Читать книгу Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2 - Green Alice Stopford - Страница 6

From the mediæval Craft Association to the modern Trade Union the distance, as we have seen, is great. In the guild or “mistery” of the older world, instead of associations of working men we have to deal mainly with associations of producers or middlemen, whose battle is not the organized attack of wage-earners on the profits of their masters, but an attempt of dealers and manufacturers to stand out for their interests against the whole body of consumers or against the aggressions of competing trades; while far from being a voluntary association, or a self-governed institution of spontaneous growth, its individual members were if necessary enrolled by compulsion, and governed with little regard to their own consent. But the relations between the trades and the municipalities show a yet more striking contrast. According to a modern English theory the common good is best served when we allow every artizan and trader perfect liberty to develope his own industry in his own way.[267] But the mediæval world was fully convinced that since all trade and manufacture was carried on for the benefit of the public, all trade and manufacture should be subject to public control; and no one then questioned that it was the duty and the right of the State or the municipality to fix hours of labour, rates of wages, prices of goods, times and places of sale, the quality of the wares to be sold, and so on. In the interest, not of the trader or manufacturer, but of the whole community, the central government made general laws for regulating industry, and the towns carried out these laws by their officers and filled up the blanks of legislation after their own will; while in the exercise of the enormous power which law and public opinion gave to the authorities, the power of the people was supposed to be used with impartial justice alike against the dealer or the employer and the artizan or serving man, whenever individual claims clashed with what seemed to be the public advantage. Hence to the governing body of the borough the trade association was a mere matter of public convenience; and was so little regarded as depending on the free will of the craft itself that it was frequently founded by order of the town, and was invariably compelled to make submission to superior force and receive orders from its master the municipality. Unable to secure the passing of any new rule save by convincing the authorities on some pretext or other that it was devised in the interest of the whole commonwealth, the craft came at last to be considered as a society which existed mainly for the advantage of “the common people of the realm,” and indeed, bowing to a hard necessity, itself contracted the habit of solemnly disavowing any special regard for “its own singular profit,” and apologetically described itself as the humble servant of the municipality and the obedient minister of the public, in phrazes which the modern trade union would scarcely accept as an adequate description of its uses.

This service of the public, however, was in no sense a voluntary tribute of the guilds, nor did it enter in the slightest degree into their original scheme; and if through long and severe compulsion the crafts learned to wear with decorum their odd cloke of apparent devotion to the common weal, behind this ostensible policy and feigned colour of self-abnegation they had still their own purposes to serve, which were by no means the purposes of the rest of the community. Occasions of discord were probably far more frequent than provocations to unity and concord in the society of a mediæval town, with its hierarchy of struggling workers – the rising dealers, the small masters who employed two or three servants, the artizans who let down the ledge from their window to display the goods which they had themselves made, journeymen working for a statute wage, and unskilled labourers for whatever they could get – men for the most part living meagrely by incessant toil, and to whom the public, thrifty and inclined to bargains, was “the enemy”; and with its population of consumers, poor and ignorant, without the means of travelling, forced to buy what they wanted on the spot and thus deprived of such protection as may be given by a larger competition, able to afford little beyond the mere necessaries of life so that every fraud brought to them real suffering, and to whom the trader represented the ancient adversary lying in wait among the gins which he had privily set for the innocent. The thin veil of civility thrown over the situation by the polite phrazes of contemporary convention which have come down to us in ordinance and compact deceived nobody concerned; and between the “poor commons” and the whole army of crafts reconciliation never went farther than an armed truce. To the consumer the dealers seemed all alike steeped in iniquity. Shopkeepers measured out their wares “by horn or by aim of hand,” or in chance cups and dishes; and sold in dark corners where a man could not see what scamped work and deceitful goods were being handed over to him. Clothiers gave out bad yarn in scanty measure, and stretched out the list of their cloth with cunning presses “in deceit of the poor commons.” Hatters because they knew that everyone must needs wear hats charged exorbitantly for their wares, and shoemakers were no better, so that statute after statute vainly sought to mend them. Chandlers asked scandalous prices for wax candles, images, and figures, “by which means divers of the people be defrauded of their good intent and devotion.”[268] “All the bakers, butchers, fishers, taverners, poulterers, chandlers, tanners, shoemakers, cooks, hostelers, weavers, and fullers,” according to the comprehensive statement of the Nottingham Mickletorn jury in 1395, were asking too high prices and selling bad goods; and they go on the next year to repeat the same complaints.[269] Above all the anger of the common folk burned hot against the traders they knew best, the powerful licensed victuallers who heaped up to themselves riches with the food that should have fed the starving workers: “for took they on truly, they timbered not so high.” The “sundry sorrows in cities,” fevers and murrains and floods, or fires which burned down half the town and seemed ever to begin by the falling of a candle at a brewer’s or some “cursed place,” were the vivid testimony of the anathema of the poor and the righteous vengeance of heaven falling on the sinful traders;[270] and the common rumour of the market is still heard behind the poet’s parable of the day when Guile was at the point of death, and when it was only the shopkeepers who recovered him to life:

As for the crafts, on the other hand, whether they were combinations of employers, or associations of middlemen or dealers, or unions of wage-earners, or societies of masters and men, in one respect their unanimity was unbroken; for inspired by a reasonable hostility to the consumer who wanted to cheapen their wares, they were all ranged on the same side in the common controversy as to who was ultimately to fix prices, the seller or the buyer. Then obvious policy was declared in a number of conspiracies which were constantly made in the various trades to raise prices by combination among the dealers; but unfortunately for the traders, always on the watch as they were for opportunities, they still found the public as alert as themselves, and more powerful to accomplish their will. When Edward the Third in 1331 fixed the price of wine of Gascony at 4d. a gallon the retail dealers, who had apparently found their profit best secured by the absence of any statutory prices for their goods, broke into open rebellion, and “all the taverners of the city making a confederacy and alliance among them” closed the doors of their taverns and would not allow their wines to be sold; till to “put a check upon this malignancy” the mayor and sheriffs proceeded through the city, and had the names of the taverners so closing their taverns written down, twenty-nine in number, and twelve men from each ward of the city were summoned by the authorities to decide in the name of the injured wine-drinkers upon the punishment to be awarded to the taverners for their contumacy.[272] In 1363 and again in 1411 the consumer was protected by law against the rich Pepperers who had formed a company in 1345, and were accused of raising prices.[273] The whole body of chandlers in Norwich were presented at the Court Leet in 1300 for a certain agreement made among themselves that “no one of them shall sell a pound of candles for less than another.”[274] And in 1329 when a lime-burner of London bound all the members of his trade by oath not to sell lime below a fixed price, and “by reason of his great conspiracy” almost doubled the price of lime, the city rulers imprisoned him and the “conspiracy” was cut short.[275]

Alliances of this kind to increase profits or raise prices were universally met by a determined resistance on the part of the public.[276] But the “poor commons” went far beyond a policy of mere self-defence. They aimed in fact at nothing less than putting the crafts altogether under the yoke of the community, at seizing the whole organization of trade which had been built up and binding it over to perpetual service. Nothing could have been more distasteful to the guilds. In the twelfth century, while municipal government was in its very infancy, they had already aimed at complete independence and a real autonomy; and certain crafts did in fact succeed in making a special bargain with the King over the heads of the local magistrates. By charters bought at Westminster fraternities were made dependent for their existence on the royal will alone; and were granted rights of supervision and jurisdiction over their workmen without any reference to the borough;[277] and since in these early charters the only definite provision was that all the men of the trade in that particular district should be enrolled in the guild, the freedom of the craft as a whole remained for the moment unquestioned even if the freedom of the individual was limited. An independence so complete however was bitterly resented by town governments. In London for example the weavers lived in a quarter by themselves into which the city officers never entered. They had their own courts and special privileges, and raised their taxes through their own officers. Under the protection of the King’s writ they successfully defied the town authorities, and when in the time of Henry the Third the citizens seemed likely to overpower them by force they laid up their charter of rights in the Exchequer as a perpetual record of their privileges. The jealousy excited in municipal bodies by an alien society settled in their midst, where the town writs did not run, is not surprising. Every interest of the city was threatened – the monopoly of the sale of cloth claimed by the burgesses, the authority of the town magistrates, the orderly system of administration which the kings were building up, and the interests of the whole body of consumers. A natural apprehension of any danger to the unity of the borough was shown not only in London, but in Winchester, Oxford, Marlborough, Beverley,[278] and possibly in other towns; the weavers were shut out of the franchise and all its privileges, hampered in their trade by all sorts of oppressive regulations, forbidden to buy their tools, or possess any wealth, or sell their goods save to freemen of the city, while the status of villeins and aliens in the city courts was allotted to them. But mere repression left the real evil untouched; and by 1300 the city authorities in London had found a more radical cure. The Mayor had gained the right to preside in the weavers’ court if he chose, and to nominate the wardens of the guild;[279] and no sooner was all danger from an independent rule thus averted than the weavers were granted power to buy and sell “like other free citizens.”[280]

From this time all independent trade jurisdictions in the towns came to an end.[281] No more charters such as that of the weavers were sold by the crown;[282] and the crafts were presently forced to conciliate the local powers according to their measure of art or cunning – to beg from the municipal government a formal recognition for their association with such limited liberties as the town officers could be induced to give; to secure a more or less precarious existence by the payment of fines to the town treasury;[283] or to wrap round them a solemn conventional disguise, and conceal wholly or in part the fact of their union for trade purposes by sheltering themselves under the form of a religious association, and seeking independence “under a feigned colour of sanctity”[284] as men wholly moved by a zealous care for the souls of their dead comrades but taking no thought for the bodily welfare of living brethren.

But by whatever means the fraternities hoped to compass liberty, it was in vain that they sought to elude the heavy hand of the municipal government. Trade associations were laid hold of by the boroughs, brought under the discipline and authority of the public magistrates, and forced to take their due part in the developement of the municipal organisation.[285] Towns which obtained a grant to have “all reasonable guilds” took care to maintain a reasonable authority, and craft fraternities were only given leave to exist on the express plea that they were “consonant with reason and redounding to the public honour and to the advantage of the common weal”;[286] while privileges were meted out to them on the distinct understanding of the gain which was to spring from these to the whole commonalty. By a dexterous move on the part of the town governors the officers of the guild were transformed into the officers of the community, and the machinery of the guild became the means by which the public sought to provide for a full and cheap supply of the necessaries of life, and protected itself from overcharges and false measures and bad wares, from uproar and disorder, from drunken workmen, from the flying sparks of the smith’s forge, or the noise of his hammer at night. In London for example there was a constant succession of customers complaining at the Mayor’s Court of the bad bargains they had made in buying cloth, so that the fullers found themselves excessively “hard worked” in appearing at the Guildhall to examine the cloths of discontented buyers, and begged that every one might buy at his own risk.[287]

The masterly manœuvre executed by the town magistrates is revealed in the self-denying ordinances passed by the later guilds. Crafts “petition,” as we are gravely told, to have masters and ordinances, and these being granted the new rules turn out to be simply regulations to supply wares to the people of a fixed quality and price.[288] We can scarcely believe that the farriers should of their own free will have devised the rule that if any one of them, through negligence or any excess of pride which hindered his asking advice of the craft, failed in curing a horse of sickness, “then he shall be accused thereof before the Mayor and Aldermen and be punished at their discretion, in the way of making restitution for such horse to the person to whom the same belongs.”[289] Nor is it likely that masons and carpenters should have volunteered to take oath before Mayor and Aldermen that they would do their duty in their trade;[290] or that the masons should themselves propose that if a mason failed to fulfil his contract certain men of the trade who acted as his securities should be bound to finish his task.[291] Even the universal rule against night work was never among the London guilds (save in the single instance of the hat-makers)[292] made in the interest of the working-man; but on the contrary was dictated by the sagacious observation of the buyers that “sight is not so profitable by night, or so certain, as by day —to the profit, that is, of the community;”[293] and if spurriers “who compass how to practise deception in their work desire to work by night rather than by day”[294] the reason given for interfering with them was that they wandered about all day idle, and “then when they have become drunk and frantic they take to their work to the annoyance of the sick and all their neighbourhood … and then they blow up their fires so vigorously that their forges begin all at once to blaze … and all the neighbours are much in dread of the sparks which so vigorously issue forth in all directions from the mouths of the chimneys in their forges.”[295] Sunday closing itself was ordered as a matter of public convenience, because apprentices “could not be trusted to carry on work in the absence of their masters at church.”[296]

In thus bringing the crafts into subjection the towns were greatly strengthened by the sympathy of the State, which was the more inclined to make common cause with them from a growing apprehension of guilds of artificers and other labourers which in troubled times might prove centres of disturbance throughout the country. By a series of statutes the ancient powers of crafts were carefully pruned, and new authority grafted on to the town governments. “Congregations and confederacies” were jealously watched and forbidden.[297] The guilds were ordered to have their charters registered, and their rules and bye-laws approved by the chief magistrates of the town. They were forbidden to make ordinances to the damage of the King or the people. Sometimes jurisdiction over their own members was taken from them; and the right of search for any articles that “be not pure lawful and able chaffers,” or even the duty of seeing that the workers were duly paid their wages in ready money, was handed over to the town officers.[298]

Thus it came about that by the triple alliance of the officials at Westminster with the governing class of the town and the general body of consumers, all alike bent on organizing industry in their several interests, the primitive free associations of workers were gradually forced into the singular position of deferential servants of the community. Within its own little realm each guild might use a narrow independence or a petty tyranny, but in its public aspect it could assert few pretensions.[299] No craft fraternity could be formed without the leave of the municipality, and every Warden took his oath of office before the Mayor, at whose bidding and subject to whose approval he had been elected.[300] The rules made by any trade for its government had no force till they had been approved by the Mayor and Corporation, enrolled by them on the city records, and sealed with the common seal.[301] And since they reserved the right of making any addition to these ordinances which they might deem necessary,[302] the town magistrates could interfere whenever they chose in the interests of order. Not only did they bear rule over the seller in the market, but they followed the craftsman to his little workroom and ordered every smallest detail of his trade, material, wages, apprentices, cost, the fit of a coat and the quality of a shoe, according to the laws that “reserved all time to the Mayor and to the Council of the town power to correct, to punish, amerce, and redress, as well the masters and all other persons of the said crafts, each after their deserving and trespass, as the case asketh.”[303]