surrounding circumstances, and it must be admitted that the old guilds, limited and comparatively selfish as their objects were, did good work in their time, and were the germ of much that is most excellent in this country. It is not philosophical to except to the leaf because it is not a blossom; or to the blossom because it is not a fruit; and we must be content to acknowledge our obligations to these ancient associations, although we may at the same time retain the right to prefer modern ways and means, and even to censure some of what survives from the old guilds, in the most objectionable features of the actual trades' unions.

In the year 1388, the twelfth of Richard II., it was ordered by a Parliament holden at Cambridge, that returns should be made to the King in Council as to the ordinances, usages, and properties of the English Guilds; and it is from the returns made in obedience to this order that the contents of the volume before us have been obtained. In our days, in a similar case, there would have been a Commission to collect information, or a simple motion for a Parliamentary Return precisely like that of 1388, and in either mode of proceeding there would be a result of blue book. But whether the blue books would survive for nearly five hundred years, and create as much interest at the end of that period as the parchments disinterred by Mr. Toulmin Smith from the Record Office are now capable of creating, is a speculation into which we will not enter. The returns seem to have been duly made and forwarded, and enough of them have escaped the perils of decay and of the rats to give ample information of what the guilds really were at that time. It was ordered that two writs should be sent to every sheriff in England, one calling upon 'the masters and wardens of all guilds and brotherhoods to send returns of all details as to the foundation, statutes, and property of their guilds; and the other desiring the masters and wardens and overlookers of all the mysteries and crafts to return copies of their charters or letters-patent. Of these official returns more than five hundred remain; but there is a noteworthy suggestion that others are yet to be found among local and municipal archives for which search might be made, and from which further knowledge might be gained. object of this proceeding may be surmised to have been to ascertain the numbers and influence of the guilds (many of which had been then recently founded) in a jealous feeling of their growing importance; or it may have been to raise money by direct confiscation of their funds, or by compelling them to accept charters from the crown, as happened to so many municipal corporations in the reign of Charles II.

The general idea of the guilds was, as has been already observed, that of association for mutual help, beyond and beside that which the available protection of the law of the land afforded, in times of almost universal insecurity. They were of two kinds, the social guilds and the guilds of crafts (for each of which separate writs were issued); the one, although with higher aims, resembling the modern club or benefit society, and the other more like the familiar trades' union. The religious element pervading the guilds does not seem to have been essential to their character, but rather to have been contained in the atmosphere which they breathed, and to have been unavoidably taken in along with it. Yet it must have exercised a strong influence upon them; it asserts a prominent place in almost all of their ordinances; and it ultimately afforded ground for their destruction.

To nearly all the guilds women were admitted as well as men, and the brethren and sisters of the societies appear to have been on terms of absolute equality, wives as well as single women belonging to them. Nor did persons of good worship and estate think it above them to belong to these fraternities, and appear in public in the uniform garb or livery prescribed for them. Some such with their wives are described by Chaucer in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales : '—

'An Haberdasher and a Carpenter,
A Webbe, a Deyer, and a Tapiser,
Were alle yclothed in o livere,
Of a solempne and grete fraternite.

Ful freshe and newe hir gere ypiked was.
Hir knives were ychaped not with bras,
But all with silver wrought ful clere and wel,
Hir girdeles and hir pouches every del.
Wel semed eche of hem a fayre burgeis,
To sitten in a gild halle, on the deis.
Everich, for the wisdom that he can,
Was shapelich for to ben an alderman.
For catel hadden they ynough and rent,
And eke hir wives wolde it wel assent:
And elles certainly they were to blame.
It is ful fayre to ben ycleped madame,
And for to gon to vigiles all before,
And have a mantel reallich ybore.'

The guilds must often have been wealthy and numerous bodies, and occasionally enrolled amongst them distinguished personages. The Guild of Corpus Christi at York numbered 14,850 members; the Guild of the Trinity at Coventry could count Henry IV. and Henry VI. among its brethren; as in

later times, that of St. Barbara of St. Catherine's Church, near the Tower of London, could boast of Henry VIII. and Wolsey as belonging to it. There was generally an oath of obedience and some formality in the admission of new members. There were payments upon entrance, and annual or occasional payments and various fines, and in most there were payments in money, or in kind, for wax, for the light at the feasts, or to burn at an altar, or at the funeral rites of deceased members; a superstitious use, which very directly exposed the guilds to the action of the statute of the 1st Edward VI., of which Mr. Toulmin Smith has made, as we venture to think, far too much ground of complaint. It seems to have been a necessary corollary to the suppression of the monasteries, and an inevitable incident in the progress of the Reformation, that all funds dedicated to the maintenance of services for the dead and the support of lights should be applied to better uses-and if the incomes of the charities and guilds so suppressed and confiscated to the Crown became the prey of rapacious courtiers, instead of being applied, as intended, to the foundation of grammar schools, it is no more than what happened in the case of the vast estates of the Church, which were forfeited and squandered away in the course of the grand revolt from Rome. On the Continent also guilds were abolished in all Protestant countries at the time of the Reformation, and their property made over to poor-houses, hospitals, and schools.

6

The guilds had their appointed days of meeting, called 'morning-speeches' or dayes of spekyngges tokedere for here comune profyte,' at which the business of the society was transacted; and the name seems to have been originally derived from the circumstance that these business meetings were held on the morning or morrow of the day on which the guild held its feast. And, as in the modern parish club, there was always a grand day or anniversary celebration, usually kept on the day of the saint to whom the guild was dedicated, when the brethren and sisters, clad in their proper liveries or hoods, assembled for worship, almsgiving, feasting, and for the nourishing of brotherly love." Some of the guilds seem to have been expressly founded for the performance of mystery-plays, and probably all appeared on their public days in procession, and with banners and other decorations, such as still survive at the Lord Mayor's show in London, or on the gala days of the modern Odd Fellows and Foresters' club, or such as until recently could be seen in the annual procession of Lady Godiva at Coventry. At the guild meetings there was a box

6

containing their valuables, and the opened box was the sign that the meeting had begun. While the box was open, all present had to remain with uncovered heads, and during such time all disrespectful conduct, as well as improper clothing, cursing and swearing-in short, all that showed want of respect -was severely punished. It may be mentioned in connexion with this observance, that at the dinners of the oldest existing social club in London (the Dilettanti Society), a carved box is solemnly placed after dinner upon the table, before the transaction of any business commences; as it were in pursuance of this ancient custom.

6

The property of the guilds consisted of lands, cattle, money, valuable church ornaments, furniture for the guild-house, hoods and liveries, and articles used for the presentment of plays and in the shows. The expenditure would be on the sick, poor, and aged of the confraternity, in making good losses by robbery, and in the performance of funeral rites. Loans of money were advanced, pilgrims were assisted, and at one place any good girl of the guild' was to have a dowry on marriage, if her father was unable to provide it. In some instances, travellers were lodged and fed; while the funds of some guilds were charged with the repair of roads, townwalls, and bridges, or with the sustentation of the fabric and ornaments of a church. Education was a less frequent object, but was not altogether unknown, and the maintenance of a school and schoolmaster is provided for by some of the ordinances returned in obedience to the writs of Richard II.

The guilds were governed by officers chosen annually by the members, in the true spirit of self-government, bearing the names of aldermen, wardens, deans, and clerks. The due wearing of the gowns and hoods which formed the livery of each society was enforced. This uniformity of dress was universal, and the name still survives in that of the LiveryCompanies of London. Governments of the day seem to have occasionally felt alarm at the use of a regular costume, and ineffectual attempts were made to check it, not long after the date of the returns, which may themselves have been asked for, as already suggested, in some alarm at the increasing power of so many independent and self-governed communities throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Beyond material advantages, and mutual protection against oppression, the guilds proposed to themselves the maintenance of a high code of morality and social discipline. A good specimen of the sort of ordinance used for this purpose is afforded by the Guild of St. Anne, in the church of St. Lawrence, Jewry, London, to the following effect :

6

If any of the company be of wicked fame of his body, and take other wives than his own, or if he be single man, and be hold a common lechour or contekour, or rebel of his tongue, he shall be warned of the Warden three times; and if he will not himself amend, he shall pay to the Wardens all his arreerages that he oweth to the company, and he shall be put off for evermore. And if ony man be of good state, and use hym to ly long in bed; and at rising of his bed ne will not work, but ne wyn his sustenance and keep his house, and go to the tavern, to the wyne, to the ale, to wrestling, to schetyng, and in this manner falleth poor, and left his cattel in his default for succour; and trust to be holpen by the fraternity: that man shal never have good, ne hep of companie, neither in his lyfe, ne at his dethe; but he shal be for evermore of the companie.'

put of

Differences between members were to be, as far as possible. settled by the arbitration of a forum domesticum,' instead of by resort to the general courts of the country; a provision alike to those contained in the statutes of the colleges at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and in other old foundations, by which the decision of a private visitor is substituted for the operation of the public law of the land. Such were the chief matters, to the regulation of which the ordinances of the guilds were directed.

We pass on to some account of the Records, from which they have, for the most part, been printed. In the Public Record Office there are three bundles, known as Miscellaneous Rolls and Town Records,' and containing 549 skins or membranes. Most are of vellum or parchment, but some are upon a peculiar and hitherto unknown kind of linen paper, to which notice was first called by Mr. Toulmin Smith. This is a very much earlier use of paper in England than had ever been previously suspected. Some of the writs sent to the sheriffs are upon this paper, and some of the returns sent up from the country are also upon a similar kind of paper, showing that it was employed not only in what would now be called the Government Offices in London, but in the remote shires of England as well, and this as early as the close of the fourteenth century. The paper is described as remarkably firm and sound, and as having resisted the effects of time, after five hundred years of bad treatment, as well as the best specimens of vellum found in company with it. The documents vary in shape and size, from narrow slips or small squares of eight or nine inches, to large skins or several skins tacked together. and some are in the form of small books. The greater part are in Latin; some in old French, and some in English. The volume, published by the Early English Text Society contains the whole of the returns in the Record Office, to the number of