The regulation of labour in later medieval towns is nearly always discussed by historians within the context of either the craft guilds or the household. But craft guild organization was not a static and ever-present feature of urban life. Many historians have recognized that government policy, both royal and local, had a profound impact on the organization of craft associations in the century after the Black Death. Some have argued that the imposition of craft associations upon artisan groups was a deliberately oppressive policy imposed by mercantile elites who wished to ensure their political and economic supremacy in urban government. Others have argued, by contrast, that craft associations remained largely voluntary organizations that offered real benefits to their members.

From this wide range of views, we should distill one fundamental area of agreement. The vast majority of the documentary evidence for the internal organization of guilds survives only from the period after the Black Death, and indeed largely from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: that is to say, from the very period that administrative changes were having their greatest effect. We cannot therefore assume that the forms of regulation recorded in those records were the same as those that preceded the Black Death. Furthermore, although the number of craft associations multiplied in the fifteenth century, both in London and in provincial cities, they still represented only a proportion of the workforce, excluding large numbers of hired labourers, journeymen, women and several distinct occupations. We therefore need to consider the regulation of labour in a wider forum than that of the guilds alone, and to investigate more critically the broader legal principles of civic regulation. What was the administrative context out of which craft guilds developed, and how did that context shape assumptions about the status of labour?

This study will argue that later medieval craft associations were not so much the deliberate consequence of the economic legislation that followed the Black Death in England as one accidental consequence of the new administrative systems developed to implement that legislation. Yet these new systems still bore the imprint of older legal attitudes. Furthermore, in enlarging the public role of craft officials, they also had a profound impact on the function and status of the craft household within civic government, enhancing its public status, its autonomy and its patriarchal character.