ABSTRACT
When the workers in leather were petitioning James I in 1619 for a charter, they asserted that the leather-sellers, ‘having promysed them they should ever be esteemed of their body, yet having once translated them by this order from the local circuit of their jurisdiction, they have in process of time wormed them out of their freedom, allowing none of the breede and posteritie of those workemen to be free to whom they made so large a promise, there not being at this day a leather-dresser free of the Leathersellers’ Company.’ The leather-sellers, they declare in
1 2 0 T H E C A S E FOR SEPARATION
another place, ‘having injuriously driven us from our seates within the city and liberties are like chaungelings in our cradle alienated from the nature or knowledge of our trades, and soe incapable to governe us through ignorance.’ It is not merely of the displacement of their craft organization by the Livery Company that the workers in leather complain. This process, they admit, was not peculiar to themselves, but it was not usual, they contended, for the ruling class of traders so completely to lose touch with the craftsmen who were nominally attached to their company, ‘For whereas in all other trades, though the shopkeepers growing riche doe make the workemen their underlings, yet they suffer them according to their increase of ability to become like themselves, and in the meantime to exercise the favour and privilege of their company and society; and though in some trades the shopkeepers sell to the workemen their materials, yet they take them again from them wrought and manufactured at reasonable rates, as Goldsmiths, Skinners, Silkmen and divers others. But the Leathersellers who pretend themselves to be of the same trade with the Glovers, Pointmakers and White Tawyers, if once they put their griping hands betwixt the Grower and (=or) the Merchant and any of the said Trades they never parte with the commodities they buy till they sell them at their owne pitched rates without either regard or care whether the workeman be able to make his money thereof or no1.’
