Estate Acquisition

The royal licence for the foundation of the Guild issued on 20 March 1356/7 gave permission to the thirteen York merchants, who had petitioned the king, to acquire property in the city of York to the annual value of ten pounds (Sellers, 1-3) and it is clear from subsequent licences to alienate in mortmain that the accumulation of property within the city began immediately. The bulk of the Guild and Hospital possessions were amassed in the period from the foundation to the close of the fifteenth century, although later archives reveal that the Company continued to acquire property, albeit on a very much smaller scale, down to the present century. The archives contain a large number of original charters relating to these properties (with earlier title going back to the thirteenth century). In the first half of the fifteenth century a cartulary was compiled for the Hospital, including copies of many of these original documents. In addition to the obvious significance of this collection for the history of the Guild and its successor bodies, these records are of great importance for the light they shed incidentally on the topography of medieval York.