A History of the Carpenters Company

First published in 1968, A History of the Carpenters Company deals with developments in the carpenter’s craft as well as with the Company’s own internal growth. It examines the effectiveness of efforts to enforce regulations dealing with wages, apprenticeship, and building, which emanated from both the Company and the Common Council of the City of London. The Great Fire of 1666 had profound effects on the organization which struggled on with a meager income until railway compensation and the enhancement of property values, in the second-half of the nineteenth century, transformed it into one of the wealthiest of the City Livery Companies. The Carpenters’ unusually complete records have not only enabled the authors to trace the acquisition of property, but also to illustrate the legal fictions used to protect this property from unscrupulous demands of Tudor and Stuart monarchs, and, at the same time, to question some of the existing general accounts of the apparent rise in charitable activity during that period. The domestic life of the Company, its charities, and successive halls, are all described.

Throughout, an attempt has been made to trace the social and economic life of the Carpenters against a backcloth of London and National History. This book is an important historical reference work for students of British history.

B. W. E. Alford is Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History, University of Bristol.

T. C. Barker (19 July 1923 - 22 November 2001) was a British social and economic historian.