Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Alice Stopford Green

From this time all independent trade jurisdictions in the towns came to an end.[281] No more charters such as that of the weavers were sold by the crown;[282] and the crafts were presently forced to conciliate the local powers according to their measure of art or cunning—to beg from the municipal government a formal recognition for their association with such limited liberties as the town officers could be induced to give; to secure a more or less precarious existence by the payment of fines to the town treasury;[283] or to wrap round them a solemn conventional disguise, and conceal wholly or in part the fact of their union for trade purposes by sheltering themselves under the form of a religious association, and seeking independence “under a feigned colour of sanctity”[284] as men wholly moved by a zealous care for the souls of their dead comrades but taking no thought for the bodily welfare of living brethren.

But by whatever means the fraternities hoped to compass liberty, it was in vain that they sought to elude the heavy hand of the municipal government. Trade associations were laid hold of by the boroughs, brought under the discipline and authority of the public magistrates, and forced to take their due part in the developement of the municipal organisation.[285] Towns which obtained a grant to have “all reasonable guilds” took care to maintain a reasonable authority, and craft fraternities were only given leave to exist on the express plea that they were “consonant with reason and redounding to the public honour and to the advantage of the common weal”;[286] while privileges were meted out to them on the distinct understanding of the gain which was to spring from these to the whole commonalty. By a dexterous move on the part of the town governors the officers of the guild were transformed into the officers of the community, and the machinery of the guild became the means by which the public sought to provide for a full and cheap supply of the necessaries of life, and protected itself from overcharges and false measures and bad wares, from uproar and disorder, from drunken workmen, from the flying sparks of the smith’s forge, or the noise of his hammer at night. In London for example there was a constant succession of customers complaining at the Mayor’s Court of the bad bargains they had made in buying cloth, so that the fullers found themselves excessively “hard worked” in appearing at the Guildhall to examine the cloths of discontented buyers, and begged that every one might buy at his own risk.[287]

The masterly manœuvre executed by the town magistrates is revealed in the self-denying ordinances passed by the later guilds. Crafts “petition,” as we are gravely told, to have masters and ordinances, and these being granted the new rules turn out to be simply regulations to supply wares to the people of a fixed quality and price.[288] We can scarcely believe that the farriers should of their own free will have devised the rule that if any one of them, through negligence or any excess of pride which hindered his asking advice of the craft, failed in curing a horse of sickness, “then he shall be accused thereof before the Mayor and Aldermen and be punished at their discretion, in the way of making restitution for such horse to the person to whom the same belongs.”[289] Nor is it likely that masons and carpenters should have volunteered to take oath before Mayor and Aldermen that they would do their duty in their trade;[290] or that the masons should themselves propose that if a mason failed to fulfil his contract certain men of the trade who acted as his securities should be bound to finish his task.[291] Even the universal rule against night work was never among the London guilds (save in the single instance of the hat-makers)[292] made in the interest of the working-man; but on the contrary was dictated by the sagacious observation of the buyers that “sight is not so profitable by night, or so certain, as by day—to the profit, that is, of the community;”[293] and if spurriers “who compass how to practise deception in their work desire to work by night rather than by day”[294] the reason given for interfering with them was that they wandered about all day idle, and “then when they have become drunk and frantic they take to their work to the annoyance of the sick and all their neighbourhood ... and then they blow up their fires so vigorously that their forges begin all at once to blaze ... and all the neighbours are much in dread of the sparks which so vigorously issue forth in all directions from the mouths of the chimneys in their forges.”[295] Sunday closing itself was ordered as a matter of public convenience, because apprentices “could not be trusted to carry on work in the absence of their masters at church.”[296]

In thus bringing the crafts into subjection the towns were greatly strengthened by the sympathy of the State, which was the more inclined to make common cause with them from a growing apprehension of guilds of artificers and other labourers which in troubled times might prove centres of disturbance throughout the country. By a series of statutes the ancient powers of crafts were carefully pruned, and new authority grafted on to the town governments. “Congregations and confederacies” were jealously watched and forbidden.[297] The guilds were ordered to have their charters registered, and their rules and bye-laws approved by the chief magistrates of the town. They were forbidden to make ordinances to the damage of the King or the people. Sometimes jurisdiction over their own members was taken from them; and the right of search for any articles that “be not pure lawful and able chaffers,” or even the duty of seeing that the workers were duly paid their wages in ready money, was handed over to the town officers.[298]

Thus it came about that by the triple alliance of the officials at Westminster with the governing class of the town and the general body of consumers, all alike bent on organizing industry in their several interests, the primitive free associations of workers were gradually forced into the singular position of deferential servants of the community. Within its own little realm each guild might use a narrow independence or a petty tyranny, but in its public aspect it could assert few pretensions.[299] No craft fraternity could be formed without the leave of the municipality, and every Warden took his oath of office before the Mayor, at whose bidding and subject to whose approval he had been elected.[300] The rules made by any trade for its government had no force till they had been approved by the Mayor and Corporation, enrolled by them on the city records, and sealed with the common seal.[301] And since they reserved the right of making any addition to these ordinances which they might deem necessary,[302] the town magistrates could interfere whenever they chose in the interests of order. Not only did they bear rule over the seller in the market, but they followed the craftsman to his little workroom and ordered every smallest detail of his trade, material, wages, apprentices, cost, the fit of a coat and the quality of a shoe, according to the laws that “reserved all time to the Mayor and to the Council of the town power to correct, to punish, amerce, and redress, as well the masters and all other persons of the said crafts, each after their deserving and trespass, as the case asketh.”[303] Men who offended against the rules of the trade were brought before the town officers for punishment, and half their fines went into the town treasury.[304] Even the wandering artizans who moved from place to place, who had no fixed shops and no complete guild organization, found themselves subjected to the town authorities as soon as they had crossed the borders of the borough. Carpenters, masons, plasterers, daubers, tilers, and paviours had to take whatever wages the law decreed and to accept the supervision of the municipal rulers,[305] and their regulations were framed according to the convenience of the borough. Thus after the big storm of 1362 in London they were forbidden to raise their prices for repairing the citizens’ roofs;[306] and the same ordinances of Worcester which direct that chimneys of timber and thatched houses should be done away with, and stone or brick chimneys and tiled roofs everywhere made by midsummer day, contain regulations for the tilers who must have flocked to the city on such an occasion. They must set up no parliament to make any one of them “as a master and all other tilers to be as his servant and at his commandment, but that every tiler be free to come and go to work with every man and citizen freely as they may accord.” No stranger tiler coming to the city was to be forced to work for any city tiler, but might take whatever work he liked by the day.[307]

The rapidity with which the whole movement was conceived and carried out is one of the most surprising things about it; and nothing was wanting to the thoroughness with which mediæval society carried out its theory of the use which the craft guilds might be made to serve, whether willingly or no, in protecting the interests of the public. One discovery followed on another. As the King for convenience of administration constantly delegated new powers to the Mayor, and successive Acts and Charters added to his load of responsibilities for supervising work and wages and wares, so the Mayor in his turn passed on these charges to the craft—apparently exalting its power, in reality undermining its independence. Town governors embarrassed by the difficulty of overawing a turbulent community and keeping the peace with the aid of a couple of constables, found in the guild organization an admirable machinery all ready to their hands, and turned its officers, responsible as they were for the good behaviour and order of the whole trade, into an effective city police; so that when Bristol was in danger of a general riot in consequence of the imprisonment of its Mayor, the sheriff and recorder simply summoned the masters of the various crafts, and ordered them to keep the peace in their several trades. In the same way the crafts might be charged with the duty of “setting the watch” at night.[308] Difficulties of taxation were lightened by shifting responsibility from the municipal officers to the guilds—by charging for example the bakers or blanket-makers or fullers with a certain proportion of the ferm, to be collected among their members and paid in by their officers.[309] If walls were to be repaired and gates and towers and piers maintained, or if the expenses of a public festival were to be met,[310] the craft might again be brought into use, and for the due performance of the allotted task their common funds or individual profits might be reckoned as security.

When the town had thus laid firm hold on the guilds and discovered the various uses to which these bodies might be put in the municipal scheme, it began to look on them with as much favour as it had formerly shown distrust,[311] and proceeded industriously to multiply their numbers both by creating new fraternities and reorganizing the old ones.[312] The public opinion of the day showed itself strongly in favour of guilds, and indeed often outran the desires of the workin-gmen, so that the drawing together of artizans into the later craft fraternities was not always a matter of free will. If trades did not associate at their own wish they were presently forced to do so, and at the end of the fifteenth century we find the towns everywhere issuing orders that crafts which had hitherto escaped should be compelled to group themselves into companies. In Sandwich, for example, barbers, surgeons, and wax-chandlers were incorporated in 1482; and in 1494 wardens were appointed of the companies of tailors, shoemakers, weavers, and shearmen.[313] In Canterbury, where a spirit of revolt against the rules of the corporation seems to have gone abroad, where strangers were setting up trades within the liberties and laws had to be made to insure their paying “reasonable fine” for so doing, where masters neglected to enroll their apprentices in the books of the Common Chamber, and where the servants in husbandry riotously resisted the Statute of Labourers, the outraged city authorities declared that the crafts needed new regulations “to maintain due order for the weal and increase of the same,” and set to work to tighten the hold of the government on manufacturer and artizan, by forcing the trades to form themselves into companies, and setting at the head of every craft or mystery two of the city aldermen.[314] In very many cases the later incorporation of trades was connected with a pledge to undertake certain town works such as the building or repairing of gates;[315] and here we probably find the clue to the growing custom of combining several poor societies into one substantial association. When the crafts of Canterbury began to grudge spending their money on the Corpus Christi Play and on the Pageant of St. Thomas (which had to be revived in 1504 and paid for by the corporation), and also neglected “setting the watch,” the Town Council would have none of the excuse of poverty, only made “for lack of good ordering of certain crafts within the same city not corporate”; and it was settled that every trade “being not corporate for the nonsufficience of their craft be associate, incorporate, and adjoining to some other craft most needing support, if they will not labour to be corporate within themselves”; any obstinate craft that did not make suit to the Burghmote by next Michaelmas to be incorporate was to pay 20s. and give up their bodies for punishment. The shoemakers were accordingly joined in one guild with the leather-sellers and pouchmakers, the apothecaries with the grocers and chandlers.[316]

But if the town carried on business in this high-handed and imperious fashion, still in the double bargain made between the municipalities and the crafts it is not to be supposed that the advantage was all on one side. If the guild had services to sell to the community, it in its turn demanded a fair price. The trading society received all the benefits which fall upon communities by law established; and municipalities fostered with tender care the fraternities whose discipline they had first seized into their hands.[317] If trade was reaching out its branches to markets beyond the sea or if it was withering away, if the serving-men were growing poor or if they were waxing prosperous and threatening to dictate wages and prices, if new machinery was introduced to replace human labour, if foreign craftsmen came in to supplant the home-bred artizan—whatever the trouble might be the government of the people bravely stepped in to set the matter right. Craft rules once entered on the city records became an admitted part of the city statutes, to be enforced by the authority of the whole community, and the master found his jurisdiction recognized and enforced, and might call on the mayor, “if the men are rebels or contrarious and will not work,” to deal with them “according to law and reason.”[318] The whole strength of the town government could be invoked to suppress “foreign” labour or alien dealers and manufacturers, or combinations of men against their employers. No remedy was too heroic for patriotic burghers if they thought the prosperity of the local manufacturers was in danger. When the cloth trade of Canterbury had fallen into an evil plight the Town Council passed a law ordaining that in the next year the mayor and each of the twelve aldermen should buy a certain amount of cloth, the forty-eight councillors one-half that amount, and certain well-to-do inhabitants a like measure according to their degree.[319]

The system in fact was a curious balance of compromise among three distinct parties to a triangular strife—the whole body of traders and manufacturers organized in craft guilds, whose primary object was naturally to secure “their own singular profit,” as the phrase went, and to take on themselves as few of the common burdens as possible—the body of householders organized for civic purposes as the mayor, council, and commonalty, whose business was to keep order and carry on government—and the entire population of the town considered as consumers, who were thinking only of the supply of their own wants and whose chief aim was to buy the trader’s goods at the lowest possible price. For a time the borough corporations and the big public had the triumph on their side, and the traders were held in a position which was judged to be “consonant to reason.” But if the crafts passed through a period of subjection while their organization and discipline were being perfected, this by no means implied the practice of a like humility when they had learned how to manipulate the narrow oligarchy that formed the corporation, and to despise the incoherent masses that made up the body of consumers. For all this time the guilds were steadily, by the help of the town customs and administration, fortifying themselves in their position, strengthening their monopoly, closing their ranks, shutting out competitors from their gains. There came at last a moment when the crafts matched their strength with that of their masters, and the municipalities surrendered to the forces which they themselves had drilled. How completely the mediæval theory of the consumer’s interest in legislation about industry was swept away by the final success of the crafts in enforcing by their compact majority the original purpose of their own members, we may see from the chasm that separates in principle the ancient trade guild from the modern trade union. To-day we also are constantly making attempts to regulate industry through combinations whether of capitalists or of wage-earners. We have our associations of employers which have grown up to resist their workmen, and our unions of working-men formed to fight the employers; but neither is in the least concerned with the interests of the public, and not even in a phrase of courtesy are any of our modern associations supposed to “redound to the common profit” of the buyers. In this profound difference between the old and the new organizations of industry we may find a measure of the tremendous importance of the victory achieved by the crafts, when they had learned to use the disciplined forces of the guild for the capture of the municipal government. In later times, when public opinion almost ceased to work through the machinery of local government and only found occasional or incoherent expression, teaching societies under their more modern name of companies employed the same compact organization of monopolists to press their claims with redoubled success on the attention of the all-powerful central authorities, and the protection of the consumer was more and more forgotten in the protection of the privileged trader.

NOTE A.