University of Virginia Library

IT MUST NOT BE FORGOTTEN," WROTE ARBER,[1] "that the primary intention of this First Register was chiefly that it should be a permanent Record of the Wardens' annual Cash Accounts." I am going to try, in this paper, to reconstruct these Wardens' Accounts from 19 July 1557 to 15 July 1596—that is, for the first thirty-nine years of the Stationers' Company after its incorporation.[2] Arber's Transcripts, though they have yielded a great deal of information to students of English Literature, to bibliographers and to those interested in the activities of early Stationers, are unable, as they stand, to provide the sort of evidence one looks for in account books. The reason for this is obvious.

Anyone working on the Transcripts must have wondered what was concealed by the little italicized notes within square brackets— [Three entries omitted]—and what was the sum of money received, for instance, from the old Wardens by the Wardens for the ensuing year. The missing entries are often, as Arber points out (p.320), mere repetitions of similar, and previous, entries; but sometimes they are interesting and very nearly always they are part of the financial picture. In the 1557 inventory of things in the cellar (p.66) the last item before the signatures is "a case com[?plete] wth letters for the corporacyun"; in the account for 1564/5 (p.281) there is a note of repairs to the hall amounting to £15 3s.; in that for 1569/70 (p.421) there is a grant of

£2 4s. to the poor; in 1580/1 (p.490) Timothy Rider is paid 6s. 8d. "for paines taken in goinge into the Cuntrey"; and so on. The most complete set of figures omitted occurs on p.113, and I have shewn below how I have used these in setting out the account for 1558/9. But the summaries which begin with the year 1571/2 (p.451) are all left incomplete, usually by the omission of totals on the receipts side and by the omission of individual items and totals on the expenditure side.

In addition to these cases, in which the Transcript declares omissions, there are useful totals, both of separate pages of the Register and of whole years, to which the Transcript does not draw attention; these were no doubt added at the time the accounts were audited. There is no indication, for instance, on p. 79 that the following has been left out:

nor that there is a total of expenditure given on p.223. It is possible to arrive at these figures, or at something like them, by totalling the receipts for the separate sections — entering of copies or fines for breaking orders; but the totals were presumably the figures on which the annual audit was based and their existence does bear out Arber's statement that Register A,[3] labelled on the spine "Wardens Accounts", was kept primarily for financial purposes.

With the help of the figures not printed in the Transcript I have constructed the Table which appears at the end of this article. I must, however, make it quite clear now that there are no major discoveries, nothing to upset what is already known about the Company. There are small but interesting points like the existence of type (but apparently no press) at the time of the incorporation, and the Beadle's journey into the country on the Company's, and probably the Government's, business. But it is by the accumulation of unprinted details which usually, with the items to be found in the Transcripts, make up the unprinted totals, that the construction of a set of more or less balanced accounts has been possible; and it is from these that a little light can be thrown on the financial problems of the Company and the means by which it solved them.

On 10 July 1559 the accounts of Jaques and Turk for the previous year were audited and the balance handed over, in the presence of

ten members of the Court, to the new Wardens, Lobley (one of an interesting family) and Duxwell, who both signed for it. For some reason a summary (p. 113) of the year's accounts, of a kind not found again until July 1572, was made. Since only two items are printed complete, I give the whole account, in modern notation and with numeration added for reference.

This final balance is twice repeated in the formal receipt.

Unfortunately, the totals of the printed figures on pages

Therefore 5s. 10d. shewn in one place as received was not there on 10 July 1559; moreover, the addition in (18) is a halfpenny out. The points are small, but I have drawn attention to them because the inaccuracy of sixteenth-century accounting is demonstrated several times in the following years.

Furthermore, there is the occasional misplacing of an item. On page 99, among the Presentment of Apprentices etc., is the receipt of 4d. from Thomas Marsh for licence to print a book; hence the figure for licensing of copies in the Table is £1 os. 2d. instead of the 19s. 10d. in (3); and on page 94, Caly's 8s. 4d. — 3s. 4d. for his freedom and 5s. towards the hall — is entered amongst the fines and followed by Hill's arrears — no doubt of quarterage due to the Renters. The figures in the Table for the year 1558/9 do not, therefore, correspond in every case with the figures in the summary quoted above; but the redistribution leads to the same totals and, allowing for that vagrant halfpenny, to the same discrepancy on the receipts side.

Of the payments made by Jaques and Turk the £5 10s. 9d. (11) is the sum of the items on page 106, the missing entries being:

           

	s	d
for two dinners in December and April	13	11
Scavenger	1	6
mending two guns	3	0
paper and brooms	1	6
fee of Lord Mayor's officer	6	8

The total of page 112, which is given in the original, is that shewn in (13), the three missing entries being:        

	s	d
to the armourers	10	0
for twelve men's purses &c.mmat; 8d. each	8	0
carting harness		8

But how the total of the charges for the dinners is reached by adding the items on pages 107 to 110 defeats me; it obstinately refuses to come to more than £9 9s. 3d., short of the printed figure on page 113 by 4s. 4½d. This difference between the calculated total of individual items and the given total in the summary — like the difference on the receipts side — has forced me to include, in the Table, a line for adjustments on each side of the annual accounts.

In selecting the headings for the "Charge" or receipts side of the Table, I have, in the main, been governed by the summaries which begin on page 451. This has meant amalgamating the fines for disobedience with the fines for printing without licence, which in 1558/9 were separated. On the other hand, the value of a heading for Rents, and of other headings which do not find places in 1559, will appear later.

Nearly all these sources of income were common to all City Companies; but two of them — the licensing of copies and the sale of books — could belong only to the Stationers' Company. Neither of them was of great economic importance; the former provided a steady flow of cash which, in the earlier years, was more valuable than the fees for enrolling apprentices and, in 1578/9, reached nearly £9: the latter might have come to play a more obviously important part (as it threatened to do between 1589 and 1593) if the English Stock had not developed into a separate trading organization within the framework of the Company.[4] It might be argued that fines for printing without licence made a third source of income which could arise only in the Stationers' Company; so too might fines for binding books contrary to the regulations. I have, however, chosen to regard these, special as they are to the Stationers, as parallelled by similar disciplinary measures in other Companies — Thomas Huat's fine by the Carpenters in 1567, for instance, "for that his borde did not beare measure ijs vjd"[5] — in a way that the fee paid for the entry of a licence to print was, so far as I know, unparallelled.

The headings on the "Discharge" or expenditure side of the Table were more difficult to keep within reasonable bounds without destroying their individual significance. In the year 1591/2 there are over sixty entries for sums paid out, totalling nearly £70 and ranging from 6d. paid for carpenters to £14 17s. 11d. repaid to John Wolf for new chimneys and wainscotting in "the Lower Rowme". Moreover, it is not always possible to discover whether charges for legal advice or "writing" were for property transactions, for Company ordinances or

for action taken against pirates. It will be best, therefore, to give an indication of what to expect under each heading.

Wages contains payments to the full-time servants of the Company, the Beadle and the Clerk; whether the Porter was paid by the Renters or existed on what he could pick up, I do not know. Remuneration for additional work at times of crisis is put under the heading appropriate to the business undertaken, usually Legal Action. The apparent irregularity in the payment of salaries I shall refer to later.

Retaining fees deals with the standing charges for the Company's counsel, which was sometimes as high as £3 for two of them; and with the payments made to certain officers of the City — the Lord Mayor's "man", the Butler, the Cook, the Armourer and the Scavenger.[6]

Under Property I should have liked to distinguish between expenditure on the hall and expenditure on other property; and under the former to differentiate between the purchase of buckets or brooms and the much more important items like bricks and mortar or carpenters' wages. But there are so many borderline cases and, in the later years, so many doubts about where building operations were carried out, that I was forced to lump all these items together.

The policy controlling the contribution to Dinners varied according to the Company's own financial position and according to City edicts. The standard payment, almost throughout the period, was £5 for the feast on the Sunday after St Peter's day (p.164). Attempts were made to make the Company contribute to the Livery Dinner and to one or other of the Quarter Day Dinners; and there were odd special occasions — when the Queen came to the City and in honour of Mrs Kevall's bequest in 1592. But the Court wisely refused to allow the Company's money to be eaten away by a too heavy recurring charge.

I have kept the unimportant item Sermons, partly because it is always clearly distinguishable in the accounts, partly because it is a tenuous link with the medieval practice of a gild, and partly because it is one of the customs which is still kept up. As a Liveryman, I have recently been "desired by the Master and Wardens" to meet them at the hall on Ash Wednesday and to "accompany them, according to custom, to the chapel of St Faith in the crypt of St Paul's cathedral, to attend the service of the day, and to hear a sermon". Cakes and ale will be available at the hall on the morning of that day.

In 1571/2 the Company subscribed £2 towards the Bishop of London's fund for Exhibitions for poor scholars at Cambridge, but

from March 1580 it supported Thomas Draper at Oxford and from 1585 Benjamin Gonneld at Cambridge. £13 was the largest sum paid out during this period, but the support of these boys indicates both the determination of the Company to make its expected contribution and its financial ability to do so. The Stationers' Company School, founded nearly 100 years ago, still has the Company's support.

From this charitable venture it is a logical step to the relief of the Poor. The missing entry on page 244 is for 6s. 6d. given "to the good Wyf burker of charyte by consent of the Mr Wardens & assestaunts"; and most years thereafter shew similar payments, often to those whose connection with the Company is not apparent. These payments received official sanction at a Court held on 2 July 1565,[7] when it was "agreed and establesshed by the Mr Wardens and Comõallty" (an interesting phrase) that 40s. a year out of the common stock might be spent in this way and that unspent balances might be carried forward. In a troublesome year like 1582/3 the contribution from the general fund was nearly £5. This does not include the 5s. to be paid immediately (8 April 1583)[8] by the Renters to Peter French, nor his annual pension of £1 voted the same day. It is likely, therefore, that in those years when no charity is recorded in these accounts, some charity was being paid out of the Renters' funds; but, from an analysis of the decisions of the Court, it seems that, while the Wardens were normally to make ad hoc payments to relieve immediate distress, the Renters were to be responsible for recurring expenditure, i.e. for pensions. It is probable that these last were to be met out of the royalties of 6d. in the £ payable for permission to reprint certain books over which the Court claimed control. The account book for this fund is first mentioned in July 1585 (p.512) and the credit balance is recorded each succeeding year. In 1594 the balance stood at something over £8 and after 1603 the fund was firmly established on the basis of an annual payment of £200 from the profits of the English Stock. In addition, the annual returns from the bequests of William Lamb and Thomas Duxwell probably passed through the Renters' hands, as did the small sums bequeathed by many other Stationers.

The granting of interest-free Loans is a natural extension of charitable activities, but until the bequest of William Norton[9] began to

operate (after this period) the beneficiaries were not, as one might have expected, young men setting up in business but established members of the Company like Fayreberne the Beadle (p.392) or men in trouble like Roger Ward (p.566).

There is no indication how much money came in from Stephen Kevall's bequest. By his will,[10] he had divided the proceeds of some property between the poor of St Mary at Hill and the poor of the Company. Jane Kevall, who had a life interest, died in 1573, but it is seven years before there is a record (here under the heading Bequest Money) of any payment to the churchwardens of St Mary at Hill. Whether the Company had had difficulty in collecting the rent, as the legal charges on page 491 suggest, or whether it had taken all the money for its own poor until compelled by law to disburse half, is not clear. All we know for certain is that £50 was received for a pair of twenty-one-year leases; but we can be fairly sure that, at least from 1580, an income of not less than £10 (and the expenditure of £2 8s. for a Hall Dinner on 6 May 1592 suggests that at one stage it was more) was collected by the Renters and that half of this was available for the Company's poor. For some reason the Wardens and not the Renters were responsible for the payment to the churchwardens.

Under the heading of Defence I have put all those payments which, by royal or City edict, the Company had to make towards providing troops or warships. Corn etc. contains similarly unavoidable contributions towards the provision of corn or salt, towards the loan for rebuilding Yarmouth harbour and aid for Geneva. Whether these contributions were loans or not, they were usually offset by special subscriptions from individual members. Taxes, on the other hand, were levied on the hall and were the responsibility of the Company. The only point to notice about them is the frequency with which Arber omitted them from his Transcripts.

The last two items of expenditure, Legal action and Search Dinners, are in some ways the most important. In the first place, the Company, as part of the condition of its incorporation, became both an instrument of the government and an instrument of the highest ecclesiastical authority; it was therefore forced to take action not only, like any other Company, against those who had broken gild rules, but against those who, in the manufacture or distribution of the printed word, were thought to have offended against state or church. In the second place, the members of the Company manufactured and distributed a commodity which was — and still is — fantastically more expensive,

per unit, to produce in small numbers than to produce in large; the Company had to provide, therefore, some sort of protection for the man who had undertaken the expense of setting up the type for a book while he, and not a pirate, got his money back from its sale. These two problems — the suppression of treasonable and recusant literature and the prevention of copy-right infringement — are still exceedingly, and sometimes were then deliberately, confused; the point here is that they cost the Company a great deal of time and a certain amount of money. There were lawyers' fees and police expenses; there were journeys to Whitehall, Fulham and Greenwich (and further afield): there were "sweeteners", in money and in kind; there was the cost of drafting ordinances and decrees. These items of expenditure might yield, through analysis, a very interesting picture of the Company's development; here they have had to be lumped together and put with what are the more normal outgoings of a corporation — expenditure arising from the ownership of property, for instance. I have, however, kept the costs of Search Dinners separate because they are clearly labelled and because they shew more quickly than anything else the amount of time — otherwise unrewarded — put in by the senior members of the Company on Company's business.

I think it reasonable to say, after a close study of these accounts and of the accounts of the English Stock which have survived from the seventeenth century, that financial policy in the Stationers' Company should be rated no higher than a determination to remain solvent, and that, in the first thirty-nine years of its existence after the granting of a Charter, it comfortably achieved solvency. Even if the making of a profit on a year's working had been a more fully developed idea in the sixteenth century, it would still not have been the function of the Company to make a profit. Moreover, the lack of personal continuity in the office of "treasurer", who from 1571 was always the Under Warden (p.451), worked against any tendency there may have been to plan ahead and to make expenditure wait on income. When the necessity arose of finding the cost of a muster or the lawyers' fees for the Star Chamber Decrees or the contractors' bills for alterations to the hall, benevolences were demanded from individual members of the Company, and the Assistants had to set a good example to the Livery and to the Yeomanry. This attitude to finance, which is still a fairly usual one in personal matters, was probably the almost universal attitude during the reign of Elizabeth I and largely explains why I have had to devote so much more space to the headings of expenditure than to those of income.

It might seem that the steadily increasing balance carried forward which, from a debit of £2 5s. 3d. in 1574 became £106 4s. 8d. in 1585, was a contradiction of my statement about policy, and that the expenditure in the year 1586/7, which reduced the balance with a thump to 14s. 2d., had been carefully saved for during the previous eleven years. But it is most unlikely that the idea of buying, from the Government, greater authority for the Company can have arisen much before 1580 or that, by the time such an idea began to take shape (which it did by 29 October 1584 when the Court authorized the Wardens to spend money on an Act of Parliament), the cost would be as much as £73. As it was, the Court ordered on 18 July 1586 a payment of £40 to their lawyer Grafton "wch is to [be] levied againe in forme folowing". But only £22 was collected, which barely covered the succeeding two years' legal expenses; since there was money in the Corn account and money in the common stock, the senior members of the Company saw no necessity to put their hands too deeply into their own pockets.

The next five years were difficult and expensive, and the Company was able to avoid asking for benevolences (except for Corn and Gunpowder) only by a windfall of £50 from the granting of leases on the Kevall property. But in the last four years the previous ratio of income to expenditure returned, and a deficit of £6 16s. 7d. became in July 1596 a balance of £44 8s. 8d. The Company had weathered the storm brought on by the battle over the monopolies and, with the granting in 1603 of the Patent for what became the English Stock, was economically soundly based.

It is difficult, from the figures in the Table, to trace the fortunes of the Company in much greater detail. We can say that it had, during the first thirty-nine somewhat inflationary years after incorporation, fulfilled its obligations to the City and to the Crown (usually by special calls on its members, though the Serving of the Corn Market became a standing charge on the Company); that it had, with little help from its members, managed to pay about £240 (excluding counsel's standing charges) in legal expenses of one kind and another; that it had, helped in the early years by benevolences and donations, spent over £250 on improving its property; that its capital position had been bettered by gifts of silver — legacies and presents from retiring officers — and by a noble gift of property. There are also two small but clear indications that the Company was gaining in confidence. On 21 January 1578 the fee for enrolling an apprentice was raised from 6d. to 2s. 6d.; though the purpose was to limit the number of apprentices, it is clear that its

effect was to increase the revenue.[11] A year later the first fine was paid for the avoidance of office.

The plainest indication, however, of the steady progress of the Company lies in the entries under the heading "Cash from Renters". This was always a clear credit and quite independent of the previous year's balance. The average for the first five years was a little under £11; for the years 1581 to 1585 it was nearly £23; and for the last five years when, as I shall shew, the commitments were heavy, it was still well over £16. Unfortunately, the Renters' Books have not survived and one is forced to deduce both the items which the Renters were responsible for paying and the sources from which their income was derived.

It is well known that, as collectores, they collected quarterage, 4d. a quarter from each full member of the Company. I should be surprised if this yielded more than £14 in any one year; the number of names in the Charter is under 100; 150 members, if they all paid, would have contributed £10; £2 6s. 8d. is shewn (p. 102) as a part payment for six months' quarterages and £9 5s. 4d. as the whole of the quarterages for the previous year (p.72) "as appereth by thayre boke of collection"; in 1560/1 (p.160) three quarters and arrears produced £6 6s. 9d.; the petition of (?) 1582 (p.111) says the number was 175; an assessment of 1632[12] gives the membership of the Company as about 225. It is equally obvious that they collected the rents. But regularly up to 1564 receipts of rents are shewn in the Wardens' accounts (and, astonishingly, in 1570/1) even though they were collected, as in 1558/9, by the Renters; and these figures suggest that, up to the time when the Kevall property began to produce income for the Company, the letting of the property yielded about £5 a year. (For some reason the hiring out of the hall was normally controlled by the Wardens.)

But the Renters must have had other sources of revenue. The summary of accounts for 1571/2 (p.451) refers to these as "such like over and above their Allowaunces". What the "such like" were I have no evidence, but that they were substantial, regular and increasing is proved by the growth of the "Allowaunces". These fall under two main heads — wages and poor relief. Between 1566 and 1569, and from 1573, the wages of the Company's servants were paid by the Renters. These were probably only £4 a year in 1573; but from 3 June 1580 the Beadle's salary was raised to £6 and on 3 August 1591 Wolf, as Beadle, had his salary increased to £10, having previously arranged a

payment to himself of £3 a year for the supply of fuel for the hall. It is probable that the Clerk was at this time receiving £4 from the Renters, in addition to payments for "writings" which he had from the Wardens; and something may have been paid to the Porter. As I have already pointed out, the Renters were probably required to make certain payments to the poor even before the institution of the 6d. in the £ scheme, and were liable to be saddled with the pensions; they probably also administered the Lamb and Duxwell (and possibly other) bequests.

On the basis of this inadequate evidence a very rough balance sheet can be compiled for 1595/6 which will at least shew the importance of these lost accounts in the general pattern of the Company's finances. Since collections for and payments to the poor were at this time kept separate, I have omitted them.

The only uncertain figure on the expenditure side is the Clerk's salary;[13] but there were probably other items for which the Renters were responsible. The points I want to make are that at least £33 of income (excluding money earmarked for the poor) was accruing to the Company, at the end of the period, through the hands of the Renters, and that only the unexpended balance of this amount finds a place in the Table.

I want to finish with brief accounts of two of the Company's investments in something other than land. In the year 1586/7 (p.520) £18 10s. was laid out by the Wardens on the purchase of 750 "shorte Dyctionaryes" at 49s. 4d. per 100. This book, as Mr F.S. Ferguson has been kind enough to point out, is almost certainly John Withal's, which was reprinted in quarto by Thomas Purfoot in 1586 (STC 25881). Though the Assistants made several efforts at this time to put work in the way of printers, and though they passed an order on 18

January 1585 that Purfoot was to have the printing of the first leaf of the Little Catechism, there is no record in the Court Book of such an exceptional step as the purchase from a printer of what must have been a large part of the lawfully printed edition of a book. The explanation of the action must, I think, be that it was part of the policy of giving printers work enough to keep them from interfering with the books of the patentees; and it is worth noting that the "treasurer" this year was Henry Denham, a powerful and outspoken monopolist.

The story of this isolated venture into publishing emphasizes both the charitable nature of the transaction and the fact that the Company was run like a club or learned society and was not primarily a profitmaking organization. At the end of the year succeeding the purchase, the 750 copies were still in stock. During 1588/9 twenty-five were sold to Edward White, through John Wolf, for 12s. 4d., the rate at which they had been bought. In the next three years the sales were 125, 56 and 100. In 1592/3 a further twenty-five were sold at the normal rate and 418 to Thomas Woodcock at a shade over 4d. a copy. With one copy unaccounted for, the loss to the Company was £1 9s. 8d.

In the other example, both the investment and the profit were unavoidable. By an Act of Common Council of 16 June 1591 a loan was exacted from the City Companies to furnish ships for Howard's and Ralegh's expeditions.[14] The Stationers' share was £80, equal to that of the Barber-Surgeons, the Whitebakers and the Sadlers, but only half that of the Dyers and Brewers, and only about a quarter that of the Vintners, the poorest of the big twelve. At the first call £53 6s. 8d. was subscribed and at the second call £41 7s., an additional assessment of £14 13s. 8d. over the £80 originally required. The money was raised in the following way:

The debit was made up by George Allen, the Under Warden and was refunded to him by Conway and Stirropp, the Wardens for the following year. I first assumed that they paid this out of their own pockets, since there is no record of the amount in their accounts; and this assumption may be correct. But on page 565 the contribution of the Company, when it came to calculating the dividend of 24s. in the £, is clearly given as £14 8s. 4d., the £10 from the Common Stock and £4 8s. 4d. the repayment to Allen as it was misrecorded. If Conway and Stirropp did dip into their own purses, why did they not subscribe on their own accounts? If they did not, where did the money come from?

To these questions I have no answers; and for good measure I throw in what is to me another little mystery which involves a similar appearance of money like a rabbit out of a hat. On page 129 (1559/60) the entry left out by Arber reads as follows: "Rd out of the cheste by the hands of the mrs for the corporations vjli xiijs iiijd". It is, I suppose, good for us that additional information does not automatically lead to a clearer understanding; nevertheless, I hope that the following Table — with its new material — will lead rather to clarity than to confusion.

Note: In the Table that follows, an asterisk denotes a figure not printed by Arber; this may be either a total or an individual item which happens to be the whole and not part of a heading. Since printing in red is expensive a minus sign in the Adjustments lines is the sole indication of excess expenditure or excess receipt.