It is impossible to conceive that regulations of this kind were self-denying ordinances on the part of employers to limit the supply of labour; they rather come to us as echoes of the first great controversy concerning the position and privileges of the hired worker. The “protection” of industry from all competition was the first and the last creed of the crafts (as distinguished from the general public)—a protection by which every conceivable danger that might threaten the interests of the monopolists was struck down, whether it was the competition of other allied trades, or that introduced by machinery and new methods of organizing labour, or rivalry between members in the same craft, or the intrusion of dealers from the provinces, or the immigration of alien manufacturers from abroad. As to the main principle there was no dispute; and there were some of its less important developements where the interests of the masters and the journeymen coincided. But to employers and dealers the monopoly of trade chiefly meant their own monopoly of production and sale; while the wage-earner’s dominant anxiety was to keep surplus labour out of the craft, lest the regular workman might be deprived of his comfortable certainty of subsistence. Labour however was too sorely needed in the enormously increasing trade of the country for masters to deny themselves its services; nor did any of their ordinances necessarily tend in the least to produce a result so disastrous to themselves. In their eyes the important matter was that workers should be kept docile and obedient, retained in country districts where they were most advantageous to the contractor, and prevented from making claims on the control or the profits of industry which must have hampered the great business of the moment—the expansion of English trade; and the ability of the craft-leaders was shown in the masterly tactics which they adopted, the success which they achieved, and the political sagacity by which they accomplished their purpose without open strife or public agitation.
For it seems probable that the labour question had its origin with the very beginning of manufacturing industries, and that long before the fifteenth century a large class of hired workers already existed. We know that in the fourteenth century the wage-earners in the crafts already constituted a force which the State and the municipality had come to fear, and that not only in London but in other towns journeymen had learned discontent, and had begun to combine for self-protection.[214] We know also that before 1340 one manufacturing town at least (and no doubt the records will ultimately tell of more) owned its miserable race of labourers who worked by the day at a bare subsistence wage of a penny, an outcast people whose abject poverty was their only protection; men possessing absolutely nothing by which they could be attached for crimes or offences, and who could laugh at any attempt of the court to summon or to fine them; while their employers, not being held legally responsible save under some special ordinance for such day labourers as these, took no care for the debt or crime of a class without privilege or standing in the eye of the law.[215] And obscure as the subject still is, we seem at a very early time to detect behind the guild system a growing class of “uncovenanted” labour, which the policy of the employers constantly tended to foster, their aim being on the one hand to limit the number of privileged serving-men, and on the other to increase the supply of unprotected workers.
It was for this reason that while the demand for manufactures was increasing beyond all experience, the number of men who sought through apprenticeship to enter the trade was most strictly limited by law;[216] and when a man had finished his apprenticeship cunning devices were found for casting him back among the rank and file of hired labourers;[217] so that the skilled workman who had passed through his time of service but had not been admitted to the freedom of his trade[218]—whether because he failed to secure the recommendation of the heads of the guild, or because he was unable to pay the double fees demanded for the franchise of the city and the franchise of the craft[219]—was condemned henceforth to remain a mere journeyman without apparently much hope of promotion. For the enrolled journeyman there was some protection, though of a very limited kind, in the guild; but a lower and more helpless class of serving-men was recruited from the apprentices who had not worked out their full time—poor children whose service had begun at seven or twelve, and who while yet mere lads were induced to cut short the seven or ten years fixed in their trade for apprenticeship, and entering hastily on work for a daily wage found themselves from that time forward counted as unskilled labourers;[220] apparently deprived of the protection of the law in the matter of wages, without any standing in the guild, and lying in the power of the craft-masters for their hire, they were for the rest of their lives admitted to work on sufferance as bringing cheap labour into the market. Finally even the statutes which forbade poor country people to apprentice their children in the towns,[221] far from proving any intention of withdrawing the villagers from the service of the manufacturer, may have been the result of an alliance between landowner and employer to serve their several ends, and have been designed by the town magnate merely to prevent the dependent country workers from flocking into the boroughs in search of apprenticeship and subsequent freedom of the trade.[222] For it seems probable that the town dealers had very early been accustomed to contract with the country folk for the lower and rougher kinds of work. In Norwich, for example, all the tanners’ business was at first done in the country, and the skins sent into Norwich to be worked and finished by the parmenters; and it was perhaps but a generation before the passing of the Act of Henry the Fourth that the tanners came into Norwich and settled down by its river side. And in like manner all cloth brought to the Norwich market was country-made, and originally no wool was sold in the Norwich streets and no cloth manufactured in its workshops.[223] The same system of contracting for work in surrounding villages[224] was known far beyond Norwich, but its local history varied greatly with local circumstances. In that city, where trade was manifestly too vigorous to be shut up into a few square miles, and where the surrounding population had turned into a people of journeymen and artizans, the municipality seems to have inaugurated the policy of governing an industry it had no desire to suppress, by seizing the organization of the country districts into the same hands as that of the town, and bringing the workers under the same municipal control[225]—a policy, it would seem, of merchants and employers mainly occupied with the expansion of commerce, and blind to the danger which their experiment implied of the breaking up of municipal life. But in other towns we seem to detect a vain attempt of the working population to clutch at a trade which had grown into a free maturity, and force it back into the old municipal nursery under the tutors and governors of its infancy; as in Worcester, where the ordinances contain many proofs of having been drawn up under strong popular influences, and where the masters were forbidden to give out wool to weavers so long as there were people enough in the city to do the work, “in the hindering of the poor commonalty of the same.”[226] It is evident that the manufacturer might, from his own point of view, feel the strongest objection to flooding the towns with an unmanageable number of workers attached to the guild who could, by virtue of their numbers and their covenanted position, call on the municipal government to interfere for their special benefit in the management of the trade.[227]
If we consider therefore the case of the working population in town or country—whether we remember the poor folk of the hamlets, known to Langland, that “have no chattel but their crafts and few pence taketh;”[228] or consider in the towns the lowest class of casual labourers working at a wage of a penny a day, or the little more fortunate groups of unskilled serving-men, or the depressed company of the skilled journeymen; whether we trace in villages or boroughs the astonishing multitude of religious fraternities which sometimes at least concealed an illicit attempt at self-protection by the wage-earners; or examine the rigour with which towns and guilds repressed every attempt of the working men to combine in any association for their common benefit—we find ourselves again and again confronted with the problem of labour. In the thick darkness which still envelopes the subject dogmatism itself is swallowed up. But as we look into the obscurity, the borderland of the covenanted trades and the dim regions that lie beyond their recognized limits become crowded with the masses of the common workers—dreary groups of labourers seething with inarticulate discontent, themselves suffering the terrors and bondage of a harsh law, and from time to time, as they emerge into a brief light of riot and disorder,[229] kindling the alarms of the settled and protected classes above them. Associations of the richer merchants inspired by a common interest drew together for mutual support; and friendly Town Councils whose policy was to keep down the number of voters—especially of poor craftsmen who might be troublesome—and all whose members were indeed themselves employers and craft masters, made alliance with the guilds, and passed laws which, by shutting out apprentices from the freedom of the craft, debarred them from the franchise of the town. It was in vain that from time to time as the evil increased the central government sought to interfere with craft-masters and wardens who “for their own singular profit” made ingenious bye-laws or ordinances for the exclusion of new comers;[230] local alliances were too strong for it, and local wits too cunning, and one of the main results of the triumphant guild system was to develope throughout the country a formless and incoherent multitude of hired labourers, who could by no possibility rise to positions of independence, and had no means of association in self-defence. As the weaker members of the crowd from time to time sank back into utter penury, the outcasts of the industrial system slowly gathered into a new brotherhood of the destitute; and even in the fifteenth century, long before they had been reinforced by the waifs and strays of town and country that flocked into their sad fellowship on the dissolution of the monasteries, the advanced guard of the army of paupers appears in the streets of the boroughs to trouble the counsels of municipal rulers.
CHAPTER V
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.