Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution Part 9

These few remarks show how incorrect was the view taken by some early explorers of the guilds when they wanted to see the essence of the inst.i.tution in its yearly festival. In reality, the day of the common meal was always the day, or the morrow of the day, of election of aldermen, of discussion of alterations in the statutes, and very often the day of judgment of quarrels that had risen among the brethren,(36) or of renewed allegiance to the guild. The common meal, like the festival at the old tribal folkmote--the mahl or malum--or the Buryate aba, or the parish feast and the harvest supper, was simply an affirmation of brotherhood. It symbolized the times when everything was kept in common by the clan. This day, at least, all belonged to all; all sate at the same table and partook of the same meal. Even at a much later time the inmate of the almshouse of a London guild sat this day by the side of the rich alderman. As to the distinction which several explorers have tried to establish between the old Saxon "frith guild"

and the so-called "social" or "religious" guilds--all were frith guilds in the sense above mentioned,(37) and all were religious in the sense in which a village community or a city placed under the protection of a special saint is social and religious. If the inst.i.tution of the guild has taken such an immense extension in Asia, Africa, and Europe, if it has lived thousands of years, reappearing again and again when similar conditions called it into existence, it is because it was much more than an eating a.s.sociation, or an a.s.sociation for going to church on a certain day, or a burial club. It answered to a deeply inrooted want of human nature; and it embodied all the attributes which the State appropriated later on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than that. It was an a.s.sociation for mutual support in all circ.u.mstances and in all accidents of life, "by deed and advise," and it was an organization for maintaining justice--with this difference from the State, that on all these occasions a humane, a brotherly element was introduced instead of the formal element which is the essential characteristic of State interference. Even when appearing before the guild tribunal, the guild-brother answered before men who knew him well and had stood by him before in their daily work, at the common meal, in the performance of their brotherly duties: men who were his equals and brethren indeed, not theorists of law nor defenders of some one else's interests.(38)

It is evident that an inst.i.tution so well suited to serve the need of union, without depriving the individual of his initiative, could but spread, grow, and fortify. The difficulty was only to find such form as would permit to federate the unions of the guilds without interfering with the unions of the village communities, and to federate all these into one harmonious whole. And when this form of combination had been found, and a series of favourable circ.u.mstances permitted the cities to affirm their independence, they did so with a unity of thought which can but excite our admiration, even in our century of railways, telegraphs, and printing. Hundreds of charters in which the cities inscribed their liberation have reached us, and through all of them--notwithstanding the infinite variety of details, which depended upon the more or less greater fulness of emanc.i.p.ation--the same leading ideas run. The city organized itself as a federation of both small village communities and guilds.

"All those who belong to the friends.h.i.+p of the town"--so runs a charter given in 1188 to the burghesses of Aire by Philip, Count of Flanders--"have promised and confirmed by faith and oath that they will aid each other as brethren, in whatever is useful and honest. That if one commits against another an offence in words or in deeds, the one who has suffered there from will not take revenge, either himself or his people ... he will lodge a complaint and the offender will make good for his offence, according to what will be p.r.o.nounced by twelve elected judges acting as arbiters, And if the offender or the offended, after having been warned thrice, does not submit to the decision of the arbiters, he will be excluded from the friends.h.i.+p as a wicked man and a perjuror.(39)

"Each one of the men of the commune will be faithful to his con-juror, and will give him aid and advice, according to what justice will dictate him"--the Amiens and Abbeville charters say. "All will aid each other, according to their powers, within the boundaries of the Commune, and will not suffer that any one takes anything from any one of them, or makes one pay contributions"--do we read in the charters of Soissons, Compiegne, Senlis, and many others of the same type.(40) And so on with countless variations on the same theme.

"The Commune," Guilbert de Nogent wrote, "is an oath of mutual aid (mutui adjutorii conjuratio) ... A new and detestable word. Through it the serfs (capite sensi) are freed from all serfdom; through it, they can only be condemned to a legally determined fine for breaches of the law; through it, they cease to be liable to payments which the serfs always used to pay."(41)

The same wave of emanc.i.p.ation ran, in the twelfth century, through all parts of the continent, involving both rich cities and the poorest towns. And if we may say that, as a rule, the Italian cities were the first to free themselves, we can a.s.sign no centre from which the movement would have spread. Very often a small burg in central Europe took the lead for its region, and big agglomerations accepted the little town's charter as a model for their own. Thus, the charter of a small town, Lorris, was adopted by eighty-three towns in south-west France, and that of Beaumont became the model for over five hundred towns and cities in Belgium and France. Special deputies were dispatched by the cities to their neighbours to obtain a copy from their charter, and the const.i.tution was framed upon that model. However, they did not simply copy each other: they framed their own charters in accordance with the concessions they had obtained from their lords; and the result was that, as remarked by an historian, the charters of the medieval communes offer the same variety as the Gothic architecture of their churches and cathedrals. The same leading ideas in all of them--the cathedral symbolizing the union of parish and guild in the, city--and the same infinitely rich variety of detail.

Self-jurisdiction was the essential point, and self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. But the commune was not simply an "autonomous" part of the State--such ambiguous words had not yet been invented by that time--it was a State in itself. It had the right of war and peace, of federation and alliance with its neighbours. It was sovereign in its own affairs, and mixed with no others. The supreme political power could be vested entirely in a democratic forum, as was the case in Pskov, whose vyeche sent and received amba.s.sadors, concluded treaties, accepted and sent away princes, or went on without them for dozens of years; or it was vested in, or usurped by, an aristocracy of merchants or even n.o.bles, as was the case in hundreds of Italian and middle European cities. The principle, nevertheless, remained the same: the city was a State and--what was perhaps still more remarkable--when the power in the city was usurped by an aristocracy of merchants or even n.o.bles, the inner life of the city and the democratism of its daily life did not disappear: they depended but little upon what may be called the political form of the State.

The secret of this seeming anomaly lies in the fact that a medieval city was not a centralized State. During the first centuries of its existence, the city hardly could be named a State as regards its interior organization, because the middle ages knew no more of the present centralization of functions than of the present territorial centralization. Each group had its share of sovereignty. The city was usually divided into four quarters, or into five to seven sections radiating from a centre, each quarter or section roughly corresponding to a certain trade or profession which prevailed in it, but nevertheless containing inhabitants of different social positions and occupations--n.o.bles, merchants, artisans, or even half-serfs; and each section or quarter const.i.tuted a quite independent agglomeration. In Venice, each island was an independent political community. It had its own organized trades, its own commerce in salt, its own jurisdiction and administration, its own forum; and the nomination of a doge by the city changed nothing in the inner independence of the units.(42) In Cologne, we see the inhabitants divided into Geburschaften and Heimschaften (viciniae), i.e. neighbour guilds, which dated from the Franconian period. Each of them had its judge (Burrichter) and the usual twelve elected sentence-finders (Schoffen), its Vogt, and its greve or commander of the local militia.(43) The story of early London before the Conquest--Mr. Green says--is that "of a number of little groups scattered here and there over the area within the walls, each growing up with its own life and inst.i.tutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and the like, and only slowly drawing together into a munic.i.p.al union."(44) And if we refer to the annals of the Russian cities, Novgorod and Pskov, both of which are relatively rich in local details, we find the section (konets) consisting of independent streets (ulitsa), each of which, though chiefly peopled with artisans of a certain craft, had also merchants and landowners among its inhabitants, and was a separate community. It had the communal responsibility of all members in case of crime, its own jurisdiction and administration by street aldermen (ulichanskiye starosty), its own seal and, in case of need, its own forum; its own militia, as also its self-elected priests and its, own collective life and collective enterprise.(45)

The medieval city thus appears as a double federation: of all householders united into small territorial unions--the street, the parish, the section--and of individuals united by oath into guilds according to their professions; the former being a produce of the village-community origin of the city, while the second is a subsequent growth called to life by new conditions.

To guarantee liberty, self-administration, and peace was the chief aim of the medieval city; and labour, as we shall presently see when speaking of the craft guilds, was its chief foundation. But "production"

did not absorb the whole attention of the medieval economist. With his practical mind, he understood that "consumption" must be guaranteed in order to obtain production; and therefore, to provide for "the common first food and lodging of poor and rich alike" (gemeine notdurft und gemach armer und richer(46)) was the fundamental principle in each city.

The purchase of food supplies and other first necessaries (coal, wood, etc.) before they had reached the market, or altogether in especially favourable conditions from which others would be excluded--the preempcio, in a word--was entirely prohibited. Everything had to go to the market and be offered there for every one's purchase, till the ringing of the bell had closed the market. Then only could the retailer buy the remainder, and even then his profit should be an "honest profit"

only.(47) Moreover, when corn was bought by a baker wholesale after the close of the market, every citizen had the right to claim part of the corn (about half-a-quarter) for his own use, at wholesale price, if he did so before the final conclusion of the bargain; and reciprocally, every baker could claim the same if the citizen purchased corn for re-selling it. In the first case, the corn had only to be brought to the town mill to be ground in its proper turn for a settled price, and the bread could be baked in the four ba.n.a.l, or communal oven.(48) In short, if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the case in our own times.

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 doc.u.ments 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 among the merchant burgesses, no one being allowed to buy wares landed in the port unless the munic.i.p.al authorities refused to purchase them. This seem--she adds--to have been quite a common practice in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland."(49) 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.(50) 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 administrated the imports, being bound to send to every citizen's house the quant.i.ty allotted to him.(51) In France, the city of Amiens used to purchase salt and to distribute it to all citizens at cost price;(52) and even now one sees in many French towns the halles which formerly were munic.i.p.al depots for corn and salt.(53) 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 doc.u.ments, 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 transportation. 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 medieval 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 commissioners, 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 Novgorod and the Sovereign Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to distant lands.

We know also that in nearly all medieval cities of 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 abolis.h.i.+ng this responsibility.(54) And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich doc.u.ment published by Mr. Gross, from which doc.u.ment we learn that the merchant guild of this town was const.i.tuted 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 thus appears rather as a body of trustees of the town than as a common private guild.

In short, 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 organization. How far this attempt has been successful will be best seen when we have a.n.a.lyzed in the next chapter the organization of labour in the medieval city and the relations of the cities with the surrounding peasant population.

NOTES:

1. W. Arnold, in his Wanderungen und Ansiedelungen der deutschen Stamme, p. 431, even maintains that one-half of the now arable area in middle Germany must have been reclaimed from the sixth to the ninth century.

Nitzsch (Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, Leipzig, 1883, vol. i.) shares the same opinion.

2. Leo and Botta, Histoire d'Italie, French edition, 1844, t. i., p. 37.

3. The composition for the stealing of a simple knife was 15 solidii and of the iron parts of a mill, 45 solidii (See on this subject Lamprecht's Wirthschaft und Recht der Franken in Raumer's Historisches Taschenbuch, 1883, p. 52.) According to the Riparian law, the sword, the spear, and the iron armour of a warrior attained the value of at least twenty-five cows, or two years of a freeman's labour. A cuira.s.s alone was valued in the Salic law (Desmichels, quoted by Michelet) at as much as thirty-six bushels of wheat.

4. The chief wealth of the chieftains, for a long time, was in their personal domains peopled partly with prisoner slaves, but chiefly in the above way. On the origin of property see Inama Sternegg's Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, in Schmoller's Forschungen, Bd. I., 1878; F. Dahn's Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Volker, Berlin, 1881; Maurer's Dorfverfa.s.sung; Guizot's Essais sur l'histoire de France; Maine's Village Community; Botta's Histoire d'Italie; Seebohm, Vinogradov, J. R. Green, etc.

5. See Sir Henry Maine's International Law, London, 1888.

6. Ancient Laws of Ireland, Introduction; E. Nys, Etudes de droit international, t. i., 1896, pp. 86 seq. Among the Ossetes the arbiters from three oldest villages enjoy a special reputation (M. Kovalevsky's Modern Custom and Old Law, Moscow, 1886, ii. 217, Russian).

7. It is permissible to think that this conception (related to the conception of tanistry) played an important part in the life of the period; but research has not yet been directed that way.

8. It was distinctly stated in the charter of St. Quentin of the year 1002 that the ransom for houses which had to be demolished for crimes went for the city walls. The same destination was given to the Ungeld in German cities. At Pskov the cathedral was the bank for the fines, and from this fund money was taken for the wails.

9. Sohm, Frankische Rechts-und Gerichtsverfa.s.sung, p. 23; also Nitzsch, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 78.

10. See the excellent remarks on this subject in Augustin Thierry's Lettres sur l'histoire de France. 7th Letter. The barbarian translations of parts of the Bible are extremely instructive on this point.

11. Thirty-six times more than a n.o.ble, according to the Anglo-Saxon law. In the code of Rothari the slaying of a king is, however, punished by death; but (apart from Roman influence) this new disposition was introduced (in 646) in the Lombardian law--as remarked by Leo and Botta--to cover the king from blood revenge. The king being at that time the executioner of his own sentences (as the tribe formerly was of its own sentences), he had to be protected by a special disposition, the more so as several Lombardian kings before Rothari had been slain in succession (Leo and Botta, l.c., i. 66-90).

12. Kaufmann, Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. I. "Die Germanen der Urzeit," p.

133.

13. Dr. F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Volker, Berlin, 1881, Bd. I. 96.

14. If I thus follow the views long since advocated by Maurer (Geschichte der Stadteverfa.s.sung in Deutschland, Erlangen, 1869), it is because he has fully proved the uninterrupted evolution from the village community to the mediaeval city, and that his views alone can explain the universality of the communal movement. Savigny and Eichhorn and their followers have certainly proved that the traditions of the Roman municipia had never totally disappeared. But they took no account of the village community period which the barbarians lived through before they had any cities. The fact is, that whenever mankind made a new start in civilization, in Greece, Rome, or middle Europe, it pa.s.sed through the same stages--the tribe, the village community, the free city, the state--each one naturally evolving out of the preceding stage. Of course, the experience of each preceding civilization was never lost.

Greece (itself influenced by Eastern civilizations) influenced Rome, and Rome influenced our civilization; but each of them begin from the same beginning--the tribe. And just as we cannot say that our states are continuations of the Roman state, so also can we not say that the mediaeval cities of Europe (including Scandinavia and Russia) were a continuation of the Roman cities. They were a continuation of the barbarian village community, influenced to a certain extent by the traditions of the Roman towns.

15. M. Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia (Ilchester Lectures, London, 1891, Lecture 4).

16. A considerable amount of research had to be done before this character of the so-called udyelnyi period was properly established by the works of Byelaeff (Tales from Russian History), Kostomaroff (The Beginnings of Autocracy in Russia), and especially Professor Sergievich (The Vyeche and the Prince). The English reader may find some information about this period in the just-named work of M. Kovalevsky, in Rambaud's History of Russia, and, in a short summary, in the article "Russia" of the last edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia.

17. Ferrari, Histoire des revolutions d'Italie, i. 257; Kallsen, Die deutschen Stadte im Mittelalter, Bd. I. (Halle, 1891).

18. See the excellent remarks of Mr. G.L. Gomme as regards the folkmote of London (The Literature of Local Inst.i.tutions, London, 1886, p. 76).

It must, however, be remarked that in royal cities the folkmote never attained the independence which it a.s.sumed elsewhere. It is even certain that Moscow and Paris were chosen by the kings and the Church as the cradles of the future royal authority in the State, because they did not possess the tradition of folkmotes accustomed to act as sovereign in all matters.

19. A. Luchaire, Les Communes francaises; also Kluckohn, Geschichte des Gottesfrieden, 1857. L. Semichon (La paix et la treve de Dieu, 2 vols., Paris, 1869) has tried to represent the communal movement as issued from that inst.i.tution. In reality, the treuga Dei, like the league started under Louis le Gros for the defence against both the robberies of the n.o.bles and the Norman invasions, was a thoroughly popular movement. The only historian who mentions this last league--that is, Vitalis--describes it as a "popular community" ("Considerations sur l'histoire de France," in vol. iv. of Aug. Thierry's OEuvres, Paris, 1868, p. 191 and note).

20. Ferrari, i. 152, 263, etc.

21. Perrens, Histoire de Florence, i. 188; Ferrari, l.c., i. 283.

22. Aug. Thierry, Essai sur l'histoire du Tiers Etat, Paris, 1875, p.

414, note.

23. F. Rocquain, "La Renaissance au XIIe siecle," in Etudes sur l'histoire de France, Paris, 1875, pp. 55-117.

24. N. Kostomaroff, "The Rationalists of the Twelfth Century," in his Monographies and Researches (Russian).

25. Very interesting facts relative to the universality of guilds will be found in "Two Thousand Years of Guild Life," by Rev. J. M. Lambert, Hull, 1891. On the Georgian amkari, see S. Eghiazarov, Gorodskiye Tsekhi ("Organization of Transcaucasian Amkari"), in Memoirs of the Caucasian Geographical Society, xiv. 2, 1891.

26. J.D. Wunderer's "Reisebericht" in Fichard's Frankfurter Archiv, ii.

245; quoted by Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 355.

27. Dr. Leonard Ennen, Der Dom zu Koln, Historische Einleitung, Koln, 1871, pp. 46, 50.