Part 12

Payd for the baryll for the yerthequake iiij_d._ Payd for starche to make the storm vj_d._ Payd for settynge the world of fyer v_d._

How realistic also must have been the crossing of the Red Sea! For the children of Israel did actually cross it in the sight of all. ‘Halfe a yard of Rede Sea’—there it is down in black and white among the properties belonging to _Israel in Egypt_.

* * * * *

The mediæval Miracle Plays have long been dead in our country, but we still have with us the remains of the great mediæval FAIRS. In the days when few people travelled if they could possibly stay at home, and when for the whole of the winter months the state of the country roads prohibited all travelling except that on horseback, fairs were a necessity. The right to hold an annual fair was therefore an eagerly sought privilege.

Thus Beverley, Bridlington, Hedon, Howden, Hull—all these towns very early obtained the right to hold annual fairs. The Hedon townsfolk had their fair every year ‘on the feast of St. Mary Magdalen, and for seven days after,’ from the year 1162; and this fair continued to be held on Magdalen Hill down to 1878. The charter for the holding of a fair at Hull was granted in 1299, and the eleventh day of October, 1911, saw Hull Fair still in full swing.

To these mediæval fairs would come a large concourse of merchants, minstrels, pedlars, jugglers, and rogues. To them would come also householders and the stewards of manor-house and castle, eager to buy cloth, silks, ribbons, pots and pans, boots and shoes, wine, wax, malt, a store of butter to last over the winter, or a store of salt for preparing the winter meat supply.

Among the entertainment providers would come the owner of the ‘wild beast show’—the show consisting of a solitary elephant or dromedary, or, much more frequently, an ape and a bear. If it is a bear that is the showman’s stock-in-trade, then there will be a chance for dogs that have grown sated with indulgence in the sport of bull-baiting to experience a new sensation.[42]

Footnote 42:

The old ‘bull ring’ to which bulls were tethered at a bull-baiting in the market-place of Kilham is now built into the bank of the churchyard wall.

Hither also would come that strange product of the middle ages—the pardoner. He professes to have from the Pope power to grant pardons for sins committed, or even for sins to be committed, if only satisfactory payment is forthcoming. To prove his genuineness he has a wallet full of parchments, brought straight from Rome, and all duly stamped with large seals. And if that is not enough for his credulous audience he has holy relics to show—a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat, and a feather from the wing of the angel Gabriel.

He has also the shoulder bone of a holy Jew’s sheep, which is guaranteed to cure disease in any cow, calf, ox, or sheep, if the bone be but washed in a bucket of water and the sick animal’s tongue well cleaned with this water. ‘One penny’ is all his charge. ‘Bring your buckets full of water. Now’s your chance! If you lose it, your sick cow, calf, ox, or sheep may be dead in the morning, and you’ll be sorry ever afterwards that you didn’t take my advice.’

Thus does the rascal do a roaring trade.

XIX. THE TRADE UNIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

With the Trade Unions of our days almost everyone is to some extent acquainted. Certainly everyone who lives in a town is acquainted with them. For, in the first place, most workmen in a town belong to a trade union; and, in the second place, many who are not ‘workmen’, in the usual meaning of the word, are made uncomfortably aware of the existence of one or other of the Trade Unions when what is called a ‘Strike’ takes place.

Many people, if asked their opinion, would say that Trade Unions are a purely modern institution—that it is only in our own times that workmen have found the usefulness of binding themselves together in a ‘Union’ for the obtaining of benefits which singly they could not expect to gain. But such an opinion would be wrong. Trade Unions, though called by a different name, existed in our country six, seven, and even eight hundred years ago.

What we call by the name of Trade Unions were in former times known as CRAFT GILDS. They had this name because they were clubs, or fraternities, or brotherhoods, of men who were engaged in some branch or branches of handicraft, and who paid a fine—originally known as _gildi_—to obtain the privileges of membership.

In all towns there were found these Craft Gilds. Thus in 1406 Beverley had thirty-eight, and the Craft Gilds of Kingston-upon-Hull in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included those of the Weavers, the Tailors, the Glovers, the Joiners, the Carpenters, the Shipwrights, the Bricklayers, the Cobblers, the Shoemakers, the Coopers, the Brewers, the Innholders, the Bakers, and the Barber Chirurgeons. Each of these crafts had its own Gild. But, on the other hand, the Goldsmiths, Pewterers, Plumbers, Glaziers, Painters, Cutlers, Musicians, Stationers, Bookbinders, and Basketmakers had to be content with one Gild among them; and a strange medley their Gild must have been.

There was one great difference between these Craft Gilds and our Trade Unions. Whereas the men who belong to the latter are the employed workmen, those who belonged to the former were both the employers and the employed, both the masters and the men. Hence the rules of the Gilds were framed not only to protect the workmen against hard and unjust masters, but also to protect the masters against dishonest and careless workmen, and, in addition, to protect the public from being defrauded by either dishonest masters or idle workmen. How each of these good results was effected will be seen from the following extracts, taken from the rules of different Craft Gilds belonging to Kingston-upon-Hull.

* * * * *

First, we will consider the protection of the workman. Before a _Weaver_ might set up in business for himself he must pay xij_d._ to the Alderman of his Gild for the inspection of his workhouse by the searchers, who would search whether his workhouse were ‘good and able’ or not. If they were satisfied on this point, then the owner was permitted to begin business on payment of an ‘upsett’ of iij_s._ iiij_d._ No woman was allowed to work at this trade within the town upon pain of xl_s._ Nor might a _Tailor_ keep any manner of workman tailor employed within his dwelling-house. Again, no _Joiner_ might withhold his servant’s wages over the space of six days after the same were due. If he did, the servant could get from the Warden an order for their payment, and the master’s penalty for disobeying this order was xij_d._

For the protection of the masters there were corresponding laws:—

If any of the brotherhood of the _Bricklayers_, being at work with any man, do, in the time of his work, resort unto the alehouse or do play at dice, cards, or any other unthrifty game, he shall forfeit and pay for every time so doing viij_d._

So also, in the rules of the _Shipwrights_, a very heavy penalty was imposed upon the workman who for mere caprice threw down his tools and left his work unfinished:—

If any person shall be lawfully retained in work by the day, and shall unjustly and unlawfully leave or depart from the same until such time as the same work shall be fully finished, he shall forfeit and pay to the master warden for every such offence forty shillings of lawful money of england.

The protection of the public was equally well looked after. No person might set up or keep an Inn, unless he could make and furnish four comely and decent guest beds; and every _Innholder_ was obliged to have in his house, ready-made, four bottles of hay, to be shown to the searchers at all times when they came to make search. Thus the comfort of both man and beast was ensured to travellers.

All manufactured goods were to be open to inspection by the searchers of the particular Gild, and any scamped or fraudulent goods were ‘seized and forfeited.’ Thus a rule of the _Shoemakers’ Gild_ stated that—

The searchers shall well and diligently search and try all boots, shoes, buskins, slippers and pantoufles,[43] whether they be made of leather well and truly tanned and curried, and well and substantially sewed with good thread, well twisted and made and sufficiently waxed with wax well rosined, and the stitches hard drawn with hand leathers.

Boots and shoes made under these regulations were intended to last in wear for a substantially long time, and brown paper inner soles and wooden heels would stand a poor chance of passing the inspection of the searchers. On the shelves of the Hull Museum may be seen some pairs of boots made and worn two hundred and fifty years ago, and still almost ‘as good as new.’

Footnote 43:

The French name for slippers.

A rule of the _Brotherhood of Cobblers_ reads quaintly. But, doubtless, it proved a very useful rule:—

If any cobbler shall keep any work brought to him longer than two days, without consent of the owner, he shall forfeit for every offence the sum of two shillings and sixpence.

One is bound to imagine that there was in those days a brisk trade in ‘Boots Mended While You Wait.’

Prices were also well looked after. ‘That no one presume to sell a pound of candles for more than one penny, or a gallon of the best ale for more than the same, or a gallon of small ale for more than a half-penny’—so runs one of the laws as to prices. Bakers’ charges were regulated according to the price of wheat. A farthing and a half-penny were fixed as the price of loaves, but the weight of the loaf varied. Thus in 1267, when wheat was one shilling a quarter—

White bread cost ½d. per 13 lbs. Wheat bread ” ” ” 20 ” Horseloaves[44] ” ” ” 27 ”

Footnote 44:

Horse loaves were coarse bean bread, something like the modern dog-biscuit, and used as a winter food for horses.

The employment of cheap unskilled labour was expressly guarded against. In general, no master might keep more than one or two apprentices, and each apprentice must serve for a space of seven years. By the latter rule there was a kind of guarantee that an apprentice would learn his craft thoroughly before becoming a journeyman. No alien might be taken as an apprentice, and in many towns night-work was forbidden, as being usually inferior to day-work.

* * * * *

When an apprentice had ‘served his time’ and learned his craft, he might, in his turn, become free of his Gild and so earn the right to sell the product of his hands. But this right to sell was carefully guarded, as the following regulations of the _Coopers_ and the _Bakers_ show:—

No cooper, unless he be first free burgess of this town and free of this company, shall keep any shop in this town upon pain of 5s. weekly.

No person or persons dwelling without this town shall sell any bread or cakes within this town otherwise than on the Tuesdays and Fridays, market days, in open market.

If a craftsman was thus protected against undue competition from outsiders, so he was protected against undue competition from those who had a desire to encroach on someone else’s preserves. Carpenters might not work as joiners or as shipwrights, cobblers might not work as shoemakers, nor might shoemakers work as cobblers. ‘Every man to his own trade’ was a maxim of the middle ages, and there was then no call for a ‘William Whiteley’ or a ‘Selfridge’s, Ltd.’

Sunday labour and Sunday trading were expressly forbidden in all Gilds:—

No shopwindows of the fraternity of _Shoemakers_ shall be opened upon the sabbath days in pain of every default viij_d._

No brother exercising the crafts or mysteries of a _Barber_ or _Peruke-maker_ shall upon the Lord’s day, commonly called Sunday, either out or in time of divine service, work, or keep open his shop, on pain to forfeit for every time he shall be found so doing the sum of ten shillings.

Again, it is interesting to find that ‘Sunday Closing’ was provided for in the following regulation:—

No _Vintner_ or _Aleseller_ shall sell any ale or wine unto any one before 11 o’clock on Sunday, unless to strangers, under penalty of vj_s._ viij_d._

* * * * *

Most interesting of all the thirty-eight Craft Gilds of Beverley is that of the Minstrels. The charter of this Gild was confirmed by ‘the gracious goodness of our most virtuous sovereign Lord and Lady, King Philip and Queen Mary,’ and is said to date ‘from the time of King Aethelstan, of famous memory.’

In 1520 the tower of St. Mary’s Church, Beverley, fell, and destroyed in its fall the greater part of the nave of the church. Various families of the town undertook the rebuilding of some portion of this, and one portion—the north-east pillar and the wall and roof above it—was rebuilt at the expense of the _Gild of the Minstrels_. This fact is recorded on a tablet placed high up on the pillar, where may be read these words:—

THYS PYLLOR MADE THE MEYNSTYRLS.

Attached to the east face of the pillar are also figures of five ‘meynstyrls,’ each gaudily coloured and holding his particular musical instrument—a tabor and pipe, a large viol, a shawm, a cittern, and a wait or hautboy.

Besides these numerous Craft Gilds there were MERCHANT GILDS, or, as we should call them to-day, ‘Trading Companies.’

The distinction between the two kinds of Gilds is not always clear, and in some cases a trader belonged to both. But in general the Craft Gilds contained men who by their daily work changed the form of a thing, while the Merchant Gilds contained those whose daily work consisted of trading in a thing without changing its form. Thus, the Merchant Tailors bought and sold cloth, but the Tailors made the cloth into clothes. And just as to-day it is ‘much more respectable’ to be an egg-merchant than to be a pastry-cook, so, five centuries ago, it was equally ‘more respectable’ to be a merchant-tailor than a tailor pure and simple.

Chief among the Merchant Gilds of Kingston-upon-Hull were the _Gild of the Merchant Adventurers_, originally known as the ‘Brotherhood of St. Thomas of Canterbury,’ and the _Hull Merchants’ Company_. During the reigns of the Tudor and Stuart Kings, these did much to foster the trade of Hull with the great ports on the other side of the North Sea.

A charter was granted to the Hull Merchants’ Company by Queen Elizabeth, and King Charles II. renewed it on receipt of ‘fifty pounds of good and lawful money of England.’ The members of the Company met in the Merchants’ Hall—the upper story of the red-brick building on the south of the Market Place, now known as the Choir School—and a ‘merchant’s mark’ is still to be seen cut in three stone panels in the front wall of the building. They were a wealthy Company, and at one time had much power. Fines or ‘upsetts’ for the privilege of membership ranged from 6s. 8d. to £20.

It is interesting to find that the Hull Merchants’ Company acted as a Post Office for foreign correspondence. ‘Masters of ships’—so ran one of the laws governing their Exchange—must

hang up a bagg a week before their sailing, that merchants may putt their letters therein, and soe the masters to take the same away the night before they intend to saile.

Equally interesting is it to find that the Hull merchants of the seventeenth century were, evidently, firm believers in the modern doctrine of ‘Protection.’ For, by one of the statutes regulating the trade of the port, all alien merchants must bring their goods to the Exchange and must pay one penny in the pound for the privilege of sale.

* * * * *

What an insight into the working-lives of the townspeople, whether traders or craftsmen, we have given us in the ancient documents of the Merchant Gilds and Trade Gilds! As Canon Lambert says in his _Two Thousand Years of Gild Life_, they ‘bring back into view the everyday life of the town in the centuries of which they treat. As we study them we can mingle again in the vigorous life of the narrow streets. We can learn how it was that the men of that time built houses of which the mortar stands to-day as hard as stone; we can picture the barber looking askance at the upstart man who presumed as surgeon to molest his ancient right of letting the blood of his customers at the fall of the leaf; we can look into the mysteries of the brewing-vat as it was before tea had usurped the time-honoured place of the pewter at the breakfast tables of society; we can see the shipwrights who made the ships of Elizabeth at work; we can walk, as it were, along the small booths and shops, and judge of the quality of the goods which had come from Hamburg or Muscovy, or which had been fashioned with such care in the workshop behind the parlour.’

Of the _Religious_ or _Social Gilds_, which existed at even earlier times than the Merchant and Craft Gilds, something was said in Chapter XVIII. The fate which overwhelmed the Religious Gilds during the reign of Edward VI. had, doubtless, some effect on the Trading Companies and Brotherhoods of Craftsmen. But the last-named were very largely excepted from the Suppression of the Gilds in 1547, and their gradual decay and final extinction were due to the introduction of new industries and new methods of working. The _Hull Merchants’ Company_ became extinct in 1706, there was still existing at Beverley in 1752 the _Brotherhood of the Barkers or Tanners_, and the last entry in the Book of the _Hull Fraternity of Coopers_ is dated 1788.

XX. THE SUPPRESSION OF THE MONASTERIES AND THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE.

In a previous chapter were described the various buildings of a monastery and the mode of life of its inmates. And at the end of the chapter reference was made to the gradual loss of those high ideals which had been the origin of the many hundred monasteries that existed in our country at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The results of that loss will now be described.

The benefits to the country at large arising from the establishment of these religious houses had been great. They served as hotels for the rich and as almshouses for the poor. The Cistercian monks were pioneers in agriculture. Both monks and friars got together libraries of books—that at Meaux Abbey contained 324 volumes in 1539—and were mostly diligent scribes. Thus they helped to spread the means of learning.

But by the beginning of the sixteenth century many Houses had outlived their usefulness. Their inmates had decreased in numbers until only six monks remained where sixty had once been. Laxity of discipline crept in with this decrease of numbers. Hence it seemed right to suppress the small and useless religious houses, and to apply their revenues to other useful purposes.

This was the thought in the minds of both Cardinal Wolsey and the Pope of Rome when in 1524 the one applied for a certain Papal Bull and the other granted it. It was to the effect that various small monasteries to the annual value of three thousand ducats should be suppressed, and their revenues used to endow the new ‘Cardinal College’ which Wolsey was then planning to build at Oxford. Four years later permission was granted to suppress others to the annual value of eight thousand ducats. In the following year King Henry VIII. was given permission to suppress others to the annual value of ten thousand ducats, and to apply their revenues to the foundation of new cathedrals.

‘Very right and proper,’ you will probably think. ‘The money was going to be put to a better use.’ Yes, but these suppressions might point out to some unscrupulous adviser of the King a means whereby large supplies of money could easily be obtained; and if the King happened to be in need of money and was not very scrupulous as to the manner in which that money were obtained, it might become a very dangerous precedent.

This is just what it did become. King Henry VIII. was not a particularly scrupulous man in more ways than one, and his chief adviser after Cardinal Wolsey’s death was particularly unscrupulous. Acting on the advice of Thomas Cromwell, Parliament, at the close of 1535, ordered a ‘Visitation’ of the monasteries throughout the country, and the presentation of a report based on the results of this. Accordingly, two ‘Visitors’ were appointed, who in the short space of six weeks visited, or were said to have visited, eighty-eight monasteries in the dioceses of Coventry, Lichfield and York.

The report presented to Parliament was named THE BLACK BOOK, and its nature was such that in February, 1536, Parliament ordered the suppression of all monasteries that had an annual income of less than £200. As a result 376 religious houses were suppressed, their inmates were transferred to the larger houses or left to shift for themselves, and their lands, to the annual value of £32,000, were forfeited to the King. All the monasteries and nunneries in the East Riding thus came to an end except those at Kirkham, Meaux, Watton and Bridlington, whose annual incomes amounted to £269, £299, £360 and £547 respectively.

* * * * *

In most parts of the country this suppression of the smaller monasteries caused no great stir. Undoubtedly some of them needed suppression. Undoubtedly, too, the report which got about, that the confiscation of the wealth of the religious houses would provide so much money for the government that there would thenceforth be no taxes for the common folk to pay, tended to prevent an outcry from being raised by the people. But in two counties there were rebellions. The first, in Lincolnshire, proved of little account; but the second, which had its origin in Yorkshire, was a formidable rising to which was given the name of _The Pilgrimage of Grace_.

In this rising all the north of England was concerned. The great Abbeys of Yorkshire exercised a powerful influence over the minds of the people, and a widespread religious ferment broke out. Lord Darcy, Earl of Holderness, Sir Robert Constable of Flamborough, Sir Thomas Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and many other northern nobles threw in their lot with the rebellious commoners. Soon forty thousand men were enrolled under the command of Robert Aske, a Westminster lawyer and brother of John Aske, the lord of the manor of Aughton-on-Derwent.

The demands of Aske and his followers were:—

(1) The restoration of the suppressed monasteries;

(2) The expulsion of counsellors of low birth from the King’s court;

(3) The holding of Parliament and of a Court of Justice at York as well as at London.[45]

Footnote 45:

This third demand resulted in the formation of the ‘Council of the North,’ which met at York during the next hundred years.