Historical Social Network Analysis: The Apprenticeship Networks of London Brewers, 1530-1800

This paper represents one part of a larger project about the history of beer and brewing in London. Our research group is building a social network of the Brewing Guild's apprenticeship training program in the years from about 1530 to approximately 1800. During this 270-year period, the Worshipful Company of Brewers, first established by Henry VI in 1438, logged nearly 10,000 records of (mostly) young men being apprenticed to master brewers in order to learn the craft. At first glance, the apprenticeship records look somewhat unpromising, but with some clever deduction and analysis, they collectively become an illuminating dataset that shows not just an important "Who's Who" of the brewing industry but also the waxing and waning of England's brewing culture and how it responded to important British historical events.

At first glance, the catalogue of brewing apprentices and their brewing masters is a remarkably sparse dataset rife with symbols and codes. For example:

Briggs Thomas s Henry, Skipton, Yks, husbandman† to William Pistor 16 Jan 1581/2

This record tells us that Thomas Briggs, son of Henry Briggs (deceased), a husbandman from Skipton, Yorkshire, was apprenticed to William Pistor on the 16th of January 1581 (Old Style Date, or 1582 New Style Date).

The Briggs family does not appear again in the records. However, we can learn a good deal about William Pistor (or Pystor or Pister or Pistar), who first took on an apprentice from a Mr. Peltar in 1563. Between the years 1565 and 1584, William Pistor took on fifteen more apprentices. By the fall of 1584, Pistor's health began to fail and he died in the first half of 1585. By combining records, then, we can begin to draw portraits of various individual's brewing careers. Simultaneously, we can construct a social network of the various relationships detailed in the records.

The argument of our paper, then, is twofold: a) an exploration of what we can learn about the historical social networks of England's brewing industry using sparse records combined with modern social network techniques, and b) a methodological question of reconciling record matches across disparate datasets, especially during those times when our data overlaps with other rich resources such as London Lives (1690-) or the Old Bailey records (1674-). Which of these actions can be automated via digital techniques, and which must still be done "by hand"?

Toward that end, we seek to answer the following research questions:

• how did the apprenticeship program rise and fall over the course of this time period? --Who are the most important people in any given time period?

which masters attracted the most apprentices and why?

• how long were careers in the brewing industry? Did many apprentices later become masters of other apprentices?
• to learn more, can we contextualize these records against other record sets (marriage, birth, death, criminal proceedings) and what might those records tell us about England's brewing industry?

Among the books owned by Lord Byron and sold in one of the two sales of his library – 1816 and 1827 – was the 1800 English translation of Joseph Alexandre Pierre, Vicomte de Ségur’s Women: Their Condition and Influence in Society (from which the title quotation is taken). Finding Ségur’s three volumes of research amongst Byron’s books is not overly notable, but the presence of women in the roles of authors and editors of the books that Byron owned and prized is formidable. In transforming Byron’s library sale lists into a database comprising the books’ constituent metadata and fulltext, women feature as some of the most prominent authorities of canonicity, from Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s fifty volume The British Novelists to Elizabeth Inchbald’s 25 volume British Theatre and 7 volume Collection of Farces. In Macroanalysis (2013), Matthew Jockers experiments with stylistic analysis to detect the author’s gender in nineteenth century novels, revealing the relative ease of this, but also noting that “far more interesting […] is an examination of which authors get misclassified as being of the other gender” (95). With anonymity and pseudonymity a relative norm for first editions of novels in the Romantic period, an author’s gender was often unknown to the public with the launch of their work. Byron, in contrast to many literary figures in the period, openly acknowledged his love of novels. Taking Byron’s library and the representative database and network, how might stylistic analysis aligned with metadata on roles beyond simply authorship reveal the influence of women in Byron’s books? Moreover, what influence might these women have had upon Byron’s works, as visualized in Euclidean distances and network graphs? To further this experimentation, might the inclusion of further works by women – works not catalogued as part of Byron’s library, but works by authors of whom he owned a single work – might these reveal close stylistic proximity to Byron’s works such that we might conjecture that Byron had read or even owned these works? Comparing this corpus of Byron’s books by female editors or authors to some of Byron’s most important poetical works – like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Manfred, and Don Juan – raises the questions about methods used to stylistically compare prose and verse, editors and writers, and the complexities of gender. However, ultimately this experiment reinforces the convictions of scholars like Paul Douglass, that “Byron’s reading of several thousand works of popular fiction (most of it by women), certainly impacted his work” (“Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction” Romanticism on the Net, vol. 43, 2006, p. 2) or as Peter Cochran describes it in the case of Charlotte Dacre’s influence upon Byron, “[her] books had sunk into his subconscious, whence he had, in his own idioms, regurgitated them” (“Byron the Vampire, and the Vampire Women.” Newstead Abbey Byron Society Website. http://newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org/works/downloads/vampires.pdf, Jan. 23, 2023, p. 9).