The town had been willing to support the Drapers in their measures to draw the Welsh trade to Shrewsbury, but it did not approve of the line of action they tried subsequently to take, namely, to limit all the trade to their own members. In 1653 regulations were framed to prevent the company "forestalling or engrossing the Welsh Flannels, Cloaths etc.[160]" A more serious abuse transpired in connection with the Feltmakers' company in 1667. They refused to make one who had been lawfully apprenticed to the trade in Shrewsbury free of their company. On this occasion the mayor and aldermen exercised their right of supervision by ordering the Wardens to admit the man, "and the Mayor is desired to give him the oath of a Freeman of the said Company[161]." The importance of the mayor being thus empowered by the municipal authorities to administer the oath of admittance to one of the Gilds is very great, and shows how real was the subordination of the latter to the town when the corporation chose to exert its rights.
An order of the corporation[162] directing that burgesses only are to be elected Wardens of the companies points to another abuse, the existence of which is proved by other evidence, viz., the admittance of non-residents in the town to membership in the companies on payment of a sufficiently large entrance fee. Yet the extent to which corruption could go was seen forty years later when the corporation stultified itself by passing an order[163] allowing the Haberdashers to elect persons, though they might not be burgesses, as Wardens of their company.
The general impression which such transactions leave is that extreme laxity prevailed in all departments. The town woke up for a moment in 1702 when the prospect perhaps of a harvest of unpaid fines induced them to make an effort to recover all such[164]. It is to be regretted that nothing remains to show to what extent the abuse had prevailed, nor how far the present effort was successful. The annual fine of the Bakers' company was £3. 6_s._ 8_d._ which they appear to have generally paid with considerable reluctance[165]. The supply of provision to the town seems to have given much trouble in the early years of the eighteenth century. Permission was given, in 1730, to the country butchers to sell in the town unless the town butchers could furnish meat in sufficient quantity. Similar permission was accorded to the country bakers, if the Bakers' company in the town would not pay their yearly fine. This they were unwilling, or unable, to do, and the country bakers were in consequence called in[166].