poor peasant stock, and he must have been put to it from early childhood
to find a means of living. Like many other unfortunates in every age, he
was a beachcomber, on the lookout for wreckage cast up by the waves.
Next, perhaps following some lucky find, he played the rôle of peddler
and went about the country with a pack on his back. Eventually he picked
up a little change and, one fine day, he joined a band of merchants met
in the course of his peregrinations. With them he went from market to
market, from fair to fair, from town to town. Thus become a merchant by
profession, he rapidly realized profits big enough to enable him to form
an association with his fellows, to load a ship in common with them and
to engage in coastal trade along the shores of England, Scotland,
Denmark and Flanders. The company prospered to the fullest. Its
operations consisted in shipping abroad goods which were known to be
scarce, and there picking up in return merchandise which it took care
to dispose of in places where the demand was the greatest and where
might be realized, in consequence, the largest profits. At the end of
several years this prudent custom of buying cheap and selling dear made
of Godric a very rich man. It was then that, moved by grace, he suddenly
renounced the life he had led until then, turned over his possessions to
the poor, and became a hermit.
The story of St. Godric, if we eliminate from it the mystic ending, was
that of a great many others. It shows, with the utmost clearness, how a
man, starting with nothing, was able in a relatively short time to amass
considerable capital. Circumstances and luck probably contributed
largely to the making of his fortune. But the essential cause of his
success, and the contemporary biography to which we owe the account lays
abundant stress thereon, was intelligence, or rather business sense.[87]
Godric seems to have been a shrewd calculator gifted with that
commercial instinct which it is not altogether rare to meet, in every
age, among enterprising natures. The quest of profit guided all his
actions and in him can be easily recognized that famous “capitalistic
spirit” (_spiritus capitalisticus_) which some would have us believe
dates only from the Renaissance. It is preposterous to submit that
Godric carried on his business only to provide for his daily needs. In
place of hoarding in the bottom of some chest the money he gained, he
used it only to maintain and extend his trading. It is not employing too
modern an expression to say that the profits he realized were put to
work as fast as possible to augment his revolving capital. For that
matter, it is somewhat surprising to observe that the conscience of this
future monk was completely free of all religious scruple. His zeal in
searching out for every commodity the market where it would produce the
maximum profit was in flagrant opposition to the disapproval with which
the Church looked upon every kind of speculation, and to the economic
doctrine of “fair price.”[88]
The fortune of Godric is not to be explained merely by business
ability. In a society still as crude as that of the eleventh century,
private initiative could succeed only by having recourse to association.
Too many perils threatened the wandering existence of the merchant not
to impose on him first of all the fundamental necessity of forming in
groups for the sake of common defence. Still other motives impelled him
to unite with his fellows. At fairs and markets, should a dispute arise,
he found in them favorable witnesses, or bondsmen who would be security
for him in a court of justice. In common with them he was able to buy at
wholesale merchandise which, left to his own resources, he would have
been unable to get. His credit was increased by the collective credit of
which he supplied a part, and thanks thereto he was able more easily to
come out on top in competition with his rivals. The biography of Godric
informs us in its own very words that from the day when its hero
associated himself with a band of merchants his fortunes took their
upward turn. In taking this step he merely conformed to custom. Trade in
the late Middle Ages was known only in that primitive form of which the
caravan is the characteristic manifestation. Maritime or land trade was
possible only by grace of the mutual assurance an association inspired
in its members, of the discipline which it imposed upon them, of the
regulations to which it subjected them. And this feature was always in
evidence. Boats sailed only when assembled in flotillas, just as
merchants travelled the country only in bands. Security existed for them
only if guaranteed by force, and force was the consequence of
collectivity.
It would be a complete mistake to see in the merchant associations, of
which traces may be found in the tenth century, a peculiarly German
phenomenon. It is true that the terms which were used to designate them
in the north of Europe--_gild_ and _hanse_--came originally from
Germany. But this habit of cooperating is to be found everywhere in
economic life and, whatever may have been the differences in the
details, in what was essential it was everywhere the same, because
everywhere there were the same conditions which made it indispensable.
In Italy as in the Netherlands, trade was able to expand only by
cooperation. The _frairies_, the _charités_, the merchant _compagnies_
of the countries of the Roman tongue were exactly analogous to the
_gilds_ and _hanses_ of the German territories.[89] What determined the
economic organization was not “national genius,” but social necessity.
The primitive institutions of trade were as cosmopolitan as those of the
feudal system.
The sources of information make it possible to obtain an excellent idea
of the merchant troops which, beginning with the tenth century, were to
be found in greater and greater numbers in Western Europe.[90] They
should be pictured as armed bands, the members of which, equipped with
bows and swords, encircled the horses and wagons loaded with bags, packs
and casks. At the head of the caravan marched a standard-bearer. A
chief, the _Hansgraf_ or the _Doyen_, exercised his authority over the
company. This latter was composed of “brothers,” bound together by an
oath of fidelity. A spirit of close solidarity animated the whole group.
The merchandise, apparently, was bought and sold in common and the
profits divided pro rata, according to the share of each one in the
association.
It seems that these companies, as a general rule, made very long
journeys. It would be a decided mistake to conceive of the commerce of
this era as a local commerce, strictly confined within the orbit of a
regional market. It has already been seen that Italian traders went as
far as Paris and Flanders. At the end of the tenth century the port of
London was regularly frequented by merchants from Cologne, Huy, Dinant,
Flanders and Rouen. A contemporary text speaks of men from Verdun
trading with Spain.[91] In the valley of the Seine, the Parisian hanse
of river merchants was in constant relations with Rouen. The biography
of Godric, in chronicling his distant expeditions in the Baltic and the
North Sea, at the same time throws light on those of his fellows.
It was therefore trade on a big scale or, if you prefer a more precise
term, trade over long distances, that was characteristic of the economic
revival of the Middle Ages. Just as the shipping of Venice and Amalfi
and later that of Pisa and Genoa launched forth from the very beginning
on long sea voyages, so did the merchants of the Continent lead their
vagabond life over wide territories.[92] It is quite clear that this was
for them the sole means of realizing big profits. To get high prices it
was necessary to seek afar the products which were there found in
abundance, in order to be able to resell them later at a profit in
places where their rarity increased their value. The more distant the
journey of the merchant, the more profitable was it for him. And it is
easily appreciated how the desire for gain was strong enough to
counterbalance the hardships, the risks and the dangers of a wandering
existence open to every hazard. Except during the winter, the merchant
of the Middle Ages was continually on the road. English texts of the
twelfth century picturesquely designated him under the name of
_piepowdrous_--“dusty-foot.”[93]
This rover, this vagabond of trade, by the strangeness of his manner of
life must have, from the very first, astonished the agricultural society
all of the customs of which he went counter to and in which no place was
set aside for him. He brought mobility to the midst of people attached
to the soil; he revealed, to a world faithful to tradition and
respectful of a hierarchy which fixed the rôle and the rank of each
class, a shrewd and rationalist activity in which fortune, instead of
being measured by social status, depended only on intelligence and
energy. And so it is not surprising that he gave offense. The nobility
never had anything but disdain for these upstarts come from no one knew
where, and whose insolent good fortune they could not bear. They were
enraged to see them better supplied with money than themselves; they
were humiliated by being obliged to have recourse, in time of trouble,
to the purse of these newly rich. Save in Italy, where aristocratic
families did not hesitate to augment their fortunes by having an
interest in commercial operations in the capacity of money-lender, the
prejudice that it was degrading to engage in business remained
deep-rooted in the heart of the feudal caste up to the time of the
French Revolution.
As to the clergy, their attitude in regard to merchants was still more
unfavorable. In the eyes of the Church, commercial life was dangerous to
the safety of the soul. “The merchant,” says a text attributed to St.
Jerome “can please God only with difficulty.” Trade seemed to the
canonists to be form of usury. They condemned profit-seeking, which they
confounded with avarice. Their doctrine of “fair price” was meant to
impose a renouncement of economic life and, in short, an asceticism
incompatible with the natural development of the latter. Every form of
speculation seemed to them a sin. And this severity was not entirely
caused by the strict interpretation of Christian morality. Very likely,
it should also be attributed to the conditions under which the Church
existed. The subsistence of the Church, in fact, depended exclusively on
that demesnial organization which, as has been seen above, was so
foreign to the idea of enterprise and profit. If to this be added the
ideal of poverty which Clunisian mysticism gave to religious fervor, it
can be readily understood why the Church took a defiant and hostile
attitude toward the commercial revival which must, from the very first,
have seemed to it a thing for shame and a cause of anxiety.[94]
We must admit, however, that this attitude was not without its benefits.
It certainly resulted in preventing the passion for gain from spreading
without limit; it protected, in a certain measure, the poor from the
rich, debtors from creditors. The scourge of debts, which in Greek and
Roman antiquity so sorely afflicted the people, was spared the social
order of the Middle Ages, and it may well be that the Church contributed
largely to that happy result. The universal prestige it enjoyed served
as a moral check-rein. If it was not strong enough to subject the
traders to the doctrine of “fair price,” it was strong enough to
restrain them from giving way entirely to greediness for profits. They
were certainly very uneasy over the peril to which their way of living
exposed their eternal salvation. The fear of the future life tormented
their conscience. Many there were who, on their death beds, founded by
their wills charitable institutions or appropriated a part of their
wealth to reimburse sums unjustly acquired. The edifying end of Godric
testifies to the inner conflict which must often have been waged in
their souls, torn between the irresistible seductions of wealth and the
austere prescriptions of religious morality which their profession
obliged them, in spite of their veneration, to violate unceasingly.[95]
The legal status of the merchants eventually gave them a thoroughly
singular place in that society which they astonished in so many
respects. By virtue of the wandering existence they led, they were
everywhere regarded as foreigners. No one knew the origins of these
eternal travellers. Certainly the majority among them were born of
nonfree parents, from whom they had early taken leave in order to
launch upon adventures. But serfdom was not to be presumed: it had to be
proven. The law necessarily treated as a free man one who could not be
ascribed to a master. It therefore came about that it was necessary to
treat the merchants, most of whom were without doubt the sons of serfs,
as if they had always enjoyed freedom. In detaching themselves from
their natal soil they had freed themselves in fact. In the midst of a
social organization where the populace was attached to the land and
where everyone was dependent upon a liege lord, they presented the
strange picture of circulating everywhere without being claimed by
anyone. They did not demand freedom; it was conceded to them because no
one could prove that they did not already enjoy it. They acquired it, so
to speak, by usage and limitation. In short, just as agrarian
civilization had made of the peasant a man whose normal state was
servitude, trade made of the merchant a man whose normal condition was
liberty. From that time on, in place of being subject to seignorial and
demesnial jurisdiction, he was answerable only to public jurisdiction.
Alone competent to try him were the tribunals which still kept, above
the multitude of private courts, the old framework of the judicial
constitution of the Frankish State.[96]
Public authority at the same time took him under its protection. The
local princes whose task it was to preserve, in their counties, peace
and public order--to which pertained the policing of the highways and
the safeguarding of travellers--extended their tutelage over the
merchants. In doing so they did nothing more than to continue the
tradition of the State, the powers of which they had usurped. In that
agricultural empire of his, Charlemagne himself had given careful
attention to the maintenance of the freedom of circulation. He had
issued edicts in favor of pilgrims and traders, Jew or Christian, and
the capitularies of his successors attest to the fact that they remained
faithful to that policy. The emperors of the House of Saxony followed
suit in Germany, and the kings of France, after they came into power,
did likewise. The princes had, furthermore, every interest in attracting
numerous merchants to their countries, whither they brought a new
animation and where they augmented bountifully the revenues from the
market tolls. The counts early took active measures against highwaymen,
watching over the good conduct of the fairs and the security of the
routes of communication. In the eleventh century great progress had been
made and the chroniclers state that there were regions where one could
travel with a sack full of gold without running the risk of being
despoiled. On its part, the Church punished highwaymen with
excommunication, and the Truces of God, in which it took the initiative
in the tenth century, protected the merchants in particular.
But it was not enough that merchants be placed under the safeguard and
the jurisdiction of the public authority. The novelty of their
profession had further consequences. It forced a law made for a
civilization based on agriculture to become more flexible and to lend
itself to the fundamental needs which were imposed upon it. Judicial
procedure, with its rigid and traditional formalism, with its delays,
with its methods of proof as primitive as the duel, with its abuse of
the absolutory oath, with its “ordeals” which left to chance the outcome
of a trial, was for the merchants a perpetual nuisance. They needed a
simpler legal system, more expeditious and more equitable. At the fairs
and markets they elaborated among themselves a commercial code (_jus
mercatorum_) of which the oldest traces may be noted by the beginning of
the eleventh century.[97] Most probably it was introduced very early
into the legal practice, at least for suits between merchants. It must
have constituted for them a sort of personal law, the benefits of which
the judges had no motive for refusing them.[98] The contemporary texts
which make allusion to it unfortunately do not make clear its terms.
There is, however, no doubt but that it was a collection of usages born
of business experience and which spread from place to place
commensurately with the spread of trade itself. The great fairs whither
came, periodically, merchants from divers countries and which had a
special tribunal charged with the rendering of speedy justice, must have
seen from the very first the elaboration of a sort of commercial
jurisprudence, the same everywhere despite the differences in country,
language, and national laws.
The merchant thus seems to have been not only a free man but a
privileged man to boot. Like the cleric and the noble, he enjoyed a law
of exception. Like them, he escaped the demesnial and seignorial
authority which continued to bear down upon the peasants.
_Chapter VI_
The Middle Class
In no civilization is city life evolved independently of commerce and
industry. Neither antiquity nor modern times show any exception to this
rule. Diversity of climates, peoples or religions is as immaterial as
diversity of eras. It is a rule which held true, in the past, in the
cities of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and the Roman and Arab Empires, just
as in our day it has held true in the cities of Europe, America, India,
Japan, and China.
Its universality is explained by exigence. A city group, in fact, can
live only by importing its food-supply from outside. But with this
importation must correspond, on the other hand, an exportation of
manufactured products constituting a counterpart or countervalue. Thus
is established, between the city and the surrounding country, a close
interrelation of services. Commerce and industry are indispensable to
the maintenance of this reciprocal dependence; without the first, to
assure a steady traffic, without the second, to furnish goods for
exchange, the city would perish.[99]
This condition is obviously subject to any quantity of variations.
Depending on time and place, sometimes commercial activity and sometimes
industrial activity is the dominant characteristic of a city population.
In antiquity, of course, a considerable section of the city population
was made up of landed proprietors, living either by the working of or by
the revenue from the lands which they owned outside. But it remains none
the less true that commensurately with the development of cities,
artisans and traders became more and more numerous. The rural economy,
older than the urban economy, continued to exist side by side with the
latter; the one did not prevent the other from developing.
The cities of the Middle Ages show a very different picture. Commerce
and industry made them what they were. They did not cease to grow under
that influence. At no era in history is there so marked a contrast as
that which their social and economic organization presented to the
social and economic organization of the country. Never before had there
existed, it seems, a class of men so specifically and strictly urban as
was the medieval bourgeoisie.[100]
That the origin of these cities is directly related, as an effect to its
cause, to the commercial revival of which we have spoken in the
preceding chapters, it is impossible to doubt. The proof is to be found
in the striking correspondence which is to be noted between the
expansion of trade and the rise of cities. Italy and the Netherlands,
where commerce first showed itself, are precisely the countries where
cities made their first appearance and where they developed most rapidly
and vigorously. It is easy to mark how, in step with the progress of
trade, towns multiplied. They appeared along all the natural routes by
which trade spread. They were born, so to speak, under its footsteps.
They are found, at first, only along sea coasts and rivers. Then, as the
commercial penetration spread, others were founded along the transverse
roads which connected these first centers of activity with each other.
The case of the Netherlands is quite typical. In the tenth century the
earlier towns were founded on the shore of the sea or on the banks of
the Meuse and the Scheldt; the intermediate region, Brabant, did not yet
know them. We must wait until the twelfth century before they make their
appearance on the route which lay between those two great rivers.
Similar observations may be made anywhere. A map of Europe on which was
marked the relative importance of the commercial highways would coincide
very closely with an abstract of the relative importance of the city
groups.
The towns of the Middle Ages showed an extraordinary variety in type.
Each had a distinctive physiognomy and particular characteristics. Every
one of them differed from the others just as men differ among
themselves. They can, however, be classified according to certain
general types. And these types themselves resemble one another in their
essential traits. It is therefore not a hopeless task to try to depict,
as we shall endeavor to do here, the evolution of city life in the West
of Europe. Doubtless the picture will necessarily be a little too
schematic, not fitting exactly any one particular case but rather being
the description of what is common to a whole species, an abstract of
individual characteristics. Only the general outlines will appear, as
in a landscape viewed from a mountain top.
The subject, however, is less complicated than would appear at first
glance. It is futile, indeed, in an outline of the origin of European
cities, to take count of the infinite complexity which they manifested.
City life was developed first of all in only a quite restricted number
of localities in Northern Italy, in the Netherlands, and in neighboring
regions. It will be enough if we confine ourselves to these latter,
neglecting the later developments which, whatever might be of interest
in them, were actually only duplicate phenomena.[101] Yet in the
following pages a privileged place will be accorded to the Netherlands.
This is because that country supplies the historian with more abundant
illumination on the early days of city evolution than any other region
of Western Europe.
The organization of commerce in the Middle Ages, as it has been
described in the preceding chapter, obliged the peripatetic merchants or
“merchant adventurers,” on whom it relied, to settle at fixed points.
In the interval between their trips and especially during the bad season
which made the sea, the rivers and the roads impassable, they
necessarily had to gather at certain places in the region. It was
naturally in localities of which the site, by its facilities in the
matter of communications, lent itself best to the exigencies of trade
and where they could at the same time place their money and goods in
security, that the merchants established their residence. They therefore
repaired to the towns and burgs which best met these conditions.
The number of them was considerable. The site of the towns had been
determined by the conformation of the terrain or the direction of the
river courses--in short, by conditions of nature, which were precisely
what determined the direction of trade and so steered the merchants
towards them. In the same way the burgs, which had been designed to
resist enemies or furnish a shelter to the population, were naturally
built in localities particularly easy of access. It was by the same
routes the invaders passed that the merchants travelled, and the result
was that fortresses erected against the former were excellently situated
for attracting the latter to their walls. Thus it came about that the
first commercial groups were formed in neighborhoods which Nature had
predisposed to become--or to become again--the focal points of economic
circulation.[102]