“Thy famous Maire, by pryncely governaunce, with
sword of justice thee ruleth prudently.”—Dunbar.
Wandering in Cheapside, I came across some massive emblazoned coats-of-arms over great doorways, and found they always announced the halls of the City Companies of London, those great mediæval trade unions that survive to-day—so taken for granted by the Londoner that few people remark their amazing existence.
Yet most of the real history of the old City is bound up with the tale of the rise to wealth and power of these great companies. They once numbered a hundred, and about seventy-six still survive. I see that in one recent guide-book the Pattenmakers are quoted as extinct, but though this ancient guild, founded in 1300, might be supposed to have received its deathblow a hundred years ago, when the improvement in the streets made pattens unnecessary, they are still made for country use and the company has recently renewed its vitality by association with the rubber boot and shoe industry.
I like the quaint names of the companies that are now no more. The occupation of the Bowyers and the Horners is fairly obvious, but who would guess that the Fletchers were makers of arrows, or the Lorriners makers of bridles and bits, and I leave you to discover the lugubrious meaning of the Worshipful Company of Upholders.
They were the trade unions of the Middle Ages, but they had this great difference, that they were a combination of the masters for the benefit of their particular industry, whereas now the trade unions are composed of the workmen, who combine for their own benefit even if it ruins the industry. Comparisons may be odious but they are inevitable. Our present trade unions, which seem to be growing almost as powerful as their forerunners, are exclusively concerned with the question of wages, but the guilds, whilst jealously guarding the privileges of their members and craftsmen, not only guaranteed a fixed wage, but administered even-handed justice as between master and men, and, more important still, insisted on a high standard of workmanship. Nothing but the best satisfied them, and they built up the tradition of English excellence which our present distaste for honest work puts us in a fair way to lose.
For in this matter we compare badly with our forefathers. Their ruthless methods might well be copied in this age of the meretricious and shoddy. In 1311 there was a bonfire in Cheapside (at the instance of the Hatters’ and Haberdashers’ Company) of forty grey and white and fifteen black “bad and cheating hats,” which had been seized in the shops of dishonest traders, and other defective goods were publicly burnt in the same place from time to time, but so rarely as to show how high was the usual standard of trade honesty. Nowadays, such seizures would provide almost enough fuel to tide us through another coal strike.
The City Companies were an autocracy, but, given the conditions of the time, they were a benevolent autocracy, and the guilds laid the foundations of the vast commercial wealth which has made London what she is. For centuries the Lord Mayor, their civic head, has been chosen almost always from amongst the members of the twelve great companies, and enjoys a prestige abroad only second to that of the king, as anyone who has lived in France can testify. Trade in England has always been honourable. The merchants of the Middle Ages belonged almost exclusively to families of good position; often they were younger sons of the landed gentry, for whom a commercial life, in days when there were no engineers, journalists, or bankers, was the usual opening if they did not go into the Church or Law. Whittington was the son of a Gloucestershire knight: Sir Thomas Gresham, that finest type of City magnate and honoured friend of Elizabeth, came of a good old stock and was educated at Cambridge. For centuries our kings and queens have been pleased to come to banquets in the Guildhall and the halls of the greater companies, though they might not nowadays look favourably upon that lord mayor with whom Charles II. dined, who became so drunk that when the king got up to leave he rushed after him and dragged him back, good-naturedly protesting, “to finish t’other bottle.”
The old power of the guilds has gone, but in what other country would you find bodies of merchants, each with a vast revenue at its disposal of which it need give account to no man, using that wealth, generation after generation,
GUILDHALL