In those days the guilds were the units for elections, for the militia, and for taxation; they judged their dependents without appeal; they expelled, or reduced to the rank of passive citizens, those who were not inscribed on their registers; they decided questions of taxation, peace, and war, and directed the policy of their town, whose internal and even external history is essentially one with their own.
In these little corporate republics, the principal question became that of deciding how the different groups of guilds should apportion the government among themselves. But first, on what principle were the guilds classified? Was it according to the vital importance of the needs they existed to supply? This would seem reasonable enough, but apparently it was nothing of the kind, or else the provision trades would have been in the first rank. Primum vivere, said the old adage, and to live it is necessary to eat and drink, more necessary even than to be housed and clothed, and to trade, and certainly more necessary than to draw up notaries’ deeds or go to law. Now the crafts which provided for the inner man, for Messer Gaster, as Rabelais calls him (butchers, wine merchants, bakers), were almost everywhere placed in the second or third rank; the only exceptions were the grocer-druggists, and it will be seen why this was so.
We must look elsewhere, then, for the reasons which determined the order of social importance assigned to the guilds by public opinion in the Middle Ages. It appears that this classification was based on three different principles which I will call the aristocratic, the plutocratic, and the historical; that is to say, the status of a profession seems to have depended on whether it was more or less honourable, lucrative, or ancient.[81]
The place of honour was reserved for those crafts in which brainwork took precedence over manual work. They were regarded as more honourable evidently because, in the dualistic conception which governed Christian societies, spirit was placed above matter, the intellectual above the animal part of man. It was for this reason that the professions which demanded brainwork alone were called from that time onwards “liberal,” as opposed to manual labour which was called “servile,” an expression which the Catholic Church has piously preserved to our own days.
At Montpellier, Boulogne, Paris, wherever universities existed (which were themselves in effect “guilds” or corporations, and were practically federations of advanced schools, as we see from their jurisdiction, their statutes, their dependents and agents whom they possessed in the parchment makers and booksellers, and in the title of rector which their head shared with many other officers elected by the guilds), the professors of the different Faculties enjoyed very extensive privileges, and had the proud right of walking, like the nobles, on the wall side of the pavement. At Florence, where the division of the guilds into greater, intermediate, and lesser bore witness to their hierarchy before all the world, as there was no university, the judges and notaries took precedence; the judges, who were doctors of law, styled themselves Messer, like the knights; the notaries called themselves simply ser, but this served to distinguish them from the commoners. The proconsul, or head of the corporation, went out robed in scarlet, and was always escorted by two gold-laced apparitors. In the first rank, too, were the doctors, but the barber-surgeons, simply because they performed operations, were relegated to a lower status; artists, in spite of being often ranked among craftsmen, gradually obtained social recognition.
Although architects were ranked with carpenters, and image makers and sculptors were often ranked with stonecutters, in many places the goldsmiths, who included chasers, moulders, enamellers, and statuaries, took a high rank. At Paris they were classed among the Six Guilds, which, when the king, the queen, or the papal legate made a solemn entry into the city, enjoyed the coveted honour of carrying the blue canopy under which the august personage advanced. At Florence they belonged—as a sub-order it is true—to the speziali (apothecaries), which also included the painters and colour-merchants.
While the artists, when they were ranked among the great guilds, only took a secondary and subsidiary position, the bankers, money-changers, wholesale traders, the great manufacturers (woollen merchants, haberdashers, or furriers) lorded it over the others with their wealth and splendour. This was, moreover, to a certain extent, homage rendered to brains and education. The exchange and the bank, where it was necessary to make rapid and complicated calculations, to transact business at a distance, and to do accounts in differing coinages (and sometimes, even, without coin), demanded varied knowledge and a certain mental agility.
Wholesale commerce, which henceforward became international, involved the power of taking long views, quickness in grasping a situation, general aptitude, and, in fact, qualities of mind and character which are not given to all.[82] The apothecaries had an advantage in that they sold spices which had come from distant lands. The trade in luxuries (furs and silks) was also concerned with foreign articles and took for granted a certain savoir-faire. “Great” industry, for its part, demanded of those who carried it on, a talent for setting in motion, directing, and co-ordinating the complicated machinery of affairs or of men, and this gift of organization is far from common.
However, it is easy to see that in the priority accorded to the great industrial and commercial guilds, the second of the principles we have mentioned was at work, namely, that a craft was considered more or less honourable according to the wealth it yielded. Did the goldsmiths owe the respect which was shown them more to their artistic skill than to the fact that they were in the habit of handling jewels and precious metals? It would be difficult to say. But it is very certain that the bankers, money-changers, manufacturers of cloth and silk, the dealers in furs and in spices, and the haberdashers, who sold everything, would not have been among the most favoured, if they had not also been among the most wealthy. Thanks to the crowns, ducats, and florins at their command, they could indulge in a sumptuous style of living and rival in luxury the lords of the land.
Like the latter they were in command of troops of men; in their way they were captains; they united the prestige of power with that of wealth. It was undoubtedly for this reason that the butchers, who had numerous assistants working under their orders and who made considerable profits, sometimes managed in Paris to be included among the Six Guilds, and at Florence headed the list of Intermediate Guilds. It was for a similar reason that in the same town the innkeepers and the stone and wood merchants, classed among the Lesser Guilds, were called grosse;[83] while the small tavern-keepers and those who retailed wood were not considered worthy of such a distinction.
The third principle—the historical—was active in its turn. The later crafts, recently specialized, suffered from the competition of work done in the home from which they were imperfectly separated. If the butchers did not succeed in taking their place definitely among the Six Guilds of Paris, or in becoming affiliated to the Greater Guilds of Florence, it is probably because, for many years, the people were their own butchers, and the fatted pig or calf was killed at home; in other words because their field of action was an integral part of domestic industry. The same may be said of bakers and bread-makers; many peasants had their own oven in which they baked their bread,[84] and they held stubbornly to this right which they sometimes insisted on having solemnly recognized. There is no need for further explanations to make us understand why the bakers and bread-makers at Florence came last on the list of the twenty-one official guilds. It is useless to attribute their comparative disrepute[85] to the supposed ease with which they could defraud their clients in the weight and quality of the bread they sold. Unfortunately, the same suspicions might have been applied to many others. Can it be forgotten that, at Rome, the fishmongers were compelled to use scales with holes in them like skimmers, so that the water could run off and not add weight unfairly!
Thus on account of one or another of these three principles, “small” crafts and “small” commerce were far from attaining the level to which the great guilds rose; and in those days the organized world of labour was divided, sometimes into three groups, as at Florence, Perpignan,[86] or Ghent, sometimes into two, as at Zurich, and sometimes into a greater number. It is impossible to go into the details of the prolonged struggles between these unequal groups, of their efforts to maintain the balance among themselves, or to rule one over another, or of the alternate victories and defeats which they sustained. Nearly two centuries—from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth—are filled with the unrest caused by these quarrels which broke out in two or three hundred towns at once, and which, in view of the absence of dependable information concerning them, appear at a distance utterly chaotic. All we can do is to indicate the development which followed.[87]
Immediately upon the victory of the lower classes over lay and ecclesiastical feudalism—the first act accomplished by the communal revolution—the power passed to the rich burgesses. Aristocracy of money naturally succeeded aristocracy of birth. This plutocracy was represented by the great merchant guilds, whose rise was soon followed by that of the great industrial guilds, destined in some cases to supplant them, but more often to remain their faithful allies. At Florence, the Arte di Calimala which included bankers and finishers and sellers of foreign cloth, was at first the most important of all; it was later dethroned by the Arte della Lana, composed of cloth manufacturers, but both were included in the federation of the Greater Guilds, which kept in its own hands the direction of affairs. At Brussels and at Louvain seven families long furnished the aldermen; at Ghent thirty-nine nouveaux riches, and at Amiens an oligarchy of several families, monopolized the direction of communal affairs. Everywhere wool-merchants, money-changers, and goldsmiths became important in proportion to their wealth, not to their numbers. At Beauvais of thirteen “peers” who constituted the municipal administration seven were nominated by one guild—that of the money-changers; the other twenty-one guilds nominated six.
In short, what happened in the free towns was what usually happens in such a case, namely what happened in France in the nineteenth century. The victorious bourgeoisie wanted to keep to themselves the spoils of victory; they attempted to keep the lower classes—their allies of yesterday—in a precarious and subordinate position, and not only excluded them from the magistracy, but stamped all politics with a strongly plutocratic character. They sold to or reserved for themselves all lucrative posts; they administered the finances according to their own ideas without giving any account of their actions; they multiplied wars to kill inconvenient competition, or to open up new outlets for their commerce. As all this entailed enormous expense they resorted to loans which brought in high and steady interest, and to taxes on objects of daily consumption—reactionary taxes which demanded an equal sum, and therefore an unequal sacrifice, from rich and poor. They despised and oppressed the small craftsmen and the small retailers; they tried to limit or to suppress their right to combine or hold public meetings, and of course they were still harder on all that labouring population which was not admitted to the guilds, or which at least was only admitted in a subject capacity. We have already seen (Chapter II. 7) how they organized the first form of capitalist supremacy.
The second act of the revolution now began. The town population divided itself into two separate groups, which soon became two opposing parties: the rich and the poor; the fat and the lean; the great and the small; the good and the bad, as the chroniclers, who usually belonged to the leisured class, said with a certain savage naïveté. The crafts which claimed to be honourable were set in opposition to those which were considered low and inferior, and were supported and urged on by the masses, who, without rights or possessions, lived from day to day by hiring out their labour.
The fight was complicated by the capricious intervention of the nobles or clergy who, sometimes by a natural affinity, joined the aristocracy of wealth; sometimes, in the desire to get the better of the great burgesses who kept them out of the government, allied themselves to the lower classes and made the balance turn in their favour.
At certain times (this also is a law of history) the lower classes, in despair at never getting anything out of a selfish and implacable bourgeoisie, put their confidence in some soldier of fortune, some ephemeral dictator, some “tyrant” in the Greek sense, who defeated their enemies and secured them a little well-being and consideration. On other occasions it was the rich burgesses who, frightened by the claims of the people, called on some foreign or military power to reduce the populace to order. Thus, by separate roads, the republics and towns were travelling towards monarchy.
Before they reached this point, however, the “small” crafts had their days of supremacy, which were characterized by a peaceful policy, fiscal reforms, and the effort to make taxation just through the progressive taxation of incomes. They raised with themselves, out of the darkness and degradation into which they had fallen, the ragged and barefooted labourers (carders, porters, blue-nails, as the Flemish labouring classes were called in derision), proletarians, wage-slaves, who in their turn desired political rights, a legal status in the city, a rank among the guilds, a share in the direction of the Commune.
In the year 1378 this movement seems to have been at its height.[88] A wave of revolution passed over Europe at that time, and at Florence as at Ghent, at Siena as at Rouen, in Paris as in London, for several years, months, and sometimes weeks, Ciompi, Chaperons blancs, Maillotins, etc., made the ruling classes tremble for fear of union on the part of all this riff-raff. As a Flemish chronicler expresses it: “An extraordinary thing was to be seen in those days; the common people gained the supremacy.”
Their victory was short-lived. All the conservative forces combined against the intruders. The attempt, not to destroy but to reform and enlarge guild administration, to make the whole world of labour enter into it, was shown to be powerless; perhaps because the workmen and men of the “small” crafts did not clearly perceive what could give them freedom, or know how to unite into a cohesive body; perhaps, also, because the idea of hierarchy was still too strongly rooted in society; finally, perhaps because there was a fundamental contradiction between the administration of the closed guilds which stood for privilege, and the ideas of equality which tried to force an entrance into them.
Whatever may have been the cause, from this culmination they descended again towards their starting-point, the supremacy of money and of the great commercial and industrial guilds which no longer allowed their power to be shared by the Lesser Guilds. However, they stopped half-way. The preponderance was not restored either to the prelates or to the lords, neither did it remain with the lower classes. It was too late for the great, too early for the small. It remained and was consolidated in the hands of two powers, each of which relied on the other—the middle classes and the monarchy, the latter being represented in the great states by royalty and elsewhere by princes who might be condottieri or upstart bankers. Florence went to sleep under the enervating and corrupt rule of the Medicis. An ever-narrowing merchant oligarchy governed Genoa, Venice, and the towns of the Teutonic Hanse. Flanders was quiet under the authority of the Dukes of Burgundy and of its opulent guilds, to which craftsmen were no longer admitted. Towards the middle of the fifteenth century the great epoch of the free towns was over, and the glory of the guilds went with them.
Nevertheless, while their restless and busy life lasted they had their days of greatness, heroism, and glory. Sometimes, as at Courtrai, they gained victories over armoured knighthood. They did better. In the neighbourhood of their cities they built roads, canals, and seaports. Within the city walls they gave a splendid impetus to architecture. They built monumental halls like those of Bruges, fountains, hospitals, and public promenades; they erected churches which were popular palaces, town halls which were carved like fine lace and flanked by towers and belfries from which the Tocsin called the citizens to arms or to the assembly. They had pride and patriotism, and also desired to honour the profession which was for each of them a state within the state. They contended for the honour of giving a picture, a statue, or a tabernacle to the buildings which thus became the incarnation of the soul of a whole people. The traveller who visits Florence admires the bas-reliefs half-way up the Campanile attributed to Giotto, which represent the origin of arts and crafts in the earliest ages of mankind; it is the stamp and blazonry of the working classes on their common work. Guilds have passed away, as all human institutions must pass, imperfect and frail in their very nature; but before their passing they realized a great part of their high ideal, which, in its many aspects, I have tried to make plain.
CHAPTER V
THE MERITS AND DEFECTS OF THE GUILD SYSTEM
We are now in a position to estimate the merits and defects of the guilds before they fell into decadence and decrepitude.
It is necessary to consider separately the two types of guilds which we have described; for although they had characteristics in common, they present more differences than resemblances. Let us see, then, how each acted on production and sale, and on producers and sellers.
The guild system in the “small” crafts was at once a guarantee of, and a check on, production and sale. It endeavoured to insure and guard the consumer against adulteration, falsification, and dishonesty; to stamp goods with the character of finish, solidity, and relative perfection, thus giving to them something personal and therefore artistic; to keep within reasonable limits the profits of the manufacturer, who was also the merchant. On the other hand, the manufacturer only dealt with small quantities, was content with a very restricted clientèle, and aimed at nothing beyond the local market without much chance of either making a fortune or being ruined. Production thus had but little vigour, and what was more serious still, its plasticity was interfered with. The statutes which regulated it resembled feudal castles, which protected but imprisoned those whom they sheltered. The manufacturer, hampered by the restrictions which surrounded him, could make no progress. Industry, bound down by directions which were too precise, too detailed, too authoritative, could not adapt itself to the many caprices of fashion or to the changes of taste which are the very life of human civilizations; its forms were set, its methods petrified. Invention could not have free play; it was accused of outraging healthy tradition; it was considered dangerous to set out to create anything new. In Florence in 1286[89] a cooper complained of being boycotted by his guild because in making his barrels he bent his staves by means of water, which was, he said, an advantage to all who bought them. At Paris[90] it was forbidden to mould seals with letters engraved on them; apparently the counterfeiting of seals and coins was feared. Who knows, however, whether this prohibition did not retard by a hundred years the invention of printing, to which—when a method of making them movable had been discovered—these engraved letters gave birth?
With regard to producers and sellers, we may go back to the simile of the strong castle. An instrument of defence for those who were within the guild easily degenerated into one of tyranny for those who were without. It was the centre of an ardent and exclusive corporate spirit. It resolved all the individual egoisms of its members into a great collective egoism. It is only necessary to recall the quarrels with neighbouring guilds, and the hostility shown towards workers who were not enrolled. To the masters of which it was composed it ensured at least a modest and honest livelihood, the just remuneration of labour, or, one might almost say, to use a modern formula, the whole product of labour. It even assured a refuge against misery and distress, the certainty of assistance in times of trouble, illness, old age, or misfortune. The fishermen of Arles were bound to give one another mutual assistance in stormy weather;[91] in Paris among the goldsmiths one shop remained open every Sunday,[92] and the money from the sales was divided among the needy of the town and the widows and sick of the guild. Fines were often used in this way. The guild sometimes even gave to the travelling workman who found himself at the end of his resources the means of going in search of work elsewhere. The guild secured to its members other advantages no less coveted: a good position in public processions and ceremonies when state dress was worn, or even at the melancholy solemnities of the public executions;[93] at Lyons, at the time of the feast of St. John, two furriers with lighted torches paraded to the church door, mounted on two white mules, and at the entrance were received by the cross and the canons.[94] But more than all this, the guild was not only a great family for those who belonged to it, it was a little self-contained city, a diminutive commune which the members administered at will, and thereby prepared themselves for civic life and its duties; it was a training-ground for independent, well-informed, active citizens, who, with their parliamentary traditions, republican sentiments, and democratic hopes, formed, with their fellow-craftsmen of other crafts, a proud, practical, and courageous middle-class, as anxious to defend their town from outsiders as to beautify and adorn it.
Journeymen and apprentices shared in these honourable privileges, and did not suffer unduly from the inequality imposed on them, tempered as it was by simplicity of manners and by the thought that it was only temporary.
The guilds of “great” commerce and of “great” industry also had their fine sense of honour, their complicated regulations, their exclusive spirit. But what distinguished them was the fact that their capital was large and that they dealt with a vast market; consequently, while the former were busy with exchange and transport, traversed land and sea with their convoys, and constituted themselves the carriers and brokers of the world, the latter intensified production; they possessed workshops which for those days were very large, and, in order to lower their general expenses, were interested in new inventions, and willingly adopted mechanical methods; at Florence, for example, metallic carders, which were still prohibited in Great Britain in 1765, were already in use under the guild system. Banking, commercial and maritime law, the science of finance, the art of production on a large scale and of securing international relations certainly owe a great deal to these merchants and manufacturers, who were the precursors of modern capitalists.
The members of these powerful guilds amassed enormous fortunes, built themselves superb palaces, became counsellors and money-lenders to kings, towns, or popes. Sometimes they were too adventurous in their speculations and their bankruptcies made a wide stir. Accustomed to affairs of the highest importance and to court intrigues, they became diplomats, clever politicians, who willingly took their share in government; nor was it by chance that the first man in France who tried to reform the kingdom according to the views of the Third Estate was Étienne Marcel, provost of the richest Parisian guild. Often, however, these great burgesses were of an aristocratic spirit. In the city they opposed the rise of the lower classes, and, in their magnificent palaces, princes in fact before they were princes in name, as the Medicis became, they gradually extinguished around them the love of liberty and of republican virtues. At the same time they broke up that solidarity which was the very soul of the primitive guilds; they created a social system which perpetuated riches above and poverty below; they enslaved and cruelly exploited the clerks and workers they employed, their attitude towards whom was no longer that of masters towards journeymen or compagnons, but that of lords towards dependents. In a word, they broke from the conditions which no longer sufficed for the realization of their ambitions, and they were preparing, indeed they were already developing, an organization of labour which anticipated the future. They were the agents of that profound change which slowly brought about the death of the guilds.
CHAPTER VI
EXTERNAL CAUSES OF DECAY
A body of institutions, like a living body, begins by passing through a period of formation, growth, and consolidation, after which decay inevitably follows; it becomes feeble, disintegrates, decomposes, and finally dissolves. Death is thus presented as the natural term of life with its constant wear and tear, as the necessary end of the spontaneous development peculiar to living beings. But it is also determined by the pressure of outside forces, by the action of environment. Thus the guild system held within itself elements of dissolution, and at the same time met with destructive forces from without; it declined and decayed under the combined influences of internal and external causes.
It seems fitting to begin with the external causes, since these were the most important. In an unchanging environment living beings could exist for long unchanged, but the changes ever at work without hasten changes within, from the very fact that the organism is itself at work. Thus it was that the guilds were first of all affected by the profound changes going on around them. The sphere in which they had to work was both extended and modified. We must follow out the consequences of both these changes.
1. The Extension of the Market and its Results.—The fifteenth century saw the formation of the great States in Europe. France, which felt herself to be a nation when she was trampled under foot by the English, was the first to become a unity, and for several centuries drew her power and her greatness from the start which she thus gained. Spain was concentrated under the authority of Ferdinand and Isabella. England, worn out after a terrible civil war, found rest under the Tudor dynasty. In Germany, which was still very divided, the Hanseatic League included twenty-four cities. Even in Italy the restless republics, ever jealous of their independence, were absorbed into larger territories and placed under a common supremacy. Everywhere the endless subdivision of the Middle Ages gave place to larger groupings, possessing fuller life and wider interests. Hence a new situation arose for the cities; among those which in every state had up till now been on an equal footing one rose to be the capital, the others, with diminished prestige and importance, were only secondary centres. They also ceased to be islets where the people lived lives apart; from henceforward they formed an integral part of a whole which surrounded them and no longer allowed of a proud isolation; they could no longer treat their neighbours as foreigners or enemies; they found themselves bound together by the necessity of obeying the same laws and the same sovereign.
It followed that city economy, becoming narrow and exclusive, grew difficult and by degrees impossible.[95] It was replaced by national economy. This meant that the commercial market, instead of being confined to the inhabitants of a town and its suburbs, included henceforth the province, the duchy, and by degrees the whole kingdom. Above all, it meant that the central power no longer legislated for people enclosed within a small area, but that it attempted to unify over the whole surface of a considerably enlarged territory the official language, moneys, weights and measures, as well as the regulations of industry and the judicial forms; that it suppressed as far as possible the tolls which obstructed the roads and rivers; that it carried back to the frontier the barriers which had been set up on the boundaries of every little domain; that for a localizing spirit it substituted the desire to reconcile the interests of the different regions between which it played the part of arbitrator and peacemaker.
Doubtless the economic policy adopted by the great States did not sensibly differ from that practised in the towns. A system does not disappear without bequeathing traditions and customs to its successor. National economy copied the methods of city economy. When Colbert, for instance, tried to realize for France the ideal of self-sufficiency, when for this reason he wanted to sell as much as possible and buy as little as possible abroad, to create industries which were lacking, to prevent those which existed from leaving the country, to encourage the export of manufactured goods while watching over their proper manufacture, and to hinder the import of similar goods by barricading the country with customs tariffs, he was only taking up once more and making general an old system formerly tried by Florence or Venice and adopted later by kings and ministers in France and England, by Henry IV. and notably by Richelieu. This mercantile system has been christened Colbertism, and the name will serve provided that it is known that Colbert was not its father but its godfather.
Nevertheless, in spite of the continuity of the principles which guide great governors, the mere fact that the enlarged area in which the guilds operated contained several towns whose jealousy might be measured by their rights, was a terrible blow for the guilds; each town with its narrow boundaries, finding itself completely out of harmony with the world in which it was condemned to live, had to adapt itself to the new conditions or die.
Not only, however, had the internal markets grown larger, the external market had also extended enormously, and it was no longer for the spices and gems of the Levant alone that ships and caravans set out. In the South, Vasco da Gama had discovered the route to the Indies; in the West, Christopher Columbus, while seeking those same Indies, had come upon America; in the North, Russia and Scandinavia had proved to be magnificent fields for traders to exploit. Africa, which as yet no one had dared to penetrate, was approached and the existence of Oceania suspected. Europe, in revenge for old invasions, overflowed in her turn into other continents; she expanded into distant colonies; the sun no longer set on her possessions.
The first result was a rearrangement of commercial routes, a formidable rush to the West. The Mediterranean basin, cut off from the East by the Turks, ceased to be the meeting-place of nations and the universal centre of commerce. Genoa and Florence, the mothers and glorious victims of Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, began to decay, and the very source of their wealth was assailed by the discoveries of their children. Beneath the trappings of gold and silk that yet covered them there was left only the melancholy glory of their dying prosperity. Venice the rich, Venice the beautiful, slumbering in the fever-laden air of her canals from which the life was ebbing, slowly died in her gorgeous setting of palaces and churches and degenerated into a city of dreams, luxury, and pleasure, where the leisured and the gay came to seek the shadow of a great past and the splendours of a half-oriental civilization. Many cities, like Pisa or Siena, deserved with Bruges to be called “the dead,” cut off from the ocean by the encroaching sands and from liberty by the Spanish lords of Flanders.
How could the guilds hope to escape from the consequences of misfortunes which struck at their very roots? An even graver menace threatened them. To take advantage of the new outlets, to satisfy a clientèle henceforth scattered over the most diverse countries, it was necessary to produce more, and to produce more it was necessary to produce in a different way. Production was transformed to meet the needs of trade. Capitalism, which had hitherto been confined to a few towns, received an impetus and developed with unexpected vigour.
“Great” commerce, which spread over an immense area, created exchanges and banks, and great financial institutions for the circulation of capital; it formed great companies which undertook to exploit the resources of new countries; it accelerated transport and built up in the press a valuable instrument for the spread of information and for advertisement. In its use of credit it no longer encountered the displeasure of the Church, which, together with civil law, became reconciled to loans on interest and recognized the practice as long as the rate was moderate. Its coffers, filled with the gold and silver of the galleons which came from Mexico and Peru, gave Europe a hint of a hitherto unsuspected danger—the glut of money. Capital, too, which had accumulated in the landlords’ and merchants’ chests, took a leading part in business activities by reason of its power to command; it became a moving force.
Henceforward, as we have already seen in the case of the woollen merchants, three functions, hitherto united in the person of the small craftsman of the towns, became separated: those of the merchant, who bought raw material and sold finished goods; of the manufacturer, who possessed the appliances of labour; and of the workman, who wrought with his own hands. Three classes of men answer to this specialization at the present day: the traders, who are not producers, but act as middlemen between producer and consumer, deciding what shall be produced and concerning themselves solely with buying and selling; the industrial capitalists, who, at the tradesmen’s orders, direct the transformation of the raw materials entrusted to them, in workshops and with machinery which are their property; finally the workmen, who, mere wage-earners, carry out manual or mechanical work as they are told.
These three classes of men have different interests. The big merchants, with their bold speculations, are impatient of anything which hinders circulation: town dues, customs, tolls, differences of coinage, weights and measures, all regulations, everything, in fact, which tends to isolate towns and countries. When Louis XI. convoked the States General in 1484, the town deputies expressed themselves in favour of the freedom of trade, which now felt strong enough to stand alone. When Henry IV., on the advice of Montchrestian and Laffemas, wanted to secure French markets to the French by increasing customs tariffs, all the guilds consulted declared themselves in favour of the project, with the exception of the mercers—“sellers of everything, makers of nothing,” as they were called—thus plainly expressing the hostility of wholesale trade to the exclusive policy which had been pursued by the towns. The great traders represented a revolutionary tendency with regard to the guild system; they were its constant enemies; they ended by being its destroyers.
The manufacturers, for their part, were not averse to being protected against foreign competition; they were indeed inclined to ask for this protection. Like the guilds, they had a predilection for privilege and monopoly, but were not in agreement with them on some essential points. In order to produce much and profitably they were in need of cheap and abundant labour. Ignoring the rules of apprenticeship, they hired foreigners, peasants, women, and children; in the sixteenth century, in the town of Norwich, which from being agricultural had become industrial, children of six were employed in the factories.[96] When they did not crowd the workers together in enormous workshops, they resorted to what sometimes goes by the equivocal name of “the domestic system,” which I prefer to call “scattered manufacture.” In the towns they employed men and women, who, working in their own homes, were sheltered from inquisitive eyes. Such workers were found in the suburban and country districts, in any places which were beyond the ordinary jurisdiction of wardenship and mastership. Or again, they employed labour in the hospitals, orphanages, or work-rooms of religious orders, which had escaped from the jealous supervision of the guilds. In Picardy, at certain periods, the weaver workmen thus scattered among the villages numbered 10,000.[97] The same thing was to be found in Brittany,[98] Normandy, and Dauphiny, in the manufacture of linen and hemp; in Velay in that of lace; in Auvergne in that of trimmings; in the Rhone valley in that of silk. In England the peasants, driven from home, impoverished, eaten out by sheep, deprived of their means of livelihood by the enclosure of huge pasture lands to which they might no longer take their cattle, provided a wonderful reserve army for industrial magnates in search of labour.[99] The town artisans fought with desperation against the blows struck at town monopolies by these new departures.[100] Opposition—significant but utterly useless—was offered on every hand to the new demands of large-scale production. Risings against foreign workers, like those at Norwich; the many attempts to limit the number of apprentices; the English law of 1555 known as the Weavers’ Act, which forbade a master to own or hire out more than a certain number of looms; and the innumerable lawsuits in France brought by guilds to check the disastrous competition of peasant labour were all illustrations of this opposition.
Another necessity of large-scale production, involving still greater consequences, was mechanical labour.
“Great” industry demanded the division—even the disintegration—of labour. The product, before it is finished, passes through the hands of various craft groups. It undergoes a series of processes which follow one another and are interdependent, and of which each is carried out by specially trained workers. This was the case in the manufacture of wool from the thirteenth century. The wool had to be washed, beaten, carded, combed, oiled, spun, woven, fulled; then the cloth had to be stretched, dyed, dressed, and folded. It is a well-known fact that if each class of work is entrusted to a special class of workers, manufacture costs less both in money and in time. But it must be added that this disintegration of the whole process into a succession of operations leads straight to the mechanical system.[101] The simple and monotonous tasks performed under this system of subdivision by the different classes of workers owe their automatic and half-mechanical character to the uniformity of the movements they demand. It needed very little to complete the technical revolution already begun and to make hands of wood or metal accomplish what had been done by human hands.
A machine may be described as a more or less complicate engine, which, by means of an animate or inanimate motive force, executes movements which hitherto have been performed by the human hand. The weaving loom and the spinning wheel were already rudimentary machines. The Middle Ages knew, under the name of “mills,” more complicate appliances, of which many date from the Alexandrine period, which was to Graeco-Roman antiquity what the nineteenth century is to modern times—the era of science and machinery.
Water- or wind-mills, mills for grinding flour, for crushing nuts or olives, for raising water; iron mills; mills for fulling cloth, for making paper, sugar, silk stuffs—all these expensive appliances were in use, and gradually spread over Europe during the period which brought to a close and immediately followed the Middle Ages. Thus old industries changed their method, and new industries were from the start modelled on the new system.
Printing may be quoted as an example; the printing press, with its movable letters, took the place of writing—the work of human fingers. It may be said of it that it was born mechanical, and if we ask why it killed the slow industry of the old copyists who protested in vain, we need only look at the unexpected results it achieved. The identity of the copies produced; the speed, which allowed demands hitherto forced to wait months and years to be met in a few days, and which gave, so to speak, wings to thought; and the unheard-of cheapness, which reduced the price of a Bible from 600 to 60 crowns and even less (things which evidently could not be obtained without the co-operation of the Prince of Darkness, as was proved by the red characters which flamed at the head of the chapters), such were the diabolical but invaluable advantages which in less than half a century assured the triumph and the rapid spread of the new invention.
If we remember the thousand-and-one prohibitions with which the guild statutes bristled—the prohibition to mould seals with engraved letters, the regulations which in every craft prevented all change and consequently all improvement in manufacture, it is easy to understand how “great” industry, without deliberate effort, but by its very development, overthrew the economic order which had reigned in the Middle Ages. The guilds, moreover, with the best intentions in the world, fought against innovations which seemed to them abominations. In England in the year 1555 the gig-mill, a mechanical appliance, was forbidden by law.[102] The first English coaches, called “flying coaches,” were attacked and censured[103] because they threatened to injure the art of riding and the manufacture of saddles and spurs, and because, being too cold in winter and too hot in summer, they were bad for the health of travellers; but, above all, because, on account of their extreme speed, they would be dangerous. The public authorities were begged to limit them to thirty miles a day (rather less than the distance a fast train covers to-day in an hour); and later, in France, when the turgotines were instituted, which shortened by half the length of a journey, an abbot added the strange complaint that, by going so fast, they deprived the passenger of the means of hearing mass.[104]
“Great” commerce and “great” industry, however, continued to develop in the direction they had originally taken, and finally overcame the old-fashioned timidity of the guilds, which were gradually reduced to defending the interests of the small crafts. The great merchant guilds were predominant at first; the Lord Mayor of London was chosen from the city guilds, and the guild of the river merchants gave to Paris its coat-of-arms and motto and was an embryonic form of the municipal councils which followed later. As time went on, however, they disappeared or separated themselves from the organized crafts. At Paris, the Hanse of the river merchants does not figure among the six guilds which head the list, although they did not actually lose their privileges till the year 1672. In London,[105] the city guilds slowly ceased to have any connection with the crafts whose names they bore. The great capitalists, whether bankers, merchants, or great manufacturers, voluntarily formed themselves into a separate group and, as far as possible, cut themselves clear of the trammels of the guild system.
Meantime, under the system of large-scale production, the workers were either subjected to the guilds as we have seen them at Florence in the Arte della Lana,[106] or else, if they were not enrolled, were treated by their individual masters in such a way as to keep them permanently in a precarious and subordinate position. Whether they worked crowded together in great workshops—where, owing to their numbers, they were under severe discipline—or at home, in which case their isolation only brought them, under the appearance of liberty, harder conditions, they soon saw that, with the rarest possible exceptions, they were destined to be wage-earners for life. They no longer had the hope, the ambition, even the idea of one day owning the factory in which they laboured, or the business which every week paid its thousands of workers. The divorce was complete between the manual worker and the instruments of production, and, in consequence, between the men who were the servants of these expensive appliances and the master-manufacturers who owned them. Masters and workmen, henceforth separated by their present and their future, by their education, their manner of life, and their aspirations, formed two classes, united as yet, in that both were interested in the intensity of industrial activity, but opposed, in that the one wished to keep the other in subjection and to sweat out of him as much work as possible, as cheaply as possible.
It is from this time, and still only in “great” industry, that a working class can be spoken of. For a long time it was fairly small; but the self-consciousness it was acquiring was shown by the strikes, the combinations, and the attempts at union which were common in England from the sixteenth century; by combinations which were already national, like that of the papermakers in France at the end of the seventeenth century; by the popular songs in which the discontent of the workmen was expressed in bitter complaints or biting irony.[107] The energy and diplomacy displayed in the sixteenth century by the master printers of Lyons and Paris in preventing their workmen from striking (fair le tric, which was the name given in those days to concerted abstention from work[108]) is well known; so is the song sung in England by the wool workers[109] towards the end of the seventeenth century, the title of which is curious. The master is supposed to speak.
THE CLOTHIER’S DELIGHT;
OR, THE RICH MEN’S JOY, AND THE POOR MEN’S SORROWWherein is expressed the craftiness and subtility of Many Clothiers in England, by beating down their Workmen’s Wages.
Combers, weavers, and spinners, for little gains,
Doth earn their money, by taking of hard pains.
To the tune of “Jenny, come tae me,” etc., “Paddington’s Pound,” or “Monk hath confounded,” etc.
Of all sorts of callings that in England be,
There is none that liveth so gallant as we;
Our trading maintains us as brave as a knight,
We live at our pleasure, and take our delight;
We heapeth up riches and treasure great store,
Which we get by griping and grinding the poor.
And this is a way for to fill up our purse,
Although we do get it with many a curse.
Throughout the whole kingdom, in country and town,
There is no danger of our trade going down,
So long as the Comber can work with his comb,
And also the Weaver weave with his lomb;
The Tucker and Spinner that spins all the year,
We will make them to earn their wages full dear.
And this is the way, etc.
In former ages we us’d to give,
So that our work-folks like farmers did live;
But the times are altered, we will make them know
All we can for to bring them under our bow;
We will make to work hard for sixpence a day,
Though a shilling they deserve if they had their just pay.
And this is the way, etc.
and so on, for twelve stanzas.
From now onwards can be found all those motives for disagreement with which the “social question,” as it has developed and grown more bitter, has made us familiar;—increase of hours of work, lowering of wages by the employment of apprentices, women, and children; reductions of the sums agreed upon by means of fines, payment in kind,[110] and other tricks; draconian regulations; harsh foremen; the binding of the workers to the workshop, as the serfs were to the soil, by money advances which they could never repay. Events follow their usual course: the story is one of struggles, prosecutions, appeals to the law, and finally, when no more can be said, battles with folded arms and closed factories—strikes by workmen or employers. There follow riots in which machinery is wrecked and attacks are sometimes made upon the masters themselves. Repression ensues; the carrying of arms is forbidden, the rights of combination and public meeting denied at pain of death. And, in reply to these measures, the workers retaliate by emigration, by secret societies, by recourse to force which may damp down the fire but cannot prevent it from smouldering till in time it bursts out afresh.
The guilds and their statutes were of but feeble assistance in calming these conflicts. The greater part of the workers in the great industries did not belong to them. Worse still, the guild system itself suffered from the startling inequality which separated its great manufacturers from their employees. Between rich masters and small masters, between the sons of masters and the poor journeymen, the gulf ever widened, and an institution was soon to reveal the growing friction. I have already spoken of the separate societies, now of long standing, governed by journeymen (compagnons); but compagnonnage, united to these ancient associations by more than one tie, had a more extensive influence. Its origins are obscure.[111] It is hardly found before the beginning of the fifteenth century, and developed particularly in Central Europe, France, the Low Countries, and in Germany. It seems to be allied to freemasonry in its origins, but was distinguished by an activity peculiar to itself. Freemasonry, as far as it is possible to pierce the mists which envelop its early history, was essentially a federation of building trades. It took its birth from the bands of workmen who had their raison d’être in the construction of those vast cathedrals whose harmonious proportions are certainly the most perfect legacy left to us by the Middle Ages. The aim of the association was to keep in order the crowds of half-nomadic labourers, who for half a century or more would establish themselves in a town; to transmit from one generation to the next the secrets of the craft; to act as arbitrator in the quarrels which might arise among this restless population. Born in the shadow of the sanctuary, it was naturally mystic and religious in character; it claimed to go back to the Templars, or even to the builders of Solomon’s Temple; it was the child of an age which delighted in mystery and occult knowledge, and it imposed on its members a complicated initiation, formidable tests, signs of recognition, and pass-words. Created for men who sometimes transferred their labour and their plans from one end of Europe to the other, it scattered its lodges over different lands; it was international, and in this differed profoundly from the guilds. But with this exception, it took its place within the existing order of things, accepted the hierarchy of the guild system, and had its three degrees—i.e. included apprentices, journeymen, and masters. It was a mixed institution as much and even more bourgeois than working-class.
Compagnonnage, too, covered many craft-guilds, of which the most important were closely connected with building (carpenters, stone-cutters, joiners) or with the clothing trades. It had its mystic legends, its symbolic rites in which baptism and communion figured, its claims to a long genealogy, its tests, pass-words, and strange ceremonies, in fact the whole armoury of a society which believes secrecy to be of vital importance. It was a league for mutual and fraternal assistance, which spread over many countries and undertook to procure for its travelling members moral support, lodging, travel-money, and, above all, work. But it differed from the guilds and from freemasonry in that no masters were admitted. It concerned itself exclusively with obtaining work for compagnons, and with looking after their professional interests. It thus emphasized the separation which had taken place between masters and workers. It was feared as an instrument of war, suspected on account of its secret methods by the public authorities which persecuted it, and by the Church which accused it of disseminating heretical ideas and condemned it in 1655 by the voice of the Faculty of Theology at Paris; it was also exposed to the attacks of the guilds. Nevertheless it survived all this, and was strong enough to organize strikes, and to black-list the firms which did not accept its conditions, and even the towns in which it was persecuted.[112]
Of course its strength and power of emancipation must not be exaggerated. Compagnonnage remained bound by the customs and liable to the vices of the guild system. If it escaped from the restraining spirit it did not escape from the corporate spirit; it jealously closed its ranks, and would only admit certain crafts; it was divided into hostile rites or devoirs which took for patrons Solomon, Maître Jacques, or Père Soubise. Violence was frequent (topage for instance), and bloody battles for the monopoly of work in a particular town often took place. Besides, it only included a privileged minority who ill-treated and despised not only those who were outside their ranks but even those who aspired to enter them. It was on the whole a fighting league, and imposed conditions on certain masters; but it was far from being a combination of the whole of the working classes against the masters.
Centuries were yet to pass before the development of “great” industry, by constantly increasing the number employed, by turning the suburbs of great cities and the black country into seething human anthills, forced all these multitudes of workers, in spite of wide differences of occupation, to unite into a great army.
As has been said, the division of society into guilds is vertical; it only becomes horizontal when the conditions common to the great army of wage-earners blot out all differences of craft and origin.
2. The change in intellectual conditions. The Renaissance and the Reformation.—We have summed up the effects produced on the guilds by the enlargement of the environment in which they developed. This environment, however, changed not only in extent but also in character. Without going into the details of the changes they passed through, we can see that three great events stand out in the history of Europe from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, and it is impossible that they should have failed to react on the system we are studying; these are the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the increase in the powers of the State.
The great intellectual revolution which has been named the Renaissance was at first a return to Greek and Roman antiquity. Literary men and scholars, filled with adoration for a glorious past, abandoned their mother tongue for that of the great dead, imitated Virgil, Cicero, Demosthenes, swore by Jupiter and Mercury, insisted, like Montaigne, on being given the title of Roman citizens, or like Erasmus, Ramus, or Melanchthon, took neo-classical names. They restored ancient methods of thought and action; they wove conspiracies in imitation of Brutus; they dated their letters by the Calends and the Ides; they became pagans once more in appearance and sometimes in reality; in opposition to Christianity—the religion of sadness, resignation, poverty, and of the struggle against the flesh and passion—they re-established love, pleasure, beauty, and the joy of life. They wakened from their long slumber the old systems of philosophy, and as disciples not only of Aristotle, but of Plato, Epicurus, and Diogenes, they became accustomed to coquetting with every kind of doctrine and often acquired an elegant dilettantism.
These new conceptions, which demanded a knowledge of languages requiring long study at college, could only be held by an élite. To have the right of initiation into the ancient authors it was necessary to belong to the leisured classes; it took time to read and re-read them in order to extract the “marrow within.”
In a word, the Renaissance was fundamentally aristocratic. Most of its classical scholars and poets profess disdain and hatred of the ignorant masses.