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Green Alice Stopford
Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

CHAPTER VIII
THE GUILD MERCHANT

In the conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we see the town society rent into two factions; and whether the contending groups call themselves the Burghers and Commonalty, or “the rich” and “the poor people of the city,” or the Merchant Guild and the Crafts, or by any other names, they seem practically to represent the same broad sections of the community. In town quarrels it is hard for us to draw any valid distinction between groups of citizens and companies of craftsmen, as though they were led by different passions; for however numerous were the mere inhabitants who must have lain outside the organization of the crafts, usually every freeman was a member of some company, and the whole voting population was thus enrolled under the banners of the various trades. The real line of cleavage on which we have to concentrate attention is not the thin line which may be drawn between the Town Council and the Merchant Guild, the Commonalty and the Crafts, but rather the broad chasm which breaks the whole industrial society itself into two factions – on the one side the merchant traders, on the other the artificers and small retail dealers. Wherever the lesser crafts who represented the middle classes of the borough, and whose interests were more or less identified with the cause of the commons and “poor people of the city,” were forcing their claim to a share in the counsels of the town; to which their way was barred by a solid phalanx of hereditary “magnates” and wealthy merchants who had abandoned the meaner employments of trade and thrown in their lot with the governing oligarchy of “the rich,” and who fought in alliance with or under cover of the burghers; there the revolt of the commons against the Town Council becomes practically a battle of the working crafts against the rule of the mercantile fraternities – a battle which may be fought at one time for the winning of civic privileges, at another for industrial freedom.

If we ask how old this conflict was, and at what time the peace of the town was first disturbed by the antagonism of the greater commerce and the lesser crafts, of the trader and the artificer, we must go back for an answer to the very much earlier period when commercial societies first became organized, or at least to the twelfth century when the Merchant Guild and the Crafts come prominently to the front.^[356] Unfortunately the history of the Guild Merchant,^[357] from its obscure beginnings in the days of the Confessor, or of the Norman kings, down to the time when its organization had spread all over England, and its fraternities were to be found in most of the trading boroughs, is still enveloped in the darkness which covers the early records of our towns, and problems await solution which involve the whole developement of the Guild. We know that from a remote period men had banded themselves together in associations to secure protection and monopoly of trade, and before the close of the twelfth century the majority of trading towns had each its “Merchant Guild” with rights guaranteed by royal charter. First born into life in a society where a merchant class such as we understand it was unknown, we are told that the Guild may have first consisted mainly of agriculturists busied in tilling their common lands, and increasing their herds of cows and sheep and pigs; and whose chief anxiety was to sell the butter and honey and salt meat and wool that remained over when they had supplied their own wants, and to buy fish for the fasting seasons, ploughs and spades for their fields and the simplest furniture for their humble households. But, in the opinion of its latest historian, from the twelfth century artizans were freely admitted to its society, and presently formed the majority of the Guild^[358]– each craftsman being a small trader on his own account, buying his raw material, and selling his manufactured goods at the stall he rented in the market or on the folding shelf that he let down to the street from the window of his little workroom. With these were clergy and women who busied themselves in trade;^[359] travelling dealers among the townsfolk to whom exemptions from jurisdictions outside the town and freedom from toll were important (things which mattered little to the homekeeping citizens); and strangers who brought their wares to the town market,^[360] paid their entrance fee and pledged themselves to bear henceforth their share of the town taxes, though they were considered free from all other charges that lay on the “downlying and uprising and pot-boiling” householders. It is therefore supposed that when the time came for the Guild to emerge from its humble state of private association, and rise into the dignity of an official civic body, charged with the protection of the trading interests of the borough,^[361] it formed a really popular institution, which from its very nature could never become entangled in a conflict with the crafts – an organization of the whole community for the control of trade by the common consent of the people, which was in many respects peculiarly characteristic of English life,^[362] and which was the natural product of an age of freedom before the people had been trodden under foot of a despotic oligarchy. Theoretically subject to the authority of the town as part of its regular administrative machinery,^[363] but ruled over by its own officers, and exercising independent jurisdiction through its voluntary tribunals of arbitration, the Guild by virtue of its trade monopoly,^[364] its powerful organization and discipline, and the fact that the men who formed its governing body were generally the same as those who sat on the governing body of the borough, maintained a far more independent position than any department of town government to-day.^[365]

But according to Dr. Gross the Gilda Mercatoria was doomed to vanish away before the growth of new industrial conditions. The first blow was struck at its supremacy by the appearance early in the twelfth century of crafts, which bought from the king the right to exist as independent fraternities during his pleasure.^[366] From this time the decline of the Merchant Guild from its old estate kept pace with the commercial revolution that caused its ruin. It began to undergo its great change at the close of the thirteenth century, and in the two following centuries it may be said to have practically ceased to exist. Broken up into a multitude of independent associations, each of which carried on business for itself,^[367] deprived of all its old functions, it died because it had no longer any adequate reason to live. Perhaps it lingered on here and there in agricultural towns where few or no craft guilds had been formed;^[368] or in ecclesiastical boroughs where its organization provided the only rallying point for the community in any struggle for freedom; but everywhere else its machinery fell to pieces;^[369] and so completely did it vanish away as a distinct body that the very name only survived by taking to itself new meanings. Sometimes the old Merchant Guild became indistinguishably blended with the town and gave its name to the whole community;^[370] though in another place it perhaps handed over name and functions to the narrow select governing body of the borough as distinguished from the general community of citizens.^[371] Elsewhere its title was in some vague way transferred to the aggregate of the craft guilds.^[372] As a mere shadow of its former self, with nothing but the word to mark its identity, the Merchant Guild might survive as a simple social-religious fraternity;^[373] or perhaps without conflict or bitterness it merely faded away before the crafts, leaving not so much as a name behind it.^[374] But however the implicit, unspoken compact was carried out, by whatever means the Gilda Mercatoria, obedient to a final destiny, effected its renunciation of an inconvenient supremacy, there was no possible occasion left for strife between Guild and crafts,^[375] and the suggestion of any such quarrel, or of revolt on the part of the crafts against the superior fraternity from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, must be looked on as a wanton “myth”.^[376] Having fulfilled its course the Merchant Guild took its doom without noise or struggle, and entered decently into the shades with a grave decorum before which jarring sounds of contention were put to silence. It was at a later time, when the old popular organization had died, that the harmony of the commons was destroyed by the coming in of a tyranny unknown till then – the tyranny of a select and irresponsible governing body which by its corrupt administration stirred up a new spirit of dissension in the boroughs.

Unfortunately this picture of the successive stages of the guild history, from the free republican period through which they are all apparently supposed to have passed, down to their extinction or absorption into a governing oligarchy, a whole borough community, or a group of trades, has not been verified by following out the continuous story of any single guild. Moreover it would seem that the difficulty of making any general statement about the groups of traders who made the fortunes of the English boroughs, is as great as the difficulty of making a general statement as to the position and grouping of a host of irregular troops in rapid march over a tangled country. Amid the intense activity and the transformation scenes of mediæval life there is no exact definition which does not prove false with a little lapse of time, a little change of place; and theories of “natural tendency” are but as traps set for the unwary. So far as the Guild Merchant is concerned, there were probably as many various exceptions to any general rule as there were towns which contained a Guild. Let but a generation pass away and the institution is perhaps wholly changed; here it existed in some special form; a few miles off it never existed at all; in some boroughs it dominated the history of the town, while in others it left but the bare echo of its name behind.^[377] There may possibly have been towns where at one time the Guild included within its ranks the majority of the burghers, and perhaps mainly consisted of craftsmen;^[378] but there were evidently others where from the first it formed a society far narrower and more restricted,^[379] or where it rapidly tended to become a limited body of wealthy citizens out of whose midst the craft guilds cannot possibly have been developed; while occasionally it may have happened that the craft guilds preceded the Merchant Guild.^[380] Even if the theory was ostensibly maintained that craftsmen “were freely enrolled among the members of the Guild Merchant”^[381]– in practice “gifts and entrance fees of a collation, a bull, beer, and wine” could effectually keep out the poorer sort, and allow the association^[382] to develope rapidly into an exclusive and comparatively aristocratic society, which demanded from all save owners of a house or burgage, or men entitled by direct descent to belong to the fraternity, admission fees big enough to guarantee the new comer’s fitness to be of their fine company. The two ranks established in the Andover Guild^[383] as early as the thirteenth century suggest how privilege might creep in even among Guild members themselves; as the merchants of Bristol teach us how it could be fought for;^[384] and there is no doubt that the policy of each separate fraternity must have largely depended on whether it adopted the custom of having its officers chosen by consent of the whole community of Guildsmen,^[385] or by a handful of electors of the superior class.^[386] Even if a considerable number of burghers was admitted to trading privileges, it by no means follows that they were allowed any voice in the control of business.

Nor are we less in the dark as to that “natural process” by which the Guild is believed to have passed to its resigned and painless end. The “transference of authority from the ancient general Guild Merchant to a number of distinct bodies and the consequent disintegration and decay of the former,”^[387] the weakening of its strength by the creation of new crafts, the splitting up of its monopoly into fragments, the annihilation of its original being to make place for “the aggregate of the crafts,” the turning of the Guild into a “simple social-religious fraternity” – a kind of quiet haven of rest for wealthy merchants who had given up the sweets of power and the real government of trade in which their fortunes were concerned, to busy themselves with dirges and masses and chaplains, or even with a Corpus Christi procession – in fact the whole “gradual and spontaneous” movement in which lay the death of the primitive fraternity is still enveloped in mystery. If craftsmen, associated in their own peculiar guilds, yet remained in the common Guild Merchant^[388] which had once made regulations for their trade, and in many cases still did so,^[389] the instances (apart from cases where the Guild Merchant either was the municipal body, or had simply handed over to it its name) are rare or perhaps unknown in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; nor can we easily follow the far more complicated transformation said to have taken place when the burgesses became the heirs of the general body of guildsmen, by a double process which changed the idea of citizenship from the conception of the freeman holding a burgage tenure into the later idea of a man holding the right to exercise a trade, and which turned the governors of the guild into the rulers of the town;^[390] so that by natural growth the fraternity of the Guild Merchant, once wholly distinct from the borough, became identical with it.^[391]

It is very possible – indeed it is very probable if we remember the thrift of the English people in politics, their habit of fetching out the old machinery whenever there seems a chance of making it useful; their aversion to repairs or patches beyond what imperative necessity demands; their indifference to new inventions if the old wheels and cranks can still be induced to turn – that we may learn something of the working of the original Guild Merchant by watching the doings of its successors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For whether the primitive Guild had ceased to exist or no, something going by its name and clothed in its form confronts us constantly in the later times, soberly masquerading in an ancient habit which seems scarcely the worse for wear or out of fashion for all the lapse of centuries; and figuring before us as a robust survival, as an old organization fitted out afresh for a pressing emergency, or even as a new creation. We may watch in Coventry such a Guild, which bears none of the signs of decrepitude or symptoms of decay – a guild which was in no sense a simple social-religious fraternity, nor yet an ordinary craft guild; which was far from being an aggregate of the trades; which refused to the lesser crafts the right to combine, and despotically governed their business in its own interests; which was the municipal body of the city and carried on its entire administration, but never gave its name either to the community or to the governing body; anti-democratic in its origin, in its maturity, and in its old age; jealous of dominion; incapable of making terms from behind its barricaded doors with dissolution. Late as was its date, it has features in its origin, its constitution, and its policy far too like those of much earlier guilds, not to claim our interest.^[392]

Born two or three hundred years out of due time (for it was not till Queen Isabella became owner of part of Coventry and interested in defending her tenants’ rights against the Prior, that the city was able to obtain the grant of a Gilda Mercatoria), it was only in 1340 that the Merchant Guild of S. Mary’s was founded^[393]– an association apparently of dealers in cloth, wool, and general merchandise.^[394] Even then it failed to secure license to mortmain, perhaps through the resistance of the Prior, the lord of the soil; but it is possible that the charter of incorporation for the town, granted in 1344, was bought by the Guild, and at least as early as 1347 and 1350 two of its masters were mayors; while the Town Hall, where the mayor and council met and where the chest containing the town treasure and the charter were kept, always bore the name of S. Mary’s Guild.

In the meantime two other societies had sprung up – the guild of S. John Baptist^[395] in 1342, and the guild of S. Catherine in 1343 – and the three companies of S. Mary, S. John, and S. Catherine united into one body between 1364 and 1369; and finally joined themselves to the Trinity Guild, which had received license to mortmain in 1364, and gave its name to the whole association.^[396] Considerable property was handed over in trust for the combined societies to six of the chief citizens of the town, most of whom had been mayors several times, and one of whom had been founder of S. John’s Guild. From this time the history of the municipality is the history of its leading guilds; and the further step taken in 1392, when the four guilds were more formally united by a patent of incorporation, and when fresh donations of land were given to the whole body, was only a fortifying of the position which it already held.

Though the name of the Merchant Guild was sacrificed, doubtless for some sufficient reason, the Trinity Guild was nothing more than an extension of the primitive association under a new title. The founders and donors and the early mayors are usually classed together as “mercatores” in the deeds, and the union seems to have represented the wealthy upper class (drapers and mercers for the most part, with a few leading members of other trades),^[397] living in S. Michael’s parish, of which Queen Isabella and her successors were the owners. Only one other society was allowed to exist alongside of it, – the fraternity of rich traders in Trinity parish (the Prior’s half of the town), who were in 1348 licensed to form the Corpus Christi Guild. Drawn from the same rank, sharing the same interests, they cast in their lot with the merchants of the neighbouring parish, contributed to the general town expenses, and were admitted to a corresponding degree of influence in the municipal government.^[398]

For the Trinity and Corpus Christi Guilds were in fact the governing body of the town. According to the general custom the Master of the Corpus Christi Guild was made Mayor in the second year after his laying down that post, and two years after his mayoralty he was set at the head of the Trinity Guild.^[399] All important town officials were sworn members of both the great companies; so were the Leet Jury and the Twenty-four who elected the mayor (these two bodies consisting of almost the same individuals); and so were all the men who might be summoned on the Mayor’s Council to aid the Twenty-four. By this simple device, the fear of an alien party being formed in the Council was once for all banished; for if the Corpus Christi Guild held its elections in the Bishop’s palace^[400] and had its centre in Trinity Church on the Prior’s land, – if its members included the Prior and his bailiff, the vicar, and strangers, some of them of great estate, from near and far^[401]– all dangerous elements were made harmless by the order that none of its members should meddle with town affairs unless he had been first approved and accepted by the Trinity Guild. The Corpus Christi fraternity in fact was admitted to its position by a sort of cautious sufferance, and all real power lay with the Guild of the Trinity. Its master was a Justice of the Peace, and therefore took a leading part in all the most important business of the courts; he was first on the list of the Twenty-four who elected the mayor and who also sat at the Leet Court. Invariably he was one of the five men chosen by the mayor to keep the keys of the common chest – being, in fact, in matters of finance supreme; for at the end of the mayor’s year of office it was to the master that he delivered up his accounts and his balance “and is quit”; and the Guild was not only charged with the payment of salaries to public officials – the recorder, the grammar-school master, the priests in the Lady Chapel of S. Michael’s, and the warden and priests at Bablake – but as early as 1384 it was ordered by the Leet to pay yearly the ferm to the Prior, in return for which a certain part of the common lands was made over into its possession. The keeping of Bablake Gate was committed to it; and it was given possession of the Drapery Hall, which was used as the cloth mart under the control of the municipality.^[402]

But this great society, known on the one side as the Trinity Guild, on the other as the Town Corporation, owed in neither aspect anything whatever to popular election,^[403] and made no pretence at government according to the will of the people.^[404] From the very moment of the first union of the fraternities the story of revolt among the 7,000 workers who thronged the streets of Coventry begins, and is repeated from generation to generation for the next hundred and fifty years. Incessant riots declared the discontent of the commons at the light loaves sold under mayors who neglected to keep the assize of bread, at false measures allowed for selling corn, at the encroachments on common lands by chamberlains and councillors, at the government of trade by the drapers and mercers enrolled in the two great guilds of the city, while weavers, shearmen, fullers, and tailors, lying for the most part outside these guilds, had little hope of ever rising to municipal power.^[405] The crafts, in fact, were kept in uncompromising subjection. When the fullers and tailors tried to set up a fraternity,^[406] the ruling guilds obtained a charter in 1407 which forbade the creation of any other society than their own. They had this grant confirmed in 1414; and the next year they appealed to Parliament against the dyers^[407] who endeavoured to form a confederation of cloth-makers and wool-sellers. S. George’s Guild – a union of the “young men, serving men of the tailors and other artificers, and labourers working by the day called journeymen,” who defiantly gathered in S. George’s Chapel and elected “masters and clerks and other officials to fulfil their youthful and insolent desires,” and “abet each other in their quarrels” – was put down because it was “to the ruin and destruction of the Guilds of Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi and disturbance of all the community.”^[408] Though the fullers and tailors once more obtained license in 1438 to hold property, their union was broken up in the next ten years;^[409] and the persistence of the dyers in clinging to their illegal combinations was opposed in 1475 by an ordinance that unlawful writings and oaths made by dyers and other crafts were to be “void, quashed, and annulled,” and members of the craft should not be sued for not observing these illegal ordinances.^[410] Circuitous attempts to win independence by informally setting up voluntary tribunals where the members of the trade assembled to settle disputes, were met by the order that no masters of crafts should sue any of their craft in any kind of suit in special courts until the mayor have heard the matter and licensed the suit; on the plea that “discord falls out continually because masters of crafts sue in special courts divers people of their crafts, affirming they have broken their oaths made in breaking divers rules, which rules are ofttimes unreasonable, and the punishment of the said masters excessive, which, if it continue, by likelihood will cause much people to void out of this city.”^[411] With regard to customs on wool, or the conditions of sale for the coarse cloth of the people, or the regulations for apprentices, the merchants passed laws which drove the commons to impotent fury;^[412] and the wild dreams of revolution that passed from street to street for the century after John Ball found his hiding-place in the lanes of Coventry, are told in the rhymes nailed by the people on the church door side by side with the official announcements, where we hear their passionate outcry for the freedom of the good old days of Godiva, and threats of a time when the “littel small been” and “wappys” should “also sting”;^[413] or in the teaching of the leader of the populace that the city would have no peace till three or four of the churls that ruled them had their heads stricken off.

But if the Trinity Guild was in this complete sense the governing body of the town – if its legislation was at once so characteristic and so irresistible – by what strange access of modesty was it restrained from taking to itself the glory, and letting its name blot out all others on the city roll?^[414] Such renunciation, we can scarcely doubt, whether in Coventry or in other places where the problem presents itself, was more likely to spring from the “grace of guile” than from modesty. From the point of view of worldly wisdom, indeed, the arguments for a diplomatic self-effacement were overwhelming; for it was easy to discern the dangers to its hoarded treasure which a guild must incur from the moment when in the eyes of the law or of its officers it became confounded with the municipality. Safety lay in silence, and if the name of the guild lingered in the Guildhall, it did not pass the precincts; while by a wise precaution the actual mayor of the borough was never allowed to be the same person as the actual master of the guild,^[415] lest the higher authorities should in some emergency make an easy confusion between the keys with which he opened the treasure-box of the community, and those which unlocked the coffers of the guild.^[416] If there were any doubt before 1392^[417] about the meaning of thus carefully preserving the double aspect of the fraternity, there seems but little after it. For in that year when the Coventry Guild got its new formal patent and its increased income, it was only following a somewhat common fashion of the day.^[418] In 1392 the bailiffs and commonalty of Birmingham obtained leave to have their Guild of the Holy Cross – “a guild and brotherhood of bretheren and sisteren among themselves in that town … and men and women well disposed in other towns and in the neighbourhood” – which might hold lands in mortmain, and which was intimately connected with the governing body of the town. The Town Hall or Guild Hall was built by it, and charities were distributed “according to the ordering and will of the bailiffs and commonalty”; and it “kept in good reparacioune two great stone bridges and divers foul and dangerous highways, the charge whereof the town of itself is not able to maintain.”^[419] In the same year, 1392, “the seneschalls of the Guild Merchant of Bridgewater and of the community of the same town” obtained a grant to assign certain lands in mortmain,^[420] and an indenture which probably belongs to the beginning of the reign of Edward the First^[421] proves that there was a close relation of this guild on one side to the fraternity of S. Mary or of the Holy Cross, and on the other to the corporation of the town. The brotherhood of the Holy Cross at Abingdon, which was established under Richard the Second, seems to have been practically the governing body of the borough, owned most of the landed property in the town in the fifteenth century, and spent money liberally in the building of churches and the market cross.^[422]

Such guilds as these seem to have been the quick retort of the towns to the Act of 1391, which for the first time extended to cities and boroughs the Statute of Mortmain passed in 1279, and placed them in a position where they could thenceforth boast of no advantage over religious corporations, and like them had to buy leave to hold property. But it seemed beyond the wit of man to put English traders into a difficulty which was not by their very touch turned into a new opportunity for gain. If right to hold corporate property must now be bought, whatever claimant appeared, then why should it not be bought by a private society of merchants, sheltered under the Holy Cross or the Trinity, rather than by the town community or the burgesses? On the one hand the leading citizens, the intelligent and prosperous men of the town, thus secured an indestructible claim to guide its fortunes aright; on the other hand the town funds were by the same measure garnered once for all in a safe hiding-place – in other words, if troublesome officers from the exchequer should come with demands for inconvenient rent or forfeitures, they were met by the fact that the men of the town had nothing, while the men of the guild owed nothing. The system seems to have worked as effectively as the British constitution itself. We know that the Coventry Guild, besides the property it already held, had taken over yet more at its incorporation in 1392. But in 1468, Coventry being then the fourth city in the kingdom, it was £800 in arrears for its ferm; and since the goods of “the mayor and men of Coventry” only amounted to 106s., and since the said “mayor and men” had no other goods or lands within the bailiwick that could be taken into the king’s hands, no further payment was then made.^[423] If we remember the wealth of the Trinity and Corpus Christi Guilds, the fact that they probably held the main portion of the common property,^[424] and their close connexion with the city government,^[425] it is plain that the town was doing very good business in withdrawing its funds from the reach of the king’s officers; and that the traders had adequately realized their purpose in setting up in their Townhall one of those familiar companies which was admitted at home to be in effect the corporation, but which was officially known at Westminster only as a “simple” social-religious fraternity that yearly carried S. George and his Dragon or some other poetic emblem through the streets with solemn festival, or kept great tendrilles of wax burning before the Holy Cross in the parish church.