By the fifteenth century, most London companies employed professional clerks to keep their records. While at the end of the middle ages most merchants and substantial craftsmen would have been able to read or write (some degree of schooling was integral to a London apprenticeship), the clerks came from a world of professional administrators familiar with common practices of record keeping, and many of them, it has been suggested, were central also to the dissemination of early English literature, and of the traditions and customs that underpinned civic and company life. While the names of the Fletchers’ clerks are known only from the 18^th century, there is no reason to doubt that they, like other companies, employed such professional administrators from an early date.

For more on the role of the early clerks more generally, see M.P. Davies, ‘ “Writying, making and engrocyng”: clerks, guilds and identity in late medieval London’, in Medieval Merchants and Money: Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton ed. Martin Allen and Matthew Davies (London, 2016), pp. 21-42.