Take the single example of Stratford, the details of whose inhabitants' lives, because of the greatness of one of them, have attracted more attention than those of any other town of corresponding size in England. At the beginning of the Fourteenth Century it is only what we would call a village, and it probably did not have 3,000 inhabitants, if, indeed, the number was not less than 2,000. In his book, "Shakespeare the Boy," Mr. Rolfe calls attention to certain conditions that interest us in the old village. He tells us of what happened as a result of the development of liberty in the Thirteenth Century:
"Villeinage gradually disappeared in the reign of Edward VII. (1327-1337), and those who had been subject to it became free tenants, paying definite rents for house and land. Three natives of the town, who, after the fashion of the time, took their surnames from the place of their birth, rose to high positions in the Church, one becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, and the others respectively Bishops of London and Chichester. John of Stratford and Robert of Stratford were brothers, and Ralph of Stratford was their nephew. John and Robert were both for a time Chancellors of England, and there is no other instance of two brothers attaining that high office in succession."
To many people the fact that the avenue to rise was through the Clergy more than in any other way will be disappointing. One advantage, however, that the old people would insist that they had from their system was that these men, having no direct descendants, were less likely to pursue selfish aims and more likely to try to secure the benefit of the Community than are those who, in our time, rise through the legal profession. The Lord High Chancellors of recent time have all been lawyers. Would not most of the world confess that the advantage was with the medieval peoples?
President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton realized sympathetically this great element of saving democracy in the Middle Ages, and has paid worthy tribute to it. He said: "The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed was that the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the church—from that great church, that body which we now distinguish from other church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of Christendom, and every chancellery in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished men—the priesthood of that great and then dominant church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood."
V. INSURANCE.
Insurance is usually supposed to be a modern idea representing one of those developments of the capitalization of mutual risks of life, property, and the like that have come as a consequence of modern progress. The insurance system of the Middle Ages, the organization of which came in the Thirteenth Century, is therefore extremely interesting. It was accomplished, as was every form of co-operation and co-ordination of effort, through special gilds or through the trade or merchant gilds. Among the objects of the gilds enumerated by Toulmin Smith is insurance against loss by fire. This was paid through the particular gild to which the merchant belonged, or in the case of the artisan through a special gild which he joined for the purpose. Provision was made, however, for much more than insurance by fire. Our fire insurance companies are probably several centuries old, so also are our insurance arrangements against shipwreck. Other features of insurance, however, are much more recent. Practically all of these were in active existence during the Middle Ages, though they disappeared with the so-called reformation, and then [{438}] did not come into existence again for several centuries and, indeed, not until our own time.
The old gilds, for instance, provided insurance against loss from flood, a feature of insurance that has not, so far as I know, developed in our time, against loss by robbery (our burglary insurance is quite recent), against loss by the fall of a house, by imprisonment, and then also insurance against the loss of cattle and farm products. All the features of life insurance also were in existence. The partial disability clauses of life or accident insurance policies are recent developments. In the old days there is insurance against the loss of sight, against the loss of a limb, or any other form of crippling. The deaf and dumb might be insured so as to secure an income for them, and corresponding relief for leprosy might be obtained; so that, if one were set apart from the community by the law requiring segregation of lepers, there might be provision for food and lodging, even though productive work had become impossible. In a word, the insurance system of the Middle Ages was thoroughly developed. It was not capitalistic. The charges were only enough to maintain the system, and not such as to provide large percentage returns on invested stock and on bonds, and the accumulation of huge surpluses that almost inevitably lead to gross abuses. What is best in our modern system of insurance is an imitation of the older methods. Certain of the trade insurance companies which assume a portion of the risk on mills, factories and the like, are typical examples. They know the conditions, enforce proper precautions, keep an absolute check on suspicious losses, accumulate only a moderate surplus and present very few opportunities for insurance abuses. The same thing is true for the fraternal societies that conduct life insurance. When properly managed they represent the lowest possible cost and the best efficiency with least opportunities for fraud and without any temptations to interfere with legislation and any allurements for legislators to spend their time making strike and graft bills instead of doing legislative work.
VI. OLD AGE PENSIONS.
This generation has occupied itself much with the question of old age pensions. Probably most people feel that this is the first time in the world's history that such arrangements have been made. The movement is supposed to represent a recent development of humanitarian purpose, and to be a feature of recent philanthropic evolution. It is rather interesting, in the light of that idea, to see how well they accomplish this same purpose in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. In our time it has been a government affair, with all the possibilities of abuse that there are in a huge pension system, and surely no country knows it better than we do here in America. The old countries, Germany and France, have established a contributing [{439}] system of pension. This was the model of their system of caring for the old and the disabled in the Middle Ages. Toulmin Smith cites a rule of one of the gilds which gives us exactly the status of the old age disability pension question. After a workman had been seven years a member, the gild assured him a livelihood in case of disability from any cause.