Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2. Green Alice Stopford

century when the Bristol wool trade was half ruined by the loss of Bordeaux which destroyed its great market and brought about lasting changes in the French manufacturing centres; and by the determination of the Merchant Adventurers to establish in London and in favour of London merchants a practical monopoly of the cloth trade with the Northern Seas, a complaint was made by the journeymen against the master-weavers who had “brought in and put in occupation of the craft strangers, persons of divers countries, not born under the King’s obeisance but rebellious,” urged the desperate working man in search of an unassailable argument which should finally decide the matter, “which been sold to them as it were heathen people”; and the Mayor granted the desired order that no foreign weaver should be brought into Bristol[200]– a law which did not however restore the cloth trade to their city.

      In this case we seem really to hear the complaint of the poor journeyman; and elsewhere, in appeals for compassion and protection, in statutes of Parliament and royal charters,[201] or in ordinances of Town Councils for his relief, we seem from time to time to find ourselves on the brink of a labour problem present to the modern as to the ancient world. But generally the story of foreign immigration as it has been handed down to us is in no sense the story of the labour question. An association of masters seeking to secure a strict monopoly for their own advantage could not bring a more powerful argument than the desperate situation of their workmen – an argument which might be used by a powerful corporation confident of official support, or by a dying trade which had been utterly beaten in the competitive struggle – and which taken alone throws little light on the subject. When the dispute with the foreigner emerges it generally seems to bear the character of a quarrel among dealers rather than a grudge of artizans. The working man had no doubt his grievance, but it is not his voice which we hear – it is the voice of his more noisy neighbour the shopkeeper or the trader, who knowing that he himself had little to expect from the sympathy of the English consumer, passed briefly over the subject of his own immediate interests, and used with artistic skill the sufferings of the wage-earner to kindle a general compassion and heighten the effect of an appeal to an anxious government or an alarmed public. For as we read the Town Ordinances and Acts of Parliament[202] these strange “artificers” who were setting the world on fire put on the guise of pedlars or small dealers who “bring much foreign wares with them to sell,” and were thus especially obnoxious to the native traders; such foreign pests, it appears, were going “to men’s doors” “taking up standings” and there “showing” their wares to the undoing of the natives, and hiring servants of their own people to retail their goods about the country – an unpardonable offence in the eyes of London merchants, who were moving heaven and earth to become the only middlemen of the foreign trade. With varying success the native dealers clamoured for protective legislation, praying that the strangers might be forbidden to engage freely in trade, and forced as journeymen to serve only an English master, or as masters to employ only English servants. A usurper like Richard the Third, anxious to conciliate the leading burghers of the towns, was ready among other things to forbid any alien whatever to become a handicraftsman, or any foreigner to take an apprentice of his own people save his own son or daughter;[203] while on the other hand, Henry the Seventh carried out his own views of industrial policy by bringing weavers over to develope the trade of Yorkshire and Devonshire.

      But under whatever restrictions the foreigners still came, and the same cry against them went up loudly from time to time. Manufacturers and middlemen who would have gladly welcomed immigrants so long as they gave themselves out as men working for hire, resented the invasion of strangers coming from over sea “with their wives, children, and household, and will not take upon them any laborious occupation as carting and ploughing but use making of cloths and other handicrafts and easy occupations;” and this apparently as masters, for the complaint was that they employed only foreign apprentices, so that English people were falling into idleness and becoming thieves, beggars, and vagabonds.[204] “The land is so inhabited with a great multitude of needy people, strangers of divers nations … that your liege people, Englishmen, cannot imagine or tell whereto or to what occupation that they shall use or put their children to learn or occupy within your said cities or boroughs” – so the Londoners complain in 1514: and add that if this went on Englishmen would no longer be able to pay their rents, maintain their households, and subdue and vanquish their ancient enemies the French.[205] Hopeless, in fact, of combating the theory of his time that trade legislation was meant in the first instance to serve the interests of the buyer rather than the dealer, and fearing lest an argument for monopoly of sale might hardly withstand the criticism of a hostile public, the trader was tempted to discover some circuitous course, and catch at the cause of the poor workman, the terror of the French, and the patriotic vision of a nation of warrior weavers,[206] as infallible appeals to the sentiment of his time.

      We find animosities and complaints of the same kind directed against the struggling suburban manufacturers, who competed with the townsfolk by dint of braving every hardship, and accustoming their hands to every form of labour. To the town manufacturer they were an abomination; and he sought to enlist the sympathy of the public by loud complaints that it was only workmen who had scarcely learned their trade who thus left their masters to set up for themselves and make an independent living. It is probable indeed that their numbers were often recruited by small masters who had fallen through poverty out of the regular ranks of industry; as for example when an apprentice or a stranger set up in business to try his luck, and having been given perhaps three or four years in which to pay by instalments the sum charged by the guild for opening shop, made his escape out of the borough just before his last fine became due,[207] being by that time possibly ready to start as a free trader in an “upland” hovel, and to eke out a scanty living by working at his hand loom or his rope-making in the intervals of cultivating field or garden. But such home industries, however they originated, were inevitably disallowed by the municipal organizers of labour. They diverted trade, established a formidable competition of unregulated labour, reduced tolls, and emptied the tax-gatherer’s collecting box. Town councillors and shopkeepers and journeymen with one accord declared war on those who for their own “singular advantages and commodities, nothing regarding the upholding of the said towns, nor the common wealth of the handicrafts … nor the poor people which had living by the same,” hired farms and became graziers and husbandmen, and yet took to weaving, fulling, and shearing cloths in their own houses;[208] or who, like the grasping people that withdrew from Bridport, took farms “for their private lucre” and not only “used husbandry” but made cables, ropes, ships’ tackling, and halters in their idle hours.[209]

      Disputes of the kind which have been mentioned, however, were of trifling importance in the secular controversy between the leaders of industry and the general body of workers, as it presented itself in the Middle Ages; and the great problem of all – that which concerned no separate groups or industries, but the whole mass of labour that was to be let out for hire – was one inarticulate through its very magnitude. While workers were being set free from the land wherever arable farms were turned into enclosed pastures for sheep farming, they were called for by the manufacturer whose new business of making cloth needed more hands than the old business of selling wool. But the labour released from the field was perhaps not always easily transferred to the shop; and when the countryman who with his fellows had toiled on the land

      “All for dread of their death such dints gave hunger,”[210]

      and, save when harvest time gave a brief plenty, ate in suffering his cake of oats with a few curds, his “bread of beans and peases,” his onions and half-ripe cherries, and little baked apples,[211]– when he forsook his “cote” and carried to the town nothing but his hunger, his ignorance, his want of skill, he did not necessarily mend his fortune by turning

200

Hunt’s Bristol, 82, 93, 111. The complaint seems to have been against master-weavers who employed their own servants and not the Bristol journeymen. See Rymer’s Fœdera, v. 137.

201

See Hibbert’s Influence of Eng. Gilds, 64.

202

See the Commons’ Petition in Parliament, 50 Edward the Third (1376), Rolls of Parliament, vol. ii., p. 332. “Et come les bones gentz des touz Citees & Borghs parmy ceste terre si pleignent durement, ̃q … toute manere de gentz Aliens, & autres qi ne sont pas Frauncs en les dites Citees & Borghs, poent venir illeõqs demourrer auxi longement come lour plest, & tenir overtz Hostiels, & recepter ̃q coñqs persones qe lour plerra: Et s’ils eiount ascunes Marchandises ils les vendent as autres Estraungers, pur revendre si ̃bn par retail come autre ̃qcoñq manere ̃q lour mieltz semble pur lours Profitz demeisne. Par qi les Marchauntz Denizeins sont trop anientiz, la Terre voide de Moneie, les closures des Citees & Borghs desapparaillez, la Navye de la terre ̃bn pres destruite, le Conseil de la terre par tout descovert, toute manere d’estraunge Marchaundise grandement encherie; & qe pys est, par tieles privees receites les Enemys auxint priveez ou ̃q les loialx Liges: De qi n’ad mestier de autres tesmoignes fors ̃q sentir & vewe ̃q molte app’tement en touz degreez la provent.”

203

Stat. 1 Richard III. cap. 9.

204

Stat. 1 Richard III. cap. 9. About 1528 the London shoemakers complain that whereas the King had granted leave that a fraternity of forty-four foreigners might exercise the craft of shoemakers in the city, by colour of this grant 220 foreign householders employing over 400 apprentices and servants, had set up in the business. An amusing account is given of the attitude of this foreign company to the English searchers of the craft. There had once been 140 Englishmen of the cordwainers’ livery but now there were only twenty, and the wives and children of those who had been ruined were turned into water-carriers and labourers. These foreigners did not come to settle, but having made their fortunes went off home, while others took their places. (Schanz, ii. 598-600.)

205

Schanz, ii. 596-8. They pray that the former laws may be put in force, ordering strangers only to dwell in the houses of Englishmen, to sell only in gross and not by retail, and to remain only a month in any town after their first coming.

206

In the same way Bristol in 1461 forbade its weavers to employ their wives, daughters, and maidens at the loom, lest the King’s people likely to do the King service in his wars should lack employment. (Hunt’s Bristol, 82.)

207

The customs of Coventry in this respect are exceedingly interesting.

208

Stat. 25 Henry VIII. cap. 18.

209

Stat. 21 Henry VIII. cap. 12. In the reign of Henry the Eighth there were complaints that Worcester, Evesham, Droitwich, Kidderminster, and Bromsgrove, had fallen into decay from the growth of the free-traders. (Stat. 25 Henry VIII. cap. 18.) See also the coverlet makers of York. (34 and 35 Henry VIII. cap. 10.)

210

Piers Ploughman. Passus ix. 187.

“‘It is nothing for love they labour thus fast,

But for fear of famine, in faith,’ said Piers.”

Passus ix. 214, 215.

211

“Fridays and fasting days a farthingworth of mussels

Were a feast for such folk, or so many cockles.”

Pass. x. 94, 95; see 72-87. Pollard’s Miracle Plays, 31-2.