Tylers and Bricklayers

The favourable reception given to the Tilers’ petition by the Court of Aldermen in 1468 was a turning point in its history and the date from which the Company can trace its continuous history as a Livery Company, although that term was not to come into general use for another thirty or forty years. Although they would never know it, the Tilers were approaching one of those boundary lines drawn by historians, invisible to contemporaries but clear to those who have the benefit of hindsight. They were about to leave behind the Middle Ages and the Plantagenet, Lancastrian and Yorkist monarchies and enter what is known to us as modern history, acknowledging a new Tudor Monarchy and facing the challenge of all those new ideas conveniently summed up for us in the words “Renaissance” and “Reformation”. This passing from one age to another is emotively described by the mid 19th century historian J A Froude in the first chapter of his history of the Tudors:

“A change was coming upon the world …. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream …. And all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations was seen to be a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone – like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery …. they cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them.”

The Tilers however busied themselves with more mundane matters, appearing anxious to make up for lost time. On the 14th December 1473 they came before the Court of Aldermen to obtain confirmation of additional Ordinances enabling them to appoint three wardens in place of two to search for defective tiles, and they were back again on 14th March 1480/1 to have more Ordinances approved for regulating tile searches and also the relationship of the members of the Company with each other.