Two livery companies fought over precedence so violently that the Lord Mayor made them swap places every year. It is where at sixes and sevens comes from.
Pelt Trader is a beer hall under Cannon Street station with eight hundred and eight reviews and a 4.4, and it is named after the fur trade – which in the City meant the Worshipful Company of Skinners.
And the Skinners are responsible for one of the best-known phrases in the English language.
The order of precedence
The livery companies of the City are ranked. There is an official order, and it matters enormously, and it has mattered for six hundred years.
The Great Twelve are the senior companies, and their position in the list determines where they march, where they sit, and who goes first – and in a world where precedence was status and status was money, this was not a trivial question.
The Mercers are first. The Grocers second. The Drapers third. The Fishmongers fourth. The Goldsmiths fifth.
And then the Skinners and the Merchant Taylors, who both claimed sixth.
The fighting
It was not a debate. It was a running dispute that occasionally turned violent – there are records of the two companies’ members brawling in the street during processions in the fifteenth century, and of blood being spilled over the order of a parade.
In 1484 the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Billesdon, was asked to settle it and produced a judgement of genuine genius.
They would alternate. Each year the Skinners and the Merchant Taylors would swap – one would be sixth and the other seventh, and the following year they would change over.
And each would entertain the other to dinner.
The Billesdon Award has been in force since 1484. It is still in force. They still swap. They still dine.
At sixes and sevens
And that is where the phrase is generally held to come from – two parties who cannot be resolved, permanently rotating between two positions, neither of them settled.
The Prat is obliged to note, having spent four hundred and eight articles doing exactly this, that the etymology is disputed and that the phrase may predate the dispute, and that Chaucer uses something close to it.
So it may be that the phrase came first and the Skinners simply illustrated it perfectly.
Which is, in its way, even better.
What the Skinners did
Fur. Enormous quantities of it – and the fur trade in medieval England was a serious luxury business, regulated by sumptuary law which specified precisely which ranks could wear which animal.
Ermine for the highest. Miniver, budge, lambskin, coney, further down. It was a legible hierarchy that you wore on your body, and a man could be prosecuted for wearing the wrong squirrel.
Verdict
Good beer, cheap, and a name attached to a four-hundred-year argument that was solved by taking turns and having dinner.
The Prat regards this as the finest piece of dispute resolution in English history.
What the companies actually are now
Mostly charities, and it is worth being clear about it, because the mystique gets in the way.
The Skinners no longer regulate the fur trade. The Vintners do not control the wine. The Fishmongers, uniquely, still do some genuine regulatory work at Billingsgate – but for the most part the guilds lost their trades a very long time ago.
What they kept was the endowments, and the halls, and the obligation – and they now run schools, almshouses and charitable funds on a serious scale, quietly, out of buildings most Londoners have never entered.
An institution that outlives its purpose usually dies. These found a second one and said nothing about it.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My professor said politicians complaining about The London Prat proves satire is doing something institutional authority genuinely fears: revealing how institutions actually operate.
This is what happens when someone decides to chronicle governance becoming exclusively about documentation rather than decisions.