Guilds in the Middle Ages

by Georges François Renard

[CHAPTER VI]
EXTERNAL CAUSES OF DECAY

A body of institutions, like a living body, begins by passing through a period of formation, growth, and consolidation, after which decay inevitably follows; it becomes feeble, disintegrates, decomposes, and finally dissolves. Death is thus presented as the natural term of life with its constant wear and tear, as the necessary end of the spontaneous development peculiar to living beings. But it is also determined by the pressure of outside forces, by the action of environment. Thus the guild system held within itself elements of dissolution, and at the same time met with destructive forces from without; it declined and decayed under the combined influences of internal and external causes.

It seems fitting to begin with the external causes, since these were the most important. In an unchanging environment living beings could exist for long unchanged, but the changes ever at work without hasten changes within, from the very fact that the organism is itself at work. Thus it was that the guilds were first of all affected by the profound changes going on around them. The sphere in which they had to work was both extended and modified. We must follow out the consequences of both these changes.

1. The Extension of the Market and its Results.—The fifteenth century saw the formation of the great States in Europe. France, which felt herself to be a nation when she was trampled under foot by the English, was the first to become a unity, and for several centuries drew her power and her greatness from the start which she thus gained. Spain was concentrated under the authority of Ferdinand and Isabella. England, worn out after a terrible civil war, found rest under the Tudor dynasty. In Germany, which was still very divided, the Hanseatic League included twenty-four cities. Even in Italy the restless republics, ever jealous of their independence, were absorbed into larger territories and placed under a common supremacy. Everywhere the endless subdivision of the Middle Ages gave place to larger groupings, possessing fuller life and wider interests. Hence a new situation arose for the cities; among those which in every state had up till now been on an equal footing one rose to be the capital, the others, with diminished prestige and importance, were only secondary centres. They also ceased to be islets where the people lived lives apart; from henceforward they formed an integral part of a whole which surrounded them and no longer allowed of a proud isolation; they could no longer treat their neighbours as foreigners or enemies; they found themselves bound together by the necessity of obeying the same laws and the same sovereign.

It followed that city economy, becoming narrow and exclusive, grew difficult and by degrees impossible.[95] It was replaced by national economy. This meant that the commercial market, instead of being confined to the inhabitants of a town and its suburbs, included henceforth the province, the duchy, and by degrees the whole kingdom. Above all, it meant that the central power no longer legislated for people enclosed within a small area, but that it attempted to unify over the whole surface of a considerably enlarged territory the official language, moneys, weights and measures, as well as the regulations of industry and the judicial forms; that it suppressed as far as possible the tolls which obstructed the roads and rivers; that it carried back to the frontier the barriers which had been set up on the boundaries of every little domain; that for a localizing spirit it substituted the desire to reconcile the interests of the different regions between which it played the part of arbitrator and peacemaker.

Doubtless the economic policy adopted by the great States did not sensibly differ from that practised in the towns. A system does not disappear without bequeathing traditions and customs to its successor. National economy copied the methods of city economy. When Colbert, for instance, tried to realize for France the ideal of self-sufficiency, when for this reason he wanted to sell as much as possible and buy as little as possible abroad, to create industries which were lacking, to prevent those which existed from leaving the country, to encourage the export of manufactured goods while watching over their proper manufacture, and to hinder the import of similar goods by barricading the country with customs tariffs, he was only taking up once more and making general an old system formerly tried by Florence or Venice and adopted later by kings and ministers in France and England, by Henry IV. and notably by Richelieu. This mercantile system has been christened Colbertism, and the name will serve provided that it is known that Colbert was not its father but its godfather.

Nevertheless, in spite of the continuity of the principles which guide great governors, the mere fact that the enlarged area in which the guilds operated contained several towns whose jealousy might be measured by their rights, was a terrible blow for the guilds; each town with its narrow boundaries, finding itself completely out of harmony with the world in which it was condemned to live, had to adapt itself to the new conditions or die.