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The Glove

Guilds

A History of England by Andre Maurois
CHAPTER VIII abridged
THE COMMUNITIES: (1) TOWNS AND CORPORATIONS

To apprehend the slow change from feudal to parliamentary control after Magna Carta, we must examine the birth in medieval England of certain new forces - the communities. Feudal law protected the warrior landlord, and indirectly his serfs. But a gradually prospering society, untroubled now by invaders, could not remain a nation of soldiers and farmers. The town-dwellers, traders, students, and all who did not fit into the feudal framework, could only find security in association. The burgesses of a town, the craftsmen of a gild, the students of a university, the monks of a monastery began to form communities which insisted on their rights. Even at Runnymede, as we saw, the City of London had taken rank as a tenant-in-chief.

During the Saxon invasions most of the smaller Roman towns had fallen into decay, but a few survived. London, Winchester, York and Worcester, for instance, had never ceased to be towns. In the thirteenth century London had about 30,000 inhabitants, but the other towns were very small. Originally many of these had taken shape round a monastery. Some were places where a river was crossed, as indicated by so many names ending in 'ford' or 'bridge'; others were road-junctions or ports; and nearly all were fortified points. The word 'burgess' comes from 'burgh', a fort, reminding us that a town was for a long time a place of refuge, having its earthwork or stone walls, its drawbridge, and sometimes, in Norman days, its royal fortress.

The smaller landowners had houses there in case of war or times of danger, which they leased in times of tranquillity. Encased within its walls, a medieval town could not expand; its houses were small, its streets narrow, Thatched roofs frequently caused fires. Dirt was prevalent. The first public well in London dates from the thirteenth century, and its water was reserved for the poor to drink, as all who could drank beer. Ordure lay in the streets, and the stench was vile. Occasionally some contagion carried off part of the population.

Every town was partly rural even within its walls London had its kitchen gardens, and the mayor was constantly forbidding citizens to a]low pigs to wander about the streets. When the King dissolved Parliament during the fourteenth century, he dismissed 'the nobles to their sports, the commons to their harvests', drawing no line between knights and burgesses. The town, in fact, took part in the harvesting; courts and universities were suspended from July to October, to make way for the toil of the fields; and hence come the annual 'long vacations'.

At the time of the Conquest every town was dependent on a lord; its taxes were levied by the sheriff, and a townsman was answerable to the manor-court. Gradually the burgesses, as they grew richer, purchased 'liberties', that is to say, privileges. There is a twelfth-century story telling how two poor fellows were ordered by the manor-court to settle a question of property by combat, and how they fought from morning till the sun was high in the sky. One of them, tired out, was driven back to the edge of a deep ditch and was about to fall into it when his adversary, whose pity overcame his acquisitiveness, called out a warning. Whereupon the burgesses of the town compassionately bought from their lord for an annual rent the right to settle such disputes themselves.

In the thirteenth century the French invented the commune or free town, a kind of conspiracy of townsmen under a vow of. mutual protection. The name and the idea at once crossed the Channel, to the alarm of the lords. When the town attained the status of a tenant-in-chief it found its place in the feudal structure, having its own court, presided over by the mayor, and its own gallows, raising its own taxes, and being in due course summoned to Parliament. Towns, in France as in England, came to have their own seals, arms and mottoes, because they were themselves lords. The individual, in the Middle Ages, only participated in the governance of the country if he were a noble, but the communities were independent powers, and as such recognized by the law. The House of Commons emerged, not as a House of Communes, but a House of Communities - of counties, towns, and universities. England did not pass from the personal and feudal bond to a patriotic and national bond, but rather to a bond between the King and the 'States' or Commons of the realm.

To see in our own day a town of the twelfth or thirteenth century, one might view the sukhs of Fez or Marrakesh. The people are grouped in their several quarters according to their vocations. There is a street of butchers, another of armourers, another of tailors. The gild or corporation had the twofold object of protecting its members against outside competition, and of imposing on them rules to safeguard the consumer. Most villages before the eighteenth century had no shops medieval ideas on trade were in direct opposition to those of the modern liberal economists. The Middle Ages did not admit the idea of competition, nor that of the open market. To buy in advance simply to sell again was an offence, and to buy wholesale so as to sell retail likewise. If one member of a gild made a purchase, any other member, if so minded, could buy also at the same price. No stranger was entitled to settle in a town to practise his calling without licence.

Gild membership was an hereditary privilege. At first, poor artisans could become master-craftsmen by serving an apprenticeship of six or seven years. Later, in the sixteenth century, the gilds in the larger towns restricted some of their choicer privileges to wealthy members, although never altogether excluding any who had truly served apprenticeship. The Middle Ages recognized no law of supply and demand. Any merchandise was thought to have its just price, scaled to enable the seller to live decently without leaving him an excessive profit.

Merchants, of course, were not saints, and had countless tricks for evading the control of gild or municipality. Bakers kneaded loaves of short weight, or when their customers brought their own dough to be baked, kept a small boy hidden beneath the counter to steal handfuls before it was placed in the oven. Such fellows were punished in the pillory, the fradulent loaves being strung round their necks. A seller of bad wine had the residue of the stuff poured over his head. Rotten meat was burnt under the nose of its vendor, that he might smell it for himself. But gain is as strong a stimulant to fraud as to laborious toil.

Notwithstanding strict rules, merchants grew rich. In 1248 the prosperity of London outraged the feelings of King Henry III, who, having had to sell his plate and jewels to make up deficiencies of taxation, learned that they had been bought by merchants of his capital.

'I know,' said he, 'that were the treasures of imperial Rome for sale, this town would buy them all . These London clowns who style themselves barons are disgustingly rich. This city is a bottomless well.'

Throughout the Middle Ages the political strength of London was great. Its armed citizens, and the bands of apprentices ever ready to join in a riot, were a contribution to the armies, now checking, now upholding the sovereign.The trading methods of the Middle Ages were later severely judged by nineteenth-century economists, and the corporations, like all such bodies of men, were bound to cause abuses. But the system had great advantages in its day. The suppression of middlemen and the ruling-out of speculation made rural life excellently stable, until the middle of the fourteenth century. Medieval times knew little of the artificial rises and falls that we know.

The gild protected both vendor and buyer against the excess of competition. It was a regulative instrument. Foreigners were not themselves entitled to engage in retail trade, but must deal with English merchants, burgesses of a town. They bought metals and wool from the English, and imported silks, jewels and spices which they had from the East by way of Baghdad, Trebizond Kiev and Novgorod. These foreigners, however - French, Germans, Genoee, Venetians - were authorized to attend the great fairs. To host' a fair was a seigniorial privilege granted to certain towns and abbeys, its object being the double one of enabling English producers to find more buyers than there were in the town markets, and allowing the country-dwellers to obtain goods not to be found in their small local towns.