[111] These regulations for a long period were of marked value for insuring a high grade of workmanship according to traditional methods, but later they became a most serious impediment to any improvements in industrial processes. Originality, new designs, and labor-saving devices were practically prohibited, and some industries were destined to remain almost stagnant down to the French Revolution.
[112] Among the oldest traceable guilds in Paris were the Master Chandlers and Oilmen, who received royal privileges in 1061. The butchers, tanners, shoemakers, drapers, furriers, and purse makers, were other old Parisian guilds.
[113] The fullers were always suing the weavers. Could the latter, if they wished, dye the cloth which they themselves had woven? Bakers were always at law with keepers of small cookshops who baked their own bread, etc.
[114] Certain saints would naturally be the patrons of certain particular crafts—e.g., St. Joseph of the carpenters, St. Peter of the fishmongers, etc.
[115] A master could not employ more than one or two paid workers, lest he build up too big a business and ruin his competitors. The guild system seems deliberately contrived to perpetuate the existence of a great number of very small industries.
[116] The extreme difficulty of collecting loans made to powerful seigneurs went far to explain these astonishing rates of interest. The chances of an unfriended Jew being unable to collect any part of his loan were extremely great. As a rule his hopes lay in becoming the indispensable man of business and financier of a king or other great lord who would support him in recovering principal and interest from lesser debtors, in return for great favors to himself. Thus Richard I of England is alleged to have made the Jews settled in his realm furnish nearly one third of his entire revenues, as recompense for allowing them to use his courts to collect from their private debtors.
[117] Mediæval coinages varied to such an extreme extent that it is almost impossible to make correct general statements about their modern values. In the time of Philip Augustus, probably the North French money table was something like this:
1 pound (livre)—2 marks—20 (earlier 24) sous—240 deniers—4760 obols.
A sou, merely a money of account, was equal to about 20 modern francs ($3.86 gold), and the denier, a regular coin, to about one franc (19.3 cents, gold). The copper obols were thus worth about one cent. But money in the Feudal Age had a purchasing power equal to at least ten times what it is to-day, and attempts at close estimating are decidedly futile.
[118] The courts of Champagne took particular pains to assure merchants of honest treatment and protection, and their fairs were unusually successful. Champagne, of course, by its central location between the Seine and the Rhine, the Midi and Flemish lands, was exceedingly well placed to attract merchants.