사슬에서 풀려난 길드 : 왕정복고 이후 헐 트리니티 하우스와 상인 회사 사이의 법적 분쟁과 해결 과정을 중심으로

A legal dispute in 1664-1665 between the Hull Trinity House and the Company of Merchants, two guilds in Kingston upon Hull, provides a useful signpost on which to reassess the existing literature on conflict resolutions in early modern English provincial towns. The received version chiefly focused in early Stuart England has long depicted those localities involved in intramural conflicts as incapable of sorting them out without relying on the central government at whose helm lay the Crown as the font of justice. Resort to the metropolitan legal networks and infrastructures was, the argument goes, always mediated effectively through the borough corporation in provincial towns as its administrators were first and foremost committed to restoring harmony and peace of their communities. The dispute between Hull’s two local guilds, however, challenges this historiographical consensus, as in the changed circumstance of post-restoration England town governments and councils were increasingly politicized and polarized, no longer playing the role of impartial arbitrator or problem solver. At loggerheads not only with the merchants’ company but with the Hull corporation also, the Trinity House looked to London at the earliest inception of its legal proceedings for counsel and arbitration, standing on its own as an impressively freestanding corporation within a corporation in disfavor of their corporate interests. A closer examination of the guild’s order book and related printed and manuscript sources helps to spot the dynamic creativity of an autonomous craft guild in late seventeenth-century England, neither diminished nor hampered by its borough corporation and related provincial constraints.