The Medieval 1%: The Rise of the Merchant Class with Elanor Janega

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:04]Life in the medieval period looked like lots of different things to lots of different people. Your place in society could dictate everything from what food you ate, where you could go, how educated you were, and even how long you were likely to live for. Across this series, we'll discover what life was like for those that worked, those that earned, those that learned, and those that played in medieval England.

[00:00:38]When we talk about the three estates in the medieval period, those who work are often thought of as peasants. And this is quite right because 80% of the European population, of course, are peasants, and that's what work means.

[00:00:50]However, there's also a number of workers who belong to one of the most powerful and influential groups in medieval Europe. These are the guilds.

[00:01:02]A guild is a really interesting institution because it's sort of halfway between what we would call a union now and halfway just a sort of monopoly.

[00:01:11]Guilds exist to say that someone can or cannot partake in a particular industry.

[00:01:17]You might be a fishmonger. You might be a leather maker. You might be a goldsmith. All of these, particularly in London, would require guild membership in order to take part of them. That you can't just decide that you're going to move to London and start selling fish.

[00:01:32]It's something that's protected very heavily in order to make sure that benefits go to people who are in a guilt. Guilds exist across Europe and they also exist across England. So in any of the big fancy medieval cities like York or Norwich, you'll also find guilts.

[00:01:56]We're here in the Grocerers Hall to talk about the second most important guild in London in the 14th century. That is the Grocerers. As the name indicates, they sell things in gross. Well, what does that mean? Specifically, when we're talking about the grocerers, we're not talking about groceries in the way that we think now, we're talking about spices. Spices in the medieval period and indeed into the early modern period are one of the most expensive and important commodities in Europe. So, the grocerers are able to command prestige and power as beits someone with a hall like this because they're bringing in absolutely tons of money to the city of London. The term grossers for the medieval mind is such a particularized and important thing because spices occupy such an important part of both the economy and the medieval imagination.

[00:02:48]There are now about 110 guilds in London, though that was not true of the medieval period. And often times when we talk about the medieval guilds, we're talking about what we call the great 12.

[00:02:58]And they have a specific order because guilds love to rank themselves. So they are mercers, grossers, drapers, fishmongers, the goldsmiths, skinners, merchant tailor. That all depends on what year you ask that in because they trade off every other year. Both of the guilds were incorporated in the year 1327 and we don't know who was incorporated first. Eight. the habidashers, then the psalters, then the iron mongers, then the venters, and then the cloth workers.

[00:03:31]All of these people have associations overseeing their particular trade and making sure only some people can come in and out. Beyond trade, these are also massively politically important people.

[00:03:42]In order to be a part of a guild, you also have to agree to be a city alderman, which means that you are one of the people who votes for and can become the Lord Mayor. The fact that London has a mayor is really interesting in and of itself and it's specifically tied to the power and prestige of guilds. They are seen as so rich and influential that they need to have a say in royal matters. So the mayor of London speaks for London in general, but what that means is that he's actually speaking for the guilds in front of the king and on par with members of the nobility. The Grocerers Guild specifically up until the year 1345 had already contributed 10 mayors of the city of London. This is just a little taste of exactly where power presides in the city.

[00:04:34]As you can see from the opulence of rooms like this, the guilds have a lot of money and power within London. This isn't just because they control specific trades, but because they actually own a lot of the property in London itself. If you're inside the city wall of London, you're in London. If you're outside of it, you're not. So, property can't expand in London in the same way that it can now because what constitutes London property has to be within the walls.

[00:05:01]It's easy for the guilds to monopolize all of that land. If you think London property is expensive now, in the medieval period where you simply couldn't make any more of it, it was even more important. This is one of the ways that the guilds are able to collectivize their power and prestige in London. So being a member of a guild has very specific political advantages in that you actually get some say in the world around you. It also has some personal advantages that knock on from that. So every member of a guild is also a freeman of the city of London. It's a way of disassociating people who are in guilds from ordinary workers like peasants. You are well a free man. You are not a surf. You're not owned by anyone or anyone's property. If you're a freeman, you're an alderman. You're a member of the guild. You're part of an elite society, although you may still work. There are also some knock-on advantages of that in that you can drive sheep across London Bridge. That might sound kind of silly and weird, but what it means is that you can actually bring sheep to market without having to pay a tax on it. For example, any peasants from the countryside who want to sell sheep for slaughter at Smithfield Market or who want to sell on their wool will have to pay a tax when they bring their sheep across London Bridge. If you're Freeman, no such fee applies to you. So, it's ways like these that freemen can make more and more money more and more easily than their compatriots who might be unfree.

[00:06:32]For the most part now, the Grocerers Guild is a charitable and social organization where you can come have a really amazing banquet, obviously. But what I really love about this incredible place setting is all these hints to the medieval period and where this company was originally established. In particular, I'm obsessed with these camels because they are an association that sells spices. The camel is inextricably linked in the minds of medieval people with the grocerers. For them, spices are something that come in over the Silk Road from the east. Maybe these spices are coming all the way from East Asia.

[00:07:13]We know that there are, for example, Indonesian spices in regular use in medieval Europe. Maybe they simply have come from the near east. There's something that's come through Jerusalem, for example. Either way, when medieval people think about spices, they think about camels. And that's why it's an intricral part of the Grossers Association symbols. You'll find it on their livery. You'll find it on this table. You'll find it on the carpet in this room. And always you'll see that the camels are set up to be coming from the east. So here is where we would have the chairman of the table sit. And all of the camels look as though they're coming from the east from that perspective. I really love this bit of the medieval imagination persevering into the modern period. And also they're just really cute. Here on the table, we also have some nice hints about what the organization used to do. We have this lovely gavvel to call any of proceedings to order. And over here we have the seal from the barge. Why would a guild have a barge? Well, in the medieval period, there's only one bridge in and out of the city, London Bridge. And it's actually somewhere where people live as well. It's much, much smaller than it is now, so it could take forever to get back and forth across to Southern. An important company like the grocerers would have their own barge, so any members can get back and forth across the river very quickly and in some style. This ornate door of the grocerers guild gives us a great opportunity to talk about the guild's crest itself. At the top again, we see this camel coming in from the east. But what's quite interesting on the guild crest itself is the clove. Of course, it's a reference now to the spice clove. But in the 14th century, that's not what clove meant.

[00:08:54]Clove is actually a reference to the weights that were used by grocerers to measure out spices as they were sold.

[00:09:00]So, it's actually a nice little double ent. It does remind us of the spices that are being sold by grocerers, but it also tells you exactly how they did that.

[00:09:10]When you come into the groceryer hall, one incredibly exciting thing they have is this, the oldest working bell in London. It initially comes from a nearby parish church, which is no longer extent. And on the bell is inscribed the words in Flemish, "My name is Martin.

[00:09:27]May my sound be God-pleasing 1458. The guilds here would be working very closely in trading oftentimes with the continent itself. As a result, you have Flemish communities within London and these are the sort of people that might be involved with the guilds. So, since this is the oldest working bell in London, let's give it a go.

[00:09:55]I mean, it's pleasing to me because the guilds are so incredibly rich and influential. We have a lot of records about them. And this is great because that means that we can know more about the individual lives of people who are involved in guilds. In particular, today we're going to talk about the Dartan family who are Mercers. This means they're general merchants. And the Mercers are considered the first and most important guild in the city of London. We know that the Dartens lived on a particular street called Sappers Lane, which unfortunately no longer exists. It was burnt down during the Great Fire of London in 1666.

[00:10:35]This little courtyard is near the site of where Sappers Lane would have been in the medieval period. As you can see from the sign behind me, this is where St. Pancress Church was. And we know that was the DGarten Family Parish Church.

[00:10:49]This church served the pastoral needs of the pepperers and Mercers who lived on Soppers Lane. This is indicative of how the communities of Mercers and Grocerers worked. They lived in the same area because they were involved in slightly similar trades and they also set up shop with their specific guilds as close as they could to their own community. It's these Mercers and these grocerers, these few families that really control both this neighborhood and trade in the city.

[00:11:27]This is the actual Mercer's Hall and it's interesting because it's just across the street from where Soopers Lane would have been. So the Darten family would have had a very very easy commute if you like between their own home and the Mercers Hall itself.

[00:11:42]However, whilst the community of Mercers is very close to the hall itself, that isn't where they go about their day-to-day business. In the medieval period, the majority of actual business dealings will take place within a family's own house and household. They have their own offices there. They probably have their own store. That's the sort of place where you see day-to-day business taking place. The Mercer Hall is for conducting any guild specific business and enjoying a banquet now and then.

[00:12:18]Walking just a few more minutes away from Sappers Lane in the Mercer Hall, we then encounter this, the Goldsmith's Hall. It's a reminder of how dense the number of guilds in the city of London are. You can't make it more than a few streets without running into another one.

[00:12:42]We are here back outside St. Barts, which if you've seen my other program about walking around communities of medieval London, you might remember. But today, I'm not going to talk about St. Barts again, as exciting as I think it is, I'm here to talk about 41 Clothfare just behind me. It is the oldest house still extent in the city of London, and it dates to the 16th century. That's a little bit later than we are talking about for the majority of this program, but it tells us something very interesting about houses in London generally. A household will mean the family itself like the Darters, but it'll also mean the various servants that work for them and it will also and very crucially mean their apprentices, people who are living with them kind of as indentured servants learning a particular trade that they want. We know that the Dartan family brings in apprentices specifically from Lincoln share quite often to learn how to be a Mercer. So a household is also not always just one house. It might be a series of houses that are around an enclosed courtyard in the middle of town. 41 Clothfare is just such a place.

[00:13:46]It used to be a collection of 11 buildings around a centralized courtyard just over here. And it lets us think about a different kind of city. It's not just individual buildings and individual people. It's part of a collective of which guilds help to make. The dartans are one such really influential and rich house. We know that they have servants.

[00:14:07]We know that they have apprentices. Why do you have apprentices? If you want to get into a guild, there are only four specific ways of doing so. If you're lucky enough to be born into garden, that's the number one way to get into a guild, just through patrimony. If your father is a Mercer, then you can be a Mercer if you're a man. It's just that easy. The second most common way is to be an apprentice. That means that you go and live and work often for free in a household, learn the trade, the family therefore gets the benefit of your work and their help, and then you can set up once you pass a masterership, and you can be a member of the guild itself. The third way that you can join a guild is what's called redemption. Redemption is interesting because it sounds like it's probably a punishment and it's kind of shown to be like that and it's framed in that way, but it actually just means you're buying your way in. You have to buy a fee to sort of redeem yourself for not having the privilege of being born into a guild family or not having worked your way up. So, if you've got enough spare cash, you can become a Mercer, provided that the Mercers want your money. That's redemption. The fourth way is through invitation. And that is really uncommon when we say that someone can join a guild through invitation and that it's a rare honor. Who is it who is invited into a guild? Well, here we have a great modern example of that in the grosser guild when we see on the table King George III's domed tanker. And granted, that is a modern example, but it shows you just what prestige a guild has even into the modern period. The kinds of invitations that are given out are given out to monarchs, the ruling classes, really important people who make huge decisions about the country.

[00:15:50]Even if you are King George III, you want to come hang out with the grocerers guild. You might have noticed when I'm talking about guilds here that I keep saying free men. Uh, and that's because in order to join a guild, you have to be a man. This is annoying because it's not as though women aren't participating in the same work as men in guilds. And often it's super common for members of guilds to intermar. There are huge advantages to marrying a woman from another guild family because she knows how to conduct the business of the guild that you're in. And it's often specifically women who look after the books of their husband's businesses.

[00:16:28]Another specific political function that members of guilds has is they're often elected to act as the sheriff of London.

[00:16:34]There's no such thing as a police force for medieval people. What there is is a posi commutatus. A posy commutatus gets called together by a sheriff when a crime is committed. So say you're the sheriff and you know that someone was robbed down the street and you want to find who did it. It will be your job to call together a bunch of men to go look for the thief. We know that the dartans serve as sheriff on several occasions which is a great indication of how powerful they are within their own community. There's a lot of guild members in the city, but there aren't always a lot of sheriffs. So, getting up to that high level shows that you really know people and you're very well thought of. Hugh Darton is one such person. He's elected sheriff of London in 1314. He also acts interestingly as a witness in a murder case in 1324.

[00:17:25]Uh someone was just murdered in the middle of Sappers Lane and he was called on to act as a witness and tell everybody what happened. uh a terrible scene, but something that does happen from time to time. All of this is very interesting because Hugh Deg Garten also is a bit of a chancer. Even though Hugh himself acts as sheriff and he's considered to be an upstanding member of the community, he himself at a point in time joins a gang and robs a neighbor for 200 lb of cash. This is an absolutely unbelievable sum of money. If we think back to our episode about peasants and we think about poor Thomas Collins who had to sell off his 15 acres of land, he gets two quid for it. This is a hundred times that amount of money.

[00:18:08]This shows us a lot about life in London because number one, people in guilds have this kind of cash just hanging out.

[00:18:15]That's the equivalent of keeping hundreds of thousands of pounds in your house now. And apparently they do. But it's also really interesting because say you were going to steal hundreds of thousands of pounds now. You would expect that you would get in some serious trouble for that. Hudartin emphatically does not. He's let completely off the hook. Why? And how?

[00:18:35]The king. Hudgarten has so much power and prestige that he's well known to the king, can throw himself on his mercy, and be completely let off for committing a huge and heinous crime. To be very clear, say Thomas Collins, who was in extreme debt, went and stole, I don't know, £5 from someone. he would almost certainly be killed for that. However, Hugh Degarten can be accused of a much much worse crime and absolutely nothing is done to him as a result. He is so wealthy and well-connected that he does specific services for the king. On several occasions, he acts as a messenger for the king, fing various letters and money throughout the kingdom. The king is not going to be sending money up and down the country with just anyone. It needs to be someone who can be relied upon. And apparently that reliance goes far enough that you're allowed to steal a cheeky fortune here and there.

[00:19:28]We're here outside the Wax Chandlers Guild who are a great representation of what it is that guilds did in the city of London. They supply the goods and services that people in London need.

[00:19:39]Let's keep in mind this is a world before electricity. So candles are an extraordinarily important commodity.

[00:19:45]It's the wax chandlers who provide that and have the monopoly on services for it within the city of London. Fun unicorn fact. Uh I also love this because it's a great example of the medieval idea of a unicorn. Now when we think about unicorns, we think of them as horses with horns, but they're not. They're actually monsters. They're half lion, half goat, and they're savage. So if you look at these ones up here, you can see that they are goats because they have cloven hooves. They don't have a mane so much as a little bit of a beard. and what's left over from a lion's mane, not a horse's.

[00:20:20]Members of guilds are not living their lives on the same razor's edge that peasants are. Their money is not so specifically tied to the land. You can stockpile wool. You can stockpile spices. You can continue to sell things that people want even if a harvest is failing. that insulates you from a lot of the more difficult things that peasants have to experience in the medieval period. We're talking about the Dartan family who are fabulously wealthy and enjoying an incredibly privileged life at the same time that the great famine is happening in the rest of Europe. The Collins family, the peasant family we talked about before, completely dies out at this point and we lose track of them. In contrast, the Dartan family becomes only more wealthy and more well-connected. There are all sorts of people in the city just as there are now who are doing day-to-day things like running restaurants, working at the markets, acting as bakers, and they're not going to be members of guilds. Probably though they are interconnected with guilds because odds are they're renting from a member of a guild, but they're not enjoying the same kind of rarified life that guild members are.

[00:21:30]Standing in a place like this, it's really easy to forget that working is not always something that is associated with great wealth and power in the medieval period. It just so happens that we know a lot about the people that that is true for. It's a good reminder that while a lot of the work that is happening in the medieval period and indeed the majority is work done by peasants in the countryside, there are still a huge group of people who are trading, who are working and are politically important who are involved in the third estate.

[00:22:00]Guild members are some of the most important, wealthy, and well-connected people in the medieval world. They are also very much seen as sort of denisins of cities. When we talk about peasants, we're talking about the story of life in the countryside and we're talking about the story of most people. When we talk about guild members, we're talking about the story of cities themselves. The difference between guild members and the other people working in cities is also often linked to the fact that we just don't have records of them. I want to talk to you about people who are working in cities. So, I'm talking to you about guild members because I can find them. I can find the Dartan family. I can know all about them. I can know who they married, where they live, and what they get up to in their spare time, which is robbing, apparently. I can't tell you that much about the local bakers. I can't tell you that much about the people who are actually physically selling fish in the street as opposed to people who are part of the fishmongerers guilt. This is a really sad state of affairs. I love to know more about common people and I would love to tell you all about whoever is driving swine down Soppers Lane. Unfortunately, I can only really tell you who is written about. And the people that we tend to write about are the people who are well-connected and wealthy because they can do things like ask favors from the king. But there's also a really interesting group of people in cities who aren't working. They're praying. And that's the clergy who we'll talk about next.

[00:23:37]Hey, hey, hey.