THE LABOUR QUESTION
PERHAPS no complaint is at first sight so startling amid the vigorous
growth of manufacture and commerce which marked the fifteenth century,
and in a society where pestilence and plague apparently kept population
stationary, as the complaint of surplus labour; and the elusive way
in which the problem appears and vanishes again makes it yet more
bewildering. People complained at one moment of labourers unemployed,
and at the next they modified old laws because they could not get
workmen enough. Masters on all sides were evading the regulations which
limited the number of their apprentices and journeymen, and still cried
to the State for protection for their craft because the artizan could
find no work to do. Men talked of foreign competition and too many
workers in every trade, and took forcible measures to keep down prices
and wages. The lawmakers were forbidding the import of foreign goods so
as to give employment to destitute artizans at home, and the artizans
were conspiring to limit their output and raise their prices. That
there was some real trouble whose indeterminate presence can be felt
behind all these conflicting appearances we cannot doubt; but it may be
questioned whether the trouble was that of labour for which there was
no demand.
Many of the complaints no doubt arose in some period of peculiar
suffering, when an outbreak of war or the rivalry between England and
the Netherlands shut the great markets across the sea, and left weavers
with idle looms and bales of cloth unsold; and we must occasionally
take the phrases of statutes passed under the stress of some temporary
calamity as merely describing a distress too unaccustomed to be borne
in silence. For instance the statute of 1488 which was passed during
the depression of trade that marked the first years of the reign of
Henry the Seventh proposed to restore prosperity to the drapers’
craftsmen, for “they that should obtain their needy sustentation and
living by means of the same drapery, for lack of such occupation daily
fall in great number to idleness and poverty;”[190] but the commercial
treaties which distinguished the next three or four years of Henry’s
reign were probably more effectual than any statute of this kind, and
they sufficiently prove that the trade was not in a dying or decrepit
state.
Occasionally too the murmurings of the people only tell of troubles
that follow every industrial change. To an employer the new industry
came to search out the extent of his resources and his activity. What
with the haste to make wealth, and the hurry of keeping pace with the
demands of foreign traders and of big markets, he was hard pressed
by the necessity of cheap and swift production, and his attempts to
improve his industrial methods brought him into collision with workers
to whom ruder and more wasteful ways of doing business were often
more immediately profitable. Labour disputes arose over questions of
wages and piece-work, of holidays, of the employment of women[191]
and cheap workers. Occasionally the master carried on an illicit
industry—keeping workmen privately engaged in his own house or on
board a ship in the port,[192] so as to withdraw his servants from the
supervision of the town council, and his goods from charges for the
town dues. If he had accumulated a little capital he perhaps moved out
to the valleys of Yorkshire or Gloucestershire in search of water-power
for his fulling-mills, or of finer wool for his weavers; or forsook the
manufacturing town for some rural district where labour was plentiful,
and where he could escape the heavy municipal dues which his business
could ill afford to pay. While the valley of the Stroud was welcoming
Flemish settlers and seeing mills spring up along every stream, London
and Canterbury found their manufacturing trade slipping away from
them;[193] and the glory of Norwich departed as cloth-makers pushed
along the moorland streams of Yorkshire to Wakefield and Huddersfield
and Halifax, and set up fulling-mills among the few peasant huts of
remote hamlets.
Difficulties also arose when the manufacturer began to contrive the
first rude form of a factory system, and so disturbed the occasional
labour of his neighbourhood; after the manner of the brewers of Kent,
who besides having to supply London and the big trading ports of the
coast were also beginning to send out beer to Flanders, and who no
longer as of old bought their malt from the people, making only some
trifling hundred quarters or so in their own houses, but began to make
at home as much as a thousand or even eighteen hundred quarters, to
the hurt of those farmers and youths who had once gained a livelihood
by preparing malt for sale.[194] Or perhaps enterprising masters began
to introduce new machinery to keep pace with the increasing demand
for their wares. Such an innovation was resisted as hotly as in our
own century. The shearers of cloth raised a cry against a new iron
instrument invented for raising the nap of cloth so that it could be
quickly burned off without the old labour, while shearers were left
idly loitering.[195] Among the cap-makers “some of the trade provided
a water-mill for fulling their caps” in 1376, by which apprentices
and freemen of the trade found themselves deprived of work and “at
the point of perishing.” Their appeal to the town was of course on
the ground that caps so fulled were bad wear for the community,
and the mills were in consequence forbidden;[196] but a century of
disobedience and evasions and wranglings followed until the working
fullers appealed to Parliament itself, and in 1482 it was decreed that
hats, bonnets, and caps, which “were wont to be faithfully ... thicked
by men’s strength, that is to say with hands and feet,” should never
again be fulled in fulling-mills invented “by subtle imagination to
the destruction of the labours and sustenance of many men,” and to the
“final undoing” of the cap-makers.[197]
Even the question of foreign immigration stirred up contention between
clothiers and weavers. Manufacturers trading in marts where the fine
work of Flemish experts—the most skilful weavers in Europe—had been
displayed, required for the success of their trade the services of the
finely trained artizans who took refuge in England from the ruin that
awaited them in Flanders, and in many a town skilled immigrants found
themselves welcome guests.[198] Under the protection of the classes to
whom the foreign artizan can never have been unwelcome—the consumer,
the merchant, and the master—he fared well enough; for so long as he
was subjected to the local control of the guild or the municipality,
forced to dwell in the house of an Englishman, forbidden to sell in
retail, kept under a supervision so strict as practically to shut
him out from the market, the employers of labour saw no reason for
anxiety.[199] On the other hand the complacent view of the manufacturer
was not shared by the English artizan; and in places where trade was
shrinking or where there was financial trouble the foreigner might
chance to be made into the luckless scape-goat of the community, and
have heaped on his head all the calamities that burdened the guild
or the municipality. For example, in the middle of the fifteenth
century when the Bristol wool trade was half ruined by the loss of
Bordeaux which destroyed its great market and brought about lasting
changes in the French manufacturing centres; and by the determination
of the Merchant Adventurers to establish in London and in favour of
London merchants a practical monopoly of the cloth trade with the
Northern Seas, a complaint was made by the journeymen against the
master-weavers who had “brought in and put in occupation of the craft
strangers, persons of divers countries, not born under the King’s
obeisance but rebellious,” urged the desperate working man in search
of an unassailable argument which should finally decide the matter,
“which been sold to them as it were heathen people”; and the Mayor
granted the desired order that no foreign weaver should be brought into
Bristol[200]—a law which did not however restore the cloth trade to
their city.
In this case we seem really to hear the complaint of the poor
journeyman; and elsewhere, in appeals for compassion and protection,
in statutes of Parliament and royal charters,[201] or in ordinances
of Town Councils for his relief, we seem from time to time to find
ourselves on the brink of a labour problem present to the modern as to
the ancient world. But generally the story of foreign immigration as
it has been handed down to us is in no sense the story of the labour
question. An association of masters seeking to secure a strict monopoly
for their own advantage could not bring a more powerful argument than
the desperate situation of their workmen—an argument which might be
used by a powerful corporation confident of official support, or
by a dying trade which had been utterly beaten in the competitive
struggle—and which taken alone throws little light on the subject.
When the dispute with the foreigner emerges it generally seems to
bear the character of a quarrel among dealers rather than a grudge of
artizans. The working man had no doubt his grievance, but it is not
his voice which we hear—it is the voice of his more noisy neighbour
the shopkeeper or the trader, who knowing that he himself had little
to expect from the sympathy of the English consumer, passed briefly
over the subject of his own immediate interests, and used with artistic
skill the sufferings of the wage-earner to kindle a general compassion
and heighten the effect of an appeal to an anxious government or
an alarmed public. For as we read the Town Ordinances and Acts of
Parliament[202] these strange “artificers” who were setting the world
on fire put on the guise of pedlars or small dealers who “bring much
foreign wares with them to sell,” and were thus especially obnoxious
to the native traders; such foreign pests, it appears, were going “to
men’s doors” “taking up standings” and there “showing” their wares to
the undoing of the natives, and hiring servants of their own people to
retail their goods about the country—an unpardonable offence in the
eyes of London merchants, who were moving heaven and earth to become
the only middlemen of the foreign trade. With varying success the
native dealers clamoured for protective legislation, praying that the
strangers might be forbidden to engage freely in trade, and forced as
journeymen to serve only an English master, or as masters to employ
only English servants. A usurper like Richard the Third, anxious to
conciliate the leading burghers of the towns, was ready among other
things to forbid any alien whatever to become a handicraftsman, or any
foreigner to take an apprentice of his own people save his own son or
daughter;[203] while on the other hand, Henry the Seventh carried out
his own views of industrial policy by bringing weavers over to develope
the trade of Yorkshire and Devonshire.
But under whatever restrictions the foreigners still came, and the same
cry against them went up loudly from time to time. Manufacturers and
middlemen who would have gladly welcomed immigrants so long as they
gave themselves out as men working for hire, resented the invasion
of strangers coming from over sea “with their wives, children, and
household, and will not take upon them any laborious occupation as
carting and ploughing but use making of cloths and other handicrafts
and easy occupations;” and this apparently as masters, for the
complaint was that they employed only foreign apprentices, so that
English people were falling into idleness and becoming thieves,
beggars, and vagabonds.[204] “The land is so inhabited with a great
multitude of needy people, strangers of divers nations ... that your
liege people, Englishmen, cannot imagine or tell whereto or to what
occupation that they shall use or put their children to learn or
occupy within your said cities or boroughs”—so the Londoners complain
in 1514: and add that if this went on Englishmen would no longer be
able to pay their rents, maintain their households, and subdue and
vanquish their ancient enemies the French.[205] Hopeless, in fact, of
combating the theory of his time that trade legislation was meant in
the first instance to serve the interests of the buyer rather than the
dealer, and fearing lest an argument for monopoly of sale might hardly
withstand the criticism of a hostile public, the trader was tempted to
discover some circuitous course, and catch at the cause of the poor
workman, the terror of the French, and the patriotic vision of a nation
of warrior weavers,[206] as infallible appeals to the sentiment of his
time.
We find animosities and complaints of the same kind directed against
the struggling suburban manufacturers, who competed with the townsfolk
by dint of braving every hardship, and accustoming their hands to every
form of labour. To the town manufacturer they were an abomination;
and he sought to enlist the sympathy of the public by loud complaints
that it was only workmen who had scarcely learned their trade who thus
left their masters to set up for themselves and make an independent
living. It is probable indeed that their numbers were often recruited
by small masters who had fallen through poverty out of the regular
ranks of industry; as for example when an apprentice or a stranger set
up in business to try his luck, and having been given perhaps three or
four years in which to pay by instalments the sum charged by the guild
for opening shop, made his escape out of the borough just before his
last fine became due,[207] being by that time possibly ready to start
as a free trader in an “upland” hovel, and to eke out a scanty living
by working at his hand loom or his rope-making in the intervals of
cultivating field or garden. But such home industries, however they
originated, were inevitably disallowed by the municipal organizers
of labour. They diverted trade, established a formidable competition
of unregulated labour, reduced tolls, and emptied the tax-gatherer’s
collecting box. Town councillors and shopkeepers and journeymen with
one accord declared war on those who for their own “singular advantages
and commodities, nothing regarding the upholding of the said towns,
nor the common wealth of the handicrafts ... nor the poor people
which had living by the same,” hired farms and became graziers and
husbandmen, and yet took to weaving, fulling, and shearing cloths in
their own houses;[208] or who, like the grasping people that withdrew
from Bridport, took farms “for their private lucre” and not only “used
husbandry” but made cables, ropes, ships’ tackling, and halters in
their idle hours.[209]
Disputes of the kind which have been mentioned, however, were of
trifling importance in the secular controversy between the leaders of
industry and the general body of workers, as it presented itself in
the Middle Ages; and the great problem of all—that which concerned no
separate groups or industries, but the whole mass of labour that was to
be let out for hire—was one inarticulate through its very magnitude.
While workers were being set free from the land wherever arable farms
were turned into enclosed pastures for sheep farming, they were called
for by the manufacturer whose new business of making cloth needed more
hands than the old business of selling wool. But the labour released
from the field was perhaps not always easily transferred to the shop;
and when the countryman who with his fellows had toiled on the land
“All for dread of their death such dints gave hunger,”[210]
and, save when harvest time gave a brief plenty, ate in suffering his
cake of oats with a few curds, his “bread of beans and peases,” his
onions and half-ripe cherries, and little baked apples,[211]—when he
forsook his “cote” and carried to the town nothing but his hunger,
his ignorance, his want of skill, he did not necessarily mend his
fortune by turning from the serf of the landlord into the wretched
dependent of the employer. Moreover, as though the obstacles in the
way of his helplessness were not already sufficiently overwhelming, by
the ingenious device of man the difficulty was made yet more acute.
Artificial barriers to keep in check the labour that clamoured at their
gates were thrown up with all the united strength of State and Town
and Guild. The State in order to protect the agricultural interest
strictly forbade the poor countryman to leave husbandry for trade,
or to apprentice his child to any craft.[212] The towns for reasons
of their own hastened to intensify the effect of these laws by local
regulations, or by the strictness with which they carried out old
enactments.[213] Finally the guilds fenced themselves about with rules
to protect their monopoly by limiting their numbers and shutting out
intruders. As the fifteenth century went on all these bodies alike
enforced their provisions with increasing severity, and the danger that
threatened the working-class through the industrial revolution was
hardened into a present calamity.
It is impossible to conceive that regulations of this kind were
self-denying ordinances on the part of employers to limit the supply
of labour; they rather come to us as echoes of the first great
controversy concerning the position and privileges of the hired worker.
The “protection” of industry from all competition was the first and
the last creed of the crafts (as distinguished from the general
public)—a protection by which every conceivable danger that might
threaten the interests of the monopolists was struck down, whether
it was the competition of other allied trades, or that introduced by
machinery and new methods of organizing labour, or rivalry between
members in the same craft, or the intrusion of dealers from the
provinces, or the immigration of alien manufacturers from abroad. As
to the main principle there was no dispute; and there were some of its
less important developements where the interests of the masters and
the journeymen coincided. But to employers and dealers the monopoly
of trade chiefly meant their own monopoly of production and sale;
while the wage-earner’s dominant anxiety was to keep surplus labour
out of the craft, lest the regular workman might be deprived of his
comfortable certainty of subsistence. Labour however was too sorely
needed in the enormously increasing trade of the country for masters
to deny themselves its services; nor did any of their ordinances
necessarily tend in the least to produce a result so disastrous to
themselves. In their eyes the important matter was that workers should
be kept docile and obedient, retained in country districts where they
were most advantageous to the contractor, and prevented from making
claims on the control or the profits of industry which must have
hampered the great business of the moment—the expansion of English
trade; and the ability of the craft-leaders was shown in the masterly
tactics which they adopted, the success which they achieved, and the
political sagacity by which they accomplished their purpose without
open strife or public agitation.
For it seems probable that the labour question had its origin with
the very beginning of manufacturing industries, and that long before
the fifteenth century a large class of hired workers already existed.
We know that in the fourteenth century the wage-earners in the crafts
already constituted a force which the State and the municipality
had come to fear, and that not only in London but in other towns
journeymen had learned discontent, and had begun to combine for
self-protection.[214] We know also that before 1340 one manufacturing
town at least (and no doubt the records will ultimately tell of more)
owned its miserable race of labourers who worked by the day at a bare
subsistence wage of a penny, an outcast people whose abject poverty was
their only protection; men possessing absolutely nothing by which they
could be attached for crimes or offences, and who could laugh at any
attempt of the court to summon or to fine them; while their employers,
not being held legally responsible save under some special ordinance
for such day labourers as these, took no care for the debt or crime
of a class without privilege or standing in the eye of the law.[215]
And obscure as the subject still is, we seem at a very early time
to detect behind the guild system a growing class of “uncovenanted”
labour, which the policy of the employers constantly tended to foster,
their aim being on the one hand to limit the number of privileged
serving-men, and on the other to increase the supply of unprotected
workers.
It was for this reason that while the demand for manufactures was
increasing beyond all experience, the number of men who sought
through apprenticeship to enter the trade was most strictly limited
by law;[216] and when a man had finished his apprenticeship cunning
devices were found for casting him back among the rank and file of
hired labourers;[217] so that the skilled workman who had passed
through his time of service but had not been admitted to the freedom of
his trade[218]—whether because he failed to secure the recommendation
of the heads of the guild, or because he was unable to pay the double
fees demanded for the franchise of the city and the franchise of the
craft[219]—was condemned henceforth to remain a mere journeyman
without apparently much hope of promotion. For the enrolled journeyman
there was some protection, though of a very limited kind, in the guild;
but a lower and more helpless class of serving-men was recruited from
the apprentices who had not worked out their full time—poor children
whose service had begun at seven or twelve, and who while yet mere
lads were induced to cut short the seven or ten years fixed in their
trade for apprenticeship, and entering hastily on work for a daily
wage found themselves from that time forward counted as unskilled
labourers;[220] apparently deprived of the protection of the law in
the matter of wages, without any standing in the guild, and lying in
the power of the craft-masters for their hire, they were for the rest
of their lives admitted to work on sufferance as bringing cheap labour
into the market. Finally even the statutes which forbade poor country
people to apprentice their children in the towns,[221] far from proving
any intention of withdrawing the villagers from the service of the
manufacturer, may have been the result of an alliance between landowner
and employer to serve their several ends, and have been designed by
the town magnate merely to prevent the dependent country workers from
flocking into the boroughs in search of apprenticeship and subsequent
freedom of the trade.[222] For it seems probable that the town dealers
had very early been accustomed to contract with the country folk for
the lower and rougher kinds of work. In Norwich, for example, all the
tanners’ business was at first done in the country, and the skins
sent into Norwich to be worked and finished by the parmenters; and it
was perhaps but a generation before the passing of the Act of Henry
the Fourth that the tanners came into Norwich and settled down by
its river side. And in like manner all cloth brought to the Norwich
market was country-made, and originally no wool was sold in the Norwich
streets and no cloth manufactured in its workshops.[223] The same
system of contracting for work in surrounding villages[224] was known
far beyond Norwich, but its local history varied greatly with local
circumstances. In that city, where trade was manifestly too vigorous
to be shut up into a few square miles, and where the surrounding
population had turned into a people of journeymen and artizans, the
municipality seems to have inaugurated the policy of governing an
industry it had no desire to suppress, by seizing the organization of
the country districts into the same hands as that of the town, and
bringing the workers under the same municipal control[225]—a policy,
it would seem, of merchants and employers mainly occupied with the
expansion of commerce, and blind to the danger which their experiment
implied of the breaking up of municipal life. But in other towns we
seem to detect a vain attempt of the working population to clutch
at a trade which had grown into a free maturity, and force it back
into the old municipal nursery under the tutors and governors of its
infancy; as in Worcester, where the ordinances contain many proofs of
having been drawn up under strong popular influences, and where the
masters were forbidden to give out wool to weavers so long as there
were people enough in the city to do the work, “in the hindering of the
poor commonalty of the same.”[226] It is evident that the manufacturer
might, from his own point of view, feel the strongest objection to
flooding the towns with an unmanageable number of workers attached to
the guild who could, by virtue of their numbers and their covenanted
position, call on the municipal government to interfere for their
special benefit in the management of the trade.[227]
If we consider therefore the case of the working population in
town or country—whether we remember the poor folk of the hamlets,
known to Langland, that “have no chattel but their crafts and few
pence taketh;”[228] or consider in the towns the lowest class of
casual labourers working at a wage of a penny a day, or the little
more fortunate groups of unskilled serving-men, or the depressed
company of the skilled journeymen; whether we trace in villages or
boroughs the astonishing multitude of religious fraternities which
sometimes at least concealed an illicit attempt at self-protection
by the wage-earners; or examine the rigour with which towns and
guilds repressed every attempt of the working men to combine in any
association for their common benefit—we find ourselves again and
again confronted with the problem of labour. In the thick darkness
which still envelopes the subject dogmatism itself is swallowed up.
But as we look into the obscurity, the borderland of the covenanted
trades and the dim regions that lie beyond their recognized limits
become crowded with the masses of the common workers—dreary groups of
labourers seething with inarticulate discontent, themselves suffering
the terrors and bondage of a harsh law, and from time to time, as they
emerge into a brief light of riot and disorder,[229] kindling the
alarms of the settled and protected classes above them. Associations of
the richer merchants inspired by a common interest drew together for
mutual support; and friendly Town Councils whose policy was to keep
down the number of voters—especially of poor craftsmen who might be
troublesome—and all whose members were indeed themselves employers and
craft masters, made alliance with the guilds, and passed laws which,
by shutting out apprentices from the freedom of the craft, debarred
them from the franchise of the town. It was in vain that from time to
time as the evil increased the central government sought to interfere
with craft-masters and wardens who “for their own singular profit” made
ingenious bye-laws or ordinances for the exclusion of new comers;[230]
local alliances were too strong for it, and local wits too cunning,
and one of the main results of the triumphant guild system was to
develope throughout the country a formless and incoherent multitude
of hired labourers, who could by no possibility rise to positions of
independence, and had no means of association in self-defence. As the
weaker members of the crowd from time to time sank back into utter
penury, the outcasts of the industrial system slowly gathered into a
new brotherhood of the destitute; and even in the fifteenth century,
long before they had been reinforced by the waifs and strays of town
and country that flocked into their sad fellowship on the dissolution
of the monasteries, the advanced guard of the army of paupers appears
in the streets of the boroughs to trouble the counsels of municipal
rulers.