In fact, the linkage was so strong between the glovers and the perfume industry that French glovers were granted sole rights to make , distribute and sell perfumes. In England Worcester, Oxford and Exeter were principal manufacturing centres and even small towns would have at least one glover to meet local needs. Worcester was recognized as possibly the leading English glove making city from the time of the Norman Conquest. Oxford's glovers were already formed into a Guild in 1349 and received an exclusive charter in 1371.
With the onset of the industrial revolution came the mechanization of sewing. Machine sewing fundamentally changed the nature of the glove industry. The masters of glove making used their skills to personalize and adorn machine sewn gloves and the introduction of machine made fabrics rapidly eroded the earlier strong links between the leather and glove making industries.
The Worshipful Company of Glove Makers of London
The Early Years
Following the lead of other Fraternities and Guilds in London and glovers in other English and European cities, the glove makers of London formed a Guild in 1349 to protect the high standards of their craft and to restrict local and outside competition in their market. The ordinances covered trading rules, penalties, pricing, powers of inspection and seizure. One of the Company's more interesting ordinances was that no glover should sell his wares by candlelight...."seeing that folks cannot have such good knowledge...whether the wares are made of good leather or bad, and whether they are well and lawfully, or falsely made."
As we have noted before, the early Guilds constantly had jurisdictional disputes with Guilds in related trades. The Glovers, Pursers, Curriers, Pouch-makers had constant battles with the Leathersellers and with each other. With constant conflict, the Glovers and Pursers got into financial difficulty and, in 1498, the Guilds of the Glovers and Pursers amalgamated by grant of the Court of Aldermen of the City. There are no records indication that any royal charter had been granted before this amalgamation. Four year later, in 1502, the Glovers-Pursers were integrated into the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers and the Pouch-makers followed suit in 1517.
The Glorious Age
With resurgence of the glove industry and the increasing use of gloves by the growing middle class of London in the late 16 th and early 17 th century especially during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the glovers in the Company of Leathersellers grew in wealth and stature, and the Glovers Company regained its independence by grant of a Royal Charter from King Charles I in 1638. It is this date that was used to establish the Glovers' Company position in the order of precedence. In this resurgence, the London Glove makers became the English hub of the industry, but, without charter rights beyond the city limits, competition remained strong from other leading manufacturing areas such as Gloucester and Oxford.
With the very recent grant of it Charter, at the time of the Great Fire, the Company had accumulated little wealth, but it appears they established a small hall in Beech Lane, Cripplegate in 1662. There appears to be little reference to the financial impact of the probable loss of this hall in 1666. Unlike many of the longer established Livery Companies and guilds, the Glovers had few, if any, other London properties and so came out of that disaster without serious losses of revenue and no great cost to rebuild properties except its hall. However, it must be assumed that many master glovers would have been seriously affected when their premises were burned to the ground. Clearly however, the fortunes of the Glovers Company continued to improve around that time as records show that, in 1675, the Company again owned a Livery Hall.
Two Centuries of Decline
As culture and fashion in and around London changed during the 18 th and 19 th centuries, so did the fortunes of the Worshipful Company of Glovers. The extension of the Glovers' franchise to the rapidly growing City, the move to the suburbs by the new middle classes and above all the Industrial Revolution meant that the artisan workshops of the City were replaced by factories outside it and the economical shipment of products from other English and European glove-making communities pressured the City-based Glovers. Early in the 18th century, the Glovers Livery still numbered 120 (in 1826); by 1866 it had shrunk to 40 and by the end of the century it had fallen to 14. The hall was given up for lack of funds to maintain it. Court record show that the officers and court of the Company invariably preferred to meet in the George and Vulture Tavern in Cornhill. One might surmise this was due to the availability there of beer and wine.
During this same time, Worcester moved ahead of London as the largest glove making centre. That city's pre-eminence was due to its geographical position on the River Severn and the natural land routes converging from the Midlands towards Wales. Sheepskins were converted to gloving leather by towing, involving the use of common alum and salt, and produced a softer, lighter leather with more stretch than that which came from horses and cattle and were tanned using oak bark. Worcester was a prosperous and wealthy city in the 15th and 16th Centuries, noted for woollen broad cloth of the highest quality. This material was not produced solely by the clothiers but by others, including glovers. As the cloth trade declined, people and premises transferred easily to glover-making, severely pressuring London glovers.
During the Victorian era, Yeovil replaced Worcester as England's largest glove-making area. It was during this period that the wearing of gloves became fashionable for men and women of any social standing. Yeovil's piece-work rates were lower than those of Worcester, its prices generally more competitive, and Yeovil entrepreneurs began selling to every part of the globe. The area had all the basic strengths for continued expansion, with good linking roads, and a population that had expanded at a faster rate than the national average. Furthermore, local skilled workers were not averse to change as traditional methods became outdated.
The empirical knowledge of leather manufacture had been handed down by word of mouth for centuries and had evolved slowly. By the middle of the 19th Century the methods began to change. The most significant innovation was the establishment of glove sizing and consistent methods of cutting, devised by a French Master Glover, Xavier Jouvin (1800 - 1844). He made use of uniformly proportioned knives, graded for size, giving a constant shape for stitching and establishing a reliable finished size. Also, since 1775 inventors had sought to develop a sewing machine for making gloves but had failed. However, in 1834 a two-thread machine was introduced into the gloving industry, for sewing the points on the back of the glove. A variety of other machines followed which enabled the machine operator to make complete gloves. Furthermore, the expansion of University teaching and technological research changed the very nature of the industry. It became capital intensive, using expensive machinery, obligating a high and consistent output to recover ever increasing fixed costs and necessary to meet the fast growing global mass markets.
Company Comment - Fall 2010
The Unique City
The City Livery Companies
Freedom of The City
The Constitution of Company