Label
Reference: MS 34007, Folio 1r and 26v to 28r
Collection: The Merchant Taylors’ Company at Guildhall Library
Medium: Ink on parchment
This document from the Company archives was put together in 1512, and includes a fascinating inventory of the Company treasures. It helps us understand how our members chose to donate art and treasures to adorn the Hall.
On folio 27r, the Clerk records the contents of the Great Hall:
‘First an image of Saint John Baptist gilt, standing in a tabernacle gilt.
Item iii costrynge of red saye with borders steyned of the lyf of Saint John hangyng there the more part of the yere’
This list continues on 27v, where we find evidence of Sir Stephen Jenyns’s donations to the decoration of the Hall. Half way down the page, we read:
‘The iii clothes of the high daysse of the gyfte of the Right honorable Sir Stephen Jenyns Knight late Mayre of London’.
These three cloths donated by Jenyns were part of a nine piece tapestry cycle of the life of St. John Baptist, imported from the finest workshops in Brussels. Three pieces were commissioned by Katherine Pemberton (wife of former Master Hugh Pemberton), three by Jenyns, and three by William Buck (former Master and deceased husband of Jenyns’ third wife, Margaret). This large cycle of tapestries, known as Arras cloths, would have been hugely expensive and showed the Company to be sophisticated patrons of the arts, commissioning tapestries from Flemish workshops.
Lower on folio 27r, we are told that Jenyns’ wife, Dame Margaret, ‘with her good mynde and zeal that she bereth to this Company', presented a blue velvet embroidered cloth of St. John, with a white rose above his head, and with green velvet edges worked with gold fleurs-de-lys and mottos, for the Hall Chapel. This page closes with the text:
‘Whiche said clothe and all forsaid ix clothes of arrays are remaynyng in a great joyned chest with ii lockes standyng in the chapell.’
Before the Reformation, the site that is now our Reception was a chapel, used by the Company for masses and prayer. On special occasions in the Company calendar, the textiles of St. John Baptist donated by Stephen and Margaret Jenyns were taken from this chest in the chapel, and were hung around the Great Hall. The ritual life of the Company, and their devotion to St. John Baptist is evident in these accounts. It is possible to imagine our Hall covered in these large, brightly coloured tapestries showing stories from the Baptists’ life, while the Company gather beneath them for their great feast on his Nativity on 24th June.
