CHAPTER V

TRADE GUILDS AND THE COMING OF THE NEW INDUSTRY

The outstanding factor in the industrial, social, and economic life of the Middle Ages is the trade guild. The real life of any people is not the story of its wars or the record of the doings of its kings and nobles. It is the life of the people themselves. The moment we try to study this aspect of these old times we find that in the towns especially the life of the people centers around their trade guilds. The guild was an organization of all the workmen in any given trade. It included the master workman, the journeyman, and the apprentice. It controlled the whole life of the industry from the buying of materials to the selling of the finished product, from the indenturing of the apprentice to the certification of the master workman. Its peculiar strength lay in the fact that it did not exercise this control in the interest of either the employer or the employed. It exercised it in the interest of the industry as a whole. It did not forget the interests of the public. It did not permit the industry to be practised by the unauthorized or outsiders. It limited competition. It distributed labor. It prevented over-production. It assumed great responsibility for its members and it held them to a very strict accountability.

Of course, such an organization was possible only under conditions of production far different from those which now prevail. All work was hand-work and each hand-worker was supposed to make the whole of the thing produced. There were no machines of any importance and there was practically no division of labor. The armorer, for example, made his helmet, carrying it through every process from the first shaping of the steel to the attaching of the last plume. The shoemaker selected his leather and carried it through every process until the shoe was finished. Men learned trades in those days. They did not learn to tend a machine. A trade was worth something because the trade organization of that day made lack of employment impossible for a decent man in ordinary times. Learning a trade took a long time. As soon as the boy was old enough to begin to learn he was apprenticed to a master workman, usually for a term of seven years. Usually he paid something for his apprenticeship, in some cases a considerable amount. He lived in the master’s family and was supported by him until he was out of his time. He then usually worked as a journeyman until he could accumulate the small capital necessary to set up as an independent master.

Having been apprenticed under guild regulations to a guild member he became a member of the guild himself as soon as he qualified as a journeyman. Meantime he had not only been thoroughly instructed in the practice of the industry but he had absorbed the craftsman’s spirit and become imbued with the great principles of guild life. These principles were five:

1. General protection of workmen. This has perhaps been sufficiently described already.

2. Limitation of competition. This has also been remarked upon.

3. Perfection of work. The guild always stood behind the quality of the product made by its members. If goods were not up to standard in quality it was not only held to be a disgrace to the guild, but the offending member was liable to severe punishment at the hands of the guild itself. The guilds maintained their own inspectors. These inspectors visited the shops and the fairs or occasional markets where goods were sold. If they found poor work in the shop or if they found that poor work had been put in the hands of the merchants for sale, they reported it to the guild officers who immediately dealt with the offending member.

4. Honesty in business. The guild member not only made his goods but sold them, generally directly to the public. Sometimes he sold them to merchants and sometimes he sent them to certain cities where at certain times markets or fairs were held, there to be sold on commission. More often, however, he made and sold his own goods in his own shop and lived in the same building with his family, his apprentices, and sometimes his journeymen. The guild stood for full weight and measure and for honesty in all business transactions. It punished faults in these directions as sternly as in the making of poor goods.

5. The maintenance of the social order. The guilds were always to be found arranged on the side of law and order, although that did not always mean that they were on the side of the king or other constituted authority in periods of civil disturbance.

The members of the guilds, all fighting men usually serving under their own guild banners and their own leaders, were an important part of the military force of the medieval cities. Although they might and did fight on one side or the other of some civic quarrel they always stood for order in the community just as they did for honesty in production and trade. This, however, is closely connected with the further fact that the guilds had a distinct religious side. The medieval man was not perhaps very much more religious than his modern descendant, but he was religious in a different way and paid much more attention to the forms of religion. Religious ceremonies formed a part of the regular routine of guild life and in many cases special churches were closely identified with certain guilds. Closely connected with the guilds were organizations known as confraternities. These confraternities were religious, charitable, and social organizations. Although usually drawn from members of some particular industry, they did not attempt to exercise the trade control which was in the hands of the guilds. They adopted the name of some saint who was chosen as their patron. They had a solemn feast following attendance at church on his day in the calendar, and they maintained a fund out of which the needy could be assisted and the dead buried with due provision of masses for the repose of his soul in case the family funds were not sufficient.

You see we are dealing with a time when the lives of men were very simple, very neighborly, and at least so far as observance goes, very religious. It is very important that we should have some fairly clear idea of these times if we are to understand at all how the early printers lived, what they did, and why they did it.

The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were the golden age of the guilds. They were at the height of their power and influence at the period of the invention of printing. The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were a period of decline. At first the decline was slow. After the sixteenth century, however, the decline was rapid, and long before the end of the eighteenth century the guilds had lost practically all of their old-time power and influence. In some portions of Europe the old guild organization still exists, but its influence is very slight and its purposes are far different from those of the old organizations of the Middle Ages.

This decline was the result of the changing economic conditions. One of the most important of these was the development of the modern type of production in factories using costly equipment and employing large numbers of men. The old type of production required little or no capital. There was practically no costly machinery. The work was done in the master workman’s house by himself, his sons, and apprentices. No expensive outlay for materials or plant was required. The journeyman required practically no capital for starting in business beyond his personal strength and skill.

Printing was the first industry which could not be carried on under the old conditions. From the beginning the printer must have capital to supply type, presses, and other equipment, to purchase material, which was costly, and to maintain himself and those who were working with him while a long process was being brought to completion and the product marketed. In order to carry on the business to any advantage a considerable number of persons must be employed. Under these circumstances printing was necessarily from the beginning an enterprise which required the co-operation of capital and labor to an extent hitherto unknown.

Another reason for the decline of the guilds may be found in the increasing power of the government and its progressive control of the citizen. The control and protection thus exercised by the government rendered the protection and control exercised by the guild over its members not only unnecessary but improper. While in some respects governmental control and the freedom of a well-organized system of courts did not protect the rights of the individual and insure the quality of product as effectively as the guilds had done, it was inevitable that particular regulations should give way to general regulation and that the individual should not only be taught but compelled to look to the state rather than to an association of individuals for the protection of his rights and the definition of his duties.

It was probably this more than anything else which brought about an increasing antagonism between the guilds and the state in every country. In the years of their growth and power the guilds, as we have seen, had been the strong supporters of the social order, the pillars of the state, and the firm reliance of the government, or at any rate of that party in the government which they supported. When the government became strong enough to desire to stand alone, the power of the guilds, which had formerly been useful, became decidedly objectionable, and the entire influence of the state was more and more directed against them.

Another important social change was the development of free labor and free capital, resulting in the separation of industrial classes. Under the guild system there was no separation between labor and capital, or between the employers and the employed as classes. The guilds were associations in which labor and so much capital as there was were combined in a close organization, while there was neither labor nor capital in any particular amount outside the guild. With the gradual change of conditions, growth of population, increase of wealth, and greater intercourse between communities there grew up on one end of the social scale groups of laborers who were not members of any guild and on the other end accumulations of capital which were either in the hands of men who were neither craftsmen nor guild members or of those who had larger accumulations than they could use in their own business. This development of laborers seeking employment and capital seeking investment was fatal to the guild system when once the progress of invention made the factory system possible.

One of the factors which accelerated this movement was a curious combination of high prices fixed by the economic law of supply and demand and low wages fixed by the ancient law of custom. It must be remembered that at this time the science of political economy did not exist. People did not know the laws which govern business and control prices and wages. They ignorantly supposed, as some persons still suppose, that these things may be governed by statute, being entirely unaware of the fact that they are really the product of causes for the most part beyond human control. In the early Middle Ages wages and prices were fixed on a basis of custom. The three centuries which formed the golden age of the guilds were a period of very slight industrial changes. There were no great changes in population. There was no colonizing, with the consequent opening of new markets. There were no modern inventions. There was no particular change in the amount of gold and silver in circulation. Consequently the law of supply and demand made itself felt so little through variations in prices and in wages that it was entirely neglected. It became the custom to pay a certain amount for each commodity, and especially to pay a fixed rate of wages in certain occupations. Nobody thought of paying less or of asking more than this customary sum. In case anybody did attempt any modification of this sort he was promptly checked by law. Attempts were also frequently made to prevent by law variations in prices.

This condition of things was completely upset by the changes which took place about the time of the discovery of America. One of the immediate results of the opening up of the mines and treasure hoards of Mexico and Central and South America, with the consequent enormous increases in the amount of gold and silver in circulation, was a rise in general prices of about 100 per cent or, to put it differently, a cutting in two of the value of gold and silver. Gold and silver are just like other commodities. When the amount of gold in a given market is doubled its value is halved; that is to say, you have to pay twice as much for whatever you want to buy.

The opening of new markets and the stimulus given not only to invention but to production and communication by the intellectual movement and consequent discoveries and inventions which were going on at this time upset industrial conditions tremendously. As usual, however, the workmen were the last to feel this change. Men paid more gold for commodities because they could not get them at the same old price, but wages for a long period remained fixed by custom. The laborer, like other people, had to pay more for what he bought, but unlike other people did not get any more for what he sold. This condition was made even worse by ignorant and sometimes disastrous attempts to control by legislation a situation which nobody understood. Statutes to fix prices and curtail profits are never enforceable unless backed by a government monopoly of production. Consequently the extensive legislation for these purposes was useless. Unfortunately there was also legislation forbidding combination of workmen, forbidding their passage from place to place in search of work, and forbidding their asking or receiving more than the customary rate of wages. Some of this was old legislation revived. Some of it was new. While not entirely effective, it was much more effective than the legislation with regard to commodity prices, because in the nature of things it was much more easily enforceable.

The natural consequence of these conditions was the disruption of the old economic order. The employer and employed, who had been associated together in the old guilds, separated into antagonistic, if not hostile, camps. Capital and labor instead of co-operating contested for supremacy. Guilds, if they survived at all, gradually became associations of masters. We shall see how this worked out in the development of the Community of Printers. The workmen gathered into organizations of their own which were the ancestors of the modern labor unions. The modern industrial system with all its power and with all its abuses came into existence.

Printing did not fit into the guild system at all. As has already been pointed out, the very nature of the industry prevented it. Indeed it was not legally regarded as an industry or a mechanical occupation until the great reorganization of the trade in 1618, a date to which we shall have frequent occasion to refer. At first it was regarded as an art or profession and those who practiced it were legally recognized as not being mechanics and not being liable to the laws governing mechanics. From 1450 to 1618 the printing industry was a sort of industrial outlaw. It was not under guild control on the one hand and was not amenable to the general statutes regarding industry on the other. That meant that the regulations which were at this period so advantageous to the other industries did not apply to this one, with numerous unfortunate results.

The industry at first attached itself to the universities. It was utilized, as we have seen, not for a commercial purpose as now, but for the production of Bibles, the classics, and other learned books almost exclusively. As we have also seen, the universities attempted to control the output of the press until more effective methods of censorship were devised.

Previous to the invention of typography there had been a sort of guild of the makers and sellers of books. In most places this was known as the Confraternity of St. John the Evangelist, sometimes as the Confraternity of St. Luke, and in one place at least as the Brothers of the Pen. This organization continued to exist as an association of printers, but it did not have the power and standing of the great trade guilds of an earlier period. Soon after the invention of printing the journeymen and apprentices formed an association of their own, which very soon developed into something like a labor union. The result of these conditions was great disorganization in the trade. Strikes were frequent. In France particularly the period from 1539 to 1544 was one of great disorder. Accounts of a series of strikes in the city of Lyons at this period read almost like the accounts of a serious labor disturbance of the present time. Shops were picketed. There were parades of strikers. There were riots by the strikers and their sympathizers, and an appeal to the town authorities to settle the matter. The settlement proposed was so unfavorable to the master printers that they threatened to leave Lyons in a body. This would have been a very serious matter, as printing was then one of the great industries of the city, and the disturbance was finally settled by a compromise which granted the journeymen some of their more important demands and yet left enough to the masters so that they felt that they could continue in business. The great grievances complained of were low pay, poor food (the journeymen were boarded by their employers), too many apprentices, and the unwillingness of the masters to allow them to work at certain times when they wanted to work, such as on the eves of Sundays and feast days and the like, and to abstain from work at certain times when they did not want to work.

Attempts were made to stop the disturbances in the trade by the intervention of the government. This intervention was entirely on the side of the masters. The journeymen were forbidden to do anything whatever to injure the masters or to impede their business and they were denied the limitation of apprentices for which they had asked. Guild regulations limited the number of apprentices taken in other industries and it seemed only reasonable to the journeyman that similar regulations should obtain among the printers, but the royal authority was constantly exercised against them. This attempted settlement by royal authority was immediately followed by still more serious strikes. The masters complained that the agitation was due to the pernicious activity of labor leaders and invoked the royal edicts. The journeymen alleged abuses, claimed their rights, and undertook to enforce them by combination. The royal authority was exercised in the effort to coerce the journeymen even to the point of threatening by an edict of 1617 that workmen who interfered with the conduct of their master’s business should be put to death. This, however, was the last expiring effort of the old order of things. In the next year, 1618, a royal edict organized the trade and prescribed the regulations under which it should be conducted.

This organization, which we shall proceed to study in detail, was the basis of the conduct of the printing industry in France until 1789. It did not bring industrial peace and it did not remedy all existing evils. As we shall see, the history of printing is a history of industrial conflict throughout the whole period until 1789. Henceforth, however, the regulation of the trade, the establishment of a responsible organization, and the fixing of regulations between masters and men changed the field of strife. We hear little or nothing more of strikes. The state was recognized as the source of regulation and as the arbiter of questions which might arise between the associated employers on one hand and their partially associated employees on the other. The industrial struggles hereafter took the form of litigation rather than of strikes. The outlaw industry at last obtained a recognized, responsible position in the industrial world.