All these, however, are but opportunities for the meeting of journeymen of the same trade. They do not explain the establishment of continuous organisations of the wage-earners in the seventeenth and eighteenth rather than in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. The essential cause of the growth of durable associations of wage-earners must lie in something peculiar to the later centuries. This fundamental condition of Trade Unionism we discover in the economic revolution through which certain industries were passing. In all cases in which Trade Unions arose, the great bulk of the workers had ceased to be independent producers, themselves controlling the processes, and owning the materials and the product of their labour, and had passed into the condition of lifelong wage-earners, possessing neither the instruments of production nor the commodity in its finished state. “From the moment that to establish a given business more capital is required than a journeyman can easily accumulate within a few years, gild mastership—the mastership of the masterpiece—becomes little more than a name.... Skill alone is valueless, and is soon compelled to hire itself out to capital.... Now begins the opposition of interest between employers and employed, now the latter begin to group themselves together; now rises the trade society.”[40] Or, to express this Industrial Revolution in more abstract terms, we may say, in the words of Dr. Ingram, that “the whole modern organisation of labour in its advanced forms rests on a fundamental fact which has spontaneously and increasingly developed itself—namely, the definite separation between the functions of the capitalist and the workman, or, in other words, between the direction of industrial operations and their execution in detail.”[41]
It is often assumed that the divorce of the manual worker from the ownership of the means of production resulted from the introduction of machinery, the use of power, and the factory system. Had this been the case we should not, upon our hypothesis, have expected to find Trade Unions at an earlier date than factories, or in industries untransformed by machinery. The fact that the earliest durable combinations of wage-earners in England precede the factory system by a whole century, and occur in trades carried on exclusively by hand labour, reminds us that the creation of a class of lifelong wage-servants came about in more than one way.
We may note, to begin with, the very old institution of the printers’ “chapel,” with its “father” and “clerk,” an informal association among the compositors of a particular establishment for the discussion and regulation, not only of their own workshop conditions, but also of their relations with the employer, who must, in early days, have been a man of superior education, with an outlook much wider than that of his journeymen.
The “chapel” may possibly be nearly as old as the introduction of printing into this country.[42] We have no evidence as to the date at which the “chapels” of different printing offices entered into communication with each other in London, so as to form a Trade Union. But already in 1666 we have The Case and Proposals of the Free Journeymen Printers in and about London, in which they complain of the multiplication of apprentices and the prevalence of “turnovers”—grievances which vexed every compositors’ Trade Union throughout the nineteenth century.[43] Whether the “Free Journeymen Printers” managed to continue in existence as a Trade Union is uncertain. We have found no actual evidence of any other combination among compositors than the “chapel” earlier than the eighteenth century.
One of the earliest proven cases of continuous association among journeymen is that of the hatters (or feltmakers), whose combination—now the Journeymen Hatters’ Trade Union of Great Britain and Ireland—may perhaps claim to trace its ancestry from 1667, the very year in which the Feltmakers’ Company, consisting of their employers, obtained a charter from Charles II. Within a few months the journeymen in the various London workshops—each of which had apparently a workshop organisation somewhat resembling the printers’ “chapel”—had combined to present a petition to the Court of Aldermen against the Master, Wardens and Assistants of the Company. The Court of Aldermen decided that, in order “that the journeymen may not by combination or otherwise excessively at their pleasure raise their wages,” a piecework list is to be annually settled and presented for enactment by the Court of Aldermen. The journeymen seem to have co-operated with the employers in presenting this list, and in preventing the employment of non-freemen. The rates fixed did not, however, always satisfy the journeymen, especially when the employers were successful in getting them lowered; and in 1696 we read of a deputation appearing before the Court to declare that they had resolved among themselves not to accept any less wages than they had formerly received, and to ask for a revision of the order. They had, according to the masters’ statement, not confined themselves to peaceful resolutions, but had made an example of a journeyman who had remained at work at the reduced rates. “They stirred up the apprentices to seize upon him as he was working, to tie him in a wheelbarrow, and in a tumultuous and riotous manner to drive him through all the considerable places in London and Southwark.” It was alleged that the men were organised in “clubs,” which “raised several sums of money for the abetting and supporting such of them who should desert their masters’ service.” In 1697 the employers introduced the “character note” or “leaving certificate,” the Company enacting that no master should employ a journeyman who did not bring with him a certificate from his previous employer. Successive prosecutions of journeymen took place for refusing to work at the lawful rates, but the workmen seem to have had good legal advice, and to have defended themselves with skill. On one occasion they pleaded guilty, and promised amendment and the abandonment of their combination, whereupon the prosecution was withdrawn. On another occasion they got the case removed by writ of certiorari from the Lord Mayor’s session to the Assizes, where Lord Chief Justice Holt referred the dispute to arbitration. The award of June 1699 was a virtual victory for the journeymen, after a three years’ struggle, as it gave them an increase of rates, with a stoppage of all legal proceedings.[44] That the London Trade Clubs of the journeymen hatters, or at any rate their several workshop organisations, maintained a continuous existence we need not doubt; though we do not hear of them again until 1771, when they seem to have established a national federation of the local trade clubs existing in more than a dozen provincial towns with those of Southwark and the West End of London, very largely for the purpose of maintaining and enforcing the statutory limitation of apprentices. In 1775 this federation appears to have been strong enough, not only to obtain increased rates of wages, but also the exclusive employment of “clubmen.” There were “congresses” of the hatters in 1772, 1775, and 1777, held in London for the adoption of “bye-laws” for the whole trade; but we believe that these “congresses” were attended by delegates from the workshops in and near London only. It is clear that similar organisations existed in the other towns in which the trade was carried on. The members who were unemployed “tramped” from town to town, and regulations for their relief were framed. A weekly contribution of 2d. appears to have been paid by each member. The employers successfully petitioned Parliament in 1777 for a repeal of the old limitation of apprentices and a renewed prohibition of combination.[45]
More definite evidence is afforded by the development of the tailoring trade. In tailoring for rich customers the master craftsmen appear at the very beginning of the eighteenth century to have been recruited from the comparatively small number of journeymen who acquired the specially skilled part of the business—namely, the cutting-out.[46] “The tailor,” says an eighteenth-century manual for the young tradesman, “ought to have a quick eye to steal the cut of a sleeve, the pattern of a flap, or the shape of a good trimming at a glance, ... in the passing of a chariot, or in the space between the door and a coach.” There grew up accordingly a class of mere sewers, “not one in ten” knowing “how to cut out a pair of breeches: they are employed only to sew the seam, to cast the buttonholes, and prepare the work for the finisher.... Generally as poor as rats, the House of Call runs away with all their earnings, and keeps them constantly in debt and want.”[47]
This differentiation was promoted by the increasing need of capital for successfully beginning business in the better quarters of the metropolis. Already in 1681 the “shop-keeping tailor” was deplored as a new and objectionable feature, “for many remember when there were no new garments sold in London (in shops) as now there are.”[48] The “accustomed tailor,” or working craftsman, making up the customer’s own cloth, objected to “taylers being sales-men,” paying high rents for shops in fashionable neighbourhoods, giving long credit to their aristocratic clients, and each employing, in his own workshops, dozens or even scores of journeymen, who were recruited from the houses of call in times of pressure, and ruthlessly turned adrift when the season was over. And although it remained possible in the reign of King William the Third, as it still is in that of King George the Fifth, to start business in a back street as an independent master tailor with no more capital or skill than the average journeyman could command, yet the making of the fine clothes worn by the Court and the gentry demanded, then as now, a capital and a skill which put this extensive and lucrative trade altogether out of the reach of the thousands of journeymen whom it employed. Thus we find that at the very beginning of the eighteenth century the typical journeyman tailor in London and Westminster had become a lifelong wage-earner. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the earliest instances of permanent Trade Unionism that we have been able to discover occurs in this trade. The master tailors in 1720 complain to Parliament that “the Journeymen Taylors in and about the Cities of London and Westminster, to the number of seven thousand and upwards, have lately entered into a combination to raise their wages and leave off working an hour sooner than they used to do; and for the better carrying on their design have subscribed their respective names in books prepared for that purpose, at the several houses of call or resort (being publick-houses in and about London and Westminster) which they use; and collect several considerable sums of money to defend any prosecutions against them.”[49] Parliament listened to the masters’ complaint, and passed the Act 7, Geo. I. st. 1, c. 13, restraining both the giving and the taking of wages in excess of a stated maximum, all combinations being prohibited. From that time forth the journeymen tailors of London and Westminster have remained in effective though sometimes informal combination, the organisation centring round the fifteen or twenty “houses of call,” being the public-houses to which it was customary for the workmen to resort, and at which the employers sought any additional men whom they wished to engage. In 1744 the Privy Council was set in motion against their refusal to obey the Act of 1720.[50] In 1750-51 they invoked the assistance of the Middlesex Justices, and obtained an order requiring the masters to pay certain rates. In 1767 further legislation was, in spite of their eloquent protests, obtained against them.[51] In 1810 a master declared before a Select Committee that their combination had existed for over a century.[52]
An equally early instance of permanent trade combination is the woollen manufacture of the West of England. Here the rise of a class of lifelong wage-earners took a form altogether different from that in the London tailoring trade, but it produced the same result of combinations among the workers. The “wealthy clothiers” of Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Devon, who during the sixteenth century had “mightily increased in fame and riches, their houses frequented like kings’ courts,”[53] provided and owned the material of the industry throughout the whole manufacturing process, but employed a separate class of operatives at each stage. Buying the wool at one of the market towns, the capitalist clothier gave this to one set of hand-workers to be carded and spun into yarn in the village households. The yarn was passed on to another set—the handloom weavers—to be made into cloth in their cottages. The cloth was then “fulled” at the capitalist’s own mill (usually a water-mill) and again given out to be “dressed” by a new set of hand-workers, after which it was ready to be packed in the warehouse, and dispatched to Bristol or London for shipment or sale. In this case, as in that of the tailors, the operatives still retained the ownership of the tools of their particular processes, but it was practically impossible for them to acquire either the capital or the commercial knowledge necessary for the success of so highly organised an industry, and we accordingly find them entering into extensive combinations from the closing years of the seventeenth century. Already in 1675 the journeymen clothworkers of London combined to petition the Court of the Clothworkers’ Company against the engagement of workmen from the country. In 1682 we hear of them taking advantage of an extensive shipping order to refuse, in concert, to work under 12s. per week. But it is not clear whether any lasting association then resulted.[54] In the West of England the ephemeral revolts of the early part of the seventeenth century seem to have developed into lasting combinations by the end of that century. We hear of them at Tiverton as early as 1700.[55] In 1717 the Journals of the House of Commons contain evidence of the existence of a widespread combination of the woollen-workers in Devonshire and Somerset. The Mayor and Corporation of Bradninch complain “that for some years past the woolcombers and weavers in those parts have been confederating how to incorporate themselves into a club: and have to the number of some thousands in this county, in a very riotous and tumultuous manner, exacted tribute from many.”[56] The House of Commons apparently thought the evil could be met by Royal Authority and requested the King to issue a Proclamation. Accordingly on February 4, 1718, a Royal Proclamation was issued against these “lawless clubs and societies which had illegally presumed to use a common seal, and to act as Bodies Corporate, by making and unlawfully conspiring to execute certain By-laws or Orders, whereby they pretend to determine who had a right to the Trade, what and how many Apprentices and Journeymen each man should keep at once, together with the prices of all their manufactures, and the manner and materials of which they should be wrought.”[57] This kingly fulmination, which was read at the Royal Exchange, failed to effect its purpose, for the Journals of the House of Commons for 1723 and 1725 contain frequent complaints of the continuance of the combinations,[58] which are constantly heard of throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, dying away only on the supersession of the male by the female weaver at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not to be effectively revived until the beginning of the twentieth.
This early development of trade combinations in the West of England stands in striking contrast with their absence in the same industry where pursued, as in Yorkshire, on the so-called “Domestic System.” The Yorkshire weaver was a small master craftsman of the old type, himself buying and owning the raw material, and once or twice a week selling his cloth in the markets of Leeds or Wakefield, to which, we are told by Defoe in 1724, “few clothiers bring more than one piece.” “Almost at every house,” he writes of the country near Halifax, “there was a Tenter, and almost on every Tenter a piece of cloth, or kersey, or shalloon, ... at every considerable house was a manufactory; ... then, as every clothier must keep a horse, perhaps two, to fetch and carry for the use of his manufacture, viz., to fetch home his wool and his provisions from the market, to carry his yarn to the spinners, his manufacture to the fulling mill, and when finished, to the market to be sold, and the like; so every manufacturer generally keeps a cow or two or more, for his family, and this employs the two or three or four pieces of enclosed land about his house, for they scarce sow corn enough for their cocks and hens.”[59] Not until the Yorkshire cloth dealers began, about 1794, to establish factories on a large scale do we find any Trade Unions, and then journeymen and small masters struggled with one accord to resist the new form of capitalist industry which was beginning to deprive them of their control over the product of their labour.
The worsted industry appears everywhere to have been carried on rather like the woollen manufactures of the West of England than the same industry in Yorkshire. The woolcomber frequently owned the inexpensive hand-combs and pots with which he worked. But the woolcombers, like the weavers of the West of England, formed but one of several classes of workers for whose employment both capital and commercial knowledge was indispensable. We hear, already in 1674, of an attempt by the Leicester woolcombers to “form a company,”[60] though with what success we know not. In 1741 it was remarked that the woolcombers had “for a number of years past erected themselves into a sort of corporation (though without a charter); their first pretence was to take care of their poor brethren that should fall sick, or be out of work; and this was done by meeting once or twice a week, and each of them contributing 2d. or 3d. towards the box to make a bank, and when they became a little formidable they gave laws to their masters, as also to themselves—viz., That no man should comb wool under 2s. per dozen; that no master should employ any comber that was not of their club: if he did they agreed one and all not to work for him; and if he had employed twenty they all of them turned out, and oftentimes were not satisfied with that, but would abuse the honest man that would labour, and in a riotous manner beat him, break his comb-pots, and destroy his working tools; they further support one another in so much that they are become one society throughout the kingdom. And that they may keep up their price to encourage idleness rather than labour, if any one of their club is out of work, they give him a ticket and money to seek for work at the next town where a box club is, where he is also subsisted, suffered to live a certain time with them, and then used as before; by which means he can travel the kingdom round, be caressed at each club, and not spend a farthing of his own or strike one stroke of work. This hath been imitated by the weavers also, though not carried through the kingdom, but confined to the places where they work.”[61] The surviving members of the Old Amicable Society of Woolstaplers retain a tradition of local trade clubs dating from the very beginning of the eighteenth century, and of their forming a federal union in 1785. Old members of the United Journeymen Curriers’ Society have seen circulars and tramping cards, showing that a similar tramping federation existed in their trade from the middle of the century.[62]