ABSTRACT
On 15 August 1754, Kingston-upon-Thames fined Thomas Worthington £20 to be ‘tolerated’ as a grocer. On the same day, Elizabeth Duke was fined £20 to operate as a linen draper. These were lucrative trades, hence the £20 fine. 1 In Aberdeen on 30 May 1717, tailors granted Rachel Baxter ‘liberty’ for mantuamaking only, requiring guild fees and an extra sum for ‘banqueting money’. 2 In La Rochelle, in 1760, Helene Poupelin from St Jean d’Angely applied to open a marchande de modes boutique. Despite having run the shop ‘illegally’ for a year, she was granted the privilege because ‘we have no rules to prevent her’. 3 In 1781, the Gritti brothers and Zacharias Sütt set up pastry shops in Vienna and gained the privilege to trade as long as they did not sell Viennese pastries but ‘all kinds of baked goods in the French and Italian style’. 4 In 1784, a Spanish royal order undercut calico guilds, declaring that ‘all women could freely sell the products that they themselves made, even if these were the privilege of a guild’. 5 In these examples and many others in towns across eighteenth-century Europe, men and women gained privileges or liberty to trade or were tolerated despite not being guild members or having served an apprenticeship.
