Letters patent of John of Gaunt dated 1380 and confirmed by an ‘inspeximus’ of Henry VI in 1443 assigned ‘le roy des ministralx’ in the honour of Tutbury to arrest all minstrels within the honour not doing service on the feast of the Assumption. It was a custom that the prior of Tutbury should provide a bull for a bull-running by the assembled minstrels on this feast. The court was still held by an annual ‘king of the fiddlers,’ with the steward and bailiff of the honour (including Staffs., Derby, Notts., Leicester, and Warwick), at the end of the seventeenth century, and the minstrels claimed to be exempt, like those of Chester, from vagrancy legislation. But their rights were not reserved, either by the Charter of 1469 or the Vagrant Acts[684]. The first English craft guild of minstrels is later by a century and a half than that of Paris. 3. _London._ A charter of Edward IV (1469), ‘ex querelosa insinuatione dilectorum nobis Walteri Haliday, marescalli [and seven others] ministrallorum nostrorum,’ declares that ‘nonnulli rudes Agricolae et Artifices diversarum Misterarum Regni nostri Angliae finxerunt se fore Ministrallos. Quorum aliqui Liberatam nostram, eis minime datam, portarunt, seipsos etiam fingentes esse Ministrallos nostros proprios. Cuius quidem Liberatae ac dictae Artis sive Occupationis Ministrallorum colore in diversis Partibus Regni nostri praedicti grandes Pecuniarum Exactiones de Ligeis nostris deceptive colligunt et recipiunt.’ Hence illegitimate competition with the real minstrels, decay of the art, and neglect of agriculture. The charter then does two things. It makes the royal minstrels a corporation with a marshall elected by themselves, and it puts them at the head of a ‘Fraternitatem sive Gildam’ of minstrels already existing in the chapel of the Virgin in St. Paul’s, and in the royal free chapel of St. Anthony. All minstrels in the country are to join this guild or be suppressed. It is to have two _custodes_ and to make statutes and ordinances. The jurisdiction of Dutton over Chester minstrels is, as already stated, reserved[685]. A ‘serviens’ or ‘serjeant’ seems to have been an officer of the guild[686]. With this exception nothing more is heard of it until 1594, when a dispute as to the office of the Master of the Musicians’ Company called for the intervention of the Lord Keeper[687].’ In 1604 the Company received a new charter, which gave it jurisdiction within the city and a radius of three miles from its boundaries. It was further restricted to the city itself under Charles I. It still exists as the Corporation of the Master, Wardens, and Commonalty of the Art or Science of the Musicians of London[688].