CHAPTER I

THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM

THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM:

BY SIDNEY AND BEATRICE WEBB

(REVISED EDITION, EXTENDED TO 1920).

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS

1920

INTRODUCTION TO THE EDITION OF 1920

The thirty years that have elapsed since 1890, down to which date we

brought the first edition of this book, have been momentous in the

history of British Trade Unionism. The Trade Union Movement, which

then included scarcely 20 per cent of the adult male manual-working

wage-earners, now includes over 60 per cent. Its legal and

constitutional status, which was then indefinite and precarious, has

now been explicitly defined and embodied in precise and absolutely

expressed statutes. Its internal organisation has been, in many cases,

officially adopted as part of the machinery of public administration.

Most important of all, it has equipped itself with an entirely new

political organisation, extending throughout the whole of Great

Britain, inspired by large ideas embodied in a comprehensive programme

of Social Reconstruction, which has already achieved the position

of “His Majesty’s Opposition,” and now makes a bid for that of “His

Majesty’s Government.” So great an advance within a single generation

makes the historical account of Trade Union development down to 1920

equivalent to a new book.

We have taken the opportunity to revise, and at some points to amplify,

our description of the origin and early struggles of Trade Unionism

in this country. We have naturally examined the new material that has

been made accessible during the past quarter of a century, in order

to incorporate in our work whatever has thus been added to public

knowledge. But we have not found it necessary to make any but trifling

changes in our original interpretation of the historical development.

The Home Office papers are now available in the Public Record Office

for the troubled period at the beginning of the nineteenth century;

and these, together with the researches of Professor George Unwin, Mr.

and Mrs. Hammond, Professor Graham Wallas, Mr. Mark Hovell, and Mr.

M. Beer, have enabled us both to verify and to amplify our statements

at certain points. For the recent history of Trade Unionism we have

found most useful the collections and knowledge of the Labour Research

Department, established in 1913; and we gratefully acknowledge the

assistance in facts, suggestions, and criticisms that we have had from

Mr. G. D. H. Cole and Mr. R. Page Arnot. We owe thanks, also, to Miss

Ivy Schmidt for unwearied assistance in research.

The reader must not expect to find, in this historical volume, either

an analysis of Trade Union organisation, policy, and methods, or

any judgement upon the validity of its assumptions, its economic

achievements, or its limitations. On these things we have written at

great length, and very explicitly, in our _Industrial Democracy_,

and in other books described in the pages at the end of this volume,

to which we must refer those desirous of knowing whether the Trade

Unionism of which we now write merely the story is a good or a bad

element in industry and in the State.

SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB.

41 Grosvenor Road,

Westminster,

_January 1920_.

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF 1894

It is not our intention to delay the reader here by a conventional

preface. As every one knows, the preface is never written until the

story is finished; and this story will not be finished in our time, or

for many generations after us. A word or two as to our method of work

and its results is all that we need say before getting to our main

business.

Though we undertook the study of the Trade Union movement, not to

prove any proposition of our own, but to discover what problems it had

to present to us, our minds were not so blank on the subject that we

had no preconception of the character of these problems. We thought

they would almost certainly be economic, pointing a common economic

moral; and that expectation still seems to us so natural, that if it

had been fulfilled we should have accepted its fulfilment without

comment. But it was not so. Our researches were no sooner fairly in

hand than we began to discover that the effects of Trade Unionism

upon the conditions of labour, and upon industrial organisation and

progress, are so governed by the infinite technical variety of our

productive processes, that they vary from industry to industry and

even from trade to trade; and the economic moral varies with them.

Where we expected to find an economic thread for a treatise, we found

a spider’s web; and from that moment we recognised that what we had

first to write was not a treatise, but a history. And we saw that

even a history would be impossible to follow unless we separated the

general history of the whole movement from the particular histories

of thousands of trade societies, some of which have maintained a

continuous existence from the last century, whilst others have cropped

up, run their brief course, and disappeared. Thus, when we had finished

our labour of investigating the records of practically every important

trade society from one end of the kingdom to the other, and accumulated

piles of extracts, classified under endless trades and subdivisions

of trades, we found that we must exclude from the first volume all

but a small selection from those documents which appeared to us most

significant with regard to the development of the general movement.

Many famous strikes and lock-outs, many interesting trade disputes,

many sensational prosecutions, and some furious outbursts of riot and

crime, together with many drier matters relating to particular trades,

have had either to be altogether omitted from our narrative, or else

accorded a strictly subordinate reference in their relation to the

history of Trade Unionism as a whole. All analysis of the economic

effects of Trade Union action we reserve for a subsequent volume on the

Problems of Trade Unionism, for which we shall draw more fully from the

annals of the separate unions. And in that volume the most exacting

seeker for economic morals will be more than satisfied; for there will

be almost as many economic morals drawn as societies described.

That history of the general movement, to which we have confined

ourselves here, will be found to be part of the political history

of England. In spite of all the pleas of modern historians for less

history of the actions of governments, and more descriptions of the

manners and customs of the governed, it remains true that history,

however it may relieve and enliven itself with descriptions of the

manners and morals of the people, must, if it is to be history at

all, follow the course of continuous organisations. The history

of a perfectly democratic State would be at once the history of a

government and of a people. The history of Trade Unionism is the

history of a State within our State, and one so jealously democratic

that to know it well is to know the English working man as no reader

of middle-class histories can know him. From the early years of the

eighteenth century down to the present day, Democracy, Freedom of

Association, _Laisser-faire_, Regulation of the Hours and Wages of

Labour, Co-operative Production, Free Trade, Protection, and many other

distinct and often contradictory political ideals, have from time to

time seized the imagination of the organised wage-earners and made

their mark on the course of the Trade Union movement. And, since 1867

at least, wherever the ideals have left their mark on Trade Unionism,

Trade Unionism has left its mark on politics. We shall be able to show

that some of those overthrows of our party governments which have

caused most surprise in the middle and upper classes, and for which the

most far-fetched reasons have been given by them and their journalists

and historians after the event, carry their explanation on the surface

for any one who knows what the Trade Unionists of the period were

thinking. Such demonstrations, however, will be purely incidental, as

we have written throughout of Trade Unionism for its own sake, and

not for that of the innumerable sidelights which it throws on party

politics.

In our concluding chapter, which we should perhaps offer as an appendix

rather than as part of the regular plan of the volume, we have

attempted to give a bird’s-eye view of the Trade Union world of to-day,

with its unequal distribution, its strong sectional organisation

and defective political machinery, its new governing class of trade

officials--above all, its present state of transition in methods, aims,

and policy, in the face of the multitude of unsettled constitutional,

economic, and political problems with which it stands confronted.

A few words upon the work of collecting materials for our work may

prove useful to those who may hereafter come to reap in the same field.

In the absence of any exhaustive treatment of any period of Trade

Union history we have to rely mainly upon our own investigations.

But every student of the subject must acknowledge the value of Dr.

Brentano’s fertile researches into English working-class history, and

of Mr. George Howell’s thoroughly practical exposition of the Trade

Unionism of his own school and his own time. Perhaps the most important

published material on the subject is the _Report on Trade Societies and

Strikes_ issued by the Social Science Association in 1860, a compact

storehouse of carefully sifted facts which compares favourably with the

enormous bulk of scrappy and unverified information collected by the

five historic official inquiries into Trade Unionism between 1824 and

1894. We have, moreover, found a great many miscellaneous facts about

Trade Unions in periodical literature and ephemeral pamphlets in the

various public libraries all over the country. To facilitate the work

of future students we append to this volume a complete list of such

published materials as we have been able to discover. For the early

history of combinations we have had to rely upon the public records,

old newspapers, and miscellaneous contemporary pamphlets. Thus, our

first two chapters are principally based upon the journals of the House

of Commons, the minutes of the Privy Council, the publications of the

Record Office, and the innumerable broadsheet petitions to Parliament

and old tracts relating to Trade which have been preserved in the

British Museum, the Guildhall Library, and the invaluable collection

of economic literature made by Professor H. S. Foxwell, St. John’s

College, Cambridge.[1] Most important of all, for the period prior

to 1835, are the many volumes of manuscript commentaries, newspaper

cuttings, rules, reports, pamphlets, etc., left by Francis Place,

and now in the British Museum. This unique collection, formed by the

busiest politician of his time, is indispensable, not only to the

student of working-class movements, but also to any historian of

English political or social life during the first forty years of the

century.[2]

But the greater part of our material, especially that relating to

the present century, has come from the Trade Unionists themselves.

The offices of the older unions contain interesting archives,

sometimes reaching back to the eighteenth century--minute-books

in which generations of diligent, if unlettered, secretaries, the

true historians of a great movement, have struggled to record the

doings of their committees, and files of Trade Union periodicals,

ignored even by the British Museum, through which the plans and

aspirations of ardent working-class politicians and administrators

have been expounded month by month to the scattered branches of their

organisations. We were assured at the outset of our investigation that

no outsider would be allowed access to the inner history of some of the

old-fashioned societies. But we have found this prevalent impression

as to the jealous secrecy of the Trade Unions without justification.

The secretaries of old branches or ancient local societies have

rummaged for us their archaic chests with three locks, dating from the

eighteenth century. The surviving leaders of a bygone Trade Unionism

have ransacked their drawers to find for our use the rules and minutes

of their long-forgotten societies. In many a working man’s home in

London and Liverpool, Newcastle and Dublin--above all, in Glasgow and

Manchester--the descendants of the old skilled handicraftsmen have

unearthed “grandfather’s indentures,” or “father’s old card,” or a

tattered set of rules, to help forward the investigation of a stranger

whom they dimly recognised as striving to record the annals of their

class. The whole of the documents in the offices of the great National

and County Unions have been most generously placed at our disposal,

from the printed reports and sets of rules to the private cash accounts

and executive minute-books. In only one case has a General Secretary

refused us access to the old books of his society, and then simply on

the ground that he was himself proposing to write its history, and

regarded us as rivals in the literary field.

Nor has this generous confidence been confined to the musty records

of the past. In the long sojourns at the various industrial centres

which this examination of local archives has necessitated, every

facility has been afforded to us for studying the actual working of

the Trade Union organisation of to-day. We have attended the sittings

of the Trades Councils in most of the large towns; we have sat through

numerous branch and members’ meetings all over the country; and one of

us has even enjoyed the exceptional privilege of being present at the

private deliberations of the Executive Committees of various national

societies, as well as at the special delegate meetings summoned by

the great federal Unions of Cotton-spinners, Cotton-weavers, and

Coal-miners for the settlement of momentous issues of trade policy, and

at the six weeks’ sessions in 1892 in which sixty chosen delegates of

the Amalgamated Society of Engineers overhauled the trade policy and

internal administration of that world-wide organisation.

We have naturally not confined ourselves to the workmen’s side of

the case. In almost every industrial centre we have sought out

representative employers in the different industries. From them we

have received many useful hints and criticisms. But, as might have

been expected, the great captains of industry are, for the most part,

absorbed in the commercial side of their business, and are seldom

accurately acquainted with the details of the past, or even of the

present, organisation of their workmen. Of more assistance in our task

have been the secretaries of the various employers’ associations.

Especially in the ship-building ports have these gentlemen placed

at our disposal their experience in collective negotiation with the

different sections of labour, and the private statistics compiled

by their associations. But of all the employing class we have found

the working managers and foremen, who have themselves often been

workmen, the best informed and most suggestive critics of Trade Union

organisation and methods. We have often regretted that precisely this

class is the most difficult of access to the investigator of industrial

problems, and the least often called as witnesses before Royal

Commissions.

The difficulty of welding into narrative form the innumerable details

of the thousands of distinct organisations, and of constructing out

of their separate chronicles anything like a history of the general

movement, has, we need hardly say, been very great. We are painfully

aware of the shortcomings of our work, both from a literary and from

a historical point of view. We have been encouraged in our task by

the conviction--strengthened as our investigation proceeded--that

the Trade Union records contain material of the utmost value to the

future historian of industrial and political organisation, and that

these records are fast disappearing. Many of the older archives are

in the possession of individual workmen, who are insensible of their

historical value. Among the larger societies it is not uncommon to find

only one complete set of rules, reports, circulars, etc., in existence.

A fire, a removal to new premises, or the death of an old secretary

frequently results in the disappearance of everything not actually in

daily office use. The keen investigator or collector will appreciate

the extremity of the vexation with which we have learnt on arriving at

an ancient Trade Union centre that the “old rubbish” of the office had

been “cleared out” six months before. The local public libraries, and

even the British Museum, seldom contain any of the internal Trade Union

records new or old. We have therefore not only collected every Trade

Union document that we could acquire, but we have made lengthy extracts

from, and abstracts of, the piles of minute-books, reports, rules,

circulars, pamphlets, working-class newspapers, etc., which have been

lent to us.

This collection of material, and, indeed, the wide scope of the

investigation itself, would have been impossible if we had not had

the good fortune to secure the help of a colleague exceptionally well

qualified for the work. In Mr. F. W. Galton we have found a devoted

assistant, to whose unwearied labours we owe the extensive range of our

material and our statistics. Himself a skilled handicraftsman, and for

some time secretary to his Trade Union, he has brought to the task not

only keen intelligence and unremitting industry, but also a personal

acquaintance with the details of Trade Union life and organisation

which has rendered his co-operation of inestimable value. We have

incorporated in our last chapter a graphic sketch from his pen of the

inner life of a Trade Union.

We have, moreover, received the most cordial assistance from all

quarters. If we were to acknowledge by name all those to whom our

thanks are due, we should set forth a list of nearly all the Trade

Union officials in the kingdom. Individual acknowledgement is in their

case the less necessary, in that many of them are our valued personal

friends. Only second to this is our indebtedness to many of the great

“captains of industry,” notably to Mr. Hugh Bell, of Middlesboro’,

and Colonel Dyer, of Elswick, and the secretaries of employers’

associations, whose time has been freely placed at our disposal. To

Professor H. S. Foxwell, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor E. S. Beesly,

Mr. Robert Applegarth, and Mr. John Burns, M.P., we are especially

indebted for the loan of many scarce pamphlets and working-class

journals, whilst Mr. John Burnett and Mr. Henry Crompton have been

good enough to go through one or more of our chapters in proof, and to

improve them by numerous suggestions. And there are two dear comrades

and friends to whose repeated revision of every line of our manuscript

the volume owes whatever approach to literary merit it may possess.

The bibliography has been prepared from our material by Mr. R. A.

Peddie, to whom, as well as to Miss Apple-yard for the laborious task

of verifying nearly all the quotations, our thanks are due.

SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB.

41 Grosvenor Road,

Westminster,

_April 1894_.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Now in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London.

[2] Place’s _Letter Books_, together with an unpublished autobiography,

preserved by his family, are now in the custody of Mr. Graham Wallas,

who is preparing a critical biography of this great reformer, which

will throw much new light on all the social and political events of

English history between 1798 and 1840 [published, 1st edition, 1898;

2nd edition, 1918].

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

Introduction to the Edition of 1920 v

Preface to the Original Edition of 1894 vii

I. The Origins of Trade Unionism 1

II. The Struggle for Existence [1799-1825] 64

III. The Revolutionary Period [1829-1842] 113

IV. The New Spirit and the New Model [1843-1860] 180

V. The Junta and their Allies 233

VI. Sectional Developments [1863-1885] 299

VII. The Old Unionism and the New [1875-1890] 358

VIII. The Trade Union World [1890-1894] 422

IX. Thirty Years’ Growth [1890-1920] 472

X. The Place of Trade Unionism in the State [1890-1920] 594

XI. Political Organisation [1900-1920] 677

Appendix.--On the assumed connection between the Trade

Unions and the Gilds in Dublin--The Rules of the Grand

National Consolidated Trades Union--Sliding Scales--The

Summons to the First Trade Union Congress--Distribution

of Trade Unionists in the United Kingdom--The Progress in

Membership of particular Trade Unions--Publications on

Trade Unions and Combinations of Workmen--The Relationship

of Trade Unionism to the Government of Industry 721

Index 765

Other Works by Sidney and Beatrice Webb

THE HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONISM

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGINS OF TRADE UNIONISM

A Trade Union, as we understand the term, is a continuous association

of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the

conditions of their working lives.[3] This form of association has, as

we shall see, existed in England for over two centuries, and cannot be

supposed to have sprung at once fully developed into existence. But

although we shall briefly discuss the institutions which have sometimes

been described as the forerunners of Trade Unionism, our narrative will

commence only from the latter part of the seventeenth century, before

which date we have been unable to discover the existence in the British

Isles of anything falling within our definition. Moreover, although

it is suggested that analogous associations may have existed during

the Middle Ages in various parts of the Continent of Europe, we have

no reason to suppose that such institutions exercised any influence

whatever upon the rise and development of the Trade Union Movement in

this country. We feel ourselves, therefore, warranted, as we are indeed

compelled, to limit our history exclusively to the Trade Unions of the

United Kingdom.

We have, by our definition, expressly excluded from our history any

account of the innumerable instances in which the manual workers have

formed ephemeral combinations against their social superiors. Strikes

are as old as history itself. The ingenious seeker of historical

parallels might, for instance, find in the revolt, 1490 B.C., of the

Hebrew brickmakers in Egypt against being required to make bricks

without straw, a curious precedent for the strike of the Stalybridge

cotton-spinners, A.D. 1892, against the supply of bad material for

their work. But we cannot seriously regard, as in any way analogous

to the Trade Union Movement of to-day, the innumerable rebellions of

subject races, the slave insurrections, and the semi-servile peasant

revolts of which the annals of history are full. These forms of the

“labour war” fall outside our subject, not only because they in no case

resulted in permanent associations, but because the “strikers” were not

seeking to improve the conditions of a contract of service into which

they voluntarily entered.

When, however, we pass from the annals of slavery or serfdom to those

of the nominally free citizenship of the mediæval town, we are on

more debatable ground. We make no pretence to a thorough knowledge of

English town-life in the Middle Ages. But it is clear that there were

at times, alongside of the independent master craftsmen, a number of

hired journeymen and labourers, who are known to have occasionally

combined against their rulers and governors. These combinations are

stated sometimes to have lasted for months, and even for years. As

early as 1383 we find the Corporation of the City of London prohibiting

all “congregations, covins, and conspiracies of workmen.” In 1387

the serving-men of the London cordwainers, in rebellion against the

“overseers of the trade,”[4] are reported to be aiming at making a

permanent fraternity. Nine years later the serving-men of the saddlers,

“called yeomen,” assert that they have had a fraternity of their

own, “time out of mind,” with a livery and appointed governors. The

masters declared, however, that the association was only thirteen years

old, and that its object was to raise wages.[5] In 1417 the tailors’

“serving men and journeymen” in London have to be forbidden to dwell

apart from their masters as they hold assemblies and have formed a kind

of association.[6] Nor were these fraternities confined to London. In

1538 the Bishop of Ely reports to Cromwell that twenty-one journeymen

shoemakers of Wisbech have assembled on a hill without the town, and

sent three of their number to summon all the master shoemakers to meet

them, in order to insist upon an advance in their wages, threatening

that “there shall none come into the town to serve for that wages

within a twelve month and a day, but we woll have an harme or a legge

of hym, except they woll take an othe as we have doon.”[7]

These instances derived from the very fragmentary materials as yet

printed, suggest that a more complete examination of the unpublished

archives might possibly disclose a whole series of journeymen

fraternities, and enable us to determine the exact constitution of

these associations. It is, for instance, by no means clear whether the

instances cited were strikes against employers, or revolts against

the authority of the gild. Our impression is that the case of the

Wisbech shoemakers, and possibly some of the others, represent the

embryo stage of a Trade Union. Supposing, therefore, that further

investigation were to prove that such ephemeral combinations by hired

journeymen against their employers did actually pass into durable

associations of like character, we should be constrained to begin our

history with the fourteenth or fifteenth century. But, after detailed

consideration of every published instance of a journeyman’s fraternity

in England, we are fully convinced that there is as yet no evidence

of the existence of any such durable and independent combination of

wage-earners against their employers during the Middle Ages.

There are certain other cases in which associations during the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which are sometimes assumed to have

been composed of journeymen,[8] maintained a continuous existence. But

in all these cases, so far as we have been able to investigate them,

the “Bachelors’ Company,” presumed to be a journeymen’s fraternity,

formed a subordinate department of the masters’ gild, by the rulers

of which it was governed. It will be obvious that associations in

which the employers dispensed the funds and appointed the officers

can bear no analogy to modern Trade Unions. Moreover, these “yeoman”

organisations or “Bachelors’ Companies” do not appear to have long

survived the sixteenth century.

The explanation of the tardy growth of stable independent combination

among hired journeymen is, we believe, to be found in the prospects of

economic advancement which the skilled handicraftsman still possessed.

We do not wish to suggest the existence of any Golden Age in which each

skilled workman was his own master, and the wage system was unknown.

The earliest records of English town history imply the presence of

hired journeymen, who were not always contented with their wages. But

the apprenticed journeyman in the skilled handicrafts belonged, until

comparatively modern times, to the same social grade as his employer,

and was indeed usually the son of a master in the same or an analogous

trade. So long as industry was carried on mainly by small masters,

each employing but one or two journeymen, the period of any energetic

man’s service as a hired wage-earner cannot normally have exceeded

a few years, and the industrious apprentice might reasonably hope,

if not always to marry his master’s daughter, at any rate to set up

in business for himself. Any incipient organisation would always be

losing its oldest and most capable members, and would of necessity

be confined, like the Coventry journeymen’s Gild of St. George, to

“the young people,”[9] or like the ephemeral fraternity of journeymen

tailors of 1415-17, to “a race at once youthful and unstable,”[10] from

whose inexperienced ranks it would be hard to draw a supply of good

Trade Union leaders. We are therefore able to understand how it is

that, whilst industrial oppression belongs to all ages, it is not until

the changing conditions of industry had reduced to an infinitesimal

chance the journeyman’s prospect of becoming himself a master, that

we find the passage of ephemeral combinations into permanent trade

societies. This inference is supported by the experience of an

analogous case in the Lancashire of to-day. The “piecers,” who assist

at the “mules,” are employed and paid by the operative cotton-spinners

under whom they work. The “big piecer” is often an adult man, quite

as skilled as the spinner himself, from whom, however, he receives

very inferior wages. But although the cotton operatives display a

remarkable aptitude for Trade Unionism, attempts to form an independent

organisation among the piecers have invariably failed. The energetic

and competent piecer is always looking forward to becoming a spinner,

interested rather in reducing than in raising piecers’ wages. The

leaders of any incipient movement among the piecers have necessarily

fallen away from it on becoming themselves employers of the class

from which they have been promoted. But though the Lancashire piecers

have always failed to form an independent Trade Union, they are not

without their associations, in the constitution of which we may find

some hint of the relation between the gild of the master craftsmen

and the Bachelors’ Company or other subordinate association in which

journeymen may possibly have been included. The spinners have, for

their own purposes, brigaded the piecers into piecers’ associations.

These associations, membership of which is usually compulsory, form a

subordinate part of the spinners’ Trade Union, the officers of which

fix and collect the contributions, draw up the rules, dispense the

funds, and in every way manage the affairs, without in the slightest

degree consulting the piecers themselves. It is not difficult to

understand that the master craftsmen who formed the court of a mediæval

gild might, in a similar way, have found it convenient to brigade the

journeymen or other inferior members of the trade into a subordinate

fraternity, for which they fixed the quarterly dues, appointed the

“wardens” or “wardens’ substitutes,” administered the funds, and in

every way controlled the affairs, without admitting the journeymen to

any voice in the proceedings.[11]

If further proof were needed that it was the prospect of economic

advancement that hindered the formation of permanent combinations

among the hired journeymen of the Middle Ages, we might adduce

the fact that certain classes of skilled manual workers, who had

no chance of becoming employers, do appear to have succeeded in

establishing long-lived combinations which had to be put down by law.

The masons, for instance, had long had their “yearly congregations

and confederacies made in their general chapiters assembled,” which

were expressly prohibited by Act of Parliament in 1425.[12] And the

tilers of Worcester are ordered by the Corporation in 1467 to “sett

no parliament amonge them.”[13] It appears probable, indeed, that

the masons, wandering over the country from one job to another, were

united, not in any local gild, but in a trade fraternity of national

extent. Such an association may, if further researches throw light upon

its constitution and working, not improbably be found to possess some

points of resemblance to the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons

of the present day, which was established in 1832. But, unlike the

operative in the modern building trades, the mason of the Middle

Ages served, not a master _entrepreneur_, but the customer himself,

who provided the materials, supervised the work, and engaged, at

specified daily rates, both the skilled mechanics and their labourers

or apprentices.[14] In contrast with the handicraftsmen of the towns,

the masons, tilers, etc. remained, from the completion of their

apprenticeship to the end of their working lives, in one and the same

economic position, a position which appears to have been intermediate

between those of the master craftsman and the journeyman of the other

trades. Like the jobbing carpenter of the country village of to-day,

they were independent producers, each controlling the processes of

his own craft, and dealing directly with the customer. But unlike the

typical master craftsman of the handicraft trades they sold nothing but

labour, and their own labour only, at regulated customary rates, and

were unconcerned, therefore, with the making of profit, whether upon

the purchase and sale of materials or upon the hiring of subordinate

workers.[15] The stability of their combinations was accordingly not

prevented by those influences which, as we have suggested, proved fatal

in England to the corresponding attempts of the hired journeymen of the

handicrafts.

But if the example of the building trades in the Middle Ages supports

our inference as to the cause of the tardy growth of combination

among the journeymen in other trades, the “yearly congregations and

confederacies” of the masons might themselves demand our attention as

instances of early Trade Unionism. Of the constitution, function, or

ultimate development of these mediæval associations in the building

trades we know unfortunately next to nothing.[16] It is remarkable

that there is, so far as we are aware, no trace of their existence in

Great Britain later than the fifteenth century. During the eighteenth

century there is, as we shall see, no lack of information as to

combinations of workmen in nearly every other skilled trade. The

employers appear to have been perpetually running to Parliament to

complain of the misdeeds of their workmen. But of combinations in the

building trades we have found scarcely a trace until the very end of

that century. If, therefore, adhering strictly to the letter of our

definition, we accepted the masons’ confederacy as a Trade Union,

we should be compelled to regard the building trades as presenting

the unique instance of an industry which had a period of Trade

Unionism in the fifteenth century, then passed for several centuries

into a condition in which Trade Unionism was impossible, and finally

changed once more to a state in which Trade Unions flourished. Our

own impression is however that the “congregations and confederacies”

of the masons are more justly to be considered the embryonic stage

of a gild of master craftsmen than of a Trade Union. There appears

to us to be a subtle distinction between the economic position of

workers who hire themselves out to the individual consumer direct,

and those who, like the typical Trade Unionist of to-day, serve an

employer who stands between them and the actual consumers, and who

hires their labour in order to make out of it such a profit as will

provide him with his interest on capital and “wages of management.” We

suggest that, with the growing elaboration of domestic architecture,

the superior craftsmen tended more and more to become employers,

and any organisations of such craftsmen to pass insensibly into the

ordinary type of masters’ gild.[17] Under such a system of industry the

journeymen would possess the same prospects of economic advancement

that hindered the growth of stable combinations in the ordinary

handicrafts, and in this fact may lie the explanation of the striking

absence of evidence of any Trade Unionism in the building trades right

down to the eighteenth century.[18] When, however, the capitalist

builder or contractor began to supersede the master mason, master

plasterer, etc., and this class of small _entrepreneurs_ had again to

give place to a hierarchy of hired workers, Trade Unions, in the modern

sense, began, as we shall see, to arise. “Just as we found the small

master in the sixteenth century struggling to adapt and appropriate the

traditions of the superseded handicraft organisation, so we shall find

the journeyman at the close of the seventeenth century [in some trades

and at the close of the eighteenth century in others] endeavouring to

build up a new status out of the ruins of the small master.”[19]

We have dwelt at some length upon these ephemeral associations of

wage-earners and on the journeymen fraternities of the Middle Ages,

because it might plausibly be argued that they were in some sense

the predecessors of the Trade Union. But strangely enough it is not

in these institutions that the origin of Trade Unionism has usually

been sought. For the predecessor of the modern Trade Union, men have

turned, not to the mediæval associations of the wage-earners, but to

those of their employers--that is to say, the Craft Gilds.[20] The

outward resemblance of the Trade Union to the Craft Gild had long

attracted the attention, both of the friends and the enemies of Trade

Unionism; but it was the publication in 1870 of Professor Brentano’s

brilliant study on the “Origin of Trades Unions” that gave form to the

popular idea.[21] Without in the least implying that any connection

could be traced between the mediæval gild and the modern Trade Union,

Dr. Brentano suggested that the one was in so far the successor of the

other, that both institutions had arisen “under the breaking up of an

old system, and among the men suffering from this disorganisation, in

order that they might maintain independence and order.”[22] And when

George Howell prefixed to his history of Trade Unionism a paraphrase

of Dr. Brentano’s account of the gilds, it became commonly accepted

that the Trade Union had, in some undefined way, really originated from

the Craft Gild.[23] We are therefore under the obligation of digressing

to examine the relation between the mediæval gild and the modern Trade

Union. If it could be shown that the Trade Unions were, in any way, the

descendants of the old gilds, it would clearly be the origin of the

latter that we should have to trace.

The supposed descent in this country of the Trade Unions from the

mediæval Craft Gilds rests, as far as we have been able to discover,

upon no evidence whatsoever. The historical proof is all the other

way. In London, for instance, more than one Trade Union has preserved

an unbroken existence from the eighteenth century. The Craft Gilds

still exist in the City Companies, and at no point in their history

do we find the slightest evidence of the branching off from them of

independent journeymen’s societies. By the eighteenth century the

London journeymen had in nearly all cases lost whatever participation

they may possibly once have possessed in the Companies, which had for

the most part already ceased to have any connection with the trades

of which they bore the names.[24] It is sometimes suggested that the

London Companies have had an exceptional history, and that in towns

in which the gilds underwent a more normal development they may have

given rise to the modern trade society. So far as Great Britain is

concerned we have satisfied ourselves that this suggestion rests on no

better foundation than the other. Neither in Bristol nor in Preston,

neither in Newcastle nor in Glasgow, have we been able to trace the

slightest connection between the slowly dying gilds and the upstarting

Trade Unions. At Sheffield J. M. Ludlow, basing himself on an account

by Frank Hill, once expressly declared[25] that direct affiliation

could be proved. Diligent inquiry into the character and history of the

still flourishing Cutlers’ Company demonstrates that this exclusively

masters’ association at no time originated or engendered any of the

numerous Trade Unions with which Sheffield abounds. There remains the

case of Dublin, where some of the older unions themselves claim descent

from the gilds. Here, too, careful search reveals, not only the absence

of any affiliation or direct descent, but also the impossibility of

any organic connection between the exclusively Protestant gilds which

were not abolished until 1842, and the mainly Roman Catholic Trade

Unions which attained their greatest influence many years before.[26]

We assert, indeed, with some confidence, that in no case did any Trade

Union in the United Kingdom arise, either directly or indirectly, by

descent, from a Craft Gild.

It is often taken for granted that the Trade Union, whatever may have

been its origin, represents the same elements, and plays the same part

in the industrial system of the nineteenth century, as the Craft Gild

did in that of the Middle Ages. A brief analysis of what is known of

the gilds will be sufficient to show that these organisations were

even in their purest days essentially different, both in structure and

function, from the modern trade society.

For the purpose of this comparison it will be unnecessary for us to

discuss the rival theories of historians as to the nature and origin of

the Craft Gilds. We may agree, on the one hand, with Dr. Brentano[27]

in maintaining that the free craftsmen associated in order to stop

the deterioration of their condition and encroachments on their

earnings, and to protect themselves against “the abuse of power on the

part of the lords of the town, who tried to reduce the free to the

dependence of the unfree.” On the other hand, we may believe with Dr.

Cunningham[28] that the Craft Gilds were “called into being, not out of

antagonism to existing authorities, but as new institutions, to which

special parts of their own duties were delegated by the burgh officers

or the local Gild Merchant,” as a kind of “police system,” in fact, by

which the community controlled the local industries in the interest

of the consumer. Or again, we may accept the middle view advanced by

Sir William Ashley,[29] that the gilds were self-governing bodies of

craftsmen, initiating their own trade regulations, the magistrates or

town council having a real, if somewhat vague, authority to sanction or

veto these ordinances for the good of the citizens. Each of these three

views is supported by numerous instances, and to determine which theory

represents the rule and which the exception would involve a statistical

knowledge of Craft Gilds for which the material has not yet been

collected. It will be evident that, if Dr. Cunningham’s theory of the

Craft Gild is the correct one, there can be no essential resemblance

between these semi-municipal bodies and the Trade Unions of to-day.

Dr. Brentano, however, produces ample evidence that, in some cases

at any rate, the gilds acted, not with any view to the protection of

the consumer, but, like the Trade Unions, for the furtherance of the

interests of their own members--that is, of one class of producers.

Accepting for the moment the view that the Craft Gild, like the

Trade Union, or the Employers’ Association, belonged to the genus of

“associations of producers,” let us examine briefly how far the gild

was similar to modern combinations of wage-earners.

Now, the central figure of the gild organisation, in all instances, and

at all periods of its development, was the master craftsman, owning

the instruments of production, and selling the product. Opinions may

differ as to the position of the journeymen in the gild or to the

extent of the prevalence of subordinate or semi-servile labour outside

it. Different views may be entertained as to the reality of that

regard for the interests of the consumer which forms the ostensible

object of many gild ordinances. But throughout the whole range of gild

history the master craftsman, controlling the processes and selling

the products of the labour of his little industrial group, was the

practical administrator of, and the dominant influence in, the gild

system.[30] In short, the typical gild member was not wholly, or even

chiefly, a manual worker. From the first he supplied not only whatever

capital was needed in his industry, but also that knowledge of the

markets for both raw material and product, and that direction and

control which are the special functions of the _entrepreneur_. The

economic functions and political authority of the gild rested, not upon

its assumed inclusion of practically the whole body of manual workers,

but upon the presence within it of the real directors of industry of

the time. In the modern Trade Union, on the contrary, we find, not an

association of _entrepreneurs_, themselves controlling the processes

of their industry, and selling its products, but a combination of

hired wage-workers, serving under the direction of industrial captains

who are outside the organisation. The separation into distinct social

classes of the capitalist and the brainworker on the one hand, and the

manual workers on the other--the substitution, in fact, of a horizontal

for a vertical cleavage of society--vitiates any treatment of the Trade

Union as the analogue of the Craft Gild.

On the other hand, to regard the typical Craft Gild as the predecessor

of the modern Employers’ Association or capitalist syndicate would,

in our opinion, be as great a mistake as to believe, with George

Howell, that it was the “early prototype” of the Trade Union. Dr.

Brentano himself laid stress on the fact, afterwards brought into

special prominence by Dr. Cunningham, that the Craft Gild was looked

upon as the representative of the interests, not of any one class

alone, but of the three distinct and somewhat antagonistic elements

of modern society, the capitalist _entrepreneur_, the manual worker,

and the consumer at large. We do not need to discuss the soundness of

the mediæval lack of faith in unfettered competition as a guarantee

of the genuineness and good quality of wares. Nor are we concerned

with their assumption of the identity of interest between all classes

of the community. It seemed a matter of course to the statesman, no

less than to the public, that the leading master craftsmen of the

town should be entrusted with the power and the duty of seeing that

neither themselves nor their competitors were permitted to lower the

standard of production. “The Fundamental Ground,” says the petition

of the Carpenters’ Company in 1681, “of Incorporating Handicraft

Trades and Manual Occupations into distinct Companies was to the

end that all Persons using such Trades should be brought into one

Uniform Government and Corrected and Regulated by Expert and Skilful

Governors, under certain Rules and Ordinances appointed to that

purpose.”[31] The leading men of the gild became, in effect, officers

of the municipality, charged with the protection of the public from

adulteration and fraud. When, therefore, we remember that the Craft

Gild was assumed to represent, not only all the grades of producers

in a particular industry, but also the consumers of the product,

and the community at large, the impossibility of finding, in modern

society, any single inheritor of its multifarious functions will

become apparent. The powers and duties of the mediæval gild have, in

fact, been broken up and dispersed. The friendly society and the

Trade Union, the capitalist syndicate and the employers’ association,

the factory inspector and the Poor Law relieving officer, the School

Attendance officer, and the municipal officers who look after

adulteration and inspect our weights and measures--all these persons

and institutions might, with equal justice, be put forward as the

successors of the Craft Gild.[32]

Although there is an essential difference in the composition of the

two organisations, the popular theory of their resemblance is easily

accounted for. First, there are the picturesque likenesses which Dr.

Brentano discovered--the regulations for admission, the box with its

three locks, the common meal, the titles of the officers, and so forth.

But these are to be found in all kinds of association in England.

The Trade Union organisations share them with the local friendly

societies, or sick clubs, which have existed all over England for the

last two centuries. Whether these features were originally derived

from the Craft Gilds or not, it is practically certain that the early

Trade Unions took them, in the vast majority of cases, not from the

traditions of any fifteenth-century organisation, but from the existing

little friendly societies around them. In some cases the parentage of

these forms and ceremonies might be ascribed with as much justice to

the mystic rites of the Freemasons as to the ordinances of the Craft

Gilds. The fantastic ritual peculiar to the Trade Unionism of 1829-34,

which we shall describe in a subsequent chapter, was, as we shall see,

taken from the ceremonies of the Friendly Society of Oddfellows. But

we are informed that it bears traces of being an illiterate copy of a

masonic ritual. In our own times the “Free Colliers of Scotland,” an

early attempt at a national miners’ union, were organised into “Lodges”

under a “Grand Master,” with much of the terminology and some of the

characteristic forms of Freemasonry. No one would, however, assert

any essential resemblance between the village sick club and the trade

society, still less between Freemasonry and Trade Unionism. The only

common feature between all these is the spirit of association, clothing

itself in more or less similar picturesque forms.

But other resemblances between the gild and the union brought out

by Dr. Brentano are more to the point. The fundamental purpose of

the Trade Union is the protection of the Standard of Life--that is

to say, the organised resistance to any innovation likely to tend

to the degradation of the wage-earners as a class. That some social

organisation for the protection of the Standard of Life was necessary

was a leading principle of the Craft Gild, as it was, in fact, of the

whole mediæval order. “Our forefathers,” wrote the Emperor Sigismund

in 1434, “have not been fools. The crafts have been devised for this

purpose: that everybody by them should earn his daily bread, and nobody

shall interfere with the craft of another. By this the world gets rid

of its misery, and every one may find his livelihood.”[33] But in this

respect the Trade Union does not so much resemble the Craft Gild, as

reassert what was once the accepted principle of mediæval society,

of which the gild policy was only one manifestation. We do not wish,

in our historical survey of the Trade Union Movement, to enter into

the far-reaching controversy as to the political validity either of

the mediæval theory of the compulsory maintenance of the Standard of

Life, or of such analogous modern expedients as Collective Bargaining

on the one hand, or Factory Legislation on the other. Nor do we wish

to imply that the mediæval theory was at any time so effectively and

so sincerely carried out as really to secure to every manual worker a

comfortable maintenance. We are concerned only with the historical fact

that, as we shall see, the artisans of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries sought to perpetuate those legal or customary regulations of

their trade which, as they believed, protected their own interests.

When these regulations fell into disuse the workers combined to secure

their enforcement. When legal redress was denied, the operatives, in

many instances, took the matter into their own hands, and endeavoured

to maintain, by Trade Union regulations, what had once been prescribed

by law. In this respect, and practically in this respect only, do we

find any trace of the gild in the Trade Union.

Let us now turn from the hypothetical origin of Trade Unionism to the

recorded facts. We have failed to discover in the manuscript records of

companies or municipal corporations, in the innumerable trade pamphlets

and broadsheets of the time, or in the Journals of the House of

Commons, any evidence of the existence, prior to the latter half of the

seventeenth century,[34] or indeed much before the very close of that

century, of continuous associations of wage-earners for maintaining

or improving the conditions of their working lives. And when we

remember that during the latter decades of the seventeenth century

the employers of labour, and especially the industrial “companies” or

corporations, memorialised the House of Commons on every conceivable

grievance which affected their particular trade, the absence of all

complaints of workmen’s combinations suggests to us that few, if any,

such combinations existed.[35] We do, however, discover in the latter

half of the seventeenth century various traces of sporadic combinations

and associations, some of which appear to have maintained in obscurity

a continuous existence. In the early years of the eighteenth century

we find isolated complaints of combinations “lately entered into”

by the skilled workers in certain trades. As the century progresses

we watch the gradual multiplication of these complaints, met by

counter-accusations presented by organised bodies of workmen. From the

middle of the century the Journals of the House of Commons abound in

petitions and counter-petitions revealing the existence of journeymen’s

associations in most of the skilled trades. And finally, we may infer

the wide extension of the movement from the steady multiplication of

the Acts against combinations in particular industries, and their

culmination in the comprehensive statute of 1799 forbidding all

combinations whatsoever.

If we examine the evidence of the rise of combinations in particular

trades, we see the Trade Union springing, not from any particular

institution, but from every opportunity for the meeting together

of wage-earners of the same occupation. Adam Smith remarked that

“people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment

and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the

public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”[36] And there is

actual evidence of the rise of one of the oldest of the existing Trade

Unions out of a gathering of the journeymen “to take a social pint of

porter together.”[37] More often it is a tumultuous strike, out of

which grows a permanent organisation. Elsewhere, as we shall see, the

workers meet to petition the House of Commons, and reassemble from

time to time to carry on their agitation for the enactment of some new

regulation, or the enforcement of an existing law. In other instances

we shall find the journeymen of a particular trade frequenting

certain public-houses, at which they hear of situations vacant, and

the “house of call” becomes thus the nucleus of an organisation. Or

we watch the journeymen in a particular trade declaring that “it has

been an ancient custom in the kingdom of Great Britain for divers

Artists to meet together and unite themselves in societies to

promote Amity and true Christian Charity,” and establishing a sick

and funeral club, which invariably proceeds to discuss the rates of

wages offered by the employers, and insensibly passes into a Trade

Union with friendly benefits.[38] And if the trade is one in which

the journeymen frequently travel in search of work, we note the slow

elaboration of systematic arrangements for the relief of these “tramps”

by their fellow-workers in each town through which they pass, and

the inevitable passage of this far-extending tramping society into a

national Trade Union.[39]

All these, however, are but opportunities for the meeting of journeymen

of the same trade. They do not explain the establishment of continuous

organisations of the wage-earners in the seventeenth and eighteenth

rather than in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. The essential

cause of the growth of durable associations of wage-earners must

lie in something peculiar to the later centuries. This fundamental

condition of Trade Unionism we discover in the economic revolution

through which certain industries were passing. In all cases in which

Trade Unions arose, the great bulk of the workers had ceased to be

independent producers, themselves controlling the processes, and

owning the materials and the product of their labour, and had passed

into the condition of lifelong wage-earners, possessing neither the

instruments of production nor the commodity in its finished state.

“From the moment that to establish a given business more capital is

required than a journeyman can easily accumulate within a few years,

gild mastership--the mastership of the masterpiece--becomes little more

than a name.... Skill alone is valueless, and is soon compelled to hire

itself out to capital.... Now begins the opposition of interest between

employers and employed, now the latter begin to group themselves

together; now rises the trade society.”[40] Or, to express this

Industrial Revolution in more abstract terms, we may say, in the words

of Dr. Ingram, that “the whole modern organisation of labour in its

advanced forms rests on a fundamental fact which has spontaneously and

increasingly developed itself--namely, the definite separation between

the functions of the capitalist and the workman, or, in other words,

between the direction of industrial operations and their execution in

detail.”[41]

It is often assumed that the divorce of the manual worker from the

ownership of the means of production resulted from the introduction

of machinery, the use of power, and the factory system. Had this been

the case we should not, upon our hypothesis, have expected to find

Trade Unions at an earlier date than factories, or in industries

untransformed by machinery. The fact that the earliest durable

combinations of wage-earners in England precede the factory system

by a whole century, and occur in trades carried on exclusively by

hand labour, reminds us that the creation of a class of lifelong

wage-servants came about in more than one way.

We may note, to begin with, the very old institution of the printers’

“chapel,” with its “father” and “clerk,” an informal association among

the compositors of a particular establishment for the discussion and

regulation, not only of their own workshop conditions, but also of

their relations with the employer, who must, in early days, have been a

man of superior education, with an outlook much wider than that of his

journeymen.

The “chapel” may possibly be nearly as old as the introduction of

printing into this country.[42] We have no evidence as to the date

at which the “chapels” of different printing offices entered into

communication with each other in London, so as to form a Trade

Union. But already in 1666 we have _The Case and Proposals of

the Free Journeymen Printers in and about London_, in which they

complain of the multiplication of apprentices and the prevalence of

“turnovers”--grievances which vexed every compositors’ Trade Union

throughout the nineteenth century.[43] Whether the “Free Journeymen

Printers” managed to continue in existence as a Trade Union is

uncertain. We have found no actual evidence of any other combination

among compositors than the “chapel” earlier than the eighteenth

century.

One of the earliest proven cases of continuous association

among journeymen is that of the hatters (or feltmakers), whose

combination--now the Journeymen Hatters’ Trade Union of Great Britain

and Ireland--may perhaps claim to trace its ancestry from 1667, the

very year in which the Feltmakers’ Company, consisting of their

employers, obtained a charter from Charles II. Within a few months

the journeymen in the various London workshops--each of which had

apparently a workshop organisation somewhat resembling the printers’

“chapel”--had combined to present a petition to the Court of Aldermen

against the Master, Wardens and Assistants of the Company. The Court

of Aldermen decided that, in order “that the journeymen may not by

combination or otherwise excessively at their pleasure raise their

wages,” a piecework list is to be annually settled and presented

for enactment by the Court of Aldermen. The journeymen seem to

have co-operated with the employers in presenting this list, and

in preventing the employment of non-freemen. The rates fixed did

not, however, always satisfy the journeymen, especially when the

employers were successful in getting them lowered; and in 1696 we

read of a deputation appearing before the Court to declare that they

had resolved among themselves not to accept any less wages than they

had formerly received, and to ask for a revision of the order. They

had, according to the masters’ statement, not confined themselves to

peaceful resolutions, but had made an example of a journeyman who had

remained at work at the reduced rates. “They stirred up the apprentices

to seize upon him as he was working, to tie him in a wheelbarrow,

and in a tumultuous and riotous manner to drive him through all the

considerable places in London and Southwark.” It was alleged that the

men were organised in “clubs,” which “raised several sums of money

for the abetting and supporting such of them who should desert their

masters’ service.” In 1697 the employers introduced the “character

note” or “leaving certificate,” the Company enacting that no master

should employ a journeyman who did not bring with him a certificate

from his previous employer. Successive prosecutions of journeymen took

place for refusing to work at the lawful rates, but the workmen seem

to have had good legal advice, and to have defended themselves with

skill. On one occasion they pleaded guilty, and promised amendment

and the abandonment of their combination, whereupon the prosecution

was withdrawn. On another occasion they got the case removed by writ

of _certiorari_ from the Lord Mayor’s session to the Assizes, where

Lord Chief Justice Holt referred the dispute to arbitration. The

award of June 1699 was a virtual victory for the journeymen, after a

three years’ struggle, as it gave them an increase of rates, with a

stoppage of all legal proceedings.[44] That the London Trade Clubs

of the journeymen hatters, or at any rate their several workshop

organisations, maintained a continuous existence we need not doubt;

though we do not hear of them again until 1771, when they seem to have

established a national federation of the local trade clubs existing

in more than a dozen provincial towns with those of Southwark and

the West End of London, very largely for the purpose of maintaining

and enforcing the statutory limitation of apprentices. In 1775 this

federation appears to have been strong enough, not only to obtain

increased rates of wages, but also the exclusive employment of

“clubmen.” There were “congresses” of the hatters in 1772, 1775,

and 1777, held in London for the adoption of “bye-laws” for the

whole trade; but we believe that these “congresses” were attended by

delegates from the workshops in and near London only. It is clear

that similar organisations existed in the other towns in which the

trade was carried on. The members who were unemployed “tramped” from

town to town, and regulations for their relief were framed. A weekly

contribution of 2d. appears to have been paid by each member. The

employers successfully petitioned Parliament in 1777 for a repeal

of the old limitation of apprentices and a renewed prohibition of

combination.[45]

More definite evidence is afforded by the development of the tailoring

trade. In tailoring for rich customers the master craftsmen appear at

the very beginning of the eighteenth century to have been recruited

from the comparatively small number of journeymen who acquired the

specially skilled part of the business--namely, the cutting-out.[46]

“The tailor,” says an eighteenth-century manual for the young

tradesman, “ought to have a quick eye to steal the cut of a sleeve,

the pattern of a flap, or the shape of a good trimming at a glance,

... in the passing of a chariot, or in the space between the door and

a coach.” There grew up accordingly a class of mere sewers, “not one

in ten” knowing “how to cut out a pair of breeches: they are employed

only to sew the seam, to cast the buttonholes, and prepare the work

for the finisher.... Generally as poor as rats, the House of Call runs

away with all their earnings, and keeps them constantly in debt and

want.”[47]

This differentiation was promoted by the increasing need of capital

for successfully beginning business in the better quarters of the

metropolis. Already in 1681 the “shop-keeping tailor” was deplored as

a new and objectionable feature, “for many remember when there were

no new garments sold in London (in shops) as now there are.”[48] The

“accustomed tailor,” or working craftsman, making up the customer’s

own cloth, objected to “taylers being sales-men,” paying high rents

for shops in fashionable neighbourhoods, giving long credit to their

aristocratic clients, and each employing, in his own workshops, dozens

or even scores of journeymen, who were recruited from the houses of

call in times of pressure, and ruthlessly turned adrift when the season

was over. And although it remained possible in the reign of King

William the Third, as it still is in that of King George the Fifth, to

start business in a back street as an independent master tailor with

no more capital or skill than the average journeyman could command,

yet the making of the fine clothes worn by the Court and the gentry

demanded, then as now, a capital and a skill which put this extensive

and lucrative trade altogether out of the reach of the thousands of

journeymen whom it employed. Thus we find that at the very beginning

of the eighteenth century the typical journeyman tailor in London and

Westminster had become a lifelong wage-earner. It is not surprising,

therefore, that one of the earliest instances of permanent Trade

Unionism that we have been able to discover occurs in this trade. The

master tailors in 1720 complain to Parliament that “the Journeymen

Taylors in and about the Cities of London and Westminster, to the

number of seven thousand and upwards, have lately entered into a

combination to raise their wages and leave off working an hour sooner

than they used to do; and for the better carrying on their design

have subscribed their respective names in books prepared for that

purpose, at the several houses of call or resort (being publick-houses

in and about London and Westminster) which they use; and collect

several considerable sums of money to defend any prosecutions against

them.”[49] Parliament listened to the masters’ complaint, and passed

the Act 7, Geo. I. st. 1, c. 13, restraining both the giving and the

taking of wages in excess of a stated maximum, all combinations being

prohibited. From that time forth the journeymen tailors of London

and Westminster have remained in effective though sometimes informal

combination, the organisation centring round the fifteen or twenty

“houses of call,” being the public-houses to which it was customary for

the workmen to resort, and at which the employers sought any additional

men whom they wished to engage. In 1744 the Privy Council was set in

motion against their refusal to obey the Act of 1720.[50] In 1750-51

they invoked the assistance of the Middlesex Justices, and obtained

an order requiring the masters to pay certain rates. In 1767 further

legislation was, in spite of their eloquent protests, obtained against

them.[51] In 1810 a master declared before a Select Committee that

their combination had existed for over a century.[52]

An equally early instance of permanent trade combination is the

woollen manufacture of the West of England. Here the rise of a class

of lifelong wage-earners took a form altogether different from that

in the London tailoring trade, but it produced the same result of

combinations among the workers. The “wealthy clothiers” of Somerset,

Gloucestershire, and Devon, who during the sixteenth century had

“mightily increased in fame and riches, their houses frequented like

kings’ courts,”[53] provided and owned the material of the industry

throughout the whole manufacturing process, but employed a separate

class of operatives at each stage. Buying the wool at one of the market

towns, the capitalist clothier gave this to one set of hand-workers to

be carded and spun into yarn in the village households. The yarn was

passed on to another set--the handloom weavers--to be made into cloth

in their cottages. The cloth was then “fulled” at the capitalist’s own

mill (usually a water-mill) and again given out to be “dressed” by a

new set of hand-workers, after which it was ready to be packed in the

warehouse, and dispatched to Bristol or London for shipment or sale.

In this case, as in that of the tailors, the operatives still retained

the ownership of the tools of their particular processes, but it was

practically impossible for them to acquire either the capital or the

commercial knowledge necessary for the success of so highly organised

an industry, and we accordingly find them entering into extensive

combinations from the closing years of the seventeenth century. Already

in 1675 the journeymen clothworkers of London combined to petition the

Court of the Clothworkers’ Company against the engagement of workmen

from the country. In 1682 we hear of them taking advantage of an

extensive shipping order to refuse, in concert, to work under 12s.

per week. But it is not clear whether any lasting association then

resulted.[54] In the West of England the ephemeral revolts of the early

part of the seventeenth century seem to have developed into lasting

combinations by the end of that century. We hear of them at Tiverton

as early as 1700.[55] In 1717 the Journals of the House of Commons

contain evidence of the existence of a widespread combination of the

woollen-workers in Devonshire and Somerset. The Mayor and Corporation

of Bradninch complain “that for some years past the woolcombers and

weavers in those parts have been confederating how to incorporate

themselves into a club: and have to the number of some thousands in

this county, in a very riotous and tumultuous manner, exacted tribute

from many.”[56] The House of Commons apparently thought the evil

could be met by Royal Authority and requested the King to issue a

Proclamation. Accordingly on February 4, 1718, a Royal Proclamation was

issued against these “lawless clubs and societies which had illegally

presumed to use a common seal, and to act as Bodies Corporate, by

making and unlawfully conspiring to execute certain By-laws or Orders,

whereby they pretend to determine who had a right to the Trade, what

and how many Apprentices and Journeymen each man should keep at once,

together with the prices of all their manufactures, and the manner

and materials of which they should be wrought.”[57] This kingly

fulmination, which was read at the Royal Exchange, failed to effect its

purpose, for the Journals of the House of Commons for 1723 and 1725

contain frequent complaints of the continuance of the combinations,[58]

which are constantly heard of throughout the whole of the eighteenth

century, dying away only on the supersession of the male by the

female weaver at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not to be

effectively revived until the beginning of the twentieth.

This early development of trade combinations in the West of England

stands in striking contrast with their absence in the same industry

where pursued, as in Yorkshire, on the so-called “Domestic System.”

The Yorkshire weaver was a small master craftsman of the old type,

himself buying and owning the raw material, and once or twice a week

selling his cloth in the markets of Leeds or Wakefield, to which, we

are told by Defoe in 1724, “few clothiers bring more than one piece.”

“Almost at every house,” he writes of the country near Halifax, “there

was a Tenter, and almost on every Tenter a piece of cloth, or kersey,

or shalloon, ... at every considerable house was a manufactory; ...

then, as every clothier must keep a horse, perhaps two, to fetch and

carry for the use of his manufacture, viz., to fetch home his wool and

his provisions from the market, to carry his yarn to the spinners,

his manufacture to the fulling mill, and when finished, to the market

to be sold, and the like; so every manufacturer generally keeps a cow

or two or more, for his family, and this employs the two or three or

four pieces of enclosed land about his house, for they scarce sow corn

enough for their cocks and hens.”[59] Not until the Yorkshire cloth

dealers began, about 1794, to establish factories on a large scale

do we find any Trade Unions, and then journeymen and small masters

struggled with one accord to resist the new form of capitalist industry

which was beginning to deprive them of their control over the product

of their labour.

The worsted industry appears everywhere to have been carried on rather

like the woollen manufactures of the West of England than the same

industry in Yorkshire. The woolcomber frequently owned the inexpensive

hand-combs and pots with which he worked. But the woolcombers, like

the weavers of the West of England, formed but one of several classes

of workers for whose employment both capital and commercial knowledge

was indispensable. We hear, already in 1674, of an attempt by the

Leicester woolcombers to “form a company,”[60] though with what success

we know not. In 1741 it was remarked that the woolcombers had “for a

number of years past erected themselves into a sort of corporation

(though without a charter); their first pretence was to take care

of their poor brethren that should fall sick, or be out of work;

and this was done by meeting once or twice a week, and each of them

contributing 2d. or 3d. towards the box to make a bank, and when they

became a little formidable they gave laws to their masters, as also to

themselves--viz., That no man should comb wool under 2s. per dozen;

that no master should employ any comber that was not of their club:

if he did they agreed one and all not to work for him; and if he had

employed twenty they all of them turned out, and oftentimes were not

satisfied with that, but would abuse the honest man that would labour,

and in a riotous manner beat him, break his comb-pots, and destroy his

working tools; they further support one another in so much that they

are become one society throughout the kingdom. And that they may keep

up their price to encourage idleness rather than labour, if any one of

their club is out of work, they give him a ticket and money to seek for

work at the next town where a box club is, where he is also subsisted,

suffered to live a certain time with them, and then used as before; by

which means he can travel the kingdom round, be caressed at each club,

and not spend a farthing of his own or strike one stroke of work. This

hath been imitated by the weavers also, though not carried through the

kingdom, but confined to the places where they work.”[61] The surviving

members of the Old Amicable Society of Woolstaplers retain a tradition

of local trade clubs dating from the very beginning of the eighteenth

century, and of their forming a federal union in 1785. Old members

of the United Journeymen Curriers’ Society have seen circulars and

tramping cards, showing that a similar tramping federation existed in

their trade from the middle of the century.[62]

In other cases the expensive nature of the raw material or the tools

aided the creation of a separate class. The Spitalfields silk-weavers,

whom we find forming a permanent organisation in 1773, could never have

owned the costly silks they wove.[63] The gold-beaters, whose union

dates at any rate from 1777, were similarly debarred from owning the

material.

Another remarkable instance of combination prior to the introduction of

mechanical power and the factory system is that of the “stockingers,”

the hosiery workers, or framework knitters, described by Dr. Brentano.

From the very beginning of the use of the stocking-frame, in the

early part of the seventeenth century, servants appear to have been

set to work upon frames owned by capitalists, though the bulk of the

trade was in the hands of men who worked upon their own frames as

independent producers. The competition of these embryo factories was

severely felt by the domestic framework knitter, and on the final

breakdown, in 1753, of the legal limitation of apprentices, it became

disastrous. There grew up a “ruinous practice of parishes giving

premiums to manufacturers for employing their poor,” and this flooding

of the labour market with subsidised child labour reduced the typical

framework knitter to a state of destitution. Though he continued to

work in his cottage, he rapidly lost the ownership of his frame, and a

system arose under which the frames were hired at a rent, either from

a small capitalist frame-owner, or from the manufacturer by whom the

work was given out. The operative was thus deprived, not only of the

ownership of the product, but also of the instruments of his labour.

Hence, although from the very beginning of the eighteenth century

there were ephemeral combinations among the framework knitters, in

which masters and men often joined, it was not until 1780, when the

renting of frames had become general, that a durable Trade Union of

wage-earners arose.[64]

The development of the industrial organisation of the cutlery

trades affords another example of this evolution. At the date of

the establishment in Sheffield of the Cutlers’ Company (1624) the

typical craftsman was himself the owner of his “wheel” and other

instruments, and a strict limitation of apprentices was maintained. By

1791, when the masters obtained from Parliament a formal ratification

of the prevalent relaxation in the customary restrictions as to

apprentices, we find this system largely replaced by something very

like the present order of things, in which the typical Sheffield

operative works with material given out by the manufacturer, upon

wheels rented either from the latter or from a landlord supplying

power. It is no mere coincidence that in the year 1790 the Sheffield

employers found themselves obliged to take concerted action against

the “scissor-grinders and other workmen who have entered into unlawful

combinations to raise the price of labour.”[65]

The shipwrights of Liverpool, and probably those of other shipbuilding

ports, were combined in trade benefit clubs early in the eighteenth

century. At Liverpool, where this society had very successfully

maintained the customary limitation of apprentices, the members were

all freemen of the municipal corporation, and as such entitled to the

Parliamentary franchise. As a result the shipwrights’ organisation

became intensely political, by which was meant chiefly the negotiation

of the sale of its members’ votes. At the election of 1790, when Whigs

and Tories compromised in order to avoid the expense of a contest, it

was the Shipwrights’ Society, then at the zenith of its power, which

insisted on forcing a contest by nominating its own candidate, and, in

the end, actually put him at the head of the poll. The society, which

had a contribution in 1824 of fifteen pence per month, and had built

almshouses for its old members, is reputed to have been at one time

so powerful that any employer who refused to obey its rules found his

business absolutely brought to a standstill.[66]

But the cardinal example of the conception of Trade Unionism with

the divorce of the worker from the instruments of production is seen

in the rapid rise of trade combinations on the introduction of the

factory system. We have already noticed that Trade Unions in Yorkshire

began with the erection of factories and the use of power. When, in

1794, the clothiers of the West Riding failed to prevent the Leeds

merchants from establishing large factories, “wherein it is intended

to employ a great number of persons now working at their own homes,”

the journeymen took the matter into their own hands, and founded “the

Clothiers’ Community,” or “Brief Institution,” professedly to gather

“briefs” or levies for the relief of the sick, and to carry on a

Parliamentary agitation for hampering the factory owners by a legal

limitation of apprentices. “It appears,” reports the Parliamentary

Committee of 1806, “that there has existed for some time an institution

or society among the woollen manufacturers, consisting chiefly of

clothworkers. In each of the principal manufacturing towns there

appears to be a society, composed of deputies chosen from the several

shops of workmen, from each of which town societies one or more

deputies are chosen to form what is called the central committee,

which meets, as occasion requires, at some place suitable to the local

convenience of all parties. The powers of the central committee appear

to pervade the whole institution; and any determination or measure

which it may adopt may be communicated with ease throughout the whole

body of manufacturers. Every workman, on his becoming a member of the

society, receives a certain card or ticket, on which is an emblematical

engraving--the same, the Committee are assured, both in the North

and the West of England--that by producing his ticket he may at once

show he belongs to the society. The same rules and regulations appear

to be in force throughout the whole district, and there is the utmost

reason to believe that no clothworker would be suffered to carry on

his trade, otherwise than in solitude, who should refuse to submit

to the obligations and rules of the society.”[67] The transformation

of cotton-spinning into a factory industry, which may be said to

have taken place round about the year 1780, was equally accompanied

by the growth of Trade Unionism. The so-called benefit clubs of the

Oldham operatives, which we know to have existed from 1792, and those

of Stockport, of which we hear in 1796, were the forerunners of that

network of spinners’ societies throughout the northern counties and

Scotland which rose into notoriety in the great strikes of the next

thirty years.[68]

It is easy to understand how the massing together in factories of

regiments of men all engaged in the same trade facilitated and

promoted the formation of journeymen’s trade societies. But with the

cotton-spinners, as with the tailors, the rise of permanent trade

combinations is to be ascribed, in a final analysis, to the definite

separation between the functions of the capitalist _entrepreneur_ and

the manual worker--between, that is to say, the direction of industrial

operations and their execution. It has, indeed, become a commonplace of

modern Trade Unionism that only in those industries in which the worker

has ceased to be concerned in the profits of buying and selling--that

inseparable characteristic of the ownership and management of the

means of production--can effective and stable trade organisations be

established.

The positive proofs of this historical dependence of Trade Unionism

upon the divorce of the worker from the ownership of the means of

production are complemented by the absence of any permanent trade

combinations in industries in which the divorce had not taken place.

The degradation of the Standard of Life of the skilled manual worker on

the break-up of the mediæval system occurred in all sorts of trades,

whether the operative retained his ownership of the means of production

or not, but Trade Unionism followed only where the change took the form

of a divorce between capital and labour. The Corporation of Pinmakers

of London are found petitioning Parliament towards the end of the

seventeenth century or beginning of the eighteenth, as follows:

“This company consists for the most part of poor and indigent people,

who have neither credit nor mony to purchase wyre of the merchant

at the best hand, but are forced for want thereof to buy only small

parcels of the second or third buyer as they have occasion to use it,

and to sell off the pins they make of the same from week to week,

as soon as they are made, for ready money to feed themselves, their

wives and children, whom they are constrained to imploy to go up and

down every Saturday night from shop to shop to offer their pins to

sale, otherwise cannot have money to buy bread. And these are daily so

exceedingly multiplyed and encreased by reason of the unlimited number

of apprentices that some few covetous-minded members of the company

(who have considerable stocks) do constantly imploy and keep....

The persons that buy the pins from the maker to sell again to other

retailing shopkeepers, taking advantage of this necessity of the poor

workmen (who are always forced to sell for ready mony, or otherwise

cannot subsist), have by degrees so beaten down the price of pins that

the workman is not able to live of his work, ... and betake themselves

to be porters, tankard bearers, and other day labourers, ... and many

of their children do daily become parish charges.”[69] And the glovers

complain at the same period that “they are generally so poor that they

are supplied with leather upon credit, not being able to pay for that

or their work-folk’s wages till they have sold the gloves.”[70]

Now, although these pinmakers and glovers, and other trades in like

condition, fully recognised the need for some protection of their

Standard of Life, we do not find any trace of Trade Unionism among

them. Selling as they did, not their labour alone, but also its

product, their only resource was legislative protection of the price of

their wares.[71] In short, in those industries in which the cleavage

between capitalist and artisan, manager and manual labourer, was not

yet complete, the old gild policy of commercial monopoly was resorted

to as the only expedient for protecting the Standard of Life of the

producer.

We do not contend that the divorce supplies, in itself, a complete

explanation of the origin of Trade Unions. At all times in the

history of English industry there have existed large classes of

workers as much debarred from becoming the directors of their own

industry as the eighteenth-century tailor or woolcomber, or as the

modern cotton-spinner or miner. Besides the semi-servile workers on

the land or in the mines, it is certain that there were in the towns

a considerable class of unskilled labourers, excluded, through lack

of apprenticeship, from any participation in the gild.[72] By the

eighteenth century, at any rate, the numbers of this class must

have been largely swollen, by the increased demand for common labour

involved in the growth of the transport trade, the extensive building

operations, etc. But it is not among the farm servants, miners, or

general labourers, ill-paid and ill-treated as these often were,

that the early Trade Unions arose. We do not even hear of ephemeral

combinations among them, and only very occasionally of transient

strikes.[73] The formation of independent associations to resist the

will of employers requires the possession of a certain degree of

personal independence and strength of character. Thus we find the

earliest Trade Unions arising among journeymen whose skill and Standard

of Life had been for centuries encouraged and protected by legal or

customary regulations as to apprenticeship, and by the limitation

of their numbers which the high premiums and other conditions must

have involved. It is often assumed that Trade Unionism arose as a

protest against intolerable industrial oppression. This was not so.

The first half of the eighteenth century was certainly not a period of

exceptional distress. For fifty years from 1710 there was an almost

constant succession of good harvests, the price of wheat remaining

unusually low. The tailors of London and Westminster united, at the

very beginning of the eighteenth century, not to resist any reduction

of their customary earnings, but to wring from their employers better

wages and shorter hours of labour. The few survivors of the hand

woolcombers still cherish the tradition of the eighteenth century,

when they styled themselves “gentlemen woolcombers,” refused to

drink with other operatives, and were strong enough, as we have seen,

to give “laws to their masters.”[74] The very superior millwrights,

whose exclusive trade clubs preceded any general organisation of the

engineering trade, had for “their everyday garb” a “long frock coat and

tall hat.”[75] And the curriers, hatters, woolstaplers, shipwrights,

brush-makers, basketmakers, and calico-printers, who furnish prominent

instances of eighteenth-century Trade Unionism, all earned relatively

high wages, and long maintained a very effectual resistance to the

encroachments of their employers.

It appears to us from these facts that Trade Unionism would have been

a feature of English industry, even without the steam-engine and the

factory system. Whether the association of superior workmen which arose

in the early part of the century would, in such an event, ever have

developed into a Trade Union Movement is another matter. The typical

“trade club” of the town artisan of this time was an isolated “ring”

of highly skilled journeymen, who were even more decisively marked

off from the mass of the manual workers than from the small class of

capitalist employers. The customary enforcement of the apprenticeship

prescribed by the Elizabethan statutes, and the high premiums often

exacted from parents not belonging to the trade, long maintained a

virtual monopoly of the better-paid handicrafts in the hands of an

almost hereditary caste of “tradesmen” in whose ranks the employers

themselves had for the most part served their apprenticeship. Enjoying,

as they did, this legal or customary protection, they found their

trade clubs of use mainly for the provision of friendly benefits, and

for “higgling” with their masters for better terms. We find little

trace among such trade clubs of that sense of solidarity between the

manual workers of different trades which afterwards became so marked

a feature of the Trade Union Movement. Their occasional disputes with

their employers resembled rather family differences than conflicts

between distinct social classes. They exhibit more tendency to “stand

in” with their masters against the community, or to back them against

rivals or interlopers, than to join their fellow-workers of other

trades in an attack upon the capitalist class. In short, we have

industrial society still divided vertically trade by trade, instead of

horizontally between employers and wage-earners. This latter cleavage

it is which has transformed the Trade Unionism of petty groups of

skilled workmen into the modern Trade Union Movement.[76]

The pioneers of the Trade Union Movement were not the trade clubs

of the town artisans, but the extensive combinations of the West of

England woollen-workers and the Midland framework knitters. It was

these associations that initiated what afterwards became the common

purpose of nearly all eighteenth-century combinations--the appeal to

the Government and the House of Commons to save the wage-earners from

the new policy of buying labour, like the raw material of manufacture,

in the cheapest market. The rapidly changing processes and widening

markets of English industry seemed to demand the sweeping away of

all restrictions on the supply and employment of labour, a process

which involved the levelling of all classes of wage-earners to their

“natural wages.” The first to feel the encroachment on their customary

earnings were the woollen-workers employed by the capitalist clothiers

of the Western counties. As the century advances we find trade after

trade taking up the agitation against the new conditions, and such

old-established clubs as the hatters and the woolcombers joining the

general movement as soon as their own industries are menaced. To the

skilled craftsman in the towns the new policy was brought home by the

repeal of the regulations which protected his trade against an influx

of pauper labour. His defence was to ask for the enforcement of the

law relating to apprenticeship.[77] This would not have helped the

operative in the staple textile industries. To him the new order took

the form of constantly declining piecework rates. What he demanded,

therefore, was the fixing of the “convenient proportion of wages”

contemplated by Elizabethan legislation. But, whether craftsmen or

factory operatives, the wage-earners turned, for the maintenance of

their Standard of Life, to that protection by the law upon which they

had been taught to rely. So long as each section of workers believed in

the intention of the governing class to protect their trade from the

results of unrestricted competition no community of interest arose. It

was a change of industrial policy on the part of the Government that

brought all trades into line, and for the first time produced what can

properly be called a Trade Union Movement. In order, therefore, to make

this movement fully intelligible, we must now retrace our steps, and

follow the political history of industry in the eighteenth century.

The dominant industrial policy of the sixteenth century was the

establishment of some regulating authority to perform, for the trade

of the time, the services formerly rendered by the Craft Gilds.

When, for instance, in the middle of the century the weavers found

their customary earnings dwindling, they managed so far to combine

as to make their voice heard at Westminster. In 1555 we find them

complaining “that the rich and wealthy clothiers do many ways oppress

them” by putting unapprenticed men to work on the capitalists’ own

looms, by letting out looms at rents, and “some also by giving much

less wages and hire for the weaving and workmanship of clothes than

in times past they did.”[78] To the Parliament of these days it

seemed right and natural that the oppressed wage-earners should turn

to the legislature to protect them against the cutting down of their

earnings by the competing capitalists. The statutes of 1552 and 1555

forbid the use of the gig-mill, restrict the number of looms that one

person may own to two in towns and one in the country, and absolutely

prohibit the letting-out of looms for hire or rent. In 1563, indeed,

Parliament expressly charged itself with securing to all wage-earners

a “convenient” livelihood. The old laws fixing a maximum wage could

not, in face of the enormous rise of prices, be put in force “without

the great grief and burden of the poor labourer and hired man.”

Circumstances were changing too fast for any rigid rule. But by the

celebrated “Statute of Apprentices” the statesmen of the time contrived

arrangements which would, as they hoped, “yield unto the hired person,

both in the time of scarcity and in the time of plenty, a convenient

proportion of wages.” Every year the justices of each locality were

to meet, “and calling unto them such discreet and grave persons ...

as they shall think meet, and conferring together respecting the

plenty or scarcity of the time,” were to fix the wages of practically

every kind of labour,[79] their decisions being enforceable by heavy

penalties. Stringent regulations as to the necessity of apprenticeship,

the length of its term, and the number of apprentices to be taken by

each employer, received the confirmation of law. The typical ordinances

of the mediæval gild were, in fact, enacted in minute detail in a

comprehensive general statute applying to the greater part of the

industry of the period.