Sustainable Enterprise Strategies for Optimizing Digital Stewardship: A Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Abstract

members and benefactors. The entire business of providing these services is vividly documented by the annual accounts in the present edition, while the ambience in which it took place is also very well evoked. The annual account of 1518, for instance, includes a striking illustration of a publicity event. The entry records a payment of 13 shillings: “to the 6 weites with baners payntede, conisaunces enbrowderede with Jhūs, goyng alle the stretes and subbarbes of London pleying with theire instrumentes to gif warnyng and knowledge to the people of the saide Fraternite for the saide festes of Transfiguracione and Name of Jhu’, according to the saide ordenaunce 10s., and in rewarde 3s” (121). Reference is made to a bonfire staged to mark the eve of the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. Music had an important role in the liturgical celebration and the arrangements for making it are documented. A mass book was donated by the royal composer Robert Fayrfax. The accounts make available much detail about the employment of carpenters, glaziers, plasterers, metal workers, locksmiths, organ and vestment makers, and many other tradesmen and craftsmen. In this way, they are a valuable source of information about London trades, crafts, and professions in the reign of Henry VIII. It is recorded that an attorney in the Court of Common Pleas was employed. Since they are written in English, the accounts are rich in contemporary vernacular terminology. The language itself, though, is a somewhat colourless standard contemporary London English usage, and is thus unlikely to be of particular interest to scholars whose primary concern is with the variety of English linguistic and dialect form at the time. The Jesus Guild was dissolved in 1548 and, most unusually, refounded in 1556 during the reign of Mary Tudor, but it did not survive the accession of Elizabeth I. Its records, however, have survived and, now made readily accessible in this fine edition by Elizabeth New, they throw brilliant light upon secular religious life in London at the eve of the Reformation. The present volume, produced with the assistance of a grant from the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, is a notable addition to the publications of the London Record Society.