Introduction

Summary

Guilds or fraternities, which existed from the early middle ages, were associations of, predominantly, the laity established to perform masses and prayers for their deceased members and other named people and for other charitable purposes. The terms guild (or gild) and fraternity were interchangeable and brotherhood was also used, especially in referring to the membership. Guilds were part of the voluntary lay participation in religious life. At their simplest, they were village groups which funded a light or lamp in their parish church. Others had a wider scope and supported such activities as chantries, schools or highway maintenance and owned property to provide the income to do so; regulated local trade or crafts; or were part of their town or borough government. Irrespective of other activities, all had the core purposes of praying for the souls of the dead at their altar or chapel in their parish church or in their own chapel and of fostering good fellowship amongst the living brothers and sisters of the guild.

Guilds were dissolved in 1548 under the provisions of the second Chantries Act passed at the beginning of Edward VI's reign. Along with the pious functions of praying for souls, many of their other charitable purposes were also lost, although some parishes and towns managed to re-establish activities such as schools. As guilds were not part of the formal organization of the church or state, their records did not have a natural place to be deposited after dissolution and most have disappeared. Remarkably, the registers of the two most important Bedfordshire guilds, Dunstable and Luton, have survived, together with some financial accounts for the latter. It is those which, for the first time, are published in full in this volume.

The licence from the king to establish the ‘Fraternity or Gild of Holy Trinity, Luyton’ in 1474 is amongst the State Papers and the abstract from the Calendar of Patent Rolls is reproduced below. The guild's register of annual admission to membership for the whole period 1474 to 1547 and the final twenty-one years of its accounts from 1526/7 to 1546/7 survive. The accounts are in 20 sets, the last set containing two years, 1545/6 and 1546/7. None of the guild's other records such as ordinances, regulations and the bulk of its deeds are extant.