This thesis examines a group of freemen trading in coal at Newcastle upon Tyne in the sixteenth century known as the Hostmen’s Company. The Newcastle hostmen had established an unincorporated guild by 1508 and held the monopoly in the sale of coal from the town’s port during the rapid expansion of the Tyneside coal trade in the half-century from 1550. Their guild was granted legal status by the Crown in 1600. Existing research on the activities of the Newcastle hostmen in the sixteenth century offers important evidence about their monopoly but leaves open questions about the organization and membership of their guild. No comprehensive history of the Tudor hostmen has been attempted before. There has been no detailed assessment of their ascendancy or the trade of their principal members during a period of decisive change in the mining and sale of Tyneside coal and England’s transition to an industrial economy.

This thesis uses little-explored town chamberlains’ accounts to investigate the origins, trading networks, family connections, and business activities of the Tudor hostmen for the first time. The accounts show that hosting coal at Newcastle was confined to a small group of citizens drawn mainly from the town’s mercantile and civic elite, and their widows. Some strangers, gentlemen, craftsmen, and yeomen also participated in the hosting trade. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the armed rebellions of the English Roman Catholic nobles the principal hostmen used their capital, political power, and religious connections to acquire the bulk of newly available mining land in the vicinity of Newcastle, creating a de facto monopoly in the production as well as the sale of coal. The hostmen shipped Tyneside coal to markets on the English coast, France, the Netherlands, and the Baltic Sea and had gained control over Newcastle’s governance by the mid-sixteenth century. This thesis shows the importance of two urban-industrial coal dynasties founded by the Newcastle corn merchants James Lawson (d. 1544) and Henry Anderson (d. 1559). Members of the Lawson-Anderson oligarchy dominated mining and hosting in Elizabethan Newcastle at a time when there was a more than three-fold increase in the volume of coal leaving the town’s port by the seaborne trade. They mined extensively in the vicinity of Newcastle on the banks of the River Tyne, created the most developed industrialized landscape in Elizabethan England, and built the two biggest integrated coal businesses in the town while continuing to trade as merchants in a wide variety of commodities. This thesis shows that the Lawson-Anderson oligarchy continued to dominate the Tyneside coal trade in the first half of the seventeenth century, though some of their members suffered heavy losses in the Civil War.