Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society is an ambitious and innovative study of the social, political and religious histories of medieval England and Wales. Using the Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow as a prism, it sets out to consider the almost ubiquitous membership of religious guilds in both urban and rural society on the eve of the Reformation. With over 18,000 members recorded in the guild’s massive extant archive, drawn from across the social spectrum and spread throughout Wales, England, Iberia, Ireland and France, the Palmers offer a unique opportunity to investigate the interplay between institutions and individuals in the Middle Ages. Why did thousands of men and women join this particular organization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? What influenced people’s decision to become a member, how can we reconstruct these decisions from surviving documents, and what do they reveal about the communities that made up late medieval society?

By posing these questions, this book charts individual and collective experiences, reconstructing the life-stages, political circumstances, and social pressures incumbent on individuals as they engaged in a moral and fiscal commitment to a guild. Departing from traditional guild studies, Forging Fraternity crosses conventional historiographical boundaries to reconceptualise guild membership as both a structure for and mirror of complex social relations and identities, demonstrating with ingenuity how medieval sources can be put to use in unconventional ways.