The wholesale cloth merchants no longer worked with their own hands; they confined themselves to giving orders and superintending everything; they supplied the initiative; they were the prime movers in the weaving trades which depended on their orders; they regulated the quantity and quality of production; they raised the price of raw material, and the workmen’s wages; they often provided the appliances for work; they undertook the sale and distribution of goods, taking the risks, but also the profits. Already they were capitalists, fulfilling all the functions of captains of industry.
What became, then, of the intimate and cordial relations between masters, journeymen, and apprentices? The guilds began to assume a character unlike anything which could exist among the clothiers or blacksmiths for instance. This new state of affairs suddenly arose at Florence in the Arte della Lana. At some periods of its existence this guild had a membership of 20,000 to 30,000, but it was like a pyramid, with a very large base, numerous tiers, and a very small apex. At the summit were the masters, who were recruited entirely from among the rich families and formed a solid alliance for the defence of their own interests. Forced to guard against the perils which threatened their business on every hand—the difficulty of transport, a foreign country closed to them by war or by a tariff, the jealousy of rival towns—they tried to recoup themselves by employing cheap labour, and, remembering the maxim “divide and rule,” they ranked the workmen they employed in different degrees of dependence and poverty.
Some classes of workers, such as dyers and retailers, were affiliated to the arte under the name of inferior membri. True, they were allowed certain advantages, a shadow of autonomy, and liberty of association, but at the same time they were kept under strict rules and under the vow to obey officers nominated by the masters alone. Thus the dyers were not allowed to work on their own account, and were subject to heavy fines if the goods entrusted to them suffered the slightest damage; the rate of wages was fixed, but not the date of payment, which was invariably delayed.
On a lower tier came the weavers and the male and female spinners; both classes were isolated home-workers under the system of domestic manufacture, which is highly unfavourable to combination and therefore to the independence of the workers. The weavers, whether proprietors or lessees of their trade, could not set up without the permission of the masters who held the monopoly of wool, on whom they therefore became entirely dependent. They were pieceworkers and had no guaranteed schedule of prices.
The spinners lived for the most part in the country, and this country labour served, as usual, to lower the rate of wages in the towns; perhaps this was why the Florentine tradesmen favoured the abolition of serfdom, for the reason that its abolition took the peasants from the land and left them free but without property, thus forcing them to hire themselves out, and so creating a reserve army for the needs of industry. The masters invented a curious method of keeping the women weavers in their power. Every year the consuls obtained pastoral letters from the bishops of Fiesole and Florence, which, at Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, and All Saints, were read in the villages from the bishop’s throne. In these letters the careless spinner who wasted the wool which had been entrusted to her was threatened with ecclesiastical censure and even with excommunication if she repeated the offence. An excellent idea indeed, to use the thunderbolts of the Church for the benefit of the great manufacturers!
On a lower tier again we find the washers, beaters, and carders of wool, the fullers and the soapboilers, who formed the lowest grade of the labouring classes—a true industrial proletariat,—wage-earners already living under the régime of modern manufacture. They were crowded together in large workshops, subjected to a rigorous discipline, compelled to come and go at the sound of the bell, paid at the will of the masters—and always in silver or copper, or in small coin which was often debased,—supervised by foremen, and placed under the authority of an external official who was a sort of industrial magistrate or policeman chosen by the consuls of the arte and empowered to inflict fines, discharges, and punishments, and even imprisonment and torture. In addition, these tools or subjects of the guilds were absolutely forbidden to combine, to act in concert, to assemble together, or even to emigrate. They were the victims of an almost perfect system of slavery.
This short sketch shows how necessary it is to discriminate between the various types of guilds. But, however much they differed in their inner characteristics, they shared many points of resemblance which we must now proceed to examine.