BJJ News | I ssue 8 | S eptember 2015
R. Vickers
Livery companies
The Barbers Company Sir Roger Vickers, immediate past Master Barber, describes the history and activities of the Worshipful Company of Barbers, one of London’s oldest livery companies
Fig. 1 The Master (Sir Roger Vickers), Deputy Master (Lord Ribeiro) and Wardens of the Barbers’ Company 2014/15
he Worshipful Company of Barbers, to use its full title, developed in the Middle Ages, as one of the Guilds of tradesmen in the City of London. The first official record is from the Court of Aldermen, who appointed Richard Le Barber as the first Master of the Company in 1308. His role was to keep records, and to keep order amongst his colleagues, and if anyone misbehaved, or for example, “became a brothel keeper”, they would be reported and fined. Trade was regulated within the City and in Westminster and in due course the Guilds became known as Livery Companies, as they each wore recognisable uniforms, or livery. Barbers and surgeons developed together, particularly as Pope Innocent lll had decreed in 1215 at the fourth Lateran Council that members of the clergy who had developed medical and early surgical skills, should not shed blood. Since it
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was the barbers who possessed the sharp knives, they took on bloodletting, or phlebotomy, and early surgical procedures. The barbers and surgeons developed alongside one another, in the joint Company of Barbers and Surgeons. They were given further recognition by the Royal Charter of Edward IV in 1462, and even more recognition by Henry Vlll’s Act of Union of 1540, which stated that barbers in The Company should only do barbery, such as shaving or cutting hair, and that the surgeons in The Company should perform only surgery, but that both groups could let blood, and both could remove teeth. More importantly, however, the Act also stipulated that The Company would be allocated four bodies a year from Tyburn, the place of judicial execution, for dissection and the teaching of anatomy to the surgeons in The Company. The Act of Union is portrayed in the great Holbein Portrait, painted in 1541, of Henry Vlll presenting the Act
of Union to Thomas Vicary, his Serjeant Surgeon, and the surgeons and barbers of the Company. This great picture is still in Barber-Surgeons Hall today, and its almost contemporaneous copy will be known to many orthopaedic surgeons as it hangs in the Edward Lumley Hall of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. An anatomy theatre, based on the one in Padua, and designed by Inigo Jones, was built at Barber-Surgeons Hall in 1640, and was in fact the only part of the Hall that was not burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666. The Hall was rebuilt over a few years, and both barbers and surgeons remained as the joint Company of Barbers and Surgeons, for almost another century. In 1745 the Surgeons pet it ioned Parliament, and were allowed to leave The barbers, and they formed The Company of Surgeons, taking with them their librar y and anatomy teaching,