ABSTRACT
The most important thing that happened on Lord Mayor’s Day, the morrow of the feast of Sts Simon and Jude was that the new Lord Mayor took his oath before the Barons of the Exchequer, often in the presence of other leading Crown officials. In the wake of the Great Fire in 1666 all the companies except those of the incoming and outgoing Lord Mayor and the sheriffs were excused from attending and the procession went by horseback to Westminster, Pepys noting ‘how meanly they looked, who upon the day used to be all little lords’. The rituals of Lord Mayor’s Day can be seen as promoting social and political cohesion in a variety of ways. The Show required the mobilisation of the financial resources of the bachelors in the expectation of promotion within the company; members of the livery companies provided dinners or performed service roles at the Guildhall feast.
