On this day … 31 May 1397

The Preston Guild Merchant opened. It’s the first guild for which records survive, but not the first one held. According to Preston’s first historian, Dr Richard Kuerden, writing in the late seventeenth century, there was one held in 1328:

‘In 2nd of K. Edward 3d there is mention made of a grand or Gild Court, holden at Preston, in Amoundernes, before Aubert the son of Robert, Maior, and William the son of Paulin and Roger of the Wich, Balives of the same Towne; on Monday after the Feast of the Nativity of St. John Baptist, the yeare reigning of K. Edward 3d after the Conquest the 2d, and at that said Gild divers Orders confirmed that had been made at a precedent Gild.’

There must have been at least one held before 1328, the right to hold a guild had been granted to Preston by Henry II in a charter dated 1179. And a ‘precedent Gild’ is mentioned by Kuerden above.

There could also have been another held between 1328 and the 1397 one, for which no record survives. For, as everyone knows, ‘once every Preston Guild’ means once every twenty years.

But, in fact, the guild was certainly not held every twenty years in its early years, and there was no requirement on the burgesses to hold one at a set period, but only if they needed one to, for example, confirm new charters. It was decided in 1328 that they should ‘sett a Gyld Marchant at every xx yere end if they have nede to conferme charters’.

After 1397, the burgesses didn’t wait twenty years. The next was held just eighteen years later in 1415, possibly because in the interval Preston had gained two more important charters: one from Henry IV in 1401 and a second from Henry V in 1414.

The long gap in the fourteenth century between the guild of 1328 and that of 1397, could be due to a dreadful calamity that afflicted the town in that century: the Black Death

The first cases were recorded at the beginning of September 1349, the last in early January 1350. It took just three months for this brutal plague to carry off as much as half the population of the town. Preston had not long recovered from the aftermath of the plague by the time of the 1397 guild.

As the centuries progressed, the guild became more of an occasion for public entertainment, attracting visitors from all around the country (see the pictured song sheets for the 1842 guild below). Many of the townsfolk took the opportunity to profit from the visitors’ need for accommodation and sustenance, and, indeed, to profiteer, as one observer noted of the 1802 guild:

‘The scarcity of beds is so great there, that the most exorbitant prices are demanded. A Stationer, near the Market Place, has had the modesty to ask one hundred guineas for three beds and a fitting room. An old woman residing in a cottage asked twenty-one guineas for her wretched beds, filled with chaff; four guineas are paid for the standing of a carriage in an inn yard, and sums in proportion are paid for horses.’
A guinea was worth getting on for £50 in 1802.

For family and local historians it is not primarily the history of the guild that is of interest, but the detailed lists of the town’s inhabitants, the in-burgesses, and a great number more from outside the town, with more limited burgess rights, the out-burgesses.

Lancashire Archives have transcribed the surviving guild rolls and put them on line:
https://archivecat.lancashire.gov.uk/calmview/TreeBrowse.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&field=RefNo&key=CNP%2f2%2f1

An earlier transcription of the rolls from 1397 to 1682, by the nineteenth-century historian W A Abram, is still very useful, since it is better for establishing family links. It also has a helpful introduction and index:
https://prestonhistory.com/preston-history-library/abrams-preston-guild-rolls/
And for more information see his Memorials of Preston Guilds:
https://prestonhistory.com/preston-history-library/abrams-memorials-of-preston-guilds/

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Sources:
Fishwick’s History of Preston
An account of the 1802 guild in the London Times