ABSTRACT
From the early medieval period up to the eighteenth century, a dominant feature of the economic life of the City of London was the organization of groups of craftsmen, traders and merchants into self-regulatory guilds or livery companies which in the metropolis, as in other English cities and towns, came to be a major feature of urban society. Production, distribution and supply were dominated by the livery companies, which regulated urban markets, and provided the electorate for the assemblies of urban government. This essay is devoted to examining a set of social practices which were associated with the operation of the livery companies, the powers of inspection of manufactured goods, in order to see what can be learned about the changing social and economic forces which shaped metropolitan society, and the role of artisans inside and outside livery company organizations. By looking at the exercise of these policing powers, especially at those points at which consensus over their enforcement broke down, it is hoped to gain insight into how artisans viewed the exercise of their productive capacities during a period when the process of economic, social and technological change was gradually dissolving many of the tacit assumptions upon which the system of regulated craft production was based.
