The constitutional challenge against the High Guild Assembly’s ‘Foreign Practitioner Tax’ was heard in the First Courtroom of the King’s Bench at nine o’clock on Thursday morning. The gallery was packed to the vaulted rafters with country merchants, independent carriers, and guild journeymen who had traveled from five counties to witness the legal dismantling of the capital’s most hungry monopoly.
Hester Quill stood at the central advocate’s lectern, wearing her plain black scholar’s gown, her reading glasses resting firmly upon the bridge of her nose. Before her lay a three-foot stack of town tax registers, apprentice statutes, and ancient royal patents. Across the aisle, standing behind a dark wood table covered in velvet folios, stood the Chief Advocate of the High Guild Assembly, Sir Giles Thornbury. A portly, haughty barrister in a huge powdered wig and silk robes.
“My Lords,” Sir Giles argued, bowing smoothly to the three Chief Justices on the bench, “the High Guild Assembly has possessed the chartered prerogative to regulate trade within Crown-Reach since the reign of King Henry the Fourth. The imposition of a daily registration fee of one hundred gold crowns upon uncalled practitioners from the provinces is a reasonable exercise of town police power, designed to shield our metropolitan guilds from untrained vagrants and secret plebeians.”
