Wardens and deputy wardens, from the freemen’s eight surviving craft guilds formed at the end of the Middle Ages, will be available across four days in mid-September will meet members of the public and explain how craftsmen played such a key role in developing trade and prosperity in the city across seven centuries.
Visitors invited in the Town Hall will be able to step into the Guildhall, the oldest part of the building complex which dates back to 1356 and remains to this day the formal meeting place of the freemen’s 280 men and women.
Within the antiquity of the Guildhall, with its impressive oak roof, is a copy of a charter granted by Durham’s Prince Bishop in 1179 freeing city traders from varying of taxes to cultivate the title of “free men.” Alongside are the ancient crests of various guilds – some of them long since disappeared.
There are also displays of historic items associated with the city’s civic history and, within a glass case, brass measures that set standards for market traders and a series of corn measures
Written evidence of the freemen’s collective activities, whose primary concerns were trade and standards of workmanship, have been traced back to 1450. But the establishment of the first guilds are thought to be much older and, according to one university researcher, the Skinners and Glovers, claimed to have been incorporated in 1327.
The Chairman of the Wardens, Garry Dunnill, said: “The existence of the freemen’s trade guilds and their evolution over such an extraordinary period of time, including the admission of the first women in 2011, is a fine example of our national tradition and culture of which we can be justly proud.”
The Guildhall, along with other key parts of the Town Hall, will be open to the public between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on September 12th,13th,19th and 20th as part of National Heritage Open Days.
For more information and tour bookings https://www.heritageopendays.org.uk/submission-event/durham-town-hall.htm
