The second act of the revolution now began. The town population divided itself into two separate groups, which soon became two opposing parties: the rich and the poor; the fat and the lean; the great and the small; the good and the bad, as the chroniclers, who usually belonged to the leisured class, said with a certain savage naïveté. The crafts which claimed to be honourable were set in opposition to those which were considered low and inferior, and were supported and urged on by the masses, who, without rights or possessions, lived from day to day by hiring out their labour.
The fight was complicated by the capricious intervention of the nobles or clergy who, sometimes by a natural affinity, joined the aristocracy of wealth; sometimes, in the desire to get the better of the great burgesses who kept them out of the government, allied themselves to the lower classes and made the balance turn in their favour.
At certain times (this also is a law of history) the lower classes, in despair at never getting anything out of a selfish and implacable bourgeoisie, put their confidence in some soldier of fortune, some ephemeral dictator, some “tyrant” in the Greek sense, who defeated their enemies and secured them a little well-being and consideration. On other occasions it was the rich burgesses who, frightened by the claims of the people, called on some foreign or military power to reduce the populace to order. Thus, by separate roads, the republics and towns were travelling towards monarchy.
Before they reached this point, however, the “small” crafts had their days of supremacy, which were characterized by a peaceful policy, fiscal reforms, and the effort to make taxation just through the progressive taxation of incomes. They raised with themselves, out of the darkness and degradation into which they had fallen, the ragged and barefooted labourers (carders, porters, blue-nails, as the Flemish labouring classes were called in derision), proletarians, wage-slaves, who in their turn desired political rights, a legal status in the city, a rank among the guilds, a share in the direction of the Commune.
In the year 1378 this movement seems to have been at its height.[88] A wave of revolution passed over Europe at that time, and at Florence as at Ghent, at Siena as at Rouen, in Paris as in London, for several years, months, and sometimes weeks, Ciompi, Chaperons blancs, Maillotins, etc., made the ruling classes tremble for fear of union on the part of all this riff-raff. As a Flemish chronicler expresses it: “An extraordinary thing was to be seen in those days; the common people gained the supremacy.”
Their victory was short-lived. All the conservative forces combined against the intruders. The attempt, not to destroy but to reform and enlarge guild administration, to make the whole world of labour enter into it, was shown to be powerless; perhaps because the workmen and men of the “small” crafts did not clearly perceive what could give them freedom, or know how to unite into a cohesive body; perhaps, also, because the idea of hierarchy was still too strongly rooted in society; finally, perhaps because there was a fundamental contradiction between the administration of the closed guilds which stood for privilege, and the ideas of equality which tried to force an entrance into them.
Whatever may have been the cause, from this culmination they descended again towards their starting-point, the supremacy of money and of the great commercial and industrial guilds which no longer allowed their power to be shared by the Lesser Guilds. However, they stopped half-way. The preponderance was not restored either to the prelates or to the lords, neither did it remain with the lower classes. It was too late for the great, too early for the small. It remained and was consolidated in the hands of two powers, each of which relied on the other—the middle classes and the monarchy, the latter being represented in the great states by royalty and elsewhere by princes who might be condottieri or upstart bankers. Florence went to sleep under the enervating and corrupt rule of the Medicis. An ever-narrowing merchant oligarchy governed Genoa, Venice, and the towns of the Teutonic Hanse. Flanders was quiet under the authority of the Dukes of Burgundy and of its opulent guilds, to which craftsmen were no longer admitted. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century the great epoch of the free towns was over, and the glory of the guilds went with them.
Nevertheless, while their restless and busy life lasted they had their days of greatness, heroism, and glory. Sometimes, as at Courtrai, they gained victories over armoured knighthood. They did better. In the neighbourhood of their cities they built roads, canals, and seaports. Within the city walls they gave a splendid impetus to architecture. They built monumental halls like those of Bruges, fountains, hospitals, and public promenades; they erected churches which were popular palaces, town halls which were carved like fine lace and flanked by towers and belfries from which the Tocsin called the citizens to arms or to the assembly. They had pride and patriotism, and also desired to honour the profession which was for each of them a state within the state. They contended for the honour of giving a picture, a statue, or a tabernacle to the buildings which thus became the incarnation of the soul of a whole people. The traveller who visits Florence admires the bas-reliefs half-way up the Campanile attributed to Giotto, which represent the origin of arts and crafts in the earliest ages of mankind; it is the stamp and blazonry of the working classes on their common work. Guilds have passed away, as all human institutions must pass, imperfect and frail in their very nature; but before their passing they realized a great part of their high ideal, which, in its many aspects, I have tried to make plain.