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

matter of public convenience; and was so little regarded as depending on the free will of the craft itself that it was frequently founded by order of the town, and was invariably compelled to make submission to superior force and receive orders from its master the municipality. Unable to secure the passing of any new rule save by convincing the authorities on some pretext or other that it was devised in the interest of the whole commonwealth, the craft came at last to be considered as a society which existed mainly for the advantage of “the common people of the realm,” and indeed, bowing to a hard necessity, itself contracted the habit of solemnly disavowing any special regard for “its own singular profit,” and apologetically described itself as the humble servant of the municipality and the obedient minister of the public, in phrazes which the modern trade union would scarcely accept as an adequate description of its uses.

      This service of the public, however, was in no sense a voluntary tribute of the guilds, nor did it enter in the slightest degree into their original scheme; and if through long and severe compulsion the crafts learned to wear with decorum their odd cloke of apparent devotion to the common weal, behind this ostensible policy and feigned colour of self-abnegation they had still their own purposes to serve, which were by no means the purposes of the rest of the community. Occasions of discord were probably far more frequent than provocations to unity and concord in the society of a mediæval town, with its hierarchy of struggling workers – the rising dealers, the small masters who employed two or three servants, the artizans who let down the ledge from their window to display the goods which they had themselves made, journeymen working for a statute wage, and unskilled labourers for whatever they could get – men for the most part living meagrely by incessant toil, and to whom the public, thrifty and inclined to bargains, was “the enemy”; and with its population of consumers, poor and ignorant, without the means of travelling, forced to buy what they wanted on the spot and thus deprived of such protection as may be given by a larger competition, able to afford little beyond the mere necessaries of life so that every fraud brought to them real suffering, and to whom the trader represented the ancient adversary lying in wait among the gins which he had privily set for the innocent. The thin veil of civility thrown over the situation by the polite phrazes of contemporary convention which have come down to us in ordinance and compact deceived nobody concerned; and between the “poor commons” and the whole army of crafts reconciliation never went farther than an armed truce. To the consumer the dealers seemed all alike steeped in iniquity. Shopkeepers measured out their wares “by horn or by aim of hand,” or in chance cups and dishes; and sold in dark corners where a man could not see what scamped work and deceitful goods were being handed over to him. Clothiers gave out bad yarn in scanty measure, and stretched out the list of their cloth with cunning presses “in deceit of the poor commons.” Hatters because they knew that everyone must needs wear hats charged exorbitantly for their wares, and shoemakers were no better, so that statute after statute vainly sought to mend them. Chandlers asked scandalous prices for wax candles, images, and figures, “by which means divers of the people be defrauded of their good intent and devotion.”[268] “All the bakers, butchers, fishers, taverners, poulterers, chandlers, tanners, shoemakers, cooks, hostelers, weavers, and fullers,” according to the comprehensive statement of the Nottingham Mickletorn jury in 1395, were asking too high prices and selling bad goods; and they go on the next year to repeat the same complaints.[269] Above all the anger of the common folk burned hot against the traders they knew best, the powerful licensed victuallers who heaped up to themselves riches with the food that should have fed the starving workers: “for took they on truly, they timbered not so high.” The “sundry sorrows in cities,” fevers and murrains and floods, or fires which burned down half the town and seemed ever to begin by the falling of a candle at a brewer’s or some “cursed place,” were the vivid testimony of the anathema of the poor and the righteous vengeance of heaven falling on the sinful traders;[270] and the common rumour of the market is still heard behind the poet’s parable of the day when Guile was at the point of death, and when it was only the shopkeepers who recovered him to life:

      “But merchants met with him and made him abide,

      And shutten him in their shops to showen their ware,

      And parrelled him like their prentice the people to serve.”[271]

      As for the crafts, on the other hand, whether they were combinations of employers, or associations of middlemen or dealers, or unions of wage-earners, or societies of masters and men, in one respect their unanimity was unbroken; for inspired by a reasonable hostility to the consumer who wanted to cheapen their wares, they were all ranged on the same side in the common controversy as to who was ultimately to fix prices, the seller or the buyer. Then obvious policy was declared in a number of conspiracies which were constantly made in the various trades to raise prices by combination among the dealers; but unfortunately for the traders, always on the watch as they were for opportunities, they still found the public as alert as themselves, and more powerful to accomplish their will. When Edward the Third in 1331 fixed the price of wine of Gascony at 4d. a gallon the retail dealers, who had apparently found their profit best secured by the absence of any statutory prices for their goods, broke into open rebellion, and “all the taverners of the city making a confederacy and alliance among them” closed the doors of their taverns and would not allow their wines to be sold; till to “put a check upon this malignancy” the mayor and sheriffs proceeded through the city, and had the names of the taverners so closing their taverns written down, twenty-nine in number, and twelve men from each ward of the city were summoned by the authorities to decide in the name of the injured wine-drinkers upon the punishment to be awarded to the taverners for their contumacy.[272] In 1363 and again in 1411 the consumer was protected by law against the rich Pepperers who had formed a company in 1345, and were accused of raising prices.[273] The whole body of chandlers in Norwich were presented at the Court Leet in 1300 for a certain agreement made among themselves that “no one of them shall sell a pound of candles for less than another.”[274] And in 1329 when a lime-burner of London bound all the members of his trade by oath not to sell lime below a fixed price, and “by reason of his great conspiracy” almost doubled the price of lime, the city rulers imprisoned him and the “conspiracy” was cut short.[275]

      Alliances of this kind to increase profits or raise prices were universally met by a determined resistance on the part of the public.[276] But the “poor commons” went far beyond a policy of mere self-defence. They aimed in fact at nothing less than putting the crafts altogether under the yoke of the community, at seizing the whole organization of trade which had been built up and binding it over to perpetual service. Nothing could have been more distasteful to the guilds. In the twelfth century, while municipal government was in its very infancy, they had already aimed at complete independence and a real autonomy; and certain crafts did in fact succeed in making a special bargain with the King over the heads of the local magistrates. By charters bought at Westminster fraternities were made dependent for their existence on the royal will alone; and were granted rights of supervision and jurisdiction over their workmen without any reference to the borough;[277] and since in these early charters the only definite provision was that all the men of the trade in that particular district should be enrolled in the guild, the freedom of the craft as a whole remained for the moment unquestioned even if the freedom of the individual was limited. An independence so complete however was bitterly resented by town governments. In London for example the weavers lived in a quarter by themselves into which the city officers never entered. They had their own courts and special privileges, and raised their taxes through their own officers. Under the protection of the King’s writ they successfully defied the town authorities, and when in the time of Henry the Third the citizens seemed likely to overpower them by force they laid up their charter of rights in the Exchequer as a perpetual record of their privileges. The jealousy excited in municipal bodies by an alien society settled in their midst,

268

Stat. 11 Henry VI. cap. 12.

269

Nott. Rec. i. 268-272, 316-318. See also Hist. MSS. Com. vi. 582.

270

Piers Ploughman. Pass. iv. 80-118. There is an instance of a guild in which no parson, baker, or wife, was admitted. (Eng. Gilds, 271).

271

Piers Ploughman. Pass. iii. 222.

272

Riley’s Mem. 182. A summary of the conflict on the price of wine is given in Schanz, i. 642-50. By 5 Richard II. Stat. i. cap. 4 if a vintner refused to sell at the right price the mayor might deliver the wine to any buyer at statute cost.

273

Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, i., xvii., xviii.; Schanz, i. 651.

274

Norwich Town Close Evidences (Brit. Museum.), 16.

275

Riley’s Memorials, 174-5. Many other examples might be given. A later instance occurs when the London Corporation brought a complaint against the society of hoastmen in 1603 about the raising of the price of coals in London and the scanty supply, so that “without great difficulty the city cannot be provided sufficiently of sea-coals for the poor.” The fraternity of hoastmen make a statement of their reasons concerning the prices of sea-coals to the Privy Council in answer to the complaint of the Mayor and Aldermen. (Newcastle Guilds, 44.)

276

The chief objection of the public to the “unreasonable ordinances” by which the crafts closed their corporations was the “common damage to the people,” probably as tending to raise prices. (P. 102, n. 2.) The Coventry Leet opposed the crafts in this matter.

277

These grants were all of early date, in the twelfth century. Ashley, Woollen Industry, 15-17; Madox, 26, 191, etc., 212, etc., 283-4. The Nottingham weavers paid a rent of 40s. for their guild to the King from the time of Henry the Second. For this they raised a contribution from each loom, and obtained a grant that those who paid might work in the outskirts of the town. (Nott. Rec. iii. 27, 58, ii. 36.)