Civic splendour

St Mary's Guildhall, Coventry A property of Coventry City Council

- John Goodall

The guildhall built as a symbol of Coventry's 14th-century prosperity and self-government has recently undergone restoration. John Goodall reports.

ON May 20, 1340, Edward III issued a royal licence authorising ‘the men of Coventry to have a guild merchant with a fraternity of brothers and sisters’. In this licence are to be traced the origins of the great medieval Guildhall that almost miraculously survives next to the great spire and ruins of the former parish church of St Michael’s in the heart of the city. The Guildhall has recently undergone a £6 million restoration project that highlights the interest of this building and its outstanding collections.

Brotherhoods that drew together individuals in a shared trade were a commonplace of late medieval urban life and Coventry’s ‘guild merchant’, dedicated to St Mary, was conventional in form. Its membership, the licence continues, could draw up governing statutes and elect a master or warden. Religious observance was always central to the lives of these incorporated bodies and the guild, therefore, was also given permission ‘to found chantries, [dispense] alms and [undertake] other works of piety’. Typically, a guild adopted a chapel in a convenient parish church, paying for priests to say divine service and financing improvements to them.

Almost immediately, St Mary’s Guild began to secure property to create a home for itself. In architectural terms, guildhalls resembled grand residences, typically comprising a great hall—for feasts and gatherings—a kitchen and services, as well as withdrawing chambers. A deed dated April 14, 1347, described a tenement, screened from the street by a row of five cottages and next to St Michael’s church (as well as the former site of Coventry Castle), as having ‘become the site of St Mary’s Hall’. The great hall was probably of timber frame and was raised above a surviving vaulted undercroft of stone.