Social Origins and Social Aspirations of Jacobean London Merchants.

This article attempts to set out a data that tends to support professor T.S. Willan's view of the integrity of the merchant class in England as suggested in his book "The Muscovy Merchants of 1555." Willan suggested in his book that few of the Londoners who were charter members of Muscovy Co. were sons of gentry, rather it was lesser provincial families who sent their sons to London, England. He also suggested that few of the Muscovy merchants retired altogether from London, and that those who did were exceptional. The evidence from which these data are drawn is based on a survey of the lives of 140 men; that is, those citizens of London who were aldermen in January 1600 and those who were elected to the Court of Aldermen between the beginning of 1600 and the end of 1624. These men comprise a sample of London's richest citizens in the early seventeenth century. By drawing mainly on three sources: the inventories of estates summarized in the Common Serjeant's Books in London, wills and assessments for the subsidy, it is possible to estimate that 55 of the 140 citizens in the sample were worth over 20,000 pounds in goods at the times of their deaths.