In other cities besides London the clerks seem to have formed their
guilds. As early as the time of the _Domesday Survey_ there was a
clerks' guild at Canterbury, wherein it is stated "_In civitate
Cantuaria habet achiepiscopus_ xii burgesses and xxxii mansuras which
the clerks of the town, _clerici de villa_, hold within their gild and
do yield xxxv shillings."

The first mention of the company carries us back to the early days of
Henry III, when in the seventeenth year of that monarch's reign (A.D.
1233), according to Stow, they were incorporated and registered in the
books of the Guildhall. The patron saint of the company was St.
Nicholas, who also extended his patronage to robbers and mariners.
Thieves are dubbed by Shakespeare as St. Nicholas's clerks[51], and
Rowley calls highwaymen by the same title. Possibly this may be
accounted for by the association of the light-fingered fraternity with
Nicholas, or Old Nick, a cant name for the devil, or because _The
Golden Legend_ tells of the conversion of some thieves through the
saint's agency. At any rate, the good Bishop of Myra was the patron
saint of scholars, and therefore was naturally selected as tutelary
guardian of clerks.

[Footnote 51: _Henry IV_, act ii. sc. 1.]

In 1442 Henry VI granted a charter to "the Chief or Parish Clerks of the
City of London for the honour and glory of Almighty God and of the
undefiled and most glorious Virgin Mary, His Mother, and on account of
that special devotion, which they especially bore to Christ's glorious
confessor, St. Nicholas, on whose day or festival we were first
presented into this present world, at the hands of a mother of memory
ever to be revered." The charter states that they had maintained a poor