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1 Clubhouses and guild halls T he formation of the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907 was a revolutionary moment for women art workers in England. On a winter’s evening in December, the Guild’s first official meeting took place in a Hall at Clifford’s Inn, Fleet Street, London. Mary Seton Watts chaired the event, which was packed with guests who had come to hear speeches from members of the nascent Guild and – intriguingly – from members of the male-only Art Workers’ Guild who had ‘kindly lent’ the Hall for the evening. Stained-glass designer Mary Lowndes and the
5 Out of the guild hall and into the city F or the 1916 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society exhibition, held at the height of the First World War, the Women’s Guild of Arts was asked to decorate a room with the work of members, to represent the Guild to the public. The exhibition was held at Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy. This was an intriguing turn of events for the Society, its exhibitors, and the public, symbolising the acceptance of the Arts and Crafts by ‘the establishment’ to an unprecedented extent.1 The letter sent by the Society to members
This book explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and political status of London’s crafts and craftsmen was embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual, and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London’s artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city, and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly upon their own distinctive individual and collective identities. The book identifies and examines a significant cultural development hitherto overlooked by social and architectural historians: a movement to enlarge, beautify, and rebuild livery company halls in the City of London from the mid-sixteenth century to the start of the English civil wars. By exploring these re-building projects in depth, the book throws new light on artisanal cultural production and self-presentation in England’s most diverse and challenging urban environment. Craft company halls became multifunctional sites for knowledge production, social and economic organisation, political exchange, and collective memorialisation. The forms, uses, and perceptions of company halls worked to define relationships and hierarchies within the guild, and shaped its external civic and political relations. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design, and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural, and urban history, and those interested in design and architectural history.
associations of craftsmen, the guilds or fraternities of the medieval town brought together men and women working in various crafts, to serve ends which included both mutual insurance and public charity. 1 That charity needs to be considered not merely for its significant yet limited impact on the actual needs of the poor, but also and more profoundly as an expression of mutual concern and common identity. The first two documents in the
A mid-sixteenth-century manuscript composed by London's Girdlers’ Company records gifts of land, property, and moveable goods by prominent members of the craft to their guild. It begins with the most substantial and significant gift of all, Andrew Hunt's bequest, in 1431, of ‘two tenements and a voyde pece of ground … with a greate gate and an Entrye under the Solar of Maude Moundevyle. These two tenements are nowe Thalle [the hall] and the voyde grounde is the yarde at the comyng in thereof The Soleir [upper floor chamber] of Maude Moundevyle
Charles de la Roncière, 7 Samuel Cohn, Jr, 8 John Najemy, 9 Alessandro Stella, 10 and Richard Trexler 11 have attributed more originality to the Ciompi – their social and economic demands, monetary and employment policies, and the creation of three new revolutionary guilds composed of workmen, which granted rights to previously disenfranchised men and women and gave them a voice in
between spaces, objects and human activity: the mutually constitutive relationship between people and their houses’. 6 Here, the focus is institutional artisanal built spaces and the social and cultural practices of the guilds, and, as we will see, these were similarly mutually constitutive. Notions of belonging, status, and hierarchy were articulated and experienced through institutional architectures. Further, conceptions of relative ‘secrecy’ and ‘openness’ were enacted and reinforced through the use and appropriation
Ministry of Justice … will not be communicated … to organisations which have the declared object of destroying the democratic Government of the Irish Republic and replacing it with a Godless totalitarianism?26 The Guild of Irish Journalists The following year, the Communist scare continued to put a strain on the NUJ’s Dublin branch. The imprisonment of Cardinal József Mindszenty by the Hungarian Communist government was condemned by the branch; it noted that, ‘as Christians and as trade unionists’, it wished the Hungarian people ‘a speedy end to their tribulation and