Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-04T07:51:18.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2024

Get access

Summary

‘William Porlond's Minute Book, Being an Account and Memorandum Book, compiled by William Porlond, clerk to the Brewers’ Company, 1418–40’, is a remarkable book and a rare survival. It was compiled as the personal memorandum book of the clerk to the Worshipful Company of Brewers of London, for the years 1418–40, with a gap in the records from 1425 to 1429. It survives not as an official set of minutes and memoranda but as an informal record of matters of concern to the Brewers, gathered by their clerk, William Porlond, in his own working volume of draft materials. On the very first page he recorded, in Norman French, his appointment as clerk to the mistery and fraternity of Brewers of London on 14 February 1418 and that he, the said William, ‘ordained this book, to have cognizance of all the things done in the mistery and fraternity abovesaid, for all the time that the said William should be clerk of the said Brewers’ [1]. This book, with its collection of more personal proceedings, affords a valuable insight into the clerk's ways of working and into those matters that he considered significant.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

William Porlond created his memorandum book during his time as clerk to the craft and fraternity of Brewers, 1418–40. No books compiled by his predecessor, John Morey, or Porlond's successor, Robert Coket, have survived. Indeed, no further Brewers’ clerks can be identified from Coket, who began his term in 1440, until John Bowgham in 1554. Porlond's book was rescued from the Great Fire of London in 1666, over 200 years after its compilation, and it also survived the destruction of the seventeenth-century Brewers’ Hall in December 1940. One of Porlond's successors, William Vines, the Brewers’ clerk 1824–48, clearly worked through the whole manuscript identifying damaged and missing pages [92] [165]. During 1830–1, the antiquary W. H. Black compiled an unpublished manuscript volume, The Brewers’ Company Extract of Minutes 1418–40, in which he commented briefly on the contents of the Brewers’ Book.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Brewers’ Book Part 1, 1418–25
An Edition of the Minute Book of William Porlond, Clerk of the Brewers' Company
, pp. 1 - 34
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×