Sarah Birt
This project challenges long-held assumptions about women's work in early modern London by showing that women engaged in highly skilled work through the City's guilds. By examining apprenticeship bindings, freedom admissions, and court minutes across several livery companies, I have traced more than 2,500 female apprentices and over 800 new female freemen for the period 1600 to 1800. This constitutes a significant sample of women working in early modern London, offering myriad opportunities to glean new insights into how their businesses operated.
Using livery company records as a basis for my research, I have also consulted a vast range of other sources including probate inventories, insurance policy registers, petitions, indentures, trade cards, and wills to reveal the wider socio-economic networks of individuals and families in trade.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
Biographies Milliners Royal Exchange Material Culture Merchant Taylors' Company Painter-Stainers' Company Women's History Month Seamstresses Mantua of the Month the Strand
Art supplies in London: the colour shops of Elizabeth Moseley and Anna Barnes
2 April 2021
Painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries required the careful preparation of tools and materials. Pigments were ground and mixed with oils or other mediums such as gum arabic...
8 March 2021
Mary Pyke was a silkwoman and milliner on the Royal Exchange in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Winter en Zomer, Wenceslaus Hollar, 1643 RP-P-OB-11.250 Public...
A Hosier near Hungerford Market: Ann Hodgson and her Partnership in Trade
1 March 2021
On 15 October 1718, Ann Hodgson ‘next the one Ton Tavern near Hungerford Market in the Strand’ took out an insurance policy for her goods and merchandise as a hosier.[1]...
Rhoda Moreland (fl. 1721-1736)
15 November 2020
Rhoda Moreland was a milliner on Leadenhall Street and freemen of the Painter-Stainers’ Company. Moreland was admitted to the Painter-Stainers’ Company by patrimony on...