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Mapping a Medieval Guild: Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society by Rachael Harkes

Dr Rachael Harkes, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol, was awarded a research grant by the Yorkist History Trust to employ a cartographer to create a series of maps for her new monograph, Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society: The Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow (London, 2025), published open access by the University of London Press and the Royal Historical Society in their New Historical Perspectives series. Here, she explains how the funding from the Trust aided her research and the importance of the maps to the book’s historiographical intervention.

In 1438, Richard, duke of York, and Cecily Neville, his wife, joined the Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow, a voluntary religious association located in the parish church of St Laurence in the Marcher town of Ludlow [Fig. 1]. They gave £16 13s. 14d. for admission – £16 more than the standard rate for a couple. Through his Mortimer inheritance, York oversaw substantial estates on the Anglo-Welsh border, including the formidable castle at Ludlow which acted as a local power base. Later in the fifteenth century – after York’s death at Wakefield in 1460 and the coronation of his eldest son and heir as Edward IV the next year – their children followed their lead and joined fraternities close to their own estates: George, duke of Clarence, joined the Holy Cross Guild at Stratford, while Richard, duke of Gloucester, joined the Corpus Christi Guild in York. King Edward enrolled in the Palmers’ Guild himself in the 1470s [Fig. 2].

In doing so, these royal brothers acted like other great magnates of the period by associating with a prestigious fraternity close to the heart of their landed power bases; and there was nothing unusual about their actions. What was unique, however, was that the Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow was an extraordinarily inclusive and wide-ranging association, with members running the medieval gamut from beggars all the way through to the king, recruiting people from across Wales, England, Ireland, Iberia, and France. During the late Middle Ages, over 18,000 people are recorded as joining the Palmers. My new monograph, Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society, explores why people chose to join this particular guild, either instead of or alongside more conveniently located guilds that were available to them. What influenced an individual’s decision to become a Palmer? Forging Fraternity scrutinises the life-stages, political circumstances, and social pressures that were incumbent on individuals as they chose to join a religious guild.

One of the main classes of documentary sources that survive for the Palmers’ Guild are membership lists, which – as the name might suggest – record people who signed up and provide identifying details: their occupation, marital status, and residency (parish, manor, village, town, or city). This information is mainly collected in a homogeneous series of ten manuscripts dating between 1497 and 1508 and 1515 to 1516, each with anywhere from twenty to over one hundred folios. Additional members are recorded for other dates on rolls and loose paper pages, but with less consistency. My idea to create maps, showing where recruits originated from, grew out of a need to able to take this enormous volume of written information and to picture it differently – quite literally. I was very fortunate to receive a grant from the Yorkist History Trust to collaborate with a cartographer to create a series of maps for Forging Fraternity [Map 1].

In order to achieve this, I recorded the places found in the ten membership lists from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the number of new recruits from each respective location. The next step was to locate and record the Easting and Northing coordinates for each location in a simple database. Craig Asquith, FRGS, was able to take this data and use it to create maps that were integral to my research process.

The purpose of these maps is two-fold. First, they act as an analytical tool to understand how the geography of Wales and England influenced who became a Palmer and the subsequent geographical trends in the guild’s popularity. Mapping the recruitment allows us to see how the terrain influenced engagement with the guild: the guild stewards embarked on recruitment rides by following established routes cutting through the hilly terrain of Wales, for example. Consistently, we see stewards making the same annual journey from Shropshire to Aberystwyth, via Welshpool and Machynlleth.

Likewise, the map for new recruitment between 1497 and 1501 revealed particular concentrations of membership from certain cities: London, Coventry, Bristol, Gloucester and Worcester [Map 2]. This map, then, prompted me to question why membership might be popular within those locations. Chapter Three in Forging Fraternity considers the relationship between the guild and local urban power structures. It reveals that the Palmers’ Guild was in some towns a proving ground for aspiring members of the urban elite, attracting men at the early state of their political careers despite often significant distances to Ludlow, and that membership was bound up with notions of civic piety and moral probity. London, however, presented a different and more diverse story, with membership of the Palmers being associated more closely with patterns within specific livery companies and master-apprentice relations.

Second, the maps serve to support one of the main tenets of Forging Fraternity: that membership of this organisation was unusually widespread in the late Middle Ages. Mapping locations of recruitment immediately demonstrates the geographical range of the guild which, when translated into human terms, represents an extraordinary undertaking on the part of the guild’s officers who travelled far and wide to enrol people and collect their fees. With membership spilling out far beyond the confines of the Welsh Marches in an age which is commonly (if inaccurately) thought to have been one of limited mobility and circumscribed world views, the guild’s stewards certainly travelled across much of mainland Britain as well as to Tournai and Rome. Members recruited from Troyes, Ireland, and Iberia may, on the other hand, represent movement in the other direction. The maps are also able to show variations in the numbers recruited in different locations at different times, through the use of proportional symbols – coloured circles of varying sizes relative to the data collected [compare maps 2 and 3]. It is therefore possible to discern trends in recruitment for individual places, which might be tied to local circumstances or external pressures. Maps provide a starting point from which to investigate the root causes of these observations, teasing out their implications for our understanding of many aspects of medieval society.

Readers therefore benefit from voluminous data extracted from the sources being instead rendered graphically. The maps help to distil complex historical research into an immediately cognisable form and in a way that is visually impactful and also serve to disseminate research effectively and increase comprehension of the significance of the Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow. For historians dealing with large datasets which often cannot be directly translated onto the printed (or digital) page, thinking in alternative, visual ways is an important tool that aids not only the reader, but also the author, promoting them to reconsider their research and findings in a new light. The maps became integral to understanding and writing about this extraordinary guild. Viewing the data in this way transformed my analysis and proffered new research questions.

Although the enrolment of the duke and duchess of York and Edward IV was an important moment in the guild’s story, these maps are one tool that allows us to see their actions in context and as part of a complex and rich tapestry through which is woven all ranks of society across an extraordinarily wide geographical catchment. In many ways, the Palmers’ Guild during the Yorkist and Tudor periods offers a rare glimpse of medieval society in its broadest sense.

I am very grateful to the Yorkist History Trust for the award of a grant, and to Craig Asquith for working with complicated and vast data to create a series of clear and striking maps.

Rachael Harkes, Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society: The Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow, Royal Historical Society and University of London Press, New Historical Perspectives series (London, 2025). Available open access or to purchase in paperback (£29.99/$39.99), hardback (£90.00/$120.00), and as an EPUB (£29.99) from www.uolpress.co.uk/book/forging-fraternity-in-late-medieval-society.

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