A Brief History of Printing. Part II: The Economic History of Printing

by Frederick W. Hamilton

4. Honesty in business. The guild member not only made his goods but sold them, generally directly to the public. Sometimes he sold them to merchants and sometimes he sent them to certain cities where at certain times markets or fairs were held, there to be sold on commission. More often, however, he made and sold his own goods in his own shop and lived in the same building with his family, his apprentices, and sometimes his journeymen. The guild stood for full weight and measure and for honesty in all business transactions. It punished faults in these directions as sternly as in the making of poor goods.

5. The maintenance of the social order. The guilds were always to be found arranged on the side of law and order, although that did not always mean that they were on the side of the king or other constituted authority in periods of civil disturbance.

The members of the guilds, all fighting men usually serving under their own guild banners and their own leaders, were an important part of the military force of the medieval cities. Although they might and did fight on one side or the other of some civic quarrel they always stood for order in the community just as they did for honesty in production and trade. This, however, is closely connected with the further fact that the guilds had a distinct religious side. The medieval man was not perhaps very much more religious than his modern descendant, but he was religious in a different way and paid much more attention to the forms of religion. Religious ceremonies formed a part of the regular routine of guild life and in many cases special churches were closely identified with certain guilds. Closely connected with the guilds were organizations known as confraternities. These confraternities were religious, charitable, and social organizations. Although usually drawn from members of some particular industry, they did not attempt to exercise the trade control which was in the hands of the guilds. They adopted the name of some saint who was chosen as their patron. They had a solemn feast following attendance at church on his day in the calendar, and they maintained a fund out of which the needy could be assisted and the dead buried with due provision of masses for the repose of his soul in case the family funds were not sufficient.

You see we are dealing with a time when the lives of men were very simple, very neighborly, and at least so far as observance goes, very religious. It is very important that we should have some fairly clear idea of these times if we are to understand at all how the early printers lived, what they did, and why they did it.

The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were the golden age of the guilds. They were at the height of their power and influence at the period of the invention of printing. The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were a period of decline. At first the decline was slow. After the sixteenth century, however, the decline was rapid, and long before the end of the eighteenth century the guilds had lost practically all of their old-time power and influence. In some portions of Europe the old guild organization still exists, but its influence is very slight and its purposes are far different from those of the old organizations of the Middle Ages.

This decline was the result of the changing economic conditions. One of the most important of these was the development of the modern type of production in factories using costly equipment and employing large numbers of men. The old type of production required little or no capital. There was practically no costly machinery. The work was done in the master workman’s house by himself, his sons, and apprentices. No expensive outlay for materials or plant was required. The journeyman required practically no capital for starting in business beyond his personal strength and skill.

Printing was the first industry which could not be carried on under the old conditions. From the beginning the printer must have capital to supply type, presses, and other equipment, to purchase material, which was costly, and to maintain himself and those who were working with him while a long process was being brought to completion and the product marketed. In order to carry on the business to any advantage a considerable number of persons must be employed. Under these circumstances printing was necessarily from the beginning an enterprise which required the co-operation of capital and labor to an extent hitherto unknown.

Another reason for the decline of the guilds may be found in the increasing power of the government and its progressive control of the citizen. The control and protection thus exercised by the government rendered the protection and control exercised by the guild over its members not only unnecessary but improper. While in some respects governmental control and the freedom of a well-organized system of courts did not protect the rights of the individual and insure the quality of product as effectively as the guilds had done, it was inevitable that particular regulations should give way to general regulation and that the individual should not only be taught but compelled to look to the state rather than to an association of individuals for the protection of his rights and the definition of his duties.

It was probably this more than anything else which brought about an increasing antagonism between the guilds and the state in every country. In the years of their growth and power the guilds, as we have seen, had been the strong supporters of the social order, the pillars of the state, and the firm reliance of the government, or at any rate of that party in the government which they supported. When the government became strong enough to desire to stand alone, the power of the guilds, which had formerly been useful, became decidedly objectionable, and the entire influence of the state was more and more directed against them.

Another important social change was the development of free labor and free capital, resulting in the separation of industrial classes. Under the guild system there was no separation between labor and capital, or between the employers and the employed as classes. The guilds were associations in which labor and so much capital as there was were combined in a close organization, while there was neither labor nor capital in any particular amount outside the guild. With the gradual change of conditions, growth of population, increase of wealth, and greater intercourse between communities there grew up on one end of the social scale groups of laborers who were not members of any guild and on the other end accumulations of capital which were either in the hands of men who were neither craftsmen nor guild members or of those who had larger accumulations than they could use in their own business. This development of laborers seeking employment and capital seeking investment was fatal to the guild system when once the progress of invention made the factory system possible.