Guilds in the Middle Ages

by Georges François Renard

It follows logically that the education it instituted and which was founded on the study of Greek and Latin drew a clear line of demarcation between the children thus brought up, who were destined to hold the highest social positions, and the others doomed to inferior tasks and studies. It will therefore be understood that the Renaissance influenced the condition of the workers. It swelled the tide which was carrying society towards class division; it helped to separate still further the tradesman and the manual worker; and above all it separated the artist and the craftsman, those twin brothers, who till then had shared the same life and the same ideals. The artist was no longer the interpreter of the thought of a whole people, but, working for the rich and powerful bankers or princes, who required him to reproduce archaic forms and consequently demanded of him a certain amount of education, he left the ranks of the people, rose to wealth, to the ranks of the upper middle classes, and figured at court; he and his fellows grouped themselves into special brotherhoods such as that of St. Luke at Rome, and before long formed academies inaccessible to the vulgar. Compare the life of Raphael with that of Giotto. In these days, the craftsman remained a working man, lost in the crowd, watching from afar and from his lowly station his successful comrade, who no longer recognized the poor relation he had left behind.

Separations of this kind abound in almost every direction. In the Middle Ages grocers and apothecaries, barbers and surgeons, were classed together. But in the sixteenth century the apothecary, on his admission to mastership, had to reply in Latin, and henceforth he no longer considered the spice merchant his equal. So in France, from the year 1514, the bond between the two professions was broken.

The historian can easily prove that this separation of art and craft was often harmful to both; that art, isolated from the warm heart of the people, became conventional, cold, stiff, and artificial; that craft, relegated to a lower position, no longer sought for beauty, and was condemned to express itself in inferior, routine work; but, taking the guilds alone, this separation certainly weakened the mediaeval system. Deprived of members whose gifts were their glory, they lost in power as in prestige.

In spite of all this, and although the Renaissance is from some points of view a retrogression towards social conditions which had long disappeared, it was more than this; it was the awakening of the spirit of initiative; it was a forward impulse, a bold step in advance. It was not limited to a mere renewal of relations with classical antiquity; it stimulated inventive effort, and taught men to think for themselves once more, to open their eyes and to observe. It thus gave a strong impetus to science. The age is rich in many-sided geniuses and seekers after truth, who widened the field of human knowledge and power in every direction. It saw the birth of those universalists, Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo, who may be likened to trees, which, by the mysterious process of grafting, bear twenty different kinds of fruit. In short, the Renaissance was a setting free of intelligence, a breaking forth of truths, which, thanks to printing, spread all over the world and became a lasting possession.

It is true, indeed, that mankind, like the Wandering Jew, is always moving forward, and never comes completely to a standstill. Man moves ceaselessly because he is alive. But after the great creative movement which is the glory of modern times, his progress is more apparent, surer, and more rapid. From this time must be dated a permanent alliance between science and industry, exemplified in that heroic potter, Bernard Palissy, who spent his life and fortune in rediscovering the secret of certain enamelled pottery. The pity is that this alliance, so fruitful in new methods, in the exploitation of new materials and new products, was formed at the expense of the guilds; for the innovations which it rendered necessary were the death of their rules governing manufacture. Everything contributed, as we can see, to the break-up of the organization of labour which they embodied.

The same may be said of the Reformation, the religious renaissance, which was both a development of and a reaction from its fellow. It could hardly be expected that a revolution which rent Western Christianity asunder should spare the unity of the craft guilds. True, it did not act in the same way: by making the reading of the Bible obligatory it encouraged the education of the people, and in this way it raised the craftsman. It found, and not without reason, its first adherents among workmen,—Saxon miners, carders from the town of Meaux; it turned towards democracy, towards theories of equality. Those who carried it to extremes, like the Anabaptists of Münster, pictured a government in which all the guilds, great and small, should be made equal; their ideal was to turn all organized crafts, superior and inferior, into a sort of public service; to establish a kind of Biblical communism. Their leader and prophet was John of Leyden, an aged working tailor.[114] If this was only a passing birth-throe of Protestantism at least the guilds took a large share in the great movements which shook Holland and England. It really seems that the Reformation brought a renewal of vigour and activity to those states in which it triumphed. But in many countries the fight between the two faiths was so fierce that many cities were devastated and ruined by it. In Germany, after the Thirty Years’ War, Magdeburg, Wurtzburg, Heidelberg, Spire, and Mannheim were simply heaps of ruins, almost deserted. The Teutonic Hanse which had been so powerful was a wreck; the Protestant and Catholic towns had broken the union in which their strength lay. In a hundred places, since it was admitted that the religion of the prince was law for his subjects (cujus regio, hujus religio) whole bodies of people and industries moved away; workmen and masters went in search of refuge among their co-religionists. The guild system was profoundly disturbed by this; the new-comers, when they were too numerous, were not always very warmly welcomed by their brothers in God, and even when they were received, they practically forced their way into a closed system which they strained to breaking.

In places where the population remained divided between the two creeds, or where, more from indifference to, than respect for, the beliefs of others, they made a lame attempt at tolerance, it was extremely difficult to get men of the two sects to live together in the same body. Just as the Jews had been excluded from the guilds in the Middle Ages, so now the Protestants were kept out. In France, from the time of Richelieu, fifty years before the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, the professions of a doctor, apothecary, grocer, and many others were forbidden to them.[115] Then came the great exodus of 1685, which scattered the French Huguenots over every place in Europe where they had friends, and planted colonies of refugees in Switzerland, England, Holland, Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden. “They carried commerce away with them,” says Jurieu, one of their pastors; and commerce in the language of those days included what we call industry. The fact is that they naturalized abroad many manufactures which had hitherto been unknown. England alone learnt from them the arts of silk-making, Gobelins tapestry-making, and sail-making. What then became of the guilds which remained in France, of the monopoly at which they aimed, and of the secrecy which was one of their methods of securing it? It was a terrible blow for them when, as at Abbeville, 80 families out of 160 left the country, or 1600 out of 2200, as happened at the election of Amiens.[116] How, thus mutilated, could they stand against the foreign competition of which their own members had become the most formidable allies?

3. The change in political conditions.—Changes in political conditions affected the guilds even more than intellectual and religious changes. Europe, in spite of waves of revolt, passed through a period in which great powers prevailed. The State, which was becoming centralized, increased its prerogatives and complacently interfered in economic matters. The motives which determined its intervention were sometimes a purely political interest, sometimes a fiscal interest, sometimes a public or national interest.

(a) The political interest of Sovereigns is to subdue rival powers within their territories. For this reason they first attacked the liberties of any cities where the spirit was bad, that is to say, as a King of Prussia said later, frondeur, intractable, or restless. In Spain their fueros were taken from them; in France, town liberties decreased, till they were almost entirely destroyed by Richelieu and Louis XIV. In Germany, the number of free Hanseatic cities dropped from eighty to three. The Italian republics fell one by one under the domination of a monarch, and, though Venice survived, she had concentrated her government in the hands of three State judges, magistrates as autocratic and irresponsible as kings. In the Low Countries, Bruges lost all jurisdiction over her suburbs in 1435, and Ghent lost the power in 1451, and also the right to nominate the aldermen. Liége, like her neighbour Dinant, was destroyed, crushed, reduced to nothing. In the following century Antwerp, suspected of sympathy with the Reformation, lived under the Spanish yoke, pillaged and down-trodden.