ABSTRACT
The most influential model of early modern sociability argues that the post-Restoration period witnessed the development of a distinctively new leisure culture, in which towns became centres for the consumption of polite recreation. This chapter explores the important role which trade guilds played in the social lives of their members from the pre-Restoration period until the mid-eighteenth century. It is based on the records of six trade guilds in the North-East; the Newcastle Hostmen, Barber Surgeons and Shipwrights, and the Durham Mercers, Barbers and Curriers. The chapter describes the regular conviviality of trade companies in the first threequarters of the seventeenth century and examines how this was challenged by changing attitudes to communal celebrations from the last decades of the century. The change in patterns of social interaction in the post-Restoration period seems to have been less significant than the urban renaissance model would suggest.
