Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

However, all such regulations belong to later periods of the cities' life, while at an earlier period it was the city itself which used to buy all food supplies for the use of the citizens. The documents recently published by Mr. Gross are quite positive on this point and fully support his conclusion to the effect that the cargoes of subsistences " were purchased by certain civic officials in the name of the town, and then distributed in shares 1 When a boat brought a cargo of coal to Wiirzburg, coal could only be sold in retail during the first eight days, each family being entitled to no more than fifty basketfuls. The remaining cargo could be sold wholesale, but the retailer was allowed to raise a zittlicher profit only, the unzittlicher, or dishonest profit, being strictly forbidden (Gramich, /. c). Same in London (Liber aU>us, quoted by Ochenkowski, p. i6i), and, in fact, everywhere.

^ See Fagniez, jttudes sur Vindustrie et la dasse industrielk h, Paris au Xlllme et XlVme sikle, Paris, 1877, PP- ^55 ^^9- It hardly need be added that the tax on bread, and on beer as well, was settled after careful experiments as to the quantity of bread and beer which could be obtained from a given amount of corn. The Amiens archives contain the minutes of such experiences (A. de Calonne, I.e. pp. 77, 93). Also those of London (Ochenkowski, England's wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, etc., Jena, 1879, P- 165).

among the merchant burgesses, no one being allowed to buy wares landed in the port unless the municipal authorities refused to purchase them. This seems — h'e adds — to have been quite a common practice in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland." ^ Even in the sixteenth century we find that common purchases of corn were made for the " comoditie and profitt in all things of this .... Citie and Chamber of London, and of all the Citizens and Inhabitants of the same as moche as in us lieth" — as the Mayor wrote in 1565.2 In Venice, the whole of the trade in corn is well known to have been in the hands of the city ; the "quarters," on receiving the cereals from the board which adminis- trated the imports, being bound to send to every citizen's house the quantity allotted to him.^ In France, the city of Amiens used to purchase salt and to distribute it to all citizens at cost price ; * and even now one sees in many French towns the halles which

1 Ch. Grossj The Guild Merchant, Oxford, 1890, i. 135. His documents prove that this practice existed in Liverpool (ii. 148-150), Waterford in Ireland, Neath in Wales, and Linlithgow and Thurso in Scotland. Mr. Gross's texts also show that the purchases were made for distribution, not only among the merchant burgesses, but "upon all citsains and commynalte" (p. 136, note), or, as the Thurso ordinance of the seventeenth century runs, to " make oifer to the merchants, craftsmen, and inhabitants of the said burgh, that they may have their proportion of the same, according to their necessitys and ability."

2 The Early History of the Guild of Merchant Taylors, by Charles M. Clode, London, 1888, i. 361, appendix 10 ; also the follow- ing appendix which shows that the same purchases were made in 1546. ^ Cibrario, Les conditions iconomiques de Vltalie au temps de Dante, Paris, 1865, p. 44. ■* A. de Calonne, La vie municipale au XVme stick dans le Nord de la France, Paris, 1880, pp. 12-16. In 1485 the city permitted the export to Antwerp of a certain quantity of corn, "the inhabitants of Antwerp being always ready to be agreeable to the merchants and burgesses of Amiens" (ibid., pp. 75-77 and texts).

formerly were municipal dSpSts for corn and salt.^ In Russia it was a regular custom in Novgorod and Pskov. The whole matter relative to the communal purchases for the use of the citizens, and the manner in which they used to be made, seems not to have yet received proper attention from the historians of the period ; but there are here and there some very interesting facts which throw a new light upon it. Thus there is, among Mr. Gross's documents, a Kilkenny ordinance of the year 1367, from which we learn how the prices of the goods were established. " The merchants and the sailors," Mr. Gross writes, " were to state on oath the first cost of the goods and the expenses of trans- portation. Then the mayor of the town and two discreet men were to name the price at which the wares were to be sold." The same rule held good in Thurso for merchandise coming " by sea or land." This way of ' ' naming the price " so well answers to the very conceptions of trade which were current in mediaeval times that it must have been all but universal. To have the price established by a third person was a very old custom ; and for all interchange within the city it certainly was a widely-spread habit to leave the establishment of prices to " discreet men " — to a third party — and not to the vendor or the buyer. But this order of things takes us still further back in the history of trade— namely, to a time when trade in staple produce was carried on by the whole city, and the merchants were only the comm,issioners, the trustees, of the city for selling the goods which it exported. A Waterford ordinance, published also by Mr. Gross, says " that all manere of marchandis what

so ever kynde thei be of . . . shal be bought by the Maire and balives which bene commene biers [common buyers, for the town] for the time being, and to distribute the same on freemen of the citie (the propre goods of free citisains and inhabitants only excepted)." This ordinance can hardly be explained otherwise than by admitting that all the exterior trade of the town was carried on by its agents. Moreover, we have direct evidence of such having been the case for Novgorod and Pskov. It was the Sovereign Nov- gorod and the Sovereign Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to distant lands.

We know also that in nearly all mediaeval cities ol Middle and Western Europe, the craft guilds used to buy, as a body, all necessary raw produce, and to sell the produce of their work through their officials, and it is hardly possible that the same should not have been done for exterior trade — the more so as it is well known that up to the thirteenth century, not only all merchants of a given city were considered abroad as responsible in a body for debts contracted by any one of them, but the whole city as well was responsible for the debts of each one of its merchants. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth century the towns on the Rhine entered into special treaties abolishing this responsi- bility.^ And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich document published by Mr. Gross, from which docu- ment we learn that the merchant guild of this town was constituted by all who had the freedom of the city, and who wished to pay their contribution (" their hanse ") to the guild, the whole community discussing all together how better to maintain the merchant guild, and giving it certain privileges. The merchant guild of Ipswich 1 Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt'Kdln, i. 491, 492, also texts.

thus appears rather as a body of trustees of the town than as a common private guild. In-^hort, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organizatioh. How far this attempt has been successful will be best seen when we have analyzed in the next chapter the organization of labour in the mediaeval city and the relations of the cities with the surrounding peasant population.

Likeness and diversity among the mediaeval cities. — The craft- guilds : State-attributes in each of thentt. — Attitude of the city towards the peasants ; attempts to free them. — The lords. — Results achieved by the mediaeval city : in arts, in learning. — Causes of decay. The mediaeval cities were not organized upon some preconceived plan in obedience to the will of an out- 1 side legislator. Each of them was a natural growth in the full sense of the word — an always varying result of struggle between various forces which adjusted and 7 re-adjusted themselves in conformity with their relative ^ energies, the chances of their conflicts, and the support they found in their surroundings. Therefore, there are not two cities whose inner organization and destinies would have been identical. Each one, taken separately, varies from century to century. And yet, when we cast a broad glance upon all the cities of Europe, the local and national unlikenesses disappear, and we are struck to find among all of them a wonder- ful resemblance, although each has developed for itself, independently from the others, and in different con- ditions. A small town in the north of Scotland, with its population of coarse labourers and fishermen ; a rich city of Flanders, with its world-wide commerce, luxury, love of amusement and animated life ; an Italian city enriched by its intercourse with the East,

and breeding within its walls a refined artistic taste and civilization ; and a poor, chiefly agricultural, city in the marsh and lake district of Russia, seem to have little in common. And nevertheless, the leading lines of their organization, and the spirit which animates them, are imbued with a strong family likeness. Everywhere we see the same federations of small communities and guilds, the same " sub-towns " round, the mother city, the same folkmote, and the same insigns of its independence. The defensor of the city, under different names and in different accoutrements, represents the same authority and interests ; food supplies, labour and commerce, are organized on closely similar lines ; inner and outer struggles are fought with like ambitions ; nay, the very formulae used in the struggles, as also in the annals, the ordin- ances, and the rolls, are identical ; and the architectural monuments, whether Gothic, Roman, or Byzantine in style, express the same aspirations and the same ideals ; they are conceived and built in the same way. Many dissemblances are mere differences of age, and those disparities between sister cities which are real are repeated in different parts of Europe. The unity of the leading idea and the identity of origin make up for differences of climate, geographical situation, wealth, language and religion. This is why we can speak of the mediaeval city as of a well-defined phase of civilization ; and while every research insisting upon local and individual differences is most welcome, we may still indicate the chief lines of development which are common to all cities.^

1 The literature of the subject is immense ; but there is no work yet which treats of the mediaeval city as of a whole. For the French Communes, Augustin Thierry's Lettres and Considerations sur There is no doubt that the protection which used to be accorded to the market-place from the earliest barbarian times has played an important, though not an exclusive, part in the emancipation of the mediaeval city. The early barbarians knew no trade within their village communities ; they traded with strangers only, at certain definite spots, on certain determined days. And, in order that the stranger might come to the barter-place without risk of being slain for some feud which might be running between two kins, the market was always placed under the special protection of all kins. It was inviolable, like the place of worship under the shadow of which it was held. With the Kabyles it is still annaya, like the footpath along

Pkistoire de Fratue still remain classical, and Luchaire's Communes franfaises is an excellent addition on the same lines. For the cities of Italy, the great work of Sismondi {Histoire des rkfubliques italiennes du moyen age, Paris, 1826, 16 vols.), Leo and Botta's History of Italy, Ferrari's Rtvolutions d'ltalie, and Hegel's Geschichte der Stddtever- fassung in Jtalien, are the chief sources of general information. For Germany we have Maurer's Stddteverfassung, Barthold's Geschichte der deutschen Stddte, and, of recent works, Hegel's Stddte und Gilden der germanischen Volker {2 vols. Leipzig, 1891), and Dr. Otto Kallsen's Z>?V deutschen Stddte im Mittelalter (2 vols. Halle, 1891), as also Janssen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (5 vols. 1886), which, let us hope, will soon be translated into EngUsh (French translation in 1892). For Belgium, A. Wauters, Les Libertes communales (Bruxelles, 1869-78, 3 vols.). For Russia, Byelaeff's, Kostomaroff's and Sergievich's works. And finally, for England, we posses one of the best works on cities of a wider region in Mrs. J. R. Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (2 vols. London, 1894). We have, moreover, a wealth of well-known local histories, and several excel- lent works of general or economical history which I have so often mentioned in this and the preceding chapter. The richness of liter- ature consists, however, chiefly in separate, sometimes admirable, researches into the history of separate cities, especially Italian and German ; the guilds ; the land question ; the economical principles of the time ; the economical importance of guilds and crafts ; the leagues between cities (the Hansa) ; and communal art. An incredible wealth of information is contained in works of this second category, of which only some of the more important are named in these pages.

which women carry water from the well ; neither must be trodden upon in arms, even during inter-tribal wars. In mediaeval times the market universally enjoyed the same protection. ^ No feud could be prosecuted on the place whereto people came to trade, nor within a certain radius from it ; and if a quarrel arose in the motley crowd of buyers and sellers, it had to be brought before those under whose protection the market stood — the community's tribunal, or the bishop's, the lord's, or the king's judge. A stranger who came to trade was a guest, and he went on under this very name. Even the lord who had no scruples about robbing a merchant on the high road, respected the Weichbiid, that is, the pole which stood in the market-place and bore either the king's arms, or a glove, or the image of the local saint, or simply a cross, according to whether the market was under the protection of the king, the lord, the local church, or the folkmote — the vyeche?'

It is easy to understand how the self-jurisdiction of the city could develop out of the special jurisdiction in the market-place, when this last right was conceded, willingly or not, to the city itself. And such an origin 1 Kulischer, in an excellent essay on primitive trade (Zeitschrift fiir Volkerpsychologie, Bd. x. 380), also points out that, according to Herodotus, the Argippaeans were considered inviolable, because the trade between the Scythians and the northern tribes took place on their territory. A fugitive was sacred on their territory, and they were often asked to act as arbiters for their neighbours. See Appendix XI.

^ Some discussion has lately taken place upon the Weichbild and the Weichl>ild-\a.w, which still remain obscure (see Zopfl, Alterthiimer des deutschen Reichs und Rechts, iii. 29 ; Kallsen, i. 316). The above explanation seems to be the more probable, but, of course, it must be tested by further research, It is also evident that, to use a Scotch expression, the " mercet cross " could be considered as an emblem of Church jurisdiction, but we find it both in bishop cities and in those in which the folkmote was sovereign.

of the city's liberties, which can be traced in very many cases, necessarily laid a special stamp upon their sub- sequent development. It gave a predominance to the trading part of the community. The burghers who possessed a house in the city at the time being, and were co-owners in the town-lands, constituted very often a merchant guild which held in its hands the city's trade ; and although at the outset every burgher, rich and poor, could make part of the merchant guild, and the trade itself seems to have been carried on for the entire city by its trustees, the guild gradually became a sort of privileged body. It jealously prevented the outsiders who soon began to flock into the free cities from entering the gfuild, and kept the advantages result- ing from trade for the few " families " which had been burghers at the time of the emancipation. There evidently was a danger of a merchant oligarchy being thus constituted. But already in the tenth, and still more during the two next centuries, the chief crafts, also organized in guilds, were powerful enough to check the oligarchic tendencies of the merchants.

The craft guild was then a common seller of its produce and a common buyer of the raw materials, and its members were merchants and manual workers at the same time. Therefore, the predominance taken by the old craft guilds from the very beginnings of the free city life guaranteed to manual labour the high position which it afterwards occupied in the city.^ In fact, in a 1 For all concerning the merchant guild see Mr. Gross's exhaustive work. The Guild Merchant (Oxford, 1890, 2 vols.); also Mrs. Green's remarks in Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, vol. ii. chaps. V. viii. X. ; and A. Doren's review of the subject in Schmoller's Forschungen, vol. xii. If the considerations indicated in the previous chapter (according to which trade was communal at its beginnings) prove to be correct, it will be permissible to suggest as a probable hypothesis that the guild merchant was a body entrusted

mediaeval city manual labour was no token of in- feriority; it bore, on the contrary, traces of the high respect it had been kept in in the village community. Manual labour in a " mystery " was considered as a pious duty towards the citizens : a public function {Ami), as honourable as any other. An idea of "justice" to the community, of "right" towards both producer and consumer, which would seem so ex- travagant now, penetrated production and exchange. The tanner's, the cooper's, or the shoemaker's work must be "just," fair, they wrote in those times. Wood, leather or thread which are used by the artisan must be "right" ; bread must be baked "in justice," and so on. Transport this language into our present life, and it would seem affected and unnatural ; but it was natural and unaffected then, because the mediaeval artisan did not produce for an unknown buyer, or to throw his goods into an unknown market. He pro- duced for his guild first ; for a brotherhood of men who knew each other, knew the technics of the craft, and, in naming the price of each product, could appreciate the skill displayed in its fabrication or the labour bestowed upon it. Then the guild, not the separate producer, offered the goods for sale in the community, and this last, in its turn, offered to the brotherhood of allied communities those goods which were exported, and assumed responsibility for their

with commerce in the interest of the whole city, and only gradually became a guild of merchants trading for themselves; while the merchant adventurers of this country, the Novgorod povolniki (free colonizers and merchants) and the mercati personati, would be those to whom it was left to open new markets and new branches of com- merce for themselves. Altogether, it must be remarked that the origin of the mediaeval city can be ascribed to no separate agency. It was a result of many agencies in different degrees.

quality. With such an organization, it was the ambition of each craft not to offer goods of inferior quality, and technical defects or adulterations became a matter concerning the whole community, because, an ordinance says, ' ' they would destroy public con- fidence." ^ Production being thus a social, duty, placed under the control of the whole amitas, manual labour could not fall into the degraded condition which it occupies now, so long as the free city was living.

A difference between master and apprentice, or between master and worker {compayne, Geselle), existed in the mediaeval cities from their very beginnings ; but this was at the outset a mere difference of age and skill, not of wealth and power. After a seven years' apprenticeship, and after having proved his knowledge and capacities by a work of art, the apprentice became a master himself And only much later, in the six- teenth century, after the royal power had destroyed the city and the craft organization, was it possible to become master in virtue of simple inheritance or wealth. But this was also the time of a general decay in mediaeval industries and art.

There was not much room for hired work in the early flourishing periods of the mediaeval cities, still less for individual hirelings. The work of the weavers, the archers, the smiths, the bakers, and so on, was performed for the craft and the city ; and when crafts- men were hired in the building trades, they worked as temporary^corporations (as they still do in the Russian artels), whose work was paid en bloc. Work for a master began to multiply only later on ; but even in this case the worker was paid better than he is paid now,

1 Janssen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 315; Gramich's Wiirzburg ; and, in fact, any collection of ordinances. even in this country, and very much better than he used to be paid all over Europe in the first half of this century. Thorold Rogers has familiarized English readers with this idea; but the same is true for the Continent as well, as is shown by the researches of Falke and Schonberg, and by many occasional indica- tions. Even in the fifteenth century a mason, a carpenter, or a smith worker would be paid at Amiens four sols a day, which corresponded to forty-eight pounds of bread, or to the eighth part of a small ox \bouvard). In Saxony, the salary of the Geselle in the building trade was such that, to put it in Falke's words, he could buy with his six days' wages three sheep and one pair of shoes. ^ The donations of workers {Geselle) to cathedrals also bear testimony of their relative well-being, to say nothing of the glorious donations of certain craft guilds nor of what they used to spend in festivities and pageants.^ In fact, the more we learn about the mediaeval city, the more we are convinced that at no time has labour enjoyed such conditions of prosperity and such respect as when city life stood at its highest.

1 Falke, Geschichtliche Statistik, i. 373-393, and ii. 66 ; quoted in Janssen's Geschichte, i. 339 ; J. D. Blavignac, in Comptes et defenses de la construction du clocher de Saint-Nicolas a Fribourg en Suisse, comes to a similar conclusion. For Amiens, De Calonne's Vie Muni- cipale, p. 99 and Appendix. For a thorough appreciation and graphical representation of the mediaeval wages in England and their value in bread and meat, see G. Steffen's excellent article and curves in The Nineteenth Century for 1891, and Studier o/ver lonsystemets historia i England, Stockholm, 1895.

^ To quote but one example out of many which may be found in Sehonberg's and Falke's works, the sixteen shoemaker workers {Schusterknechte) of the town Xanten, on the Rhine, gave, for erecting a screen and an altar in the church, 75 guldens of subscriptions, and 12 guldens out of their box, which money was worth, according to the best valuations, ten times its present value. modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact. We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but — " every one must be pleased with his work," a mediaeval Kuttenberg ordinance says, " and no one shall, while doing nothing {mit nichts thun), appropriate for him- self what others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield for application and work." ^ And amidst all present talk about an eight hours' day, it may be well to remember an ordinance of Ferdinand the First relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled the miner's day at eight hours, "as it used to be of old " {wie vor Alters kerkommen), and work on Saturday afternoon was prohibited. Longer hours were very rare, we are told by Janssen, while shorter hours were of common occurrence. In this country, in the fifteenth century, Rogers says, " the workmen worked only forty-eight hours a week." ^ The Saturday half-holiday, too, which we consider as a modern conquest, was in reality an old mediaeval institution ; it was bathing-time for a great part of the community, while Wednesday afternoon was bathing- time for the Geselle.^ And although school meals did

^ Janssen, /. c. See also Dr. Alwin Schultz, Deutsches Leben im XIV. und XV. Jahrhundert, grosse Ausgabe, Wien, 1892, pp. 67 seq. At Paris, the day of labour varied from seven to eight hours in the winter to fourteen hours in summer in certain trades, while in others it was from eight to nine hours in winter, to from ten to twelve in summer. All work was stopped on Saturdays and on about twenty- five other days {jours de commun de vile foire) at four o'clock, while on Sundays and thirty other holidays there was no work at all. The general conclusion is, that the mediseval worker worked less hours, all taken, than the present-day worker (Dr. E. Martin Saint-Ldon, Histoire des corporations, p. 121).

not exist — probably because no children went hungry to school — a distribution of bath-money to the children whose parents found difficulty in providing it was habitual in several places. As to Labour Congresses, they also were a regular feature of the middles ages. In some parts of Germany craftsmen of the same trade, belonging to different communes, used to come together every year to discuss questions relative to their trade, the years of apprenticeship, the wandering years, the wages, and so on; and in 1572, the Hanseatic towns formally recognized the right of the crafts to come together at periodical congresses, and to take any resolutions, so long as they were not contrary to the cities' rolls, relative to the quality of goods. Such Labour Congresses, partly international like the Hansa itself, are known to have been held by bakers, founders, smiths, tanners, sword-makers and cask-makers.^

The craft organization required, of' course, a close supervision of the craftsmen by the guild, and special jurates were always nominated for that purpose. But it is most remarkable that, so long as the cities lived their free life, no complaints were heard about the supervision ; while, after the State had stepped in, confiscating the property of the guilds and destroying their independence in favour of its own bureaucracy, the complaints became simply countless.^ On the other hand, the immensity of progress realized in all

1 W. Stieda, "Hansische VereinbarungenuberstadtischesGewerbe im XIV. und XV. Jahrhundert," in Hmisische Geschichtsbldtter, Jahrgang 1886, p. 121. Schonberg's WirtJischaftliche Bedeutung der Ziinfte ; also, partly, Roscher. 2 See Toulmin Smith's deeply-felt remarks about the royal spolia-, tion of the guilds, in Miss Smith's Introduction to English Guilds. In France the same royal spoliation and abolition of the guilds' juris- diction was begun from 1306, and the final blow was struck in 1382 (Fagniez, /. c. pp. 52-54).