Sir Ralf / Rafe Sadler / Sadleir (1507 – 1587)

Company members may be intrigued to know that our current Director of Finance, Mr Hugh SADLEIR is a direct descendant of Ralph/Rafe Sadler/Sadleir of Tudor history. Anyone who has watched Wolf Hall or read the original books by Hilary Mantel will be familiar with the character of Ralf/Rafe as the loyal sidekick of Thomas Cromwell. […]

The Haberdashers c.1380-1530: A Company on the Rise

Dr Eliot Benbow, an alumnus of Queen Mary University London, is now a researcher at the Museum of London. His doctoral thesis was on ‘The Shrine, the Marketplace and the Home: Forms of Lay Devotion in London during the Long Fifteenth Century (c.1370 – 1530) for which he used some archival records in the Hall. […]

Black Tudors and their links to the Haberdashers’ Company

In her 2017 book ‘Black Tudors: The Untold Story’ Miranda Kaufmann has written a seminal work which challenges the idea that it was only the horrors of late 17th and 18th Century slavery that were the beginning of Africans’ presence in England, and that exploitation and discrimination their only experience.   The book takes the […]

John Banks: The Enigma Resolved

A Timber Merchant, Landlord and Property Developer   Timber Merchant It has long been thought by the Company that John Banks, our Master Haberdasher in 1717 and our Benefactor too, was a silk merchant with the Levant. However actual evidence for this occupation seems to have been more linked to fanciful thinking of a haberdashery […]