The Livery is to Blame

Ten Things You Can Blame On The Livery

The annoying expectation that professionals should be compentent

Long before formal government regulators arrived, Liveries existed to protect standards: training, entry to the trade, quality control, and the general principle that if you sell something in the City, it shouldn’t be dreadful. That idea didn’t die. It evolved. Even the modern Freedom of the City narrative still frames the Liveries as part of an old bargain: you pay a fee, you gain the right to trade and in return, the trade behaves properly. If you’ve ever benefited from a professional who actually knows what they’re doing, you can blame the Liveries for setting the tone.

The apprenticeship model as a route to mastery

Modern apprenticeships come with qualifications and frameworks, but the Livery tradition is where the idea hardens into something serious: skill passed from practitioner to practitioner, measured over time, with real consequences.

Historically, the norm in London was a seven-year apprenticeship, usually starting in the mid-teens, to a freeman of a livery company, long enough to form expertise, not just technique. So if you’ve ever met someone who’s not merely trained, but a master of their craft, blame a Livery.



Cancel Culture

Cancel culture didn’t start with social media. The Liveries built an older, colder version: the trade decides you’re not fit to trade. In the City guild system, membership, freedom, and permission to operate were conditional. If you cheated customers, produced bad work, broke the rules, or operated outside the recognised system, the consequences weren’t “a backlash”. They were practical: fines, confiscation, exclusion, and in serious cases, being barred from working your trade in the City. This is the root idea behind modern professional strike-off and licence withdrawal: the privilege of trading isn’t absolute. It can be removed.

If you’ve ever watched someone lose the right to practice, trade, or operate because they couldn’t be trusted, blame a Livery.



Charity on an industrial scale

Here’s the modern truth: Liveries are, in many cases, serious philanthropic engines. Some are explicit about it. The Worshipful Company of Communicators describes the City Livery movement as giving around £75 million to charity each year. And this isn’t one-off “we sponsored a fun run” charity. It’s structural: trusts, grants, education, hardship support, research, and long-term institutional giving.

If you’ve ever met someone whose life got nudged into a better lane by a scholarship, bursary, or professional grant with a City badge on it: blame a Livery.



The Great Fire of London

The Great Fire of London began at around 1am on 2 September 1666 in the bakery of the King’s baker, Thomas Farriner, on Pudding Lane. We can’t be sure exactly how it started, but an ember from an oven is the usual suspect. Farriner had joined the Bakers’ Company in 1637. So when London was burning, blame a Livery, kind of.

Large scale drug manufacturing

The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries manufactured medicines at scale from its own Hall. Chartered in 1617, the Society acquired Apothecaries’ Hall in Blackfriars in 1632 and, after the Great Fire rebuilt it, later adding an “Elaboratory” a purpose-built facility for bulk production. From the late 17th century it ran organised manufacturing and supply operations for major institutional customers, and that medicines trade continued into the early 20th century.

Product recalls

Before consumer protection law, the Liveries enforced the brutal version of a recall: seize it, destroy it, compensate if necessary, and stop the maker trading.

Guild officers inspected goods in markets and workshops. If bread was underweight, metal was impure, cloth was shoddy, or medicines were unsafe, the response wasn’t guidance or “best practice”. The goods were taken off sale immediately. In some trades they were publicly destroyed. Repeat offenders faced escalating penalties, including loss of the right to trade. This is the ancestor of the modern product recall: unsafe or defective goods removed from circulation because the integrity of the market matters more than the embarrassment of the maker.

If you’ve ever seen a product pulled from shelves “out of an abundance of caution”, blame a Livery.



Official markings

Liveries didn’t invent the idea of marking goods. Traders had been scratching names, symbols, and ownership marks onto products for centuries. What the Liveries did was far more consequential: they turned marks into enforceable proof. In certain trades, a mark stopped being a claim by the maker and became a verdict by the trade itself. If the mark was there, the item had been tested. If it wasn’t, it wasn’t legitimate.



That shift matters. Hallmarks on precious metals and proof marks on firearms are the cleanest examples, but the principle is broader: inspection, verification, record-keeping, and consequences. Marks became shorthand for trust backed by real authority, not marketing. If you’ve ever trusted a product because it carried an official stamp rather than a promise, blame a Livery.

Moving the goalposts

The Liveries embedded a deeply inconvenient idea into British commercial life: passing a standard once doesn’t buy you permanent approval. As materials, tools, and risks changed, so did expectations. A product or practice that was acceptable in one generation could be rejected in the next. Marks, permissions, and approvals were always conditional on current standards, not historical reputation.

The underlying logic is simple: the public shouldn’t bear the risk of your outdated competence. If you’ve ever been told that yesterday’s pass is today’s fail, blame a Livery.



The Lord Mayor’s world is real, not a fashion show

In most places, civic ceremony is decorative. In the City, it’s welded into governance. Liverymen still participate in the City’s unique constitutional machinery, including being summoned to Common Hall at Guildhall for key elections, such as Sheriffs.

This is not nostalgia. It’s an operating system that continues to drive inward investment and strong international partnerships. If you've ever wondered why business people and politicians still attend banquets and dress in white tie, blame a Livery.



Blame the Worshipful Company of Carmen

One-way traffic

Long before cars, congestion was already a problem. Medieval London’s streets were narrow, crowded, and chaotic: carts, drays, packhorses, pedestrians, animals, and market stalls all competing for space. Two carts meeting head-on in the wrong place could bring an entire street or gateway to a halt.

The Worshipful Company of Carmen, responsible for regulating carts and carters, addressed this not by widening streets but by controlling movement. They enforced designated routes for carts carrying goods, restricted access at certain times of day, and, in particularly tight lanes, wharves, and market approaches, imposed directional movement.

These weren’t called “one-way streets,” but functionally that’s what they were: enter here, exit there, keep the flow moving. The principle was simple and enduring, traffic efficiency matters more than individual convenience.

If you’ve ever been funnelled down a one-way system and told it’s “for traffic flow,” blame the Carmen.



Vehicle registration

Carts caused damage, injury, obstruction, toll evasion, and were part of illegal trading. Without identification, enforcement was impossible.

The Worshipful Company of Carmen solved this with cart marking. Every authorised cart had to carry a visible, unique mark. That mark was recorded and tied to the owner, the carter, and the permitted trade. Unmarked carts were illegal. They could be fined, seized, or excluded from operating.

Crucially, these marks required no paperwork in the street. A warden could see instantly whether a cart was legitimate. A mark wasn’t branding or decoration, it was permission, rendered visible.

This is vehicle registration stripped to its essentials: a unique identifier, linked to a central authority, used for compliance and enforcement. The difference between a medieval cart mark and a modern number plate is material, not logic.

If you’ve ever been told your vehicle must be identifiable to the state, blame the Carmen.



Vehicle Tax

Carts placed heavy strain on roads, bridges, wharves, and markets, infrastructure built primarily for feet, not wheels. Maintenance cost money, and the burden fell disproportionately on wheeled traffic.

Cart marking was not free. Fees were paid for registration, renewal, and permission to operate within the City. Fines applied for overloading, operating outside permitted routes, or using unregistered carts. Pay, and your cart was lawful. Don’t, and it wasn’t.

This is road-use taxation by licence: those who use infrastructure most contribute to its upkeep; failure to pay removes your right to operate. The principle is unchanged, whether the fee is collected by a medieval livery or registered with the DVLA.

If you’ve ever paid to keep a vehicle legally on the road, blame the Carmen.