Historians have traditionally seen guilds as local-minded associations whose interests and jurisdictions rarely strayed far beyond the outer walls of the town or city to which they belonged. However, just as few crafts did not rely in some way upon the world beyond the town walls, whether for labour, technology, raw materials, or markets, few guilds lacked mechanisms and procedures – apprenticeship, quality control, price regulation, and so on – designed in part to mediate their needs with this ‘outside’ world. In this chapter we explore a development in London guilds' concern with the rest of the country that has received little attention from historians: the establishment and operation of nationwide jurisdictions and monopolies by a number of metropolitan guilds.

National jurisdictions were unusual. For the most part in England, as in the rest of Europe, the jurisdictions of craft guilds stopped at the town or city's gate or extended only a few miles into its immediate suburbs and hinterland. It is not surprising then that nationwide guild jurisdictions in England have tended to be ignored or dismissed, at best relegated to the footnotes of company histories. The few examples that are better known tend to be those that were most intimately associated with the financial problems and opportunism – even corruption – of the crown.