The quotations above illustrate the centrality of written documentation to merchants of the fourteenth century, but they mask the different routes to pragmatic literacy taken by Italian and English merchants. The Florentine Giovanni Morelli had imbibed the skill of writing in Latin and the vernacular through a reasonably well organized school system and curriculum as well as through his experiences in the counting house; English guildsmen had to learn by a slower process of on the-job training, aided, feebly, by some time in the schoolroom. Morelli's advice to posterity is straightforward: keep good records. The oath taken by the bailiff of the London Weavers' Guild illustrates a similar point obliquely: the ‘Goods of the [Weavers'] craft’ that the bailiff is to maintain are here listed as charters, seals, storage boxes and books of writing. Its total absence of the whiff of the Nick Bottom's trade powerfully marks how ‘hard-handed men’ of London grew to ‘labour in their minds’ over the written record between the earlier fourteenth and the middle of the fifteenth centuries.