Career reconstitution

The large group of one thousand men whose careers were reconstituted consists of two different samples. The primary sample – the ‘entrants’ – includes 530 men who became citizens of London and members of livery companies in the early 1550s. Included in the second sample – the ‘masters’ – are 470 men with whom most of the entrants served apprenticeships. The masters' careers were reconstituted in order to explore the effects of patronage upon the entrants' social mobility, to see whether the status of the man with whom he served his apprenticeship affected the heights to which a man could rise in society. The second sample is biased since all of the men in it were master craftsmen, retailers, and merchants who had their own shops, while many men in London worked as wage labourers throughout their lives, never rising above the rank of journeyman. Furthermore, nearly one-half of the masters were liverymen, that is, they were members of the elite of their companies, considerably higher than the proportion of liverymen among all Londoners who belonged to companies.

The names of the 530 entrants were drawn from an extant fragment of London's register of freemen. When a man finished his apprenticeship term he became a member of the company associated with his new craft or trade, swearing an oath of a Baker or a Weaver before the master and wardens, the company's governors, in a simple ceremony at the hall.