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

a lesson in combination from the employers. “If there was any dispute between a master in the said trade and his man,” ran the complaint of the masters about 1350, “such man has been wont to go to all the men within the city of the same trade, and then by covin and conspiracy between them made, they would order that no one among them should work or serve his own master, until the said master and his servant or man had come to an agreement; by reason whereof the masters in the said trade have been in great trouble and the people left unserved.” These men were also making a covert attempt to raise their payment by refusing to work at day wages, and insisting on piece-work through which they could gain more money; while the masters, so long as they were forced by law to sell at a fixed price, had a valid reason for protesting before the mayor that there must be some relation between lowering the price of their wares and raising the wages of their workmen, or they themselves would be set between the upper and nether mill-stone; and for making a petition that the men might be chastised and commanded to work according to the ancient usage “as matter of charity and for the profit of the people.” The city magistrates granted ordinances which forbade any attempt to settle trade disputes by strikes, and ordered all complaints to be brought before the warden of the craft (himself of course a master), and failing him before the mayor. Though the court did not forbid piece-work, it fixed its price at the low rate that prevailed before the Plague.[257] On the whole the victory therefore lay with the masters.

      The shoemakers’ servants were early in the field. They made their first rebellion before 1306, the main results of which seem to have been a decree added to their old ordinances that the journeymen of the trade should make no provisions to the prejudice of the public;[258] and perhaps the imposition of an oath that they would not make among themselves any union or confederation.[259] For eighty years they waited before making a new attempt. At last in 1387 a “great congregation” of them met at the Black Friars “and there did conspire and confederate to hold together … and because that Richard Bonet of the trade aforesaid would not agree with them made assault upon him so that he hardly escaped with his life … to the alarm of the neighbours.” The meeting was illegal, not only because of their oath, but because of a law passed four years before to forbid any confederation among workers; so to make their position more regular the poor shoemakers hit upon the plan of calling in the help of a friendly friar preacher, “Brother William Bartone by name, who had made an agreement with their companions that he would make suit in the Court of Rome for confirmation of that fraternity by the Pope; so that on pain of excommunication and of still more grievous sentence (!) afterwards to be fulminated, no man should dare to interfere with the well-being of the fraternity. For doing the which he had received a certain sum of money which had been collected among their said companions.” This form of Papal interference, however, was not to the mind of Londoners – “a deed,” they said, “which notoriously redounds to the weakening of the liberties of the said city and of the powers of the officers of the same.” The mayor accordingly threw the leaders into prison,[260] and the attempt of the luckless journeymen came to an end.

      The serving-men of the saddlers tried another plan, and formed in 1383 a religious fraternity whose ostensible duties were perfectly harmless. Its members were wont once a year to array themselves in a like suit and go out beyond the city bounds to Stratford (in other words, out of reach for the moment of the city authorities) where they held a meeting, and returned to hear mass in honour of the Virgin in the church next to the Saddlers’ Hall; also from time to time their beadle would summon journeymen to attend at vigils of the dead and pray for the souls of their old comrades. According to the masters, however, this was but “a certain feigned colour of sanctity” under which the men merely wasted their masters’ time and conspired to “raise wages greatly in excess” – in fact in the space of thirteen years, from 1373 to 1396, they had increased their hire to twice or three times the old customary rate. The mayor and aldermen agreed with the masters as to the dangerous character of these proceedings, forbade any such meetings or any fraternities for the future, and ordered that the serving-men should be under the masters, and that the “masters must properly treat and govern” them as in all other trades.[261]

      The journeymen tailors took a bolder line, for they not only held illegal meetings both within and without the city bounds, at which they assembled wearing a common livery, but also hired houses in the city where they lived in companies, and defied both their own masters and the officers of the city. Whereupon the masters and wardens of the trade notified to the mayor and aldermen “that they were exceedingly sorrowful at there being such offenders and such misdeeds”; and the mayor and aldermen “after holding careful council and conference thereon” decided that it was manifestly to the public peril to allow journeymen and serving-men – a race at once youthful and unstable – to have a common livery at their assemblies, or common dwelling-houses by themselves. The settlement was broken up, and livery and meetings forbidden. Then the tailors also put on the colour of sanctity, and a couple of years later (in 1417) we find them petitioning to be allowed to meet for prayers and offerings for the souls of deceased tailors.[262]

      That similar attempts, with the same impotent conclusions, took place in other manufacturing towns is certain; though we have not yet the means of measuring the extent of the movement. The uniform failure of every effort at revolt, even the acquiescence of the workmen when revolt was impossible, declare the helplessness of the mediæval labourer, entangled as he was in a vast net-work of commercial theories, administrative maxims, and arguments of vested interests public and private. For in a society where law ruled all industry, the whole community was on the alert to resist any defiance of ordinances avowedly made for their own protection.[263] The right to strike was denied by law and vehemently resisted by public opinion as contrary to the common good; and disputes were settled, not as now by an agreement voluntarily made within the trade, but by the formal decision of the municipality, against which there was no appeal.

      At the same time it is evident that in their dealings with journeymen and hired servants, if in no other respect, the municipalities did no more than carry out exactly the intentions of the guilds themselves. From the moment that they come into view the crafts – that is, all the more important ones, for from the nature of the case we know very little about the poorer sort of associations or the humbler trades concealed under the form of religious societies – are distinguished by the same creed and policy. Their essential character was laid down in the oligarchic schemes of administration to which they inclined; and, as we have seen, the purity of the guild government was further maintained by the pains which was taken to prevent the journeymen from pressing on into the upper ranks and weakening the established system by multiplying the number of small masters; and to select with adequate care the people admitted to be subjects with constitutional rights – a people chosen as far as possible from an upper class and even from the hereditary stock of the guild.[264] By an original stringent constitution therefore, and by their own later discipline, the governing oligarchy was protected as by a double course of entrenchments; and a third line of defence was formed by keeping guard over every entrance through which the common workman might make his way into the superior class of artizans who, in however inferior a degree, might still be recognized as more or less officially attached to the craft. In its very nature, therefore, the guild organization was adverse to the claims of the men who worked for hire, and under its government the journeyman was practically condemned without a hearing. What with the influence exercised by the masters in the Town Council and government, and what with the credulous fears of the public of consumers when they were told what “contrarious” workmen might do in raising prices and limiting supply, and “the many losses which might happen in future times” through combinations of hired labour, the victory of the employers was never for a moment doubtful,[265] and unions of journeymen such as those which sprang up in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries, broken and disabled almost at the outset, seem, so far as we can see, to have been again and again crushed out of existence by the overwhelming forces of guild

257

Riley’s Mem. 247-8, 250-1, 256.

258

Lib. Cus. 84.

259

Riley’s Mem. 495.

260

Mem. Lond. 495-6. The friars from time to time appear as supporters of the poorer people. In Coventry the White Friars was the meeting place for the fellowship of the crafts and for the tilers’ company in the fifteenth century; and Friar John Bredon played the part of a local agitator. The policy of the Friars was often, as in Canterbury, part of a general antagonism to other religious establishments. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 98.)

261

Mem. Lond. 543-4. The suppression of the May-day festival of the journeymen shearmen in Shrewsbury was very possibly a similar putting down of confederations and conspiracies. (Hibbert’s Inf. and Dev. of Eng. Gilds, 120-2.) See also the Bristol Coruesers, p. 119, n. 1.

262

Riley’s Mem. Lond. 609-12, 653. Clode, 4, 22-29.

263

The town records of Shrewsbury note in 1516 a reward to the king’s messenger bearing letters concerning the insurrection of the apprentices of the City of London. (Owen’s Shrewsbury, i. 284.)

264

See p. 102, note 2.

265

See Note A, p. 160.