law was or was not advantageous to the labouring folk of the time,
or whether and to what extent its provisions were actually put in
force.[80] But codifying and enacting as it did the fundamental
principles of the mediæval social order, we can scarcely be surprised
that its adoption by Parliament confirmed the working man in the once
universal belief in the essential justice and good policy securing by
appropriate legislation “the getting of a competent livelihood” by
all those concerned in industry.[81] Exactly the same view prevailed
at the beginning of the eighteenth century. We again find the newly
established associations of the operatives appealing to the King,
to the House of Commons, or to Quarter Sessions against the beating
down of their wages by their employers. For the first half of the
century the governing classes continued to act on the assumption that
the industrious mechanic had a right to the customary earnings of
his trade. Thus in 1726 the weavers of Wilts and Somerset combine to
petition the King against the harshness and fraud of their employers
the clothiers, with the result that a Committee of the Privy Council
investigates their grievances, and draws up “Articles of Agreement”
for the settlement of the matters in dispute,[82] admonishing the
weavers “for the future” not to attempt to help themselves by unlawful
combinations, but always “to lay their grievances in a regular way
before His Majesty, who would be always ready to grant them relief
suitable to the justice of their case.”[83] More often the operatives
appealed to the House of Commons. In 1719 the “broad and narrow
weavers” of Stroud and places round, petitioned Parliament to put down
the tyrannical capitalist clothiers by enforcing the “Act touching
Weavers” of 1555.[84] In 1728 the Gloucestershire operatives appealed
to the local justices of the peace, and induced them, in spite of
protests from the master clothiers, and apparently for the first time,
to fix a liberal scale of wages for the weavers of the country.[85]
Twenty years later the operatives obtained from Parliament a special
prohibition of truck.[86] Finally, in 1756 they persuaded the House of
Commons to pass an Act[87] providing for the fixing of piecework prices
by the justices, in order that the practice of cutting down rates and
underselling might be stopped. “A Table or Scheme for Rates of Wages”
was accordingly settled at Quarter Sessions, November 6, 1756, with
which the operatives were fairly contented.[88]
The next few years saw a revolutionary change in the industrial
policy of the legislature which must have utterly bewildered the
operatives. Within a generation the House of Commons exchanged its
policy of mediæval protection for one of “Administrative Nihilism.” The
Woollen Cloth Weavers’ Act of 1756 had not been one year in force when
Parliament was assailed by numerous petitions and counter petitions.
The employers declared that the rates fixed by the justices were, in
face of the growing competition of Yorkshire, absolutely impracticable.
The operatives, on the other hand, asked that the Act might be
strengthened in their favour. The clothiers asserted the advantages of
freedom of contract and unrestrained competition. The weavers received
the support of the landowners and gentry in claiming the maintenance by
law of their customary earnings. The perplexed House of Commons wavered
between the two. At first a Bill was ordered to be drawn strengthening
the existing law; but ultimately the clothiers were held to have proved
their case.[89] The Act of 1756 was, in 1757, unconditionally repealed;
and Parliament was now heading straight for _laisser-faire_.
The struggle over this Woollen Cloth Weavers’ Act of 1756 marks the
passage from the old ideas to the new. When, in 1776, the weavers,
spinners, scribblers, and other woollen operatives of Somerset
petitioned against the evil that was being done to their accustomed
livelihood by the introduction of the spinning-jenny into Shepton
Mallet, the House of Commons, which had two centuries before absolutely
prohibited the gig-mill, refused even to allow the petition to be
received.[90]
The change of policy had already affected another trade. The London
Framework Knitters’ Company, which had been incorporated in 1663 for
the express purpose of regulating the trade, found itself during
the first half of the eighteenth century in continual conflict with
recalcitrant masters who set its bye-laws at defiance. This long
struggle, in which the journeymen took vigorous action in support
of the Company, was brought to an end in 1753 by an exhaustive
Parliamentary inquiry. The bye-laws of the Company, upon the
enforcement of which the journeymen had rested all their hopes, were
solemnly declared to be “injurious and vexatious to the manufacturers,”
whilst the Company’s authority was pronounced to be “hurtful to the
trade.”[91] The total abandonment of all legal regulation of the trade
led, after numerous transitory revolts, to the establishment in 1778
of “The Stocking Makers’ Association for the Mutual Protection in the
Midland Counties of England,” having for its objects the limitation of
apprentices, and the enactment of a fixed rate of wages. Dr. Brentano
has summarised the various attempts made by the operatives during the
next two years to secure the protection of the legislature.[92] Through
the influence of their Union a sympathetic member was returned for the
borough of Nottingham. Investigation by a committee brought to light
a degree of “sweating” scarcely paralleled even by the worst modern
instances. A Bill for the fixing of wages had actually passed its
second reading when the employers, whipping up all their friends in
the House, defeated it on the third reading--a rebuff to the workmen
which led to serious riots at Nottingham, and thrust the unfortunate
framework knitters back into despairing poverty.[93]
By this time the town craftsmen were also beginning to be menaced
by the revolutionary proposals of their employers. The hatters, for
example, whose early combination we have already mentioned, had
hitherto been protected by the strict limitation of the number of
apprentices prescribed by the Acts of 1566 and 1603, and enforced by
the Feltmakers’ Company. We gather from the employers’ complaints that
the journeymen’s organisation, which by this time extended to most of
the provincial towns in which hats were made, was aiming at a strict
enforcement of the law limiting the number of apprentices which each
master might take. This caused the leading master hatters to promote,
in 1777, a Bill to remove the limitation. Against them was marshalled
the whole strength of the journeymen’s organisation. Petitions poured
in from London, Burton, Bristol, Chester, Liverpool, Hexham, Derby, and
other places, the “piecemaster hat or feltmakers and finishers” usually
joining with the journeymen against the demand of the capitalist
employers. The men asserted that, even with the limitation, “except
at brisk times many hundreds are obliged to go travelling up and down
the kingdom in search of employ.” But the House was impressed with the
evidence and arguments of the large employers, and their Bill passed
into law.[94]
The action of the House of Commons on occasions like these was not
as yet influenced by any conscious theory of freedom of contract.
What happened was that, as each trade in turn felt the effect of
the new capitalist competition, the journeymen, and often also the
smaller employers, would petition for redress, usually demanding the
prohibition of the new machines, the enforcement of a seven years’
apprenticeship, or the maintenance of the old limitation of the
number of boys to be taught by each employer. The House would as
a rule appoint a Committee to investigate the complaint, with the
full intention of redressing the alleged grievance. But the large
employers would produce before that Committee an overwhelming array
of evidence proving that without the new machinery the growing export
trade must be arrested; that the new processes could be learnt in a
few months instead of seven years; and that the restriction of the old
master craftsmen to two or three apprentices apiece was out of the
question with the new buyers of labour on a large scale. Confronted
with such a case as this for the masters even the most sympathetic
committee seldom found it possible to endorse the proposals of the
artisans. In fact, these proposals were impossible. The artisans had a
grievance--perhaps the worst that any class can have--the degradation
of their standard of livelihood by circumstances which enormously
increased the productivity of their labour. But they mistook the
remedy; and Parliament, though it saw the mistake, could devise nothing
better. Common sense forced the Government to take the easy and
obvious step of abolishing the mediæval regulations which industry had
outgrown. But the problem of protecting the workers’ Standard of Life
under the new conditions was neither easy nor obvious, and it remained
unsolved until the nineteenth century discovered the expedients of
Collective Bargaining and Factory Legislation, developing, in the
twentieth century, into the fixing by law of a Minimum Wage. In the
meantime the workers were left to shift for themselves, the attitude
of Parliament towards them being for the first years one of pure
perplexity, quite untouched by the doctrine of freedom of contract.
That the House of Commons remained innocent of any general theory
against legislative interference long after it had begun the work of
sweeping away the mediæval regulations is proved by the famous case of
the Spitalfields silk-weavers, in which the old policy of industrial
regulation was reverted to. In 1765 the Spitalfields weavers protested
that they were without employment, owing to the importation of foreign
silk. Assembling in crowds, they marched in processions to Westminster,
headed by bands and banners, and demanded the prohibition of the import
of the foreign product. Riots occurred sufficiently serious to induce
Parliament to pass an Act in the terms desired;[95] but this experiment
in Protection failed to maintain wages, and the riots were renewed
in 1769. Finally Sir John Fielding, the well-known London police
magistrate, suggested to the London silkweavers that they should
secure their earnings by an Act.[96] Under the pressure of another
outbreak of rioting in 1773, Parliament adopted this proposal, and
empowered the justices to fix the rates of wages and to enforce their
maintenance. The effect of this enactment upon the men’s combination
is significant. “A great man” had told the weavers, as one of them
relates, that the governing class “made laws, and we, the people,
must make legs to them.”[97] The ephemeral combination to obtain the
Act became accordingly a permanent union to enforce it. From this
time forth we hear no more of strikes or riots among the Spitalfields
weavers. Instead, we see arising a permanent machinery, designated the
“Union,” for the representation, before the justices, of both masters
and men, upon whose evidence the complicated lists of piecework rates
are periodically settled. Clearly the Parliaments which passed the
Spitalfields Acts of 1765 and 1773 had no conception of the political
philosophy of Adam Smith, whose _Wealth of Nations_, afterwards to be
accepted as the English gospel of freedom of contract and “natural
liberty,” was published in 1776. At the same time, so exceptional had
such acts become, that when Adam Smith’s masterpiece came into the
hands of the statesmen of the time, it must have seemed not so much a
novel view of industrial economics as the explicit generalisation of
practical conclusions to which experience had already repeatedly driven
them.
Towards the end of the century the governing classes, who had found
in the new industrial policy a source of enormous pecuniary profit,
eagerly seized on the new economic theory as an intellectual and
moral justification of that policy. The abandonment of the operatives
by the law, previously resorted to under pressure of circumstances,
and, as we gather, not without some remorse, was now carried out on
principle, with unflinching determination. When the handloom-weavers,
earning little more than a third of the livelihood they had gained
ten years before, and unable to realise that the factory system would
be deliberately allowed to ruin them, made themselves heard in the
House of Commons in 1808, a Committee reported against their proposal
to fix a minimum rate of wages on the ground that it was “wholly
inadmissible in principle, incapable of being reduced to practice by
any means which can possibly be devised, and, if practicable, would be
productive of the most fatal consequences”; and “that the proposition
relative to the limiting the number of apprentices is also entirely
inadmissible, and would, if adopted by the House, be attended with the
greatest injustice to the manufacturer as well as to the labourer.”[98]
Here we have _laisser-faire_ fully established in Parliament as an
authoritative industrial doctrine of political economy, able to
overcome the great bulk of the evidence given before this Committee,
which was decidedly in favour of the minimum wage. The House of Commons
had no lack of opportunities for educating itself on the question. The
special misery caused by bad harvests and the prolonged war between
1793 and 1815[99] brought a rush of appeals, especially from the newly
established associations of cotton operatives. In the early years of
the present century petition after petition poured in from Lancashire
and Glasgow, showing that the rates for weaving had steadily declined,
and reiterating the old demands for a legally fixed scale of piecework
rates and the limitation of apprentices. In 1795, and again in 1800,
and once more in 1808, Bills fixing a minimum rate were introduced into
the House of Commons, sometimes meeting with considerable favour. The
report of the Committee of 1808, which took voluminous evidence on the
subject, has already been quoted. Petitions from the calico-printers
for a legal limitation of the number of apprentices, although warmly
supported by the Select Committee to which they were referred, met with
the same fate. Sheridan, indeed, was not convinced, and brought in a
Bill proposing, among other things, to limit the number of apprentices.
But Sir Robert Peel (the elder), whose own factories swarmed with boys,
opposed it in the name of industrial freedom, and carried the House of
Commons with him.[100]
Meanwhile the despairing operatives, baffled in their attempts to
procure fresh legislation, turned for aid to the existing law.
Unrepealed statutes still enabled the justices in some trades to fix
the rate of wages, limited in others the number of apprentices; in
others, again, prohibited certain kinds of machinery, and forbade
any but apprenticed men to exercise the trade. So completely had
these statutes fallen into disuse that their very existence was in
many instances unknown to the artisans. The West of England weavers,
however, combined with those of Yorkshire in 1802 to employ an
attorney, who took proceedings against employers for infringing the old
laws. The result was that Parliament hastily passed an Act suspending
these statutes, in order to put a stop to the prosecutions.[101] “At
a numerous meeting of the cordwainers of the City of New Sarum in
1784,” says an old circular that we have seen, “it was unanimously
resolved ... that a subscription be entered into for putting the law
in force against infringements on the Trade,” but apparently without
result.[102] The Edinburgh compositors were more successful; on
being refused an advance of wages, to correspond with the rise in the
cost of living, they presented, February 28, 1804, a memorial to the
Court of Session, and obtained the celebrated “Interlocutor” of 1805,
which fixed a scale of piecework prices for the Edinburgh printing
trade.[103] But the chief event of this campaign for the enforcement
of the old laws began in Glasgow. The cotton-weavers of that city,
after four or five years of Parliamentary agitation for additional
legislation, resorted to the law empowering the justices to fix the
rates of wages. After an unsuccessful attempt to fix a standard rate by
agreement with a committee of employers, the men’s association which
now extended throughout the whole of the cotton-weaving districts in
the United Kingdom commenced legal proceedings at the Lanarkshire
Quarter Sessions. The employers in 1812 disputed the competence of
the magistrates, and appealed to the Court of Sessions at Edinburgh.
The Court held that the magistrates were competent to fix a scale of
wages, and a table of piecework rates was accordingly drawn up. The
employers immediately withdrew from the proceedings; but the operatives
were nevertheless compelled, at great expense, to produce witnesses
to testify to every one of the numerous rates proposed. After one
hundred and thirty witnesses had been heard, the magistrates at length
declared the rates to be reasonable, but made no actual order enforcing
them. The employers, with few exceptions, refused to accept the table,
which it had cost the operatives £3000 to obtain. The result was the
most extensive strike the trade has ever known. From Carlisle to
Aberdeen every loom stopped, forty thousand weavers ceasing work almost
simultaneously. After three weeks’ strike the employers were preparing
to meet the operatives, when the whole Strike Committee was suddenly
arrested by the police, and held to bail under the common law for the
crime of combination, of which the authorities, in that revolutionary
period, were very jealous on purely political grounds. The five
leaders were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying from four to
eighteen months; and this blow broke up the combination, defeated the
strike, and put an end to the struggles of the operatives against the
progressive degradation of their wages.[104]
The London artisans, though they were not put down by prosecution and
imprisonment, met with no greater success than their Glasgow brethren.
Between 1810 and 1812 a number of trade societies combined to engage
the services of a solicitor, who prosecuted masters for employing
“illegal men,” that is to say, men who had not by apprenticeship
gained a right to follow the trade. The original “case” which the
journeymen curriers submitted to counsel in 1810 (fee two guineas),
with a view to putting in force the Statute of Apprentices, was in
our possession, together with the somewhat hesitating opinion of the
legal adviser.[105] In a few cases proceedings were even taken against
employers for having set up in trades to which they had not themselves
served their time. Convictions were obtained in some instances; but no
costs were allowed to the prosecutors, who were, on the other hand,
condemned to pay heavy costs when they failed. Lord Ellenborough,
moreover, held on appeal that new trades, such as those of engineer
and lockmaker, were not included within the Elizabethan Act. In 1811
certain journeymen millers of Kent petitioned the justices to fix a
rate of wages under the Elizabethan Act. When the justices refused
to hear the petition a writ of mandamus was applied for. Lord
Ellenborough granted the writ to compel them to hear the petition, but
said they were to exercise their own discretion as to whether they
would fix any rate. The justices, on this hint, declined to fix the
wages.[106] It soon became apparent that legal proceedings under these
obsolete statutes were, in face of the adverse bias of the courts,
as futile as they were costly. There was nothing for it then but
either to abandon the line of attack or to petition Parliament to make
effective the still unrepealed laws. This they accordingly did, with
the unexpected result that the “pernicious” law empowering justices to
fix wages was in 1813 peremptorily repealed.[107]
The law thus swept away was but one section of the great Elizabethan
statute, and its repeal left the other clauses untouched. A Select
Committee had already, in 1811, reported that “no interference of the
legislature with the freedom of trade, or with the perfect liberty
of every individual to dispose of his time and of his labour in the
way and on the terms which he may judge most conducive to his own
interest, can take place without violating general principles of the
first importance to the prosperity and happiness of the community;
without establishing the most pernicious precedent, or even without
aggravating, after a very short time, the pressure of the general
distress, and imposing obstacles against that distress being ever
removed.” The repeal of the wages clauses of the statute made this
emphatic declaration of the new doctrine law as far as the fixing of
wages was concerned; but there remained the apprenticeship clauses.
Petitions for the enforcement of these, and their extension to the new
trades, kept pouring in. They were finally referred to a large and
influential committee which included Canning, Huskisson, Sir Robert
Peel, and Sir James Graham among its members. The witnesses examined
were strongly in favour of the retention of the laws, with amendments
bringing them up to date. The chairman (George Rose) was apparently
converted to the view of the operatives by the evidence. The committee,
which had undoubtedly been appointed to formulate the complete
abolition of the apprenticeship clauses, found itself unable to fulfil
its virtual mandate. Not venturing, in the teeth of the manufacturers
and economists, to recommend the House to comply with the operatives’
demands, it got out of the difficulty by making no recommendation at
all. Hundreds of petitions in favour of the laws continued to pour in
from all parts of the country, 300,000 signatures being for retention
against 2000 for repeal, masters often joining in the journeymen’s
prayer. A public meeting of the “Master Manufacturers and Tradesmen
of the Cities of London and Westminster,” at the Freemasons’ Tavern,
passed resolutions strongly supporting the amendment and enforcement
of the existing law. On the other hand, a committee on which the
master engineers Maudsley and Galloway were prominent members, argued
forcibly in favour of freedom and against “the monstrous and alarming
but misguided association.” In 1814 Mr. Serjeant Onslow, who had not
served on the committee of the previous session, introduced a Bill to
repeal the whole apprenticeship law. The “Masters and Journeymen of
Westminster” were heard by counsel against this measure, but the House
had made up its mind in favour of the manufacturers, and by the Act
of 54 Geo. III. c. 96 swept away the apprenticeship clauses of the
statute, and with them practically the last remnant of that legislative
protection of the Standard of Life which survived from the Middle
Ages.[108] The triumphant manufacturers presented Serjeant Onslow with
several pieces of plate for his championship of commercial liberty.[109]
So thoroughly had the new doctrine by this time driven out the very
recollection of the old ideals from the mind of the governing class
that it was now the operatives who were regarded as innovators, and
we are hardly surprised to find another committee gravely declaring
that “the right of every man to employ the capital he inherits, or
has acquired, according to his own discretion, without molestation
or obstruction, so long as he does not infringe on the rights or
property of others, is one of those privileges which the free and
happy constitution of this country has long accustomed every Briton
to consider as his birthright.”[110] But it must be added that the
governing class was by no means impartial in the application of its
new doctrine. Mediæval regulation acted not only in restriction of
free competition in the labour market to the pecuniary loss of the
employers, but also in restriction of free contract to the loss
of the employees, who could only obtain the best terms for their
labour by collective instead of individual bargaining. Consequently
the operatives, if they had clearly understood the situation, would
have been as anxious to abolish the laws against combination as to
maintain those fixing wages and limiting apprenticeship; just as the
capitalists, better informed, were no less resolute in maintaining the
anti-combination laws than in repealing the others. We shall presently
see how slow the workers were to realise this, in spite of the fact
that the laws against combinations of workmen were maintained in force,
and even increased in severity. Strikes, and any organised resistance
to the employers’ demands, were put down with a high hand. The first
twenty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a legal persecution
of Trade Unionists as rebels and revolutionists. This persecution,
thwarting the healthy growth of the Unions, and driving their members
into violence and sedition, but finally leading to the repeal of the
Combination Laws and the birth of the modern Trade Union Movement, will
be the subject of the next chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] In the first edition we said “of their employment.” This has been
objected to as implying that Trade Unions have always contemplated
a perpetual continuance of the capitalist or wage-system. No such
implication was intended. Trade Unions have, at various dates during
the past century at any rate, frequently had aspirations towards a
revolutionary change in social and economic relations.
[4] Riley’s _Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries_ (1888), p. 495 (partly cited in
_Trade Unions_, by William Trant, 1884).
[5] _Ibid._ pp. 542-3.
[6] _Ibid._ p. 609; Clode’s _Early History of the Merchant Taylors’
Company_, vol. i. p. 63.
[7] _Calendars of State Papers: Letters and Papers, Foreign and
Domestic, Henry VIII._ vol. xiii. part i., 1538, No. 1454, p. 537.
Compare the ephemeral combinations cited by Fagniez, _Études sur
l’industrie et la classe industrielle à Paris_ (Paris, 1877), pp. 76,
82, etc.
[8] It has been assumed that, in the company of “Bachelors” or “Yeomen
Tailors” connected with the Merchant Taylors’ Company of London
between 1446 and 1661, we have “for the first time revealed to us the
existence, and something of the constitution, of a journeyman’s society
which succeeded in maintaining itself for a prolonged period.” More
careful examination of the materials from which this vivid picture of
this supposed journeyman’s society has been drawn leads us to believe
that it was not composed of journeymen at all, but of masters. This
might, in the first place, have been inferred from the fact that in
the ranks of the supposed journeymen were to be found opulent leaders
like Richard Hilles, the friend of Cranmer and Bullinger, who “became
a Bachelor in Budge of the Yeoman Company” in 1535 (Clode, _Early
History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company_, vol. ii. p. 64), and Sir
Leonard Halliday, afterwards Lord Mayor, who was in the Bachelors’
Company from 1572 to 1594, when “he was elected a member of the
higher hierarchy of the Corporation” (_ibid._ p. 237). The Bachelors’
Company, indeed, far from being composed of needy wage-earners, bore
the greater part of the expense of the pageant in connection with the
mayoralty, and managed the whole proceedings. The Bachelors “in Foynes”
and those “in Budge” are all named as marching in the procession in
“gownes to be welted with velvet, and there jackyttes, cassockes, and
doublettes to be either of satten damaske, taffataye” (_ibid._ pp.
262-6). And when, in 1609, the Company was assessed to contribute to
the Plantation of Ulster, the Bachelors contributed nearly as much as
the merchants (£155, 10s. from ten members as compared with £187, 10s.
from nine members (_ibid._ vol. i. pp. 327-9)). Whether the Bachelors’
Company ever included any large proportion of hired journeymen appears
extremely doubtful, though its object was clearly the regulation of
the trade. The members, according to the Ordinance of 1613, paid a
contribution of 2s. 2d. a quarter “for the poor of the fraternity.”
This may be contrasted with the quarterage of 8d. a year or 2d. per
quarter, levied, according to order of August 1578, on every servant or
journeyman free of the City. The funds of the two companies were kept
distinct, but frequent donations were made from one to the other, and
not only from the inferior to the superior (_ibid._ vol. i. pp. 67-9).
That the Bachelors’ Company was by no means confined to journeymen
is clear. Sir Leonard Halliday, for instance, became a freeman in
April 1564 on completing his apprenticeship, and at once set up in
business for himself, obtaining a charitable loan for the purpose.
Yet, although he prospered in business, “in 1572 we find him assessed
as in the Bachelors’ Company,” and he was not elected to the superior
company until 1594 (_ibid._ vol. ii. p. 237). And in the Ordinance of
1507, “for all those persons that shall be abled by the maister and
Wardeins to holde hous or shop open,” it is provided that the person
desiring to set up shop shall not only pay a licence fee, but also “for
his incomyng to the bachelers’ Company and to be broder with theym
iij^s iii^d” (Clode, _Memorials of the Merchant Taylors’ Company_, p.
209). Nor do the instances of its action imply that it had at heart
the interest of the wage-earners, as distinguished from that of the
employers. The hostility to foreigners, the desire to secure government
clothing contracts, and the preference for a limitation of apprentices
to two for each employer are all consistent with the theory that
the Bachelors’ Company was, like its superior, composed of masters,
probably less opulent than the governing clique, and perhaps occupied
in tailoring rather than in the business of a clothier or merchant. It
is not until 1675 and 1682 that can be traced in the MS. records of
the Clothworkers’ Company the existence of distinctively journeymen’s
combinations (_Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries_, by George Unwin, 1904, p. 199). The other instances of
identification of “Bachelors’ Companies” or “Yeomen” organisation with
journeymen’s societies are no more convincing than that of the Merchant
Taylors. That the “valets,” serving-men, or journeymen in many trades
possessed some kind of “almsbox,” or charitable funds of their own
is indeed clear, but that this was ever used in trade disputes, or
was independent of the masters’ control, must at present be regarded
as highly improbable. The strongest instance of independence is
that of the Oxford cordwainers (_Selections from the Records of the
City of Oxford_, by William H. Turner, Oxford, 1880). See, on the
whole subject, the chapter on “Mediæval Journeymen’s Clubs,” in Sir
William Ashley’s _Surveys: Historic and Economic_, 1900; _Industrial
Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries_, by Professor
George Unwin, 1904; and an article on “The Origin of Trade Unionism,”
by Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, in the _Economic Review_, April 1895 (vol. v.).
[9] Dugdale’s _Antiquities of Warwickshire_ (1656), p. 125.
[10] Riley’s _Memorials_, p. 653; Clode, _Early History of Merchant
Taylors’ Company_, vol. i. p. 63.
[11] Compare Fagniez, _Études sur l’industrie et la classe industrielle
à Paris_ (Paris, 1877), p. 123.
[12] 3 Henry VI. c. 1; see also 34 Edward III. c. 9.
[13] “Ordinances of Worcester,” Art. lvii. in Toulmin Smith’s _English
Gilds_, p. 399.
[14] Compare the analogous instances given by Fagniez, _Études sur
l’industrie et la classe industrielle à Paris_, p. 203 (Paris, 1877).
[15] Dr. Brentano has noticed (p. 81) that the great majority of
the legal regulations of wages in the Middle Ages relate (if not to
agriculture) to the building trades; and it may be that these were,
like modern cab-fare regulations, intended more for the protection of
the customer than for that of the capitalist.
[16] See “Notes on the Organisation of the Mason’s Craft in England,”
by Dr. William Cunningham (_British Academy Proceedings_).
[17] Such a master craftsmen’s society we see in the Masons’ “Lodge of
Atchison’s Haven,” which, on December 27, 1735, passed the following
resolution: “The Company of Atchison’s Haven being mett together, have
found Andrew Kinghorn guilty of a most atrocious crime against the
whole Trade of Masonry, and he not submitting himself to the Company
for taking his work so cheap that no man could have his bread of it.
Therefore in not submitting himself he has excluded himself from the
said Company; and therefore the Company doth hereby enact that no man,
neither fellow craft nor enter’d prentice after this shall work as
journeyman under the said Andrew Kinghorn, under the penalty of being
cut off as well as he. Likewise if any man shall follow the example of
the said Andrew Kinghorn in taking work at eight pounds Scots per rood
the walls being twenty feet high, and rebates at eighteen pennies Scots
per foot, that they shall be cut off in the same manner” (_Sketch of
the Incorporation of Masons_, by James Cruikshank, Glasgow, 1879, pp.
131, 132).
[18] Thorold Rogers points out that the Merton College bell-tower was
built in 1448-50 by direct employment at wages. The new quadrangle,
early in the seventeenth century, was put out to contract with a master
mason and a master carpenter respectively, but the college still
supplied all the material (_History of Agriculture and Prices_, vol. i.
pp. 258-60; iii. pp. 720-37; v. pp. 478, 503, 629).
[19] _Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries_, by George Unwin, 1904, p. 201. In this connection may
be mentioned the London watermen, who have always dealt directly
with their customers, and who possess a tradition of having been
continuously organised since 1350. Power to regulate the trade of
watermen was, in 1555, conferred by Act of Parliament upon the
then incorporated Thames Watermen and Lightermen’s Company, the
administration of which appears to have been, from the first,
entirely in the hands of the master lightermen. The watermen, who
had no masters, were compelled to take out the freedom of this
Company, and the existing Trade Union, the Amalgamated Society of
Watermen and Lightermen, was established in 1872 for the express
purpose of obtaining some representation of the working watermen
and the journeymen lightermen on the Court of the Company. Previous
associations of working watermen for trade purposes seem to have been
in existence in 1789 (a Rotherhithe Society of Watermen) and in 1799
(Friendly Society of Watermen usually plying at the Hermitage Stairs,
in the parish of St. John, Wapping); and Mayhew describes, in 1850,
local “turnway societies,” regulating the sharing of custom, and a
Watermen’s Protective Society, to resist non-freemen (_London Labour
and the London Poor_, 1851).
[20] Schanz, however, in his _Zur Geschichte der deutschen
Gesellenverbände_ (Leipzig, 1877), suggests that the associations of
journeymen which flourished in Germany side by side with the Craft
Gilds prior to the Thirty Years’ War (1618) were, in fact, virtually
Trade Unions. Compare Schmoller’s _Strassburger Tucher-und Weberzunft_
(Strassburg, 1879). Professor G. Des Marez, the learned archivist
of Brussels, supplies evidence of the persistence of journeymen’s
organisations in Belgium, resembling those of Germany, down to the
beginning of the sixteenth century; and of the rise of new ones towards
the end of the seventeenth century, without trace of continuity (in
_Le Compagnonnage des chapeliers bruxellois_, Brussels, 1909.) See
Professor Unwin’s article in _English Historical Review_ (October
1910); and compare _Les Compagnonnages des arts et métiers à Dijon aux
xvii^e et xviii^e siècles_, by H. House, 1909, and _Enquêtes sur les
associations professionnelles d’artisans et ouvriers en Belgique_, by
E. Vandervelde, 1891.
[21] Dr. Brentano’s essay was originally prefixed to Toulmin Smith’s
_English Gilds_, published by the Early English Text Society in 1870.
It was republished separately as _The History and Development of Gilds
and the Origin of Trades Unions_ (135 pp., 1870), and it is to this
edition that we refer. Dr. Brentano’s larger work, _Die Arbeitergilden
der Gegenwart_ (Leipzig, 2 vols., 1871-72), includes this essay, and
also his article in the _North British Review_ for October 1870 on
“The Growth of a Trades Union.” It is only fair to say that in this,
the ablest study of English Trade Union history down to that time, Dr.
Brentano lent no support to the popular idea of any actual descent
of the Trade Unions from the gilds. The _Cobden Club Essays_ (1872)
contain a good article on Trade Unions, by Joseph Gostick, in which it
is argued that these associations were, in England, unknown before the
eighteenth century, and had no connection with the gilds.
[22] Page 102.
[23] The first hundred pages of George Howell’s _Conflicts of Capital
and Labour_ (first edition, 1877; second edition, 1890) are a close
paraphrase of Dr. Brentano’s essay, practically the whole of which
appears, often in the same words, as Howell’s own. But already in 1871
Dr. Brentano, in his _Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart_ (vol. i. ch. iii.
p. 83), expressly connected the Trade Unions, like Schanz, not with the
gilds, but with the Journeymen Fraternities, which he suggests may have
“awaked under changed circumstances to new strength and life, and to a
new policy.” We gather that Sir William Ashley inclines to this view.
“My own impression,” he says, “is that we shall by and by find that,
like the usages of the German journeymen in the eighteenth century
that centred into Herbergen, the trade clubs of eighteenth century
England were broken-down survivals from an earlier period, undergoing,
with the advent of the married journeyman and other causes, the slow
transformation from which they emerged in the nineteenth century as the
nuclei of the modern Trade Union.” Sir William Ashley does not assert
that any continuity of organisation can be proved. “What is suggested
is only that the habit of acting together in certain ways, which we
find to characterise the journeymen of the eighteenth century, had been
formed in a much earlier period” (_Surveys: Historic and Economic_, by
Sir William Ashley, 1900).
[24] So long as the Companies continued to exercise any jurisdiction
over their trades, we find them (as in the cases of the London
Framework-knitters and the Dublin Silkweavers) supported by any
workmen’s combinations that existed. In exceptional instances, such
as the London Brushmakers, Basketmakers, and Watermen, we find this
alliance for the exclusion of “illegal men” continuing into the
nineteenth century, and (as regards the Watermen) down to the present
time.
[25] _Macmillan’s Magazine_ (February 1861), relying on the Social
Science _Report on Trade Societies and Strikes_ (1860), p. 521.
[26] See Appendix _On the Assumed Connection between the Trade Unions
and the Gilds in Dublin_.
[27] _Gilds and Trade Unions_ (1870), p. 54.
[28] _History of Industry and Commerce_, vol. i. p. 310. Dr. Gross, in
his _Gild Merchant_, apparently takes a similar view.
[29] See his _Introduction to Economic History and Theory_, vol. i.
(1891); vol. ii. (1893); see also his _Surveys: Historic and Economic_
(1900).
[30] Dr. Brentano himself makes this clear. “We must not forget that
these gilds were not unions of labourers in the present sense of the
word, but of persons who, with the help of some stock, carried on their
craft on their own account. The gild contests were, consequently, not
contests for acquiring political equality for labour and property,
but for the recognition of political equality of trade stock and real
property in the towns” (_Gilds and Trade Unions_, p. 73).
[31] Jupp’s _History of the Carpenters’ Company_, p. 313, second
edition, 1848. In certain cases we see the workmen seeking
incorporation as a gild or company, in order that they might themselves
lawfully regulate their trades. Thus, in 1670 the wage-earning
woodsawyers of the City of London, who were employed by the members of
the Carpenters’, Joiners’ and Shipwrights’ Companies, formally applied
to the Corporation to be made a Company. Their employers strongly
objected, alleging that they had already by combination raised their
wages during the past quarter of a century from 5s. to nearly 10s.
per load; that they were only day labourers who worked on material
provided by their employers, and consequently not entitled to rank as
masters; and that if their combination were recognised by incorporation
they would be able to bring the whole building trade to a standstill,
as experience had already demonstrated even without incorporation.
Moreover, their main object, it was alleged, was to exclude from
employment “all that sort of labourers who daily resort to the City
of London and parts adjacent, and by that means keep the wages and
prices of these sorts of labourers at an equal and indifferent rate;
and then success would be an evil precedent, all other labourers, the
masons, bricklayers, plasterers, etc., having the same reason to allege
for incorporation” (_Ibid._ p. 307). The London coal-porters in 1699
unsuccessfully petitioned the House of Commons that a Bill might be
passed to establish them as “a Fellowship in such government and rules
as shall be thought meet” (House of Commons Journals, vol. xiii. p.
69). Professor Unwin suggests that it was “by its failure along these
traditional lines” that “the wage-earning class was driven into secret
combinations, from the obscurity of which the Trade Union did not
emerge till the 19th century” (_Industrial Organisation in the 16th and
17th Centuries_, 1904).
[32] “The Trade Union of to-day is often spoken of as the lineal
descendant of the ancient Craft Gilds. There is, however, no direct
or indirect connection between the ancient and modern forms of trade
combination. Beyond the fact that they each had for their objects
the establishment of certain trade regulations, and the provision of
certain similar benefits, they had nothing in common.” “Trade Unions
as a Means of Improving the Conditions of Labour,” by John Burnett;
published in _The Claims of Labour_ (Edinburgh, 1886).
“To attempt to find an immediate connection between the Gild and
the Trade Union is like attempting to derive the English House of
Commons from the Saxon Witanagemot. In the one case as in the other
the two institutions were separated by centuries of development, and
the earlier one was dead before the later one was born” (_Industrial
Organisation in the 16th and 17th Centuries_, by Professor George
Unwin, 1904, p. 8).
[33] Goldasti’s _Constitutiones Imperiales_, tom. iv. p. 189, quoted by
Dr. Brentano, p. 60.
[34] A pamphlet of 1669 contains what appears at first sight to be a
mention of Trade Unionism. “The general conspiracy amongst artificers
and labourers is so apparent that within these twenty-five years the
wages of joiners, bricklayers, carpenters, etc., are increased, I mean
within 40 miles of London (against all reason and good government),
from eighteen and twenty pence a day, to 2/6 and 3/-, and mere
labourers from 10 and 12 pence a day unto 16 and 20 pence, and this
not since the dreadful fire of London only, but some time before. A
journeyman shoemaker has now in London (and proportionately in the
country) 14 pence for making that pair of shoes, which within these
12 years he made for 10 pence.... Nor has the increase of wages
amongst us been occasioned by quickness of trade and want of hands (as
some do suppose) which are indeed justifiable reasons, but through
an exacting humour and evil disposition in our people (like our
Gravesend watermen, who by some temporary and mean pretences of the
late Dutch war, have raised their ferry double to what it was, and
finding the sweet thereof, keep it up still), that so they may live
the better above their station, and work so much the fewer days by
how much the more they exact in their wages” (_Usury at Six Per Cent.
Examined_, by Thomas Manley, London, 1669). But we cannot infer from
this unique and ambiguous passage anything more than the possibility
of ephemeral combinations. It is significant that Defoe, with all his
detailed description of English industry in 1724, does not mention any
combinations of workmen.
[35] In an able pamphlet dated 1681, entitled _The Trade of England
Revived_, it is stated that “we cannot make our English cloth so
cheap as they do in other countries, because of the strange idleness
and stubbornness of our poor,” who insist on excessive wages. But
the author attributes this state of things, not to the existence of
combinations, of which he seems never to have heard, but to the Poor
Law and the prevalence of almsgiving.
[36] _Wealth of Nations_, bk. i. ch. x. p. 59 of McCulloch’s edition,
1863. In an operative’s description, dated 1809, of the gatherings
of the Paisley weavers, we see the Trade Union in the making. “The
Paisley operatives are of a free, communicative disposition. They
are fond to inform one another in anything respecting trade, and in
order to receive information in a collective capacity they have, for
a long course of years, associated in a friendly manner in societies
denominated clubs.... When met the first hour is devoted to reading
the daily newspapers out aloud.... At nine o’clock the chairman calls
silence; then the report of trade is heard. The chairman reports first
what he knows or what he has heard of such a manufacturing house or
houses, as wishing to engage operatives for such fabric or fabrics;
likewise the price, the number of the yarn, etc. Then each reports
as he is seated; so in the period of an hour not only the state of
the trade is known, but any difference that has taken place between
manufacturers and operatives” (_An Answer to Mr. Carlile’s Sketches of
Paisley_, by William Taylor, Paisley, 1809, pp. 15-17).
[37] See Dunning’s account of the origin of the Consolidated Society
of Bookbinders in 1779-80, in the Social Science Association’s _Report
on Trade Societies_, 1860, p. 93; also _Workers on their Industries_,
edited by F. W. Galton, 1895; _Women in the Printing Trades_, edited by
J. R. MacDonald, 1904, p. 30.
[38] _Articles of Agreement made and confirmed by a Society of Taylors,
begun March 25, 1760_ (London, 1812). In 1790 Francis Place joined the
Breeches Makers’ Benefit Society “for the support of the members when
sick and their burial when dead”--its real object being to support
the members “in a strike for wages” (_Life of Francis Place_, by
Professor Graham Wallas, new edition, 1918). Local friendly societies
giving sick pay and providing for funeral expenses had sprung up all
over England during the eighteenth century. Towards its close their
number seems to have rapidly increased until, in some parts at any
rate, every village ale-house became a centre for one or more of
these humble and spontaneous organisations. The rules of upwards of
a hundred of these societies, dating between 1750 and 1820, and all
centred round Newcastle-on-Tyne, are preserved in the British Museum.
At Nottingham, in 1794, fifty-six of these clubs joined in the annual
procession (_Nottingham Journal_, June 14, 1794). So long as they were
composed indiscriminately of men of all trades, it is probable that
no distinctively Trade Union action could arise from their meetings.
But in some cases, for various reasons, such as high contributions,
migratory habits, or the danger of the calling, the sick and burial
club was confined to men of a particular trade. This kind of friendly
society frequently became a Trade Union. Some societies of this type
can trace their existence for nearly a century and a half. The Glasgow
coopers, for instance, have had a local trade friendly society,
confined to journeymen coopers, ever since 1752. The London Sailmakers
Burial Society dates from 1740. The Newcastle shoemakers established a
similar society as early as 1719 (_Observations upon the Report from
the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the laws respecting
Friendly Societies_, by the Rev. J. T. Becher, Prebendary of Southwell,
1826). On the occurrence of any dispute with the employers their funds,
as this contemporary observer in another pamphlet deplores, “have also
too frequently been converted into engines of abuse by paying weekly
sums to artisans out of work, and have thereby encouraged combinations
among workmen not less injurious to the misguided members than to
the Public Weal” (_Observations on the Rise and Progress of Friendly
Societies_, 1824, p. 55). Similar friendly societies among workmen of
particular trades appear to have existed in the Netherlands in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where they perhaps bridged the
gap between the mediæval fraternities and the modern Trade Unions (see
review in the _English Historical Review_, October 1918, of P. J.
Blok’s _Geschiedenes einer Hollandischen Stad_).
[39] Schanz (_Gesellenverbände_, p. 25) follows Brentano (p. 94) in
attributing the formation of journeymen’s fraternities in the Middle
Ages mainly to a desire to provide for the wandering craftsmen.
The connection between the “Herbergen” or “Schenken,” designed to
find lodging and employment, with the journeymen’s associations was
certainly close. (See Dr. Bruno Schoenlank’s article in 1894, quoted in
Sir William Ashley’s _Surveys: Historic and Economic_, 1900.) It may be
suggested that the contrast between the absence or scanty existence of
such fraternities in England and their spread in Germany is, perhaps,
to be ascribed in some measure to the fact that English journeymen seem
never to have adopted the German custom of “Wanderjahre,” or regular
habit of spending, on completing their apprenticeship, a few years in
travelling about the country to complete their training. When the local
privileges of the old gilds had fallen somewhat into abeyance, the
restrictions of the successive Settlement Acts must in England, to some
extent, have checked the mobility of labour. But, from the beginning of
the eighteenth century at any rate, we find it customary for journeymen
of certain trades--it is to be noticed that these are relatively new
trades in England--to “tramp” from town to town in search of work,
and the description, subsequently quoted, of the organisations of the
woolcombers and worsted weavers in 1741, shows that the relief of these
travelling journeymen was a prominent object of the early unions.
The hatters in the middle of the eighteenth century had a regular
arrangement for such relief. The compositors at the very beginning
of the nineteenth century had already covered the country with a
network of local clubs, the chief function of which appears to have
been the facilitation of this wandering in search of work. And the
calico-printers had a systematic way of issuing a ticket which entitled
the tramp to collect from each journeyman, in any “print-field” that he
visited, at first a voluntary contribution, and latterly a fixed relief
of a halfpenny per head in England, and a penny per head in Scotland
(_Minutes of evidence taken before the Committee to whom the petition
of the several journeymen Calico-printers and others working in that
trade, etc., was referred_, July 4, 1804, and the _Report_ from that
Committee, July 17, 1806).
[40] J. M. Ludlow, in article in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, February 1861.
[41] _Work and the Workman_, by Dr. J. K. Ingram (Address to the Trades
Union Congress at Dublin, 1880).
[42] Benjamin Franklin mentions the “chapel” and its regulations in
1725. A copy, dated 1734, of the _Rules and Orders to be observed by
the Members of this Chapel: by Compositors, by Pressmen, by Both_, is
preserved in the Place MSS. 27799--88.
[43] This petition (in the British Museum) is printed in Brentano’s
_Gilds and Trade Unions_, p. 97. Benjamin Franklin, who worked in
London printing offices in 1725, makes no mention of Trade Unionism.
The Stationers’ Company continued, so far as the City of London was
concerned, to regulate apprenticeship; and we see it, in 1775, taking
steps to prevent employers having an undue number. Regulations agreed
to by the employers and the compositors, as to the rates of pay for
different kinds of work, can be traced back to 1785, at least. A copy
of the rules of “The Phœnix, or Society of Compositors” meeting at “The
Hole in the Wall” tavern, Fleet Street, shows that this organisation
was “instituted March 12th, 1792.” In 1798 five members of the
“Pressmen’s Friendly Society” were indicted for conspiracy in meeting
for the purpose of restricting the number of apprentices (they sought
to limit them to three for seven presses). Although the secretary to
the “Society of Master Printers” had requested these men to attend
the meeting, in order to get settled the pending dispute, they were
convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (_Conflicts of
Capital and Labour_, by George Howell, 1890, p. 92).
[44] For this interesting case we are indebted to Professor George
Unwin’s researches in the records of the Feltmakers’ Company, whose
“Court Book” contains the record. See _Industrial Organisation in the
16th and 17th Centuries_, by George Unwin, 1904; “A Seventeenth-Century
Trade Union,” by the same, in _Economic Journal_, 1910, pp. 394-403;
the chapter “Mediæval Journeymen’s Clubs” in Sir William Ashley’s
_Surveys, Historic and Economic_, 1900.
[45] House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi.; 8 Eliz. c. 11; 1 James
I. c. 14; and 17 George III. c. 55; Place MSS. 27799--68; Committee
on Artisans and Machinery, 1824; _Industrial Democracy_, p. 11;
“A Seventeenth Century Trade Union,” by Professor George Unwin,
in _Economic Journal_, 1910, pp. 394-403; _Conflicts of Capital
and Labour_, by G. Howell, 1890, p. 83. The organisation evidently
continued in existence, at least in its local form; but the existing
national “Journeymen Hatters’ Trade Union of Great Britain and Ireland”
claims to date only from 1798. In 1806 the Macclesfield hatters were
indicted for conspiracy in striking for higher wages, and sentenced to
twelve months’ imprisonment. Particulars of this organisation will be
found in _The Trial of W. Davenport ... Hatters of Macclesfield for a
Conspiracy against their Masters_ ... by Thomas Mulineaux, 1806.
[46] For the whole history of this industry, see _The Tailoring Trade_,
by F. W. Galton, 1896.
[47] _The London Tradesman_, by Campbell, 1747, p. 192.
[48] _The Trade of England Revived_, 1681, p. 36.
[49] House of Commons Journals, vol. xix. pp. 416, 424, 481; _The
Case of the Master Taylors residing within the Cities of London and
Westminster, in relation to the great abuses committed by their
journeymen_; _An Abstract of the Master Taylors’ Bill before the
Honourable House of Commons, with the Journeymen’s Observation on
each clause of the said Bill_; _The Case of the Journeymen Taylors
residing in the Cities of London and Westminster_ (all 1720). These and
other documents relating to combinations in this trade have now been
published in a useful volume (_The Tailoring Trade_, by F. W. Galton,
1896), with an elaborate bibliography.
[50] _London_, by David Hughson (1821), pp. 392-3; House of Commons
Journals, vol. xxiv. Place MSS. 27799, pp. 4, 5. _The Case of the
Journeymen Taylors in and about the Cities of London and Westminster_
(January 7, 1745).
[51] _Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 1750, 1768.
[52] Place MSS. 27799--10; see _The Life of Francis Place, 1771-1854_,
by Professor Graham Wallas, 1898; second edition, 1918. There is
evidence of very similar organisation in other towns. At Birmingham,
for instance, there was a systematically organised strike in 1777
against a reduction of wages, which lasted for some months (Langford’s
_Century of Birmingham Life_, pp. 225, etc.; _The Tailoring Trade_, by
F. W. Galton, 1896).
[53] _A Declaration of the Estate of Clothing now used within this
Realme of England_, by John May, Deputy Alnager (1613, 51 pp., in B.M.
712, g. 16), a volume which contains many interesting pamphlets on the
woollen manufacture between 1613 and 1753. Already in 1622, a year of
depression of trade, we hear of numerous riots and tumults among the
weavers of the West of England, notably those of certain Devonshire
towns, who paraded the streets demanding work or food (_Quarter
Sessions from Elizabeth to Anne_, by A. H. A. Hamilton, 1878, pp.
95-6). But there is as yet no evidence of durable combinations at so
early a date.
[54] MS. Minutes, Court Book of the Clothworkers’ Company, December 10,
1675; August 16, 1682; _Industrial Organisation of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries_, by George Unwin, 1904, p. 199.
[55] _History of Tiverton_, by Martin Dunsford (Exeter, 1790).
[56] House of Commons Journals, vol. xviii. p. 715, February 5, 1717.
Tiverton and Exeter petition to the same effect.
[57] Hughson’s _London_, p. 337. The proclamation was reprinted in
_Notes and Queries_, September 21, 1867, from a copy preserved by the
Sun Fire Office.
[58] See the petitions from Exeter and Dartmouth, February 24, 1723,
vol. xx. pp. 268-9; and those from Taunton, Tiverton, Exeter, and
Bristol, March 3 and 7, 1725, vol. xx. pp. 598, 602, 648. In 1729 the
Bristol weavers, “while the corporation was at church,” riotously
attacked the house of an obnoxious employer, and had to be repulsed by
the troops (_History of Bristol_, p. 261, by J. Evans; Bristol, 1824).
In 1738 they forced the clothiers to sign a bond that they would “for
ever forward” give fifteen pence a yard for weaving, under penalty of
£1000 (_Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 1738, p. 658; see also “An Essay on
Riots, their Causes and Cure,” published in the _Gloucester Journal_,
and reprinted in the _Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 1739, pp. 7-10). In 1756
there was an extensive and serious uprising (see _A State of the Case
and Narrative of Facts relating to the late Commotion and Rising of the
Weavers in the County of Gloucester_, in the Gough Collection, Bodleian
Library).
[59] Defoe’s _Tour_, vol. iii. pp. 97-101, 116 (1724). John Bright
mentions his father’s apprenticeship, about 1789, to “a most worthy
man who had a few acres of ground, a very small farm, and three or
four looms in his house” (speech reported in _Beehive_, February 2,
1867). For a less optimistic account of the Yorkshire clothiers, who
were, even in the seventeenth century, often mere wage-earners, see
Cartwright’s _Chapters of Yorkshire History_.
[60] _History of Leicester_, by James Thompson, 1849, pp. 431-2.
[61] _A Short Essay upon Trade in General_, by “A Lover of his
Country,” 1741, quoted in James’ _History of the Worsted Manufacture in
England_, p. 232.
[62] See, in corroboration, _Leicester Herald_, August 24, 1793;
_Morning Chronicle_, October 13, 1824; Place MSS., 27801--246, 247.
[63] The Dublin silk-weavers, owing perhaps to their having been
largely Huguenot refugees in a Roman Catholic town, appear to have
been associated from the early part of the eighteenth century; see,
for instance, _The Case of the Silk and Worsted Weavers in a Letter
to a Member of Parliament_ (Dublin, 1749, 8 pp.). Compare _A Short
Historical Account of the Silk Manufacture in England_, by Samuel
Sholl, 1811, and _Industrial Dublin since 1698 and the Silk Industry in
Dublin_, by J. J. Webb, 1913.
[64] The condition of the framework knitters may be gathered from
the elaborate Parliamentary Inquiry, the proceedings of which fill
fifteen pages of the Journals of the House of Commons, vol. xxvi.,
April 19, 1753. See also vols. xxxvi. and xxxvii., and the Report from
the Committee on Framework Knitters’ Petitions, 1812; and _Conflicts
of Capital and Labour_, by G. Howell, 1890. Felkin’s _History of the
Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures_, 1867, contains an
exhaustive account of the trade, founded on Gravener Henson’s _History
of the Framework Knitters_, 1831, now a scarce work, of which only one
volume was published.
[65] _Sheffield Iris_, August 7 and September 9, 1790. The
Scissorsmiths’ Friendly Society, cited by Dr. Brentano, was established
in April 1791. Other trade friendly societies in Sheffield appear to
date from a much earlier period.
[66] Sir J. A. Picton’s _Memorials of Liverpool_, 1875; _A Digest of
the Evidence before the Committee on Artizans and Machinery_, by George
White, 1824, p. 233; _Conflicts of Labour and Capital_, by G. Howell,
1890, pp. 82-3.
[67] _Report of Committee on the Woollen Manufacture_, 1806, p. 16; see
also _Conflicts of Labour and Capital_, by G. Howell, 1890.
[68] See Chapter III.
[69] In volume entitled _Tracts Relating to Trade_, in British Museum,
816, m. 13. Tankard-bearers were water carriers.
[70] _Reasons against the designed leather impositions on gloves_, B.M.
816, m. 13.
[71] We shall have occasion later to refer to the absence of effective
Trade Unionism in those trades which are still carried on by small
working masters.
[72] The assumption frequently made that the Craft Gilds, at their best
period, included practically the whole working population, appears
to us unfounded. The gild system at no time extended to any but the
skilled handicraftsmen, alongside of whom must always have worked a
large number of unapprenticed labourers, who received less than half
the wages of the craftsmen. We venture to suggest that it is doubtful
whether the Craft Gilds at any time numbered as large a proportion of
the working population as the Trade Unions of the present day. See
_Industrial Democracy_, p. 480.
[73] “Tumults,” or strikes, among the coal-miners are occasionally
mentioned during the eighteenth century, but no lasting combinations.
See, for those in Somerset, Carmarthenshire, etc., in 1757,
_Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 1757, pp. 90, 185, 285, etc. In 1765 there
was a prolonged strike against the “yearly bond” by the Durham miners
(_Calendar of Home Office Papers_, 1765; Sykes’ _Local Records_, vol.
i, p. 254). The Keelmen, who loaded coals on the Tyne, “mutinied”
in 1654 and 1671 “for the increase of wages”; and there were fierce
strikes in 1710, 1744, 1750, 1771, and 1794. We have, however, no
particulars as to their associations, which were probably ephemeral
(Sykes’ _Local Records_; Richardson’s _Local Historian’s Table Book_;
_Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 1750).
[74] Many instances of insolence and aggression by the woolcombers are
on record; the employers’ advertisements in the _Nottingham Journal_,
August 31, 1795, and the _Leicester Herald_ of June 1792, are only two
out of many similar recitals.
[75] _Jubilee Souvenir History of the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers_, 1901, p. 12.
[76] That such clubs were common in the handicraft trades in London as
early as 1720 appears from the following extract from _The Case of the
Master Taylors residing within the Cities of London and Westminster_,
a petition which led to the Act of 1720: “This combination of the
Journeymen Taylors ... is of very ill example to Journeymen in all
other trades; as is sufficiently seen in the Journeymen Curriers,
Smiths, Farriers, Sailmakers, Coachmakers, and artificers of divers
other arts and mysteries, who have actually entered into Confederacies
of the like nature; and the Journeymen Carpenters, Bricklayers, and
Joyners have taken some steps for that purpose, and only wait to see
the event of others.” And the Journeymen Tailors in their petition of
1745 allude to the large number of “Monthly Clubs” among the London
handicraftsmen. With regard to the curriers at this date, see Place
MSS, 27801--246, 247.
It may be conveniently noticed here that, although strikes are, as we
have seen, as old as the fourteenth century at least, the word “strike”
was not commonly used in this sense until the latter part of the
eighteenth century. The Oxford Dictionary gives the first instance of
its use as in 1768, when the _Annual Register_ refers to the hatters
having “struck” for a rise in wages. The derivation appears to be from
the sailors’ term of “striking” the mast, thus bringing the movement to
a stop.
[77] So much is this the case that Dr. Brentano asserts that “Trade
Unions originated with the non-observance of” the Elizabethan Statute
of Apprentices (p. 104), and that their primary object was, in all
cases, the enforcement of the law on the subject.
[78] Preamble to “An Act touching Weavers” (2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c.
xi.); see Froude’s _History of England_, vol. i. pp. 57-9; and W. C.
Taylor’s _Modern Factory System_, pp. 53-5.
[79] As expanded by 1 James I. c. 6 and 16 Car. I. c. 4; see R. _v._
Justices of Kent, 14 East, 395.
[80] See on these points, Dr. Cunningham’s _History of English Industry
and Commerce_, Mr. Hewins’ _English Trade and Finance chiefly in the
17th Century_, and Thorold Rogers’ _History of Agriculture and Prices_,
vol. v. pp. 625-6, etc. Adam Smith observes that the fixing of wages
had, in 1776, “gone entirely into disuse” (_Wealth of Nations_, bk. i.
ch. x. p. 65), a statement broadly true, although formal determinations
of wages are found in the MS. Minutes of Quarter Sessions for another
half century.
[81] This forms the constant refrain of the numerous broadsheets or
_Tracts relating to Trade_ of 1688-1750, which are preserved in the
British Museum, the Guildhall Library, and in the Goldsmith Company’s
Library at the University of London.
[82] Privy Council Minutes of 1726, p. 310 (unpublished); see also
House of Commons Journals, vol. xx. p. 745 (February 20, 1726).
[83] Privy Council Minutes, February 4, 1726.
[84] House of Commons Journals, vol. xix. p. 181 (December 5, 1719).
[85] Petition of “Several weavers of Woollen Broadcloth on behalf
of themselves and several thousands of the Fraternity of Woollen
Broadcloth Weavers” (House of Commons Journals, vol. xxvii. p. 503; see
also pp. 730-2).
[86] 22 Geo. II. c. 27.
[87] 29 Geo. II. c. 33.
[88] _Report of Committee on Petitions of West of England Clothiers_,
House of Commons Journals, vol. xxvii. pp. 730-2.
[89] For all these proceedings, see House of Commons Journals, vol.
xxvii.
[90] House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi. p. 7 (November 1, 1776).
[91] House of Commons Journals, April 13 and 19, 1753, vol. xxvi.
pp. 764, 779; Felkin’s _History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and
Lace Manufacture_, p. 80; Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and
Commerce in Modern Times_, 1903, vol. i. p. 663.
[92] _Gilds and Trade Unions_, pp. 115-21.
[93] House of Commons Journals, vols. xxxvi. and xxxvii.
[94] House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi. pp. 192, 240, 268, 287,
1777; Act 17 Geo. III. c. 55, repealing 8 Eliz. c. 11, and 1 Jac. 1.
[95] 5 Geo. III. c. 48; see _Annual Register_, 1765, p. 41; Cunningham,
_Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times_, 1903, pp.
519, 796.
[96] Act 13 Geo. III. c. 68; see _A Short Historical Account of the
Silk Manufacture in England_, by Samuel Sholl, 1811.
[97] _Ibid._ p. 4.
[98] _Reports on Petitions of Cotton Weavers, 1809 and 1811._
[99] “The period between 1795 and 1815 was characterised by dearths
which on several occasions became well-nigh famines” (Thorold Rogers,
_History of Agriculture and Prices_, vol. i. p. 692).
[100] _Minutes of Evidence and Report of the Committee on the Petition
of the Journeymen Calico-printers_, July 4, 1804, July 17, 1806. See
also Sheridan’s speech reported in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,
vol. ix. pp. 534-8.
[101] 43 Geo. III. c. 136, continued in successive years until the
definite repeal, in 1809, of most of the laws regulating the woollen
manufacture by 49 Geo. III. c. 109; see Cunningham, 1903, vol. ii. p.
659.
[102] It was reprinted in the 121st Quarterly Report of the Amalgamated
Society of Boot and Shoemakers. The proceedings were taken by the
Friendly Society of Cordwainers of England, “instituted the 15th of
November 1784.” Particulars of the London Bootmakers’ Society, which
was in correspondence with seventy or eighty provincial societies, are
given in _A Digest of the Evidence before the Committee on Artizans and
Machinery_, by George White, 1824, p. 97.
[103] Professor Foxwell kindly placed at our disposal a unique series
of pamphlets relating to these proceedings, which are now in the
Goldsmiths Company’s Library at the University of London, including
the _Memorials_ of the journeymen and the employers, the _Report in
the Process_ by Robert Bell, and the _Scale of Prices_ as settled by
the Court. A full account of the proceedings is given in the _Scottish
Typographical Circular_, June 1858.
[104] See, for these proceedings, the two _Reports of the Committee on
the Petitions of the Cotton Weavers_, April 12, 1808, and March 29,
1809; and Richmond’s evidence before the Committee on Artisans and
Machinery, 1824, Second Report, pp. 59-64.
[105] It is now in the British Library of Political Science at the
London School of Economics.
[106] R. _v._ Justices of Kent, 14 East, 395; see F. D. Longe’s
_Inquiry into the Law of Strikes_, 1860, pp. 10, 11.
[107] 53 Geo. III. c. 40 (1813).
[108] The Spitalfields Acts, relating to the silkweavers, were,
however, not repealed until 1824; and the last sections of 5 Eliz. c. 4
were not formally repealed until 1875.
[109] White’s _Digest of all the laws at present in existence
respecting Masters and Workpeople_, 1824, p. 59. Place wrote to
Wakefield, January 2, 1814: “The affair of Serjeant Onslow partly
originated with me, but I had no suspicion it would be taken up and
pushed as vigorously as it has been and is likely to be” (_Life of
Francis Place_, by Prof. Graham Wallas, p. 159).
The proceedings in this matter can be best traced in the House of
Commons Journals for 1813 and 1814, vols. lxviii. and lxix.; and in
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vols. xxv. and xxvii. The master’s
case is given in a pamphlet, _The Origin, Object, and Operation of
the Apprentice Laws_, 1814, 26 pp., preserved in the _Pamphleteer_,
vol. iii. _The Resolutions of the Master Manufacturers and Tradesmen
of the Cities of London and Westminster on the Statute 5 Eliz. c.
4_, 1814, 4 pp., gives the contrary view (B.M. 1882, d. 2). The
contemporary argument for freedom is expressed in _An Estimate of the
Comparative Strength of Great Britain_, by G. Chalmers, 1810; see
_Cunningham_, 1903, vol. ii. p. 660. The Nottingham Library possesses
a unique copy of the _Articles and General Regulations of a Society
for obtaining Parliamentary Relief, and the Encouragement of Mechanics
in the Improvement of Mechanism_, printed at Nottingham in 1813. This
appears to have been a federation of framework knitters’ societies, and
possibly others, for Parliamentary action, as well as trade protection;
and its establishment in 1813 was perhaps connected with the movement
for the revival of the Apprenticeship Laws.
[110] _Report of the Committee on the State of the Woollen Manufacture
in England_, July 4, 1806, p. 12.