THE CRAFTS AND THE TOWN
FROM the mediæval Craft Association to the modern Trade Union the
distance, as we have seen, is great. In the guild or “mistery” of
the older world, instead of associations of working men we have to
deal mainly with associations of producers or middlemen, whose battle
is not the organized attack of wage-earners on the profits of their
masters, but an attempt of dealers and manufacturers to stand out for
their interests against the whole body of consumers or against the
aggressions of competing trades; while far from being a voluntary
association, or a self-governed institution of spontaneous growth,
its individual members were if necessary enrolled by compulsion, and
governed with little regard to their own consent. But the relations
between the trades and the municipalities show a yet more striking
contrast. According to a modern English theory the common good is
best served when we allow every artizan and trader perfect liberty to
develope his own industry in his own way.[267] But the mediæval world
was fully convinced that since all trade and manufacture was carried
on for the benefit of the public, all trade and manufacture should be
subject to public control; and no one then questioned that it was the
duty and the right of the State or the municipality to fix hours of
labour, rates of wages, prices of goods, times and places of sale, the
quality of the wares to be sold, and so on. In the interest, not of
the trader or manufacturer, but of the whole community, the central
government made general laws for regulating industry, and the towns
carried out these laws by their officers and filled up the blanks
of legislation after their own will; while in the exercise of the
enormous power which law and public opinion gave to the authorities,
the power of the people was supposed to be used with impartial justice
alike against the dealer or the employer and the artizan or serving
man, whenever individual claims clashed with what seemed to be the
public advantage. Hence to the governing body of the borough the trade
association was a mere matter of public convenience; and was so little
regarded as depending on the free will of the craft itself that it was
frequently founded by order of the town, and was invariably compelled
to make submission to superior force and receive orders from its master
the municipality. Unable to secure the passing of any new rule save
by convincing the authorities on some pretext or other that it was
devised in the interest of the whole commonwealth, the craft came
at last to be considered as a society which existed mainly for the
advantage of “the common people of the realm,” and indeed, bowing to
a hard necessity, itself contracted the habit of solemnly disavowing
any special regard for “its own singular profit,” and apologetically
described itself as the humble servant of the municipality and the
obedient minister of the public, in phrazes which the modern trade
union would scarcely accept as an adequate description of its uses.
This service of the public, however, was in no sense a voluntary
tribute of the guilds, nor did it enter in the slightest degree into
their original scheme; and if through long and severe compulsion
the crafts learned to wear with decorum their odd cloke of apparent
devotion to the common weal, behind this ostensible policy and
feigned colour of self-abnegation they had still their own purposes
to serve, which were by no means the purposes of the rest of the
community. Occasions of discord were probably far more frequent
than provocations to unity and concord in the society of a mediæval
town, with its hierarchy of struggling workers—the rising dealers,
the small masters who employed two or three servants, the artizans
who let down the ledge from their window to display the goods which
they had themselves made, journeymen working for a statute wage, and
unskilled labourers for whatever they could get—men for the most part
living meagrely by incessant toil, and to whom the public, thrifty
and inclined to bargains, was “the enemy”; and with its population
of consumers, poor and ignorant, without the means of travelling,
forced to buy what they wanted on the spot and thus deprived of such
protection as may be given by a larger competition, able to afford
little beyond the mere necessaries of life so that every fraud brought
to them real suffering, and to whom the trader represented the ancient
adversary lying in wait among the gins which he had privily set for
the innocent. The thin veil of civility thrown over the situation by
the polite phrazes of contemporary convention which have come down to
us in ordinance and compact deceived nobody concerned; and between
the “poor commons” and the whole army of crafts reconciliation never
went farther than an armed truce. To the consumer the dealers seemed
all alike steeped in iniquity. Shopkeepers measured out their wares
“by horn or by aim of hand,” or in chance cups and dishes; and sold
in dark corners where a man could not see what scamped work and
deceitful goods were being handed over to him. Clothiers gave out bad
yarn in scanty measure, and stretched out the list of their cloth
with cunning presses “in deceit of the poor commons.” Hatters because
they knew that everyone must needs wear hats charged exorbitantly for
their wares, and shoemakers were no better, so that statute after
statute vainly sought to mend them. Chandlers asked scandalous prices
for wax candles, images, and figures, “by which means divers of the
people be defrauded of their good intent and devotion.”[268] “All the
bakers, butchers, fishers, taverners, poulterers, chandlers, tanners,
shoemakers, cooks, hostelers, weavers, and fullers,” according to the
comprehensive statement of the Nottingham Mickletorn jury in 1395,
were asking too high prices and selling bad goods; and they go on the
next year to repeat the same complaints.[269] Above all the anger of
the common folk burned hot against the traders they knew best, the
powerful licensed victuallers who heaped up to themselves riches with
the food that should have fed the starving workers: “for took they on
truly, they timbered not so high.” The “sundry sorrows in cities,”
fevers and murrains and floods, or fires which burned down half the
town and seemed ever to begin by the falling of a candle at a brewer’s
or some “cursed place,” were the vivid testimony of the anathema of
the poor and the righteous vengeance of heaven falling on the sinful
traders;[270] and the common rumour of the market is still heard behind
the poet’s parable of the day when Guile was at the point of death, and
when it was only the shopkeepers who recovered him to life:
“But merchants met with him and made him abide,
And shutten him in their shops to showen their ware,
And parrelled him like their prentice the people to serve.”[271]
As for the crafts, on the other hand, whether they were combinations
of employers, or associations of middlemen or dealers, or unions of
wage-earners, or societies of masters and men, in one respect their
unanimity was unbroken; for inspired by a reasonable hostility to the
consumer who wanted to cheapen their wares, they were all ranged on the
same side in the common controversy as to who was ultimately to fix
prices, the seller or the buyer. Then obvious policy was declared in a
number of conspiracies which were constantly made in the various trades
to raise prices by combination among the dealers; but unfortunately
for the traders, always on the watch as they were for opportunities,
they still found the public as alert as themselves, and more powerful
to accomplish their will. When Edward the Third in 1331 fixed the
price of wine of Gascony at 4_d._ a gallon the retail dealers, who
had apparently found their profit best secured by the absence of any
statutory prices for their goods, broke into open rebellion, and “all
the taverners of the city making a confederacy and alliance among them”
closed the doors of their taverns and would not allow their wines to be
sold; till to “put a check upon this malignancy” the mayor and sheriffs
proceeded through the city, and had the names of the taverners so
closing their taverns written down, twenty-nine in number, and twelve
men from each ward of the city were summoned by the authorities to
decide in the name of the injured wine-drinkers upon the punishment
to be awarded to the taverners for their contumacy.[272] In 1363 and
again in 1411 the consumer was protected by law against the rich
Pepperers who had formed a company in 1345, and were accused of raising
prices.[273] The whole body of chandlers in Norwich were presented at
the Court Leet in 1300 for a certain agreement made among themselves
that “no one of them shall sell a pound of candles for less than
another.”[274] And in 1329 when a lime-burner of London bound all the
members of his trade by oath not to sell lime below a fixed price, and
“by reason of his great conspiracy” almost doubled the price of lime,
the city rulers imprisoned him and the “conspiracy” was cut short.[275]
Alliances of this kind to increase profits or raise prices were
universally met by a determined resistance on the part of the
public.[276] But the “poor commons” went far beyond a policy of mere
self-defence. They aimed in fact at nothing less than putting the
crafts altogether under the yoke of the community, at seizing the
whole organization of trade which had been built up and binding it
over to perpetual service. Nothing could have been more distasteful to
the guilds. In the twelfth century, while municipal government was in
its very infancy, they had already aimed at complete independence and
a real autonomy; and certain crafts did in fact succeed in making a
special bargain with the King over the heads of the local magistrates.
By charters bought at Westminster fraternities were made dependent for
their existence on the royal will alone; and were granted rights of
supervision and jurisdiction over their workmen without any reference
to the borough;[277] and since in these early charters the only
definite provision was that all the men of the trade in that particular
district should be enrolled in the guild, the freedom of the craft
as a whole remained for the moment unquestioned even if the freedom
of the individual was limited. An independence so complete however
was bitterly resented by town governments. In London for example the
weavers lived in a quarter by themselves into which the city officers
never entered. They had their own courts and special privileges, and
raised their taxes through their own officers. Under the protection
of the King’s writ they successfully defied the town authorities,
and when in the time of Henry the Third the citizens seemed likely
to overpower them by force they laid up their charter of rights in
the Exchequer as a perpetual record of their privileges. The jealousy
excited in municipal bodies by an alien society settled in their midst,
where the town writs did not run, is not surprising. Every interest
of the city was threatened—the monopoly of the sale of cloth claimed
by the burgesses, the authority of the town magistrates, the orderly
system of administration which the kings were building up, and the
interests of the whole body of consumers. A natural apprehension of
any danger to the unity of the borough was shown not only in London,
but in Winchester, Oxford, Marlborough, Beverley,[278] and possibly
in other towns; the weavers were shut out of the franchise and all
its privileges, hampered in their trade by all sorts of oppressive
regulations, forbidden to buy their tools, or possess any wealth,
or sell their goods save to freemen of the city, while the status
of villeins and aliens in the city courts was allotted to them. But
mere repression left the real evil untouched; and by 1300 the city
authorities in London had found a more radical cure. The Mayor had
gained the right to preside in the weavers’ court if he chose, and to
nominate the wardens of the guild;[279] and no sooner was all danger
from an independent rule thus averted than the weavers were granted
power to buy and sell “like other free citizens.”[280]
From this time all independent trade jurisdictions in the towns came to
an end.[281] No more charters such as that of the weavers were sold by
the crown;[282] and the crafts were presently forced to conciliate the
local powers according to their measure of art or cunning—to beg from
the municipal government a formal recognition for their association
with such limited liberties as the town officers could be induced to
give; to secure a more or less precarious existence by the payment
of fines to the town treasury;[283] or to wrap round them a solemn
conventional disguise, and conceal wholly or in part the fact of their
union for trade purposes by sheltering themselves under the form of a
religious association, and seeking independence “under a feigned colour
of sanctity”[284] as men wholly moved by a zealous care for the souls
of their dead comrades but taking no thought for the bodily welfare of
living brethren.
But by whatever means the fraternities hoped to compass liberty, it
was in vain that they sought to elude the heavy hand of the municipal
government. Trade associations were laid hold of by the boroughs,
brought under the discipline and authority of the public magistrates,
and forced to take their due part in the developement of the municipal
organisation.[285] Towns which obtained a grant to have “all reasonable
guilds” took care to maintain a reasonable authority, and craft
fraternities were only given leave to exist on the express plea that
they were “consonant with reason and redounding to the public honour
and to the advantage of the common weal”;[286] while privileges were
meted out to them on the distinct understanding of the gain which was
to spring from these to the whole commonalty. By a dexterous move
on the part of the town governors the officers of the guild were
transformed into the officers of the community, and the machinery of
the guild became the means by which the public sought to provide for a
full and cheap supply of the necessaries of life, and protected itself
from overcharges and false measures and bad wares, from uproar and
disorder, from drunken workmen, from the flying sparks of the smith’s
forge, or the noise of his hammer at night. In London for example there
was a constant succession of customers complaining at the Mayor’s
Court of the bad bargains they had made in buying cloth, so that the
fullers found themselves excessively “hard worked” in appearing at the
Guildhall to examine the cloths of discontented buyers, and begged that
every one might buy at his own risk.[287]
The masterly manœuvre executed by the town magistrates is revealed
in the self-denying ordinances passed by the later guilds. Crafts
“petition,” as we are gravely told, to have masters and ordinances, and
these being granted the new rules turn out to be simply regulations to
supply wares to the people of a fixed quality and price.[288] We can
scarcely believe that the farriers should of their own free will have
devised the rule that if any one of them, through negligence or any
excess of pride which hindered his asking advice of the craft, failed
in curing a horse of sickness, “then he shall be accused thereof
before the Mayor and Aldermen and be punished at their discretion, in
the way of making restitution for such horse to the person to whom
the same belongs.”[289] Nor is it likely that masons and carpenters
should have volunteered to take oath before Mayor and Aldermen that
they would do their duty in their trade;[290] or that the masons should
themselves propose that if a mason failed to fulfil his contract
certain men of the trade who acted as his securities should be bound
to finish his task.[291] Even the universal rule against night work
was never among the London guilds (save in the single instance of the
hat-makers)[292] made in the interest of the working-man; but on the
contrary was dictated by the sagacious observation of the buyers that
“sight is not so profitable by night, or so certain, as by day—_to
the profit, that is, of the community_;”[293] and if spurriers “who
compass how to practise deception in their work desire to work by night
rather than by day”[294] the reason given for interfering with them was
that they wandered about all day idle, and “then when they have become
drunk and frantic they take to their work to the annoyance of the sick
and all their neighbourhood ... and then they blow up their fires so
vigorously that their forges begin all at once to blaze ... and all
the neighbours are much in dread of the sparks which so vigorously
issue forth in all directions from the mouths of the chimneys in their
forges.”[295] Sunday closing itself was ordered as a matter of public
convenience, because apprentices “could not be trusted to carry on work
in the absence of their masters at church.”[296]
In thus bringing the crafts into subjection the towns were greatly
strengthened by the sympathy of the State, which was the more inclined
to make common cause with them from a growing apprehension of guilds
of artificers and other labourers which in troubled times might prove
centres of disturbance throughout the country. By a series of statutes
the ancient powers of crafts were carefully pruned, and new authority
grafted on to the town governments. “Congregations and confederacies”
were jealously watched and forbidden.[297] The guilds were ordered
to have their charters registered, and their rules and bye-laws
approved by the chief magistrates of the town. They were forbidden to
make ordinances to the damage of the King or the people. Sometimes
jurisdiction over their own members was taken from them; and the right
of search for any articles that “be not pure lawful and able chaffers,”
or even the duty of seeing that the workers were duly paid their wages
in ready money, was handed over to the town officers.[298]
Thus it came about that by the triple alliance of the officials at
Westminster with the governing class of the town and the general
body of consumers, all alike bent on organizing industry in their
several interests, the primitive free associations of workers were
gradually forced into the singular position of deferential servants
of the community. Within its own little realm each guild might use a
narrow independence or a petty tyranny, but in its public aspect it
could assert few pretensions.[299] No craft fraternity could be formed
without the leave of the municipality, and every Warden took his oath
of office before the Mayor, at whose bidding and subject to whose
approval he had been elected.[300] The rules made by any trade for its
government had no force till they had been approved by the Mayor and
Corporation, enrolled by them on the city records, and sealed with
the common seal.[301] And since they reserved the right of making any
addition to these ordinances which they might deem necessary,[302] the
town magistrates could interfere whenever they chose in the interests
of order. Not only did they bear rule over the seller in the market,
but they followed the craftsman to his little workroom and ordered
every smallest detail of his trade, material, wages, apprentices, cost,
the fit of a coat and the quality of a shoe, according to the laws that
“reserved all time to the Mayor and to the Council of the town power
to correct, to punish, amerce, and redress, as well the masters and
all other persons of the said crafts, each after their deserving and
trespass, as the case asketh.”[303] Men who offended against the rules
of the trade were brought before the town officers for punishment, and
half their fines went into the town treasury.[304] Even the wandering
artizans who moved from place to place, who had no fixed shops and no
complete guild organization, found themselves subjected to the town
authorities as soon as they had crossed the borders of the borough.
Carpenters, masons, plasterers, daubers, tilers, and paviours had to
take whatever wages the law decreed and to accept the supervision of
the municipal rulers,[305] and their regulations were framed according
to the convenience of the borough. Thus after the big storm of 1362
in London they were forbidden to raise their prices for repairing
the citizens’ roofs;[306] and the same ordinances of Worcester which
direct that chimneys of timber and thatched houses should be done away
with, and stone or brick chimneys and tiled roofs everywhere made by
midsummer day, contain regulations for the tilers who must have flocked
to the city on such an occasion. They must set up no parliament to make
any one of them “as a master and all other tilers to be as his servant
and at his commandment, but that every tiler be free to come and go to
work with every man and citizen freely as they may accord.” No stranger
tiler coming to the city was to be forced to work for any city tiler,
but might take whatever work he liked by the day.[307]
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 20_s._ 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 6_d._, 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.