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

of workers attached to the guild who could, by virtue of their numbers and their covenanted position, call on the municipal government to interfere for their special benefit in the management of the trade.[227]

      If we consider therefore the case of the working population in town or country – whether we remember the poor folk of the hamlets, known to Langland, that “have no chattel but their crafts and few pence taketh;”[228] or consider in the towns the lowest class of casual labourers working at a wage of a penny a day, or the little more fortunate groups of unskilled serving-men, or the depressed company of the skilled journeymen; whether we trace in villages or boroughs the astonishing multitude of religious fraternities which sometimes at least concealed an illicit attempt at self-protection by the wage-earners; or examine the rigour with which towns and guilds repressed every attempt of the working men to combine in any association for their common benefit – we find ourselves again and again confronted with the problem of labour. In the thick darkness which still envelopes the subject dogmatism itself is swallowed up. But as we look into the obscurity, the borderland of the covenanted trades and the dim regions that lie beyond their recognized limits become crowded with the masses of the common workers – dreary groups of labourers seething with inarticulate discontent, themselves suffering the terrors and bondage of a harsh law, and from time to time, as they emerge into a brief light of riot and disorder,[229] kindling the alarms of the settled and protected classes above them. Associations of the richer merchants inspired by a common interest drew together for mutual support; and friendly Town Councils whose policy was to keep down the number of voters – especially of poor craftsmen who might be troublesome – and all whose members were indeed themselves employers and craft masters, made alliance with the guilds, and passed laws which, by shutting out apprentices from the freedom of the craft, debarred them from the franchise of the town. It was in vain that from time to time as the evil increased the central government sought to interfere with craft-masters and wardens who “for their own singular profit” made ingenious bye-laws or ordinances for the exclusion of new comers;[230] local alliances were too strong for it, and local wits too cunning, and one of the main results of the triumphant guild system was to develope throughout the country a formless and incoherent multitude of hired labourers, who could by no possibility rise to positions of independence, and had no means of association in self-defence. As the weaker members of the crowd from time to time sank back into utter penury, the outcasts of the industrial system slowly gathered into a new brotherhood of the destitute; and even in the fifteenth century, long before they had been reinforced by the waifs and strays of town and country that flocked into their sad fellowship on the dissolution of the monasteries, the advanced guard of the army of paupers appears in the streets of the boroughs to trouble the counsels of municipal rulers.

       CHAPTER V

      THE CRAFTS

      The early history of the craft guilds, like that of the municipalities, is the story of communities in the first strength of youth, growing by the force of their own vitality into forms which can be reduced to no mechanical regularity or order, and ever plastic to take on new shapes according to the shifting exigencies of an age when industry, commerce, local government, were all in a state of revolution. In the pride of their first creation, in the humiliation of their later apparent subjection, in the victorious results at last of their long discipline, the guilds reflected successive movements in the great change that transformed English society; and it would be hard to find a single formula in which to express a life so free and various. Like the boroughs their systems of government ranged from constitutions which, if not democratic, were at least republican, to constitutions which placed in command an oligarchy, whether limited or despotic; so that we can scarcely say that the towns borrowed their methods from the guilds, or the guilds from the towns, at a time when both alike were perhaps tentatively feeling their way towards the only solutions of the problem of government which the time and occasion admitted. They had the same period of intense activity, from the awakening of the new life of England under the Norman kings, till under Henry the Seventh its industrial and commercial position was definitely established. The very difficulties by which they were hemmed in were the true conditions of any lively growth; and it was not till the sixteenth century, when the militant life of the crafts came to an end, that a fatal monotony settled down on their associations – a dreary uniformity[231] both of constitution and of policy, which makes their period of triumphant prosperity and imminent decay a record at once tedious and disheartening.

      In dealing with the history of commerce the craft guilds necessarily take a foremost place in their character of trading or manufacturing associations; but we are here mainly concerned with what we may call their political relations to the borough, and their influence on the growth of municipal life. The constitution of the craft becomes therefore important, not from its economic results, but as indicating the character and complexion of the guild, the policy which it might be expected to pursue if it attained to authority, and the extent to which it could be supposed to favour popular or democratic theories of government. How far the crafts were actually able to make their influence felt depends on a second question as to the connexion that existed – of what kind and closeness it may have been – between the guilds and the governing body of the borough.

      We must remember that the various craft guilds represented all ranks and classes in the industrial world – the capitalist, the middleman, and the working man. There were aristocratic fraternities of the Merchant Adventurers, and of dealers living by the profits of commerce alone, who were grouped in the great mercantile companies such as the vintners and spicers and grocers and mercers. In a lower scale were the middlemen and traders who produced little or nothing themselves, but made their living mainly by selling the produce of the labour of others – such as the saddlers, the drapers, the leather-sellers, the hatters – and whose unions were in fact formidable combinations of employers. Below these again came guilds of artizans employed in preparing work for the dealers, to be by them sold to the general public, as the smiths who worked for the tailors or linen-armourers,[232] the weavers who supplied the clothiers; the joiners, painters, ironsmiths, and coppersmiths who made the saddles and harness for the saddlers; the tawyers who prepared skins for the leather-sellers; the cap-makers who fulled the caps which the hatters sold.[233] Finally there remained the crafts which both manufactured and sold their own wares, like the bakers, tailors, or shoemakers, and who dealt directly with the consumer without the intervention of any other guild. It is evident that these various associations had all their own business to do,[234] and that their policy differed as widely as did the interests of the several classes. We do not find a guild of merchants or dealers trying to raise wages or shorten hours; or a guild of artizans seeking to depress labour and assert the supremacy of the middleman; or a mixed guild of masters and men intent upon lowering prices for the public. But we may still ask whether behind all obvious divergences of interest and of power, there was any ruling instinct common to all these brotherhoods of trade.

      The original motives which drew men together into craft guilds were no doubt everywhere the same – the desire to obtain the monopoly of their trade and complete control over it;[235] and also to find the security which in those days organized associations alone could give to the poor and helpless against tyrannical and corrupt administration of the law, just as in the country men enrolled themselves under the livery of a lord or knight who was their adequate protector against the iniquities of the courts[236] and by whose arbitration their quarrels were adjusted.[237] For these purposes associations were formed of the entire trades of various districts. All the members of the craft, great and small, were enrolled in the fraternity; and thus every guild, to whatever order in the hierarchy of industry it belonged, contained within itself the various ranks of workers who belonged to that particular occupation. It is in this organization of the whole craft into a compact body arrayed in self-defence against the world

227

Von Ochenkowski (Wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, 128-133) scarcely seems to distinguish sufficiently between the objections to the competition of the dealers or masters from the suburbs, and to the employment by town manufacturers of labour outside the town. The resistance would necessarily have come from different quarters and for different reasons.

228

Cf. The Common Weal (ed. E. Lamond), 49.

229

The well-known rioter is described by Skelton. Poems (ed. Dyce), ii. 43-4.

230

This was sometimes done by royal charter. (Hibbert’s Influence of Eng. Guilds, 96.) All the facts are against the theory of Marx that the merchant was by some hostile force prevented from buying labour, though allowed to buy other commodities. The limitations were of the merchants’ and dealers’ own making for their own purposes. It is equally improbable that the guild organization excluded division of labour in the workshop. (Marx, Capital, &c. i. 352.)

231

This uniformity is well illustrated in the later ordinances of the Hull Guilds. (Lambert, Two Thousand Years of Guild Life; Gross, ii. 272.)

232

Clode, Merchant Tailors, p. 2.

233

In 1311 the “hatters” and the “dealers who bought and sold hats” in London were two quite distinct callings. (Riley’s Mem. 90.) The distinction was well known in 1327 between the saddlers and the various orders of workmen employed in manufacturing for them. (Ibid. 157-8.)

234

A separation of the guilds into these groups is sufficient of itself to shew of how little value the generalizations of Marx are as to the relations of the crafts to capital; and how misleading it is to represent the guilds as providing the main opposition to merchants or capitalists, especially in the matter of refusing the supply of labour. (See Marx i. 352.)

235

Seligman (Two Chapters on Mediæval Guilds, 69) states that the crafts were not charitable associations giving relief to poor members till the fifteenth century. Out of twelve crafts mentioned in English Guilds, nine gave relief to poor, and three do not mention it. For the Braelers in London, 1355, see Riley’s Mem. 277; the White tawyers, 1346, ibid. 232; the Lorimers, 1261, Liber Cust. 78-80. Most of the ordinances in Riley’s Mem. make no mention of relief, but the ordinances are so manifestly incomplete – merely additions or alterations made for some special purpose – that no argument can be drawn from them. The vast majority of religious or social guilds had some charitable provisions, and in many cases these were certainly trade guilds. The probability seems to lie on the side of help given to poor members from the first.

236

The way in which the guilds fought in defence of their voluntary courts of arbitration, and the objection of the towns to these, is in itself proof enough of the importance to their members of a tribunal, however voluntary and arbitrary, which might relieve them from the interference on every occasion of the local magistrates, and the party politics of the town. The advantages of association in case of being called before the greater courts is evident from the account of mediæval procedure given in Sir J. Stephen’s History of the Criminal Law. The illustrations afforded by the Paston Letters are without number. See Manorial Pleas (Selden Soc.), 136. For the heavy cost involved by the corrupt practices of lawyers, judges, pleaders, and attorneys, see the action brought in 1275 by an advocate against an employer who had withdrawn from the case; the advocate sues for his fees and also for having been prevented by the stopping of the case from getting a very large sum of money out of the other side. (Ibid. 155-6.)

237

It was a disgrace to the lord if any of his “livery” appeared in the law courts. The protection extended to the members of a craft was really efficient. See the punishment of a grocer who in 1404 had turned another of the company out of his house. (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i. 93.)