Tudor instrument making was a craft tradition practised in England between approximately 1485 and 1603, encompassing the manufacture of lutes, viols, sackbuts, and various wind instruments for royal and ecclesiastical patronage. The trade was formally regulated by the Worshipful Company of Stationers until 1557, when jurisdiction over musical instrument makers was transferred by charter to the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers on the grounds that most tools used in the manufacture of brass instruments were classified as ironmongery. Henry VIII is recorded as having employed forty-seven instrument makers at the court of Whitehall, a figure that modern historians believe includes at least eleven who made no instruments at all.