IN 1415 THE mayor, sheriffs, and citizens of Norwich agreed upon a composition, or constitution, that specified who would choose elected officials and established electoral processes. Among its other provisions, it included stipulations related to the city's privileges of citizenship, or freedom, and to its crafts. Christian Liddy argues that “pressure from the crafts lay behind the sealing” of the composition. This study investigates how the crafts were able to influence the constitution's creation and contents. Information about the crafts’ formal activities is sparse for the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and few Norwich apprenticeship indentures survive before 1512. By the early fourteenth century, however, civic officials had established 13s. 4d. as the fine for freemen (citizens) entering by apprenticeship, and 20s. as the fine for “foreigners” entering by purchase, also called redemption. While Andrew King has analyzed the occupational structure of the Norwich citizenry from 1317 to 1549, this is the first analysis of how men entered the freedom prior to 1415. This investigation contributes to a wider conversation on urban citizenship in late medieval England. It shows that entry by apprenticeship was popular amongst Norwich freemen much earlier than in other contemporary English towns and cities aside from London, and it contends that the increasing use of apprenticeship as the means by which men accessed the freedom occurred because the city's crafts grew in presence and influence in the decades leading up to the Composition of 1415. Whereas in the 1360s most men entered the freedom as foreigners, by 1414 most freemen entered the freedom as former apprentices, with a link to at least one other citizen, their past master, and perhaps links to citizens who had been fellow apprentices in the same or neighboring workshops. When the mercantile elite that dominated the city's highest offices and the “commonalty” of other citizens agreed to arbitration to solve internecine disputes in 1414, the wider body of citizens, many of them bound by craft ties, acted as a collective to voice their displeasure. Their arguments and influence helped give the crafts a central role within the city's new constitution.