Costume

ISSN: 0590-8876 (Print) 1749-6306 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycos20

Aspects of the Tailoring Trade in the City of London

in the Late Sixteenth and Earlier Seventeenth
Centuries

Nigel Sleigh-Johnson

To cite this article: Nigel Sleigh-Johnson (2003) Aspects of the Tailoring Trade in the City of
London in the Late Sixteenth and Earlier Seventeenth Centuries, Costume, 37:1, 24-32, DOI:
10.1179/cos.2003.37.1.24

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/cos.2003.37.1.24

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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 Aspects of the Tailoring Trade in the City of
london in the late Sixteenth and Earlier
Seventeenth Centuries
By NIGEL SLEIGH-JOHNSON

THE LONDONTAILORING TRADEis not the subject of major studies of its nature and
development in the early modern period. The main features of the trade by the early
eighteenth century are well known through the observations of Cambell and Galton's
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collection of petitions, 1 but the chronology and nature of the undoubtedly wide-
ranging changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are more opaque.
Responsibility for the representation and regulation of the City's tailors lay with one
of the major London guilds, the Merchant Taylors Company, in particular its
yeomanry organization. This aspect of the trade - a crucial dimension of business
activity in the capital in the early modern period - cannot be explored in any detail in
this article. Nevertheless, the Company's manuscript collection represents the starting
point for any attempt to reconstruct the development of the trade. Like the records of
other key London guilds with industrial roots, the minute books and other records of
the Company refer frequently to its nominal trade, often setting out verbatim the
petitions submitted by artisan members.2
To understand the development of the trade, it is necessary to draw on a range of
supplementary sources, including, for example, probate inventories of tailors, the
financial accounts of the Royal Household and Great Wardrobe, and the archives of
the municipal government - which include highly informative later seventeenth-
century petitions drawn up by London tailors which appear to have gone unnoticed
by historians. The incomplete nature of the sources, and in particular the difficulty of
gathering reliable quantitative data must render any analysis unsatisfactory in many
respects, as well as laborious. For example, the occupations of individual freemen
were not recorded routinely in any of the Company's extensive regulatory records and
are only referred to incidentally in the minute books. However, in respect of that part
of the capital under the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor, these sources do provide a
tentative picture of the trade and the nature and ramifications of change in the late
sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries.

THE 'ACCUSTOMED
TRADE'
In one sense, tailoring in early modern London defies generalization. The City lay
close to the royal court and law courts, and its many well-to-do inhabitants were
joined by seasonally resident gentlemen and others who made special trips to the
capital to buy new clothing and other goods. A sense of fashion was pervasive in the
capital, despite Elizabethan sumptuary legislation. In r6r2, for example, an imaginary
visitor to London was warned that 'here, men were look'd upon only for their
 TAILORING IN THE CITY 25
outsides,.3 This provided enormous business opportunities for the skilful and
enterprising master tailor. The most successful amongst them could attain an
economic and social status that marked them out from the mass of small masters,
often beset by under-employment and prey to slumps in the demand for new clothing
when economic conditions deteriorated, as in the 1590s.
Despite the social and economic gulf separating ordinary freemen from the well-to-
do master engaged in supplying the most profitable sector of the market, the trade
prior to 1650 was remarkably homogenous. Even the largest producers tended to be
personally involved in the manual side of the business, and most tailors manufactured
all types of garments for men, women and children. It is therefore possible to explore
the principal characteristics of the trade without undue simplification.
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Tailors did not require specialized premises or extensive plant and equipment.
Most conducted their trade in small workshops attached to their residences. The
shops of tailors taking up leases or loans from the Merchant Taylors' Company were
dispersed throughout the City, with some concentrations in the late sixteenth and
earlier seventeenth centuries in areas such as Lothbury, the Old Bailey and in
particular the 'liberty' of Blackfriars. The tools of the trade typically included a
wooden rule; needles and thimbles; one or more pairs of tailor's scissors or 'shears';
one or more cutting boards; and 'shopboards', on which the master and his
apprentices would sit cross-legged while stitching and sewing.4
Tailors needed to maintain only a small stock of materials. A quantity of stiffener,
trimmings and linings would normally be on hand, together with remnants of cloth
and items of work- in-progress. Expensive materials such as silks, velvet and gold were
normally provided by the customer. Bills of charges tended to cover only labour and
'small furnishings' such as canvas and buckram. In 1612, a tailor's workshop in
Chancery Lane contained stock and work-in-progress valued at a little over £15,
comprising twelve pairs of cuffs, ten ruff-bands, fifty-one 'falling bands', four yards of
canvas, four pieces of lace and work-in-progress - three shirts, a number of pairs of
hose and five caps.5 In 1613, the shop of a tailor in Cripplegate contained just three
garments under preparation and four yards of 'striped stuff' provided by a customer.6
A newly qualified freeman clearly did not require a large amount of capital to set up
on his own account as a producer of new garments. In contrast, a prospective master
clothworker needed to expend considerable sums in acquiring tenter grounds,
'houseinge, and other ymplementes' - over £100 in some cases as early as the 1560s,7
a sum still regarded as adequate start-up capital for London tailors in the mid-
eighteenth century. Nor did prospective tailors require the robust physical constitution
demanded by many early modern handicrafts. Indeed, whilst a reasonable level of
physical fitness and good eye-sight was important, later seventeenth-century publica-
tions poked fun at the tailor's alleged unmanliness and lack of sexual competence.8
Further, the level of skill required to cut out and stitch together the constituent
parts of basic garments in a 'clouterly' manner was limited and widely held; tailoring
was as simple or as sophisticated a trade as the skills of individual manufacturers
permitted. To be successful in early modern London, a tailor had to be able to
manufacture and decorate a wide range of garments for both sexes, and versatile
enough to adapt to changing fashion. Elderly tailors lacking the 'experience or
 26 COSTUME

Cunnying to Cutt of shape Garmentes of the newe & diverse fashions' were forced to
fall back on repair work. 9 Conversely, even in the changed circumstances of the 1670s,
a City freeman with sufficient 'ingenuity' could establish a flourishing tailoring
business soon after completing his apprenticeship.
The available evidence also indicates that before 1650 tailoring in London was
usually based on a small working unit. The 1563 Statute of Artificers required
employers engaged in the main handicrafts to hire journeymen for periods of at least
twelve months and, moreover, to maintain one journeyman for every third and
subsequent apprentice. These requirements were opposed vigorously by London
tailors, many of whom were prosecuted under the legislation. It is clear that
journeymen continued to be employed as necessary to complete orders - sometimes
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just two or three days - and that the majority of masters worked on a day-to-day basis
with a handful of apprentices and perhaps one journeyman. In 1609, twenty-four alien
garment-makers were licensed to work within the City franchises with thirty-four
'servants' between them, while ten years earlier a detailed survey of unfree tailors
working within the franchises found that on average each employed a total of only 2.2
journeymen and apprentices. 10
By the 1560s, the Merchant Taylors' Company had imposed a requirement for new
freemen of 'the handicraft' to 'bee with some free mane' (usually their former master)
for twelve months, if offered employment. The contracts, occasionally noted in the
Company records, reveal that journeymen received a fixed wage plus 'meat and drink'
in return for one year's labour. In practice, many journeymen were also rewarded
partly in kind, receiving expensive remnants which could be resold to brokers - a
practice frowned on by the Elizabethan municipal authorities as it was linked to a
thriving trade in stolen remnants. 11
Until the second quarter of the seventeenth century, there are no signs of the
existence of a class of journeymen with interests and concerns distinct from their
masters, as had existed in the early fifteenth century. Company records confirm the
impression that apprenticeship tended to be followed by no more than a short period
of employment. For example, tailor Richard Levitt, who later supplemented his
income by working as a Company 'informer' against 'unfree' tailors, attained the
status of City freeman in May 1588, and registered his first apprentice in January 1590.
Similarly, fellow tailor and informer Raphe Ledsham took up his freedom in February
1596 and enrolled his first apprentice just twelve months later.
The more successful masters had major account customers who were invoiced
periodically, sometimes annually. While the extended credit terms sometimes caused
cash flow difficulties, the arrangements at least provided some certainty of demand.
Most small producers faced economic uncertainty even in periods of general
prosperity as a result of the highly uneven and seasonal nature of demand for new
clothing in the capital. The seasonality of demand became marked under Elizabeth I,
and was emphasized in wide-ranging extant petitions drawn up in the 1670Sand 1680s
by London master tailors. The petitioners justified their demands for more flexible
employment practices by explaining that 'trade consists principally in the Spring and
the F oure termes in the yeare, funerals & some weddings which commonly require a
quick despatch'. 12
 TAILORING IN THE CITY 27
The underemployment of many small producers and their workforces and the
relative ease with which unauthorized workers could turn their hand to tailoring may
go some way to explaining the remarkably determined efforts of tailors affiliated to the
Merchant Taylors' Company to utilize its wide powers to defend their local monopoly
of production. Whilst membership had never been confined to artisans engaged in
tailoring, it is clear that 'members of the handicraft' were by far the single largest
occupational group in the early modern period. In the thirty-six months from May
r607, no less than seventy-nine per cent of the masters whose occupations were
incidentally referred to in the unusually detailed court minutes were described as
'cutting tailors'. Even in r660, by which time free tailors had begun to desert the City
for the suburbs and the Company was losing touch with many of its poorer members,
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the apprentice binding books (more detailed from r658) describe thirty-five per cent
of masters binding apprentices as tailors, with closely allied trades accounting for a
further nine per cent.
The flexibility inherent in the 'Custom of London' meant that not all tailors were
affiliated to the guild nominally responsible for their trade. However, membership of
the Merchant Taylors Company brought major advantages for tailors, who became
members of a remarkable yeomanry organization that represented a self-regulating
and self-sufficient industrial and fraternal social organization. Only the Drapers
Company seems to have attracted more than a handful of tailor~. Of 528 freemen
paying quarterages to that guild in r624, rr6 were described as tailors. 13Although the
'divers cutting tailors freemen of severall Companies' whose representatives submitted
a petition to the Company in r649 were estimated to number in total 'many hundreds',
complaints about the existence of tailors not affiliated to the Company were
conspicuous by their absence in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries.
The total number of Londoners engaged in the manufacture of new garments -
legally or illegally - between r580 and r650 must have been substantial, but reliable
estimation from the records examined is not possible. A contemporary estimate of the
number of freeman operating independently as 'working Tailors' within the City
franchises in the r630s was 'at least one thousand' .14This seems likely to have been
an underestimate. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Merchant Taylors' Company
had more members than any other guild in the capital,15 and in the first half of the
seventeenth century annual enrolments reached astonishing - and subsequently
unsurpassed - levels: an average of 586 apprentices and 225 freemen were enrolled
annually, a high - albeit uncertain - proportion of them tailors. The estimate would
have excluded the growing class of large employers and 'salesmen tailors', several
hundred free journeymen (who banded together to present their own grievances to
the Company in the r630s) and of course 'unfree' workers.
More precise figures for this final category are provided by the results of an extensive
survey of tailors working without authorization within the City area undertaken in
r599. This identified 4r8 independent producers, employing between them 9ro
journeymen and apprentices. 16It was also alleged that several hundred alien tailors-
who traditionally looked to the Crown to protect their livelihoods - were working in
and around the City.
 28 COSTUME

HOUSEHOLD AND SPECIALIST TAILORS

Not every London tailor worked in his own shop producing the full range of
contemporary garments. A number of citizens emulated the nobility in maintaining
tailors as domestic servants, a practice linked by Merchant Taylors to evasion of the
apprenticeship regulations by freemen who did not register apprentices and sub-
sequently placed them as 'servinge men in gentilmens houses'. However, although in
r634 the yeomanry governors took legal advice regarding 'serving-men' who 'under
coulour of domisticall servants make garments for others', their existence in London
was not a matter of concern until the mid-seventeenth century. By r650, the increasing
difficulties of the poorer small masters led to general condemnation of the 'Aldermen
Merchants & other persons of quality' maintaining domestic tailors and the Company
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governors demanded action from the City's Common Council. As a first step, it was
suggested that 'delinquents' should be removed from the houses of Common
Councillors themselves. 17
Of greater concern to small masters was the growing prominence of 'salesmen
tailors' in London. By the mid-Elizabethan period, the area around Birchin Lane,
extending to Lombard Street and Cornhill, was an established centre for the retail sale
of ready-made garments. The 'salesmen' referred to in Company and municipal
records of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were generally trained
tailors, although some were retailers who combined the sale of cloth and ready-made
clothing made under contract. Merchant Taylor William Hicks of Watling Street was
described as a 'draper' in r630 and a 'salesman' in r632 when applying for Company
loan capital. Edward Mountford, a yeomanry warden in r647, was referred to as a
'salesman draper' in r633 and a 'draper' in r637.
The enthusiastic selling techniques and Sunday opening hours of the City salesmen
were unpopular with some citizens as early as the r580s.18 Their critical observations
receive emphatic confirmation in the r6r2 tale of a visitor to London 'most terribly
and sharp ely set upon' by apprentices of ready-made garment retailers when passing
through Birchin Lane. The enthusiastic young men persuaded him with much
'bawling in his ears' to purchase a new suit of apparel with every conceivable sartorial
accessory.19
Off-the-peg garments were cheaper than tailor-made, but were of suspect quality.
In r6r6, joint searches of the 'shoppes and houses' of City salesmen by representatives
of the Merchant Taylors and Drapers companies were initiated following allegations
that many of the salesmen sold clothing 'deceiptyfully made either in the outside or
Lyninge'.20 Complaints about the quality of salesmen's work were repeated in the
r640s and r680s. London salesmen were lambasted for using cheap materials and
inferior or second-hand linings, and for making garments in one quarter of the time
taken by the 'accustomed Tayler'. 21The ferocity of later complaints appears to reflect
the increasing scale of the ready-made trade from c. r625. A growing number of
freemen identified as salesmen applied for loan capital from the Merchant Taylors'
Company from the r620s, and in the r680s it was alleged that within living memory
only a few salesmen had operated in the City.
 TAILORING IN THE CITY 29
A TRADE IN TRANSITION

The increasing prominence of the clothing salesman from the second quarter of the
seventeenth century is just one of the clear signs that incipient capitalism was
beginning to take hold in the capital's tailoring trade.
Early modern London, with its lucrative markets and abundant business opportun-
ities, had always boasted an elite of handicraftsmen who were well-to-do and
influential citizens. They were often succeeded as market leaders by their former
apprentices. For example, the numerous freemen instructed by royal tailor Walter
Fysshe included William Baxter, who became a member of the Company 'livery' in
r570, and William Edney, never a member of the livery but a major employer and one
of the wealthiest members of the Company by the r570s. During the twelve months to
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October r568, Edney registered no less than thirteen apprentices to work alongside
several trainees enrolled prior to r567. His apprentices included Anthony Holmeade,
who served as livery warden in r608, and William Mormay, a leading yeomanry officer
until co-opted to the livery of the Company in r6ro. Mormay had been fined in r608
for employing an apprentice of another City tailor without permission.
Many successful tailors accumulated impressive estates by the time of their deaths.
Whereas John Burnford, an active member of the yeomanry government from r594 to
r633, left few possessions except some silverware and interests in leases in Worcester
and London,22 fellow tailor George Furseman, a yeomanry governor from r624 to
r647, left an estate valued at £342.23 Francis Taylor, a member of the livery and one
of the 'cutting taylors' appointed to a new regulatory committee in r650, left an estate
valued at close to £r,ooo when he died in lodgings in r667.24
As early modem tailors, men like Edney, Mormay and Taylor stood at the apex of a
hierarchy of success and wealth in the same way as royal tailor and leading Merchant
Taylor George Lovekyn had between r470 and r504.25 However, by r625 the process
whereby a numerous but minority group of larger employers and retailers came to
dominate the trade was already visible. In the early seventeenth century, fixed-term
and interest-free Company loans - generally available only to drapers and merchants,
with a.number reserved for clothworkers - were increasingly sought by 'makers of
garments'. This lead to pressure to ignore restrictions imposed by original benefactors,
usually wealthy former members of the livery. In December r600, tailor William
Greene of Blackfriars was denied £25 reserved for young drapers, but the following
year obtained £r2 ros. reserved primarily for clothworkers. In r607, Budge Row
'cloakmaker' Roger Olton obtained £50 left in trust for merchants, and seven years
later one of the £25 loans sought by Greene in r600 was awarded to a Dowgate
'cloakmaker'.
The demand for business capital amongst tailors led to the establishment in r6r6 of
four £25 loans for 'young artificers', which were immediately taken up by tailors. In
r6r7, another four £25 sums were provided for young men using the 'handicraft of
Taylery', all of which were allocated within weeks. In the five years from r630, one
hundred loans were made to Merchant Taylors, of whom thirty-two were tailors and
another twelve were salesmen or other clothing retailers. 'Makers of garments', such
as Richard Herbert and John Sutton, who borrowed £roo technically reserved for
 30 COSTUME

merchants in r646 and r65r respectively, were clearly investing in greater stock levels
and larger or more attractive premises. A tailor's will of r674 reveals that his shop in
St Clement Dane contained luxurious trimmings and materials valued at £420 stored
in a street-front area, with remnants of cloth displayed in the shop-window.
Manufacturing activity was undertaken in an adjoining workshop. 26
The impact of capitalists on the London tailoring trade between r625 and r675 can
be assessed only imperfectly, but was clearly profound. In r633, the Merchant Taylors'
Company reported to the municipal government that the number of 'able' freemen
had greatly diminished, an assertion which appears to be confirmed by the emergence
in r634 - for the first time in over two centuries - of a coherent body of journeymen
tailors.
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In February r634, the yeomanry governors drew attention to the grievances of the
'exceedingly impoverished ... working Tailors', householders 'living solely by their
handy labour', blaming alien, unfree and household tailors and - for the first time -
the number of handicraftsmen resident in the suburbs. Of greater significance was the
presentation of a separate petition by 'diverse Journeymen working Tailors freemen'
to the Company eight months later. The journeymen explained that they had met
with journeymen tailors affiliated to other City guilds and established a network of
contacts designed to ensure that 'the Maisters' could at the shortest notice draw on
the labour of free 'workemen', and were now anxious to obtain approval of these
actions by the Company. There are no indications that bodies of journeymen had
formed even during the worst years of the r590s, and while the r634 network may
have been a temporary phenomenon, it appears to have resembled the 'House of Call'
system described by Campbell over a century later.27
The impression that many less wealthy freemen were beginning to struggle to
acquire or maintain the status of independent producer is strengthened by the
r649-r650 agitation of 'divers poore men being Working Taylors'. Their complaints
were directed not only against traditional adversaries such as 'foreign' (unfree)
workers, but against 'divers rich men' who 'by takinge over great multitudes of
Apprentices' were undermining all 'mechanicall Taylors'. The rich men were said to
include 'salesmen' with City 'sale shops' used as outlets for garments manufactured
by sub-contracted suburban workers, men like salesman Samuel Randall of St
Thomas Apostle.28 Randall had been investigated by the Court of Aldermen in r632
after allegations that he maintained seven shops and employed 'foreigners' as well as
numerous free journeymen and apprentices. It is significant that in r650, when the
Company governors appointed a committee of ten prominent 'cutting tailors' to
consider the complaints of their poorer brethren, four of the nominees were challenged
by the petitioners. Three were former yeomanry governors and members of the livery,
including George Endebrooke, a salesman. After enquiry, these three appointments
were withdrawn. The appointment of the fourth nominee, John Cobden, a less
prominent member of the trade who had been a freeman since r6r8 and never joined
the livery, was upheld.
The Company governors and their appointees could, however, do little to alleviate
the effects of fundamental changes in the tailoring trade in the capital, personified by
the four larger employers and salesmen tailors objected to by the petitioners in r650.
 TAILORING IN THE CITY 31

From the 1660s onwards, the masters of the trade - now invariably distinguished in
contemporary records from their journeymen - campaigned for the right to employ
'unfree' workers as necessary to allow them to compete more effectively with suburban
producers. The extant petitions to the City government referred to above reveal that
freemen were unable to attract sufficient numbers of apprentices, and that many
former apprentices failed to take-up the freedom - 'a burthen rather than a priviledg'.
As 'ingenious' freemen were able to become masters soon after completing their
apprenticeships, the City masters were obliged to employ journeymen who not only
demanded high rates of pay, but were not competent in all aspects of the trade.29 Half
a century before the 'emergence' of an association of journeymen in the metropolis,30
large employers and salesmen were contracting with master tailors to produce only
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men's suits, women's gowns or children's coats, restricting the training and experience
of apprentices and journeymen who were found by small independent producers to
be in 'noe way fitted for our businesse'. The differentiation of economic function
within the tailoring trade was clearly observable in Restoration London, with
'journeymen handicraft Taylers' organized by the 1660S31 in opposition to the
employment practices of the masters and by reason of lack of work. In 1681 the
masters were estimated to be outnumbered 5:3 by the journeymen.
Change was not confined to the tailoring trade: in 1673, one London commentator
blamed under-employment amongst handicraftsmen generally on the increasing
numbers of apprentices employed by many masters.32 Further, the petitions of
1649-1650 and 1670-1681 also refer specifically to another major aspect of change in
seventeenth-century London which had implications for all of its trades and guilds.
This development - which cannot be explored here - was the expansion of the
suburban area, where many foreign masters had 'greate trades both for Citty &
Countrey'. As early as 1634, the free tailors had complained about suburban
competition, and the shift in the centre of the trade to the West, accentuated by the
1666 Fire and 'the building of the Covent Garden', was reflected in the precipitous
drop in the number of apprentices enrolled with Company freemen after c. 1670.
Whereas an annual average of 661 new apprentices were enrolled between 1610 and
1619, this had fallen to 285 by the 1670s. It is also significant that a surviving
quarterage book of 1676 recording over one thousand names refers to only twenty-
three per cent as working tailors, with closely allied trades accounting for a further six
per cent.33
The development of the tailoring trade in early modern London can be recon-
structed only imperfectly. However, it seems clear that after c. 1625 the trade in the
capital was subject to a complex process of change that would bring about the
transformation of its structure and organization in less than half a century.

REFERENCES

1 Cambell, The London Tradesman (1747); F. W. Galton, Select Documents illustrating the History of Trade
Unionism. 1. The Tailoring Trade (1896).
2 The manuscript collection of the Merchant Taylors' Company (MTC), stored at the Guildhall Library
(GHL), was examined in detail during the preparation of my PhD thesis. This article is based on one section of
the thesis, which contains full references to support the observations made here. N. V. Sleigh-Johnson, 'The
 32 COSTUME
Merchant Taylors Company of London, 1580-1645, with special reference to government and politics',
unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1989.
3 Deckers 0 PerSe 0 ora new Cryer of Lanthorne and Candle-Light (1612), p. 23 (British Library, BL C.27.bI9).
4 Tailors' tools are referred to in many probate inventories in the Public Records Office (PRO) and incidentally
in, for example, Theodore de la Guarden, Mercurius Anti-Mechanicus or The Simple Coblers Boy, Cap. 4 (1648)
(BLE470/25)·
5 W. Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex Sessions Records. New Series, 3 (1937), pp. 34, 35.
6 Ibid., I, pp. 63,64.

7 MTC, Court Minutes (CM), I, pp. 366-69.

8 See for example, The Taylors Vindication (1670) (BL.C.12I.g9 (30)).
9 Corporation of London Record Office (CLRO), Journal of Common Council (ICC), II, ff. 336, 336v.
10 MTC, CM, 5, pp. 310,330; PRO, SPI6, 535, no. 73; MTC, Ancient Manuscript Book (AMB), 54, f. 114V.
11 See for example, CLRO, JCC, 21, ff. 294v, 295.
12 CLRO, Alchin's List of Miscellaneous Papers, Book 2, p. 53, 1842-1845. The two petitions were drawn up in
1671 or 1675 and in 1681 and represent detailed surveys of the state of the trade in the metropolis.
13 A. H. Johnson, A History of the Worshipful Company of Drapers of the City of London (Oxford, 1914-1922),4,
P·98.
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14 MTC, CM, 8, ff. 496v, 512.

15 G. D. Ramsay, 'The Recruitment and Fortunes of Some London Freemen in the Mid Sixteenth Century',
Economic History Review, 2nd Series, XXXI (1978), p. 532.
16 MTC, CM, 5, pp. 310,33°.
17 MTC, CM, I, pp. 742, 743; CM, 8, f. 496v; CM, 9, f. 348v.
18 CLRO, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen (Rep.), 20, f. 313v.
19 0 PerSe 0, p. 24.
20 CLRO, Rep. 32, ff. 218v, 255v, 256.
21 MTC, CM, 9, f. 323V; The Trade of England Revived (1681) (GHL 712 g.16. (20)); N. H. Merchant, The
Compleat Tradesman or the Exact Dealers Daily Companion (1684), p. 32 (GHL A.8·3· (35)).
22 PRO, Will PCC 116 Russell.
23 PRO, Will PCC 228 Fines.

24 PRO, Will PCC 31 Carr.

25 A. F. Sutton, 'George Lovekyn, Tailor to Three Kings of England, 1470-1504', Costume, 15 (1981), pp. 1-12.
26 PRO, Prob. 5, 2393 (1674).

27 MTC, CM, 8, ff. 464v, 465, 496, 512; Cambell, op. cit., p. 193.
28 MTC, CM, 9, ff. 323v et seq.; CLRO, Rep. 47, ff. 27v, 116, 116v.
30 S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (1926), pp. 3°-32; Galton, op. cit., pp. 1-5.
31 CLRO, Rep. 70, f. 590.
32 Barber Tooth, The Citizens Companion or the .Trades-man's Mirror (1673), pp. 154, 155 (GHL, A.8·4 (9)).
33 MTC, AMB V32.