ABSTRACT

FOR Chaucer's gildsmen, of course, membership of one of the more 'solempne and greet' fraternities was a highroad to the patriciate. That road, however, had only recently been opened. Chaucer's father, the Thames Street vintner, had seen it happen. For gildsmen, as Chaucer knew them, were the product of a social revolution. This was no less true of some of their companions on the Canterbury Road—the Sergeant of Law, to whom everything was fee simple, or even the merchant 'hye on horse', loud on his winnings, silent on his debts, for he was one of the newer kind, much occupied with Middelburgh. In their persons they illustrate the long-term processes at work in the thirteenth century, the steady growth of a class of professional legists and clerks, the multiplication of powerful new mercantile interests, the surge of enterprise from below which fashioned the craft movement. These forces, operating in a context of expanding population and broadening mercantile activity, could not be contained within the confines of the little patrician commune which fitz Ailwin and the twelfth-century dynasties had created.