In my latest entry for my Let's Yell About the London Masters of Defense posts, we're going to look at the various ranks in the guild, what they would be allowed or forbidden, the money that was involved, and all that stuff that's both pretty practical and also could contribute to a ridiculous amount of drama.
There will, naturally, be some yelling about George Silver. Because if we're yelling about money and drama involving the London Masters, I can absolutely work in some complaining about Silver at the same time. It's basically mandatory.
To recap, there were four normally achievable ranks in the guild: Scholar, Free Scholar, Provost, and Master. (There were the Four Ancient Masters who were in charge of the whole thing, but we don't have any records of how the people in those positions changed or were replaced.)
Becoming a Scholar was something that basically anyone could do. When you decided to go to a master (or a provost who had been permitted to teach), the presumptive scholar would be given the oath by their new master (or possibly an usher or Provost so delegated) and pay the master 12 pence for the oath and 4 pence for entrance to the guild. Additionally, whatever fee the scholar and master agree on would be paid half up front, and the remainder as they agree to it; the examples of these fees are 30 and 40 shillings, which I imagine is a ballpark number for what the costs would have been. Despite there being no specific fee, masters are forbidden from undercutting one another. The scholar also had to bring their own weapons and supplies, or else "agree with his master or his master's deputy" for them.
(As an aside, I went to this currency converter and checked how much 40 shillings (or two pounds, per this site) would be in 2021 dollars, and it says about $710. I haven't done any real digging into how accurate that truly is, but it's amusing nonetheless!)
What's missing is how often a scholar is typically going to pay this fee to their master. The 16 pence in up-front fees are pretty clearly one-time costs, but the payment for lessons seems like something that would be recurring. There's nothing in the Sloane manuscript hinting at whether these are yearly or something else.
Incidentally, we don't have anything like an exact wording for the oath a scholar had to take. We know that it was on the cross of a sword, and that he wasn't allowed to use the teachings against his master or to teach them until he was permitted, but that's about it. No specific wording is recorded for that oath.
So! Moving upward, like I described in my previous post, the scholar could say that he wanted to fight for free scholar, get tested, get permitted to do so, and get the prize fight scheduled. There was one hitch which didn't come up in my last post because it was a background point to the prize fight itself, but it's germane to what I'm writing about here:
The London Mayor and Aldermen.
As previously described, a prize fight was kind of a big deal - nearly a local holiday in terms of impact on the city around it. The fighter would process through the city with drummers and a retinue all the way to the location of the fight. People would want to skip out on work to go watch, and it seems about as disruptive to an area as a big game day is to the area around Fenway Park. In the "Analytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia,"(a catalog of London legal correspondence and records) we can see mention of letters from Ambrose, Earl of Warwick to the Aldermen asking for a license for his servant to play his prizes. The aldermen would routinely pull out "but the plague" as a ready excuse, and it really seemed as though getting permission from them could be a real pain. While they could prohibit the procession through the City of London pretty readily, there were a couple workarounds for holding the prize fights themselves: either go outside the city, or take advantage of one of the liberties therein - specifically Blackfriar's.
Going outside the city was straightforward enough, and there are records of a number of prize fights taking place almost literally in the shadow of the city walls. What seemed to happen more regularly however, was making use of the liberties of London - areas which were outside the control of the civic authorities. These liberties contained theaters such as the Curtain and the Theater, and inn-yards at the Bell Savage and the Bull. Blackfriars as well was located within a liberty, and has evidence of potentially being a headquarters of sorts of the London Masters, including rooms owned by William Joyner, one of the four Ancient Masters of the guild.
Back to the prize fight itself! These were events which were potentially extremely lucrative for the individuals fighting their prize, as well as the guild itself. There's no particular proof that theaters or inns would charge for admission; there seemed to be a strong ideal that prizes should be public. That said, it's very likely that they would have done a brisk trade in drinks. However, the real money made for the guild would be from the audience throwing it at the stage if they were particularly pleased with the fights that they saw - certainly a real motivation for the fencers involved! The take from the stage seems as though it would have been divided up among the prize fighter(s), the guild, and based on a remark from the diary of Philip Henslowe, who owned a number of theaters, the venue itself. Henslowe notes that he was owed 40 shillings, which as noted above could be a really decent chunk of money for just supplying the space. If that's the cut that the guild was willing to hand over to the venue, I'm very sure that what they wanted to keep for themselves and for the prize fighters would be comparable at the least.
So! Assuming the scholar was judged sufficiently skilled, he would have to pay "all orders and duetyes" as appropriate to a free scholar. The Sloane manuscript doesn't indicate what those would be, though. There aren't any indications of further privileges that a free scholar gets, only that they need to wait for seven years before they're allowed to test for Provost.
This is getting a little long, so I'm going to cut it off here, and wrangle the remaining draft into a part two within a day or so, rather than sitting on this for even longer. (Pandemic brain is a thing. Who knew? Focusing on things is hard now.)
