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 outside, and in the means that were used to maintain it, that we trace the peculiar characteristics of the mediÆval guild as opposed to those of modern associations. From the very outset its society was based on compulsion. Dealer or artizan had no choice as to whether he would join the association of his trade or no, that question being settled by the charter which gave the craft power to compel every workman to enter into its circle. A constitution such as this left a profound mark on the conduct and ultimate policy of every guild, for where there was no real freedom of association there proved at last to be no real freedom of government. Societies such as the modern trade union, created and maintained by the good will of men naturally bound to one another by common occupation and interests, and who expect from their association a common benefit, may long persist as voluntary institutions with a democratic government. But the ancient guild—a fraternity of the whole trade with all its ranks and classes, employers and wage-earners alike, compulsorily bound together into one fellowship as against the world without, and whose common interest in association tended to become more and more visionary—was inevitably driven to preserve by force an artificial and ill-compacted union; and instead of a free self-governing community, there grew up a society ruled by its leading members in a more or less despotic fashion, according to the character of the trade itself and to the support given to its governors by the authorities at Westminster or in the municipality.[238]

(1) For it is plain that no intimate union can ever have existed between the three orders that practically made up the guild.[239] At the head of the society stood the master and the aldermen or wardens, drawn from among the wealthiest men of the trade; and grouped immediately round them were all those who, after having passed through these offices, retained for life a position of dignity among the members, and from whom the court of assistants or governing council was wholly or partly formed.

(2) Then came the commonalty, the craft-holders or shopkeepers or “masters” of the trade—a term which by no means necessarily implies employers of labour, but rather artificers admitted into the “mestier”[240] or mistery—who were alone responsible before the law for offences[241] committed in their shops or work-rooms, and were therefore alone authorized by the guild to take work from a customer.[242]

(3) Last came the hired workers—that is the trained journeymen or serving-men; for the unskilled labourers working for a daily hire and apprentices can scarcely be reckoned as in any sense members of the guild.

In a society thus constituted the notion of self-government never for a moment implied the modern notion of democracy, or even the idea that authority should be exercised only by the will of the majority. In some fraternities indeed the whole community of craft-masters took part directly in the yearly election of officers, though probably this was the extreme bound and limit of their influence;[243] but in general there was the same tendency in the guilds as in the boroughs to choose their governors by some indirect and complicated system through which the commonalty was kept well in restraint. Either the alderman himself nominated candidates for the various offices, from among whom the select council or fellowship made their choice, or he appointed a few picked men, five or seven or eight as the case might be, to choose the rulers for the next year.[244] In the same way the two or four “sufficient and discreet men” who were to assist the alderman, “the helpmen and overseers,” or the council of eight or twelve or twenty-four, were chosen either by a similar committee, or by the direct choice of the alderman himself “with the aid of his fraternity.”[245] Nor is there any evidence that this method of government by the select few was a growth of later corruption; it is more probable that in societies which could only be founded at the wish of the more prosperous men in the trade, since they alone could undertake to raise the money for its charter or guarantee the payment of its yearly rent, these men were accustomed, in return for their money or as a security for it, to hold the management of the community in their own hands; and this seems confirmed by traces of the system which we find in very early times, as well as by what we know of the origins of later fraternities.

If the power of the masters was thus limited, the mere journeymen were practically of no account at all in such great matters as election and legislation. Perhaps in some trades they occasionally exercized a slight influence, as in the case of the London bowyers, whose ordinances were agreed to “as well by serving-men as by masters.”[246] But in general it is doubtful whether the voice of the hired worker was ever heard or his will consulted, however much his obedience to the ordinances was required and enforced. It was supposed that his interests were sufficiently protected by the town authorities, to whom an alien who was cheated by his master, a journeyman who found his wages paid on the truck system, or a weaver who saw his labour supplanted by that of a woman or a foreigner, could make his complaint; and who were bound to see that no freeman of the borough took more apprentices into his household than he could promise to support comfortably; that the apprentice was not chastised beyond measure, nor turned out penniless at the end of his service;[247] and that no fraudulent action of his master should rob him of the benefit of the exact tale of the years of service he had fulfilled.[248]

In all that concerned the hired worker, indeed, law had become so rigid and so detailed by the time that Parliament, the Town Council, and the Craft wardens, had taken their turn at legislation, that it might be plausibly assumed that nothing remained for the discussion of the working man. By a series of statutes Parliament endeavoured to keep the hire of the workers and the length of the working day fixed in spite of the increase of trade;[249] and mayors and bailiffs in all boroughs[250] were ordered to compel labour to keep its allotted times, and to proclaim the wages of craftsmen twice a year, “and that a pair of stocks be in every town to justify the same servants and labourers.”[251] Whatever was left undefined by Parliament was put under rule by the subordinate authorities. Town Councils made provision for the punishment of “rebel and contrarious” men in the mayor’s court, examined and corrected the customs of the crafts, forbade workmen to make their bargains anywhere save openly at the market cross, and fined them if they stood there beyond one day in the week,[252] probably on the supposition that they were holding out for a higher wage or shorter hours. The guild-masters regulated the prices to be paid for piece-work,[253] issued orders allowing work to be done by night, and made rules as to apprenticeship and service.[254] For greater security moreover the masters were accustomed to enter into covenants for mutual protection against their servants—“And if any serving-man shall conduct himself in any other manner than properly towards his master, and act rebelliously towards him,” said the Whittawyers, “no one of the trade shall set him to work until he shall have made amends before the mayor and aldermen.”[255] On the other hand journeymen were invariably bound by oath not to make any sort of confederation among themselves,[256]—a precaution which State and town and guild were equally vigilant in enforcing. Under such a system as this, if at any time the workers proposed to disturb the statute wage or the statute day, they had to contend not only against the upper class of their own craft, the masters and wardens and shopkeepers, but against the governing body of the town, and the opposition of the whole community.

Neither oaths nor laws nor public opinion however could permanently prevent men from combining to better their position, and from time to time we can follow the fortunes of a struggle which, when the town records are published, will probably be shown to have been very general. In London alone we have during a single century records of strikes among the workmen of four trades—the shearmen, the saddlers, the shoemakers, and the tailors.

The journeymen of the cloth shearers took 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 and town and state brought to bear on them, and to have found no permanent life till the eighteenth century.

There was no doubt a sense in which the strong rule of a governing oligarchy fully justified itself throughout the course of the struggle for autonomy between the rising crafts and the rising municipalities. Shaking itself free from discussions and divisions within its own body by asserting the triumph of the stronger party, the guild was able to maintain in practice the consistent theory of its constitution—the undisputed supremacy of the masters in the regulation of the trade policy; and through centuries of varying and doubtful fortunes the crafts still contrived to present to the world outside an unbroken front and a certain air of independence; holding together in companies under leaders of their own choosing, and, save in rare instances, scorning to stoop to the custom common in France or Germany of having their chief officer appointed by some external authority.[266] But this bold militant attitude was only maintained through a rigid discipline, and by a ruthless suppression of every attempt to break the ranks. A body to all appearance uniform, but in fact split up into two or three hostile groups, the craft only preserved its air of harmony by abandoning all pretence at democratic government, and avowedly subduing the weaker classes to the stronger. The policy which had been its safety in the time of conflict remained its settled creed in the time of power. It is clear, therefore, that if ever the members of the guild forced their way into the council chamber of the town, their appearance can scarcely be taken as marking a popular or democratic movement. That it enlarged the governing class by bringing in a new group of men to take part in the active political life of the country is evident; but on the other hand these men do not seem to have contributed a single idea to political experience, or carried political experiment a single step further. Saturated with the customary views of administration which were the fashion in the upper class of town society, and by which their own interests had been so well served, the craft-masters sent their representatives to the council only to give new strength to the coercive policy of the governing oligarchy. The character of the trade fraternity was fully shown when, victorious over the foes of its own household, strong in its complete organization, the craft guild rose out of its long subjection to public control, and seizing into its own hands municipal authority, destroyed its terrors for the trader. When this last step was taken the crafts stood forth in full realization of their ideal—close corporations fully equipped against the whole body of consumers, and masters of the labour of the country. What has been called the decline of the guild system may more truly be called its triumph—the revelation of its constant aim and true significance.

NOTE A

Statute Wages in 1388.

No servant of artificer or victualler in a town was to take more than those in the country (12 Richard II. cap. 4.).

In 1444.

Summer wages of mason or carpenter 4d. a day with food, without 5d.; tiler, slater, rough mason, and builders 3d. with food; other labourers 2d. Without food 1d. more in all cases. Winter wages 1d. less all round. In harvest a mower 4d., reaper 3d.; labourers 2d.; 2d. more for meat and drink. (23 Henry VI. cap. 12.)

In 1495.

The hire of women, children, and artificers remained the same. (11 Henry VII. cap. 22.)

By 12 Henry VII. cap. 3, all statutes fixing the wages of artificers and labourers were made void for masons and all concerned in building, and servants in husbandry. Rogers (Work and Wages, ii. 327) fixes the wages of the ordinary artizan in the fifteenth century at 6d. a day and agricultural wages at 4d., carpenters a little under 6d., plumbers 6-1/2d., masons 6d. The board of a skilled artizan might cost in 1438 about 2s., of a common labourer about 1s., very commonly from 8d. to 10d., most generally 8d. (Agriculture and Prices, iv. 505, 751-2.) In 1395 a Nottingham “layer” was charged for working two days as stone-cutter for 12d. against the law, and the jury stated that “all the carpenters, all the plasterers, all the stone-cutters, all the labourers, take too much for their craft by the day, against the statute of our lord the King.” (Nott. Rec. i. 275.) For a list of wages paid in 1464 see ibid. ii. 370-373; in 1511 iii. 328-337. In 1495 a man was employed to dig stones at 3d. a day without food.

That there was difficulty in enforcing the legal wage and that there was often a difference between the prices actually paid and those which the law books spoke of as still valid is evident from the ingenious methods in use of evading the law. Sometimes the workman was paid his board wages and given his food besides; or false entries were made in the account books; or a yearly fee was given in addition to wages; or he was paid a sum of so much a mile for coming to and going from his work; or his wages were calculated at 6d. or 5d. according to ability for 365 days in the year, against the statute which forbade the workman to receive hire for holidays or for the eves of feasts. (Rogers’ Agric. and Prices, i. 255; Work and Wages, ii. 328-330; Stat. 4 Henry IV. cap. 14.)

The legal hours of work for country labourers from March to September were from 5 A.M. till between 7 and 8 P.M., with half an hour for breakfast, an hour and a half for dinner; from September to March, from the springing of the day till the night of the same day. They were not to sleep in day-time save after dinner from May to August. (Stat. 11 Henry VII. cap. 22.) The Saturday half-holiday from noon seems to have been universal. In shops trading on Sundays, holidays and vigils was very generally forbidden in the middle of the fifteenth century, save in harvest time, and unless “great high need may excuse.” (Kingdon’s Grocers’ Company, ii. 190; Hist. MSS. Com. xi. 3, 169.) Rogers (Work and Wages, i. 180-2) calculates that an artizan working three hundred days a year could earn from £3 15s. 0d. to £4 7s. 6d., and in London might get from £6 5s. 0d. to £6 17s. 6 d. a year. Walter of Henley (ed. by Miss Lamond, p. 9) gives forty-four weeks, leaving eight weeks “for holidays and other hindrances.” But in his translation of Walter’s Husbandry, Bishop Grosseteste adds a phrase (ibid. 45) which throws a new light on the matter. “In these forty-four weeks be 264 days besides Sundays”—an explanation which certainly expands the amount of leisure allowed to country labourers, whether it applied to town artizans or no.