TOWNS ON THE EVE OF THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
[Sidenote: Trade and the Towns ]
Except for the wealthy Italian city-states and a few other cities which traced their history back to Roman times, most European towns, it must be remembered, dated only from the later middle ages. At first there was little excuse for their existence except to sell to farmers salt, fish, iron, and a few plows. But with the increase of commerce, which, as we shall see, especially marked the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, more merchants traveled through the country, ways of spending money multiplied, and the little agricultural villages learned to look on the town as the place to buy not only luxuries but such tools, clothing, and shoes as could be manufactured more conveniently by skillful town artisans than by clumsy rustics. The towns, moreover, became exchanges where surplus farm products could be marketed, where wine could be bartered for wool, or wheat for flax. And as the towns grew in size, the prosperous citizens proved to be the best customers for foreign luxuries, and foreign trade grew apace. Town, trade, and industry thus worked together: trade stimulated industry, industry assisted trade, and the town profited by both. By the sixteenth century the towns had grown out of their infancy and were maintaining a great measure of political and economic freedom.
[Sidenote: Freedom of the Towns.]
[Sidenote: Town Charters]
Originally many a town had belonged to some nobleman's extensive manor and its inhabitants had been under much the same servile obligations to the lord as were the strictly rural serfs. But with the lapse of time and the growth of the towns, the townsmen or burghers had begun a struggle for freedom from their feudal lords. They did not want to pay servile dues to a baron, but preferred to substitute a fixed annual payment for individual obligations; they besought the right to manage their market; they wished to have cases at law tried in a court of their own rather than in the feudal court over which the nobleman presided; and they demanded the right to pay all taxes in a lump sum for the town, themselves assessing and collecting the share of each citizen. These concessions they eventually had won, and each city had its charter, in which its privileges were enumerated and recognized by the authority of the nobleman, or of the king, to whom the city owed allegiance. In England these charters had been acquired generally by merchant gilds, upon payment of a substantial sum to the nobleman; in France frequently the townsmen had formed associations, called communes, and had rebelled successfully against their feudal lords; in Germany the cities had leagued together for mutual protection and for the acquisition of common privileges. Other towns, formerly founded by bishops, abbots, or counts, had received charters at the very outset.
[Sidenote: Merchant Gilds]
A peculiar outgrowth of the need for protection against oppressive feudal lords, as well as against thieves, swindlers, and dishonest workmen, had been the typically urban organization known as the merchant gild or the merchants' company. In the year 1500 the merchant gilds were everywhere on the decline, but they still preserved many of their earlier and more glorious traditions. At the time of their greatest importance they had embraced merchants, butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers: in fact, all who bought or sold in the town were included in the gild. And the merchant gild had then possessed the widest functions.
[Sidenote: Earlier Functions of the Merchant Gild.]
[Sidenote: Social]
Its social and religious functions, inherited from much earlier bodies, consisted in paying some special honor to a patron saint, in giving aid to members in sickness or misfortune, attending funerals, and also in the more enjoyable meetings when the freely flowing bowl enlivened the transaction of gild business.
[Sidenote: Protective]
As a protective organization, the gild had been particularly effective. Backed by the combined forces of all the gildsmen, it was able to assert itself against the lord who claimed manorial rights over the town, and to insist that a runaway serf who had lived in the town for a year and a day should not be dragged back to perform his servile labor on the manor, but should be recognized as a freeman. The protection of the gild was accorded also to townsmen on their travels. In those days all strangers were regarded as suspicious persons, and not infrequently when a merchant of the gild traveled to another town he would be set upon and robbed or cast into prison. In such cases it was necessary for the gild to ransom the imprisoned "brother" and, if possible, to punish the persons who had done the injury, so that thereafter the liberties of the gild members would be respected. That the business of the gild might be increased, it was often desirable to enter into special arrangements with neighboring cities whereby the rights, lives, and properties of gildsmen were guaranteed; and the gild as a whole was responsible for the debts of any of its members.
[Sidenote: Regulative]
The most important duty of the gild had been the regulation of the home market. Burdensome restrictions were laid upon the stranger who attempted to utilize the advantages of the market without sharing the expense of maintenance. No goods were allowed to be carried away from the city if the townsmen wished to buy; and a tax, called in France the octroi, was levied on goods brought into the town. [Footnote: The octroi is still collected in Paris.] Moreover, a conviction prevailed that the gild was morally bound to enforce honest straightforward methods of business; and the "wardens" appointed by the gild to supervise the market endeavored to prevent, as dishonest practices, "forestalling" (buying outside of the regular market), "engrossing" (cornering the market), [Footnote: The idea that "combinations in restraint of trade" are wrong quite possibly goes back to this abhorrence of engrossing.] and "regrating" (retailing at higher than market price). The dishonest green grocer was not allowed to use a peck-measure with false bottom, for weighing and measuring were done by officials. Cheats were fined heavily and, if they persisted in their evil ways, they might be expelled from the gild.
These merchant gilds, with their social, protective, and regulative functions, had first begun to be important in the eleventh century. In England, where their growth was most rapid, 82 out of the total of 102 towns had merchant gilds by the end of the thirteenth century. [Footnote: Several important places, such as London, Colchester, and Norwich, belonged to the small minority without merchant gilds.] On the Continent many towns, especially in Germany, had quite different arrangements, and where merchant gilds existed, they were often exclusive and selfish groups of merchants in a single branch of business.
[Sidenote: Decline of Merchant Guilds]
With the expansion of trade and industry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the rule of the old merchant gilds, instead of keeping pace with the times, became oppressive, limited, or merely nominal. Where the merchant gilds became oppressive oligarchical associations, as they did in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent, they lost their power by the revolt of the more democratic "craft gilds." In England specialized control of industry and trade by craft gilds, journeymen's gilds, and dealers' associations gradually took the place of the general supervision of the older merchant gild. After suffering the loss of its vital functions, the merchant gild by the sixteenth century either quietly succumbed or lived on with power in a limited branch of trade, or continued as an honorary organization with occasional feasts, or, and this was especially true in England, it became practically identical with the town corporation, from which originally it had been distinct.
[Sidenote: Industry: the Craft Guilds]
Alongside of the merchant gilds, which had been associated with the growth of commerce and the rise of towns, were other guilds connected with the growth of industry, which retained their importance long after 1500. These were the craft gilds. [Footnote: The craft gild was also called a company, or a mistery, or métier (French), or Zunft (German).] Springing into prominence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the craft gild sometimes, as in Germany, voiced a popular revolt against corrupt and oligarchical merchant gilds, and sometimes most frequently so in England—worked quite harmoniously with the merchant gild, to which its own members belonged. In common with the merchant gild, the craft gild had religious and social aspects, and like the merchant gild it insisted on righteous dealings; but unlike the merchant gild it was composed of men in a single industry, and it controlled in detail the manufacture as well as the marketing of commodities. There were bakers' gilds, brewers' gilds, smiths' gilds, saddlers' gilds, shoemakers' gilds, weavers' gilds, tailors' gilds, tanners' gilds, even gilds of masters of arts who constituted the teaching staff of colleges and universities.
When to-day we speak of a boy "serving his apprenticeship" in a trade, we seldom reflect that the expression is derived from a practice of the medieval craft gilds, a practice which survived after the gilds were extinct. Apprenticeship was designed to make sure that recruits to the trade were properly trained. The apprentice was usually selected as a boy by a master-workman and indentured—that is, bound to work several years without wages, while living at the master's house. After the expiration of this period of apprenticeship, during which he had learned his trade thoroughly, the youth became a "journeyman," and worked for wages, until he should finally receive admission to the gild as a master, with the right to set up his own little shop, with apprentices and journeymen of his own, and to sell his wares directly to those who used them.
This restriction of membership was not the only way in which the trade was supervised. The gild had rules specifying the quality of materials to be used and often, likewise, the methods of manufacture; it might prohibit night-work, and it usually fixed a "fair price" at which goods were to be sold. By means of such provisions, enforced by wardens or inspectors, the gild not only perpetuated the "good old way" of doing things, but guaranteed to the purchaser a thoroughly good article at a fair price.
[Sidenote: Partial Decay of Craft Gilds]
By the opening of the sixteenth century the craft gilds, though not so weakened as the merchant gilds, were suffering from various internal diseases which sapped their vitality. They tended to become exclusive and to direct their power and affluence in hereditary grooves. They steadily raised their entrance fees and qualifications. Struggles between gilds in allied trades, such as spinning, weaving, fulling, and dyeing, often resulted in the reduction of several gilds to a dependent position. The regulation of the processes of manufacture, once designed to keep up the standard of skill, came in time to be a powerful hindrance to technical improvements; and in the method as well as in the amount of his work, the enterprising master found himself handicapped. Even the old conscientiousness often gave way to greed, until in many places inferior workmanship received the approval of the gild.
Many craft gilds exhibited in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a tendency to split somewhat along the present lines of capital and labor. On the one hand the old gild organization would be usurped and controlled by the wealthier master-workmen, called "livery men," because they wore rich uniforms, or a class of dealers would arise and organize a "merchants' company" to conduct a wholesale business in the products of a particular industry. Thus the rich drapers sold all the cloth, but did not help to make it. On the other hand it became increasingly difficult for journeymen and apprentices to rise to the station of masters; oftentimes they remained wage-earners for life. In order to better their condition they formed new associations, which in England were called journeymen's or yeomen's companies. These new organizations were symptomatic of injustice but otherwise unimportant. The craft gilds, with all their imperfections, were to continue in power awhile longer, slowly giving away as new trades arose outside of their control, gradually succumbing in competition with capitalists who refused to be bound by gild rules and who were to evolve a new "domestic system," [Footnote: See Vol. II, ch xviii.] and slowly suffering diminution of prestige through royal interference.
[Sidenote: Life in the Towns]
In the year 1500 the European towns displayed little uniformity in government or in the amount of liberty they possessed. Some were petty republics subject only in a very vague way to an extraneous potentate; some merely paid annual tribute to a lord; some were administered by officers of a king or feudal magnate; others were controlled by oligarchical commercial associations. But of the general appearance and life of sixteenth-century towns, it is possible to secure a more uniform notion.
It must be borne in mind that the towns were comparatively small, for the great bulk of people still lived in the country. A town of 5000 inhabitants was then accounted large; and even the largest places, like Nuremberg, Strassburg, London, Paris, and Bruges, would have been only small cities in our eyes. The approach to an ordinary city of the time lay through suburbs, farms, and garden-plots, for the townsman still supplemented industry with small-scale agriculture. Usually the town itself was inclosed by strong walls, and admission was to be gained only by passing through the gates, where one might be accosted by soldiers and forced to pay toll. Inside the walls were clustered houses of every description. Rising from the midst of tumble-down dwellings might stand a magnificent cathedral, town-hall, or gild building. Here and there a prosperous merchant would have his luxurious home, built in what we now call the Gothic style, with pointed windows and gables, and, to save space in a walled town, with the second story projecting out over the street.
The streets were usually in deplorable condition. There might be one or two broad highways, but the rest were mere alleys, devious, dark, and dirty. Often their narrowness made them impassable for wagons. In places the pedestrian waded gallantly through mud and garbage; pigs grunted ponderously as he pushed them aside; chickens ran under his feet; and occasionally a dead dog obstructed the way. There were no sidewalks, and only the main thoroughfares were paved. Dirt and filth and refuse were ordinarily disposed of only when a heaven-sent rain washed them down the open gutters constructed along the middle, or on each side, of a street. Not only was there no general sewerage for the town, but there was likewise no public water supply. In many of the garden plots at the rear of the low-roofed dwellings were dug wells which provided water for the family; and the visitor, before he left the town, would be likely to meet with water-sellers calling out their ware. To guard against the danger of fires, each municipality encouraged its citizens to build their houses of stone and to keep a tub full of water before every building; and in each district a special official was equipped with a proper hook and cord for pulling down houses on fire. At night respectable town-life was practically at a standstill: the gates were shut; the curfew sounded; no street-lamps dispelled the darkness, except possibly an occasional lantern which an altruistic or festive townsman might hang in his front-window; and no efficient police-force existed—merely a handful of townsmen were drafted from time to time as "watchmen" to preserve order, and the "night watch" was famed rather for its ability to sleep or to roister than to protect life or purse. Under these circumstances the citizen who would escape an assault by ruffians or thieves remained prudently indoors at night and retired early to bed. Picturesque and quaint the sixteenth-century town may have been; but it was also an uncomfortable and an unhealthful place in which to live.