gilds that specifically mentioned old age in their relief provisions included the Holy Cross Gild in London (PRO C.47/41/190), the Gild of Saint Mary in Chesterfield (C.47/38/45a–f), the Gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Kingston-on-Hull (C.47/46/451), the Corpus Christi Gild in the same city (C.47/46/449), and the Gild of Saint George in Lincoln (C.47/40/141).

22 Some gilds provided food or clothing for poor members instead of or in addition to cash. The Gild of Saint George the Martyr at Great Yarmouth, e.g., issued a cloak, a hood, a pair of hose, a pair of shoes, and a measure of linen annually to impoverished members; see PRO C.47/45/369. The Holy Trinity Gild in the same town promised a tunic with a hood and three pairs of shoes each year in addition to a generous weekly stipend of 10 1/2d. per week; see PRO C.47/45/373. The statutes of the Gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Stretham, Cambridgeshire, provide an indication of the value of such gifts, specifying that the cloaks it distributed to poor members were to be worth at least 18d. apiece and the shoes it handed out were to cost at least 6d. a pair; see PRO C.47/38/32. Other gilds offered to provide needy members with food, lodging, or other necessities; see PRO C.47/46/440a, b, C.47/38/48.

23 The Gild of the Purification: see PRO C.47/46/448.

24 PRO C.47/40/141.

25 Of the four London gilds whose returns specified the amount of the stipend, three promised 14d. per week and one 7d. per week; see PRO C.47/41/190. C.47/42/207. C.47/42/209a. b, and C.47/41/189.

26 Instead of using weekly payments to assist poor members, a few gilds preferred to make annual disbursements. Averaged over the course of a year, these sums usually work out to be less than the weekly stipends and would probably not have been sufficient to meet even basic living expenses. In Crowland. e.g., the Gild of All Saints gave indigent members 40d. for the year, a sum equivalent to less than 1d. per week; see PRO C.47/39/96. Other gilds made larger grants, but treated them as loans and required repayment. In Kingston-on-Hull, for example, the Gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary promised to lend 10s. to any man or single woman who had fallen into poverty. Although the fraternity requested that the money be paid back within three years, it offered to forgive the debt if the borrower proved unable to repay the loan after that interval; see PRO C.47/46/451. The Gild of Saint Lawrence in Lincoln also made loans to its members, but added that no one who had failed to repay a debt should receive further funds from the gild: see PRO C.47/40/142. The offer of a loan rather than a weekly stipend was an expression of the gild's confidence that the victim would soon be on his or her feet again and would not require aid for an extended period. A distinction drawn by the Kingston-on-Hull gild brings this attitude out clearly. The fraternity's statutes drew a distinction between the needs of chronically poor members and those of brothers and sisters experiencing momentary financial embarrassment. Members of the latter group, whose predicament was temporary, were offered loans; those belonging to the former group, many of whom were suffering from severe disabilities and were likely to require support for months or even years, were promised weekly stipends.

27 Dyer (n. 10 above), p. 253.

28 Ibid., p. 208.

29 Phythian-Adams, Charles, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), p. 133Google Scholar.

30 In evaluating the standard of living of those receiving aid, bear in mind that recipients may not have derived all of their income from gild stipends. In many cases, aid from family members, voluntary contributions from friends, and cash derived from pawning or selling household goods would have supplemented the gild-furnished stipend and permitted a somewhat more satisfactory style of life.

31 PRO C.47/38/39a–b, C.47/44/318. The latter was the Gild of the Holy Trinity, Saint Mary, and All Saints at Roughton, Norfolk. The Wisbech gild was not impoverished, but it may have been strapped for cash. It reported in 1388–89 that it had spent over £80 the previous year on services and on repairs to the local church. The Roughton gild did not report its wealth.

32 One way out of this predicament was to ask gild members for individual contributions whenever a brother or sister needed financial assistance. A number of fraternities attempted to protect their finances by taking this approach. The Gild of the Purification in Lynn, e.g., requested 4d. annually from every member to support an indigent brother or sister (PRO C.47/42/245); other Lynn gilds followed the same strategy. The size of the stipends awarded by these gilds depended, of course, on the number of members who could make the annual contribution. A gild with one hundred solvent members could, e.g., have collected 400d. for the year, enough to pay an impoverished member a weekly stipend of just under 8d. Although the size of the Lynn organizations is not known, other gilds in the same city counted fewer than one hundred members. Forty-three members of the Gild of Saint Francis paid a fee to the gild in 1467, e.g., and subsidy payments from members of the Gild of Saint Giles and Julian in 1422 suggest a total of 56 members; in 1404–5, twenty-eight members of the Corpus Christi Gild made a payment to the fraternity; see Gildhall, King's Lynn (hereafter KL) Gd. 80, Gd. 37, Gd. 7. A few gilds left the size of donations to the discretion of individual members. The Gild of Saint Thomas in Lynn, e.g., simply requested that its members provide whatever aid they could to an impoverished brother or sister (C.47/43/271). Similarly, a gild in Bury St. Edmunds offered to take up a collection for a poor member among his or her fellows (C.47/46/415a, b). This approach had the advantage of shielding members from unreasonable burdens, of course, but it risked leaving impoverished individuals with inadequate stipends. By asking members to reach into their own pockets, all these gilds helped both to maintain positive balances in their accounts and to insure the availability of aid for destitute members. The financial burden of aiding the needy was not eliminated by the approach, of course; it was merely shifted from the communal funds of the organization to the private resources of its members. It is worth noting, finally, that some organizations asked solvent members to make payments directly to those in need, with the result that aid never passed through the hands of gild officials, a procedure that may help to explain the lack of evidence attesting actual distribution of assistance for some fraternities. The Lynn gilds dedicated to the Purification and to Saint Thomas cited above are possible examples of this practice; for another instance see the Gild of the Annunciation in Norwich (C.47/43/290).

33 The influence of popular piety should also be mentioned in this connection. As historians of continental fraternities have pointed out, the visions of personal disaster and promises of relief described in gild statutes follow a pattern outlined in the Acts of Mercy, a code of charitable behavior rooted in the biblical text of Matthew and later refined and promoted by the medieval church. The code enjoined Christians to feed the hungry, provide drink for the thirsty, clothe the naked, lodge the homeless, visit the sick, assist the imprisoned, and bury the dead, all activities undertaken by religious gilds. Assisting the needy in these ways was seen as a means of acquiring grace and easing the path to paradise; see Flynn (n. 5 above), pp. 44–49; C. Black (n. 5 above), pp. 3–10; Banker, James R., Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages (Athens, Ga., 1988), pp. 174–77Google Scholar. This point has not been emphasized in the historiography of English gilds, probably because English organizations did not often mention piety as a motivation for charitable provisions. This state of affairs may have been due to the relative unimportance of the mendicant orders in English gild life. It should be noted, in addition, that gild mercy was not undiscriminating. It favored members over outsiders and went to some trouble to distinguish deserving from undeserving recipients; the indigent were not all equally worthy of gild favor.

34 Scholars of the early modern period have noted a sharp change in attitudes toward begging in the early sixteenth century; see C. Black, pp. 133–47. Rubin (n. 8 above) has argued that a similar attitude emerged some years earlier in England; see pp. 289–99.

35 This gild paid a stipend of 14d. per week; see PRO C.47/42/209a–b.

36 The Gild of Our Lady and Saint Giles; see PRO C.47/42/205.

37 PRO C.47/46/438, C.47/40/124.

38 PRO C.47/46/440a–b.

39 PRO C.47/38/8: “si non per latrocinium merelricium seu aliam viam malignam.”

40 The Gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Harlaxton, Lincolnshire: see PRO C.47/40/124.

41 Social scientists have recently recognized the importance of mutual obligation to fraternal culture. See Black, Antony, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca. N.Y., 1984), pp. 5–8, 26–27Google Scholar; and Clawson, Mary Ann, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J., 1989), pp. 41–42Google Scholar.

42 For a discussion of gilds as surrogate family, see Hanawalt (n. 10 above), pp. 262–66. It apparently did not matter that pledges of assistance were redeemed only rarely. It was the commitment that was important, and the commitment could be affirmed by occasional fulfillment or even by regular repetition of an oath that included promises of assistance to those in need.

43 It is important to remember that the survey of 1388–89 was not historical. It gathered information only on those organizations actually in existence during those years. As a result it is not possible to eliminate the hypothesis that charitable provisions might have declined in popularity during the fourteenth century. To make a definitive determination, it would be necessary to have information on all pre-1359 gilds, not just those that survived until 1388–1389, information that does not exist. Forty-two out of 102 charitable gilds for which a date of foundation survives were founded before 1359; for gilds without charitable provisions, it was sixty-four out of 204.

44 Accounts of the Gild of Saint George cover the following years: 1420–21, 1427–34, 1436, 1445–47, 1461–69, 1472–74, 1477–83, 1491–94, 1496–97, 1499–1505, 1507, 1515–16, 1518–26, 1529–48: see Norwich Record Office, Norwich (hereafter NRO) 8/e, 8/f, 17/b. Minutes of gild meetings from 1451–1547 have been printed: see Grace, Mary, ed., Records of the Gild of St. George in Norwich, 1389–1547, Norfolk Record Society, vol. 9 (n.p., 1937)Google Scholar. Records of nine Lynn gilds survive: Saint John the Baptist (KL Gd.81). Great Gild of the Holy Trinity (KL C5 2, C38 1–31, Gd. 44: Arundel Castle MS MD 424–26, 1477, 1479). Corpus Christi (KL Gd. 16–31, 33, 48). Saints Giles and Julian (KL Gd.36–37). Holy Trinity, South Lynn (KL Gd.76–77). Saint George (KL Gd.34–35). Saint Francis (KL Gd.80), Saint Anthony (KL Gd.78), and All Saints (KL Gd.79). Records for the gilds of Saint John the Baptist, Holy Trinity South Lynn, and Saint George are sketchy.

45 Lynn's Gild of Saints Giles and Julian did record a single payment to a member in need, awarding 25d. to an unnamed individual in 1428; see KL Gd.37. Unfortunately, the gild offered no explanation of the nature of the recipient's difficulty, and aid was not continued in the years that followed. The fraternity had promised aid to indigent members in its 1388–89 return, although it did not specify the level of assistance to be provided: see PRO C.47/42/250.

46 For general accounts of these organizations, see Gross, Charles, The Gild Merchant: A Contribution to British Municipal History, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1890), 1:161–62Google Scholar, 2:151–70: Owen, Dorothy M., ed., The Making of King's Lynn (London, 1984). pp. 61–63, 295–317Google Scholar: Hudson, William and Tingey, John Cottingham. eds., The Records of the City of Norwich, 2 vols. (Norwich, 1906–1910), 1:xcix–ci, 2:cxli–cxliii, 395–401Google Scholar; Grace, ed., pp. 3–25; and McRee, Ben R., “Religious Gilds and Civic Order: The Case of Norwich in the Late Middle Ages,” Speculum 67 (1992): 69–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 KL C.38/1–C.38/31.

48 The gild's entry fine stabilized at £5 in 1416: see KL C.38/10.

49 Without comprehensive membership information, it is impossible to say what proportion of the fraternity's total membership women constituted. Lists of new members do exist for three years during the early fifteenth century, however. Of the forty-nine names they contain, twenty-three were those of women; see KL C.38/10, 11, 12. As will be suggested below, however, the majority of the recipients appear not to have been members of the gild.

50 A Calendar of the Freemen of Lynn, 1292–1836 (Norwich, 1913), pp. 30–31Google Scholar; KL C.38/16–18.

51 PRO C.47/43/277.

52 KL C.38/8–KL C.38/28.

53 K.L C.38/1–C.38/18; Arundel Castle MS, MD 1479. The amounts devoted to charity were remarkably consistent over a sixty-nine year period. The lowest amount was £11 10s. 4d. in 1431, the highest was £25 10s. in 1396. In 1385, the year closest to the 1389 return for which an account survives, the gild devoted £16 7s. 8d. to relief. After 1442, the sums devoted to relief were considerably smaller. Between 1463 (the next complete account) and 1484 (the last one), the average payment for the eight complete accounts that survive was only £2 8s. 8d.

54 KL C.38/17. As one of this journal's readers kindly pointed out, it is possible that Dunton and Narburgh received twice as much as the widow Alice Burgeysse because they were married. The accounts do not specify whether payments were made weekly, annually, or at some other interval. As payments to some recipients were explicitly noted as being for half or three-quarters of the year, however, it is likely that aid was delivered more often than annually.

55 Pullan (n. 5 above), pp. 80–83. See also Trexler, Richard C.. “Charity and the Defense of Urban Elites in the Italian Communes,” in The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful, ed. Jaher, Frederic Cople (Urbana, Ill., 1973), pp. 64–109Google Scholar. esp. pp. 69–76: C. Black (n. 5 above), pp. 147–50; Flynn (n. 5 above), pp. 78–83.

56 The names of all three had appeared in a declaration drawn up in the early part of the century listing 154 residents who had agreed to a settlement in a dispute over the election of the city's mayor. The declaration divided those listed into three status groups: potenciores, mediocres, and inferiores. Of the remaining recipients, the name of only one appears on the list. John Sherman, who received a payment of 4s. was listed with the mediocres. The declaration appears in Owen, ed. (n. 46 above), pp. 392–93.

57 PRO C.47/43/277.

58 T. Smith (n. 1 above), p. 453. On the early history of the gild in general, see McRee (n. 46 above).

59 The gild passed an ordinance in 1451 requiring an annual payment from every brother of the fraternity. Recipients from this assessment did not appear in the accounts with regularity until 1469. Between 1469 and 1548, the number of dues-paying members ranged from a low of 114 in 1507–8 to a high of 184 in 1521–22. In most years, however, the number of payments was close to the average of 150: see NRO 8/e, 8/f, passim; Grace ed. (n. 44 above), p. 44.

60 The figures for the Gild of Saint George have been gleaned from the annual account rolls; see NRO 8/e and 8/f.

61 PRO C.47/43/296. When the payments made to a member were not meant to cover an entire year, the records specified the number of weeks during which aid was given. The smaller-than-promised stipend cannot be due. then, to cases in which members received less than a full year's assistance.

62 NRO 8/e. Digard received the higher rate of 6d. per week. A gap of nine years separated the 1445 account from the previous one. so it was possible that Digard began receiving assistance before 1445.

63 Grace, ed., p. 71; NRO 8/e.

64 Blomefield, Francis. An Assay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 2d ed., II vols. (London, 1805–1810), 3:182–83Google Scholar.

65 Ibid., 3:207.

66 The gild's officers did meet in the wake of the fire, and in 1510 the minutes refer to the destruction caused by the blaze: see Grace, ed., pp. 106–7.

67 PRO E.301/31/28, 15, 1, 2, 43, 35, respectively. Warwickshire was the only county where the commissioners regularly separated relief to members from other charitable expenditures.

68 See n. 53 above.

69 Bennett, Judith M., “Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 134(1992), pp. 19–41Google Scholar; Rubin (n. 8 above), pp. 99–288, esp. pp. 237–88; McIntosh (n. 5 above), pp. 213–30. A “help-ale,” as described by Bennett, was a festive gathering organized by friends of an impoverished man or woman. Ale was brewed and sold to those who came, the profits then being given to the friend in need.

70 McRee (n. 46 above), pp. 72–73.