Introduction

Summary

‘William Porlond's Minute Book, Being an Account and Memorandum Book, compiled by William Porlond, clerk to the Brewers’ Company, 1418–40’, is a remarkable book and a rare survival. It was compiled as the personal memorandum book of the clerk to the Worshipful Company of Brewers of London, for the years 1418–40, with a gap in the records from 1425 to 1429. It survives not as an official set of minutes and memoranda but as an informal record of matters of concern to the Brewers, gathered by their clerk, William Porlond, in his own working volume of draft materials. On the very first page he recorded, in Norman French, his appointment as clerk to the mistery and fraternity of Brewers of London on 14 February 1418 and that he, the said William, ‘ordained this book, to have cognizance of all the things done in the mistery and fraternity abovesaid, for all the time that the said William should be clerk of the said Brewers’ [1]. This book, with its collection of more personal proceedings, affords a valuable insight into the clerk's ways of working and into those matters that he considered significant.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

William Porlond created his memorandum book during his time as clerk to the craft and fraternity of Brewers, 1418–40. No books compiled by his predecessor, John Morey, or Porlond's successor, Robert Coket, have survived. Indeed, no further Brewers’ clerks can be identified from Coket, who began his term in 1440, until John Bowgham in 1554. Porlond's book was rescued from the Great Fire of London in 1666, over 200 years after its compilation, and it also survived the destruction of the seventeenth-century Brewers’ Hall in December 1940. One of Porlond's successors, William Vines, the Brewers’ clerk 1824–48, clearly worked through the whole manuscript identifying damaged and missing pages [92] [165]. During 1830–1, the antiquary W. H. Black compiled an unpublished manuscript volume, The Brewers’ Company Extract of Minutes 1418–40, in which he commented briefly on the contents of the Brewers’ Book.