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

the wretched dependent of the employer. Moreover, as though the obstacles in the way of his helplessness were not already sufficiently overwhelming, by the ingenious device of man the difficulty was made yet more acute. Artificial barriers to keep in check the labour that clamoured at their gates were thrown up with all the united strength of State and Town and Guild. The State in order to protect the agricultural interest strictly forbade the poor countryman to leave husbandry for trade, or to apprentice his child to any craft.[212] The towns for reasons of their own hastened to intensify the effect of these laws by local regulations, or by the strictness with which they carried out old enactments.[213] Finally the guilds fenced themselves about with rules to protect their monopoly by limiting their numbers and shutting out intruders. As the fifteenth century went on all these bodies alike enforced their provisions with increasing severity, and the danger that threatened the working-class through the industrial revolution was hardened into a present calamity.

      It is impossible to conceive that regulations of this kind were self-denying ordinances on the part of employers to limit the supply of labour; they rather come to us as echoes of the first great controversy concerning the position and privileges of the hired worker. The “protection” of industry from all competition was the first and the last creed of the crafts (as distinguished from the general public) – a protection by which every conceivable danger that might threaten the interests of the monopolists was struck down, whether it was the competition of other allied trades, or that introduced by machinery and new methods of organizing labour, or rivalry between members in the same craft, or the intrusion of dealers from the provinces, or the immigration of alien manufacturers from abroad. As to the main principle there was no dispute; and there were some of its less important developements where the interests of the masters and the journeymen coincided. But to employers and dealers the monopoly of trade chiefly meant their own monopoly of production and sale; while the wage-earner’s dominant anxiety was to keep surplus labour out of the craft, lest the regular workman might be deprived of his comfortable certainty of subsistence. Labour however was too sorely needed in the enormously increasing trade of the country for masters to deny themselves its services; nor did any of their ordinances necessarily tend in the least to produce a result so disastrous to themselves. In their eyes the important matter was that workers should be kept docile and obedient, retained in country districts where they were most advantageous to the contractor, and prevented from making claims on the control or the profits of industry which must have hampered the great business of the moment – the expansion of English trade; and the ability of the craft-leaders was shown in the masterly tactics which they adopted, the success which they achieved, and the political sagacity by which they accomplished their purpose without open strife or public agitation.

      For it seems probable that the labour question had its origin with the very beginning of manufacturing industries, and that long before the fifteenth century a large class of hired workers already existed. We know that in the fourteenth century the wage-earners in the crafts already constituted a force which the State and the municipality had come to fear, and that not only in London but in other towns journeymen had learned discontent, and had begun to combine for self-protection.[214] We know also that before 1340 one manufacturing town at least (and no doubt the records will ultimately tell of more) owned its miserable race of labourers who worked by the day at a bare subsistence wage of a penny, an outcast people whose abject poverty was their only protection; men possessing absolutely nothing by which they could be attached for crimes or offences, and who could laugh at any attempt of the court to summon or to fine them; while their employers, not being held legally responsible save under some special ordinance for such day labourers as these, took no care for the debt or crime of a class without privilege or standing in the eye of the law.[215] And obscure as the subject still is, we seem at a very early time to detect behind the guild system a growing class of “uncovenanted” labour, which the policy of the employers constantly tended to foster, their aim being on the one hand to limit the number of privileged serving-men, and on the other to increase the supply of unprotected workers.

      It was for this reason that while the demand for manufactures was increasing beyond all experience, the number of men who sought through apprenticeship to enter the trade was most strictly limited by law;[216] and when a man had finished his apprenticeship cunning devices were found for casting him back among the rank and file of hired labourers;[217] so that the skilled workman who had passed through his time of service but had not been admitted to the freedom of his trade[218]– whether because he failed to secure the recommendation of the heads of the guild, or because he was unable to pay the double fees demanded for the franchise of the city and the franchise of the craft[219]– was condemned henceforth to remain a mere journeyman without apparently much hope of promotion. For the enrolled journeyman there was some protection, though of a very limited kind, in the guild; but a lower and more helpless class of serving-men was recruited from the apprentices who had not worked out their full time – poor children whose service had begun at seven or twelve, and who while yet mere lads were induced to cut short the seven or ten years fixed in their trade for apprenticeship, and entering hastily on work for a daily wage found themselves from that time forward counted as unskilled labourers;[220] apparently deprived of the protection of the law in the matter of wages, without any standing in the guild, and lying in the power of the craft-masters for their hire, they were for the rest of their lives admitted to work on sufferance as bringing cheap labour into the market. Finally even the statutes which forbade poor country people to apprentice their children in the towns,[221] far from proving any intention of withdrawing the villagers from the service of the manufacturer, may have been the result of an alliance between landowner and employer to serve their several ends, and have been designed by the town magnate merely to prevent the dependent country workers from flocking into the boroughs in search of apprenticeship and subsequent freedom of the trade.[222] For it seems probable that the town dealers had very early been accustomed to contract with the country folk for the lower and rougher kinds of work. In Norwich, for example, all the tanners’ business was at first done in the country, and the skins sent into Norwich to be worked and finished by the parmenters; and it was perhaps but a generation before the passing of the Act of Henry the Fourth that the tanners came into Norwich and settled down by its river side. And in like manner all cloth brought to the Norwich market was country-made, and originally no wool was sold in the Norwich streets and no cloth manufactured in its workshops.[223] The same system of contracting for work in surrounding villages[224] was known far beyond Norwich, but its local history varied greatly with local circumstances. In that city, where trade was manifestly too vigorous to be shut up into a few square miles, and where the surrounding population had turned into a people of journeymen and artizans, the municipality seems to have inaugurated the policy of governing an industry it had no desire to suppress, by seizing the organization of the country districts into the same hands as that of the town, and bringing the workers under the same municipal control[225]– a policy, it would seem, of merchants and employers mainly occupied with the expansion of commerce, and blind to the danger which their experiment implied of the breaking up of municipal life. But in other towns we seem to detect a vain attempt of the working population to clutch at a trade which had grown into a free maturity, and force it back into the old municipal nursery under the tutors and governors of its infancy; as in Worcester, where the ordinances contain many proofs of having been drawn up under strong popular influences, and where the masters were forbidden to give out wool to weavers so long as there were people enough in the city to do the work, “in the hindering of the poor commonalty of the same.”[226] It is evident that the manufacturer might, from his own point of view, feel the strongest objection to flooding the towns

212

Children who had served in husbandry till the age of twelve “shall abide at the same labour without being put to any mystery or handicraft” (Stat. 12 Rich. II. cap. 5).

213

It is important in the town ordinances to observe the effect of local circumstances. For instance, in Coventry the weavers were allowed in 1424 to take as many apprentices as they liked, “sine contradictione alicujus,” while the number in other trades was limited. This was just such an order as might be expected of a town council of rich merchant clothiers and drapers.

214

See Chap. V.

215

The customs of Norwich, 1340, forced some responsibility for these servants on the masters. (Leet Jurisdiction (Selden Soc.), lxvi.)

216

No general laws for the whole kingdom which seriously limited the employment of apprentices were passed before the sixteenth century, but the various towns made such local laws as seemed necessary. In most cases masters were bound to enrol their apprentices in the town court; and at the end of the fifteenth century the Town Councils and the Guilds were making serious efforts to enforce the law. Miss Dormer Harris tells me that the capper’s apprentices in Coventry were bound by surety for £5 to fulfil their covenant. If an apprentice left his master before the seven years were over, the master might not take another till the time had expired unless he delivered the £5 to the keepers for the use of the craft. The masters of crafts there appear to have been very reluctant to take apprentices, especially after 1494.

217

In Norwich in spite of the statutes of 1436 and 1503 (15 Henry VI. cap. 6; 19 Henry VII. cap. 7) the crafts persisted in making rules by which apprentices were compelled to pay 20s. or 30s. for entry into the common hall (compare the composition of 1415 in the Norwich documents) – a fine which meant that the craftsmen were practically denied the freedom of the city, and therefore the position of master, and were thus forced to swell the body of journeymen. An Act passed in 1531 ordered that no apprentice should pay more than 2s. 6d. for entry into the common hall; or 3s. 4d. at the end of the term for the freedom of the company; but the companies evaded this law by asking only the statute sum for the freedom of the company, but making the candidates swear they would not trade without license, for which they had to pay at the company’s pleasure. This was again forbidden by Henry in 1537 (Blomefield, iii. 181-2). Among the weavers of Newcastle in 1527 all who had finished their apprenticeship were admitted to membership on payment of 13s. 4d., but any man of the craft desirous to be of the fellowship a brother thereof, with power to set up shop, had to pay £20 (Newcastle Guilds). The London grocers in 1345 paid 20s. for each apprentice; the apprentice who wished to belong to the fraternity paid 40s. on leaving his master (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 11, 12).

218

Compare Riley’s Mem. Lond. 244, 181, 278, 354. Black’s Leathersellers, 39.

219

In London no apprentice after his term was to use his trade till he had been sworn to the franchise. (Liber Albus, 272.)

220

Journeymen among the cutlers and founders who had not served their time as apprentices could only get such wages as the overseers of the trade allowed to them after examination. (Riley’s Mem. Lond. 439, 514.) The system was probably widespread to judge from the many ordinances concerning wages. Unskilled journeymen must be spoken of in the ordinances of the bladesmiths. (Riley’s Mem. 570.) For serving-men who worked by the day for the glovers see ibid. 246. In 1449 at Coventry a reasonable wage seems to have been 4d. a day; but a capper’s journeyman in 1496 got 12d. a week working twelve hours a day (reference to Coventry records given me by Miss Dormer Harris).

221

7 Henry IV. cap. 17.

222

The law was done away with when it turned to the hurt of the employers. In a later state of the cloth industry some of the old centres of industry such as London and Norwich and Bristol found their wealth decayed; and decided that their trade was starved for want of workmen while the young people were growing up to idleness and vice. Then the masters, actually threatened with the loss of their manufacturing industries, insisted on new laws allowing them to take apprentices without regard to the Act of Henry the Fourth (11 Henry VII. cap. 11; 12 Henry VII. cap. 1).

223

Hudson’s Notes about Norwich; in Norfolk and Norwich Arch. Soc. vol. xii.

224

English Guilds, 284-6, 337, 350. See in Exeter the relations of the Tailors’ Guild to the suburbs. (Ibid. 310.) Possibly the system may even then have been like the ordinary system which generally prevailed till the end of the last century. In Dereham in Norfolk the site of a line of hovels is still marked in which a group of shoemakers lived and worked for the Norwich masters, whose collector came round every week to collect the finished work. A rich farmer seems to have served as a sort of contractor in the tailoring trade; the upper floor of his house immediately below the roof formed a long room without any partitions in which ten or twelve tailors worked by day and slept by night, and the contractor dispatched their work to the Norwich dealer.

225

Chap. XII. p. 385. See also the monopoly of the York weavers in the twelfth century, with the control of trade in the whole county which it must have implied. (Gross, i. 108, note.)

226

English Guilds, 383.