Eleanor Mosley and Other Milliners in the City of London Companies 1700-1750

Eleanor Mosley, the second child of a prosperous York apothecary, was seventeen years old in April 1718 when she was bound as an apprentice in London to George Tyler and his wife, Lucy, who was a milliner. Her indenture was registered with the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, of which George was a freeman (that is, a full member).When she arrived, there were already two older girls in the Tyler household serving as apprentices in millinery. Two more were taken on during Eleanor's term of seven years: in 1720 the daughter of a Leeds clothworker arrived, and in 1722 the daughter of a York grocer. George and Lucy Tyler's apprentices are listed in Table 1.

Eight years later, Eleanor took the freedom of the Clockmakers' Company in her own right, and that same year took her own first apprentice: her fifteen-year-old sister, Catherine Mosley. The following month Eleanor took on a second apprentice, the daughter of a Kentish clergyman. In 1729 Mosley took premises in the north end of Gracechurch Street in the City of London, where she lived with her two apprentices. Three years later she took on a third apprentice, daughter of a London goldsmith and by his address a neighbour of hers. When her first two apprentices had finished their seven-year terms, she took on a fourth, daughter of a Kentish sea captain, and subsequently three more. Eleanor Mosley's apprentices are listed in Table 2.

Their parents paid a substantial premium with all of these apprentices to the master and mistress, in the case of the Tylers, or to the mistress, in the case of Mosley. We don't know where the Tyler household was located, but Gracechurch Street was a prominent location: part of a main thoroughfare, the Roman road connecting the southern counties with the City via London Bridge, and extending north to Cambridge and thence to York (now the A10). Mosley's was one of the dozen or so premises immediately north of the junction with Lombard Street and Fenchurch Street, another main east-west artery through the City dominated by wealthy trades. Mosley ran her business for at least fifteen years. She remained single until marrying in her mid-forties, after which point her business career is lost to view, but she retained ownership of her Gracechurch Street property, in her maiden name, until 1752, the last year that I have found any record of her.

The career followed by Eleanor Mosley, her fellow apprentices under Lucy Tyler, and her own household of apprentices is not one normally associated either with a City company or with genteel women in the eighteenth century. Mrs Mary Delany (1700-88), who came from a family of 'successful traders and country squires',¹ wrote to her sister in 1750 that 'young men have a thousand ways of improving a little fortune, by professions and employments, if they have good friends, but young gentlewomen have no way, the fortune settled on them is all they are to expect — they are incapable of making any addition'.² Her opinion epitomizes the historical view that no woman of any social standing would have worked for her living unless forced to do so by penury.³ Since Alice Clark's Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919), there has been a tendency to see a withdrawal of women of middling social levels from commerce at some point between the sixteenth century and the early nineteenth. Recent important studies of the role of female business proprietors have focused on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, partly because the insurance records have been digitized from the 1770s.⁴ The historiography of occupational training appears to reinforce Delany's view, since studies of girls' apprenticeship in early modern England have focused on pauper apprenticeship, where the overwhelming majority of girls, some as young as six, were set to learn the 'art and mystery' of housewifery.⁵ To a modern eye, training in housewifery appears to confirm the supreme importance of marriage for women and their consignment...