Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

The rapidity with which the whole movement was conceived and carried out is one of the most surprising things about it; and nothing was wanting to the thoroughness with which mediæval society carried out its theory of the use which the craft guilds might be made to serve, whether willingly or no, in protecting the interests of the public. One discovery followed on another. As the King for convenience of administration constantly delegated new powers to the Mayor, and successive Acts and Charters added to his load of responsibilities for supervising work and wages and wares, so the Mayor in his turn passed on these charges to the craft – apparently exalting its power, in reality undermining its independence. Town governors embarrassed by the difficulty of overawing a turbulent community and keeping the peace with the aid of a couple of constables, found in the guild organization an admirable machinery all ready to their hands, and turned its officers, responsible as they were for the good behaviour and order of the whole trade, into an effective city police; so that when Bristol was in danger of a general riot in consequence of the imprisonment of its Mayor, the sheriff and recorder simply summoned the masters of the various crafts, and ordered them to keep the peace in their several trades. In the same way the crafts might be charged with the duty of “setting the watch” at night.[308] Difficulties of taxation were lightened by shifting responsibility from the municipal officers to the guilds – by charging for example the bakers or blanket-makers or fullers with a certain proportion of the ferm, to be collected among their members and paid in by their officers.[309] If walls were to be repaired and gates and towers and piers maintained, or if the expenses of a public festival were to be met,[310] the craft might again be brought into use, and for the due performance of the allotted task their common funds or individual profits might be reckoned as security.

When the town had thus laid firm hold on the guilds and discovered the various uses to which these bodies might be put in the municipal scheme, it began to look on them with as much favour as it had formerly shown distrust,[311] and proceeded industriously to multiply their numbers both by creating new fraternities and reorganizing the old ones.[312] The public opinion of the day showed itself strongly in favour of guilds, and indeed often outran the desires of the workin-gmen, so that the drawing together of artizans into the later craft fraternities was not always a matter of free will. If trades did not associate at their own wish they were presently forced to do so, and at the end of the fifteenth century we find the towns everywhere issuing orders that crafts which had hitherto escaped should be compelled to group themselves into companies. In Sandwich, for example, barbers, surgeons, and wax-chandlers were incorporated in 1482; and in 1494 wardens were appointed of the companies of tailors, shoemakers, weavers, and shearmen.[313] In Canterbury, where a spirit of revolt against the rules of the corporation seems to have gone abroad, where strangers were setting up trades within the liberties and laws had to be made to insure their paying “reasonable fine” for so doing, where masters neglected to enroll their apprentices in the books of the Common Chamber, and where the servants in husbandry riotously resisted the Statute of Labourers, the outraged city authorities declared that the crafts needed new regulations “to maintain due order for the weal and increase of the same,” and set to work to tighten the hold of the government on manufacturer and artizan, by forcing the trades to form themselves into companies, and setting at the head of every craft or mystery two of the city aldermen.[314] In very many cases the later incorporation of trades was connected with a pledge to undertake certain town works such as the building or repairing of gates;[315] and here we probably find the clue to the growing custom of combining several poor societies into one substantial association. When the crafts of Canterbury began to grudge spending their money on the Corpus Christi Play and on the Pageant of St. Thomas (which had to be revived in 1504 and paid for by the corporation), and also neglected “setting the watch,” the Town Council would have none of the excuse of poverty, only made “for lack of good ordering of certain crafts within the same city not corporate”; and it was settled that every trade “being not corporate for the nonsufficience of their craft be associate, incorporate, and adjoining to some other craft most needing support, if they will not labour to be corporate within themselves”; any obstinate craft that did not make suit to the Burghmote by next Michaelmas to be incorporate was to pay 20s. and give up their bodies for punishment. The shoemakers were accordingly joined in one guild with the leather-sellers and pouchmakers, the apothecaries with the grocers and chandlers.[316]

But if the town carried on business in this high-handed and imperious fashion, still in the double bargain made between the municipalities and the crafts it is not to be supposed that the advantage was all on one side. If the guild had services to sell to the community, it in its turn demanded a fair price. The trading society received all the benefits which fall upon communities by law established; and municipalities fostered with tender care the fraternities whose discipline they had first seized into their hands.[317] If trade was reaching out its branches to markets beyond the sea or if it was withering away, if the serving-men were growing poor or if they were waxing prosperous and threatening to dictate wages and prices, if new machinery was introduced to replace human labour, if foreign craftsmen came in to supplant the home-bred artizan – whatever the trouble might be the government of the people bravely stepped in to set the matter right. Craft rules once entered on the city records became an admitted part of the city statutes, to be enforced by the authority of the whole community, and the master found his jurisdiction recognized and enforced, and might call on the mayor, “if the men are rebels or contrarious and will not work,” to deal with them “according to law and reason.”[318] The whole strength of the town government could be invoked to suppress “foreign” labour or alien dealers and manufacturers, or combinations of men against their employers. No remedy was too heroic for patriotic burghers if they thought the prosperity of the local manufacturers was in danger. When the cloth trade of Canterbury had fallen into an evil plight the Town Council passed a law ordaining that in the next year the mayor and each of the twelve aldermen should buy a certain amount of cloth, the forty-eight councillors one-half that amount, and certain well-to-do inhabitants a like measure according to their degree.[319]

The system in fact was a curious balance of compromise among three distinct parties to a triangular strife – the whole body of traders and manufacturers organized in craft guilds, whose primary object was naturally to secure “their own singular profit,” as the phrase went, and to take on themselves as few of the common burdens as possible – the body of householders organized for civic purposes as the mayor, council, and commonalty, whose business was to keep order and carry on government – and the entire population of the town considered as consumers, who were thinking only of the supply of their own wants and whose chief aim was to buy the trader’s goods at the lowest possible price. For a time the borough corporations and the big public had the triumph on their side, and the traders were held in a position which was judged to be “consonant to reason.” But if the crafts passed through a period of subjection while their organization and discipline were being perfected, this by no means implied the practice of a like humility when they had learned how to manipulate the narrow oligarchy that formed the corporation, and to despise the incoherent masses that made up the body of consumers. For all this time the guilds were steadily, by the help of the town customs and administration, fortifying themselves in their position, strengthening their monopoly, closing their ranks, shutting out competitors from their gains. There came at last a moment when the crafts matched their strength with that of their masters, and the municipalities surrendered to the forces which they themselves had drilled. How completely the mediæval theory of the consumer’s interest in legislation about industry was swept away by the final success of the crafts in enforcing by their compact majority the original purpose of their own members, we may see from the chasm that separates in principle the ancient trade guild from the modern trade union. To-day we also are constantly making attempts to regulate industry through combinations whether of capitalists or of wage-earners. We have our associations of employers which have grown up to resist their workmen, and our unions of working-men formed to fight the employers; but neither is in the least concerned with the interests of the public, and not even in a phrase of courtesy are any of our modern associations supposed to “redound to the common profit” of the buyers. In this profound difference between the old and the new organizations of industry we may find a measure of the tremendous importance of the victory achieved by the crafts, when they had learned to use the disciplined forces of the guild for the capture of the municipal government. In later times, when public opinion almost ceased to work through the machinery of local government and only found occasional or incoherent expression, teaching societies under their more modern name of companies employed the same compact organization of monopolists to press their claims with redoubled success on the attention of the all-powerful central authorities, and the protection of the consumer was more and more forgotten in the protection of the privileged trader.

NOTE A

Besides the instances which have been given of the interference of the town with the crafts in questions that concerned the public, or that concerned the journeymen, there were other interesting cases in which it took part in struggles between the guilds of artizan producers and the guilds of dealers or middlemen for whom they worked. For the difference between the greater and the lesser crafts must always be borne in mind, and the fact that some of them were mere associations of working-men whose ordinances prove their subordinate position; though except possibly in rare instances the association was not originally formed, or at any time mainly used, for the purpose of resisting the middlemen.

The weavers in London for example who lived by themselves in a special quarter of the city formed a union of independent artizans, each of whom possessed his own loom; if by chance he became rich enough to own a second, he set his son or his wife to work at it, being forbidden by the craft-guild to hire it out of his own house and so increase the number of workers. They worked for the guild of “burellers” or cloth-makers, who gave out the yarn which they wove into a coarse cloth, and paid them a fixed wage or price by the piece. In very early times the weavers complained of the bad quality and short quantity of yarn supplied to them by the burellers, and of the prices paid for weaving; and about 1290 they planned a whole scheme of organized resistance. They reduced the hours of labour by stopping night-work, and appointing seasons when no work at all might be done; they limited the number of workers by excluding new comers and forbidding looms to be let out on hire; and as their work was necessarily done by the piece, they ruled that a given length of cloth which could easily be made in two or three days should always count as four days’ work and no less; and apparently further devised means for making plausible overcharges for work done. To compel the obedience of members of the guild they ordered that any weaver who offended against these regulations should be called up for judgement before their governing council of twenty-four, and punished by it in formal fashion in the same way as for offences against legal ordinances. And to force the submission of the burellers, they commanded a general strike among the weavers in case of complaint, and that all work should be stopped until amends were made for the wrong done. In the face of a public which had already fixed prices and wages by law and considered that question finally closed, the weavers who found themselves shut out from direct methods of gaining their ends had thus taken the crooked way, at least so their enemies said, of raising prices by limiting production, and thus forcing up the price of cloth.

For ten years middlemen and workmen seem to have fought out their quarrel together; but in 1300 the burellers brought their grievances to the mayor’s court, and charged the weavers with making new ordinances contrary to all law. There was little sympathy in the city courts for craftsmen whose rules were framed “for their singular profit and to the common injury of the people,” and the jury decided that the weavers had no right to limit the production of cheap cloth for the public by any device whatever. They were forbidden to shorten hours of labour by stopping work at any time save at night, or to check manufacture by preventing weavers from hiring out their looms to men of the craft; piece-work might be done as fast as any weaver chose to do it; all overcharges for work were forbidden. And lastly strikes were absolutely prohibited. In a second trial in 1321, when the obstinate weavers were called up before the king’s judges at the Tower, charged with making a “conspiracy and confederation” in the Church of St. Margaret de Patyns to raise the price of weaving each cloth by 6d., the king’s serjeant, who prosecuted, explained with precision that an unlimited number of workers working at full speed meant low wages and an abundance of cheap cloth, and that any attempt to reduce the number of labourers, to bring in short hours, or slow work – every device in fact by which the output of cloth was limited, was a device to empty the burgher’s purse into the workman’s pocket. In the common interest such “malicious machinations” must needs be put down; and indeed it would seem that some doubts were entertained about the wisdom of interfering even with night-work if the public was to have cheap cloth. (Riley’s Liber Custumarum, 123, 416-425.)

The guild, which by this time had declined from three hundred and eighty to eighty looms, was probably never strong enough in London to renew the strife. Perhaps the Flemish weavers supplanted them and took up the battle, for we find that in 1362 and 1366 they in their turn were making congregations and collecting money among the people of the trade through their bailiffs. By the ordinances which were drawn up to meet this emergency it was settled that in future congregations of the workers and collections of money among them might only be made with the consent of the twenty-four best men of the trade, and that these twenty-four should be chosen at the discretion of the mayor and aldermen. (Mem. Lond. 306-7, 332.)

A yet more complicated controversy divided the various crafts concerned in the making of saddles, where we have the reverse case of a union of middlemen conspiring to put under their feet the crafts of artizans with which they were connected. The London Saddlers who sold to the public formed as early as the twelfth century a guild of employers and middlemen. (Madox, 26.) Of the different crafts that worked for them were the Joiners who made the wooden framework, the fore and hind saddle-bows cut out of a quarter of a horizontal section of a tree and hollowed to fit the horse’s back; the Painters who painted these frames; and the Lorimers (that is the coppersmiths and ironsmiths) who made the metal work for the trapping and the harness of the horses. As for the saddlers themselves they seem only to have put the finishing touches to the saddles, or put on the leather covering for the great lords who were not contented with painted wood; but as all orders and all sales were carried out by them they had the ultimate control of the whole trade.

The first dispute arose out of the complaints of the public of the badness of saddles supplied to them; the saddlers threw the blame on the joiners; and the joiners seem to have in their turn pushed it back on an illegal or “blackleg” labour encouraged by the saddlers for their own advantage. “Bad apprentices who fly from their masters, and other false men, betake themselves to the woods, and there make up their work of saddle-bows glued together and send them by night to painters and to saddlers within the franchise” who profited largely by the cheap labour of the “bad apprentices” working under the cover of the woods. The authorities forbade these practices, and in 1308 granted to the joiners’ guild ordinances to protect their monopoly of the trade and check irregular labour. (Lib. Cus. 80.)

A few years later the joiners made common cause with the painters and lorimers – a formidable conspiracy, for the lorimers had already been organized as a craft for half a century, and ordinances which strictly protected their monopoly lay for safe keeping in the city treasury. (Lib. Cus. 78-9. The lorimers included two ranks – the master who kept house and forge and paid fine to the commune of London; and the journeymen who paid to the mistery but not to the city.) In 1320, however, the saddlers contrived to have the lorimers’ ordinances annulled and publicly burnt in Cheapside. (Lib. Cus. lix.) In 1327 the combined trades broke out into open war one day in Cheapside and Cripplegate, and “strongly provided with an armed force exchanged blows and manfully began to fight.” (Riley’s Mem. 156-162.) Mayor and sheriffs came to stop the riot; the trades were summoned to appear at the Guildhall, and complaints were presented on both sides. The story of the saddlers was (1) that the three trades had organized a union for strike purposes, in case any one of them should have a quarrel with any saddler.

(2) That the coppersmiths were “out of their own heads” refusing to receive any strange workman of the same trade into their craft until he shall have made oath to conceal their misdeeds, the implication being of course an attempt to raise prices by limiting numbers.

(3) And further the joiners and painters “do set every point of their trade at a fixed price … by reason whereof they are making themselves kings of the land, to the destruction of all the people of the land and to the annihilation of the saddlers.”

The trades emphatically denied both the strike conspiracy and the fixing of prices, which at all events indicates that they knew such claims would never be conceded by the public, and formulated their counter-charges.

(1) That the saddlers had formed a “conspiracy and collusion among themselves” and bound themselves to it by oath that they would compel the joiners, painters, and lorimers not to sell to any one but themselves any work they did pertaining to saddlery. The workman was thus to be bound to them hand and foot.

(2) That when the workmen come to ask for payment due to them they are so bandied about among the said saddlers with offensive words, beaten, and otherwise maltreated, that they have no longer the daring to demand their just debts.

(3) That the saddlers make old saddles into new, thus cheating the workmen of trade that ought to come to them.

The first charge was denied by the saddlers, but as they promised henceforth never to make any confederacy again their denial was scarcely conclusive. They pleaded that the sheriff’s court was the place for questions of debt. And they promised never again to sell old saddles for new.

Evidently the excitement in London over this trade dispute was extreme, for when arbitration by the city officers was proposed, and the crafts summoned to meet in the church of St. Martin’s le Grand before six chosen aldermen, they arrived there in so great multitudes and with such a concourse of people eager to hear the solution of the great trade problem, that no business could be done. The aldermen ordered another meeting at which elected representatives from each craft only should attend. Six saddlers therefore were confronted with two ironsmiths, two coppersmiths, two painters, and two joiners; and after a day’s discussion a new group of thirteen was chosen by the trades and a concord was made “by the ordinance of these common friends and presented to the mayor and aldermen.” The result was a decided victory of the working crafts over the dealers. The nine chief offenders among the saddlers were driven out of the trade, and the saddlers bound in a heavy penalty never again to take them back, to sustain them, or to help them, till they had made peace with the crafts. (Mem. Lond. 156-162.) As to the introduction of “blackleg” labour by the masters, it was decreed that no stranger was to be brought into the trades till he had been received at the husting by the assent of eight respectable men of the craft. The regulation that no repaired work was to be sold for new prevented another form of irregular labour, since trades might not legally repair for any but private customers.

In this instance it was the employers’ union that was beaten; but it is evident that the question mainly turned on the convenience of the public, and their dislike to have bad saddles supplied to them. It is also evident that save in the case of some unusually powerful combination of working crafts there was but little hope for the humbler trades in a conflict with dealers or employers backed by the public in keeping down prices. The Tawyers or dressers of skins made ordinances in 1365 “as to how they shall serve the pelterers and how much they shall take for their labour.” (Riley’s Mem. Lond. 330.) The records may state that the ordinances were “provided and made by the serving-men called tawyers,” but it is hard to believe that these “serving-men” acted of their own free will in framing rules which put their necks mercilessly and irrevocably under the yoke of the pelterers, binding themselves to serve them only, to work for the old fixed prices, and to bow to their jurisdiction in trade offences “according to the award and discretion of the rulers of the trade of pelterers.”

There were other grounds of dispute between craft and craft, and battles raged at times between guilds as to the boundaries of the trades, and the relations between them – disputes which sprang from the “overlapping” of different crafts engaged upon one and the same product; or from the “apportionment” of work between closely related trades. Shoemakers were forbidden to be tanners (Stat. 13 Rich. II. i. cap. 12); then allowed to tan leather till the next Parliament (Stat. 4 Henry IV. cap. 35); and in 1423 again forbidden to be tanners (2 Henry VI. cap. 7). And as the tanners were protected against the shoemakers, so shoemakers were protected against cobblers. There was many a quarrel between the cordwainers who made new boots and the cobblers who mended old ones, the cobblers complaining that the cordwainers were preventing them from gaining their living as they had done of old. In 1395 at the king’s order the mayor summoned twelve of each craft to state their grievances. The question of how much mending might be supposed to make a new boot required the most detailed inquiry: and the apportionment of labour was exact. No person who meddled with old shoes was to make new ones; all work with new leather was declared to be within the sphere of the cordwainers, and the cobblers were restricted to mending, and that with very small pieces of leather. Fourteen years later the lines were drawn still more precisely; the re-soling of old boots was reserved to the cordwainers, but the cobblers were allowed to mend with pieces of new leather boots that were burnt or broken. (Mem. Lond. 539-40, 572-3.) Ordinances of this kind were not necessarily designed for the protection of the workers, though no doubt that may often have been partly intended; but in the first instance were probably meant to make the supervision of trades and inspection of wares more efficient in the public interest.

CHAPTER VII

THE TAILORS OF EXETER

It was in the fifteenth century, at the very time when the towns seem to have been most energetic in tightening the bonds that held the crafts fast to their service, that we find the crafts on their side most impatient of subjection, and eager to test their strength in a direct conflict with the civic rulers. Their restless energy broke down all barriers between trade and politics, and forced each into the service of the other; for by whatever stratagem the crafts proposed to compel the constituted authorities to recognize them in a partnership of power – whether a wealthy guild planned the winning of a charter which should make it a free and independent corporation in the town; or whether a combination of less powerful trades demanded to be officially included in the municipal government which regulated their business, or in any other way to control its action – in any and every conflict with the ruling oligarchy the guilds were forced to enlist the sympathy of the burghers and to become leaders of popular discontent. On the other hand the commons, with no resource against the official class save an occasional mass meeting, eagerly welcomed the aid of the disciplined army enrolled in the guild, and under the politic guidance of expert leaders, to give weight to their claims for more power. Thus under the stress of the growing passion for political emancipation, trading interests constantly seem to merge altogether into the ambitions and animosities of parties wholly occupied in a conflict about civic rights. No doubt a prevailing suspicion of some such intimate connection between the desire of the crafts to escape from municipal control and a democratic movement in city politics, gave fire to the discussions which from the first origin of the question disturbed market-place and council-chamber, law-court and Parliament, and proclaimed the vehemence of feeling with which so great a matter was debated.