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

by Alice Stopford Green

CHAPTER VIII

THE GUILD MERCHANT

In the conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we see the town society rent into two factions; and whether the contending groups call themselves the Burghers and Commonalty, or “the rich” and “the poor people of the city,” or the Merchant Guild and the Crafts, or by any other names, they seem practically to represent the same broad sections of the community. In town quarrels it is hard for us to draw any valid distinction between groups of citizens and companies of craftsmen, as though they were led by different passions; for however numerous were the mere inhabitants who must have lain outside the organization of the crafts, usually every freeman was a member of some company, and the whole voting population was thus enrolled under the banners of the various trades. The real line of cleavage on which we have to concentrate attention is not the thin line which may be drawn between the Town Council and the Merchant Guild, the Commonalty and the Crafts, but rather the broad chasm which breaks the whole industrial society itself into two factions—on the one side the merchant traders, on the other the artificers and small retail dealers. Wherever the lesser crafts who represented the middle classes of the borough, and whose interests were more or less identified with the cause of the commons and “poor people of the city,” were forcing their claim to a share in the counsels of the town; to which their way was barred by a solid phalanx of hereditary “magnates” and wealthy merchants who had abandoned the meaner employments of trade and thrown in their lot with the governing oligarchy of “the rich,” and who fought in alliance with or under cover of the burghers; there the revolt of the commons against the Town Council becomes practically a battle of the working crafts against the rule of the mercantile fraternities—a battle which may be fought at one time for the winning of civic privileges, at another for industrial freedom.

If we ask how old this conflict was, and at what time the peace of the town was first disturbed by the antagonism of the greater commerce and the lesser crafts, of the trader and the artificer, we must go back for an answer to the very much earlier period when commercial societies first became organized, or at least to the twelfth century when the Merchant Guild and the Crafts come prominently to the front.[356] Unfortunately the history of the Guild Merchant,[357] from its obscure beginnings in the days of the Confessor, or of the Norman kings, down to the time when its organization had spread all over England, and its fraternities were to be found in most of the trading boroughs, is still enveloped in the darkness which covers the early records of our towns, and problems await solution which involve the whole developement of the Guild. We know that from a remote period men had banded themselves together in associations to secure protection and monopoly of trade, and before the close of the twelfth century the majority of trading towns had each its “Merchant Guild” with rights guaranteed by royal charter. First born into life in a society where a merchant class such as we understand it was unknown, we are told that the Guild may have first consisted mainly of agriculturists busied in tilling their common lands, and increasing their herds of cows and sheep and pigs; and whose chief anxiety was to sell the butter and honey and salt meat and wool that remained over when they had supplied their own wants, and to buy fish for the fasting seasons, ploughs and spades for their fields and the simplest furniture for their humble households. But, in the opinion of its latest historian, from the twelfth century artizans were freely admitted to its society, and presently formed the majority of the Guild[358]—each craftsman being a small trader on his own account, buying his raw material, and selling his manufactured goods at the stall he rented in the market or on the folding shelf that he let down to the street from the window of his little workroom. With these were clergy and women who busied themselves in trade;[359] travelling dealers among the townsfolk to whom exemptions from jurisdictions outside the town and freedom from toll were important (things which mattered little to the homekeeping citizens); and strangers who brought their wares to the town market,[360] paid their entrance fee and pledged themselves to bear henceforth their share of the town taxes, though they were considered free from all other charges that lay on the “downlying and uprising and pot-boiling” householders. It is therefore supposed that when the time came for the Guild to emerge from its humble state of private association, and rise into the dignity of an official civic body, charged with the protection of the trading interests of the borough,[361] it formed a really popular institution, which from its very nature could never become entangled in a conflict with the crafts—an organization of the whole community for the control of trade by the common consent of the people, which was in many respects peculiarly characteristic of English life,[362] and which was the natural product of an age of freedom before the people had been trodden under foot of a despotic oligarchy. Theoretically subject to the authority of the town as part of its regular administrative machinery,[363] but ruled over by its own officers, and exercising independent jurisdiction through its voluntary tribunals of arbitration, the Guild by virtue of its trade monopoly,[364] its powerful organization and discipline, and the fact that the men who formed its governing body were generally the same as those who sat on the governing body of the borough, maintained a far more independent position than any department of town government to-day.[365]

But according to Dr. Gross the Gilda Mercatoria was doomed to vanish away before the growth of new industrial conditions. The first blow was struck at its supremacy by the appearance early in the twelfth century of crafts, which bought from the king the right to exist as independent fraternities during his pleasure.[366] From this time the decline of the Merchant Guild from its old estate kept pace with the commercial revolution that caused its ruin. It began to undergo its great change at the close of the thirteenth century, and in the two following centuries it may be said to have practically ceased to exist. Broken up into a multitude of independent associations, each of which carried on business for itself,[367] deprived of all its old functions, it died because it had no longer any adequate reason to live. Perhaps it lingered on here and there in agricultural towns where few or no craft guilds had been formed;[368] or in ecclesiastical boroughs where its organization provided the only rallying point for the community in any struggle for freedom; but everywhere else its machinery fell to pieces;[369] and so completely did it vanish away as a distinct body that the very name only survived by taking to itself new meanings. Sometimes the old Merchant Guild became indistinguishably blended with the town and gave its name to the whole community;[370] though in another place it perhaps handed over name and functions to the narrow select governing body of the borough as distinguished from the general community of citizens.[371] Elsewhere its title was in some vague way transferred to the aggregate of the craft guilds.[372] As a mere shadow of its former self, with nothing but the word to mark its identity, the Merchant Guild might survive as a simple social-religious fraternity;[373] or perhaps without conflict or bitterness it merely faded away before the crafts, leaving not so much as a name behind it.[374] But however the implicit, unspoken compact was carried out, by whatever means the Gilda Mercatoria, obedient to a final destiny, effected its renunciation of an inconvenient supremacy, there was no possible occasion left for strife between Guild and crafts,[375] and the suggestion of any such quarrel, or of revolt on the part of the crafts against the superior fraternity from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, must be looked on as a wanton “myth”.[376] Having fulfilled its course the Merchant Guild took its doom without noise or struggle, and entered decently into the shades with a grave decorum before which jarring sounds of contention were put to silence. It was at a later time, when the old popular organization had died, that the harmony of the commons was destroyed by the coming in of a tyranny unknown till then—the tyranny of a select and irresponsible governing body which by its corrupt administration stirred up a new spirit of dissension in the boroughs.

Unfortunately this picture of the successive stages of the guild history, from the free republican period through which they are all apparently supposed to have passed, down to their extinction or absorption into a governing oligarchy, a whole borough community, or a group of trades, has not been verified by following out the continuous story of any single guild. Moreover it would seem that the difficulty of making any general statement about the groups of traders who made the fortunes of the English boroughs, is as great as the difficulty of making a general statement as to the position and grouping of a host of irregular troops in rapid march over a tangled country. Amid the intense activity and the transformation scenes of mediæval life there is no exact definition which does not prove false with a little lapse of time, a little change of place; and theories of “natural tendency” are but as traps set for the unwary. So far as the Guild Merchant is concerned, there were probably as many various exceptions to any general rule as there were towns which contained a Guild. Let but a generation pass away and the institution is perhaps wholly changed; here it existed in some special form; a few miles off it never existed at all; in some boroughs it dominated the history of the town, while in others it left but the bare echo of its name behind.[377] There may possibly have been towns where at one time the Guild included within its ranks the majority of the burghers, and perhaps mainly consisted of craftsmen;[378] but there were evidently others where from the first it formed a society far narrower and more restricted,[379] or where it rapidly tended to become a limited body of wealthy citizens out of whose midst the craft guilds cannot possibly have been developed; while occasionally it may have happened that the craft guilds preceded the Merchant Guild.[380] Even if the theory was ostensibly maintained that craftsmen “were freely enrolled among the members of the Guild Merchant”[381]—in practice “gifts and entrance fees of a collation, a bull, beer, and wine” could effectually keep out the poorer sort, and allow the association[382] to develope rapidly into an exclusive and comparatively aristocratic society, which demanded from all save owners of a house or burgage, or men entitled by direct descent to belong to the fraternity, admission fees big enough to guarantee the new comer’s fitness to be of their fine company. The two ranks established in the Andover Guild[383] as early as the thirteenth century suggest how privilege might creep in even among Guild members themselves; as the merchants of Bristol teach us how it could be fought for;[384] and there is no doubt that the policy of each separate fraternity must have largely depended on whether it adopted the custom of having its officers chosen by consent of the whole community of Guildsmen,[385] or by a handful of electors of the superior class.[386] Even if a considerable number of burghers was admitted to trading privileges, it by no means follows that they were allowed any voice in the control of business.

Nor are we less in the dark as to that “natural process” by which the Guild is believed to have passed to its resigned and painless end. The “transference of authority from the ancient general Guild Merchant to a number of distinct bodies and the consequent disintegration and decay of the former,”[387] the weakening of its strength by the creation of new crafts, the splitting up of its monopoly into fragments, the annihilation of its original being to make place for “the aggregate of the crafts,” the turning of the Guild into a “simple social-religious fraternity”—a kind of quiet haven of rest for wealthy merchants who had given up the sweets of power and the real government of trade in which their fortunes were concerned, to busy themselves with dirges and masses and chaplains, or even with a Corpus Christi procession—in fact the whole “gradual and spontaneous” movement in which lay the death of the primitive fraternity is still enveloped in mystery. If craftsmen, associated in their own peculiar guilds, yet remained in the common Guild Merchant[388] which had once made regulations for their trade, and in many cases still did so,[389] the instances (apart from cases where the Guild Merchant either was the municipal body, or had simply handed over to it its name) are rare or perhaps unknown in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; nor can we easily follow the far more complicated transformation said to have taken place when the burgesses became the heirs of the general body of guildsmen, by a double process which changed the idea of citizenship from the conception of the freeman holding a burgage tenure into the later idea of a man holding the right to exercise a trade, and which turned the governors of the guild into the rulers of the town;[390] so that by natural growth the fraternity of the Guild Merchant, once wholly distinct from the borough, became identical with it.[391]

It is very possible—indeed it is very probable if we remember the thrift of the English people in politics, their habit of fetching out the old machinery whenever there seems a chance of making it useful; their aversion to repairs or patches beyond what imperative necessity demands; their indifference to new inventions if the old wheels and cranks can still be induced to turn—that we may learn something of the working of the original Guild Merchant by watching the doings of its successors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For whether the primitive Guild had ceased to exist or no, something going by its name and clothed in its form confronts us constantly in the later times, soberly masquerading in an ancient habit which seems scarcely the worse for wear or out of fashion for all the lapse of centuries; and figuring before us as a robust survival, as an old organization fitted out afresh for a pressing emergency, or even as a new creation. We may watch in Coventry such a Guild, which bears none of the signs of decrepitude or symptoms of decay—a guild which was in no sense a simple social-religious fraternity, nor yet an ordinary craft guild; which was far from being an aggregate of the trades; which refused to the lesser crafts the right to combine, and despotically governed their business in its own interests; which was the municipal body of the city and carried on its entire administration, but never gave its name either to the community or to the governing body; anti-democratic in its origin, in its maturity, and in its old age; jealous of dominion; incapable of making terms from behind its barricaded doors with dissolution. Late as was its date, it has features in its origin, its constitution, and its policy far too like those of much earlier guilds, not to claim our interest.[392]