maintaining schools (as at Stratford-on-Avon) hospitals and
almshouses, and giving freely on all occasions of public importance.
By pageants too, they contributed to the happiness and amusement of
the people as well as by the presentation of Mysteries and Moralities,
to their instruction and edification. But in the eyes of the
Reformers, or of grasping courtiers, all this went for nothing when
weighed against the heinous offence of supporting chaplains to pray
for deceased members and so (6 Edward VI) they were suppressed along
with the chantries, and their property confiscated, "the very meanest
and most inexcusable of the plunderings which threw discredit on the
Reformation."

Here, the city bought back everything which had belonged to the
Trinity and Corpus Christi Gilds, with various almshouses and the
possessions of the majority of the Chantries; while previously at the
Dissolution it had bought the abbey-orchard, and mill, and the house
and church of the Grey Friars.

In 1340 Edward III granted Licence to the Coventry men to form a
Merchants' Gild with leave "to make chantries, bestow alms, do other
works of piety and constitute ordinances touching the same." This was
St. Mary's Gild. Two years later that of St. John Baptist was formed
and a year later that of St. Katherine, the three being united into
the Trinity Gild before 1359. Of the chapel (now St. John's church)
begun in 1344 by the St. John's Gild and the "fair and stately
structure for their feasts and meetings called St Mary Hall" built in
1394 by the united Gilds more will be said later. The end of the
fourteenth century and the fifteenth brought to Coventry a full share
in the events and movements of the time. In 1396 the duel between
Hereford and Norfolk was to have taken place on Gosford Green