Charity, despite the cliché, did not begin at home but abroad. It worked its way into the heart of the Livery ethos after an earlier, and more significant, Brexit.
In 1482, when Edward IV granted the Royal Charter that is seen as marking the true foundation of the Company, Europe was in many ways united by a common religion that led to a common legal ecclesiastical and, importantly, legal language.
Fifty years later the first great European experiment was in tatters as Henry VIII – in many ways more of a parallel with Boris Johnson than Winston Churchill – cobbled together a spurious one-sided agreement that enabled him to split from Rome and marry Anne Boleyn.
Almost immediately there was a land grab for the British assets of the Catholic Church and the monasteries and chantries that had been the main recipients of soul-saving charitable donations were nationalised and privatised.
The London guilds that had been incorporated – elevated to Worshipful Companies – were legally allowed to receive charitable donations and what better place to express your piety than the organisation that was set up for your benefit.
As Caroline Barron puts it in London in the Middle Ages: “The concern for pious commemoration and for social security which had led men to form and to join religious fraternities now found concrete expression in the endowment of trusts, run by companies to respond to spiritual social and educational concerns.”
Charity had begun to begin at home.
Very quickly most City Companies were administering trust funds created by bequests from members and some – particularly the Great 12 – had large property empires.
They also took on what the monasteries had been forced to leave off – running the chantries which sang masses for the dead, looking after the poor, running almshouses and overseeing education.
This expansion of responsibility took them way beyond the gates of the City – the Tailors were responsible for a grammar school in Wolverhampton and the Goldsmiths ran schools in Stockport and Cromer.
The Cooks joined the landed gentry in 1676 when one of the Company’s most generous benefactors Edward Corbett, a former Master, left an estate that included two farms on the border of Surrey and Sussex. Oldlands and Ladylands were leased to tenants but visited/checked on regularly by the Company until they were sold some 50 years ago.
As people started giving cash to the Company there was a responsibility to start handing it out. Since the emergence of Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill it has been common to see money and the making of it as a core motive but religion was fundamental to medieval life even if there was sometimes scepticism about the middlemen and charity was, appropriately for the Cooks, baked into the way that people thought.
Alms to the poor widows and members of the Company were possibly driven more by expectation and religious tradition than self interest. Nevertheless there was in many cases a benefit for the goose as well as the ganders.
By the middle of the 16th century the grocers, one of the 12 ‘big beasts’ of the livery, had a property portfolio that pumped out £150 a year. There were generous donations to the poor and salaries for priests but after these duties had been fulfilled there was still £65 left to be used ‘as they saw best’. Even a modest company such as the Tallow Chandlers cleared £5 a year after paying rent to the King, requiems for the dead and £2 13 shillings to the poor.
These crumbs have built up in Companies over the centuries and are the focus of persistent debate among investment and charity committees about how much should go to the wider profession and how much should stay within the company, particularly as there are fewer impoverished widows or distressed gentlefolk.
Peter Balls
