(1) That the saddlers had formed a “conspiracy and collusion among themselves” and bound themselves to it by oath that they would compel the joiners, painters, and lorimers not to sell to any one but themselves any work they did pertaining to saddlery. The workman was thus to be bound to them hand and foot.
(2) That when the workmen come to ask for payment due to them they are so bandied about among the said saddlers with offensive words, beaten, and otherwise maltreated, that they have no longer the daring to demand their just debts.
(3) That the saddlers make old saddles into new, thus cheating the workmen of trade that ought to come to them.
The first charge was denied by the saddlers, but as they promised henceforth never to make any confederacy again their denial was scarcely conclusive. They pleaded that the sheriff’s court was the place for questions of debt. And they promised never again to sell old saddles for new.
Evidently the excitement in London over this trade dispute was extreme, for when arbitration by the city officers was proposed, and the crafts summoned to meet in the church of St. Martin’s le Grand before six chosen aldermen, they arrived there in so great multitudes and with such a concourse of people eager to hear the solution of the great trade problem, that no business could be done. The aldermen ordered another meeting at which elected representatives from each craft only should attend. Six saddlers therefore were confronted with two ironsmiths, two coppersmiths, two painters, and two joiners; and after a day’s discussion a new group of thirteen was chosen by the trades and a concord was made “by the ordinance of these common friends and presented to the mayor and aldermen.” The result was a decided victory of the working crafts over the dealers. The nine chief offenders among the saddlers were driven out of the trade, and the saddlers bound in a heavy penalty never again to take them back, to sustain them, or to help them, till they had made peace with the crafts. (Mem. Lond. 156-162.) As to the introduction of “blackleg” labour by the masters, it was decreed that no stranger was to be brought into the trades till he had been received at the husting by the assent of eight respectable men of the craft. The regulation that no repaired work was to be sold for new prevented another form of irregular labour, since trades might not legally repair for any but private customers.
In this instance it was the employers’ union that was beaten; but it is evident that the question mainly turned on the convenience of the public, and their dislike to have bad saddles supplied to them. It is also evident that save in the case of some unusually powerful combination of working crafts there was but little hope for the humbler trades in a conflict with dealers or employers backed by the public in keeping down prices. The Tawyers or dressers of skins made ordinances in 1365 “as to how they shall serve the pelterers and how much they shall take for their labour.” (Riley’s Mem. Lond. 330.) The records may state that the ordinances were “provided and made by the serving-men called tawyers,” but it is hard to believe that these “serving-men” acted of their own free will in framing rules which put their necks mercilessly and irrevocably under the yoke of the pelterers, binding themselves to serve them only, to work for the old fixed prices, and to bow to their jurisdiction in trade offences “according to the award and discretion of the rulers of the trade of pelterers.”
There were other grounds of dispute between craft and craft, and battles raged at times between guilds as to the boundaries of the trades, and the relations between them—disputes which sprang from the “overlapping” of different crafts engaged upon one and the same product; or from the “apportionment” of work between closely related trades. Shoemakers were forbidden to be tanners (Stat. 13 Rich. II. i. cap. 12); then allowed to tan leather till the next Parliament (Stat. 4 Henry IV. cap. 35); and in 1423 again forbidden to be tanners (2 Henry VI. cap. 7). And as the tanners were protected against the shoemakers, so shoemakers were protected against cobblers. There was many a quarrel between the cordwainers who made new boots and the cobblers who mended old ones, the cobblers complaining that the cordwainers were preventing them from gaining their living as they had done of old. In 1395 at the king’s order the mayor summoned twelve of each craft to state their grievances. The question of how much mending might be supposed to make a new boot required the most detailed inquiry: and the apportionment of labour was exact. No person who meddled with old shoes was to make new ones; all work with new leather was declared to be within the sphere of the cordwainers, and the cobblers were restricted to mending, and that with very small pieces of leather. Fourteen years later the lines were drawn still more precisely; the re-soling of old boots was reserved to the cordwainers, but the cobblers were allowed to mend with pieces of new leather boots that were burnt or broken. (Mem. Lond. 539-40, 572-3.) Ordinances of this kind were not necessarily designed for the protection of the workers, though no doubt that may often have been partly intended; but in the first instance were probably meant to make the supervision of trades and inspection of wares more efficient in the public interest.