A unique lab course taught by Patrick Wallis brought students and faculty together to explore trust in late medieval and early modern London. This collaborative effort combined classroom learning with archival research, resulting in an article that examines guilds, families, and neighbourhoods from 1300 to 1700. Patrick Wallis reflects on how this partnership yielded fresh insights for teacher and students alike.

We just published an article in the Historical Journal on trust in London between 1300 and 1700. That’s not unusual in this department – we publish a lot of articles. What’s different about this one is that it has fifteen authors, more than most articles in our field. And even more striking is that thirteen were undergraduates studying degrees in economic history at LSE when they participated in writing it.

How? Why? And – most importantly – what can we learn from the experience? Here are my thoughts, and those from a couple of the students.

The how is pretty simple. As an experiment, I decided to teach a lab course. The students who signed up worked collectively on a research topic over the course of a year. Unlike a dissertation, the theme was predefined, and we worked as a team; we also spent about half the course on lectures and readings to make sure everyone knew the subject well. In contrast to a typical course, the other half was spent in archives, collecting data and analysing it.

The course had one big ambition: to make the students and faculty full partners in the research, thereby teaching the process of research through apprenticeship. Rather than proposing the precise question, source, and method, we worked as small groups, exploring potential sources, evaluating what we might do, and how we could deliver findings. My aim as a teacher was to coach, support, elicit, and nudge, as well as to coordinate the whole project.

We worked in two waves, producing a first set of archive-based research papers by the end of autumn term. We then returned to the secondary literature in January to read further and produced a second set of research papers by April. Working in two waves meant that everyone’s skills matured and understanding deepened over time.

The shape of the research journey was driven by conversations in the classroom. We began with the idea of looking at social capital and guilds, because Sheilagh Ogilvie had written several important pieces arguing that guilds were a way that social capital was formed in early modern Europe. But she left open questions about how those relationships were forged by guilds, while other views – Robert Putnam on guilds and social capital in Italy, Gervase Rosser on London guilds – were quite different. We ended up with an article on trust – certainly a related theme – but with guilds as only one of the three factors we assessed, family and neighbourhood being the others.

What did we learn? One big lesson is to not do projects like this just before a pandemic because it messes with your timeline.

Another lesson was about setting the ground rules early. There were lots of red herrings chased during the course. A lot of the research we carried out explored material that did not reach the final article. Agreeing at the outset to be fully collaborative equal authors meant that we all benefited equally from what worked best. There was no risk to any individual in chasing up a risky idea.

We were also lucky. The project turned from a paper with hundreds of observations to one with thousands thanks to Michael Scott, a reader in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He joined us and brought with him his enormous scholarship on the Orphans’ Court. Without that, we would not have the scale of findings that we did.

Finally, we started with the support and help of colleagues at the Guildhall Library and LMA, to make sure we didn’t overload their space as the project progressed. Without that preliminary work, it would have been tough going.

For me as the teacher, it took a bit more time than most of my teaching. There were some extra hours helping everyone learn to decipher and read the manuscripts – The National Archives has great resources, but you still need support when you start with 16th century handwriting. And then more hours in the archive while we worked collectively. But this was easily outweighed by the enjoyment of sharing a research question and working and thinking together. Plus, we got to write a really cool paper.

Would I do it again? Definitely. In fact, we have integrated several of the principles into our new core research course for second-year students, who are all involved in a project that makes them a partner in a piece of research that should be published eventually.

Reflections from student co-authors

Raphael Adés

I took the course to get experience handling primary sources. At the point when I enrolled, I was thinking about applying for a master’s, and this was a chance to see (early) if I liked the work economic history research entailed.

The confidence gained from Patrick taking us into the archive and pre-selecting our source base, was very helpful. The other attraction was that by working on guilds, we were engaging with a topic with a well-defined existing academic debate, namely, guilds contribute to economic growth and societal development, in what ways, and so on.

My subgroup’s contributions were mainly focused on the court minutes of the grocers’ guild, and as such, did not contribute as much to the final shape of the project. This was in itself an interesting lesson which I continue to try and remind myself of, that often and inevitably much of what you read and do will not enter into the final text, but rather only help define the setting and boundaries. The underside of the iceberg, so to speak.

I think overall while the size of our group allowed us to process a larger number of materials, it also made the project unwieldy at times. I would have liked to know more and been more connected with what others were doing. My own team of four interacted heavily, but I cannot recall much besides what made the final draft of the other teams’ work.

It was a splendid opportunity, without which I certainly would not be as confident and knowledgeable a historian. The palaeography lessons on 16th century handwriting especially saved me much pain down the road.

Carys Stockton

I chose the course both to work on actual data from the archives and the draw of the subject. Guilds have always had a mystique, and growing up in London and surrounded by their history I wanted to know more. Learning about how they formed a community was amazing.

I loved the ways to measure social history the project introduced me to. I still remember plotting the addresses listed in the orphans’ book and really enjoying trying to find connections between the locations of the persons listed in this network, and the commonalities between the guilds they belonged to – whether it was the same guild, two guilds within the same industry or supply chain.

I think I contributed most on gathering the location data with co-author and fellow student Sebastian Serban – going through the entries in the book of orphans and listing locations, occupations, and then trying to see if we could quantify and analyse the data.

I really learnt how hard it can be to support ideas with evidence, or how even if you think you have some evidence, some things may never be “proven” because there simply isn’t a big enough set of data.

I’ve definitely taken with me some patience and acceptance at how imperfect data can be, and it’s left an impression of ideas I’d love to one day revisit if I ever make it back to LSE for a PhD.

Read “Trust, Guilds, and Kinship in London, 1330–1680“,  Ammaarah Adam, Raphael Adès, William Banks, Canberk Benning, Gwyneth Grant, Harry Forster-Brass, Owen McGiveron,Joseph Miller, Daniel Phelan, Sebastian Randazzo, Matthew Reilly, Michael Scott, Sebastian Serban, Carys Stockton, Patrick Wallis, The Historical Journal, CUP, May 2024,