Tracing the hidden histories of women in the Stationers’ Company apprenticeship registers

In a previous blog, Helen Williams introduced the British Academy-funded feminist recovery project, ‘Communicating Women’s Work in the Historical Archive’, co-led with the Stationers’ Company archivist, Dr Ruth Frendo. One of the project’s outputs is a new finding aid to women in the Stationers’ Company, Eighteenth-Century Women in the Stationers’ Company Apprentice Registers. This blog introduces the resource and reflects on what these records can reveal about women’s participation in apprenticeship and the wider networks of book production.

The Stationers’ Company Apprentice Registers

The Apprentice Registers of the Stationers’ Company are beautiful books. You can view high-resolution images of them in AM’s Literary Print Culture, under ‘Membership Records: Apprentice Registers’, or you can visit the books in person at Stationers’ Hall. I am lucky enough to have done both, though for the finding aid I worked almost exclusively from the digitised files at Literary Print Culture. Whilst the volumes have been photographed for the site, they have not yet been transcribed, and thus a finding aid can be helpful for both in-person and digital readers.

The Stationers’ Company Apprentice Registers are formal documents: they are tidied-up versions of the scrappier Apprentice Memorandum Books. There are five apprentice registers in total, but we dealt with only four, since the project covered the long eighteenth century, a period less frequently studied in relation to the history of women in the London book trades. We therefore omitted Apprentice Register 1 (TSC/1/C/05/01/01), which deals with the period 29 Jul 1605—27 Jun 1666. We began in 1666, with Apprentice Register 2. We end in 1806, with the close of Apprentice Register 5. 

Identifying women in the registers

In identifying women in the apprentice registers, we were following a very simple methodology of identifying female names and kinship labels, and yet all the while we were conscious that such an approach does not address historical figures who did not conform to a period’s gendered expectations. Gender is, of course, a cultural and historical construct, and is contingent upon many contexts that such a list cannot hope to capture or fully make sense of. Nevertheless, when faced with the choice of whether to recover women’s work in this blundering way, or not at all, we felt that the former was the most valuable. We include all entries in these volumes that name women of any status: master, apprentice, next of kin, funder. Entries are made, aside from the occasional irregularity, in chronological order by date of binding or turnover.

Learning from the apprenticeship records

Transcribing and editing apprenticeship records over the course of 140 years taught us a lot about the rituals of apprenticing, which gradually evolve over that period, increasingly revealing more about the Company’s gendered processes. What I had expected to be quite welcome, mindless work (it was, at times: simply transcribing every entry which featured a female name) was also hugely informative. 

Entries are organised by date and then the name of the master. The master’s name is followed by the name of the apprentice with details of their father’s place of origin. Here is an example:

7 May 1767. Syndonia Forbey Widdow of Thomas: Thomas Randes Sonne of William Randes of Nottsham in the County of Lincolne gent hath putt himself an Apprentice to Syndonia Forbey Widdowe, late wife of Thomas Forbey for seven years from the nine and twentieth of January last (f.3v)
 

The entry then reminds us of the name of the master and tells us of the duration of the apprenticeship. 

By the mid eighteenth century, however, we get extra information. The master’s occupation and place of address is listed after the second instance of the master’s name, including the sum paid to fund the apprenticeship, and by whom. Here is an example:

6 July 1762. Thomas Saunders: Penelope Caporn Daughter of Thomas Caporn of the Parish of St. Brides London Coal Merchant to Thomas Saunders of Cheapside London Haberdasher 7 Years Consideration £52, 10 paid by William Gordon the Grandfather (f. 263v)
 

An interesting addition, here, and one often overlooked in book trades research, is the name of the funder. In our finding aid, we have included all apprenticeships that name a female funder, including for male apprentices to male masters. Many mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and female-led charitable trusts funded apprenticeships in this period, and it was one of many ways in which women contributed to the ecosystem of book production in the long eighteenth-century period. We are sure that this is a study waiting to happen!

Who used the apprentice registers

The other eighteenth-century innovation in the record-keeping of apprenticeships is the inclusion of the master’s occupation. This addition to later entries reveals the potential dangers of making assumptions as to who used the Stationers’ Company apprentice registers. As was the case across all London guilds, traders did not need to register their apprentices with the guild most neatly aligned with their trade. It is easy to assume that apprentices registered with the Stationers’ Company were undertaking an apprenticeship related to the stationery trades: bookselling, bookbinding, engraving, printing, etc. But it was not unusual for trades far beyond the parameters of the book trades to register their apprentices with the Stationers’ Company: many milliners are featured within these pages, and the above example is a haberdasher.

To return to the first example, then, Syndonia Forbey is the first female member to take an apprentice during the long eighteenth century. That does not mean, however, that she was the first female member to train an apprentice in the book trades. She could just as well have been a butcher, as was Elizabeth Brown (f. 267v). Indeed, neither she nor her husband, nor her apprentice, feature in the British Book Trades Index, and I have been unable to source any information about her from a cursory glance at the usual sources.

Looking beyond the Stationers’ Company

The apprentice registers of the Stationers’ Company are, therefore, not the only source for tracing eighteenth-century female apprentices in the book trades, or women involved in training the next generation of book producers. In the Clothworkers’ Guild, for example, we find Mary Darke, a printer at ‘ye Blew Anchor in Colemanstreete’, apprenticing Jonathan Bingham Junior, the son of a husbandman (i.e. farmer) from Sutton in Nottinghamshire, for 7 years from 6 July 1708. This is not a fact we would glean from the Stationers’ Company apprentice records alone.

Limits and possibilities of the finding aid

And, so, the finding aid is incomplete, as all finding aids must be. We feel almost certain that the finding aid includes every woman involved in apprenticing in Company (not in the book trades!) in the long eighteenth-century period, though we are happy to be corrected and to keep the file updated. It only deals with apprenticing, for a start. But we hope it provides a good foundation for identifying women in the Stationers’ Company’s vast archive and that its methods, as described here, can help other scholars as they navigate the archives on site or via Literary Print Culture.

Explore the finding aid here: Eighteenth-Century Women in the Stationers’ Company Apprentice Registers.

For more information on AM’s Literary Print Culture, including pricing, please request a demo.

If you find the resource helpful, we would love to hear from you. You can read more about the wider project and get in touch with us at Women Making Books.

Further Reading

Apprentice Record of Jonathan Bingham, Records of London’s Livery Companies Online (ROLLCO), available at https://www.londonroll.org/event/?company=clw&event_id=CLEB12794.

British Book Trades Index, available at https://bbti.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/#.