Jewelry Pearls

In the early 15th century, solid silver was owned and used mainly by the nobility and people of great wealth, and did not come within the reach of the middle class family. All this was changed in 1742 when Thomas Boulsover, a cutler working in Sheffield, England, accidentally fused silver onto copper while repairing a broken knifeblade, Boulsover had unknowingly revolutionized the silver trade when he discovered that these two metals, silver and copper, became inseparable when heated. Recognizing the commercial value of his discovery, Boulsover began making articles that had the appearance of solid silver, yet were stronger and cheaper to produce. Now people of modest means could have replicas of solid silver at a fraction of the cost.

By the end of the 18th century, Sheffield silver was being made in quantity and became a leading industry in Britain and the town of Sheffield a manufacturing center of great importance.

In 1838, the Russians succeeded in creating a very fine method of electroplating silver; consequently, the older and slower process of Sheffield plating, discovered by Boulsover, died out.

Really old Sheffield articles are beautiful and extremely valuable.

If you own any real Sheffield and the pink of the copper begins to show through the silverplate, do not have the piece resilvered. Resilvering would be immediately apparent to a connoisseur and ruin the value of the piece.

Sterling means a silver alloy of standard quality which is 925 parts pure silver and 75 parts copper alloy.

The term undoubtedly originated with early English coins and may have derived from the word staer meaning a starling, because some of Edward the Confessor’s pennies bore figures offour birds. However, in the r 3th Century, King John brought coiners to England from the Netherlands and the Hanseatic cities to improve the quality of English coinage. These coiners were called Easterlings. Some authorities believe the term Sterling evolved when Easterling was contracted to Sterling.

Little is known of English silver-craft prior to r 660. At this period in history, English and French monarchs and nobility kept their wealth in silver or gold objets d’art, not only for their pleasure and use, but as bullion to be melted down as needed to finance wars. In France, during the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715), some forty ordinances and edicts were issued for the melting down of silver and gold articles, and though the reasons for the Royal edicts were varied, the tragic result was the almost total destruction of France’s finest silver and gold pieces. In England, so few pieces survived the austere rule of Oliver Cromwell (r653-r658) that the Coronation of Charles II had to be postponed to allow time for the designing and making of new silver regalia.

After the Restoration, with the return of Charles II to the throne, England’s silver-craft began to flourish; r 660 therefore, is considered an arbitrary date for the beginning of the production of England silver as we know it today. Monarchs and wealthy patrons began commissioning goldsmiths to design and produce silver chandeliers, sconces, mirror frames, platters, and tea services, even fui niture embellished with silver. It was the Silver Era! When sets of flatware came into style, invited guests were no longer required to bring their own knives and forks.

At the turn of the t Sth century, during the reign of George I in England (r 714-1 727), Paul de Lamerie, one of the greatest of all goldsmiths, fled warring France with his father and other French Huguenots to seek asylum in England. Stimulated by the work of such great artisans, English goldsmiths began to design and produce some of the finest silver pieces of all times. So began the golden age of English silver, commonly referred to as “18th Century or Georgian silver.”

The history of silver in America begins in Boston in the early seventeenth century. There were many laws governing silver making in America, but the silversmiths were not as rigidly controlled as in England. However, a smith working alone could not use his mark until he was twenty-one. It is good to report that few smiths were ever in trouble with the law! There were no banks or bank vaults in 17th century America. The silversmith was respected, he handled his neighbors’ wealth and was trusted implicitly. During this period it was difficult to hide money, so it was safer to have silver coins melted and made into a large teapot than to try to hide a box of coins under the mattress! A teapot or silver piece, unique in design and monogrammed, was almost impossible for a thief to dispose of.

As the years passed, American silver followed style trends. Colonial to Classical, Federal and Empire, then to Victorian and magnificent silverware was created by our craftsmen. Some of the finest examples were made from melted coins and the content was almost the same as sterling. The English used the terms Silver or Silver Standard (Sterling), but in America, Coin, Dollar, or Standard were more commonly applied to silverware. The term Pure Coin, Warranted Pure Coin, or Warranted, had to be used on solid silver pieces when silver-plating became popular in approximately 1803. Later, the word Sterling was adopted and is still stamped on silverware, and indicates the piece is .925 per cent pure silver.
By 1840, silverware in

America was being made by machine, and the great age of handcrafted silver was ending.

It has frequently been assumed that this tragedy had been foreshadowed in the fifteenth century by a general melting of baronial plate during the Wars of the Roses, and this assumption has generally been accepted as the explanation of the present rarity of early medieval silver. There does not appear to be any evidence to support this contention and it may be taken for certain that plate which was melted at this time must have been illegally sold abroad as bullion and not coined into money as it was in the Civil War. The Wars of the Roses saw the opening of no emergency mints and the surviving accounts of the London mint suggest no extraordinary activity. Of course some plate must have been destroyed and much must have changed hands, especially during the frenzied weeks between Wakefield and Towton, but the greater rarity of the plate of the earlier Middle Ages as compared with that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries must be explained otherwise.

After all, the survival of nearly all the extant examples of plate of the latter period is due not to having been treasured as family heirlooms but to their presentation at an early date to some college or city company which managed to preserve them through the vicissitudes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The universities successfully avoided being involved in the Wars of the Roses and the citizens of London intervened as little as possible. Fate ordained that the two colleges which have preserved most of their plate (Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Christ’s College, Cambridge) should have been founded and richly endowed early in the sixteenth century. Had the choice fallen on two other colleges of earlier foundation the result might have been different.

On the other hand the immense realization of capital which occurred on the Dissolution of the Monasteries must have consigned to the melting-pot immense quantities of domestic plate from the monastic refectories and abbots’ dining-halls. Much of this must have belonged to the early Middle Ages. The abbeys were already wealthy in the thirteenth century when the city gilds were still in their infancy and most of the colleges as yet unfounded. Many of the abbeys, moreover, were at the time of the Dissolution not nearly as prosperous as they had once been, so that it is probable that what plate they retained was mostly old.

Much more deadly to the preservation of plate than the extravagances of reckless heirs and the exactions of needy governments have been the ravages occasioned by the changes of fashion. The idea that the masterpieces of the past were heirlooms to be handed down to succeeding generations is of comparatively recent growth and plate was particularly late in attracting the attention of the antiquarian collector. The illogicality of the situation in regard to plate was realized in the early eighteenth century by Matthew Prior who writes in his ‘Alma’:

My copper-lamps at any rate,
For being true antique, I bought:
Yet wisely melted down my plate,
On modern models to be wrought:
And trifles I alike pursue,
Because they’re old, because they’re new.

A careful examination of the lengthy accounts for the plate made by or through Robert Amadas for Cardinal Wolsey between 1517 and 1530 shows that nearly all was made from unwanted pieces of domestic and religious goldsmiths’ work. The callousness with which the destruction of old-fashioned plate was regarded is further illustrated in the account given by George Cavendish, Wolsey’s gentleman-usher, of the plate sacrificed by his master to regain the King’s favor after he had resigned the Great Seal on 18 November 1529. He says: ‘In the Gilt Chamber was set out upon tables nothing but all gilt plate; and a cupboard standing under a window, was garnished entirely with plate of clean gold, whereof some was set with pearl and rich stones. And in the Council Chamber was set all white plate and parcel-gilt, and under the tables, in both chambers, were set baskets with old plate, which was not esteemed but for broken plate and old.’

It is probable that the destruction of medieval plate was particularly severe about this time. A number of items which appear in a list of royal plate sent to be melted in 1533, can be recognized as having been in existence for a comparatively short time but because they had probably been made in the Gothic style they were already considered as out-of-date.

When we consider the powerful incentives which have contributed to the destruction of old plate, we cannot but be grateful to those who, from diverse and often obscure motives, have helped to preserve what remains. If we owe much to the indolence and lack of economic sense which urged some of our ancestors to cling to their old plate or that of the community to which they belonged, we must also allow that certain of them laid a certain value on the historic associations connected with some of their treasures. The fact that an object was a gift from some celebrated person of the past was unfortunately not always enough to secure its preservation. Those who felt some compunction at the destruction of a piece with historic associations were often content to compromise with their consciences and whilst consigning it to the melting-pot, to register a vow to replace it with a piece of similar value (which meant weight) when the opportunity occurred. It not at all infrequently happens that a piece which is inscribed as having been presented on some particular occasion is demonstrably of later date and may even be found to bear a hall-mark perhaps even of the nineteenth century. The earliest surviving instance of this practice is the Pusey horn, of which we shall have to speak, but the instances of this species of falsification in more recent centuries are innumerable.

After an examination of a quantity of medieval wills and inventories, it will be found that on the whole the range of utensils made in the precious metals was comparatively small. In nearly every inventory of the plate of persons of exceptional wealth unfamiliar items will be found but ordinarily the plate of baron and merchant differ from each other only in quantity.

Drinking-vessels form the largest item (beakers, bowls, cups, goblets, godets, hanaps, mazers, peces, etc., - names about which it is not always safe to dogmatize). The rest usually consists of rosewater ewers and basins, salts, spoons, candlesticks, dishes, pots and spice-plates. As there are no surviving examples of the last four items we shall not be troubled with them.

The form of most of the drinking-vessels in use during the Middle Ages may be classified roughly into two classes-those deriving from the beaker and those deriving from the bowl.

It has been suggested that the beaker originated from the use of a straight section of an ox-horn with one end stopped up. The use of beakers can be traced in this country to the eleventh century by means of manuscript illustrations. By the fourteenth century they appear to have become very popular and several are depicted in the Louttrell and ‘Queen Mary’ psalters. Beakers are mentioned in a York will of 1346 and in the accounts of the treasurer of Edward Prince of Wales in 1348.

Since this book first appeared the writer has helped to show that the mark on the beaker given by Bishop William Bateman (d. 1354) to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, proves that it was made at Avignon. The number of medieval beakers is therefore three, since a recent attempt to claim an English origin for the ‘Founder’s Cup’ of Oriel College must be resisted.

All three English beakers belong to the close of the Middle Ages and differ in pattern. The earliest is in the possession of Lady Louis Mountbatten and bears the hall-mark for 1496. It is a delightful little vessel of silver-gilt, standing only 3¼ inches high and having the lower part of the side decorated with curious projecting vertical ribs.

Of still less ambitious proportions but equally attractive is the small beaker 2! inches high, which formed part of the Pierpont Morgan Collection. Its exterior is decorated with the scale pattern popular about the time when it was made in 1525.

The only medieval beaker of ambitious proportions is the one of 1507; which was one of the rich pieces of plate with which Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, endowed Christ’s College, Cambridge, which she had founded. It stands 9t inches high, and consists of a shaped base formerly set with precious stones, a spreading drum engraved with a trellis studded with marguerites and enclosing Tudor roses and portcullises, and a cover similarly decorated and surmounted by a knop framed by six portcullises from which sprout four marguerites.

The custom of giving presents of plate, often indistinguishable from bribes, to important persons appeared early. Already at the end of the thirteenth century the accounts of the wealthy and aristocratic cleric Bogo de Clare, who was notorious in a lax age for the number of livings which he had accumulated, show that in six months of the year 1285 he spent £21 : 4 : 8 on seven silver cups for presentation. In 1371 the City of London presented the Black Prince with a handsome gift of plate costing £ 173 : 8 : 11 on his return from Aquitaine. The position of a royal duke naturally entailed huge goldsmiths’ bills as may be judged from an order signed on 13 April 1373 by John of Gaunt at his palace of the Savoy. The delivery of the following handsome presents is commanded-to his brother the Black Prince and to his wife a gold cup each, to four other notables a silver-gilt cup apiece and to one a ewer as well, to another a silver box with the arms of England and Castille, all the work of the celebrated goldsmith Sir Nicholas Twyford. Two other persons received a silver-gilt cup and a ewer made by John Chichester, two more got a silver-gilt cup each by Thomas Rainham, whilst another two each received a silver-gilt cup by an unnamed goldsmith.

The extent to which the love of collecting plate was carried at the close of the Middle Ages can be traced in the inventory of the plate of Sir John Fastolf, taken after his death in 1459. He was a Norfolk man who had succeeded in accumulating a considerable fortune partly as a result of his distinguished services in the French Wars thirty years earlier, and partly through a fortunate marriage with a rich widow. His domestic silver weighed no less than 1175 lb. troy, whilst his chapel plate contributed. another 110 lb. Hardly less impressive is the detailed list of plate in the will prepared in 1509 by John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, from which it appears that he possessed 1116 lb. troy of domestic silver as well as 108 lb. in the form of plate for his chapel. The inventory of royal plate composed in 1520 gives us a still more vivid impression of the wealth of goldsmiths’ work which then abounded in this country. Henry VIII was, indeed, a hardened and unscrupulous collector, as is shown by the number of items which are catalogued as having been forfeited on the execution of the Duke of Buckingham (’Ducke of buck’) and by those formerly belonging to his Boleyn ‘in-laws’ and to Wolsey which appear in the inventories of 1532 and 1550 in the Renaissance period.

The accumulation of plate was not entirely due to love of ostentation. Until about a hundred years ago the family plate was regarded merely as a reserve of capital which could be easily realized in an emergency. Such a realization almost inevitably consigned the plate to the melting-pot unless circumstances allowed it to be pledged. The forced loans which the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns repeatedly levied on the City formed a constant drain on the resources of the city companies which was very detrimental to their collections of plate. The Great Fire not only was the direct cause of the destruction of the plate of several companies but brought about the sacrifice of that of others in the cause of rebuilding the halls which had been destroyed. More spectacular was the general melting of plate which took place during the Civil War and under the Commonwealth, when vast hoards of plate belonging to owners whose economic stability in ordinary times would have been assured, were sacrificed voluntarily or involuntarily in the form of loans to support the cause of King or Parliament. On this occasion the collecting of plate was systematic and ruthless, the contributions varying according to the wealth of the owners from the I 06! oz. ‘lent’ to the Parliament by the gentry of the lathe of Aylesford, Kent, to the 1610 lb. provided for the King’s use by twelve of the Oxford colleges.

The use of domestic silver in the first half of the seventh century is attested by Bede, who records that St. Oswald, King of Northumbria, was served with food in a silver dish. A charter of Bertulf, King of Mercia, records the gift in the year 80 I of a large and finely worked silver dish to the Cathedral of Worcester, whilst amongst the extensive presents of plate made by Athelstan in 934 to the shrine of St. Cuthbert were two silver covered cups.

Though it is probable that plate never descended very far in the social scale in Anglo-Saxon England, it is likely that its use was as widespread in this country as anywhere else in Western Europe. There can be little doubt that the upper classes were well acquainted with the use of plate in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Ethelgiva (d. 985), wife of Earl Aylwin who founded Ramsey Abbey, is recorded to have presented its refectory with ‘two silver cups of twelve marks according to the weight of the husting of London’. William of Poitiers, when speaking of the spoils taken home by the Normans after the conquest of England, says ‘the vessels of silver or gold were marveled at, of which the number and decoration would be impossible to relate’. He adds that the English were great drinkers and favored especially ox-horns tipped at each end with metal. These drinking-horns are clearly depicted in the scene of Harold feasting in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Sutton Hoo ship-burial, discovered in 1939, yielded the British Museum the silver mounts of six to nine horns dating before the middle of the seventh century but no complete silver-mounted horn is yet known.

It is impossible to give with any certainty a list of the few surviving pieces of Anglo-Saxon domestic silver (excluding for the moment spoons), since a Continental origin has been claimed for all of them. A bowl in the Yorkshire Museum, York, which was found at Great Ormside, Cumberland, is certainly amongst the most interesting survivors. It is probably North English work of the beginning of the eighth century and is of silver and copper-gilt, embossed with birds and beasts and studded with enameled bosses. Still more attractive is the nielloed silver bowl from Fejø (Frontispiece, I) in the National Museum, Copenhagen. Its decoration of birds and beasts with fantastic interlacing seems to indicate that it was made in the south of England towards the end of the eighth century. An embossed silver bowl from Ribe in the National Museum, Copenhagen, a second from Halton Moor, Yorkshire, and a third with a cover, both in the British Museum, are perhaps more probably of Continental origin and are dated variously from the ninth to the beginning of the eleventh century.

A number of silver spoons of different dates and very various designs have been discovered. A little two-pronged fork in the British Museum, found at Sevington, Wiltshire, suggests a greater refinement than might be expected at the end of the ninth century when it appears to have been made.

However uncertain may be the extent of the use of domestic plate before the Norman Conquest, there can be no doubt that there was a steady increase in its popularity during the succeeding centuries. Plate was acquired not only to serve the everyday needs of the purchaser but also from other motives.

Amongst the more peaceful and picturesque activities of the goldsmiths was their devotion to St. Dunstan, who in his lifetime had certainly been a good patron of their craft and whom his Post-Conquest biographers credited both with a practical knowledge of their art and with the celebrated victory over a devil. In the saint’s honor the goldsmiths kept a light in the church of St. John Zacchary which remained the centre of the goldsmiths’ quarter up to the seventeenth century. On St. Dunstan’s Eve and twice on his day the members of the company went in procession to St. Paul’s in which was a chapel dedicated to their patron, and sustained themselves with a dinner in his honor at which was used a cup surmounted by his effigy. These functions came to an end at the Reformation, and in 1547 is recorded the destruction both of St. Dunstan’s Cup and of the silver gilt figure of the saint which adorned Goldsmiths’ Hall.

The history of the gild during the Renaissance was a checkered one. The latter part of the sixteenth and the early years of the seventeenth century saw a return of corporate prosperity but in 1627 the company was forced to sell plate to the value of £407 in order to pay its contribution to a forced loan which the King had levied on the City. During the Civil War period Goldsmiths’ Hall became the Parliament’s exchequer.

Besides its routine work of preserving the standard and purity of gold and silver work, the principal activity of the company during the Renaissance seems to have been a struggle to preserve the trade as far as possible in English hands and to limit the intrusion of foreigners-a matter to which we will have to recur later. In 1571 it was enacted that no craftsman might become a master until he had produced a ‘masterpiece’. The type of object to be made was not prescribed, as it was by some German gilds, and no piece made for this purpose has ever been identified. The custom had apparently fallen into disuse by 16°7 when it was reenacted with the professed aim of raising the standard of general proficiency amongst young craftsmen who, it was complained, were tending to specialize in the making of certain objects or the use of certain techniques and thus compared unfavorably with foreign workmen. It is unlikely that this order had more than a transient effect as the tendency to specialize certainly did not disappear.

Though the fortunes of individual goldsmiths could not remain unaffected by the political and religious changes, the times were certainly propitious. The prosperity of the London goldsmiths was shared by their provincial brethren whose gilds began to function with much greater efficiency than previously. The tendency for goldsmiths to seek prosperity outside the stricter limits of their profession became increasingly marked. Thus in 1589 John Spilman, a German, obtained a license to set up a paper-mill at Dartford, whilst in 16°9 Hugh Myddelton undertook the construction of the New River to supply London with water. The important part played by goldsmiths in the development of banking in this country was largely the unexpected result of the seizure by Charles Lin 1640 of the deposits of the precious metals which they and other merchants had been wont to store for safety in the Tower. This tyrannical act obliged goldsmiths henceforth to assume the responsibility for the keeping of their own reserves and forced them to construct strong-rooms in their houses. Before long they began to accept for safekeeping the money of their clients who at first paid for this privilege but soon began to receive interest in return for permitting the goldsmith the temporary use of their deposit.

When, with the Restoration, we enter the modern period in the history of English domestic silver we find the craft definitely fallen in popular esteem from its place amongst the major arts. This decline was for a time obscured by the important part played in the national affairs by the goldsmith bankers, but when the two professions became distinct in the eighteenth century the change in the status of the goldsmith is evident. The goldsmith, however great his artistic proficiency, had become no more than a superior craftsman or a prosperous tradesman. An increasing tendency towards specialization is visible both amongst firms and craftsmen, though much elasticity remained even to the end of our period. The decline in the social status of the goldsmith did not signify any decrease in the demand for his service and there can be no doubt of the general prosperity of the trade.

Another change which dates from the end of the seventeenth century is the gradual decline in the importance of the Goldsmiths’ Company in common with all the other City gilds. In 1679 the author of The Touchstone bewails the number of goldsmiths who chose to be members of other companies. The Goldsmiths’ Company, however, no longer excluded members of other crafts so that it is not surprising that it should gradually have come to take less and less interest in trade matters. It is not improbable that its prestige with members of the trade suffered at the close of the seventeenth century, from its inability to obtain from the Government any species of protection for the native craftsmen from the competition of the Huguenot goldsmiths who settled in this country in large numbers in the years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Though at first the Company returned sympathetic answers to those who petitioned them to take action against the invaders, it became obvious after the Revolution that it was useless to attempt to persuade the Government, which owed its existence to the deposition of a Catholic king, to take action against industrious foreigners who had been driven from their country because they were Protestants.

Even though the collection of the revenues of the Company’s estates would appear to have been the main interest of the members during the eighteenth century, we must not overlook the fact that at this same period the efficiency of the assay-office was greater than ever before.

No work of art can be properly appreciated if it is considered entirely apart from its maker, and it is necessary, therefore, before approaching the subject of English domestic silver, to obtain some idea of the successive phases in the history of the craft of the workers in the precious metals.

The inclusion of what is called indifferently goldsmiths’ or silversmiths’ work amongst the minor arts (as opposed to the major arts of architecture, painting and sculpture) is a comparatively recent arrangement. Throughout the Middle Ages and down to the end of the sixteenth century goldsmiths ranked as highly as any other sort of artist but from the seventh to the eleventh century they had definitely been supreme.

It would be idle to pretend that the period during which the status of the goldsmith ranked highest, was also the greatest in the history of English domestic silver. Tragically few examples of the secular plate of this age have survived and contemporary records clearly show that the works of greatest importance were made in the service of the Church. This does not, of course, imply that the rich altar frontals, shrines and chalices which were made for wealthy abbeys were usually the work of monkish goldsmiths. A certain number of goldsmiths appear to have entered monasteries during the earlier part of the Middle Ages whilst monasticism still held a strong appeal for the popular imagination, but there is little evidence that skill as a goldsmith was often acquired by those who had already entered the cloister. The number and importance of goldsmith monks must not be exaggerated even though, in the remoter periods, their names have been recorded by monastic chroniclers more often than those of their lay contemporaries with whom they worked side by side in the abbey workshops. From the twelfth century, when Government records come to supplement monastic chronicles, we begin to see clearly how small is the number of the known monastic goldsmiths as compared to the lay.

It is important, then, to realize that the ordinary goldsmith, even in the early Middle Ages, was not a monk vowed to a life which relieved him of the normal cares of the struggle for existence but a layman following a highly skilled profession, of economic importance, and accounted remunerative. Since precious metals formed the raw materials of the goldsmith’s craft, it was always necessary that those who followed the profession should possess business as well as artistic talent. As a consequence the medieval goldsmith frequently did not confine himself to the production of plate and jewelry but dabbled in many lucrative side lines. Like the members of several of the other richer crafts they often acted as pawnbrokers. Their administrative, as well as their technical and artistic capacity, made them especially useful to-the Crown, particularly during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the machinery of government was becoming rapidly more complicated. At this time we find the royal goldsmiths not only providing the King with costly works of art but administering the mints and exchanges and supervising the erection and decoration of the royal buildings.

It is not, therefore, surprising that as early as 1180 the London goldsmiths should have had a gild of their own, for which they were fined the sum of 45 marks (which they probably never paid), because it had been founded without the royal license. It was not, however, until 1327 that they received their first charter from Edward III. It particularly ordained that the goldsmiths should all have their shops in the High Street of the Cheap (where the majority was already established) and that no silver or gold should be sold elsewhere in London than in the King’s Exchange or the Cheap. Complaint had been made that there had been goldsmiths working in obscure streets where, being free from supervision, they were able to buy and melt stolen plate and to manufacture new plate of base alloy which they were able to pass off on unwary customers. Of their later medieval charters that of 1462 is of great importance. In it the company was not only granted the use of a common seal but was entrusted with the supervision of the craft throughout England with power to punish offenders.

As a body it always ranked amongst the most powerful of the London gilds. In 1267 the Goldsmiths had their celebrated battle against the Taylors in which five hundred men are said to have been engaged (including those unattached to either gild) and which resulted a few days later in the hanging of a number of the combatants who had had the misfortune to be apprehended. Similar incidents are reported in later years. Numerically it never ranked amongst the greater gilds. In 1477 its membership was 198; including 41 foreigners, but in 1483 it had sunk to 149. In 1469 it was called upon to provide 100 men for the city watch, seven other companies having to provide a larger number. On the other hand seventeen goldsmiths had acted as lord mayor before the year 1524, several of whom had held office on more than one occasion.