_Fishwives._—There is no reason to suppose that women were often engaged in the larger transactions of fishmongers. Indeed an English writer, describing the Dutchwomen who were merchants of fish, expressly says that they were a very different class from the women who sold fish in England, and who were commonly known as fisherwives.[497] Nevertheless that in this, as in other trades, they shared to some extent in their husband’s enterprises, is shown by the presentment of “John Frank of New Malton, and Alice his wife, for forestalling the markett of divers paniers of fishe, buying the same of the fishermen of Runswick or Whitbye ... before it came into the markett.”[498] Footnote 497: Ante., p. 36. Footnote 498: Atkinson, J. C. _Yorks. N. R. Q.S. Records_, Vol. I., p. 121, 1698. The position of the sisters of the Fishmongers’ Company, London, was recognised to the extent of providing them with a livery, an ordinance of 1426 ordaining that every year, on the festival of St. Peter, “alle the brethren and sustern of the same fratʳnite” should go in their new livery to St. Peters’ Church, Cornhill.[499] An ordinance dated 1499 however, requires that no fishmonger of the craft shall suffer his wife, or servant, to stand in the market to sell fish, unless in his absence.[500] An entry in the Middlesex Quarter Sessions Records notes the “discharge of Sarah, daughter of Frances Hall. Apprenticed to Rebecca Osmond of the Parish of St. Giles’ Without, Cripplegate, ‘fishwoman’.”[501] A member of the important Fishmongers’ Company would hardly be designated in this way, and Rebecca Osmond must be classed among the “Fishwives” who are so often alluded to in accounts of London. Their business was often too precarious to admit of taking apprentices, and their credit so low that a writer in the reign of Charles I., who advocated the establishment of “Mounts of Piety” speaks of the high rate of interest taken by brokers and pawn-brokers “above 400 in the hundred” from “fishwives, oysterwomen and others that do crye thinges up and downe the streets.”[502] It was in this humble class of trade rather than in the larger transactions of fishmongers, that women were chiefly engaged. In London no impediments seem to have been placed in the way of their business, but in the provinces they, like the women who hawked meat, were persecuted under the bye-laws against regrating. At Manchester, the wife of John Wilshawe was amerced “for buyinge Sparlings [smelts] and sellinge them the same day in 6d.”[503], while at the same court others were fined for selling unmarketable fish. Footnote 499: Herbert, _Livery Companies of London_, Vol. II., p. 44. Footnote 500: _Ibid._ Vol. II., p. 35. Footnote 501: _Middlesex County Records_, p. 160, 1696. Footnote 502: _A Project for Mounts of Piety, Lansdowne MSS._, 351 fo., 18b. Footnote 503: _Manchester Court Leet Records_, Vol. IV., p. 112, 1654.