In other cities besides London the clerks seem to have formed their guilds.  As early as the time of the Domesday Survey there was a clerks’ guild at Canterbury, wherein it is stated “In civitate Cantuaria habet achiepiscopus xii burgesses and xxxii mansuras which the clerks of the town, clerici de villa, hold within their gild and do yield xxxv shillings.”

The first mention of the company carries us back to the early days of Henry III, when in the seventeenth year of that monarch’s reign (A.D. 1233), according to Stow, they were incorporated and registered in the books of the Guildhall.  The patron saint of the company was St. Nicholas, who also extended his patronage to robbers and mariners.  Thieves are dubbed by Shakespeare as St. Nicholas’s clerks[51], and Rowley calls highwaymen by the same title.  Possibly this may be accounted for by the association of the light-fingered fraternity with Nicholas, or Old Nick, a cant name for the devil, or because The Golden Legend tells of the conversion of some thieves through the saint’s agency.  At any rate, the good Bishop of Myra was the patron saint of scholars, and therefore was naturally selected as tutelary guardian of clerks.

[Footnote 51:  Henry IV, act ii. sc. 1.]

In 1442 Henry VI granted a charter to “the Chief or Parish Clerks of the City of London for the honour and glory of Almighty God and of the undefiled and most glorious Virgin Mary, His Mother, and on account of that special devotion, which they especially bore to Christ’s glorious confessor, St. Nicholas, on whose day or festival we were first presented into this present world, at the hands of a mother of memory ever to be revered.”  The charter states that they had maintained a poor brotherhood of themselves, as well as a certain divine service, and divine words of charity and piety, devised and exhibited by them year by year, for forty years or more by part; and it conferred on them the right of a perpetual corporate community, having two roasters and two chaplains to celebrate divine offices every day, for the King’s welfare whether alive or dead, and for the souls of all faithful departed, for ever.  By special royal grace they were allowed, on petitioning His Majesty, to have the charter without paying any fine or fee.

Seven years later a second charter was granted, wherein it is stated that their services were held in the Chapel of Mary Magdalene by the Guildhall.  “Bretherne and Sisterne” were included in the fraternity.  Bad times and the Wars of the Roses brought distress to the community, and they prayed Edward IV to refound their guild, allowing only the maintenance of one chaplain instead of two in the chapel nigh the Guildhall, together with the support of seven poor persons who daily offered up their prayers for the welfare of the King and the repose of the souls of the faithful.  They provided “a prest, brede, wyne, wex, boke, vestments and chalise for their auter of S. Nicholas in the said chapel.”  The King granted their request.