FOOTNOTES:
[3] In the first edition we said “of their employment.” This has been objected to as implying that Trade Unions have always contemplated a perpetual continuance of the capitalist or wage-system. No such implication was intended. Trade Unions have, at various dates during the past century at any rate, frequently had aspirations towards a revolutionary change in social and economic relations.
[4] Riley’s Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries (1888), p. 495 (partly cited in Trade Unions, by William Trant, 1884).
[5]Ibid. pp. 542-3.
[6]Ibid. p. 609; Clode’s Early History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, vol. i. p. 63.
[7]Calendars of State Papers: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII. vol. xiii. part i., 1538, No. 1454, p. 537. Compare the ephemeral combinations cited by Fagniez, Études sur l’industrie et la classe industrielle à Paris (Paris, 1877), pp. 76, 82, etc.
[8]It has been assumed that, in the company of “Bachelors” or “Yeomen Tailors” connected with the Merchant Taylors’ Company of London between 1446 and 1661, we have “for the first time revealed to us the existence, and something of the constitution, of a journeyman’s society which succeeded in maintaining itself for a prolonged period.” More careful examination of the materials from which this vivid picture of this supposed journeyman’s society has been drawn leads us to believe that it was not composed of journeymen at all, but of masters. This might, in the first place, have been inferred from the fact that in the ranks of the supposed journeymen were to be found opulent leaders like Richard Hilles, the friend of Cranmer and Bullinger, who “became a Bachelor in Budge of the Yeoman Company” in 1535 (Clode, Early History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, vol. ii. p. 64), and Sir Leonard Halliday, afterwards Lord Mayor, who was in the Bachelors’ Company from 1572 to 1594, when “he was elected a member of the higher hierarchy of the Corporation” (ibid. p. 237). The Bachelors’ Company, indeed, far from being composed of needy wage-earners, bore the greater part of the expense of the pageant in connection with the mayoralty, and managed the whole proceedings. The Bachelors “in Foynes” and those “in Budge” are all named as marching in the procession in “gownes to be welted with velvet, and there jackyttes, cassockes, and doublettes to be either of satten damaske, taffataye” (ibid. pp. 262-6). And when, in 1609, the Company was assessed to contribute to the Plantation of Ulster, the Bachelors contributed nearly as much as the merchants (£155, 10s. from ten members as compared with £187, 10s. from nine members (ibid. vol. i. pp. 327-9)). Whether the Bachelors’ Company ever included any large proportion of hired journeymen appears extremely doubtful, though its object was clearly the regulation of the trade. The members, according to the Ordinance of 1613, paid a contribution of 2s. 2d. a quarter “for the poor of the fraternity.” This may be contrasted with the quarterage of 8d. a year or 2d. per quarter, levied, according to order of August 1578, on every servant or journeyman free of the City. The funds of the two companies were kept distinct, but frequent donations were made from one to the other, and not only from the inferior to the superior (ibid. vol. i. pp. 67-9). That the Bachelors’ Company was by no means confined to journeymen is clear. Sir Leonard Halliday, for instance, became a freeman in April 1564 on completing his apprenticeship, and at once set up in business for himself, obtaining a charitable loan for the purpose. Yet, although he prospered in business, “in 1572 we find him assessed as in the Bachelors’ Company,” and he was not elected to the superior company until 1594 (ibid. vol. ii. p. 237). And in the Ordinance of 1507, “for all those persons that shall be abled by the maister and Wardeins to holde hous or shop open,” it is provided that the person desiring to set up shop shall not only pay a licence fee, but also “for his incomyng to the bachelers’ Company and to be broder with theym iijs iiid” (Clode, Memorials of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, p. 209). Nor do the instances of its action imply that it had at heart the interest of the wage-earners, as distinguished from that of the employers. The hostility to foreigners, the desire to secure government clothing contracts, and the preference for a limitation of apprentices to two for each employer are all consistent with the theory that the Bachelors’ Company was, like its superior, composed of masters, probably less opulent than the governing clique, and perhaps occupied in tailoring rather than in the business of a clothier or merchant. It is not until 1675 and 1682 that can be traced in the MS. records of the Clothworkers’ Company the existence of distinctively journeymen’s combinations (Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904, p. 199). The other instances of identification of “Bachelors’ Companies” or “Yeomen” organisation with journeymen’s societies are no more convincing than that of the Merchant Taylors. That the “valets,” serving-men, or journeymen in many trades possessed some kind of “almsbox,” or charitable funds of their own is indeed clear, but that this was ever used in trade disputes, or was independent of the masters’ control, must at present be regarded as highly improbable. The strongest instance of independence is that of the Oxford cordwainers (Selections from the Records of the City of Oxford, by William H. Turner, Oxford, 1880). See, on the whole subject, the chapter on “Mediæval Journeymen’s Clubs,” in Sir William Ashley’s Surveys: Historic and Economic, 1900; Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Professor George Unwin, 1904; and an article on “The Origin of Trade Unionism,” by Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, in the Economic Review, April 1895 (vol. v.).
[9]Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), p. 125.
[10]Riley’s Memorials, p. 653; Clode, Early History of Merchant Taylors’ Company, vol. i. p. 63.
[11]Compare Fagniez, Études sur l’industrie et la classe industrielle à Paris (Paris, 1877), p. 123.
[12]3 Henry VI. c. 1; see also 34 Edward III. c. 9.
[13]“Ordinances of Worcester,” Art. lvii. in Toulmin Smith’s English Gilds, p. 399.
[14]Compare the analogous instances given by Fagniez, Études sur l’industrie et la classe industrielle à Paris, p. 203 (Paris, 1877).
[15]Dr. Brentano has noticed (p. 81) that the great majority of the legal regulations of wages in the Middle Ages relate (if not to agriculture) to the building trades; and it may be that these were, like modern cab-fare regulations, intended more for the protection of the customer than for that of the capitalist.
[16]See “Notes on the Organisation of the Mason’s Craft in England,” by Dr. William Cunningham (British Academy Proceedings).
[17]Such a master craftsmen’s society we see in the Masons’ “Lodge of Atchison’s Haven,” which, on December 27, 1735, passed the following resolution: “The Company of Atchison’s Haven being mett together, have found Andrew Kinghorn guilty of a most atrocious crime against the whole Trade of Masonry, and he not submitting himself to the Company for taking his work so cheap that no man could have his bread of it. Therefore in not submitting himself he has excluded himself from the said Company; and therefore the Company doth hereby enact that no man, neither fellow craft nor enter’d prentice after this shall work as journeyman under the said Andrew Kinghorn, under the penalty of being cut off as well as he. Likewise if any man shall follow the example of the said Andrew Kinghorn in taking work at eight pounds Scots per rood the walls being twenty feet high, and rebates at eighteen pennies Scots per foot, that they shall be cut off in the same manner” (Sketch of the Incorporation of Masons, by James Cruikshank, Glasgow, 1879, pp. 131, 132).
[18]Thorold Rogers points out that the Merton College bell-tower was built in 1448-50 by direct employment at wages. The new quadrangle, early in the seventeenth century, was put out to contract with a master mason and a master carpenter respectively, but the college still supplied all the material (History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. i. pp. 258-60; iii. pp. 720-37; v. pp. 478, 503, 629).
[19]Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904, p. 201. In this connection may be mentioned the London watermen, who have always dealt directly with their customers, and who possess a tradition of having been continuously organised since 1350. Power to regulate the trade of watermen was, in 1555, conferred by Act of Parliament upon the then incorporated Thames Watermen and Lightermen’s Company, the administration of which appears to have been, from the first, entirely in the hands of the master lightermen. The watermen, who had no masters, were compelled to take out the freedom of this Company, and the existing Trade Union, the Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen, was established in 1872 for the express purpose of obtaining some representation of the working watermen and the journeymen lightermen on the Court of the Company. Previous associations of working watermen for trade purposes seem to have been in existence in 1789 (a Rotherhithe Society of Watermen) and in 1799 (Friendly Society of Watermen usually plying at the Hermitage Stairs, in the parish of St. John, Wapping); and Mayhew describes, in 1850, local “turnway societies,” regulating the sharing of custom, and a Watermen’s Protective Society, to resist non-freemen (London Labour and the London Poor, 1851).
[20]Schanz, however, in his Zur Geschichte der deutschen Gesellenverbände (Leipzig, 1877), suggests that the associations of journeymen which flourished in Germany side by side with the Craft Gilds prior to the Thirty Years’ War (1618) were, in fact, virtually Trade Unions. Compare Schmoller’s Strassburger Tucher-und Weberzunft (Strassburg, 1879). Professor G. Des Marez, the learned archivist of Brussels, supplies evidence of the persistence of journeymen’s organisations in Belgium, resembling those of Germany, down to the beginning of the sixteenth century; and of the rise of new ones towards the end of the seventeenth century, without trace of continuity (in Le Compagnonnage des chapeliers bruxellois, Brussels, 1909.) See Professor Unwin’s article in English Historical Review (October 1910); and compare Les Compagnonnages des arts et métiers à Dijon aux xviie et xviiie siècles, by H. House, 1909, and Enquêtes sur les associations professionnelles d’artisans et ouvriers en Belgique, by E. Vandervelde, 1891.
[21]Dr. Brentano’s essay was originally prefixed to Toulmin Smith’s English Gilds, published by the Early English Text Society in 1870. It was republished separately as The History and Development of Gilds and the Origin of Trades Unions (135 pp., 1870), and it is to this edition that we refer. Dr. Brentano’s larger work, Die Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 2 vols., 1871-72), includes this essay, and also his article in the North British Review for October 1870 on “The Growth of a Trades Union.” It is only fair to say that in this, the ablest study of English Trade Union history down to that time, Dr. Brentano lent no support to the popular idea of any actual descent of the Trade Unions from the gilds. The Cobden Club Essays (1872) contain a good article on Trade Unions, by Joseph Gostick, in which it is argued that these associations were, in England, unknown before the eighteenth century, and had no connection with the gilds.
[22]Page 102.
[23]The first hundred pages of George Howell’s Conflicts of Capital and Labour (first edition, 1877; second edition, 1890) are a close paraphrase of Dr. Brentano’s essay, practically the whole of which appears, often in the same words, as Howell’s own. But already in 1871 Dr. Brentano, in his Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart (vol. i. ch. iii. p. 83), expressly connected the Trade Unions, like Schanz, not with the gilds, but with the Journeymen Fraternities, which he suggests may have “awaked under changed circumstances to new strength and life, and to a new policy.” We gather that Sir William Ashley inclines to this view. “My own impression,” he says, “is that we shall by and by find that, like the usages of the German journeymen in the eighteenth century that centred into Herbergen, the trade clubs of eighteenth century England were broken-down survivals from an earlier period, undergoing, with the advent of the married journeyman and other causes, the slow transformation from which they emerged in the nineteenth century as the nuclei of the modern Trade Union.” Sir William Ashley does not assert that any continuity of organisation can be proved. “What is suggested is only that the habit of acting together in certain ways, which we find to characterise the journeymen of the eighteenth century, had been formed in a much earlier period” (Surveys: Historic and Economic, by Sir William Ashley, 1900).
[24]So long as the Companies continued to exercise any jurisdiction over their trades, we find them (as in the cases of the London Framework-knitters and the Dublin Silkweavers) supported by any workmen’s combinations that existed. In exceptional instances, such as the London Brushmakers, Basketmakers, and Watermen, we find this alliance for the exclusion of “illegal men” continuing into the nineteenth century, and (as regards the Watermen) down to the present time.
[25]Macmillan’s Magazine (February 1861), relying on the Social Science Report on Trade Societies and Strikes (1860), p. 521.
[26]See Appendix On the Assumed Connection between the Trade Unions and the Gilds in Dublin.
[27]Gilds and Trade Unions (1870), p. 54.
[28]History of Industry and Commerce, vol. i. p. 310. Dr. Gross, in his Gild Merchant, apparently takes a similar view.
[29]See his Introduction to Economic History and Theory, vol. i. (1891); vol. ii. (1893); see also his Surveys: Historic and Economic (1900).
[30]Dr. Brentano himself makes this clear. “We must not forget that these gilds were not unions of labourers in the present sense of the word, but of persons who, with the help of some stock, carried on their craft on their own account. The gild contests were, consequently, not contests for acquiring political equality for labour and property, but for the recognition of political equality of trade stock and real property in the towns” (Gilds and Trade Unions, p. 73).
[31]Jupp’s History of the Carpenters’ Company, p. 313, second edition, 1848. In certain cases we see the workmen seeking incorporation as a gild or company, in order that they might themselves lawfully regulate their trades. Thus, in 1670 the wage-earning woodsawyers of the City of London, who were employed by the members of the Carpenters’, Joiners’ and Shipwrights’ Companies, formally applied to the Corporation to be made a Company. Their employers strongly objected, alleging that they had already by combination raised their wages during the past quarter of a century from 5s. to nearly 10s. per load; that they were only day labourers who worked on material provided by their employers, and consequently not entitled to rank as masters; and that if their combination were recognised by incorporation they would be able to bring the whole building trade to a standstill, as experience had already demonstrated even without incorporation. Moreover, their main object, it was alleged, was to exclude from employment “all that sort of labourers who daily resort to the City of London and parts adjacent, and by that means keep the wages and prices of these sorts of labourers at an equal and indifferent rate; and then success would be an evil precedent, all other labourers, the masons, bricklayers, plasterers, etc., having the same reason to allege for incorporation” (Ibid. p. 307). The London coal-porters in 1699 unsuccessfully petitioned the House of Commons that a Bill might be passed to establish them as “a Fellowship in such government and rules as shall be thought meet” (House of Commons Journals, vol. xiii. p. 69). Professor Unwin suggests that it was “by its failure along these traditional lines” that “the wage-earning class was driven into secret combinations, from the obscurity of which the Trade Union did not emerge till the 19th century” (Industrial Organisation in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 1904).
[32]“The Trade Union of to-day is often spoken of as the lineal descendant of the ancient Craft Gilds. There is, however, no direct or indirect connection between the ancient and modern forms of trade combination. Beyond the fact that they each had for their objects the establishment of certain trade regulations, and the provision of certain similar benefits, they had nothing in common.” “Trade Unions as a Means of Improving the Conditions of Labour,” by John Burnett; published in The Claims of Labour (Edinburgh, 1886).
“To attempt to find an immediate connection between the Gild and the Trade Union is like attempting to derive the English House of Commons from the Saxon Witanagemot. In the one case as in the other the two institutions were separated by centuries of development, and the earlier one was dead before the later one was born” (Industrial Organisation in the 16th and 17th Centuries, by Professor George Unwin, 1904, p. 8).
[33]Goldasti’s Constitutiones Imperiales, tom. iv. p. 189, quoted by Dr. Brentano, p. 60.
[34]A pamphlet of 1669 contains what appears at first sight to be a mention of Trade Unionism. “The general conspiracy amongst artificers and labourers is so apparent that within these twenty-five years the wages of joiners, bricklayers, carpenters, etc., are increased, I mean within 40 miles of London (against all reason and good government), from eighteen and twenty pence a day, to 2/6 and 3/-, and mere labourers from 10 and 12 pence a day unto 16 and 20 pence, and this not since the dreadful fire of London only, but some time before. A journeyman shoemaker has now in London (and proportionately in the country) 14 pence for making that pair of shoes, which within these 12 years he made for 10 pence.... Nor has the increase of wages amongst us been occasioned by quickness of trade and want of hands (as some do suppose) which are indeed justifiable reasons, but through an exacting humour and evil disposition in our people (like our Gravesend watermen, who by some temporary and mean pretences of the late Dutch war, have raised their ferry double to what it was, and finding the sweet thereof, keep it up still), that so they may live the better above their station, and work so much the fewer days by how much the more they exact in their wages” (Usury at Six Per Cent. Examined, by Thomas Manley, London, 1669). But we cannot infer from this unique and ambiguous passage anything more than the possibility of ephemeral combinations. It is significant that Defoe, with all his detailed description of English industry in 1724, does not mention any combinations of workmen.
[35]In an able pamphlet dated 1681, entitled The Trade of England Revived, it is stated that “we cannot make our English cloth so cheap as they do in other countries, because of the strange idleness and stubbornness of our poor,” who insist on excessive wages. But the author attributes this state of things, not to the existence of combinations, of which he seems never to have heard, but to the Poor Law and the prevalence of almsgiving.
[36]Wealth of Nations, bk. i. ch. x. p. 59 of McCulloch’s edition, 1863. In an operative’s description, dated 1809, of the gatherings of the Paisley weavers, we see the Trade Union in the making. “The Paisley operatives are of a free, communicative disposition. They are fond to inform one another in anything respecting trade, and in order to receive information in a collective capacity they have, for a long course of years, associated in a friendly manner in societies denominated clubs.... When met the first hour is devoted to reading the daily newspapers out aloud.... At nine o’clock the chairman calls silence; then the report of trade is heard. The chairman reports first what he knows or what he has heard of such a manufacturing house or houses, as wishing to engage operatives for such fabric or fabrics; likewise the price, the number of the yarn, etc. Then each reports as he is seated; so in the period of an hour not only the state of the trade is known, but any difference that has taken place between manufacturers and operatives” (An Answer to Mr. Carlile’s Sketches of Paisley, by William Taylor, Paisley, 1809, pp. 15-17).
[37]See Dunning’s account of the origin of the Consolidated Society of Bookbinders in 1779-80, in the Social Science Association’s Report on Trade Societies, 1860, p. 93; also Workers on their Industries, edited by F. W. Galton, 1895; Women in the Printing Trades, edited by J. R. MacDonald, 1904, p. 30.
[38]Articles of Agreement made and confirmed by a Society of Taylors, begun March 25, 1760 (London, 1812). In 1790 Francis Place joined the Breeches Makers’ Benefit Society “for the support of the members when sick and their burial when dead”—its real object being to support the members “in a strike for wages” (Life of Francis Place, by Professor Graham Wallas, new edition, 1918). Local friendly societies giving sick pay and providing for funeral expenses had sprung up all over England during the eighteenth century. Towards its close their number seems to have rapidly increased until, in some parts at any rate, every village ale-house became a centre for one or more of these humble and spontaneous organisations. The rules of upwards of a hundred of these societies, dating between 1750 and 1820, and all centred round Newcastle-on-Tyne, are preserved in the British Museum. At Nottingham, in 1794, fifty-six of these clubs joined in the annual procession (Nottingham Journal, June 14, 1794). So long as they were composed indiscriminately of men of all trades, it is probable that no distinctively Trade Union action could arise from their meetings. But in some cases, for various reasons, such as high contributions, migratory habits, or the danger of the calling, the sick and burial club was confined to men of a particular trade. This kind of friendly society frequently became a Trade Union. Some societies of this type can trace their existence for nearly a century and a half. The Glasgow coopers, for instance, have had a local trade friendly society, confined to journeymen coopers, ever since 1752. The London Sailmakers Burial Society dates from 1740. The Newcastle shoemakers established a similar society as early as 1719 (Observations upon the Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the laws respecting Friendly Societies, by the Rev. J. T. Becher, Prebendary of Southwell, 1826). On the occurrence of any dispute with the employers their funds, as this contemporary observer in another pamphlet deplores, “have also too frequently been converted into engines of abuse by paying weekly sums to artisans out of work, and have thereby encouraged combinations among workmen not less injurious to the misguided members than to the Public Weal” (Observations on the Rise and Progress of Friendly Societies, 1824, p. 55). Similar friendly societies among workmen of particular trades appear to have existed in the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where they perhaps bridged the gap between the mediæval fraternities and the modern Trade Unions (see review in the English Historical Review, October 1918, of P. J. Blok’s Geschiedenes einer Hollandischen Stad).
[39]Schanz (Gesellenverbände, p. 25) follows Brentano (p. 94) in attributing the formation of journeymen’s fraternities in the Middle Ages mainly to a desire to provide for the wandering craftsmen. The connection between the “Herbergen” or “Schenken,” designed to find lodging and employment, with the journeymen’s associations was certainly close. (See Dr. Bruno Schoenlank’s article in 1894, quoted in Sir William Ashley’s Surveys: Historic and Economic, 1900.) It may be suggested that the contrast between the absence or scanty existence of such fraternities in England and their spread in Germany is, perhaps, to be ascribed in some measure to the fact that English journeymen seem never to have adopted the German custom of “Wanderjahre,” or regular habit of spending, on completing their apprenticeship, a few years in travelling about the country to complete their training. When the local privileges of the old gilds had fallen somewhat into abeyance, the restrictions of the successive Settlement Acts must in England, to some extent, have checked the mobility of labour. But, from the beginning of the eighteenth century at any rate, we find it customary for journeymen of certain trades—it is to be noticed that these are relatively new trades in England—to “tramp” from town to town in search of work, and the description, subsequently quoted, of the organisations of the woolcombers and worsted weavers in 1741, shows that the relief of these travelling journeymen was a prominent object of the early unions. The hatters in the middle of the eighteenth century had a regular arrangement for such relief. The compositors at the very beginning of the nineteenth century had already covered the country with a network of local clubs, the chief function of which appears to have been the facilitation of this wandering in search of work. And the calico-printers had a systematic way of issuing a ticket which entitled the tramp to collect from each journeyman, in any “print-field” that he visited, at first a voluntary contribution, and latterly a fixed relief of a halfpenny per head in England, and a penny per head in Scotland (Minutes of evidence taken before the Committee to whom the petition of the several journeymen Calico-printers and others working in that trade, etc., was referred, July 4, 1804, and the Report from that Committee, July 17, 1806).
[40]J. M. Ludlow, in article in Macmillan’s Magazine, February 1861.
[41]Work and the Workman, by Dr. J. K. Ingram (Address to the Trades Union Congress at Dublin, 1880).
[42]Benjamin Franklin mentions the “chapel” and its regulations in 1725. A copy, dated 1734, of the Rules and Orders to be observed by the Members of this Chapel: by Compositors, by Pressmen, by Both, is preserved in the Place MSS. 27799—88.
[43]This petition (in the British Museum) is printed in Brentano’s Gilds and Trade Unions, p. 97. Benjamin Franklin, who worked in London printing offices in 1725, makes no mention of Trade Unionism. The Stationers’ Company continued, so far as the City of London was concerned, to regulate apprenticeship; and we see it, in 1775, taking steps to prevent employers having an undue number. Regulations agreed to by the employers and the compositors, as to the rates of pay for different kinds of work, can be traced back to 1785, at least. A copy of the rules of “The Phœnix, or Society of Compositors” meeting at “The Hole in the Wall” tavern, Fleet Street, shows that this organisation was “instituted March 12th, 1792.” In 1798 five members of the “Pressmen’s Friendly Society” were indicted for conspiracy in meeting for the purpose of restricting the number of apprentices (they sought to limit them to three for seven presses). Although the secretary to the “Society of Master Printers” had requested these men to attend the meeting, in order to get settled the pending dispute, they were convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by George Howell, 1890, p. 92).
[44]For this interesting case we are indebted to Professor George Unwin’s researches in the records of the Feltmakers’ Company, whose “Court Book” contains the record. See Industrial Organisation in the 16th and 17th Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904; “A Seventeenth-Century Trade Union,” by the same, in Economic Journal, 1910, pp. 394-403; the chapter “Mediæval Journeymen’s Clubs” in Sir William Ashley’s Surveys, Historic and Economic, 1900.
[45]House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi.; 8 Eliz. c. 11; 1 James I. c. 14; and 17 George III. c. 55; Place MSS. 27799—68; Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824; Industrial Democracy, p. 11; “A Seventeenth Century Trade Union,” by Professor George Unwin, in Economic Journal, 1910, pp. 394-403; Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by G. Howell, 1890, p. 83. The organisation evidently continued in existence, at least in its local form; but the existing national “Journeymen Hatters’ Trade Union of Great Britain and Ireland” claims to date only from 1798. In 1806 the Macclesfield hatters were indicted for conspiracy in striking for higher wages, and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. Particulars of this organisation will be found in The Trial of W. Davenport ... Hatters of Macclesfield for a Conspiracy against their Masters ... by Thomas Mulineaux, 1806.
[46]For the whole history of this industry, see The Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton, 1896.
[47]The London Tradesman, by Campbell, 1747, p. 192.
[48]The Trade of England Revived, 1681, p. 36.
[49]House of Commons Journals, vol. xix. pp. 416, 424, 481; The Case of the Master Taylors residing within the Cities of London and Westminster, in relation to the great abuses committed by their journeymen; An Abstract of the Master Taylors’ Bill before the Honourable House of Commons, with the Journeymen’s Observation on each clause of the said Bill; The Case of the Journeymen Taylors residing in the Cities of London and Westminster (all 1720). These and other documents relating to combinations in this trade have now been published in a useful volume (The Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton, 1896), with an elaborate bibliography.
[50]London, by David Hughson (1821), pp. 392-3; House of Commons Journals, vol. xxiv. Place MSS. 27799, pp. 4, 5. The Case of the Journeymen Taylors in and about the Cities of London and Westminster (January 7, 1745).
[51]Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1750, 1768.
[52]Place MSS. 27799—10; see The Life of Francis Place, 1771-1854, by Professor Graham Wallas, 1898; second edition, 1918. There is evidence of very similar organisation in other towns. At Birmingham, for instance, there was a systematically organised strike in 1777 against a reduction of wages, which lasted for some months (Langford’s Century of Birmingham Life, pp. 225, etc.; The Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton, 1896).
[53]A Declaration of the Estate of Clothing now used within this Realme of England, by John May, Deputy Alnager (1613, 51 pp., in B.M. 712, g. 16), a volume which contains many interesting pamphlets on the woollen manufacture between 1613 and 1753. Already in 1622, a year of depression of trade, we hear of numerous riots and tumults among the weavers of the West of England, notably those of certain Devonshire towns, who paraded the streets demanding work or food (Quarter Sessions from Elizabeth to Anne, by A. H. A. Hamilton, 1878, pp. 95-6). But there is as yet no evidence of durable combinations at so early a date.
[54]MS. Minutes, Court Book of the Clothworkers’ Company, December 10, 1675; August 16, 1682; Industrial Organisation of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904, p. 199.
[55]History of Tiverton, by Martin Dunsford (Exeter, 1790).
[56]House of Commons Journals, vol. xviii. p. 715, February 5, 1717. Tiverton and Exeter petition to the same effect.
[57]Hughson’s London, p. 337. The proclamation was reprinted in Notes and Queries, September 21, 1867, from a copy preserved by the Sun Fire Office.
[58]See the petitions from Exeter and Dartmouth, February 24, 1723, vol. xx. pp. 268-9; and those from Taunton, Tiverton, Exeter, and Bristol, March 3 and 7, 1725, vol. xx. pp. 598, 602, 648. In 1729 the Bristol weavers, “while the corporation was at church,” riotously attacked the house of an obnoxious employer, and had to be repulsed by the troops (History of Bristol, p. 261, by J. Evans; Bristol, 1824). In 1738 they forced the clothiers to sign a bond that they would “for ever forward” give fifteen pence a yard for weaving, under penalty of £1000 (Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1738, p. 658; see also “An Essay on Riots, their Causes and Cure,” published in the Gloucester Journal, and reprinted in the Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1739, pp. 7-10). In 1756 there was an extensive and serious uprising (see A State of the Case and Narrative of Facts relating to the late Commotion and Rising of the Weavers in the County of Gloucester, in the Gough Collection, Bodleian Library).
[59]Defoe’s Tour, vol. iii. pp. 97-101, 116 (1724). John Bright mentions his father’s apprenticeship, about 1789, to “a most worthy man who had a few acres of ground, a very small farm, and three or four looms in his house” (speech reported in Beehive, February 2, 1867). For a less optimistic account of the Yorkshire clothiers, who were, even in the seventeenth century, often mere wage-earners, see Cartwright’s Chapters of Yorkshire History.
[60]History of Leicester, by James Thompson, 1849, pp. 431-2.
[61]A Short Essay upon Trade in General, by “A Lover of his Country,” 1741, quoted in James’ History of the Worsted Manufacture in England, p. 232.
[62]See, in corroboration, Leicester Herald, August 24, 1793; Morning Chronicle, October 13, 1824; Place MSS., 27801—246, 247.
[63] The Dublin silk-weavers, owing perhaps to their having been largely Huguenot refugees in a Roman Catholic town, appear to have been associated from the early part of the eighteenth century; see, for instance, The Case of the Silk and Worsted Weavers in a Letter to a Member of Parliament (Dublin, 1749, 8 pp.). Compare A Short Historical Account of the Silk Manufacture in England, by Samuel Sholl, 1811, and Industrial Dublin since 1698 and the Silk Industry in Dublin, by J. J. Webb, 1913.
[64] The condition of the framework knitters may be gathered from the elaborate Parliamentary Inquiry, the proceedings of which fill fifteen pages of the Journals of the House of Commons, vol. xxvi., April 19, 1753. See also vols. xxxvi. and xxxvii., and the Report from the Committee on Framework Knitters’ Petitions, 1812; and Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by G. Howell, 1890. Felkin’s History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures, 1867, contains an exhaustive account of the trade, founded on Gravener Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, 1831, now a scarce work, of which only one volume was published.
[65]Sheffield Iris, August 7 and September 9, 1790. The Scissorsmiths’ Friendly Society, cited by Dr. Brentano, was established in April 1791. Other trade friendly societies in Sheffield appear to date from a much earlier period.
[66]Sir J. A. Picton’s Memorials of Liverpool, 1875; A Digest of the Evidence before the Committee on Artizans and Machinery, by George White, 1824, p. 233; Conflicts of Labour and Capital, by G. Howell, 1890, pp. 82-3.
[67]Report of Committee on the Woollen Manufacture, 1806, p. 16; see also Conflicts of Labour and Capital, by G. Howell, 1890.
[68]See Chapter III.
[69]In volume entitled Tracts Relating to Trade, in British Museum, 816, m. 13. Tankard-bearers were water carriers.
[70]Reasons against the designed leather impositions on gloves, B.M. 816, m. 13.
[71]We shall have occasion later to refer to the absence of effective Trade Unionism in those trades which are still carried on by small working masters.
[72]The assumption frequently made that the Craft Gilds, at their best period, included practically the whole working population, appears to us unfounded. The gild system at no time extended to any but the skilled handicraftsmen, alongside of whom must always have worked a large number of unapprenticed labourers, who received less than half the wages of the craftsmen. We venture to suggest that it is doubtful whether the Craft Gilds at any time numbered as large a proportion of the working population as the Trade Unions of the present day. See Industrial Democracy, p. 480.
[73]“Tumults,” or strikes, among the coal-miners are occasionally mentioned during the eighteenth century, but no lasting combinations. See, for those in Somerset, Carmarthenshire, etc., in 1757, Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1757, pp. 90, 185, 285, etc. In 1765 there was a prolonged strike against the “yearly bond” by the Durham miners (Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1765; Sykes’ Local Records, vol. i, p. 254). The Keelmen, who loaded coals on the Tyne, “mutinied” in 1654 and 1671 “for the increase of wages”; and there were fierce strikes in 1710, 1744, 1750, 1771, and 1794. We have, however, no particulars as to their associations, which were probably ephemeral (Sykes’ Local Records; Richardson’s Local Historian’s Table Book; Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1750).
[74]Many instances of insolence and aggression by the woolcombers are on record; the employers’ advertisements in the Nottingham Journal, August 31, 1795, and the Leicester Herald of June 1792, are only two out of many similar recitals.
[75]Jubilee Souvenir History of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, 1901, p. 12.
[76]That such clubs were common in the handicraft trades in London as early as 1720 appears from the following extract from The Case of the Master Taylors residing within the Cities of London and Westminster, a petition which led to the Act of 1720: “This combination of the Journeymen Taylors ... is of very ill example to Journeymen in all other trades; as is sufficiently seen in the Journeymen Curriers, Smiths, Farriers, Sailmakers, Coachmakers, and artificers of divers other arts and mysteries, who have actually entered into Confederacies of the like nature; and the Journeymen Carpenters, Bricklayers, and Joyners have taken some steps for that purpose, and only wait to see the event of others.” And the Journeymen Tailors in their petition of 1745 allude to the large number of “Monthly Clubs” among the London handicraftsmen. With regard to the curriers at this date, see Place MSS, 27801—246, 247.
It may be conveniently noticed here that, although strikes are, as we have seen, as old as the fourteenth century at least, the word “strike” was not commonly used in this sense until the latter part of the eighteenth century. The Oxford Dictionary gives the first instance of its use as in 1768, when the Annual Register refers to the hatters having “struck” for a rise in wages. The derivation appears to be from the sailors’ term of “striking” the mast, thus bringing the movement to a stop.
[77]So much is this the case that Dr. Brentano asserts that “Trade Unions originated with the non-observance of” the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices (p. 104), and that their primary object was, in all cases, the enforcement of the law on the subject.
[78]Preamble to “An Act touching Weavers” (2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. xi.); see Froude’s History of England, vol. i. pp. 57-9; and W. C. Taylor’s Modern Factory System, pp. 53-5.
[79]As expanded by 1 James I. c. 6 and 16 Car. I. c. 4; see R. v. Justices of Kent, 14 East, 395.
[80]See on these points, Dr. Cunningham’s History of English Industry and Commerce, Mr. Hewins’ English Trade and Finance chiefly in the 17th Century, and Thorold Rogers’ History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. v. pp. 625-6, etc. Adam Smith observes that the fixing of wages had, in 1776, “gone entirely into disuse” (Wealth of Nations, bk. i. ch. x. p. 65), a statement broadly true, although formal determinations of wages are found in the MS. Minutes of Quarter Sessions for another half century.
[81]This forms the constant refrain of the numerous broadsheets or Tracts relating to Trade of 1688-1750, which are preserved in the British Museum, the Guildhall Library, and in the Goldsmith Company’s Library at the University of London.
[82]Privy Council Minutes of 1726, p. 310 (unpublished); see also House of Commons Journals, vol. xx. p. 745 (February 20, 1726).
[83]Privy Council Minutes, February 4, 1726.
[84]House of Commons Journals, vol. xix. p. 181 (December 5, 1719).
[85]Petition of “Several weavers of Woollen Broadcloth on behalf of themselves and several thousands of the Fraternity of Woollen Broadcloth Weavers” (House of Commons Journals, vol. xxvii. p. 503; see also pp. 730-2).
[86]22 Geo. II. c. 27.
[87]29 Geo. II. c. 33.
[88]Report of Committee on Petitions of West of England Clothiers, House of Commons Journals, vol. xxvii. pp. 730-2.
[89]For all these proceedings, see House of Commons Journals, vol. xxvii.
[90]House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi. p. 7 (November 1, 1776).
[91]House of Commons Journals, April 13 and 19, 1753, vol. xxvi. pp. 764, 779; Felkin’s History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacture, p. 80; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, 1903, vol. i. p. 663.
[92]Gilds and Trade Unions, pp. 115-21.
[93]House of Commons Journals, vols. xxxvi. and xxxvii.
[94]House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi. pp. 192, 240, 268, 287, 1777; Act 17 Geo. III. c. 55, repealing 8 Eliz. c. 11, and 1 Jac. 1.
[95]5 Geo. III. c. 48; see Annual Register, 1765, p. 41; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, 1903, pp. 519, 796.
[96]Act 13 Geo. III. c. 68; see A Short Historical Account of the Silk Manufacture in England, by Samuel Sholl, 1811.
[97]Ibid. p. 4.
[98]Reports on Petitions of Cotton Weavers, 1809 and 1811.
[99]“The period between 1795 and 1815 was characterised by dearths which on several occasions became well-nigh famines” (Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. i. p. 692).
[100]Minutes of Evidence and Report of the Committee on the Petition of the Journeymen Calico-printers, July 4, 1804, July 17, 1806. See also Sheridan’s speech reported in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. ix. pp. 534-8.
[101]43 Geo. III. c. 136, continued in successive years until the definite repeal, in 1809, of most of the laws regulating the woollen manufacture by 49 Geo. III. c. 109; see Cunningham, 1903, vol. ii. p. 659.
[102]It was reprinted in the 121st Quarterly Report of the Amalgamated Society of Boot and Shoemakers. The proceedings were taken by the Friendly Society of Cordwainers of England, “instituted the 15th of November 1784.” Particulars of the London Bootmakers’ Society, which was in correspondence with seventy or eighty provincial societies, are given in A Digest of the Evidence before the Committee on Artizans and Machinery, by George White, 1824, p. 97.
[103]Professor Foxwell kindly placed at our disposal a unique series of pamphlets relating to these proceedings, which are now in the Goldsmiths Company’s Library at the University of London, including the Memorials of the journeymen and the employers, the Report in the Process by Robert Bell, and the Scale of Prices as settled by the Court. A full account of the proceedings is given in the Scottish Typographical Circular, June 1858.
[104]See, for these proceedings, the two Reports of the Committee on the Petitions of the Cotton Weavers, April 12, 1808, and March 29, 1809; and Richmond’s evidence before the Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, Second Report, pp. 59-64.
[105]It is now in the British Library of Political Science at the London School of Economics.
[106]R. v. Justices of Kent, 14 East, 395; see F. D. Longe’s Inquiry into the Law of Strikes, 1860, pp. 10, 11.
[107]53 Geo. III. c. 40 (1813).
[108]The Spitalfields Acts, relating to the silkweavers, were, however, not repealed until 1824; and the last sections of 5 Eliz. c. 4 were not formally repealed until 1875.
[109]White’s Digest of all the laws at present in existence respecting Masters and Workpeople, 1824, p. 59. Place wrote to Wakefield, January 2, 1814: “The affair of Serjeant Onslow partly originated with me, but I had no suspicion it would be taken up and pushed as vigorously as it has been and is likely to be” (Life of Francis Place, by Prof. Graham Wallas, p. 159).
The proceedings in this matter can be best traced in the House of Commons Journals for 1813 and 1814, vols. lxviii. and lxix.; and in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vols. xxv. and xxvii. The master’s case is given in a pamphlet, The Origin, Object, and Operation of the Apprentice Laws, 1814, 26 pp., preserved in the Pamphleteer, vol. iii. The Resolutions of the Master Manufacturers and Tradesmen of the Cities of London and Westminster on the Statute 5 Eliz. c. 4, 1814, 4 pp., gives the contrary view (B.M. 1882, d. 2). The contemporary argument for freedom is expressed in An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain, by G. Chalmers, 1810; see Cunningham, 1903, vol. ii. p. 660. The Nottingham Library possesses a unique copy of the Articles and General Regulations of a Society for obtaining Parliamentary Relief, and the Encouragement of Mechanics in the Improvement of Mechanism, printed at Nottingham in 1813. This appears to have been a federation of framework knitters’ societies, and possibly others, for Parliamentary action, as well as trade protection; and its establishment in 1813 was perhaps connected with the movement for the revival of the Apprenticeship Laws.
[110]Report of the Committee on the State of the Woollen Manufacture in England, July 4, 1806, p. 12.