Books: Mutual Aid

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The medieval cities were not organized upon some preconceived
plan in obedience to the will of an outside 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 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 wonderful
resemblance, although each has developed for itself,
independently from the others, and in different conditions. 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 ordinances, 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 medieval 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)

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 medieval 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 which
women carry water from the well; neither must be trodden upon in
arms, even during inter-tribal wars. In medieval times the market
universally enjoyed the same protection.(2) 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 Weichbild, 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.(3)

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 of the city's
liberties, which can be traced in very many cases, necessarily
laid a special stamp upon their subsequent 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 guild, and kept the advantages resulting 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.(4) In fact, in a
medieval city manual labour was no token of inferiority; 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 (Amt), as honourable as any other. An idea of "justice"
to the community, of "right" towards both producer and consumer,
which would seem so extravagant 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 medieval artisan
did not produce for an unknown buyer, or to throw his goods into
an unknown market. He produced 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
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
confidence."(5) 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 but in the medieval
cities from their very beginnings; 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 sixteenth century,
after the royal power had destroy ed 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 medieval industries and art.

There was not much room for hired work in the early
flourishing periods of the medieval 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 craftsmen 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, 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 indications. 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.(6)
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.(7) In fact, the more we
learn about the medieval 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.

More than that; not only many aspirations of our 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 medieval
Kuttenberg ordinance says, "and no one shall, while doing nothing
(mit nichts thun), appropriate for himself what others have
produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield
for application and work."(8) 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 herkommen), 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."(9) The Saturday half-holiday, too,
which we consider as a modern conquest, was in reality an old
medieval institution; it was bathing-time for a great part of the
community, while Wednesday afternoon was bathing-time for the
Geselle.(10) And although school meals did 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.(11)

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.(12) On the other hand,
the immensity of progress realized in all arts under the
mediaeval guild system is the best proof that the system was no
hindrance to individual initiative.(13) The fact is, that the
medieval guild, like the medieval parish, "street," or "quarter,"
was not a body of citizens, placed under the control of State
functionaries; it was a union of all men connected with a given
trade: jurate buyers of raw produce, sellers of manufactured
goods, and artisans--masters, "compaynes," and apprentices. For
the inner organization of the trade its assembly was sovereign,
so long as it did not hamper the other guilds, in which case the
matter was brought before the guild of the guilds--the city.
But there was in it something more than that. It had its own
self-jurisdiction, its own military force, its own general
assemblies, its own traditions of struggles, glory, and
independence, its own relations with other guilds of the same
trade in other cities: it had, in a word, a full organic life
which could only result from the integrality of the vital
functions. When the town was called to arms, the guild appeared
as a separate company (Schaar), armed with its own arms (or its
own guns, lovingly decorated by the guild, at a subsequent
epoch), under its own self-elected commanders. It was, in a word,
as independent a unit of the federation as the republic of Uri or
Geneva was fifty years ago in the Swiss Confederation. So that,
to compare it with a modern trade union, divested of all
attributes of State sovereignty, and reduced to a couple of
functions of secondary importance, is as unreasonable as to
compare Florence or Brugge with a French commune vegetating under
the Code Napoleon, or with a Russian town placed under Catherine
the Second's municipal law. Both have elected mayors, and the
latter has also its craft corporations; but the difference is--
all the difference that exists between Florence and
Fontenay-les-Oies or Tsarevokokshaisk, or between a Venetian doge
and a modern mayor who lifts his hat before the sous-prefet's
clerk.

The medieval guilds were capable of maintaining their
independence; and, later on, especially in the fourteenth
century, when, in consequence of several causes which shall
presently be indicated, the old municipal life underwent a deep
modification, the younger crafts proved strong enough to conquer
their due share in the management of the city affairs. The
masses, organized in "minor" arts, rose to wrest the power out of
the hands of a growing oligarchy, and mostly succeeded in this
task, opening again a new era of prosperity. True, that in some
cities the uprising was crushed in blood, and mass decapitations
of workers followed, as was the case in Paris in 1306, and in
Cologne in 1371. In such cases the city's liberties rapidly fell
into decay, and the city was gradually subdued by the central
authority. But the majority of the towns had preserved enough of
vitality to come out of the turmoil with a new life and
vigour.(14) A new period of rejuvenescence was their reward. New
life was infused, and it found its expression in splendid
architectural monuments, in a new period of prosperity, in a
sudden progress of technics and invention, and in a new
intellectual movement leading to the Renaissance and to the
Reformation.

The life of a mediaeval city was a succession of hard battles
to conquer liberty and to maintain it. True, that a strong and
tenacious race of burghers had developed during those fierce
contests; true, that love and worship of the mother city had been
bred by these struggles, and that the grand things achieved by
the mediaeval communes were a direct outcome of that love. But
the sacrifices which the communes had to sustain in the battle
for freedom were, nevertheless, cruel, and left deep traces of
division on their inner life as well. Very few cities had
succeeded, under a concurrence of favourable circumstances, in
obtaining liberty at one stroke, and these few mostly lost it
equally easily; while the great number had to fight fifty or a
hundred years in succession, often more, before their rights to
free life had been recognized, and another hundred years to found
their liberty on a firm basis--the twelfth century charters
thus being but one of the stepping-stones to freedom.(15) In
reality, the mediaeval city was a fortified oasis amidst a
country plunged into feudal submission, and it had to make room
for itself by the force of its arms. In consequence of the causes
briefly alluded to in the preceding chapter, each village
community had gradually fallen under the yoke of some lay or
clerical lord. His house had grown to be a castle, and his
brothers-in-arms were now the scum of adventurers, always ready
to plunder the peasants. In addition to three days a week which
the peasants had to work for the lord, they had also to bear all
sorts of exactions for the right to sow and to crop, to be gay or
sad, to live, to marry, or to die. And, worst of all, they were
continually plundered by the armed robbers of some neighbouring
lord, who chose to consider them as their master's kin, and to
take upon them, and upon their cattle and crops, the revenge for
a feud he was fighting against their owner. Every meadow, every
field, every river, and road around the city, and every man upon
the land was under some lord.

The hatred of the burghers towards the feudal barons has
found a most characteristic expression in the wording of the
different charters which they compelled them to sign. Heinrich V.
is made to sign in the charter granted to Speier in 1111, that he
frees the burghers from "the horrible and execrable law of
mortmain, through which the town has been sunk into deepest
poverty" (von dem scheusslichen und nichtswurdigen Gesetze,
welches gemein Budel genannt wird, Kallsen, i. 307). The coutume
of Bayonne, written about 1273, contains such passages as these:
"The people is anterior to the lords. It is the people, more
numerous than all others, who, desirous of peace, has made the
lords for bridling and knocking down the powerful ones, "and so
on (Giry, Etablissements de Rouen, i. 117, Quoted by Luchaire, p.
24). A charter submitted for King Robert's signature is equally
characteristic. He is made to say in it: "I shall rob no oxen nor
other animals. I shall seize no merchants, nor take their moneys,
nor impose ransom. From Lady Day to the All Saints' Day I shall
seize no horse, nor mare, nor foals, in the meadows. I shall not
burn the mills, nor rob the flour... I shall offer no protection
to thieves," etc. (Pfister has published that document,
reproduced by Luchaire). The charter "granted" by the Besancon
Archbishop Hugues, in which he has been compelled to enumerate
all the mischiefs due to his mortmain rights, is equally
characteristic.(16) And so on.

Freedom could not be maintained in such surroundings, and the
cities were compelled to carry on the war outside their walls.
The burghers sent out emissaries to lead revolt in the villages;
they received villages into their corporations, and they waged
direct war against the nobles. It Italy, where the land was
thickly sprinkled with feudal castles, the war assumed heroic
proportions, and was fought with a stern acrimony on both sides.
Florence sustained for seventy-seven years a succession of bloody
wars, in order to free its contado from the nobles; but when the
conquest had been accomplished (in 1181) all had to begin anew.
The nobles rallied; they constituted their own leagues in
opposition to the leagues of the towns, and, receiving fresh
support from either the Emperor or the Pope, they made the war
last for another 130 years. The same took place in Rome, in
Lombardy, all over Italy.

Prodigies of valour, audacity, and tenaciousness were
displayed by the citizens in these wars. But the bows and the
hatchets of the arts and crafts had not always the upper hand in
their encounters with the armour-clad knights, and many castles
withstood the ingenious siege-machinery and the perseverance of
the citizens. Some cities, like Florence, Bologna, and many towns
in France, Germany, and Bohemia, succeeded in emancipating the
surrounding villages, and they were rewarded for their efforts by
an extraordinary prosperity and tranquillity. But even here, and
still more in the less strong or less impulsive towns, the
merchants and artisans, exhausted by war, and misunderstanding
their own interests, bargained over the peasants' heads. They
compelled the lord to swear allegiance to the city; his country
castle was dismantled, and he agreed to build a house and to
reside in the city, of which he became a co-burgher
(com-bourgeois, con-cittadino); but he maintained in return most
of his rights upon the peasants, who only won a partial relief
from their burdens. The burgher could not understand that equal
rights of citizenship might be granted to the peasant upon whose
food supplies he had to rely, and a deep rent was traced between
town and village. In some cases the peasants simply changed
owners, the city buying out the barons' rights and selling them
in shares to her own citizens.(17) Serfdom was maintained, and
only much later on, towards the end of the thirteenth century, it
was the craft revolution which undertook to put an end to it, and
abolished personal servitude, but dispossessed at the same time
the serfs of the land.(18) It hardly need be added that the
fatal results of such policy were soon felt by the cities
themselves; the country became the city's enemy.

The war against the castles had another bad effect. It
involved the cities in a long succession of mutual wars, which
have given origin to the theory, till lately in vogue, namely,
that the towns lost their independence through their own
jealousies and mutual fights. The imperialist historians have
especially supported this theory, which, however, is very much
undermined now by modern research. It is certain that in Italy
cities fought each other with a stubborn animosity, but nowhere
else did such contests attain the same proportions; and in Italy
itself the city wars, especially those of the earlier period, had
their special causes. They were (as was already shown by Sismondi
and Ferrari) a mere continuation of the war against the castles--
the free municipal and federative principle unavoidably
entering into a fierce contest with feudalism, imperialism, and
papacy. Many towns which had but partially shaken off the yoke of
the bishop, the lord, or the Emperor, were simply driven against
the free cities by the nobles, the Emperor, and Church, whose
policy was to divide the cities and to arm them against each
other. These special circumstances (partly reflected on to
Germany also) explain why the Italian towns, some of which
Sollght support with the Emperor to combat the Pope, while the
others sought support from the Church to resist the Emperor, were
soon divided into a Gibelin and a Guelf camp, and why the same
division appeared in each separate city.(19)

The immense economical progress realized by most italian
cities just at the time when these wars were hottest,(20) and
the alliances so easily concluded between towns, still better
characterize those struggles and further undermine the above
theory. Already in the years 1130-1150 powerful leagues came into
existence; and a few years later, when Frederick Barbarossa
invaded Italy and, supported by the nobles and some retardatory
cities, marched against Milan, popular enthusiasm was roused in
many towns by popular preachers. Crema, Piacenza, Brescia,
Tortona, etc., went to the rescue; the banners of the guilds of
Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Trevisa floated side by side in the
cities' camp against the banners of the Emperor and the nobles.
Next year the Lombardian League came into existence, and sixty
years later we see it reinforced by many other cities, and
forming a lasting organization which had half of its federal
war-chest in Genoa and the other half in Venice.(21) In Tuscany,
Florence headed another powerful league, to which Lucca, Bologna,
Pistoia, etc., belonged, and which played an important part in
crushing down the nobles in middle Italy, while smaller leagues
were of common occurrence. It is thus certain that although petty
jealousies undoubtedly existed, and discord could be easily sown,
they did not prevent the towns from uniting together for the
common defence of liberty. Only later on, when separate cities
became little States, wars broke out between them, as always must
be the case when States struggle for supremacy or colonies.

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