THE MANUSCRIPT

This volume presents the second part of ‘William Porlond's Minute Book, Being an Account and Memorandum Book, compiled by William Porlond, clerk to the Brewers’ Company, 1418–40’. The entire manuscript is bound within one later cover of the nineteenth century or earlier. The book belongs to the Worshipful Company of Brewers of London, and it is currently lodged at the London Guildhall Library. This later part, consisting of folios 157–328, spans the years 1429–40. The first part, folios 1–156, covering the years 1418–25, was published by the London Record Society in 2024.

Records for the years 1425–9 are missing from this manuscript and the clerk's usual lists of income and expenditure are not found for those years. Pages may have been lost in Porlond's day, or subsequently. The book was rescued from the Great Fire of 1666, when Brewers’ Hall, as Porlond knew it, burnt down, and then Brewers’ Hall, as rebuilt in the seventeenth century, was destroyed during the Second World War on 29 December 1940. Another possibility to explain the missing years is that Porlond himself may have been ill or away from London. His name, however, is not on the Muster Rolls, so he was probably not abroad serving as a soldier. There seems to have been dissension within the craft and fraternity, so perhaps the usual records were simply not entered in this book for 1425–9. In 1429, when the records resume, the clerk refers to a troubled time, when ‘a great harm befell the craft’ and some who had been Masters were ‘wasted and dead’, and others were ‘voided out of London’ [1].