I LIBRARY 
 
 iwiveisrTY OF 
 
 CAUFOIWMA 
 
 fSANWEGO 
 

 
 FROM GILD TO FACTORY
 
 FROM GILD TO 
 FACTORY 
 
 A FIRST SHORT COURSE OF 
 ECONOMIC HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED MILNES, M.A. (LOND.) 
 
 EDITOR OF "JOHNSON'S SELECT WORKS," "BUTLER'S 
 HUDIBRAS," " PROBLEMS AND EXERCISES IN- 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY," ETC 
 
 SECOND EDITION, REVISED 
 
 LONDON 
 
 MACDONALD AND EVANS 
 
 4, ADAM STREET, ADELPHI, W.C. 
 
 1910
 
 RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, 
 
 liREAD STREET HILL, F.C., AND 
 BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE following pages contain the substance of a 
 short course of University Extension Lectures. 
 Confined within such close limits of space, it is 
 obvious that the aim of speaker or of writer must 
 also be restricted. And the aim here has been 
 rather to kindle interest than dogmatically to in- 
 struct rather to persuade to read much than to 
 offer a substitute for much reading. The author 
 has had frequent occasion to notice how a certain 
 type of mind, by no means uncommon amongst the 
 young, is repelled from historical reading as being 
 dull, and in a sense arbitrary. And this feeling 
 he has believed to be traceable to an inarticulate 
 repugnance to what is felt to be the isolation of 
 each historical fact. Occurrences which do not 
 hang together might as well be separated by five 
 hundred years as by five; and the personages in 
 history who do not hang together are like the 
 puppets in a Punch and Judy show, who deserve 
 to be, and generally are, hanged separately. To 
 learn by heart a list of battles and their dates can 
 only be accepted as an unavoidable consequence of 
 original sin. But once let human sympathy pro- 
 vide the thread, and the beads will be strung. 
 Once persuade Simon de Montfort to live again 
 for us, and the triumph of Lewes and the fatal 
 ruin of Evesham are no longer hard to remember. 
 
 Now the first step towards supplying this natural 
 craving for intellectual sympathy seems to be 
 taken when the reasonableness of history is insisted
 
 vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 on. And if this be so, then our First Book in any 
 branch of historical study must be not an "Out- 
 line " containing a list of facts, all alleged to have 
 "happened," and between no two whereof is any 
 connection stated, but rather the driving of a shaft 
 of reasoned cause and effect through the matter 
 with which we have to deal. 
 
 The following pages attempt to drive such a 
 shaft a very slender one through the mass of 
 our economic history. By its purpose such work 
 must be judged. Far from being intended as in 
 any way a substitute for the study of such works 
 as those enumerated in the "List of Authors," 
 these pages will have failed of their purpose if they 
 do not incite a few more students to the study of 
 those very works. Therefore it becomes needless 
 to say how the author is indebted to each and 
 all of them. This little book is founded on those 
 works, and contains little or nothing that cannot 
 be read in further detail in some one or more of 
 them, and nothing at all save what the author 
 earnestly hopes may be so studied. 
 
 In preparing the Second Edition the opportunity 
 has been taken to comply with the suggestions of 
 experience in using the book for teaching pur- 
 poses, and certain omissions have been supplied 
 and some corrections made ; whilst in one important 
 respect Trade Union Law the narrative has been 
 continued to include more recent legislation. 
 
 A. M. 
 
 HAMPSTEAD, 
 
 September 1910.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND . i 
 
 II 
 
 RISE AND FALL OF GILDS MERCHANT . . .22 
 
 III 
 
 RISE OF THE CRAFT GILDS 33 
 
 IV 
 
 CRAFT GILDS AND WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 39 
 
 V 
 RISE OF TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 57 
 
 VI 
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS. ... 67
 
 LIST OF AUTHORS 
 
 ASHLEY, W. J., Introduction to English Economic History 
 and Theory (Longmans). 
 
 BRENTANO, L., History and Development of Gilds (E.E.T.S.). 1 
 
 CUNNINGHAM, W., Growth of English Industry and Commerce 
 (Cambridge University Press). 
 
 CUNNINGHAM and MCARTHUR, Outlines of English Indus- 
 trial History (Cambridge University Press). 
 
 GIBBINS, H. DE B., Industrial History of England (Methuen). 
 
 THOROLD ROGERS, Six Centuries of Work and Wages. 
 (Sonnenschein). 
 
 THOROLD ROGERS, Economic Interpretation of History 
 (Unwin). 
 
 Social England (Cassell). 
 
 TOWNSEND WARNER, Landmarks in English Industrial 
 History, 
 
 1 Separately reprinted, p. i of the reprint p. Ixv. of the 
 Early English Text Society's Edition, and so on.
 
 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 
 
 THE first question about Economic History is 
 "How do we Know?" In England we have a 
 wealth of records, more so than any other people. 
 This is variously true for different periods in our 
 country's story, but abundantly true of quite early 
 times. The greatest of all these records is Domes- 
 day Book, completed in 1089; a register of land- 
 owners and tenants for all England, except the 
 four northern counties and part of Lancashire. 
 To compile it commissioners were sent into each 
 county, and "a jury empanelled in each Hundred 
 declared on oath the extent and nature of each 
 estate, the names, numbers, and condition of its 
 inhabitants, its value before and after the Con- 
 quest, and the sums due from it to the Crown." 
 For early history we have other sources of informa- 
 tion in documents such as Charters, Leases, and 
 Accounts. Monuments and Relics furnish valu- 
 able testimony, actual Histories not so valuable. 
 Survivals of customs and institutions give indica- 
 tion of their original form, and the preambles of
 
 2 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 statutes recite the circumstances which called for 
 their enactment. From Domesday there follows a 
 period of comparative silence in the records, some 
 two centuries long. Then, under Henry III, we 
 find the king's great audit imitated in the accounts 
 of the Manors, and these have been preserved, 
 possibly as evidence of title. Royal proclamations 
 and statutes actually passed are of the greatest 
 value. But our forefathers had a history before 
 they inhabited our present land at all, and for 
 that our authorities must be the classical historians, 
 Caesar and Tacitus. 
 
 For some years before he landed in our island 
 in 55 B.C., Caesar had been in contact with our fore- 
 fathers in their original home in North Germany. 1 
 As he describes them, they were just emerging 
 from nomadism. They hunted and they fought, 
 but they hardly ever dug, and they moved too often 
 to care to build permanently anywhere. There was 
 no such thing in those days as taking a man's 
 fixtures at a valuation. Such tillage as they had 
 w<as extensive in the old sense, that is to say, they 
 cleared the land, took a single crop from it, and 
 then let it grow wild again, whilst they moved on 
 elsew'here to repeat the process. This process, 
 when land is abundant and population small, is 
 by no means so absurd as it sounds. For it 
 enables full advantage to be taken of natural 
 fertility. In some places, such as parts of Russia 
 
 1 Geotas or Jutes, from Jutland \ were the peoples 
 
 Englas, from Sleswick and Holstein I who became the 
 
 Saxons, from Lower Weser and Elbe j conquering in- 
 
 Frisians, from Lower Ems and Rhine J vaders of Britain.
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 3 
 
 and of India, it is still in use, generally in com- 
 bination with other methods. And some crops, 
 e. g. tobacco, can be brought to perfection in no 
 other way, for the restoration of the land by manure 
 spoils the crop. 
 
 The nomad cannot accumulate wealth. Settle- 
 ment brings both accumulation and variety of 
 wealth, whence follow exchange and trade. Early 
 settlements were probably village communities as 
 sketched by Tacitus. Says that historian : 1 "Land 
 proportioned to the number of inhabitants is occu- 
 pied by the whole community in turn, and after- 
 wards divided among them according to rank. A 
 wide expanse of plains makes the partition easy. 
 They till fresh fields every year, and they have 
 still more land than enough." Each man probably 
 received his share of the land for one year only, 
 and a share in the hay crop. 
 
 When they settled it was without any definite 
 method ; wherein they present an entire contrast to 
 the Roman. Though the possessions of a Teuton 
 villager were small, his rights were considerable. 
 
 He had- 
 
 A house. A strip in the fields. Part of the 
 meadow which yielded hay. Pasturage for 
 cattle on the meadow in the common waste, 
 and fuel from the same source. 
 
 Hence a prosperous village would mean one with 
 
 1 Agri, pro numero cultorum, ab universis in vices occu- 
 pantur ; quos mox inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur ; 
 facilitatem partiendi camporum spatia praestant ; arva per 
 annos mutant, et superest ager. Germania, 26. 
 
 B 2
 
 4 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 plenty of "waste." Portions of this waste were 
 used each year for tillage and meadow ; and when 
 there was plenty of it, it had time to fully recover 
 before being again called on to bear crops. 
 
 When intensive tillage comes, men prefer to 
 retain the same land. This is a veritable indus- 
 trial revolution, even more far-reaching in its result 
 than that which occupied the closing years of the 
 eighteenth century and the early portion of the 
 nineteenth. But its date is quite uncertain; we 
 do not even know whether it was before or after 
 the English invaded Britain; but probably it was 
 after. 
 
 These communities were bound together by ties 
 of blood, neighbourliness, or comradeship in war. 
 Sometimes, too, such a community may have been 
 constituted out of a group conquered by the in- 
 vaders. Whichever way it was formed the village 
 community is a world-wide institution. Some kind 
 of administration it must have had, and this was 
 probably entrusted, year by year, by the assembled 
 householders, to the headmanship of some one 
 individual. The headmanship was rarely heredi- 
 tary. 
 
 These Teuton invaders brought with them in- 
 dustrial arts of some development, especially on 
 the military side. They had ships and wheeled 
 vehicles; their swords were good, and they were 
 acquainted with coinage. They were pirates when 
 they dared, and traders when they dared not, 
 which, to do them justice, was not often. A pro- 
 lific race they were, as all people emerging from 
 nomadism are; and they often migrated. And
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 5 
 
 when they came to Britain they brought with 
 them 
 
 A Land System, based on villages of the Ger- 
 man type, i.e. clusters of houses rather than 
 solitary homesteads. 
 
 A Tribal System, wherein chiefs rule over free- 
 men, who possess thralls. 
 
 The England these Tribes invaded. Nations 
 follow the sun. His light first show r s us our island 
 not an island at all, but the centre of a promontory 
 inhabited by cave men who had to dispute the 
 right of abode with the cave tiger and the mam- 
 moth, and when victorious etched the likeness of 
 their victim on his tooth or tusk. Then an island, 
 practically the same as we now know it, with 
 long-headed, short-legged inhabitants, non-Aryan 
 aborigines. These knew nothing of metals, but 
 they chipped the flint. Then the tall, round- 
 headed, tomb-building Briton, who brought us 
 bronze, and began our history, and (possibly) left 
 us Stonehenge. 
 
 Then the Iron Age which Cassar found here, the 
 age which buried its dead with a complete kit of 
 tools laid ready to the warrior's hand, and by the 
 side of "One, sir, that was a woman, but, rest her 
 soul, she's dead," glass beads, that beauty might 
 go beautifully through the portals of the world to 
 come. Rude and rough doubtless, but an offering 
 to be respected, being in fact some of the earliest 
 of the flowers of immortal hope that human love 
 has planted beside the pathway of human sorrow. 
 Some primitive coinage the coast Britons seem to
 
 6 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 have known from times long before the Roman 
 Conquest, but the ruder Silurians of the interior 
 and the west probably knew nothing of it. 
 
 To them enter Caesar, 55 B.C. He regarded 
 them much as Mr. Kipling does Fuzzy Wuzzy. 1 
 And the only real result of his expedition was an 
 increase of trade and communication with Gaul. 
 
 But when Aulus Plautius came in A.D. 43 the 
 results were great and lasting. There were fifty- 
 six cities in Roman Britain, and the civilization 
 was high. The organization was of Roman type, 
 politically and socially. In matters of theology 
 the change was no less complete. The Druids 
 vanished, and Roman paganism found imitators 
 of its images in British artists, who seem to have 
 been formed into Collegia or Gilds, the rudimen- 
 tary forms of those Gilds with which we shall 
 have to do. 
 
 Their Industries as we now know them, with a 
 knowledge gathered to some extent from the 
 remains of their work, comprised mosaic paving 
 (Museacum) ; glass, chiefly in the form of beads ; 
 pottery, iron, bronze, and gold. Coins they had 
 from early Roman times, a large proportion of 
 those now surviving being of the Mint of London, 
 which was established under Constantine (323-337). 
 
 In 330 B.C. Pytheas explored Britain from the 
 Greek colony of Marseilles. He noted the wheat 
 harvest, and the large barns in which the corn was 
 threshed, and he tasted mead made from wheat 
 and honey, but he did not venture inland. About 
 
 1 "A pore benighted heathen, but a fust-class fightin' 
 man."
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 7 
 
 two hundred and fifty years later, Posidonius, the 
 tutor of Cicero, came and explored the interior and 
 the west, where he saw the tin mines. Iron was 
 worked in the valley of the Severn before the 
 Romans came, when the west was the principal 
 home of the handicrafts. Britain had domesticated 
 most of the animals that have been domesticated 
 at all by the time when authentic history begins. 
 One mythical king went to heaven and stole bees ; 
 another went and stole swine, but not from heaven. 
 In Caesar's time the exports were wheat, barley, 
 hounds, and possibly slaves, the imports being 
 manufactured articles of iron and bronze, pottery, 
 salt, and cloth. Ships they had for trade and war, 
 with sails of hide. Lud, the god of commerce, was 
 worshipped on the banks of the Severn and the 
 Thames, at Lydney and on Ludgate Hill. 1 Metals 
 in rude form were exported; lead in "pigs," each 
 bearing a date. Coal was burnt, and fabrics were 
 woven. Beavers, wolves, bears, and red deer were 
 amongst the wild animals found in the country. 
 The houses were sometimes of brick, the roofs of 
 slate ; and beer was brewed and drunk. Over the 
 whole country there was profound peace. No 
 Roman villa whose remains have yet been dis- 
 covered shows any trace of having been fortified. 
 The nature of the British social life and manners 
 is best gathered from the old Welsh poems and 
 romances. There was a tribal unity of freemen, 
 who possessed the conquered villeins as serfs. 
 
 1 That Lud also sometimes appears as God of War may 
 be taken as an early version of the theory that "trade follows 
 the flag."
 
 8 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 We can trace totem-kinship in the fact that the 
 mythical ancestor of the tribe often bore the name 
 of an animal. The king was absolute. The chief 
 wealth of the tribe was cattle, horses, sheep, and 
 swine. Value was expressed in kine. Salt was of 
 great importance, as it supplied the winter meat. 
 The furniture of the homes was very scanty, but 
 the ladies led the way in luxury and fashion by 
 the possession of combs and scissors. 
 
 But the Roman power fell. The Picts and Scots 
 made inroads in the north, and the yet more formid- 
 able English in the south-east. Against these 
 Rome arranged a defence, whose organization we 
 know from the Notitia Dignitatum (about A.D. 405). 
 The whole island was under a Vicarius Britan- 
 niarum. For the army there was a Dux Britanniae, 
 commanding some thirty-seven regiments along 
 Hadrian's Wall; a Comes Litoris Saxonici for the 
 defence of the south-east coast, and a Comes Britan- 
 niarum, who commanded the field army in general. 
 But all came to an end in 410, when the Roman 
 forces were finally withdrawn, and the Britons left 
 to cope by themselves with the invading forces. 
 But under the civilizing Roman rule the right hand 
 of the British Fuzzy Wuzzy had largely lost its 
 cunning. For the Roman rule in Britain contrasts 
 with English rule in Egypt, in that it was deliber- 
 ately enervating, and intended to deprive the people 
 of the capacity for self-defence. The testimony 
 of Tacitus on this point is at once clear and strik- 
 ing. "Little by little," he says, "they were led 
 away towards the allurements of vice lounges and 
 baths and the elegancies of convivial banquets.
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 9 
 
 Thus is that called amongst the ignorant by the 
 name of civilization which is really but a character- 
 istic of servitude." 1 
 
 So the British-Romanic civilization went down 
 before the barbaric fire and sword of the Saxon. 
 These got their first entry in the usual way. Vor- 
 tigern, the British king, unable himself to repel the 
 Picts and Scots, called in the mercenary aid of the 
 Geotas (Jutes) under Hengist and Horsa, who 
 turned their arms against their employer, and by 
 457 the Britons were fleeing from them as from 
 fire. 
 
 There came a rally at the end of the fifth century, 
 the time of the legends 
 
 " Dull days were those, till our good Arthur broke 
 The Pagan yet once more on Badon hill " ; 
 
 but this was vain, and civilized Britain became 
 savage England. 
 
 Thus then came the English Saxons, Angles, 
 and Jutes to such an England as described. 
 Wave after wave of them poured in. The Battle 
 of Deorham, 577, which opened up the valley of 
 the Severn to the invaders, was the really decisive 
 one. But the struggle dragged on for a century, 
 and when it was over we had to start afresh with 
 an uncivilized England. 
 
 The invaders laid out the conquered land as 
 their own had been laid out at home. Each man 
 had his house, his yard, and his share of land, 
 his right to hay and pasture. These may at first 
 
 1 Tacitus, Agricola, c. 21.
 
 10 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 have formed groups of agricultural freemen, 1 
 though this seems hardly likely, and it is certain 
 that by the time of Domesday they were hamlets of 
 servile dependents. 
 
 Then for about 400 years from Deorham (577) 
 our history practically consists of the story of the 
 consolidation of England into one kingdom (Egbert, 
 958-975). Christianity is introduced, and com- 
 munities of monks grow up under the patronage 
 of the kings. There was but little trade, salt being 
 one of the earliest articles of commerce. Extensive 
 was gradually giving way to intensive cultivation. 
 Fallows were kept on the three-fields system, or 
 sometimes on the two-fields system. The groups 
 thus formed were self-sufficing, each member 
 thereof doing what there was to do without in- 
 dividual payment. The tillage was "combined "- 
 men contributing their oxen to make up the team 
 of eight for the plough, etc. Of commerce there 
 is hardly any. By 900 Alfred has built ships, but 
 he has had to get foreign sailors to man them. 
 Ethelred drew up a code of dues for London trade, 
 which point to considerable commerce with north- 
 west Europe, the imports being manufactured 
 goods, and the exports raw produce and slaves. 
 
 Towns. The English had wiped out the Roman 
 towns, and had substituted none of their own until 
 Alfred and his daughter yEthelflced of Mercia built 
 and walled-in some forty or fifty boroughs. London 
 had been utterly devastated when first the English 
 came, and it was not until about 700 that it became 
 
 1 On the great " Bond or Free " controversy, see Cunning- 
 ham, pp. 107-114, and Ashley, i. p. 5.
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 11 
 
 a city, described as "the mart of many traders." 
 It was for long a very foreign city ; often the brains 
 but never the heart of mediaeval England. Towns 
 on rivers like Bristol and Exeter owed their im- 
 portance to their river-trade and their fisheries. 
 But all the eighty tow r ns in Domesday taken together 
 would hardly yield a population of 200,000. These 
 boroughs were simply enlarged townships, with 
 arable, pasture, and common wood, and their men 
 were the serfs of a neighbouring lord. Next in 
 importance to agriculture and fishing came the 
 production of salt, whose great importance has 
 been already mentioned. Embroidery and weaving 
 were fairly well advanced, and the greater monas- 
 teries had their own artificers. Markets and fairs 
 were frequent, but were cumbered with tolls and dues. 
 It was law that all transactions of twenty pence value 
 and over must be done in a borough, and the trade 
 of the borough was regulated by its gilds. 
 
 There is a great mystery about Anglo-Saxon 
 agricultural life, as to the origin of the manor. 
 Some hold that the "mark" system never was 
 English in its entirety that equality had passed 
 away and property in land had become individual 
 before the system arrived here at all ; that weak 
 landholders naturally depend on strong ones, 
 whence Feudalism developed as a natural growth, 
 so that the free early Saxon ceorl becomes the 
 villan of the Norman law-. And hence that the 
 English manor begins its history as a group of 
 serfs. Be the origin what it may, the form of the 
 manor as we shall find it was pretty firmly estab- 
 lished by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066.
 
 12 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 And thus England passed 600 years with little 
 definite to show for each year that passed. Yet 
 at the end of that time it was a united Christian 
 country, with a vigorous town life, and organised 
 trade, and some commencement of central govern- 
 ment. 
 
 But meantime there has been another graft upon 
 the English stock. The Danes have come. These 
 Danes and Norsemen were a virile race. They 
 traded with the East via the Caspian and the Black 
 Seas. They made Gothland (Wisby) the centre of 
 an Arabian trade. They colonized Iceland and 
 even Greenland, and without doubt discovered 
 America. In England, the districts in which they 
 settled have ever since been in the forefront of 
 industrial enterprise. They held traffic in honour; 
 and by their custom one who had thrice fared over 
 the wide sea by his own means was to be "of 
 thane-right worthy." And they did a good deal 
 to add to the number and influence of our towns. 
 Towns, as centres of trade, had indeed been grow- 
 ing sometimes around the monasteries and shrines 
 where lay the sainted dead, sometimes at the stop- 
 ping-places of the pilgrims to those shrines, some- 
 times by the coalescence of villages ; and some 
 towns developed from the forts and strong places 
 set up either by the Danes to enable them to keep 
 what they had won, or by Alfred and ^thelfloed, 
 to prevent their winning more. 
 
 And all this while the idea of PROPERTY has been 
 slow-ly developing in the minds of those who were 
 to make our nation. Man only desires permanent 
 possession in the case of things "useful" to him. 
 Hence the nomad does not appropriate Land.
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 13 
 
 Ownership of land comes with intensive cultiva- 
 tion ; and it is respected as a " fact of rationality " 
 one rational being naturally responding to the 
 manifestation of a rational purpose by another 
 rational being. So that property in land com- 
 mences where nomadism ends. And by the time 
 w r hen Domesday Book comes to be compiled (1089), 
 the proprietary rights of every portion of English 
 soil were as real, even if not so definite, as now. 
 
 And property was of as much social importance 
 then as now. A man's whole status depended on 
 the amount of his property ; his duties as well as 
 his rights, and all his liabilities to the community 
 as a whole. Taxation there was 
 
 (a) In the form of service, the trinoda neces- 
 sitas, to help in making and maintaining 
 (i) war, (2) roads and bridges, (3) fortifi- 
 cations ; 
 
 (b) Tithe for the Church; 
 
 (c) Danegeld, the earliest money tax in the 
 strict sense. 
 
 Of these (a) was naturally fitted for commutation 
 into money payment, and some traces exist of such 
 commutation as early as the Confessor. 
 
 And thus, possessing property, man soon con- 
 trives to enhance its suitability to his wants by 
 means of EXCHANGE. Primitive exchange must 
 have been by barter, wherein the best of the bargain 
 goes to the man least anxious to trade, and the 
 limitations are set by the estimate of value in use. 
 From its obvious difficulties arises a money, in 
 the course of whose growth it is remarkable that 
 the estimation of a debt in terms of money had
 
 14 
 
 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 become common while actual payment in money 
 was still rare. The imposition of the tax Dane- 
 geld points to money having by that time become 
 fairly general. And connected with money and 
 its subdivisions we find a metric system, with units 
 of length, area, capacity, and weight. 
 
 Thus then lived the folk who dwelt in England 
 in Manors or Marks. The Manor and the Mark 
 differed inter se in respect of ultimate ownership. 
 If the land were owned in common by a group of 
 freemen it would be described as held under the 
 Mark system. If the land was the property of a 
 lord, it was a Manor. Beginning with the eleventh 
 century, because by that time the great "bond or 
 free " controversy can be discounted, we find Eng- 
 land dotted all over w-ith Manors, which looked 
 something like this
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 15 
 
 From woodland to woodland a road passes and 
 crosses a stream. Water + locomotion = village, 
 and round it the land is systematically divided. 
 Now, if this land were owned in common by a 
 group of freemen, it would be a Mark; but if, as 
 indicated in our diagram, it were owned by a Lord 
 living in a Manor House on a Demesne, it was a 
 Manor. Of this land, a part was held by tenants 
 of the lord, and this was called land in Villenage ; 
 and, as one condition of the holding, the tenants 
 had jointly to cultivate the Demesne or Inland for 
 the benefit of the lord. Each tenant held at least 
 three different strips of arable land, in order to 
 allow of a system of fallows being worked out by 
 which the land was allowed one season in every 
 three in which to recover itself after cropping. 
 And of the strips, as indicated in the diagram, the 
 same tenant would not hold three adjoining, but 
 each man's strips would have strips belonging to his 
 neighbours on either side of them. This ensured a 
 fairer distribution of the land in matter of quality. 
 The holding of each tenant was either a whole or 
 a half virgate = 30 acres. The tenant who w-anted 
 more land, or lands, for higher farming than the 
 common fields, could also occupy a close, more 
 highly rented than the common field. The chief 
 tenants held, as a rule, one or two closes. Below 
 these, some bordars and cottars, holding a cottage 
 and an acre or two of land, were probably employed 
 as labourers by the villeins proper. In some parts 
 of England, notably in the West, there were some 
 slaves below these, forming, indeed, only nine per 
 cent, of the total population recorded in Domesday,
 
 16 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 but rising to twenty-four per cent, on the Welsh 
 borders, indicating that the English Conquest 
 began with extermination, and ended with pre- 
 serving the Britons alive in a condition of slavery. 
 All the land, both villenage and demesne, was 
 cultivated by joint labour. The villein had to 
 render to his lord service of two leading kinds : 
 (i) a man's regular labour for two or three days a 
 week the whole year round, called week work, or 
 daily work; and (2) extra labour for a few days at 
 spring and autumn ploughing, and at harvest, 
 called boon-days. 1 Exactly how they cultivated 
 their land we do not know ; we only know in broad 
 outline that the system was that of common fields 
 and rotation of crops and fallows : wheat or rye, 
 oats or barley, and fallow. Ploughing was the 
 heaviest work, and all the villein tenants clubbed 
 their oxen to do the ploughing for all. The cottars 
 had no oxen, so are never called on for ploughing 
 as part of their tenancy duties. The serf was really 
 a tenant, secure from dispossession so long as he 
 paid his rent. But he could not migrate, nor marry 
 daughter, nor send son into the Church, nor sell 
 horse or beast, without the leave of the lord. It 
 must be remembered that in those days the owners 
 of land were themselves its cultivators, of which 
 fact the important results were 
 
 i. Peace was kept. Violent as the times were, 
 there was hardly any agrarian robbery, even in 
 1315-21, a veritable famine period. And hence, as 
 
 1 See the account of Cuxham Manor (in Rogers, Six 
 Centuries, pp. 39-42) held by Merton College, Oxford.
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 17 
 
 secondary result, our early success in the breeding 
 of sheep, and our consequent abundant wool. 
 
 2. The Effects of Primogeniture were minimized. 
 The stock on the land was worth three times the 
 land itself, and in this the younger children shared 
 equally with the eldest. 
 
 3. Distribution of Land was assisted. For the 
 eldest would find himself with too much land for 
 the share he retained of the stock, and the younger 
 children would find themselves with a share of 
 stock but with no land at all. Hence exchange 
 of some of the land for some of the stock would 
 be next to inevitable. 
 
 4. Legislative Aid to the Agricultural Interest, for 
 the encouragement of arable farming. Hence the 
 system of corn-bounties, etc., and hence finally 
 Protection, and the whole structure of the Corn 
 Laws. 
 
 5. The so-called "English System" of land 
 tenure, whereby the owner is expected to do the 
 repairs and the permanent improvements, other 
 than those implied in "good husbandry." 
 
 The village had in it men carrying on all neces- 
 sary crafts. Most of these worked on a communal 
 system, the smith, e.g., holding land on condition 
 of repairing the ploughs of the village and demesne, 
 and one smith serving sometimes for more than one 
 village. The village shop had not yet made its 
 appearance; the wants to which it would have 
 ministered being in those days met by infrequent 
 journeys to a distant fair, when the labour of the 
 family itself did not suffice. The village would
 
 18 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 hold from sixty to eighty adult males. There \vas 
 a mill the lord's where all the corn of the manor 
 had to be ground at a fixed fee for the service; and 
 the lord could seize handmills if the tenants used 
 them to the detriment of his rights, and the miller 
 was therefore an unpopular person, 1 of whom any 
 evil was credible. 
 
 But the village of those days was not as a village 
 now. True, the exterior appearance of it was not 
 so very different. Then as now there was but one 
 street, with a row of houses on each side. But the 
 men inside the houses were different. Then they 
 were the tenant farmers, the actual cultivators; 
 now, they are the labourers, and a few artisans 
 and shopkeepers, whilst the tenant farmers live in 
 separate homesteads, away from the village. Then, 
 they all cultivated the land on one plan and by 
 communal labour; now, each tenant farmer is free 
 to follow out his own plan. Then, the landlord 
 was an actual cultivator, the labour he wanted 
 being supplied to him by his tenants, not for a 
 money wage, but as part of the terms on which they 
 held their leases; now, the landlord either does not 
 farm at all himself, or, if he does, it is with hired 
 labour, in the same way as if he were himself a 
 tenant farmer. And lastly, in those days the land 
 was cultivated by small holders, and all of these 
 were much on the same social level, the classes 
 being much less widely separated then than now, 
 except, of course, in the case of the lord himself. 
 And the economic organization of this group was 
 
 1 '"If thou be'st a miller,' answered Gurth, ' thou art 
 doubly a thief.'" Ivanhoe, Chap. XII.
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 19 
 
 on quite other than the modern lines. There was 
 no individual freedom of motion, and hence no 
 competition. The labour service rendered by the 
 tenant in return for his holding may, if you please, 
 be called a rent, but it was not rent in the sense 
 of modern economics, for it was "not what the 
 tenant could possibly afford, but what was custom- 
 ary." 1 And practically these small holders have 
 now all disappeared. 
 
 We have said that there was no village shop. 
 The labour of each family made it almost inde- 
 pendent of exchange for the satisfaction of its 
 wants. It had rough spinning and weaving of 
 wool and linen, and rough tanning. Some things 
 the villagers were obliged to buy from a distance. 
 Salt had to be imported from Guienne, especially 
 in wet summers, when in England there was not 
 sun enough to evaporate the sea-water. Iron, 
 which was worked in the Weald of Sussex, was 
 also to some extent imported from Spain. Tar 
 was a remedy for the "scab" in sheep. Mill- 
 stones often came from near Paris. Save for such 
 things as these, as the manors grew into towns, 
 the family industries merely expanded. Thus it 
 
 1 Whether this is a preferable state of things or not 
 depends on how the terms are to be understood. Was "what 
 \vas customary" more or less than "what the tenant could 
 possibly afford " ? This in its turn depends on what a man 
 can "afford." Strictly, he can afford his whole margin 
 above "necessaries." But what are "necessaries "? In such 
 a connection it can only be the collective name for Standard 
 of Comfort. So that the question whether custom was better 
 or worse for the tenant than competition depends on whether 
 the customary payment left him in possession of a higher 
 or a lower standard of comfort than he could obtain for 
 himself under competition. 
 
 C 2
 
 20 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 was that they satisfied these more distant, more 
 far-reaching wants which necessitated an organiza- 
 tion of some kind for trading purposes ; and hence, 
 as we shall see, the Merchant Gilds. So far 
 as exchange was indispensable, it was carried 
 on at Markets and Fairs, which were frequent, 
 and brought in considerable fees to their over- 
 lords, e.g. Winchester, Stourbridge, and Abing- 
 don. 
 
 These Markets and Fairs were held in towns, and 
 towns gradually grew up around their sites; but, 
 as we have seen, the Saxons were slow to create 
 towns (p. 10), and even when towns came, the con- 
 dition of the early townsfolk was servile and un- 
 promising. With great acuteness Adam Smith 
 points out that the very privileges granted to them 
 bear evidence to the servility of their state. 1 Even 
 after the Norman Conquest the condition was diffi- 
 cult to improve. The townsfolk lived to a large 
 extent by sale of wares at the periodical fairs; but 
 the wares had to be conveyed thither, and on their 
 way were subject to taxes : Passage, on passing 
 through a manor; Pontage, for crossing a bridge; 
 Lastage, a tax on goods by weight [12 sacks = 
 i last of wool] ; and Stallage, for setting up a 
 booth or stall in a fair or market. Exemption from 
 
 1 "The people to whom it is granted as a privilege that 
 they might give away their own daughters in marriage 
 without the consent of their lord, that upon their death 
 their own children, and not their lord, should succeed to 
 their goods, and that they might dispose of their own effects 
 by will, must, before those grants were made, have been 
 either altogether or very nearly in the same state of villenage 
 with the occupiers of land in the country." Wealth of 
 Nations, III. iii.
 
 THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 21 
 
 these taxes gave its first economic meaning to the 
 term "Free Trader." 
 
 In this servile condition the towns of most coun- 
 tries seem at first to have lived. The process of 
 emerging from it was one of fishing in troubled 
 waters ; a process in which the cities of Italy 
 Venice, Genoa, and Pisa took the lead, being 
 much aided by the Crusades. For, as Adam Smith 
 puts it, "The most destructive frenzy that ever be- 
 fell the European nations was a source of opulence 
 to those republics."
 
 II 
 
 RISE AND FALL OF GILDS MERCHANT 
 
 So far, produce has been obtained for the satis- 
 faction of human wants by what is known as the 
 Family System. Practically, with the few excep- 
 tions we have been led to note as we went along, 
 each family has been a self-sufficing group. The 
 men have won the raw material from the soil, the 
 women have prepared the food and have spun and 
 woven the clothing. As the manors grew into 
 towns the Family Industries merely expanded. 
 
 But in the development of every industry there 
 may be four stages the Family, the Gild, the 
 Domestic, and the Factory- Not that every in- 
 dustry has gone through all these stages; but there 
 are some, the history of one of which we shall 
 trace with some care, which have actually done so. 
 But nearly all of those industries which have come 
 down to us from old times have passed through a 
 stage in which they have been organized in accord- 
 ance with the system we are now going to consider, 
 the system of Gilds. 1 
 
 The Gilds were of four kinds 
 
 1 The word Gild means originally a festival, or sacrificial 
 feast ; it is then applied to the company who thus feast 
 together. Cf. the Latin form company. See Brentano in 
 English Gilds, E.E.T.S., pp. Ixi. and Ixviii. ; and also as to 
 Gilds being a development of the family organization, and 
 on England as the birthplace and London the cradle of the 
 Gilds. 
 
 22
 
 RISE AND FALL OF GILDS MERCHANT 23 
 
 1. Religious Gilds. These were the earliest of 
 the voluntary associations. Their purposes were 
 what we should call social, as well as religious, 
 their funds being expended on feasts, masses for 
 the dead, the Church burial fees, charitable aid, 
 etc. 
 
 2. Frith Gilds. These were compulsory associa- 
 tions, each with a corporate responsibility for the 
 good conduct of all its members, and for mutual 
 assistance in legal matters, such as defence against 
 false accusations. 
 
 3. Gilds Merchant. The trading organizations 
 of burgess Masters. 1 
 
 4. Craft Gilds. The associations of artisans. 
 
 It is only with the last two of these that we shall 
 be concerned. 
 
 Of towns, such as we have found them to have 
 been, there were about eighty in England at the 
 time of the Norman Conquest. By this time the 
 English have greatly changed from their original 
 lack of civilization, and the Norman conquered a 
 country no longer barbarous. Literature and the 
 arts were abreast of the time, and the Norman, 
 as Stubbs says, destroyed more than he brought. 
 But he brought discipline and order, gifts which 
 were then the priceless conditions of economic pro- 
 gress. "The good order King William made 
 must not be forgotten," says the Peterborough 
 Chronicle; "it was such that any man who was 
 
 1 Merchant Gilds, first mentioned 1093, must have been 
 rising during second half of eleventh century (Ashley, i. 71); 
 the Craft Gilds about a century later (Id. i. 81), these last 
 being mentioned in the Pipe Roll for 1130.
 
 24 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 himself aught might travel from end to end of the 
 land unharmed ; and no man durst kill another, 
 however great the injury which he had received." 
 And so again of Henry I : "No man durst misdo 
 against another in his time. He made peace for 
 man and beast." And though the progress of this 
 development of order suffered rude interruption in 
 Stephen's reign, when "every man did what was 
 wrong in his own eyes," and when "they filled the 
 land full of castles and the castles of devils," yet 
 even through those dark days the boroughs were 
 steadily advancing, for a great change was going 
 on at this time. This was the gradual substitu- 
 tion of payment for service. It is generally spoken 
 of as a change from payment in kind to payment 
 in money. But this does not, in the modern sense 
 of the terms, bring out the force of the alteration. 
 If a man who had been bound to service could 
 commute this service for an annual payment of 
 barley, chickens, or pigs, he would still be paying 
 for his holding "in kind"; yet, to him, the change 
 would have been far as from east to west; for he 
 would have passed out of serfage, and become 
 free. The Lords liked the change well enough as 
 long as the payments they received enabled them 
 to purchase freely of the cheap labour of the people ; 
 but when the Great Death 1 had made labour dear 
 they tried every means to restore the old manorial 
 rights over the actual labour of the people. But it 
 was now too late, the people had tasted freedom 
 and had learned their power; and death and 
 democracy give nothing back. 
 
 1 See below, Chapter VI.
 
 RISE AND FALL OF GILDS MERCHANT 25 
 
 So far as this was really a change to money 
 payments, it is another illustration of how circum- 
 stance must alter before organization. The change 
 implies the existence of coinage and markets. 
 Places there must be where a man can be sure of 
 getting goods for the money he has received in 
 commutation for his labour dues. Such places will 
 obviously have to be the towns. 
 
 Now the first effect of the Conquest had indeed 
 been injury to the towns, but from this it took them 
 but twenty years to recover. It was of immense im- 
 portance to the commercial side of the town life that 
 the dominions of the Norman kings were so wide. A 
 charter from an Angevin king granting rights of 
 commerce and freedom from tolls "throughout all 
 my dominions, both the hither and the further side 
 of the sea," was in effect a grant of Free Trade for 
 the English merchant from Berwick to Bayonne, 
 from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees. Such advan- 
 tages made the towns prosper, and their prosperity 
 favoured their growth and their claims to constitu- 
 tional organization causes which would naturally 
 act and re-act to produce an acceleration of advance. 
 And to this constitutional organization the feudal 
 character has to give way. The hanse or gild has 
 come to stop. The traders combined for their own 
 protection, for the regulation of their trade, and 
 for the exclusion of rivals. A charter saved them 
 from being adulterine, as without such charter they 
 would have been called, and made it impossible 
 for them to be broken up, and finally enabled them 
 to impose the by-laws of their Gild as the rule of 
 the whole borough. Soon they commute their
 
 26 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 taxes for a fixed sum which they collect themselves 
 and pay direct to the Exchequer. In 1191 the Gild 
 of London becomes its governing body, the sign 
 of its recognition as such being, here as elsewhere, 
 its having its own Mayor. And other towns fol- 
 lowed the example of London, e.g. Leicester, in 
 1251. Nor did the towns thus favoured lose their 
 place in the shire system they were still repre- 
 sented in Parliament, thus giving to our House 
 of Commons to this day its mingled character, 
 territorial and commercial. 
 
 These towns, about eighty in number, were 
 what we should now call villages. A town of the 
 first rank would only contain some seven or eight 
 thousand inhabitants. Starting under the protec- 
 tion of a lord they paid at first tolls for the security 
 of their "market days," an institution still of im- 
 portance. And for maintaining their trade privi- 
 leges the Merchant Gilds grew up. The date of 
 their first inception is not known, but they seem 
 to be first mentioned in 1003. Charters to them 
 begin with Henry I, and become numerous under 
 Henry II. Such charters acknowledge the Gilds 
 as the predominant ruling power within the town, 
 and confer thereon the rights of municipal self- 
 government. The powers of the Gild Merchant 
 were 
 
 i. Control and monopoly of all the trades 
 within the town, except the trade in 
 victuals, which was always left free. 
 
 2. Liberty to trade in other towns. 
 
 3. Powers to compel wealthy outsiders to be-
 
 RISE AND FALL OF GILDS MERCHANT 27 
 
 come members of the Gild, by fining them 
 for illicit trading if they did not. 
 
 4. Recognized authority for looking after the 
 
 interests of members when trading in other 
 towns. 
 
 5. Making collective bargains when foreigners 
 
 visited the town, under right of cavel, or 
 of having a share in these common pur- 
 chases. 
 
 6. To act as sick and provident clubs. 
 
 7. Jurisdiction, to punish breaches of Gild 
 
 rules or commercial honesty, or such 
 offences as "forestalling," or buying for 
 re-sale in the same fair or market. 
 
 Such were the Merchant Gilds under w r hose 
 influence the number of "Towns " in England soon 
 doubled. From their first mention in 1093 to 1307 
 is hardly more than 200 years, but by that time 
 we have 160 towns represented in the Parliaments 
 of Edward I, whereof 92 had Gilds Merchant of 
 which we have evidence. Most likely they all had 
 them. 
 
 The regulations of four of these Gilds, Totnes, 
 Southampton, Leicester, and Berwick, have come 
 down to us. They are so much alike, though the 
 towns w r ere so far apart, that we conclude that all 
 Gilds Merchant had pretty much the same organ- 
 ization. The President was an alderman (some- 
 times there were two) who had two or four assistant 
 Wardens (echevins); and the three or the six 
 managed the funds and estates of the Gild. A 
 council of twenty-four aided them.
 
 28 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 Membership was numerous, and did not, at first, 
 exclude craftsmen. But it is not easy to say who 
 were included. Eldest sons of members were 
 admitted free, and younger sons on payment of a 
 reuuced entrance-fee. And though merchants from 
 other towns were admitted to membership, it seems 
 probable that the usual qualification for such 
 membership was the possession of land within the 
 town limits. These were the burgage tenants, or 
 burgesses. And the Gild Merchant seems to have 
 been, at least at first, closely connected with this 
 territorial citizenship. 1 In fact agriculture was one 
 of the main occupations of the burgesses, and its 
 produce one of the principal elements of their trade. 
 
 With such powers and so constituted it was 
 natural that they should be jealous of their privi- 
 leges, for the maintenance whereof they drew up 
 regulations and exercised jurisdiction. These 
 regulations aimed at the common good of the Gild 
 as a whole. It was an offence to act as agent for an 
 outsider, since this evaded the Gild monopoly. It 
 was an offence to dishonestly dye or improperly 
 mix wool, since this would damage the repute of 
 the Gild as a whole. 2 And as the member was 
 expected to stand by his Gild, so his Gild in turn 
 stood by him. If he were anywhere imprisoned, 
 the Gild authorities journeyed thither to procure 
 
 1 " Citizen and gild-brother were considered identical." 
 Brentano, p. xcix. 
 
 2 " But the Gild never assumed a right over the life and 
 limbs of its members ; compensation only and fines were 
 used for punishments, the highest penalty being expulsion." 
 Brentano, p. ciii.
 
 RISE AND FALL OF GILDS MERCHANT 29 
 
 his release. 1 And being thus eminently social, it 
 touched the everyday life of the citizen at many 
 points. "Sick gildsmen were visited, and wine 
 and food sent to them from the feasts; brethren 
 who had fallen into poverty were relieved; their 
 daughters were dowered for marriage or the con- 
 vent; and when a member died his funeral was 
 attended by the brethren and the due rites provided 
 for." 
 
 These Gilds Merchant were associations of 
 traders. Industrial associations were to come later. 
 And this order, which seems strange to us now- 
 a-days, was so natural as to be really inevitable. 
 England was then an agricultural country almost 
 exclusively. 
 
 \Ye first grew what we wanted to consume; then, 
 having a surplus, we wanted to exchange that 
 surplus for the products of the arts of other peoples 
 more advanced in an industrial sense than our- 
 selves. Dealers in imported commodities thus 
 arise before our own arts are advanced enough to 
 be organized. In England, therefore, trade pre- 
 ceded manufacture. But the agriculture which is 
 thus found to be primitive in time, remains also for 
 long years primitive in its stage of progress; and 
 indeed it is not until our manufactures are in their 
 turn organized, and their prosperity overflows into 
 the country, and their appetite for improvement 
 begins to ameliorate, under the economic Law of 
 Substitution, 2 the methods of our cultivation, that 
 
 1 " If a brother falls into poverty, if he incurs losses by 
 fire or shipwreck, if illness or mutilation renders him unable 
 to work, the brothers contribute to his assistance." Ibid. 
 2 Marshall, Economics of Industry, page 216.
 
 30 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 those methods begin to keep pace with the rapid 
 advance of our skill in manufactures. Thus that 
 "progress of opulence" the progress in the order, 
 Foreign Trade, Manufactures, Agriculture, which 
 Adam Smith in his Book III regards as a reversal 
 of the natural order was after all not so unnatural 
 as he thought it. 
 
 But the industrial organization was none the less 
 bound to come. Men working at handicrafts had 
 at first been admitted * to the Gilds Merchant in 
 sufficient numbers to ensure that craftsmen as a 
 whole should be acquainted with the advantages 
 of belonging to such organizations. Consequently, 
 as craftsmen increased in numbers and improved 
 their position whilst the Gilds Merchant became 
 more exclusive, 2 it was but natural that they should 
 organize for themselves; and thus we have Craft 
 Gilds. 
 
 The fall of the Gilds Merchant was inevitable, 
 though details of its history are wanting. What 
 we know is perhaps best told by Brentano (English 
 Gilds, Early English Text Society, pp. cix.-cxiii.). 
 While freedom was to be won the citizens were 
 benignant to the poor. But success made them 
 insolent and hard. The old merchant families 
 became an aristocracy, claiming rights to tax the 
 man "without hearth and honour, who lives by his 
 labour." Refusal of legal redress and all kinds of 
 oppression followed. The craftsmen who had 
 
 1 Provided they were possessed of full citizenship, i.e. that 
 they owned estates of a certain value within the territory 
 of the town. 
 
 2 "The older the Gild-Statutes, the more favourable are 
 they to the man of low rank." Brentano, p. cviii.
 
 RISE AND FALL OF GILDS MERCHANT 31 
 
 helped to win the independence of the merchant 
 gildsmen, fell under the mundium (protection in 
 return for sworn service and assessment) of these 
 same gildsmen, and "those who struck the lion 
 down had to pay homage to the wolves." Fear 
 there w-as of a new serfdom. On the Continent 
 this developed into a fierce civil war. In England 
 the struggle was less violent. In both the same 
 result was arrived at about the same time. Political 
 equality was secured, and the craftsmen retained 
 the bulk of the municipal power. The commonalty 
 of London, in the 49th year of Edward III, enacted 
 that all city dignitaries, including members of 
 Parliament, were to be elected by the trading com- 
 panies. And even earlier than this all citizens of 
 London had to belong to the trade Gilds, from 
 which were to spring the twelve great Companies. 
 This industrial organization began to manifest 
 itself about a century later than the Merchant Gild. 
 The coming of the new organization marks, as 
 practically always, that the industrial circumstances 
 have really changed. Hitherto the family system 
 of industry has prevailed, and each family has 
 been almost entirely self-sufficing. Now, the craft 
 system is to take its place, a system in which bodies 
 of men are to be completely and exclusively occu- 
 pied in some one particular industry. For such a 
 change it is obvious that the first precondition is 
 a large increase of population. A comparatively 
 small population would contain merchants enough, 
 each one trading in several commodities, to form 
 a Gild Merchant. But the population would have 
 to be much larger to support weavers enough to
 
 32 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 form a Gild of weavers. And again, where Gilds 
 of craftsmen can arise the articles made must have 
 been of a kind to command a wide market, being 
 portable and of universal demand. Where these 
 conditions obtain, the separation of employments 
 advances rapidly. Particular industries tend to 
 gravitate towards certain congenial localities : the 
 men carrying on- those industries have thus local 
 facilities for organization, and organization is sure 
 to come.
 
 Ill 
 
 RISE OF THE CRAFT GILDS 
 
 TRADE had been carried on in towns by merchants. 
 Owning land in those towns made a man a burgess, 
 and of burgesses the Gilds Merchant had been made 
 up. Anybody who bought and sold anything be- 
 yond provisions for daily use was a "merchant." 
 And any man who owned a plot of land, however 
 small, would not have been excluded from the Gild, 
 even though a craftsman. Hence at first the 
 craftsmen lived in harmony with the Gild. But, 
 from the first, membership involved a property 
 qualification, for besides possessing land, a man 
 must pay his entrance-fee. Now the class which 
 possessed no land and could not or would not pay 
 an entrance-fee, rapidly increased, and this class 
 consisted almost entirely of craftsmen. The richer 
 class grew in wealth, and devoted themselves 
 entirely to trade, and the crafts were left to the 
 poor. Hence the regulation that no one with 
 "dirty hands" or with "blue nails," or "who 
 hawked his wares about the streets," should be a 
 member of the Gild, and that no craftsman could 
 be admitted until he had forsworn his craft for a 
 year and a day. Such rules there were for Win- 
 chester, Marlborough, etc. Meanwhile the Gild 
 Merchant had become the municipality, with rights 
 D 33
 
 34 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 of jurisdiction in the "court-leet," and monopoly 
 of the trade of the town. What the craftsman had 
 to sell he could sell only to a member of the Gild 
 of his town. Hence as craftsmen increased there 
 became inevitable a two-fold struggle 
 
 (a) To obtain for their own organizations, the 
 Craft Gilds, rights of supervision over their 
 own members, independent of the powers of 
 the municipal authorities. 
 
 (6) To break down the trading monopoly of the 
 Merchant Gilds. 
 
 Gilds Merchant had not been specialized no 
 special market was then wide enough to support 
 its own special organization. There was, for 
 example, a Gild Merchant for Norwich, but no 
 separate Gild of dealers in cloth. But Craft Gilds 
 were specialized to trades, for now the separate 
 industries have become large enough to support 
 separate organizations. Now the commodity which 
 was the first one in England to possess the qualifi- 
 cations necessary for securing a wide market (cf. 
 p. 32) was woollen cloth. Naturally enough, then, 
 it was woollen cloth which began and led the 
 struggle of the craft against the Merchant Gild. 
 Weavers and fullers, whose Gilds we know to have 
 existed in London, Lincoln, and Oxford as early 
 as 1130, obtained royal recognition of their Gilds, 
 and, following the analogy of the merchants, 
 allowed no one to exercise the craft unless a mem- 
 ber of the Gild. These men led the struggle of 
 the Craft against the Merchant Gild; and though 
 we know little of the process the result is clear.
 
 RISE OF THE CRAFT GILDS 35 
 
 The trading monopoly of the Gild Merchant has 
 fallen by 1300. When in 1335 Edward III allowed 
 the merchants of other countries to trade freely 
 in England, they, being "of whatsoever estate or 
 condition," were to trade "with what persons it 
 shall please them." The monopoly is gone, and 
 the Gilds Merchant go after it. As separate organ- 
 izations their day is done. What becomes of them 
 we hardly know. Some of them seem to have 
 survived in an altered form. Possibly the Mer- 
 chant Adventurers are another form of survival. 
 But the subject is obscure. 
 
 The crafts have now obtained powers to deal in 
 their own courts with disputes among their mem- 
 bers. By 1377 there were 48 crafts in London 
 alone ; and by this time the tables were turned, and 
 instead of craftsmen being ineligible for citizenship, 
 citizenship was only open to craftsmen. 
 
 Organization of the Craft Gild. The authority 
 was vested in wardens, bailiffs, or masters, to super- 
 vise the industry and punish offenders. These 
 were elected at full meetings of the whole craft. 
 For admission to the craft the man must be 
 approved by the officials, either as having served 
 Apprenticeship, or on giving actual proof of skill. 
 Soon after 1300 apprenticeship became necessary. 
 
 The regulations aimed at securing good work 
 e. g. night work was prohibited, as leading to poor 
 work. Old age and sick pensions are provided for ; 
 a burial fund for those dying poor; pensions for 
 widows; and if a man fall sick in the middle of 
 his work, his task shall be finished for him "by 
 those of the trade, that the work be not lost." 
 
 D 2
 
 36 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 Characteristics of the Craft-Gild System. 
 
 1. Dealing in necessaries of stable demand, and 
 not in unstable luxuries, it was able to supply con- 
 sumers outside the family group. 
 
 2. Capital was of little importance; skill and 
 "connection" were everything. 
 
 3. As yet there was no "working class" in the 
 modern sense. There were journeymen, serving 
 under the masters, and hoping, and as a rule 
 able, to become masters of their craft after a few 
 years. 
 
 4. The master craftsman was an independent 
 producer, working in his own shop, with his own 
 tools, and at his own choice of hours. Hence it is 
 not the master, but the journeyman, whose position 
 should be compared with that of the workman of 
 to-day. 
 
 5. Municipal control with a view to securing a 
 good quality of produce. After the fall of the Gild 
 System, this function was for long in abeyance, 
 and has been lately somewhat revived in Adultera- 
 tion Acts, etc. 
 
 6. Each craftsman had to choose his craft and 
 abide in it, with a view to more perfect super- 
 vision. This principle, afterwards enforced in the 
 great Statute of Apprentices, 5 Eliz., c. 4, 1563, 
 was embodied in a Statute as early as 1363 ; and 
 lasted until it went down before the assault of 
 Adam Smith and the pressure of the Industrial 
 Revolution, and was finally repealed in 1814. 
 
 7. The members of each craft lived together in
 
 RISE OF THE CRAFT GILDS 37 
 
 the same street or locality. Of this there are traces 
 left to this day, in cases like the Bermondsey 
 tanning. 
 
 Such was the plan of organization of most of our 
 industries at the middle of the fourteenth century. 
 And not merely for manufactures. The rustic 
 labourer had his Gild, and in some cases also his 
 Gildhall in the villages, and found there ready to 
 his hand the organization which gave some of its 
 inspiration and most of its strength to the Peasant 
 Revolt of 1381. 
 
 Citizenship, then, has come to include member- 
 ship of a craft. And the town, organized on this 
 basis of citizenship, controlled industry. The old 
 association based on land has given way to one of 
 persons ; it has changed from real to personal. And 
 the various "misteries" were welded into a whole 
 which constituted the municipal life of the town. 
 Politically, they were the organs of local adminis- 
 tration and self-government; economically, they 
 were the instruments of supervision in an age when 
 everything was supervised. And in this citizen- 
 ship plutocracy ruled rather than democracy. The 
 Mayor and his brethren of the Council were the 
 ultimate authority in trade disputes. 
 
 Essentially, no one could be allowed to carry on 
 any occupation within the limits of the town, unless 
 he had been admitted a craft freeman. 
 
 The organization accorded with the economic 
 time. It was the day of the local market, and 
 industrial organization was also local. And the 
 great object of the organization was to do for a 
 man's trade and earnings what the Frith Gilds had
 
 38 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 done for his person, and secure him in the safe 
 and regular enjoyment thereof. The craft was 
 governed by its meetings, and at these meetings 
 the master and wardens were appointed. And as 
 the purpose of the Gild was to regulate the trade, 
 it is obvious that that object could only be carried 
 out if all who belonged to the trade belonged also 
 to the Gild. Hence, the regulation that all of the 
 trade must belong to the Gild was, at all events at 
 first, one of government and not of monopoly ; and 
 this is shown by the fact that at first, while none 
 of the trade were allowed to remain outside of the 
 Gild, all were allowed to enter it; and it is not until 
 the craft has degenerated into the Corporation that 
 the spirit of monopoly endeavours to limit the size 
 of the body of the craft. And before this same 
 degeneration one frequent regulation of the craft 
 referred to the number of "servants" that one 
 master craftsman might employ often only one. 
 This shows that such "servants" (i.e. wage-earning 
 labourers) must have been scarce, and that at this 
 time there was no "working class "
 
 IV 
 
 CRAFT GILDS AND WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 
 
 THE Craft Gilds, then, are now fully organized, 
 and, for most industries in England, the story of the 
 crafts and their development is that of the Trade. 
 For the name "Gild" soon drops out of use, and 
 "Mistery " or "Craft," takes its place, and the Craft 
 system continues its growth and its own internal 
 changes from Edward III to Elizabeth. During 
 the reign of Elizabeth the tendency to recognize 
 the crafts as "Corporations" has become marked; 
 and it is under this name that they and their privi- 
 leges are assailed by Adam Smith. But during 
 these two centuries say, roughly, 1350-1550 
 there has not occurred, for most industries, the 
 extent and intensity of economic change that would 
 at once cause and condition any fundamental altera- 
 tion of economic system. 
 
 Yet for one great industry, or class of industries, 
 the economic change does arise, and the consequent 
 alteration in system does take place; and the tex- 
 tiles, with wool in the leading place, pass from the 
 Gild, or Craft, to the Domestic organization. 
 
 Hence, therefore, we have to trace separately 
 these two distinct lines of development; first, the 
 slow and continuous growth of the Gild or Corpora- 
 tion system a growth without revolution, and 
 
 39
 
 40 
 
 along lines already laid down ; and, secondly, the 
 more revolutionary or catastrophic change to a 
 system of large manufacture, wherein by passing 
 through the domestic, our textiles develop into the 
 factory system. 
 
 And firstly, then, for the further storv of the 
 Gilds. 
 
 In some trades, particularly the textiles, we had 
 Gilds with a membership of workers at a very early 
 date. The twelfth century gave us Weavers' 
 Gilds, and these must have existed side by side 
 with the Gilds Merchant. But these Weavers' 
 Gilds took their authority from the Crown, whereas 
 the Craft Gilds of the fourteenth century were 
 created with the approval and under the control of 
 the civic authorities. And the relation between the 
 two, when Merchant and Craft Gilds did exist 
 contemporaneously, is difficult to trace. Cunning- 
 ham suggests that perhaps in some at least of such 
 cases the crafts were specialized branches of the 
 Gild Merchant. This, however, is probably going 
 too far; and the more likely explanation is that 
 as at first the Gild Merchant did not exclude the 
 craftsman, so when the craftsman found himself no 
 longer welcomed in the Gild Merchant he combined 
 with others, who resembled him in station, though 
 not necessarily identical in trade. And that thus 
 the Craft Gilds grew by differentiation of the parts 
 of the Gild Merchant, and aggregation of like 
 particles. 
 
 The object of these Craft Gilds was the "regula- 
 tion " of the trade. Our judgment, therefore, upon 
 the crafts as institutions will be but a particular
 
 WORKING CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 41 
 
 case of the more general judgment which we pass 
 upon the desirability of regulation as such. 
 
 There can be no doubt that much of this system 
 of regulation was intended to check fraud, and 
 maintain the corporate good name of the craft. 
 And of the provisions which make up the system 
 none was more important than the appointment of 
 the "Searchers." As early as 1363 it was enacted 
 that two of every craft be chosen "Searchers," to 
 see that none use other craft than the same which 
 he has chosen; and by the end of Edward Ill's 
 reign it was ordained that "all the misteries of the 
 city of London shall be lawfully regulated and 
 governed, that so no knavery, false workmanship, 
 or deceit shall be found in any manner in the said 
 misteries. And in each mistery there shall be 
 chosen and sworn four or six or more or less, 
 according as the mistery shall need; which persons 
 so chosen and sworn shall have full power from the 
 mayor well and lawfully to do and to perform the 
 same." These regulations seem to indicate that 
 there was at the time more rather than less of petty 
 knavery as compared with modern times; and that 
 the more highly placed in the Gilds recognized the 
 advantages of honesty as practised by the others. 
 Fraud of coarser sort seems to have been abundant 
 short weight, stones in hay, and the mixing of 
 various kinds of leather, e.g. basil with cordwain, 
 and calfskin with cowskin. Now there certainly 
 seems to be some reason for thinking that a "cor- 
 porate conscience " is necessary as a defence against 
 this kind of fraud, as witness the work of our 
 present London County Council, which has
 
 42 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 brought it about that the "coal-cellars which a year 
 or two ago held two tons of coal will now only hold 
 a ton and a-half." But it wdll not do to suppose, 
 as Cunningham seems to suppose, that all this 
 regulation was to the advantage of the workman, 
 as compared with the modern competitive regime. 
 The legal regulations were made by the payers of 
 wages, not by the receivers of them. And every 
 care was taken to prevent competition from "func- 
 tionating " when the result might be favourable to 
 the workmen. For example, the cordwainers, who 
 after swearing in four of their number to see that 
 "those who shape and make shoes shall mix no 
 manner of leather with other, but shall make them 
 wholly of one leather," proceed to enact: "And 
 it is forbidden that the servant workman in cord- 
 waining or others shall hold any meeting to make 
 provision which may be to the prejudice of the 
 trade and to the detriment of the common people, 
 under pain of imprisonment." In fact, the Gild 
 consisted of the aristocracy of labour; and those 
 were times when all aristocracies were fully alive 
 to the differences of destiny fixed by Providence 
 as between themselves and commonalties. They 
 were the elite of each trade, and chosen peoples 
 have habitually approved the choice. But this fact 
 was the cause at once of their early strength and 
 of their ultimate breakdown. 
 
 But at the time of which we are speaking, the 
 fourteenth century, the Gild system harmonized so 
 well with the spirit of the age that the formation 
 of a Gild became a kind of instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion, which went as low down as the parish clerks.
 
 WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 43 
 
 Nor were more solid reasons wanting. The craft 
 obtained the monopoly of the trade, and none could 
 be a tradesman unless in the craft. Whence 
 sprang abuses, when the craftsmen kept down their 
 numbers by demanding heavy entrance-fees, and 
 placing other difficulties in the way of joining the 
 craft. So that by about 1475 various trades had 
 openly avowed their purpose of protecting them- 
 selves against the competition of stranger work- 
 men. 
 
 Early in the fifteenth century the greater London 
 industries had secured unto themselves separate 
 incorporation ; and they remain to this day as the 
 City Companies. Of these we shall hear a good 
 deal. 
 
 And classes began to be differentiated within the 
 crafts, chiefly by discrimination of Apprenticeship 
 and Journeyman Service. Hence there were in a 
 fully developed Gild, three classes of members : 
 Apprentices, Journeymen, and Masters. Of these : 
 
 i. Apprenticeship was at first exacted by the 
 regulations of the various crafts acting individu- 
 ally. The usual time for apprenticeship was seven 
 years 
 
 " But when my seven long years are out, 
 Oh, then I'll marry Sally"; 
 
 but various other periods might be agreed upon. 
 The master is to "find" the apprentice in food, 
 clothing, shelter, and chastisement; which last item 
 at all events does not seem to have been subject to 
 short measure. A small annual payment, increas- 
 ing year by year, was due by the master to the
 
 44 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 apprentice, from 3^. in the first year to los. in the 
 last. 
 
 This apprenticeship was virtually compulsory 
 from 1363 onwards, under the enactments of the 
 crafts themselves. But in 1563 the enactment 
 passes into law by the great Statute of that date, 
 the Statute of Apprentices, 5 Elis. c. 4. All sorts 
 of measures were taken to restrict apprenticeship 
 to the children of the well-to-do, and to exclude 
 "foreigners," i.e. persons from outside the towns. 
 Also to restrict the number of apprentices a man 
 might take, generally to two. 
 
 2. The Journeyman is much more difficult to 
 investigate. His position is not so clearly defined 
 in law, and moreover seems to have been essentially 
 various and dubious. Sometimes we find journey- 
 men taking part even in the governance of the craft, 
 sometimes the victims of laws forbidding them to 
 combine amongst themselves, and "make congrega- 
 tions." The journeyman was at first one who 
 hoped, and as a rule succeeded, in making his way 
 to be a master. And it was the fading of this hope 
 which cast him back on other ways of seeking 
 prosperity, by means of combinations of quite 
 another sort. 
 
 3. The Masters. Let us look at these for a 
 moment by themselves. 
 
 In the early Middle Ages our economic activity 
 had been practically all agricultural. Then there 
 arose slowly the merchant class, embodied in the 
 Gilds Merchant. But with the rise of the Craft 
 Gild we find, for the first time, a body of men with 
 whom manufacture was the real business of life.
 
 WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 45 
 
 At first this was a mere separation of an employ- 
 ment, due to the progress of peace. For under 
 that favouring influence the productiveness of farm- 
 ing industry so increased that a smaller proportion 
 of the population sufficed to grow food for all, 
 thus setting more hands free for " other-than-food " 
 production ; and the demand for goods other than 
 food became constant and reliable enough to enable 
 men to devote their whole time to meeting it. And 
 thus was developed a higher skill than the ordinary 
 peasant, turning an occasional hand to manufac- 
 tures, could possibly acquire. The possession of 
 such skill, handed down by inheritance and train- 
 ing, differentiated the artisan class from the culti- 
 vators. But this artisan class is not what we should 
 now call a "working class." That is to come later 
 on. The Master was a man of substance. As a 
 burgess of the town he could undertake to train 
 and maintain apprentices, under the recognized 
 regulations. 
 
 Women, save only his own wife and daughter, he 
 could not employ, at all events in England; in 
 some of the Continental Gilds workers were under 
 no sex disability. But the conditions under which 
 this artisan class worked at that time were wholly 
 unlike those which now prevail. Our modern dis- 
 tinctions of Labourer, Capitalist, Entrepreneur, etc., 
 did not then apply. If a man wanted some cloth 
 woven, he bought the yarn, and either took it to the 
 artisan's house to be there woven in the artisan's 
 loom, or, if he had a loom of his own, he sent for 
 the artisan to come and weave it. And when the 
 work was done it was paid for by the piece. Such
 
 46 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 a person would be "employer," or "customer," or 
 "producer," or "consumer" in modern termino- 
 logy, according to the aspect of him regarded as 
 most conspicuous at the moment. And the crafts- 
 man so employed was a "labourer" because he 
 worked, a "capitalist" in virtue of his own tools 
 and workshop; and if ever, failing an immediate 
 order, he bought materials and manufactured some 
 goods in the hope of a market for them, he appeared 
 as an "entrepreneur." Such conditions have sur- 
 vived amongst us to this day in the gypsies' cart 
 with its load of baskets, etc., for sale. "Cane 
 chairs to mend " and " Knives to grind, scissors to 
 grind " are street cries even yet, and proclaim the 
 survival, in these humble industries, of economic 
 conditions six centuries old. 
 
 Wherefore the early craftsman simply represents 
 the side of industry that was not agricultural; and 
 rather than say that he combined in his person the 
 functions of labourer and capitalist, employer and 
 employed, it is better to decline the anachronism of 
 applying these terms to him at all. They are an 
 artisan class; but they are not as yet a labour class ; 
 still less a "working class " in the modern sense. 
 
 But now, by about 1350, we have a real labour 
 class. Small at first, but increasing as time goes 
 on. It consisted of men who either had never been 
 apprentices, or who had come out of apprentice- 
 ship, but had not yet set up for themselves as 
 master craftsmen. They acted as assistants to the 
 masters, and at first did so for a time only, till 
 they had saved stock, and found opportunity for 
 starting on their own account. These men were
 
 WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 47 
 
 called servants, or yeomen, or valets. And as they 
 increase in numbers it becomes more and more 
 obvious that only a minority of them will ever be 
 able to become masters. In fact, their very exist- 
 ence shows that the economic conditions have been 
 changing. And whereas in the earlier days the 
 energies of all but a few had been fully engaged in 
 meeting the elementary wants of a primitive society 
 the need of food, clothing, and shelter now, 
 those needs can be met by the labour of a far 
 smaller proportion of the total population, and 
 larger numbers are set free for more elaborate pro- 
 duction. And as there are many more people 
 wanting things in general, the law of averages 
 begins to assert itself, and we become increasingly 
 certain that at any moment it will be possible to 
 find some one who wants some particular thing. 
 That is to say, that men can now safely make things 
 in the confident expectation of being able to sell 
 them; and the age of "anticipatory production" 
 has begun. A man living in the early "family 
 stage " of industry which we have described above 
 would only make a coat when he happened to want 
 one himself, or, at all events, when he knew defi- 
 nitely of some one who did want one, and was 
 prepared to give him something in return for 
 supplying that want. But now all that is changed, 
 and though the coat-maker may not happen to 
 know who it is that will buy his coat when finished, 
 yet he is content to make coats in confident antici- 
 pation that some one will want them. Hence 
 there arises an industrial class, in which the posses- 
 sion of capital becomes of importance, and within
 
 48 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 it a labour class, consisting of men who look to 
 this anticipatory production to procure them a 
 constant reward for their labour. 
 
 But at about this same time we begin to see how 
 the crafts themselves are becoming exclusive. The 
 child of the craftsman is admitted to the craft on 
 easy terms, but the terms are hard to the stranger. 
 Entrance fees are purposely fixed at a high figure, 
 in order to keep the numbers down, and apprentice- 
 ship is only open to the free and legitimately born. 
 And sometimes even in England, and often on the 
 Continent of Europe, a "masterpiece" was de- 
 manded of the candidate for admission to the craft, 
 and none could exercise the craft until his master- 
 piece had been approved. The word "master- 
 piece " has of recent times greatly changed its 
 meaning, and is applied, particularly in connection 
 with the fine arts, to the best thing a man has done. 
 But the "masterpiece" was in those days simply 
 the work which proved a man as a master of his 
 craft, and would more nearly answer to the " Dip- 
 loma Picture " of a modern Academy. And the 
 burden of having to produce it was a heavy one, 
 for it often took long to do, and was wholly un- 
 saleable when done. Another obligation often 
 enforced on the apprentice desirous of qualifying 
 as a master was that of travelling, sometimes for 
 a considerable term of -years. This gave rise to the 
 establishment of the Auberges, or Houses of Call, 
 where the wandering journeyman could hear if 
 work were obtainable in the neighbourhood. Little 
 wonder, then, that men thus classified and locally 
 concentrated, and provided with common cause of 
 grievance, should unite into organizations for
 
 WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 49 
 
 mutual aid and comfort; and the consequent organ- 
 izations, when they come, are called Fraternities. 
 And though it must not be assumed that between 
 these fraternities and the modern Trades Unions 
 there is any very close link of direct succession, 
 yet there can be no doubt as to the great similarity 
 between the two organizations. 
 
 Nor were they very dissimilar in some of their 
 results. It is natural enough that with a labour 
 class, a labour question should also arise, to the 
 perplexity of legislators. Almost immediately after 
 the Black Death, as early as 1350 and 1362, we find 
 that the London ordinances give powers to the 
 Wardens of the Craft to deal with combined 
 refusals to work, which we should in our time call 
 Strikes. It has been urged that these ordinances 
 do not record any unqualified defeat for tjie 
 labourers, and indeed, for reasons which we shall 
 discover presently, the very time at which these 
 powers were conferred precludes the idea of such 
 unqualified defeat. In addition to which it must 
 be observed that the effect was to remove the deter- 
 mination of wages from the individual employer 
 to the mistery as a whole. And such a power, 
 vested in the mistery in its corporate capacity, may 
 not appear so very unfair when we remember that 
 at this same time the same power had authority to 
 fix the remuneration of the master craftsman, and 
 claimed to keep him up to the mark in the quality 
 of the work he might supply. 
 
 The Masters and the Journeymen rapidly though 
 gradually drifted further apart, and by about 1390 
 the fraternities of the Journeymen, with an organ- 
 ization modelled on that of the Craft Gilds them-
 
 50 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 selves, were fairly established in England. They 
 seem to have claimed to wear a distinctive uniform, 
 or "livery," and to meet annually for masses and 
 other religious observances, and for other purposes. 
 Against these last the masters protested, as being 
 nothing but conspiracies for the raising of wages. 
 But these Fraternities were being consolidated 
 under very favourable circumstances. The whole 
 country had been stirred to its depths by the 
 Peasant Revolt of 1381. And the "Poor Priests" 
 of the Wyclif movement had given a religious 
 basis to the national mental excitement which had 
 culminated in that revolt. Religious fraternities 
 were numerous and popular. Whence the Journey- 
 men seem to have been enabled to kill two birds 
 with one stone, and to have organized their 
 Fraternities on a religious basis, with an eye to 
 both worlds at once. Once formed, they enter 
 upon a career of struggle, generally ending in com- 
 promise, with the Craft Gild of the masters, the 
 chief points in dispute being the terms on which 
 a journeyman should be admitted a master, and 
 the number of apprentices a master might take. 
 These points were not to receive their final adjudi- 
 cation until in 1563 they passed from the realm of 
 regulation into that of statute law by the enactment 
 of the Statute of Apprentices. 
 
 Meantime, what of the Craft Gilds themselves? 
 Within the craft there has been growing up an 
 inner ring, formed of the richer members of the 
 craft, and gradually transforming its government 
 into a plutocratic oligarchy. A striking instance 
 of this is found in the livery of the London com- 
 panies. But as the crafts thus succeeded politically
 
 WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 51 
 
 in one direction, they were in another aspect, the 
 democratic aspect, committing a slow suicide. 
 Xo longer an organization of the trade as a whole, 
 but only of certain interests within it, and closely 
 pressed by opposing interests, which, though with- 
 out the Gild were within the trade, the Gild finds 
 itself in a condition of unstable equilibrium, ready 
 to fall at the first shock of change in the economic 
 conditions by \vhich it is surrounded. And in the 
 sixteenth century the shock of economic change 
 was to reach it. For now the idea of national 
 industry was springing up, and the merely local 
 groups and markets have had their day, and the 
 Trade Union is now a possibility of the future. 
 Here, as before, and as always, the new organiza- 
 tion does not effect the change, it merely marks the 
 fact that the change has already come. 
 
 One clear contrast, already alluded to, is the 
 crystallization into statute law of provisions which 
 as craft regulations had been more or less familiar 
 for two hundred years. By the Statute of Appren- 
 tices, technically described as 5 Eliz. cap. 4, and 
 passed in 1563, an order of things which had existed 
 for two centuries in an inchoate form among the 
 Craft Gilds, became law for all the traders of the 
 time. This statute was a very voluminous docu- 
 ment, as statutes regulating labour are apt to be. 
 Yet its chief enactments can be reduced to com- 
 paratively few heads. 
 
 1. No man could carry on any trade, craft or 
 mistery, unless he had been thereunto apprenticed 
 to a master of the said trade, craft, or mistery. 
 
 2. Any householder might take as apprentices 
 youths under twenty-one years of age whose parents 
 
 2
 
 52 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 could show themselves to be possessed of a certain 
 fortune. 
 
 3. For three apprentices one journeyman must 
 be kept, and one other journeyman for every 
 apprentice above three. 
 
 4. Journeymen must be retained in service at 
 least one year, and must receive three months' 
 notice of a coming dismissal. 
 
 5. The hours of labour were fixed at twelve as 
 a minimum an enactment the spirit of which 
 should be compared with that of our modern 
 Factory Acts. 
 
 6. Wages were to be fixed by the magistrates. 
 
 7. Unmarried women from twelve to forty years 
 of age could be assigned by the magistrates to 
 service at such wages as they determined; and 
 if a woman refused so to serve, she was to be 
 committed to ward till that she consent. In 
 this summary fashion "the servant question" was 
 disposed of in those days. 
 
 8. Justices were empowered to settle all disputes 
 between masters and apprentices, and to protect 
 the apprentices. 
 
 Few statutes have been so variously viewed as 
 this one. Mr. George Howell, in his Conflicts of 
 Labour and Capital, speaks strongly in favour of 
 the Act from the workman's point of view, as pro- 
 curing for him his chief desideratum regularity 
 of employment. And for another reason. The 
 limitation of the numbers of the apprentices, by 
 limiting competition, prevented the skilled work- 
 man from being brought dow r n to the level of com- 
 mon labourers. But this contention, urged by so
 
 WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 53 
 
 able and so representative a writer as Mr. Howell, 
 serves to emphasize the fact that the early writers 
 who pleaded on behalf of their own class for greater 
 freedom of combination, were really contending 
 for an aristocracy of labour, rather than on behalf 
 of the labouring class as a whole. 
 
 On the other hand, Prof. Stanley Jevons (The 
 State in Relation to Labour, pp. 34-5) says : "From 
 first to last it aimed at industrial slavery. It was 
 a monstrous law 7 . . . . Such was liberty, such was 
 industry, under Good Queen Bess, at least in the 
 intention of the governing classes. In operation 
 the statute was, there is reason to believe, little 
 more than a dead letter, except as regards the 
 important sections relating to apprenticeship, of 
 which the evil influence has hardly yet died out." 
 
 An earlier opinion is that of Adam Smith, who, 
 regarding the Statute as a case of governmental 
 interference with trade, assails it on first principles. 
 "The property which every man has in his own 
 labour, as it is the original foundation of all other 
 property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. 
 The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength 
 and dexterity of his hands ; and to hinder him 
 from employing this strength and dexterity in what 
 manner he thinks proper, without injury to his 
 neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred 
 property." And as to the professed guarantee 
 afforded by the Act as against bad work, Adam 
 Smith sees no use in it, announcing that "Long 
 apprenticeships are altogether unnecessary." 
 
 But \vhatever views different authorities may 
 take of the economic results and qualities of the 
 Statute of 1563, most are agreed that when, late
 
 54 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, the Industrial Revolution crushed this law 
 and the Law of Parochial Settlement together, the 
 modern form of Trades Unions sprang from the 
 ruins. When the Domestic gave way to the 
 Factory type of industry the great want of the 
 master manufacturers was of men. Hence men 
 were welcomed, come they from what parish they 
 might, and no question might be safely raised as 
 to the forty days' qualification under Charles II 's 
 Law. 1 Welcome they were, though they brought 
 with them no 'prenticed skill : the machines were 
 clamorous for a new skill, not to be bought at the 
 price of the entrance fee or the masterpiece of the 
 old apprenticeship. So both these laws were 
 ground to pieces in the clattering clutch of the new- 
 born giant Machinery. Once again, as in 1350 and 
 1351 2 and times innumerable since, the brazen pot 
 of Economic Law and the earthen pot of Statute 
 have collided in their flotation down the stream of 
 time, and the earthen pot has been shattered and 
 sunk. Not only men from a distance the 
 "foreigners" of four centuries ago but women 
 and children are now freely employed amongst 
 the machines ; and evils are started which it took 
 years of agitation and the touching appeal of our 
 greatest poetess to set right. The skilled journey- 
 men found themselves thrown out, the small 
 "domestic" masters supported them in their resist- 
 ance, and what may with sundry limitations be de- 
 scribed as the first modern Trade Union was formed 
 at Halifax under the name of the "Institution." 
 
 1 Page 80. 2 Page 73.
 
 WORKING-CLASS ORGANIZATIONS 55 
 
 And as these associations increase and prosper, 
 they are met with a long series of the so-called 
 "Combination Laws," of which the last (39 & 40, 
 Geo. Ill, c. 1 06) was the greatest and the most 
 thoroughgoing. All agreements between journey- 
 men and workmen for obtaining advance of wages 
 were declared illegal conspiracies, with a penalty 
 of two months' imprisonment thereto attached. 
 But in 1824 the Combination Laws fell. It is true 
 that in 1825 the immunity which the law of 1824 
 had given to the workers was limited, and only 
 those who actually attended the workers' meeting 
 to decide on the acceptance or refusal of a proffered 
 wage were allowed to partake in the bargain ; and 
 all agreements to affect the wages of persons not 
 present at the meeting were to be treated as con- 
 spiracies. Under this law six Dorchester labourers 
 were transported for seven years, ostensibly for 
 administering unlawful oaths. And though after 
 a great agitation the men were pardoned, some of 
 them were never found, and thus never heard of 
 their better fortune, or of their possible restoration. 
 But finally the Trades Union Act of 1871 legalized 
 their position fully, and in 1875 all penal labour 
 legislation was finally abolished. 
 
 Once again, in 1900-06, the position of the Trade 
 Unions was to be fought out, owing to the results 
 of the decision of the House of Lords in the cele- 
 brated "Taff Vale Railway case." In 1900 the 
 employes of the Taff Vale Railway struck, and, 
 the men adopting certain methods of conducting 
 the strike, the Company brought an action in the 
 Chancery Court against the Amalgamated Society 
 of Railway Servants, for an injunction to restrain
 
 56 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 the practices complained of. The answering plea 
 was that the Society could not be sued in its 
 corporate capacity. Mr. Justice Farwell decided 
 against the Society; his decision was reversed in the 
 Court of Appeal, but was finally upheld in the House 
 of Lords, in July 1901. This decision making it 
 possible to sue the Union, the Taff Vale Company 
 at once sued for .20,000, and obtained a verdict. 
 So the question had to be again taken up in 
 Parliament. A motion in the Commons was 
 defeated in 1902. In 1903, 1904, and 1905, Bills 
 to defend the Unions, in their corporate capacity, 
 against legal action were defeated. In January 
 1906 a Royal Commission was appointed, and in 
 the same year a general election took place, result- 
 ing in a change of ministry. In the new Parlia- 
 ment the Government and the Labour Members 
 both introduced Bills, and the Government left the 
 House free to choose which they pleased. Finally, 
 the Government Bill was so amended as to con- 
 form to the Labour Bill; and was so passed in 
 December 1906, and came into force on January 
 i, 1907. The law now stands as it was supposed, 
 before the Taff Vale Case, that it stood then ; and 
 we have it that an act done in furtherance of a trade 
 dispute shall not be actionable, in combination, 
 unless it would be actionable without combination ; 
 and that no action can lie against the Trade Union 
 in respect of an act alleged to have been committed 
 by or on behalf of the Trade Union. So that 
 redress for illegal acts of Trade Unionists can 
 only be sought at law against the individuals com- 
 mitting those acts, and not against the Union of 
 which they are members.
 
 THE RISE OF TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 
 
 THE progress which we have hitherto traced has 
 been of slow r and gradual growth. But for some 
 industries the advance was more rapid, as soon as 
 certain initial difficulties had been overcome. 
 
 We have had many occasions to note how im- 
 portant was the influence exerted upon the early 
 growth of England's industry by the rigid main- 
 tenance of the King's Peace by the rulers who 
 succeeded to the throne of the Conqueror. This in- 
 fluence was nowhere more important or most lasting 
 than in respect of the greatest of our textiles, wool. 
 
 In a climate such as ours warm clothing is, 
 next to food, the most imperative need of existence. 
 Had we possessed a tropical climate, cotton or 
 linen would probably have taken the place in our 
 history which wool has filled. As it is, wool stands 
 for us in the forefront both in economic importance 
 and historic interest. In the Middle Ages wool was 
 our one important export ; and in the latter part of 
 the seventeenth century woollen goods were two- 
 thirds of our total exports. Its influence upon 
 diplomacy may be instanced in the Methuen Treaty 
 of 1702 between England and Portugal, which 
 wholly consisted of the terms upon which the 
 woollens of England were to be exchanged for the 
 wines of Portugal a treaty whose supporters in- 
 
 57
 
 58 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 culcated that "Port is the only wine for a gentle- 
 man," and practised what they preached till their 
 descendants have had to bear the gouty penalty. 
 Wool gave us our first industrial Gild that of the 
 weavers; and in wool the Gild first broke up into 
 the diffused "domestic" form of industry. And in 
 the present day the factory has complete control 
 of it. 
 
 These leading characteristics of our wool in- 
 dustry, its age, its vitality, and its mutability, point 
 to its possession of peculiar economic attributes. 
 And such is the fact. In whatever stage of the 
 industry we consider it, we shall find it to be an 
 eminently marketable commodity. It is durable, 
 portable without much risk of damage, and highly 
 capable of being sold by sample. And whatever 
 commodity possesses these qualities in a high 
 degree is certain to command the widest market 
 which the times permit. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that England prospered 
 as an agricultural country long before she became 
 of any considerable importance in virtue of her 
 manufactures. Hence we quite naturally find that 
 for a long period, lasting until the close of Edward 
 IPs reign, our trade in wool consisted chiefly in the 
 export of the raw material, and the import of all 
 the finer kinds of woollen cloth. Cloth of a kind 
 had, it is true, been woven in the homes of the 
 peasantry, under the "Family" system of produc- 
 tion. But the well-to-do classes wanted a finer 
 article than any that the peasant looms could then 
 produce, and it was imported accordingly from the 
 Low Countries. Various efforts were made by the
 
 THE RISE OF TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 59 
 
 Government to compel the manufacture in England 
 of a finer sort. Edward I appointed an officer, 
 called an Aulnager (Norman-French aulne, an ell) 
 to see to the carrying out of the Assize of Wool, 
 to regulate its quality and its price. And in 1258 
 the export of wool was prohibited, and again in 
 1271, this last enactment also prohibiting the im- 
 port of woollen cloth. But the difficulty was too 
 fundamental to be dealt with in so simple a fashion. 
 Englishmen did not then possess the skill requisite 
 for the manufacture of those finer qualities of cloth 
 which their customers demanded. Wherefore the 
 prohibition of import had to be withdrawn. Mean- 
 time, as the demand for fine cloth increased in 
 England, the demand for English fine wool in- 
 creased on the Continent, and hence the problem of 
 over-scarce labour, the problem which the Black 
 Death had set to English society, began to find 
 some sort of a solution in the enclosing of lands 
 that had been hitherto subject to the plough, and 
 the substitution of sheep for wheat. This process 
 had indeed begun before the Death, the Statute of 
 Mcrton having been passed as early as 1235. This 
 statute had permitted the lord of the manor to do 
 as he pleased with the "waste," provided he left 
 the tenants "sufficient" pasturage; and of such 
 sufficiency he had been apt to take a narrow view. 
 And now, in the times after the Death, where the 
 enclosed land was "common field" much misery 
 was involved. Often the entire village was cleared 
 away, for under a system of communal agriculture 
 it was useless for one or two to try to stay; when 
 all could not remain, all must go.
 
 60 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 Yet, hard as this was upon the villagers in- 
 dividually, there were certain compensations from 
 the national point of view. For the enclosed land 
 was more productive than the unenclosed land had 
 been. But the advantage, such as it was, was 
 dearly bought, the dispossessed tenants going to 
 swell the unemployed class, and many of them 
 taking to beggary or outlawry, to the great 
 aggravation of the poverty and distress that were 
 so soon to culminate in a grave danger to the very 
 fabric of society. Though even here the wool itself 
 did something to provide a remedy, and by afford- 
 ing industrial employment to some portion of the 
 dispossessed agriculturalists, the calamity brought 
 with it its own partial cure. 
 
 Still England remained unable to produce the 
 finer kinds of woollen cloth. And Edward III 
 determined to do his best to remove this reproach. 
 The remedy was the only one possible in such 
 cases, the one which England has again and again 
 found successful the importation of foreign skill, 
 and the amalgamation of foreign workmen with the 
 native people. Accordingly Edward invited over 
 skilled workmen from Flanders, promising them 
 protection if they would come to exercise their 
 calling here. Flanders was then in a condition of 
 much unrest; and many came. The earliest of the 
 letters of protection issued to any of these new- 
 comers, so far as we at present know, was issued 
 to one John Kempe in 1331. And it is noticeable 
 that, conspicuous amongst the privileges conferred 
 by such letters of protection, is exemption from the 
 aulnage, the ministration of the aulnager or wool-
 
 THE RISE OF TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 61 
 
 work inspector, alluded to above. The government 
 management of an industry cannot, as a rule, 
 survive the nursery stages of that industry if 
 further prolonged, it destroys either itself or its 
 charge. Here, Competence no sooner sets its foot 
 within the kingdom, than it claims its birthright 
 it will take either its liberty or its leave. And 
 Edward had the sense to grant the freedom de- 
 manded. And the consequent change in the posi- 
 tion of the trade soon showed itself; and from 
 exporting raw wool and importing cloth we began 
 to export cloth, and to restrict, and even at last to 
 prohibit, the export of raw wool. 
 
 Not only once or twice did this immigration of 
 foreigners come to our service. That is true of 
 industrial men which is true of sheep dogs the 
 mixed breeds are the most intelligent and success- 
 ful. The advantages which England owes to her 
 maintenance of free asylum for men of all races, 
 are incalculable. Again and again, at a crisis of 
 economic change, this foreign element supplied the 
 moral and intellectual fibre needed to knit together 
 and consolidate some hardly-won success. And in 
 opening her harbours to the persecuted of all races 
 England has ever unconsciously practised a selec- 
 tion of the fittest. For it matters not in the least, 
 from the economic standpoint, which side, the 
 persecuting or the persecuted, has in the abstract 
 the better of the question at issue between them. 
 The important thing is that here be opinions, and 
 a class of men and women convinced enough, and 
 brave enough, to leave their all behind, and rather 
 than abjure the said opinions, try their fortunes
 
 62 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 anew in distant countries, with their teeming brains 
 and their skilled hands for their chief stock-in-trade. 
 Right or wrong upon the passing issue, these are 
 stronger men, men more richly endowed in intellect 
 and in "the priceless gift of character," than the 
 more compliant conformists whom they leave be- 
 hind j and it is just these stronger men whom 
 persecution drives away, and whom the land of 
 asylum receives, to profit through countless genera- 
 tions by the admixture of their dauntless blood. 
 
 In the fifteenth century great changes were 
 silently going on in the conditions of the woollen 
 industry. The Gilds are breaking up, and the trade 
 is passing into the hands of "clothiers," men with 
 more capital than formerly, and employing num- 
 bers of workpeople. The "Domestic" system of 
 industry is now upon us : not developing without 
 conflict. The legislation of the time seems to point 
 to some early signs of even a factory form of in- 
 dustry approaching. The "Weavers Act" of 1555 
 forbade any clothier dwelling outside a town to keep 
 more than one loom in his house or to let looms 
 out at hire. If this was the case, it is certain that 
 for the time the legislature was strong enough to 
 nip any such tendency in the bud. But though 
 these indications point clearly enough to increase 
 in quantity they do not show any considerable 
 improvement in quality. In the middle of the 
 sixteenth century English cloth was exported un- 
 finished and undyed. But in 1567 the Duke Alva 
 renewed the persecutions in the Netherlands, and 
 the "Reformed" fled in large numbers to England, 
 settling in the Eastern counties, and particularly
 
 THE RISE OF TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 63 
 
 in Norwich. Thanks, therefore, to the unconscious 
 kindness of Alva, the problem of quality was solved 
 for us by these men; and England was at last 
 enabled to equal, and ultimately to surpass, any- 
 thing the Continent could do in fineness of texture 
 and effectiveness of dye. 
 
 Once more was England to be dow 7 ered with 
 this priceless boon of being allowed to adopt for her 
 own the chosen children of another land. In 1685 
 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and let 
 loose the horrors of persecution upon the elect of 
 his bourgeoisie. Skilled Huguenots poured over 
 to England in great numbers, and this time it was 
 not only wool, but glass, paper, and silk, whose 
 production the strangers improved and brought up 
 to date. Cloth they improved in Yorkshire as 
 well as in the West of England, though Yorkshire's 
 share in these early days was small. Silk they 
 developed, as far as the handloom could carry it, 
 in the East End of London, where the admixture 
 of their French accent was to result in that East 
 End dialect now all but dead and gone the dialect 
 in which Mr. Weller entreated the judge to "put 
 it down a we, my lord " and whose loss is to 
 make the humour of Pickwick, so irresistible to 
 the last generation, so incomprehensible to the next. 
 For more than a century men of their indomitable 
 race struggled on against, sad to tell, the ignorant 
 opposition of the mass of English workers. Some- 
 thing of the nature of this opposition can be 
 pictured by those who read Charlotte Bronte's 
 novel, Shirley. As the great inventions came the 
 men of their race were to the fore in their adoption
 
 64 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 and improvement. The spinning-jenny, the water- 
 frame, and the mule have now come to the factory. 
 Driven at first by the running stream, the greatest 
 change of all is to come when Watt watches the 
 kettle-lid with open eyes and a brain behind them, 
 and when the steam-engine, invented in 1769, in 
 1785 first enters the factory. The water-wheels are 
 now to go to ruin by the side of the streams which 
 had turned them, and industry passes from cold 
 water to hot. The day of the factory with its 
 steam-driven power-loom has arrived, and with it 
 the aggregation of the workers in factory towns, 
 perched over the coal-fields whence the power is 
 derived. 
 
 It is a capitalistic and factory era. What is to 
 come next? The present is the result of the vast 
 industrial and commercial changes which, prepared 
 and evolved through two preceding centuries, found 
 expression in the great "Industrial Revolution" 
 which extends over a period of about three-score 
 years and ten, from 1760-1830. An enormous 
 growth of population as a whole, coincident with 
 a decline in the agricultural proportion of it, and 
 a great shifting northwards of its centre of density, 
 marked the fundamental change in the habits of 
 a people no longer prevailingly agricultural. In 
 agriculture itself changes have at last arrived, 
 largely due, as Adam Smith pointed out, to the 
 keener inventiveness of the town intelligence over- 
 flowing into the country. Rotation of crops is 
 being developed, and the wooden plough is replaced 
 by steel. The "navigable cut or canal" of Adam 
 Smith passes into insignificance as a means of con-
 
 THE RISE OF TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 65 
 
 veyance by comparison with the newly-invented 
 railway (1830). And even the distribution of 
 wealth is altered, rents and prices rising, and the 
 wages of the agricultural labourer falling fast 
 enough to add to the motive force by which he is 
 driven into the towns. In our literature the 
 changes are reflected in Goldsmith's Deserted 
 Village; while the evils of an early, undeveloped, 
 and unregulated factory system found expression 
 in the Hard Times of Charles Dickens and in the 
 appeal on behalf of the factory children made by 
 Mrs. Browning and answered in the Factory Acts. 
 
 In all this we see the supremacy of sun-force, 
 the power stored in coal. But is this the last word 
 of science and of skill ? Whilst coal is the main 
 source of power for industrial production, the 
 " factory towns " must be planted above the coal- 
 fields, and industry must be made sombre with 
 the blackness of coal smoke, and grimy with the 
 grime of its dust. But there are other forces in 
 Nature awaiting man's appropriation, and the 
 future, so far as we can plausibly foretell, lies with 
 industrial electricity. 
 
 And when once the problem is fully solved, when 
 once Power shall be conveyed by wire, or possibly 
 even by wireless induction, from any source to any 
 application, then the Factory Town is doomed. 
 And when our productive centres are no longer 
 squalid with dirt, when the mill is planted on the 
 hillside, when the web is woven and the tracery 
 designed where light is bright and Nature beauti- 
 ful, then beneath the touch of unsoiled hands a 
 fairer fabric may issue from our looms than has
 
 66 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 ever yet delighted the daughters of men. Then 
 shall pride in the results of toil toil's best reward 
 be once more the portion of the worker ; then shall 
 cleanliness of work beget cleanliness of home, and 
 therewith cleanliness of life, of speech, and of 
 thought, wherein is the perfection of man's man- 
 liness. And production, taking on somewhat of the 
 true creative character, may again hold out to the 
 craftsman some share in the Godlike privilege of 
 gazing on the work of his own hands, and seeing 
 that it is good. 
 
 It is a noble vision, one whose realization would 
 be worth its price, in thought and labour. And it 
 is not impossible, nor even incredible. For it is 
 only prejudice or ignorance that has described 
 economics as the dismal science.
 
 VI 
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 
 
 So far we have spoken of the industrial progress 
 of England as if it had been continuous and unin- 
 terrupted. But to leave such an impression of our 
 economic history uncorrected, would be to provide 
 but a poor insight into the true nature of the facts. 
 And we now proceed to take a glance at the greatest 
 calamity which ever befel our country, a calamity 
 so acute in its intensity, and so wide-spread in its 
 devastation, that it is hardly an exaggeration to 
 describe it as fixing, for quite a large group of 
 questions that have been prominent throughout our 
 modern history and which have not lost their 
 prominence even to the present day, the "fountain 
 date " of our economic history. 
 
 The calamity in question is known as the "Black 
 Death " of 1348-9. The name is not a contem- 
 porary one, the writers of the time usually alluding 
 to it as Magna mortalitas, or simply Pestis. For 
 full details of the occurrence itself the student 
 should consult the learned History of Epidemics 
 in Britain, by Dr. Charles Creighton, to which 
 work the present writer is in this respect chiefly 
 indebted. The economic consequences are admir- 
 ably treated in the Six Centuries of Work and 
 Wages, by the late Prof. Thorold Rogers. 
 F 2 67
 
 68 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 Up to the date of this Great Plague England had 
 been peacefully developing under the fostering in- 
 fluence of the good order preserved by her rulers. 
 Farming had, on the whole, with the exception of a 
 few notably bad years, been prosperous, its profits 
 being estimated at 18 per cent. There were, it is 
 true, certain exceptions to the general rule of pros- 
 perity and contentment. The English longbow 
 wielded by a professional soldiery had won both 
 renown and power from the less well-armed and less 
 experienced forces of the Continent. But the wars 
 to which this tempted us were expensive, and the 
 consequent taxation, though not really excessive in 
 amount, was clumsy in the method of its exaction, 
 and much resented by the people. The serfs had 
 for the most part been manumitted by about the 
 end of the thirteenth century, and the discussion 
 of theological questions had begun, under the direc- 
 tion of Wyclif, with a freedom of challenge which 
 augured ill for the enforcement of unpopular 
 measures. But nothing could prevent the English 
 climate from being fickle; and in those days of 
 "national independence," when we were not "de- 
 pendent on the foreigner for food," the fickleness 
 meant disaster to a people who, when they could 
 not reap, could not eat. Hence the famine of 1316, 
 when corn rose to three times its then average 
 price, with considerable consequent loss of life. 
 The diminution of the supply of labour caused 
 wages to rise, and much friction ensued between 
 employers and employed. Numerous servants were 
 dismissed, and of these a portion became outlaws. 
 But the country recovered, and, from 1319 to 1348
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 69 
 
 it had on the whole been prosperous, when the 
 pestilence struck it. 
 
 The disease known as Black Death was of a 
 nature which admits of no doubt. It was the true 
 Plague, the same disease as that which in 1665 
 broke out again, though to a much smaller extent 
 as compared with the increased population, having 
 indeed smouldered throughout the interval, with 
 numerous more or less serious recrudescences. But 
 on this occasion it assailed the English with all the 
 fury with which the greater infections are accus- 
 tomed to attack a fresh people at a first onset. 
 It seems to have started from China, where a 
 terrible series of floods and earthquakes had 
 poisoned earth, air, and water with the corruption 
 of the unburied dead. The track of its journey 
 westward is now fairly well known. There existed 
 at the time a considerable caravan trade between 
 China and the West, the route of which lay between 
 the 4Oth and 48th parallel of latitude. Two great 
 rivers of South Russia, the Don and the Volga, 
 discharge themselves respectively into the Sea of 
 Azof and the Caspian Sea. To navigate these 
 rivers upwards from their mouths would be to 
 travel for about the first 250 miles in a north-east- 
 erly direction in the case of the Don and towards 
 the north-west in the case of the Volga. So that 
 at one point in their course these two rivers 
 approach each other somewhat closely. And near 
 the points where this approach is closest there stood 
 at this time on the Volga a city of considerable 
 commerce, called Sarai ; whilst Tana, at the mouth 
 of the Don, occupied the site of the modern town
 
 70 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 of Azov. In both of them numbers of enterprising 
 Italian merchants had settled, trafficking in the 
 goods the caravans brought, and forwarding them, 
 through the Italian merchant cities, to their various 
 European destinations. But the Tartar hordes laid 
 siege to Tana, and the merchants there retreated to 
 Caffa, a fortified post on the south-east coast of the 
 Crimea, where a town of that name still stands. 
 This post the Genoese had founded some time 
 previously, and thither the Sea of Azof probably 
 afforded them a comparatively safe and easy means 
 of retreat from Tana, carrying their goods with 
 them. Here in Caffa they again stood a siege, 
 lasting for three years, and here the plague broke 
 out with great virulence, attacking both besiegers 
 and besieged. It is open to question whether the 
 goods brought from Tana had conveyed with them 
 the seeds of the infection, or whether the condition 
 of the besiegers' camp outside the walls offered a 
 favourable soil for the invasion of the plague from 
 without. However that may be, it seems certain 
 that when, after enduring a siege of three years, a 
 number of the Italian merchants within the city 
 escaped in a ship to Genoa, they carried the plague 
 with them. And though there were no cases on 
 board of the fugitive ship, yet within a couple of 
 days of her arrival there were deaths in every part 
 of the city (1347). The spark was thus fairly 
 applied to the inflammable material, and the in- 
 fection spread north and east and west with vast 
 rapidity. In the beginning of August, 1348, it 
 landed at Weymouth ; by the I5th of that month 
 it was in Bristol. Thence by way of Gloucester
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 71 
 
 and Oxford, it travelled up to London, which it 
 reached on November i. 
 
 The pestilence raged through England like a fire, 
 spreading desolation and despair throughout the 
 land. Bad as we know it to have been, we can 
 hardly tell the worst of it, for but few of those 
 who knew it at close quarters had time to record 
 their knowledge. The monastic chronicles for 1349 
 are mostly blank, or consist but of the two words 
 " Magna mortalitas" The clergy seem to have 
 suffered the worst, probably falling a sacrifice to 
 their own devotion in ministering to the dying; 
 and the monasteries worst of all. When the plague 
 reached Ireland, one monastic writer, John Clyn, 
 of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote but a few lines 
 about it, but those are of terrible significance. 
 Speaking of himself as "inter mortuos mortem 
 expectans" "waiting for death amongst the dead" 
 he concludes, " I leave parchment for continuing 
 the work if haply any man survive and any of 
 Adam's race escape this pestilence." And then 
 is written, " Videtur quod author hie obiit" "at 
 this point it seems that the author died"; and the 
 rest is in another hand. 1 This is not the place to 
 enter upon the discussion of the difficulties and 
 probabilities of the various estimates of the total 
 mortality ; suffice it to say that about half the entire 
 population of the England at that time w r as swept 
 away. No age was safe, no rank was immune, 
 for the habits and homes of the people of all classes 
 were then indescribably filthy ; but the common folk 
 suffered most. One of King Edward's daughters, 
 1 Dr. Creighton, op. cit. vol. i. p. 115.
 
 72 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 and three Archbishops of Canterbury l were carried 
 off in the first year. But even in that early day, 
 sanitary measures seem to have found their reward ; 
 and Christ Church, Canterbury, we are told, felt 
 the plague but lightly, for the prior had laid on 
 pure water from the hills to the monastery a century 
 before. 2 
 
 Such are the facts, in briefest possible outline, 
 of a cause whose effects were to influence and 
 largely change the subsequent course of our 
 economic history. For so enormous a diminution 
 in the supply of labour could not fail to raise its 
 price; and as a fact, w^ages immediately after the 
 Death rose to something like double what they had 
 been in 1347. And then arose that struggle be- 
 tween economic law and statutory enactment whose 
 beginning and whose end were alike inevitable. 
 For Statute and Law, like the Earthen and the 
 Brazen Jars of ^sop's fable, can float side by side 
 down the stream of time in safety so long as they 
 do not collide; but the first shock of contact is 
 fatal to the weaker vessel. So when the Plague 
 had reduced the supply of labour its price in wages 
 rose under economic law. And when the King 
 issued a Proclamation directing that no higher 
 wage should be paid than that customary before 
 the Death, the mandate came to nothing, for the 
 farmers had either to pay the higher wages or leave 
 their crops ungarnered. When Parliament could 
 again venture to meet, the Proclamation was em- 
 bodied in a statute, the First Statute of Labourers, 
 
 1 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 221. 
 
 2 Ibid.
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 73 
 
 1350, enacting penalties against all who either gave 
 or accepted more than the old rate of wages. But 
 the frequency with which this Act was re-enacted 
 with variants of many kinds, shows how great w r as 
 its failure. "It was no marvel that Parliament 
 constantly complained that the Statute of Labourers 
 was not kept. The marvel is that they did not 
 see that it could not possibly be kept." 1 Here, 
 then, is a fact of the very first political and economic 
 importance : The people, with economic Law on 
 their side, are struggling with their rulers armed 
 with a statute. The statute fails; and in and by 
 the failure the people learn their strength. 
 
 But in those days of slow and tedious methods of 
 communication it took some time for a political 
 cause to "develop energy." The friction had to 
 be prolonged before the spark was ultimately 
 kindled. Yet the friction did not cease, and the 
 blaze was sure to come. The clumsy methods of 
 taxation continued in evidence, supplying just the 
 kind of constantly repeated irritation, whose effects 
 were likely to be cumulative. The storm broke 
 at last in 1381, in the great Peasants' Revolt, under 
 the leadership of Wat Tyler. 
 
 Once again, and always, it is necessary to em- 
 phasize the distinction between an occasion and a 
 cause in history. There are some who think that 
 the great Indian Mutiny of 1857 was "caused" by 
 the issue of certain cartridges, alleged to have been 
 greased with beef or pork fat, to the Hindu and 
 Muhammadan soldiery. These simple minds neg- 
 
 1 Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 230.
 
 74 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 lect the entire history of India from the battle of 
 Plassy to the Mutiny itself, with its old-standing 
 prophecies, its deposed princes, its seething dis- 
 content. Similarly, the tale of insult offered to 
 Tyler's daughter in respect of the Poll-Tax, and the 
 vengeance of her father, are still sometimes spoken 
 of as the "cause " of the Wat Tyler revolt. Nothing 
 could be further from the truth. The poll-tax of 
 Tyler's time was the third in chronological order 
 of imposition, and the other two had been paid 
 without any special manifestation of hostility. The 
 poll-tax incident was but the spark which fired a 
 train already elaborately laid. And in this pro- 
 cess of storing explosive matter, Wyclif's "poor 
 priests " had been the chief agents. The struggle 
 was an economic one, the clash of two opposing 
 economic tendencies. As two rivers may start 
 from a common watershed and flow in opposite 
 directions, so from the common cause in the Black 
 Death these opposing forces took their rise. On 
 the one hand the nobles, moved by the rise in the 
 price of labour, naturally turned their thoughts 
 back to the times of the old "week work" and 
 "boon days," when their serfs rendered them 
 labour as their right, a right too lightly bartered 
 away in the careless prosperous times before the 
 Death, for an easy money commutation. Hence 
 an endeavour to restore the old labour tenure. 
 But the day was gone by. Opposed to them on 
 the other side were a people to whom the message 
 of a religious socialism was being brought with all 
 its wealth of moving force by the "poor priests" 
 of Wyclif's new dispensation. Of these new
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 75 
 
 preachers such a man as John Ball was at once a 
 leader and a type. Wandering over the land, 
 addressing the people on bleak hillside or under 
 sheltering oak, they told the tale, ever as full of 
 attraction as it is void of foundation, of a primaeval 
 equality of all mankind, and of a people all alike 
 happy in the simplicity of their toil and the pleni- 
 tude of its reward. And the people being thus 
 incited to energy of resistance, they were further 
 bidden to hold themselves in readiness for the call 
 which should summon them to the resumption of 
 their birthright. For the dissemination of such 
 teachings Ball himself was taken and imprisoned 
 in Maidstone gaol. But there was no lack of others 
 to carry on the fiery cross; and when Tyler struck 
 the spark the stored forces were all ready, and the 
 whole country was in a blaze. Three great charac- 
 teristics of this rising show how formidable it was. 
 In the first place it was very general all over the 
 country. The men of Kent had long been quit 
 of serf tenure, yet they took a leading part in the 
 revolt, thus showing that the people were widely 
 possessed of an ideal which led them to make com- 
 mon cause of special grievances. Secondly, the 
 rising was very nearly successful. Granted that 
 for the time being it was a failure; yet never before 
 or since in our history have the powers of order 
 received so bold a defiance, enforced by so shrewd 
 a shock of physical violence. 
 
 It is not necessary to accept every detail as set 
 out by the chroniclers in order to believe that the 
 young King behaved with a courage and discretion 
 beyond his years. But the very detail with which
 
 76 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 the story is told bears witness to the anxiety in- 
 flicted upon London during the terrible June nights 
 while the city was in possession of the insurgents, 
 with John Ball, who had been liberated from Maid- 
 stone gaol, to urge them on with his untutored 
 eloquence. And lastly, unlike most popular risings, 
 it was a cause of a real amelioration in the condition 
 of the people. The landlord class was furious and 
 vowed all sorts of vengeance, but the custom of 
 commuting labour rents became universal ; and only 
 the Lollards suffered for the liberties which others 
 had won. 
 
 Hence two data, as it were, to form the starting 
 points of political and economic reasoning in the 
 minds of the succeeding generations of the people. 
 At the close of the fourteenth century they found 
 themselves prosperous. And that prosperity was 
 all the dearer to them in that they regarded it as 
 having been won by making themselves feared. 
 Here was every requisite for a renewal of a grave 
 danger to the social order. 
 
 For the prosperity was not long-lived. In the 
 latter part of the fifteenth century it had already 
 begun to decline, and throughout the sixteenth 
 century the poverty and the consequent discontent 
 of the people constituted an ever-increasing menace 
 to the established order of society. The causes 
 were various and operative not all at the same time. 
 But, unhappily, any cause making for poverty in 
 the mass of the people is usually cumulative in its 
 results. The discoveries of the precious metals in 
 America were lowering the value of silver, or, what 
 is the same thing under another name, were caus-
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 77 
 
 ing a general rise of prices. But the law to be 
 observed as operative in changes of price is that 
 during the period of transition, whether the change 
 in prices be one of rise or of fall, it is the finished 
 article which changes first, the raw material next, 
 and services last. Hence, unless there be some 
 fairly potent counteracting cause at work, a period 
 of rising prices is apt to be one of hardship for 
 the wage-earner. The things he has to buy have 
 risen in price before the wages he earns the money 
 wages have actually increased. From which it of 
 course follows that real wages the labourer's com- 
 mand of the conveniences and necessaries of life 
 will be diminished by the rise of prices, for as long 
 as the transitional state lasts. 
 
 Another cause of the decline in the prosperity 
 of the labouring class was the coincidence of a 
 rising price of wheat and a rapidly increasing popu- 
 lation. Whilst the price of wheat trebled, the 
 wages rose by only about twenty per cent. In 1495 
 the price of wheat was 45. ofd. per quarter, at which 
 time the artizan in the country was earning 3$. a 
 week, and the husbandman 25. a week. In 1593 
 the corresponding labourers earn 45. and 2s. 6d. ; 
 while the price of wheat is i8s. ^d. So that "the 
 work of a whole year would not supply the labourer 
 with the quantity which in 1495 the labourer earned 
 with fifteen weeks' labour." 1 
 
 Again, the issue of base money, the great 
 
 economic sin of the earlier Tudors, which Elizabeth 
 
 strove with some success to undo, was producing 
 
 its inevitable ill results. An honest money is ever 
 
 1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 391.
 
 78 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 more essentially the interest, and even the neces- 
 sary, of the poor than of the rich. The wealthy 
 man has ready to his hand a hundred ways in which 
 to nullify the evil tendencies of a debased money 
 ways which are not open to the poor. Hence 
 when the currency is debased, the nominal prices 
 of things rise faster than the nominal price of 
 labour. 
 
 A last cause of the growing manifestation of 
 poverty during the last quarter of the sixteenth 
 century, was one to which undue prominence has 
 often been given, but which was nevertheless very 
 real. This was the suppression of the monasteries. 
 These great agencies for the distribution of indis- 
 criminate charity had long acted as a kind of social 
 buffer between society on the one hand, and the sort 
 of poverty that may become desperate and danger- 
 ous on the other. And when these were removed 
 the wealthier classes were left face to face with want 
 want of a sort that might at any moment turn 
 violent. 
 
 Here, then, were all the elements of a real danger 
 to law and order. A people who had known pros- 
 perity and enjoyed it, attributed it to the uprising 
 of their ancestors under Tyler and Ball. The 
 prosperity is slipping away from them. Old men 
 amongst them are reminding them of the doings 
 of their forefathers, when the Government was 
 scared into the concessions on which that prosperity 
 had been founded. What wonder that they were 
 becoming dangerous, or that a far-seeing Govern- 
 ment determined that something must be done to 
 avert the danger?
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 79 
 
 Energetic efforts were made to develop private 
 charity to an extent sufficient to cope with the crisis. 
 As early as 1547 the curate of each church was 
 enjoined to appeal to his parishioners on behalf 
 of "unfeigned misery," in an exhortation which 
 piety ordained was to be godly, and mercy directed 
 to be short. In 1549 collectors were appointed to 
 inquire, at the church door after service, how much 
 each man would give weekly, and then to dis- 
 tribute the amount without favour, so that the most 
 impotent should get the most. But all these pallia- 
 tives failed of their purpose, and hence in 1601 
 we arrive at the first Poor Law in the sense of the 
 term in which it has remained with us ever since. 
 From that day to this the population of England 
 has remained divided into two great classes : 
 paupers, and those who support paupers. 
 
 Let it not be supposed that the enactment of this 
 law was a result, or even a sign, of a considerable 
 softening in the feelings of the ruling class towards 
 the poor of the land. On the contrary, it was a 
 concession to a felt danger, one of which harshness 
 had failed to dispose. By a statute, 14 Eliz. c. 5, 
 "Lusty and valliant beggars" were to be "griev- 
 ously whipped and burned through the gristle of 
 the right ear with an iron of the compass of an inch 
 about, manifesting his or her rogueish life, and his 
 or her punishment for the same." If stern measures 
 of repression could have solved the problem, it 
 would have been solved that way. But that way 
 was no longer possible, and the statute 43 Eliz. c. 3 
 admitted the legal claim to live. 
 
 In its inception and method the statute was a
 
 80 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 wise one. It aimed at the three great principles 
 of Relief, Repression, and Remedy. Relief for 
 the really impotent poor who could not help them- 
 selves. Repression for the "lusty and valliant " 
 vagabond. And Remedy to be applied to that end 
 of life wherein alone its destinies are capable of 
 amelioration, by the education of the children and 
 the apprenticeship of the rising generation. 
 
 The remaining story of our poor-law constitutes 
 a considerable history by itself. Unfortunately 
 the wise methods of the Elizabethan Act were soon 
 obscured or forgotten, and the methods adopted 
 for the State relief of poverty went steadily from 
 bad to worse, until the revelations of the Com- 
 missioners of 1834 brought about the enactment of 
 the New Poor Law of 1835. 
 
 Thus from 1348 to 1835, a period of nearly five 
 hundred years, the chain of cause and effect has 
 linked the facts of modern economic life with a 
 starting-point in the Great Death. One episode 
 in the story deserves special mention the Law of 
 Parochial Settlement. 
 
 When Elizabeth's Act threw upon the several 
 parishes the burden of maintaining the indigent 
 poor resident therein, it was at once manifest that 
 a parish without resident poor would be free from 
 poor-rate. Complete parishes were therefore pur- 
 chased as estates; the poor were given notice to 
 quit, and went to live in the surrounding parishes, 
 from whose rates they derived parish relief in times 
 of stress. To remedy the resulting confusion a 
 somewhat extraordinary measure was adopted in 
 the Law of Parochial Settlement, 1662. By this
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 81 
 
 enactment a man obtained a "settlement" in a 
 parish if he lived there for forty days, and the 
 "settled" parishioner could claim relief out of the 
 parish rates. But before a newcomer to any parish 
 had resided there for forty days, a parishioner 
 could go before a magistrate and make oath that 
 this newcomer might at some future time come 
 upon the rates. And the oath having been made, 
 the new arrival was sent back to the parish whence 
 he came. Numerous modifications were introduced 
 at intervals into the law; but in its more essential 
 features it remained in force until 1795, when it 
 was subjected to drastic alteration ; the power to 
 remit to the parish of origin being abolished in all 
 cases where actual application for parish relief had 
 not been made. But as Prof. Fawcett pointed out, 
 the mischief had been done in that we had for 
 more than a century taught the agricultural labourer 
 that it was almost a crime to make any effort to 
 leave the parish of his birth. And to this cause 
 we may attribute much of the stagnation of agricul- 
 tural labour in the land, with its consequent local 
 diversities of wages. Adam Smith roundly de- 
 nounced the law, and Prof. Fawcett said of it that 
 probably no law of any land ever pressed more 
 hardly on the poor of that land. The law of course 
 fell, but its legal and formal repeal was preceded 
 by its practical abolition under the pressure of 
 economic forces. When the Industrial Revolution 
 had come, and when the factory began to call aloud 
 for hands, the old prejudice against the man from 
 a distance had to die away. Hands were wanted, 
 whether they had ever been apprenticed or not, and
 
 82 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 the Statute of Apprentices became a thing of the 
 past. Hands were welcome, come they whence 
 they would, and the feelings to which the Law of 
 Parochial Settlement had given birth began rapidly 
 to fade away. So that to-day the strength and per- 
 sistence of those feelings may be regarded as a sort 
 of measure of what may be called the rusticity of a 
 British district. When we find, as we still some- 
 times may, a district or a village whose inhabitants 
 regard a ten-miles' journey as a serious under- 
 taking, and "Lunnon " as a terra incognita, full of 
 vague and terrible possibilities, we know that in 
 that place events have marched past upon the other 
 side, and have left the spirit of mediaevalism un- 
 changed. 
 
 We have thus traced one of the great sequences 
 of cause and effect to its origin in the Black Death 
 of 1348-9. It may be well to point out that the 
 belief entertained by the masses of the people 
 the belief which made them dangerous at the close 
 of the sixteenth century namely, that their vanish- 
 ing prosperity had been originally won, and might 
 be restored, by their own violence under such 
 leadership as that of Tyler and Ball, was largely an 
 historical error. The Peasants' Revolt was not in 
 itself a success. But it would be a fatal mistake in 
 statecraft to suppose that it is only true beliefs that 
 can stir a people to formidable action; and Eliza- 
 beth was not the woman to make such a mistake. 
 
 Other results of the same cause can be only briefly 
 indicated. The great expense of hiring labour at 
 the raised wages after the Death did much to set 
 the landlords seeking for a way in which they might
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 83 
 
 derive profit from their land consistently with a 
 smaller outlay upon labour. The way was found 
 in sheep-farming. And the great increase of sheep- 
 farming brought about a great extension of the 
 enclosure of land. Before the Great Death, Eng- 
 land had hardly a hedge. But the enclosures once 
 started went on rapidly, and the rights of the 
 Commoners passed away. The preservation of a 
 few open spaces in or near towns the rescuing 
 of a few scattered remnants of what w r as once the 
 people's heritage is now a matter at once of the 
 greatest difficulty and of the highest importance. 
 
 Again, the landlords were glad to be quit by any 
 means of the burden of finding labour for their 
 land, and the system came into vogue of letting 
 it to tenant farmers. These were the "stock-and- 
 land leases," which were the forerunners of the 
 modern English system of land-tenure. 
 
 Here, then, we may pause to see what general 
 truths can be elicited from even a summary sketch 
 of the facts of our economic history. The steady 
 growth of cause and effect is the most prominent 
 and far-reaching of these truths. In the strict 
 sense of the word very little "happens " to a people. 
 To-day is the product of yesterday, and in its turn 
 will certainly mould the character of to-morrow. 
 And again, we find how organization must follow 
 and cannot force the industrial development, and 
 how a people will advance fastest and farthest when 
 it is most plastic in accommodating itself to 
 changes in the economic conditions. Hospitality 
 towards new ideas and stranger peoples is a
 
 84 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 national asset of the highest value; and exclusive- 
 ness, whether of gild, of municipality, or of nation, 
 carries with it the seeds of decay. The particular 
 kind of change called growth is at once the con- 
 dition and the manifestation of life, and finality 
 never was in the beginning, is not now, and never 
 shall be. 
 
 THE END
 
 A Plain Guide to 
 Investment and Finance 
 
 By T. E. YOUNG, B.A., F.R.A.S. 
 
 Past President of the Institute of Actuaries, Past Chairman of tht Life Offices' 
 Association, late Head Actuary of the Commercial Union Assurance Co. 
 
 Crown 8vo, 358 pp., cloth. Price 55. 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 A few of the subjects dealt with : Trade, Commerce and Industry 
 Markets generally and the Money Market in particular Bank of Eng- 
 land Joint Stock Banks Bills of Exchange Foreign Exchanges Bill 
 Brokers Stock Exchange Brokers and Jobbers Bulls and Bears 
 Sympathy of Markets Causes of the Variations in the Prices of 
 Securities Effect of War on the Prices of Securities Dear and Cheap 
 Money Condition of Trade in its Effect on the Prices of Securities 
 and Consols Accrued Interest as affecting the Cost of Securities 
 The Return derived from an Investment Ex-Dividend and Ex-Interest, 
 Cum Dividend and Cum Interest Sinking Funds, Speculations and 
 Gambling The Phase of Commercial Crises in the Course of Trade, 
 and the Succession of Sun Spots, Index Numbers, etc. , etc. 
 
 "It is carefully and lucidly written, and any one who desires to get a compre- 
 hensive grasp of the financial world at large and of the Stock and Money Markets 
 particularly, cannot secure a better or more reliable guide." Financial Times, 
 
 " Regarded from every point of view this work is really admirable, and the reader 
 cannot fail to profit very greatly from its clear exposition. " The Financier. 
 
 " Mr. Young's book truly fulfils the office of guide. A child could understand its 
 simple explanations. Everything that is necessary for one to know is expounded 
 clearly and concisely, and the various influences to which the investment market is 
 subject are shown. The book is a veritable vade mecnm and all interested in finance 
 and financial operations should not be without it." The Financial Standard. 
 
 "We are glad to testify with emphasis to the excellence of this manual. It is one 
 of the soundest, most carefully written, honest, and lucid manuals on the subject 
 dealt with we have ever come across." The Investor's Review. 
 
 "This is a book which would amply merit more than one notice. No other author 
 is better equipped than Mr. Young to supply a real and wide knowledge. Nothing 
 superficial will ever be found in his pages. . . . To sum up, we give a most cordial 
 welcome to a very valuable book. The man who relies on his experience will learn 
 much from its exposition of principles, and the student who resorts to it to equip 
 himself in principle will find abundant assistance to him in the at first bewildering 
 world of practice." Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor. 
 
 "The style is invariably clear and interesting ; and as the book is the outcome of 
 long experience, it should be found of service both by those who have money to invest 
 and by the ordinary student of economics." The Scotsman (Edinburgh). 
 
 "We must highly commend Mr. T. E. Young's 'A Plain Guide to Investment 
 and Finance ' for its sound reasoning, solid good sense, and wise discrimination. ' 
 The Liverpool Post. 
 
 " It is a remarkable book in many ways, and is thoroughly worth the price asked. 
 
 ' 
 
 , . 
 
 It should find a place on every business man's desk, for there is certain to be 
 something in it that can be learned with advantage." The Review. 
 
 Mr. Young's name is familiar to everybody in the life assurance world, where he 
 
 has made a reputation for sound judgment and an absolute mastery of his profession. 
 . . . From start to finish his book is couched in simple language, with explanations 
 of the few technical terms in footnotes. . . . It is excellently written." The Policy.
 
 AN ELEMENTARY 
 MANUAL OF STATISTICS 
 
 By A. L. BOWLEY, M.A. 
 
 Trinity College, Cambridge 
 
 Guy Silver Medallist and V ice-President of the Royal Statistical 
 
 Society, 1895; Newmarch Lecturer 1897 and 1898; Reader in 
 
 Statistics in the University of London. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 55. 
 
 MR. BOWLEY is one of the first statisticians of the day. 
 His "Elements of Statistics,'' a book that has gone 
 through several editions, is the standard work upon the subject. 
 But the price is high and the knowledge presumed on the part 
 of the reader is considerable, as the book is intended for the 
 use of post-graduates. The present work, while in no way 
 encroaching upon the scope of the larger book, provides an 
 introduction to the study of Statistics adapted to the require- 
 ments of younger students. It appeals to all students of 
 Economics and Politics, to the Actuarial student and to all 
 members of the Medical Profession who are interested in the 
 compilation and handling of vital statistics. 
 
 The Economist says: "Mr. Bowley's book provides a practical and clear 
 introduction to the subject, in which the results of much knowledge are admirably 
 arranged in a small space." 
 
 The Post Magazine says: "Although not specially intended for students of 
 insurance problems the book is worthy of their careful perusal, because of the vital 
 importance in insurance matters of a grasp of the right methods of handling 
 statistical data." 
 
 The Lancet says: "It deals in masterly style with some of the more difficult 
 problems that perplex the beginner." 
 
 MACDONALD AND EVANS, 4 ADAM STREET, 
 ADELPHI, LONDON, W.C.
 
 LANDLORD AND TENANT: 
 their Rights and Duties 
 
 By ALBERT E. HOQAN, LL.D., B.A. 
 
 London University Law Scholar, Law Society's Scholar in International Law, 
 Qua>'n Essay Prizeman, Whittuck Essay Prizeman, etc. ; Solicitor. 
 
 Fcap. 8vo, cloth - - 160 pp. 
 Price is. 6d. net. 
 
 A practical handbook by an able practitioner, explaining 
 in simple, and as far as possible, non-technical language, 
 the relationship of landlord and tenant. It covers every 
 point likely to arise out of the relationship, and will prove 
 a most useful guide both to landlords and tenants. 
 
 HOW TO 
 MAKE AND PROVE A WILL 
 
 By ALBERT E. HOGAN, LL.D., B.A. 
 
 Solicitor, Author of " Landlord and Tenant." 
 
 Fcap. 8vo. 1 60 pp. Price is. 6d. net. 
 
 A practical guide similar in character to that of " Land- 
 lord and Tenant," explaining fully everything that Testators, 
 Executors, Trustees, and Beneficiaries require to know. 
 
 MACDONALD AND EVANS, 4 ADAM STREET, 
 ADELPHI, LONDON, W.C.
 
 RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND 
 
 BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 81 
 
 enactment a man obtained a "settlement" In a 
 parish if he lived there for forty days, and the 
 "settled" parishioner could claim relief out of the 
 parish rates. But before a newcomer to any parish 
 had resided there for forty days, a parishioner 
 could go before a magistrate and make oath that 
 this newcomer might at some future time come 
 upon the rates. And the oath having been made, 
 the new arrival was sent back to the parish whence 
 he came. Numerous modifications were introduced 
 at intervals into the law ; but in its more essential 
 features it remained in force until 1795, when it 
 was subjected to drastic alteration ; the power to 
 remit to the parish of origin being abolished in all 
 cases where actual application for parish relief had 
 not been made. But as Prof. Fawcett pointed out, 
 the mischief had been done in that we had for 
 more than a century taught the agricultural labourer 
 that it was almost a crime to make any effort to 
 leave the parish of his birth. And to this cause 
 we may attribute much of the stagnation of agricul- 
 tural labour in the land, with its consequent local 
 diversities of wages. Adam Smith roundly de- 
 nounced the law, and Prof. Fawcett said of it that 
 probably no law 7 of any land ever pressed more 
 hardly on the poor of that land. The law of course 
 fell, but its legal and formal repeal was preceded 
 by its practical abolition under the pressure of 
 economic forces. When the Industrial Revolution 
 had come, and when the factory began to call aloud 
 for hands, the old prejudice against the man from 
 a distance had to die away. Hands were wanted, 
 whether they had ever been apprenticed or not, and 
 G
 
 82 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 the Statute of Apprentices became a thing of the 
 past. Hands were welcome, come they whence 
 they would, and the feelings to which the Law of 
 Parochial Settlement had given birth began rapidly 
 to fade away. So that to-day the strength and per- 
 sistence of those feelings may be regarded as a sort 
 of measure of what may be called the rusticity of a 
 British district. When we find, as we still some- 
 times may, a district or a village whose inhabitants 
 regard a ten-miles' journey as a serious under- 
 taking, and "Lunnon " as a terra incognita, full of 
 vague and terrible possibilities, we know that in 
 that place events have marched past upon the other 
 side, and have left the spirit of mediaevalism un- 
 changed. 
 
 We have thus traced one of the great sequences 
 of cause and effect to its origin in the Black Death 
 of 1348-9. It may be well to point out that the 
 belief entertained by the masses of the people 
 the belief which made them dangerous at the close 
 of the sixteenth century namely, that their vanish- 
 ing prosperity had been originally won, and might 
 be restored, by their own violence under such 
 leadership as that of Tyler and Ball, was largely an 
 historical error. The Peasants' Revolt was not in 
 itself a success. But it would be a fatal mistake in 
 statecraft to suppose that it is only true beliefs that 
 can stir a people to formidable action ; and Eliza- 
 beth was not the woman to make such a mistake. 
 
 Other results of the same cause can be only briefly 
 indicated. The great expense of hiring labour at 
 the raised wages after the Death did much to set 
 the landlords seeking for a way in which they might
 
 THE GREAT DEATH AND ITS RESULTS 83 
 
 derive profit from their land consistently with a 
 smaller outlay upon labour. The way was found 
 in sheep-farming. And the great increase of sheep- 
 farming brought about a great extension of the 
 enclosure of land. Before the Great Death, Eng- 
 land had hardly a hedge. But the enclosures once 
 started went on rapidly, and the rights of the 
 Commoners passed away. The preservation of a 
 few open spaces in or near towns the rescuing 
 of a few scattered remnants of what was once the 
 people's heritage is now a matter at once of the 
 greatest difficulty and of the highest importance. 
 
 Again, the landlords were glad to be quit by any 
 means of the burden of finding labour for their 
 land, and the system came into vogue of letting 
 it to tenant farmers. These were the "stock-and- 
 land leases," which were the forerunners of the 
 modern English system of land-tenure. 
 
 Here, then, we may pause to see what general 
 truths can be elicited from even a summary sketch 
 of the facts of our economic history. The steady 
 growth of cause and effect is the most prominent 
 and far-reaching of these truths. In the strict 
 sense of the word very little "happens " to a people. 
 To-day is the product of yesterday, and in its turn 
 will certainly mould the character of to-morrow. 
 And again, we find how organization must follow 
 and cannot force the industrial development, and 
 how a people will advance fastest and farthest when 
 it is most plastic in accommodating itself to 
 changes in the economic conditions. Hospitality 
 towards new ideas and stranger peoples is a
 
 84 FROM GILD TO FACTORY 
 
 national asset of the highest value; and exclusive- 
 ness, whether of gild, of municipality, or of nation, 
 carries with it the seeds of decay. The particular 
 kind of change called growth is at once the con- 
 dition and the manifestation of life, and finality 
 never was in the beginning, is not now, and never 
 shall be. 
 
 THE END
 
 A Plain Guide to 
 Investment and Finance 
 
 By T. E. YOUNG, B.A., F.R.A.S. 
 
 Past President of the Institute of Actuaries, Past Chairman of tht Life Offices' 
 Association, late Head Actuary of the Commercial Union Assurance Co. 
 
 Crown 8vo, 358 pp., cloth. Price 55. 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 A few of the subjects dealt with : Trade, Commerce and Industry 
 Markets generally and the Money Market in particular Bank of Eng- 
 land Joint Stock Banks Bills of Exchange Foreign Exchanges Bill 
 Brokers Stock Exchange Brokers and Jobbers Bulls and Bears 
 Sympathy of Markets Causes of the Variations in the Prices of 
 Securities Effect of War on the Prices of Securities Dear and Cheap 
 Money Condition of Trade in its Effect on the Prices of Securities 
 and Consols Accrued Interest as affecting the Cost of Securities 
 The Return derived from an Investment Ex-Dividend and Ex-Interest, 
 Cum Dividend and Cum Interest Sinking Funds, Speculations and 
 Gambling The Phase of Commercial Crises in the Course of Trade, 
 and the Succession of Sun Spots, Index Numbers, etc. , etc. 
 
 " It is carefully and lucidly written, and any one who desires to get a compre- 
 hensive grasp of the financial world at large and of the Stock and Money Markets 
 particularly, cannot secure a better or more reliable guide." Financial Times, 
 
 " Regarded from every point of view this work is really admirable, and the reader 
 cannot fail to profit very greatly from its clear exposition." The Financier. 
 
 " Mr. Young's book truly fulfils the office of guide. A child could understand its 
 simple explanations. Everything that is necessary for one to know is expounded 
 clearly and concisely, and the various influences to which the investment market is 
 subject are shown. The book is a veritable vade mecnm and all interested in finance 
 and financial operations should not be without it." The Financial Standard. 
 
 "We are glad to testify with emphasis to the excellence of this manual. It is one 
 of the soundest, most carefully written, honest, and lucid manuals on the subject 
 dealt with we have ever come across." The Investor's Review. 
 
 "This is a book which would amply merit more than one notice. No other author 
 is better equipped than Mr. Young to supply a real and wide knowledge. Nothing 
 superficial will ever be found in his pages. . . . To sum up, we give a most cordial 
 welcome to a very valuable book. The man who relies on his experience will learn 
 much from its exposition of principles, and the student who resorts to it to equip 
 himself in principle will find abundant assistance to him in the at first bewildering 
 world of practice/' Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor. 
 
 "The style is invariably clear and interesting ; and as the book is the outcome of 
 long experience, it should be found of service both by those who have money to invest 
 and by the ordinary student of economics." The Scotsman (Edinburgh). 
 
 "We must highly commend Mr. T. E. Young's 'A Plain Guide to Investment 
 and Finance ' for its sound reasoning, solid good sense, and wise discrimination. ' 
 The Liverpool Post. 
 
 " It is a remarkable book in many ways, and is thoroughly worth the price asked. 
 It should find a place on every business man's desk, for there is certain to be 
 something in it that can be learned with advantage." The Review. 
 
 "Mr. Young's name is familiar to everybody in the life assurance world, where he 
 has made a reputation for sound judgment and an absolute mastery of his profession. 
 . . . From start to finish his book is couched in simple language, with explanations 
 of the few technical terms in footnotes. . . . It is excellently written." The Policy.
 
 AN ELEMENTARY 
 MANUAL OF STATISTICS 
 
 By A. L. BOWLEY, M.A. 
 
 Trinity College, Cambridge 
 
 Guy Silver Medallist and Vice-President of the Royal Statistical 
 
 Society, 1895; Neivmarch Lecturer 1897 and 1898; Reader in 
 
 Statistics in the Uniuersity of London. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 55. 
 
 MR. BOWLEY is one of the first statisticians of the day. 
 His "Elements of Statistics,'' a book that has gone 
 through several editions, is the standard work upon the subject. 
 But the price is high and the knowledge presumed on the part 
 of the reader is considerable, as the book is intended for the 
 use of post-graduates. The present work, while in no way 
 encroaching upon the scope of the larger book, provides an 
 introduction to the study of Statistics adapted to the require- 
 ments of younger students. It appeals to all students of 
 Economics and Politics, to the Actuarial student and to all 
 members of the Medical Profession who are interested in the 
 compilation and handling of vital statistics. 
 
 The Economist says : " Mr. Bowley's book provides a practical and clear 
 introduction to the subject, in which the results of much knowledge are admirably 
 arranged in a small space." 
 
 The Post Magazine says: "Although not specially intended for students of 
 insurance problems the book is worthy of their careful perusal, because of the vital 
 importance in insurance matters of a grasp of the right methods of handling 
 statistical data." 
 
 The Lancet says: "It deals in masterly style with some of the more difficult 
 problems that perplex the beginner." 
 
 MACDONALD AND EVANS, 4 ADAM STREET, 
 ADELPHI, LONDON, W.C.
 
 LANDLORD AND TENANT: 
 their Rights and Duties 
 
 By ALBERT E. HOQAN, LL.D., B.A. 
 
 London University Law Scholar, Law Society's Scholar in International Law, 
 Quain Essay Prizeman, Whittuck Essay Prizeman, etc. ; Solicitor. 
 
 Fcap. 8vo, cloth - - 160 pp. 
 Price is. 6d. net. 
 
 A practical handbook by an able practitioner, explaining 
 in simple, and as far as possible, non-technical language, 
 the relationship of landlord and tenant. It covers every 
 point likely to arise out of the relationship, and will prove 
 a most useful guide both to landlords and tenants. 
 
 HOW TO 
 MAKE AND PROVE A WILL 
 
 By ALBERT E. HOQAN, LL.D., B.A. 
 
 Solicitor, Author of " Landlord and Tenant." 
 
 Fcap. 8vo. 1 60 pp. Price is. 6d. net. 
 
 A practical guide similar in character to that of " Land- 
 lord and Tenant," explaining fully everything that Testators, 
 Executors, Trustees, and Beneficiaries require to know. 
 
 MACDONALD AND EVANS, 4 ADAM STREET, 
 ADELPHI, LONDON, W.C.
 
 RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND 
 
 BUNGAV, SUFFOLK.
 
 ; - '' 
 
 A 000 676 696 8 
 
 University of California 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 Return this material to the library 
 
 from which it was borrowed.