![]() ![]() Elizabeth Spencer, a twenty-one-year-old servant to a threadman, described Ann’s misuse of credit. Two other young women came to testify about Ann Gray’s misdealings. Ann’s dubious transactions, and her brother’s contentiousness, established a reputation for them ‘on the Exchange’. Although she believed Ann to be already a capable worker, worth being paid wages as well as diet and lodging, she had heard that her brother was ‘a contentious person’ and that Ann ‘owed money to several persons on the Exchange’, as well as to Katherine herself and her servant. Katherine Bobart came to explain that she had refused to take Ann on herself. The Frosts alleged that Ann, working in Sarah’s shop, had allowed customers to buy on credit and had either kept the money or not pursued the debt. Footnote 1 Their negotiations illuminate the female-dominated retail world of the Royal Exchange in the late seventeenth century and the interpersonal and spatial connections that governed its trade.Īt the Mayor’s Court, witnesses described Ann Gray’s transgressions of the apprentice code. Sarah and William Frost continued to take a few apprentices, male and female, over the next thirteen years, suggesting that Exchange business waxed and waned with trade conditions as much as marital choices. Ann Gray offered her services instead to another Exchange seamstress, Katherine Bobart, and left the Frosts two years into her contract. George confronted William Frost, asking how he planned to provide for his wife-to-be’s apprentice: he received the non-committal reply that ‘he would provide for her as he thought fit’. She had scarcely any goods, he claimed, to run a business. She was dealing in gauze and bone lace but not in point and ‘other costly laces’, ‘nor doth she drive soe considerable a trade as she did before her intermarriage … but doth decline the same very much & not mind her shop at all’. Ann’s brother George Gray claimed that Sarah’s trade was reduced. Sarah Cleave’s flourishing business in the Exchange looked promising to her new apprentice, Ann Gray, until Cleave made plans to marry a scrivener, William Frost, and the Grays lost faith that her business would carry on. ![]() Litigation like that brought by Ann’s family to recoup the costs of her abandoned apprenticeship is a rare and eloquent source. Even with an interrupted training, young women like Ann Gray readily went on to make a living at sewing, but their apprenticeships, work and subsequent lives have left little record, and the story of London’s consumption revolution has focused more on goods and shoppers than their female makers and sellers. Seamstresses and shopkeepers like these worked in shops, stalls and houses across the City and Westminster and in the shopping galleries of the Royal Exchange, whose small, prestigious shops proved particularly attractive to the middling and gentry women who joined the City companies in the late seventeenth century. Sarah Cleave was a single woman who had earned the freedom of London after her own apprenticeship, and Ann was her second apprentice. One of them was Ann Gray, whose mistress, Sarah Cleave, drove a ‘considerable trade’ in her shop in the Royal Exchange in ‘costly laces and other things’. In the late seventeenth century, the shops of the Royal Exchange housed many of the apprentice seamstresses in London’s companies. ![]()
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