THE GUILD MERCHANT
IN the conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we see the
town society rent into two factions; and whether the contending groups
call themselves the Burghers and Commonalty, or “the rich” and “the
poor people of the city,” or the Merchant Guild and the Crafts, or by
any other names, they seem practically to represent the same broad
sections of the community. In town quarrels it is hard for us to draw
any valid distinction between groups of citizens and companies of
craftsmen, as though they were led by different passions; for however
numerous were the mere inhabitants who must have lain outside the
organization of the crafts, usually every freeman was a member of some
company, and the whole voting population was thus enrolled under the
banners of the various trades. The real line of cleavage on which we
have to concentrate attention is not the thin line which may be drawn
between the Town Council and the Merchant Guild, the Commonalty and the
Crafts, but rather the broad chasm which breaks the whole industrial
society itself into two factions—on the one side the merchant traders,
on the other the artificers and small retail dealers. Wherever the
lesser crafts who represented the middle classes of the borough, and
whose interests were more or less identified with the cause of the
commons and “poor people of the city,” were forcing their claim to a
share in the counsels of the town; to which their way was barred by a
solid phalanx of hereditary “magnates” and wealthy merchants who had
abandoned the meaner employments of trade and thrown in their lot with
the governing oligarchy of “the rich,” and who fought in alliance with
or under cover of the burghers; there the revolt of the commons against
the Town Council becomes practically a battle of the working crafts
against the rule of the mercantile fraternities—a battle which may be
fought at one time for the winning of civic privileges, at another for
industrial freedom.
If we ask how old this conflict was, and at what time the peace of the
town was first disturbed by the antagonism of the greater commerce and
the lesser crafts, of the trader and the artificer, we must go back for
an answer to the very much earlier period when commercial societies
first became organized, or at least to the twelfth century when the
Merchant Guild and the Crafts come prominently to the front.[356]
Unfortunately the history of the Guild Merchant,[357] from its obscure
beginnings in the days of the Confessor, or of the Norman kings, down
to the time when its organization had spread all over England, and its
fraternities were to be found in most of the trading boroughs, is still
enveloped in the darkness which covers the early records of our towns,
and problems await solution which involve the whole developement of
the Guild. We know that from a remote period men had banded themselves
together in associations to secure protection and monopoly of trade,
and before the close of the twelfth century the majority of trading
towns had each its “Merchant Guild” with rights guaranteed by royal
charter. First born into life in a society where a merchant class such
as we understand it was unknown, we are told that the Guild may have
first consisted mainly of agriculturists busied in tilling their common
lands, and increasing their herds of cows and sheep and pigs; and whose
chief anxiety was to sell the butter and honey and salt meat and wool
that remained over when they had supplied their own wants, and to buy
fish for the fasting seasons, ploughs and spades for their fields and
the simplest furniture for their humble households. But, in the opinion
of its latest historian, from the twelfth century artizans were freely
admitted to its society, and presently formed the majority of the
Guild[358]—each craftsman being a small trader on his own account,
buying his raw material, and selling his manufactured goods at the
stall he rented in the market or on the folding shelf that he let
down to the street from the window of his little workroom. With these
were clergy and women who busied themselves in trade;[359] travelling
dealers among the townsfolk to whom exemptions from jurisdictions
outside the town and freedom from toll were important (things which
mattered little to the homekeeping citizens); and strangers who
brought their wares to the town market,[360] paid their entrance fee
and pledged themselves to bear henceforth their share of the town
taxes, though they were considered free from all other charges that
lay on the “downlying and uprising and pot-boiling” householders.
It is therefore supposed that when the time came for the Guild to
emerge from its humble state of private association, and rise into
the dignity of an official civic body, charged with the protection of
the trading interests of the borough,[361] it formed a really popular
institution, which from its very nature could never become entangled
in a conflict with the crafts—an organization of the whole community
for the control of trade by the common consent of the people, which was
in many respects peculiarly characteristic of English life,[362] and
which was the natural product of an age of freedom before the people
had been trodden under foot of a despotic oligarchy. Theoretically
subject to the authority of the town as part of its regular
administrative machinery,[363] but ruled over by its own officers, and
exercising independent jurisdiction through its voluntary tribunals
of arbitration, the Guild by virtue of its trade monopoly,[364] its
powerful organization and discipline, and the fact that the men who
formed its governing body were generally the same as those who sat on
the governing body of the borough, maintained a far more independent
position than any department of town government to-day.[365]
But according to Dr. Gross the Gilda Mercatoria was doomed to vanish
away before the growth of new industrial conditions. The first blow
was struck at its supremacy by the appearance early in the twelfth
century of crafts, which bought from the king the right to exist as
independent fraternities during his pleasure.[366] From this time the
decline of the Merchant Guild from its old estate kept pace with the
commercial revolution that caused its ruin. It began to undergo its
great change at the close of the thirteenth century, and in the two
following centuries it may be said to have practically ceased to exist.
Broken up into a multitude of independent associations, each of which
carried on business for itself,[367] deprived of all its old functions,
it died because it had no longer any adequate reason to live. Perhaps
it lingered on here and there in agricultural towns where few or no
craft guilds had been formed;[368] or in ecclesiastical boroughs where
its organization provided the only rallying point for the community in
any struggle for freedom; but everywhere else its machinery fell to
pieces;[369] and so completely did it vanish away as a distinct body
that the very name only survived by taking to itself new meanings.
Sometimes the old Merchant Guild became indistinguishably blended
with the town and gave its name to the whole community;[370] though
in another place it perhaps handed over name and functions to the
narrow select governing body of the borough as distinguished from the
general community of citizens.[371] Elsewhere its title was in some
vague way transferred to the aggregate of the craft guilds.[372] As a
mere shadow of its former self, with nothing but the word to mark its
identity, the Merchant Guild might survive as a simple social-religious
fraternity;[373] or perhaps without conflict or bitterness it merely
faded away before the crafts, leaving not so much as a name behind
it.[374] But however the implicit, unspoken compact was carried out,
by whatever means the Gilda Mercatoria, obedient to a final destiny,
effected its renunciation of an inconvenient supremacy, there was
no possible occasion left for strife between Guild and crafts,[375]
and the suggestion of any such quarrel, or of revolt on the part of
the crafts against the superior fraternity from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries, must be looked on as a wanton “myth”.[376] Having
fulfilled its course the Merchant Guild took its doom without noise or
struggle, and entered decently into the shades with a grave decorum
before which jarring sounds of contention were put to silence. It was
at a later time, when the old popular organization had died, that the
harmony of the commons was destroyed by the coming in of a tyranny
unknown till then—the tyranny of a select and irresponsible governing
body which by its corrupt administration stirred up a new spirit of
dissension in the boroughs.
Unfortunately this picture of the successive stages of the guild
history, from the free republican period through which they are all
apparently supposed to have passed, down to their extinction or
absorption into a governing oligarchy, a whole borough community, or a
group of trades, has not been verified by following out the continuous
story of any single guild. Moreover it would seem that the difficulty
of making any general statement about the groups of traders who made
the fortunes of the English boroughs, is as great as the difficulty of
making a general statement as to the position and grouping of a host
of irregular troops in rapid march over a tangled country. Amid the
intense activity and the transformation scenes of mediæval life there
is no exact definition which does not prove false with a little lapse
of time, a little change of place; and theories of “natural tendency”
are but as traps set for the unwary. So far as the Guild Merchant
is concerned, there were probably as many various exceptions to any
general rule as there were towns which contained a Guild. Let but a
generation pass away and the institution is perhaps wholly changed;
here it existed in some special form; a few miles off it never existed
at all; in some boroughs it dominated the history of the town, while
in others it left but the bare echo of its name behind.[377] There may
possibly have been towns where at one time the Guild included within
its ranks the majority of the burghers, and perhaps mainly consisted of
craftsmen;[378] but there were evidently others where from the first
it formed a society far narrower and more restricted,[379] or where
it rapidly tended to become a limited body of wealthy citizens out
of whose midst the craft guilds cannot possibly have been developed;
while occasionally it may have happened that the craft guilds preceded
the Merchant Guild.[380] Even if the theory was ostensibly maintained
that craftsmen “were freely enrolled among the members of the Guild
Merchant”[381]—in practice “gifts and entrance fees of a collation, a
bull, beer, and wine” could effectually keep out the poorer sort, and
allow the association[382] to develope rapidly into an exclusive and
comparatively aristocratic society, which demanded from all save owners
of a house or burgage, or men entitled by direct descent to belong to
the fraternity, admission fees big enough to guarantee the new comer’s
fitness to be of their fine company. The two ranks established in the
Andover Guild[383] as early as the thirteenth century suggest how
privilege might creep in even among Guild members themselves; as the
merchants of Bristol teach us how it could be fought for;[384] and
there is no doubt that the policy of each separate fraternity must
have largely depended on whether it adopted the custom of having its
officers chosen by consent of the whole community of Guildsmen,[385]
or by a handful of electors of the superior class.[386] Even if a
considerable number of burghers was admitted to trading privileges, it
by no means follows that they were allowed any voice in the control of
business.
Nor are we less in the dark as to that “natural process” by which the
Guild is believed to have passed to its resigned and painless end. The
“transference of authority from the ancient general Guild Merchant to a
number of distinct bodies and the consequent disintegration and decay
of the former,”[387] the weakening of its strength by the creation
of new crafts, the splitting up of its monopoly into fragments, the
annihilation of its original being to make place for “the aggregate of
the crafts,” the turning of the Guild into a “simple social-religious
fraternity”—a kind of quiet haven of rest for wealthy merchants who
had given up the sweets of power and the real government of trade in
which their fortunes were concerned, to busy themselves with dirges
and masses and chaplains, or even with a Corpus Christi procession—in
fact the whole “gradual and spontaneous” movement in which lay the
death of the primitive fraternity is still enveloped in mystery. If
craftsmen, associated in their own peculiar guilds, yet remained in
the common Guild Merchant[388] which had once made regulations for
their trade, and in many cases still did so,[389] the instances (apart
from cases where the Guild Merchant either was the municipal body,
or had simply handed over to it its name) are rare or perhaps unknown
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; nor can we easily follow
the far more complicated transformation said to have taken place when
the burgesses became the heirs of the general body of guildsmen,
by a double process which changed the idea of citizenship from the
conception of the freeman holding a burgage tenure into the later
idea of a man holding the right to exercise a trade, and which turned
the governors of the guild into the rulers of the town;[390] so that
by natural growth the fraternity of the Guild Merchant, once wholly
distinct from the borough, became identical with it.[391]
It is very possible—indeed it is very probable if we remember the
thrift of the English people in politics, their habit of fetching out
the old machinery whenever there seems a chance of making it useful;
their aversion to repairs or patches beyond what imperative necessity
demands; their indifference to new inventions if the old wheels and
cranks can still be induced to turn—that we may learn something of
the working of the original Guild Merchant by watching the doings of
its successors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For whether
the primitive Guild had ceased to exist or no, something going by its
name and clothed in its form confronts us constantly in the later
times, soberly masquerading in an ancient habit which seems scarcely
the worse for wear or out of fashion for all the lapse of centuries;
and figuring before us as a robust survival, as an old organization
fitted out afresh for a pressing emergency, or even as a new creation.
We may watch in Coventry such a Guild, which bears none of the signs
of decrepitude or symptoms of decay—a guild which was in no sense a
simple social-religious fraternity, nor yet an ordinary craft guild;
which was far from being an aggregate of the trades; which refused to
the lesser crafts the right to combine, and despotically governed their
business in its own interests; which was the municipal body of the
city and carried on its entire administration, but never gave its name
either to the community or to the governing body; anti-democratic in
its origin, in its maturity, and in its old age; jealous of dominion;
incapable of making terms from behind its barricaded doors with
dissolution. Late as was its date, it has features in its origin, its
constitution, and its policy far too like those of much earlier guilds,
not to claim our interest.[392]
Born two or three hundred years out of due time (for it was not till
Queen Isabella became owner of part of Coventry and interested in
defending her tenants’ rights against the Prior, that the city was
able to obtain the grant of a Gilda Mercatoria), it was only in 1340
that the Merchant Guild of S. Mary’s was founded[393]—an association
apparently of dealers in cloth, wool, and general merchandise.[394]
Even then it failed to secure license to mortmain, perhaps through the
resistance of the Prior, the lord of the soil; but it is possible that
the charter of incorporation for the town, granted in 1344, was bought
by the Guild, and at least as early as 1347 and 1350 two of its masters
were mayors; while the Town Hall, where the mayor and council met and
where the chest containing the town treasure and the charter were kept,
always bore the name of S. Mary’s Guild.
In the meantime two other societies had sprung up—the guild of S.
John Baptist[395] in 1342, and the guild of S. Catherine in 1343—and
the three companies of S. Mary, S. John, and S. Catherine united into
one body between 1364 and 1369; and finally joined themselves to the
Trinity Guild, which had received license to mortmain in 1364, and gave
its name to the whole association.[396] Considerable property was
handed over in trust for the combined societies to six of the chief
citizens of the town, most of whom had been mayors several times, and
one of whom had been founder of S. John’s Guild. From this time the
history of the municipality is the history of its leading guilds; and
the further step taken in 1392, when the four guilds were more formally
united by a patent of incorporation, and when fresh donations of land
were given to the whole body, was only a fortifying of the position
which it already held.
Though the name of the Merchant Guild was sacrificed, doubtless for
some sufficient reason, the Trinity Guild was nothing more than an
extension of the primitive association under a new title. The founders
and donors and the early mayors are usually classed together as
“mercatores” in the deeds, and the union seems to have represented the
wealthy upper class (drapers and mercers for the most part, with a few
leading members of other trades),[397] living in S. Michael’s parish,
of which Queen Isabella and her successors were the owners. Only one
other society was allowed to exist alongside of it,—the fraternity
of rich traders in Trinity parish (the Prior’s half of the town), who
were in 1348 licensed to form the Corpus Christi Guild. Drawn from the
same rank, sharing the same interests, they cast in their lot with the
merchants of the neighbouring parish, contributed to the general town
expenses, and were admitted to a corresponding degree of influence in
the municipal government.[398]
For the Trinity and Corpus Christi Guilds were in fact the governing
body of the town. According to the general custom the Master of the
Corpus Christi Guild was made Mayor in the second year after his laying
down that post, and two years after his mayoralty he was set at the
head of the Trinity Guild.[399] All important town officials were
sworn members of both the great companies; so were the Leet Jury and
the Twenty-four who elected the mayor (these two bodies consisting of
almost the same individuals); and so were all the men who might be
summoned on the Mayor’s Council to aid the Twenty-four. By this simple
device, the fear of an alien party being formed in the Council was once
for all banished; for if the Corpus Christi Guild held its elections
in the Bishop’s palace[400] and had its centre in Trinity Church on
the Prior’s land,—if its members included the Prior and his bailiff,
the vicar, and strangers, some of them of great estate, from near and
far[401]—all dangerous elements were made harmless by the order that
none of its members should meddle with town affairs unless he had been
first approved and accepted by the Trinity Guild. The Corpus Christi
fraternity in fact was admitted to its position by a sort of cautious
sufferance, and all real power lay with the Guild of the Trinity. Its
master was a Justice of the Peace, and therefore took a leading part
in all the most important business of the courts; he was first on the
list of the Twenty-four who elected the mayor and who also sat at
the Leet Court. Invariably he was one of the five men chosen by the
mayor to keep the keys of the common chest—being, in fact, in matters
of finance supreme; for at the end of the mayor’s year of office it
was to the master that he delivered up his accounts and his balance
“and is quit”; and the Guild was not only charged with the payment of
salaries to public officials—the recorder, the grammar-school master,
the priests in the Lady Chapel of S. Michael’s, and the warden and
priests at Bablake—but as early as 1384 it was ordered by the Leet to
pay yearly the ferm to the Prior, in return for which a certain part
of the common lands was made over into its possession. The keeping of
Bablake Gate was committed to it; and it was given possession of the
Drapery Hall, which was used as the cloth mart under the control of the
municipality.[402]
But this great society, known on the one side as the Trinity Guild,
on the other as the Town Corporation, owed in neither aspect anything
whatever to popular election,[403] and made no pretence at government
according to the will of the people.[404] From the very moment of the
first union of the fraternities the story of revolt among the 7,000
workers who thronged the streets of Coventry begins, and is repeated
from generation to generation for the next hundred and fifty years.
Incessant riots declared the discontent of the commons at the light
loaves sold under mayors who neglected to keep the assize of bread,
at false measures allowed for selling corn, at the encroachments on
common lands by chamberlains and councillors, at the government of
trade by the drapers and mercers enrolled in the two great guilds
of the city, while weavers, shearmen, fullers, and tailors, lying
for the most part outside these guilds, had little hope of ever
rising to municipal power.[405] The crafts, in fact, were kept in
uncompromising subjection. When the fullers and tailors tried to set up
a fraternity,[406] the ruling guilds obtained a charter in 1407 which
forbade the creation of any other society than their own. They had this
grant confirmed in 1414; and the next year they appealed to Parliament
against the dyers[407] who endeavoured to form a confederation of
cloth-makers and wool-sellers. S. George’s Guild—a union of the
“young men, serving men of the tailors and other artificers, and
labourers working by the day called journeymen,” who defiantly gathered
in S. George’s Chapel and elected “masters and clerks and other
officials to fulfil their youthful and insolent desires,” and “abet
each other in their quarrels”—was put down because it was “to the
ruin and destruction of the Guilds of Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi
and disturbance of all the community.”[408] Though the fullers and
tailors once more obtained license in 1438 to hold property, their
union was broken up in the next ten years;[409] and the persistence
of the dyers in clinging to their illegal combinations was opposed
in 1475 by an ordinance that unlawful writings and oaths made by
dyers and other crafts were to be “void, quashed, and annulled,”
and members of the craft should not be sued for not observing these
illegal ordinances.[410] Circuitous attempts to win independence by
informally setting up voluntary tribunals where the members of the
trade assembled to settle disputes, were met by the order that no
masters of crafts should sue any of their craft in any kind of suit
in special courts until the mayor have heard the matter and licensed
the suit; on the plea that “discord falls out continually because
masters of crafts sue in special courts divers people of their crafts,
affirming they have broken their oaths made in breaking divers rules,
which rules are ofttimes unreasonable, and the punishment of the said
masters excessive, which, if it continue, by likelihood will cause
much people to void out of this city.”[411] With regard to customs on
wool, or the conditions of sale for the coarse cloth of the people, or
the regulations for apprentices, the merchants passed laws which drove
the commons to impotent fury;[412] and the wild dreams of revolution
that passed from street to street for the century after John Ball found
his hiding-place in the lanes of Coventry, are told in the rhymes
nailed by the people on the church door side by side with the official
announcements, where we hear their passionate outcry for the freedom
of the good old days of Godiva, and threats of a time when the “littel
small been” and “wappys” should “also sting”;[413] or in the teaching
of the leader of the populace that the city would have no peace till
three or four of the churls that ruled them had their heads stricken
off.
But if the Trinity Guild was in this complete sense the governing body
of the town—if its legislation was at once so characteristic and so
irresistible—by what strange access of modesty was it restrained from
taking to itself the glory, and letting its name blot out all others
on the city roll?[414] Such renunciation, we can scarcely doubt,
whether in Coventry or in other places where the problem presents
itself, was more likely to spring from the “grace of guile” than
from modesty. From the point of view of worldly wisdom, indeed, the
arguments for a diplomatic self-effacement were overwhelming; for
it was easy to discern the dangers to its hoarded treasure which a
guild must incur from the moment when in the eyes of the law or of
its officers it became confounded with the municipality. Safety lay
in silence, and if the name of the guild lingered in the Guildhall,
it did not pass the precincts; while by a wise precaution the actual
mayor of the borough was never allowed to be the same person as the
actual master of the guild,[415] lest the higher authorities should in
some emergency make an easy confusion between the keys with which he
opened the treasure-box of the community, and those which unlocked the
coffers of the guild.[416] If there were any doubt before 1392[417]
about the meaning of thus carefully preserving the double aspect of
the fraternity, there seems but little after it. For in that year when
the Coventry Guild got its new formal patent and its increased income,
it was only following a somewhat common fashion of the day.[418] In
1392 the bailiffs and commonalty of Birmingham obtained leave to have
their Guild of the Holy Cross—“a guild and brotherhood of bretheren
and sisteren among themselves in that town ... and men and women
well disposed in other towns and in the neighbourhood”—which might
hold lands in mortmain, and which was intimately connected with the
governing body of the town. The Town Hall or Guild Hall was built by
it, and charities were distributed “according to the ordering and will
of the bailiffs and commonalty”; and it “kept in good reparacioune two
great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous highways, the charge
whereof the town of itself is not able to maintain.”[419] In the same
year, 1392, “the seneschalls of the Guild Merchant of Bridgewater and
of the community of the same town” obtained a grant to assign certain
lands in mortmain,[420] and an indenture which probably belongs to the
beginning of the reign of Edward the First[421] proves that there was a
close relation of this guild on one side to the fraternity of S. Mary
or of the Holy Cross, and on the other to the corporation of the town.
The brotherhood of the Holy Cross at Abingdon, which was established
under Richard the Second, seems to have been practically the governing
body of the borough, owned most of the landed property in the town in
the fifteenth century, and spent money liberally in the building of
churches and the market cross.[422]
Such guilds as these seem to have been the quick retort of the towns
to the Act of 1391, which for the first time extended to cities and
boroughs the Statute of Mortmain passed in 1279, and placed them
in a position where they could thenceforth boast of no advantage
over religious corporations, and like them had to buy leave to hold
property. But it seemed beyond the wit of man to put English traders
into a difficulty which was not by their very touch turned into a new
opportunity for gain. If right to hold corporate property must now be
bought, whatever claimant appeared, then why should it not be bought
by a private society of merchants, sheltered under the Holy Cross or
the Trinity, rather than by the town community or the burgesses? On
the one hand the leading citizens, the intelligent and prosperous
men of the town, thus secured an indestructible claim to guide its
fortunes aright; on the other hand the town funds were by the same
measure garnered once for all in a safe hiding-place—in other words,
if troublesome officers from the exchequer should come with demands
for inconvenient rent or forfeitures, they were met by the fact that
the men of the town _had_ nothing, while the men of the guild _owed_
nothing. The system seems to have worked as effectively as the British
constitution itself. We know that the Coventry Guild, besides the
property it already held, had taken over yet more at its incorporation
in 1392. But in 1468, Coventry being then the fourth city in the
kingdom, it was £800 in arrears for its ferm; and since the goods of
“the mayor and men of Coventry” only amounted to 106_s._, and since the
said “mayor and men” had no other goods or lands within the bailiwick
that could be taken into the king’s hands, no further payment was then
made.[423] If we remember the wealth of the Trinity and Corpus Christi
Guilds, the fact that they probably held the main portion of the common
property,[424] and their close connexion with the city government,[425]
it is plain that the town was doing very good business in withdrawing
its funds from the reach of the king’s officers; and that the traders
had adequately realized their purpose in setting up in their Townhall
one of those familiar companies which was admitted at home to be in
effect the corporation, but which was officially known at Westminster
only as a “simple” social-religious fraternity that yearly carried S.
George and his Dragon or some other poetic emblem through the streets
with solemn festival, or kept great tendrilles of wax burning before
the Holy Cross in the parish church.
That the Trinity society of Coventry was not the last of these astute
fraternities of traders we know;[426] that it was not the first we
may safely believe. Indeed, it might well have been modelled on the
fraternity of the Trinity at Lynn[427]—an older company by a hundred
and fifty years, whose members would at no time have found any trouble
in discussing the secrets of their policy with the merchants of
Coventry. It may be that the texture of society was never so simple
or so uniform as historians have believed, that the humble mediæval
merchant loomed big in the eyes of his yet humbler fellow-citizens,
and that in many a trading town the Guild Merchant was the monument
of the successful capitalists of the village, and of a triumph so
complete that the petty details of its progress fell out of memory.
How many typical forms the early guild may have taken from town to
town, as it squeezed its way with or without a welcome into communities
of every shape and consistence, we have not yet materials to say;
nor do we yet know by what varieties of compact it may have become
the indispensable minister or the master of the municipal authority;
or what was its common relation to the lesser forms of trade. It is
indeed conceivable that later research may show us that in many cases
the subjection of the crafts to the town—a subjection so astonishing
in the silence, the calm, the rapidity with which it is affected—was
carried out by the indissoluble union of guild and corporation.
Organized in days when the way to wealth lay in the buying and selling
of raw material, and in consequence by its constitution destitute of
powers to follow the artizan into his workroom and meddle with his
tools and the stuff of his trade, the Guild Merchant must very early
have seen its officers falling behind the officers of the town before
whom all bars and doors were thrown open; but if, suiting their policy
to the necessities of the situation, seneschals and scavins of the
Guild preserved their power by becoming bailiffs and councillors of
the borough, not by laying down their authority before the wardens of
the cobblers or the tailors, or even by taking them into its councils;
such a guild might make its end neither by resigning to the crafts its
cherished prerogatives nor by a spontaneous death, but by a consecrated
alliance, in which it only seemed to merge its identity in the borough
corporation, while in reality it secured the preservation of its
ancient name and guaranteed the traditions and authority of its order.
As in Coventry, the force which had first served to overthrow the
mastery of the lord of the soil might be employed later to enforce its
own despotism over a subject people; and the question whether it used
an old or a new name was a matter of little consequence to the inferior
and dependent class. In either case the control of the town rested
in the hands of an oligarchy of the richer sort of traders, who by
combination were able to exact from the mass of the working people an
unlimited submission, and practically held at their mercy the fortunes
of the free commons of the city.
NOTE A.
The satisfactory working of the system may be inferred from its
continued use in the next century. Plymouth may serve as an
illustration. Among the three little fishing hamlets, the Augustinian
Priors’ Sutton or South Town at the mouth of the Plym, and two King’s
Suttons which had been granted out to noble families, the first
stirrings of independent life seem to have begun about 1282, when the
Sutton people, wanting to be free burgesses and to have their fair
and market, begged for a piece of waste ground near the port, five
perches long and one broad, and a piece of land “in the withdrawal of
the sea” six acres big, where the King’s bailiff held his court in
a certain house, and where every fishing boat coming to dry nets or
sails paid toll to the King. They set up a stone cross and a stall
for their market; in 1311 they made a final agreement with the Prior,
and then or very soon after began yearly to elect a “Præpositus, or
Custos Ville de Sutton Priors, which did then rule and govern under
the King.” (In the time of Edward the Third he was called mayor;
Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 274-5, 279, see also 297.) In 1411 the townsmen
petition that they may yearly elect a mayor and be incorporated so as
to be able to buy tenements without royal license (Gross, i. 94); but
apparently it was not till 1440 that they really gained their wish by
the efforts of a rich merchant of Bristol, Richard Trenode, who traded
with Plymouth, and of his sister Thomasine, widow of a Plymouth
citizen; who at great cost and labour won for the group of hamlets
their final union into the free borough of Plymouth “with one Mayor
and one perpetual Commonalty”; for which the town in gratitude bound
itself in a sum of £200 to maintain a chaplain in the parish church of
S. Andrew to pray daily for their souls.
The important point is, however, that it was in this year, 1440,
that the Plymouth Guild Merchant was either first established, or
formally confirmed and given a definite position. (Gross, i. 15.) On
one side a religious guild, on the other it was the governing body
of the town, very jealous of its monopoly of power, as we see from
the order of 1472, that every man made a freeman should be either a
whole or a half-brother in Our Lady and S. George’s Guild, a whole
brother paying 12_d._ yearly, and a half-brother 6_d._; and that if
any of the commons was made one of the Twenty-four he must pay 8_d._
yearly to the Guild, while if one of the Twenty-four was made one
of the Twelve he must pay 1_s._ (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 272.) Like the
Guild at Coventry of a century earlier the fraternity seems to have
been at first an organization of the more enterprising inhabitants
to secure the liberties promised by charter, to make a stand against
any aggressions of the Earl of Devon, and to rid themselves of some
of their obligations to the Prior, on the plea of a convenient
poverty, and a subtle appeal to the new King Edward the Fourth to
revise arrangements made by Henry the Sixth “late in deed and not of
right King of England.” (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 272.) The ancient Guild
of Totnes, known as the “Guild of the Commonalty” as late as 1333,
survived in full power in 1449, when it was ordered that no one shall
carry the mace before the mayor save a member of the Merchant Guild
(Hist. MSS. Com. iii. 344-5).