lands. The guildhalls sometimes became the parish poorhouses. At Tibenham in Norfolk is an instance of this." 4 By the former Act, of 37 Henry VIII., section 12, the king was empowered to send out commissioners to survey all lay corporations, guilds, fraternities, companies, and fellowships of mysteries or crafts incorporate, and to seize such as they thought proper, returning certificates of their lands, &c., into the King's Court of the Augmentation and Revenues of his Crown. Many of these certificates are still preserved in Her Majesty's Public Record Office, and a few of the more curious of them have been edited by Mr. Toulmin Smith. I have been to the office in the hope I might discover one relating to the Guild of the Holy Trinity of Walsoken. I found, however, that notwithstanding the vast number of guilds in the diocese of Norwich of which Mr. Richard Taylor has found the names, the certificates for that county, according to the calendar in the office, are now comparatively few. So that, after all, I am unable to say for what specific object the Guild of the Holy Trinity at Walsoken was founded. Unless further information should unexpectedly arise hereafter, we must be content to know that it was famous, as Blomefield says, because it afforded to its benefactors a plenary remission of their sins. I ought not, I think, to terminate these remarks without noticing that the long-neglected subject of guilds has been recently illustrated by the publication of several important materials in addition to those so ably edited by Mr. Toulmin Smith. In the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archæological Society for 1871, vol. iv. pp. 1-59, have appeared the ordinances of some secular guilds in London, ranging from 1354 to 1496, discovered among the records of the 4 Index Monasticus, p. 17. Commissary of London by J. Robert Daniel Tyssen, Esq., one of our members, and edited by another, Henry Charles Coote, Esq. They belong to the Glovers, the Blacksmiths, the Shearmen, the Water-bearers, and to three guilds of Germans residing and trading in London. One of the latest publications of the Surtees Society is the register of the great Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, from the year 1409 to 1546 inclusive, containing the names of upwards of 14,850 persons who joined that fraternity during its comparatively short existence of not quite a century and a half, and among them the names of many individuals of the highest rank, both civil and ecclesiastical. A small register of a Fraternity of the Assumption, at Hythe in Kent, dating from 1466 to 1522, has also been recently edited by Mr. H. B. Mackeson. And, lastly, I may be allowed to allude to a series of very curious documents relating to the Guild of the Name of Jesus, in the Crypt under St. Paul's Cathedral, to which I have already made some reference. These are included in a volume of the Statutes of St. Paul's Cathedral, which has been printed at the expense of the Dean and Chapter, and most carefully edited by our fellow, the Rev. William Sparrow Simpson, D.D., but is not as yet made public. |