Kitabı oku: «The Eve of the Reformation», sayfa 20

CHAPTER XI
PRE-REFORMATION GUILD LIFE

It would be impossible to fully understand the conditions of life on the eve of the Reformation without some knowledge of the working and purposes of mediæval guilds. These societies or brotherhoods were so common, formed such a real bond of union between people of all ranks and conditions of life, and fulfilled so many useful and even necessary purposes before their suppression under Edward VI., that a study of their principles of organisation and of their practical working cannot but throw considerable light on the popular social life of the period. To appreciate the position, it is necessary to bear in mind the very real hold the Gospel principles of the Christian brotherhood had over the minds of all in pre-Reformation days, the extinction of the general sense that man did not stand alone being distinctly traceable to the tendencies in regard to social matters evolved during the period of turmoil initiated by the religious teachings of the Reformers. What M. Siméon Luce says about the spirit of common life existing in the villages of Normandy in the fourteenth century might be adopted as a picture of English life in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. “Nobles, priests, religious clerks, sons of the soil who laboured at various manual works,” he writes, “lived then, so to say, in common, and they are found continually together in all their daily occupations. So far from this community of occupations, this familiar daily intercourse, being incompatible with the great inequality of conditions which then existed, in reality it resulted from it. It was where no strict line of demarcation divided the various classes that they ordinarily affected to keep at a distance one from the other.”³²⁸

There can be no doubt as to the nature of the teaching of the English Church in regard to the relation which, according to true Christian principles, should exist between all classes of society. In particular is this seen in all that pertained to the care of the poorer members of the Christian family. The evidence appears clear and unmistakable enough in pre-Reformation popular sermons and instructions, in formal pronouncements of Bishops and Synods, and in books intended for the particular teaching of clergy and laity in the necessary duties of the Christian man. Whilst fully recognising as a fact that in the very nature of things there must ever be the class of those who “have,” and the class of those who “have not,” our Catholic forefathers in pre-Reformation days knew no such division and distinction between the rich man and the poor man as obtained later on, when pauperism, as distinct from poverty, had come to be recognised as an inevitable consequence of the new era. To the Christian moralist, and even to the bulk of Catholic Englishmen, whether secular or lay, in the fifteenth century, those who had been blessed by God’s providence with worldly wealth were regarded not so much as the fortunate possessors of personal riches, their own to do with what they listed, and upon which none but they had right or claim, as in the light of stewards of God’s good gifts to mankind at large, for the right use and ministration of which they were accountable to Him who gave them.

Thus, to take one instance: the proceeds of ecclesiastical benefices were recognised in the Constitutions of Legates and Archbishops as being in fact as well as in theory the eleemosynæ et spes pauperum– the alms and the hope of the poor. Those ecclesiastics who consumed the revenues of their cures on other than necessary and fitting purposes were declared to be “defrauders of the rights of God’s poor,” and “thieves of Christian alms intended for them;” whilst the English canonists and legal professors who glossed these provisions of the Church law gravely discussed the ways in which the poor of a parish could vindicate their right to their share in the ecclesiastical revenues of the Church.

This “jus pauperum,” which is set forth in such a text-book of English Law as Lyndwood’s Provinciale, is naturally put forth more clearly and forcibly in a work intended for popular instruction such as Dives et Pauper. “To them that have the benefices and goods of Holy Church,” writes the author, “it belonged principally to give alms and to have the cure of poor people.” To him who squanders the alms of the altar on luxury and useless show, the poor may justly point and say: “It is ours that you so spend in pomp and vanity!.. That thou keepest for thyself of the altar passing the honest needful living, it is raveny, it is theft, it is sacrilege.” From the earliest days of English Christianity the care of the helpless poor was regarded as an obligation incumbent on all; and in 1342, Archbishop Stratford, dealing with appropriations, or the assignment of ecclesiastical revenues to the support of some religious house or college, ordered that a portion of the tithe should always be set apart for the relief of the poor, because, as Bishop Stubbs has pointed out, in England, from the days of King Ethelred, “a third part of the tithe” which belonged to the Church was the acknowledged birthright of the poorer members of Christ’s flock.

That there was social inequality is as certain as it was inevitable, for that is in the very constitution of human society. But this, as M. Luce has pointed out in regard to France, and Professor Janssens in regard to Germany, in no way detracted from the frank and full acknowledgment of the Christian brotherhood. Again and again in the sermons of the fifteenth century this truth, with all its practical applications, was enforced by the priest at the altar, where both poor and rich alike met on a common footing – “all, poor and rich, high and low, noble and simple, have sprung from a common stock and are children of a common father, Adam:” “God did not create a golden Adam from whom the nobles are descended, nor a silver Adam from whom have come the rich, and another, a clay Adam, from whom are the poor; but all, nobles, rich and poor, have one common father, made out of the dust of the earth.” These and similar lessons were constantly repeated by the religious teachers of the pre-Reformation English Church.

Equally definite is the author of the book of popular instruction, Dives et Pauper, above referred to. The sympathy of the writer is with the poor, as indeed is that of every ecclesiastical writer of the period. In fact, it is abundantly clear that the Church of England in Catholic days, as a pia mater, was ever ready to open wide her heart to aid and protect the poorer members of Christ’s mystical body. This is how Pauper in the tract in question states the true Christian teaching as to the duties of riches, and impresses upon his readers the view that the owners of worldly wealth are but stewards of the Lord: “All that the rich man hath, passing his honest living after the degree of his dispensation, it is other men’s, not his, and he shall give full hard reckoning thereof at the day of doom, when God shall say to him, ‘Yield account of your bailywick.’ For rich men and lords in this world are God’s bailiffs and God’s reeves, to ordain for the poor folk and to sustain them.” Most strongly does the same writer insist that no property gives any one the right to say “this is mine” and that is “thine,” for property, so far as it is of God, is of the nature of governance and dispensation, by which those who, by God’s Providence “have,” act as His stewards and the dispensers of His gifts to such as “have not.”³²⁹

It would, of course, be affectation to suggest that poverty and great hardness of life were not to be found in pre-Reformation days, but what did not exist was pauperism, which, as distinguished from poverty, certainly sprung up plentifully amid the ruins of Catholic institutions, overthrown as a consequence – perhaps as a necessary and useful consequence – of the religious changes in the sixteenth century. Bishop Stubbs, speaking of the condition of the poor in the Middle Ages, declares that “there is very little evidence to show that our forefathers in the middle ranks of life desired to set any impassable boundary between class and class… Even the villein, by learning a craft, might set his foot on the ladder of promotion. The most certain way to rise was furnished by education, and by the law of the land, ‘every man or woman, of what state or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth him within the realm.’” Mr. Thorold Rogers, than whom no one has ever worked so diligently at the economic history of England, and whom none can suspect of undue admiration of the Catholic Church, has also left it on record that during the century and a half which preceded the era of the Reformation the mass of English labourers were thriving under their guilds and trade unions, the peasants were gradually acquiring their lands and becoming small freeholders, the artisans rising to the position of small contractors and working with their own hands at structures which their native genius and experience had planned. In a word, according to this high authority, the last years of undivided Catholic England formed “the golden age” of the Englishman who was ready and willing to work.

“In the age which I have attempted to describe,” writes the same authority, “and in describing which I have accumulated and condensed a vast amount of unquestionable facts, the rate of production was small, the conditions of health unsatisfactory, and the duration of life short. But, on the whole, there were none of those extremes of poverty and wealth which have excited the astonishment of philanthropists and are exciting the indignation of workmen. The age, it is true, had its discontents, and these discontents were expressed forcibly and in a startling manner. But of poverty which perishes unheeded, of a willingness to do honest work and a lack of opportunity there was little or none. The essence of life in England during the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors was that every one knew his neighbour, and that every one was his brother’s keeper.”³³⁰

In regard to the general care of the poorer brethren of a parish in pre-Reformation England, Bishop Hobhouse, after a careful examination of the available sources of information, writes as follows: “I can only suppose that the brotherhood tie was so strongly realised by the community that the weaker ones were succoured by the stronger, as out of a family store. The brotherhood tie was, no doubt, very much stronger then, when the village community was from generation to generation so unalloyed by anything foreign, when all were knit together by one faith and one worship and close kindred; but, further than this, the guild fellowships must have enhanced all the other bonds in drawing men to share their worldly goods as a common stock. Covertly, if not overtly, the guildsman bound himself to help his needy brother in sickness and age, as he expected his fellow-guildsman to do for him in his turn of need, and these bonds, added to a far stronger sense of the duty of children towards aged parents than is now found, did, I conceive, suffice for the relief of the poor, aided only by the direct almsgiving which flowed from the parsonage house, or in favoured localities from the doles or broken meat of a monastery.”³³¹

To relieve the Reformation from the odious charge that it was responsible for the poor-laws, many authors have declared that not only did poverty largely exist before, say, the dissolution of the monastic houses, but that it would not long have been possible for the ancient methods of relieving the distressed to cope with the increase in their numbers under the changed circumstances of the sixteenth century. It is of course possible to deal with broad assertions only by the production of a mass of details, which is, under the present circumstances, out of the question, or by assertions equally broad, and I remark that there is no evidence of any change of circumstances, so far as such changes appear in history, which could not have been fully met by the application of the old principles, and met in a way which would never have induced the degree of distressing pauperism which, in fact, was produced by the application of the social principles adopted at the Reformation. The underlying idea of these latter was property in the sense of absolute ownership in place of the older and more Christian idea of property in the sense of stewardship.

Most certainly the result was not calculated to improve the condition of the poorer members of the community. It was they who were made to pay, whilst their betters pocketed the price. The well-to-do classes, in the process, became richer and more prosperous, whilst the “masses” became, as an old writer has it, “mere stark beggars.” As a fact, moreover, poverty became rampant, as we should have expected, immediately upon the great confiscations of land and other property at the dissolution of the religious houses. To take one example: Dr. Sharpe’s knowledge of the records of the city of London enables him to say that “the sudden closing of these institutions caused the streets to be thronged with the sick and poor.”

“The devil,” exclaims a preacher who lived through all these troublous times – “the devil cunningly turneth things his own way.” “Examples of this we have seen in our time more than I can have leisure to express or to rehearse. In the Acts of Parliament that we have had made in our days what godly preambles hath gone afore the same; even quasi oraculum Apollinis, as though the things that follow had come from the counsel of the highest in heaven; and yet the end hath been either to destroy abbeys or chauntries or colleges, or such like, by the which some have gotten much land, and have been made men of great possessions. But many an honest poor man hath been undone by it, and an innumerable multitude hath perished for default and lack of sustenance. And this misery hath long continued, and hath not yet (1556) an end. Moreover, all this commotion and fray was made under pretence of a common profit and common defence, but in very deed it was for private and proper lucre.”³³²

In the sixty years that followed the overthrow of the old system, it was necessary for Parliament to pass no less than twelve acts dealing with the relief of distress, the necessity for which, Thorold Rogers says, “can be traced distinctly back to the crimes of rulers and agents.” I need not characterise the spirit which is manifested in these acts, where poverty and crime are treated as indistinguishable.

Dr. Jessop writes: “In the general scramble of the Terror under Henry the Eighth, and of the anarchy in the days of Edward the Sixth … the monasteries were plundered even to their very pots and pans. The almshouses, in which old men and women were fed and clothed, were robbed to the last pound, the poor almsfolk being turned out in the cold at an hour’s warning to beg their bread. The splendid hospitals for the sick and needy, sometimes magnificently provided with nurses and chaplains, whose very raison d’être was that they were to look after the care of those who were past caring for themselves, these were stripped of all their belongings, the inmates sent out to hobble into some convenient dry ditch to lie down and die in, or to crawl into some barn or house, there to be tended, not without fear of consequences, by some kindly man or woman, who could not bear to see a suffering fellow-creature drop down and die at their own doorposts.”³³³

Intimately connected with the subject of the care of the poor in pre-Reformation days is obviously that of the mediæval guilds which, more than anything else, tended to foster the idea of the Christian brotherhood up to the eve of the religious changes.

It would probably be a mistake to suppose that these societies existed everywhere throughout the country in equal numbers. Mr. Thorold Rogers, it is true, says – and the opinion of one who has done so much work in every kind of local record must carry great weight – that “few parishes were probably without guild lands.” But there is certainly no distinct evidence that this was the case, especially in counties say like Hampshire, always sparsely populated as compared with other districts in the east of England, and where the people largely depended on agricultural pursuits for a living. It was in the great centres of trade and manufacture that the guilds were most numerous and most important, for it was precisely in those parts that the advantages of mutual help and co-operation outside the parish bond were most apparent and combination was practically possible.

An examination of the existing records leads to a general division of mediæval guilds into two classes —Craft or Trade associations, and Religious or, as some prefer now to call them, Social guilds. The former, as their name implies, had, as the special object of their existence, the protection of some work, trade or handicraft, and in this for practical purposes we may include those associations of traders or merchants known under the name of “guild-merchants.” Such, for instance, were the great companies of the city of London, and it was in reality under the plea that they were trading societies that they were saved in the general destruction which overtook all similar fraternities and associations in the sixteenth century. The division of guilds into the two classes named above is, however, after all more a matter of convenience than a real distinction founded on fact. All guilds, no matter for what special purpose they were founded, had the same general characteristic of brotherly aid and social charity; and no guild was divorced from the ordinary religious observances commonly practised by all such bodies in those days.

It is often supposed that, for the most part, what are called religious guilds existed for the purpose of promoting or encouraging the religious practices, such as the attendance at church on certain days, the taking part in ecclesiastical processions, the recitations of offices and prayers, and the like. Without doubt, there were such societies in pre-Reformation days – such as, for example, the great Guild of Corpus Christi, in the city of York, which counted its members by thousands. But such associations were the exception, not the rule. An examination of the existing statutes and regulations of ancient guilds will show how small a proportion these purely Ecclesiastical guilds formed of the whole number of associations known as Religious guilds. The origin of the mistaken notion is obvious. In mediæval days – that is, in times when such guilds flourished – the word “religious” had a wider, and what most people who reflect will be inclined to think, a truer signification than has obtained in later times. Religion was then understood to include the exercise of the two commandments of charity – the love of God and the love of one’s neighbour – and the exercises of practical charity to which guild brethren were bound by their guild statutes were considered as much religious practices as attendance at church or the taking part in an ecclesiastical procession. In these days, as Mr. Brentano in his essay On the History and Development of Guilds has pointed out, most of the objects, to promote which the guilds existed, would now be called social duties, but they were then regarded as true objects of Christian charity. Mutual assistance, the aid of the poor, of the helpless, of the sick, of strangers, of pilgrims and prisoners, the burial of the dead, even the keeping of schools and schoolmasters, and other such like works were held to be “exercises of religion.”³³⁴

If the word “religious” be thought now to give a wrong impression about the nature of associations, the main object of which was to secure the performance of duties we should now call “social,” quite as false an impression would be conveyed by the word “social” as applied to them. A “social” society would inevitably suggest to many in these days an association for convivial meetings, and this false notion of the nature of a mediæval guild would be further strengthened by the fact that in many, if not most, of them a yearly, and sometimes a more frequent feast existed under an item in their statutes. This guild feast, however, was a mere incident in the organisation, and in no case did it form what we might consider the end or purpose of the association.

By whichever name we call them, and assuming the religious basis which underlay the whole social life in the fifteenth century, the character and purpose of these mediæval guilds cannot in reality be misunderstood. Broadly speaking, they were the benefit societies and the provident associations of the middle ages. They undertook towards their members the duties now frequently performed by burial clubs, by hospitals, by almshouses, and by guardians of the poor. Not infrequently they acted for the public good of the community in the mending of roads and the repair of bridges, and for the private good of their members, in the same way that insurance companies to-day compensate for loss by fire or accident. The very reason of their existence was the affording of mutual aid and assistance in meeting the pecuniary demands which were constantly arising from burials, legal exactions, penal fines and all other kinds of payments and compensations. Mr. Toulmin Smith thus defines their object: “The early English guild was an institution of local self-help which, before the poor-laws were invented, took the place in old times of the modern friendly or benefit society, but with a higher aim; while it joined all classes together in the care of the needy and for objects of common welfare, it did not neglect the forms and practice of religion, justice, and morality,”³³⁵ which I may add was, indeed, the main-spring of their life and action.

“The guild lands,” writes Mr. Thorold Rogers, “were a very important economical fact in the social condition of early England. The guilds were the benefit societies of the time from which impoverished members could be, and were, aided. It was an age in which the keeping of accounts was common and familiar. Beyond question, the treasurers of the village guild rendered as accurate an annual statement of their fraternity as a bailiff did to his lord… It is quite certain that the town and country guilds obviated pauperism in the middle ages, assisted in steadying the price of labour, and formed a permanent centre for those associations which fulfilled the function that in more recent times trades unions have striven to satisfy.”³³⁶

An examination of the various articles of association contained in the returns made into the Chancery in 1389, and other similar documents, shows how wide was the field of Christian charity covered by these “fraternities.” First and foremost amongst these works of religion must be reckoned the burial of the dead; regulations as to which are invariably to be found in all the guild statutes. Then, very generally, provisions for help to the poor, sick, and aged. In some, assistance was to be given to those who were overtaken by misfortune, whose goods had been damaged or destroyed by fire or flood, or had been diminished by loss or robbery; in others, money was found as a loan to such as needed temporary assistance. In the guild at Ludlow, in Shropshire, for instance, “any good girl of the guild had a dowry provided for her if her father was too poor to find one himself.” The “guild-merchant” of Coventry kept a lodging-house with thirteen beds, “to lodge poor folk coming through the land on pilgrimage or other work of charity,” with a keeper of the house and a woman to wash the pilgrims’ feet. A guild at York found beds and attendance for poor strangers, and the guild of Holy Cross in Birmingham kept almshouses for the poor in the town. In Hampshire, the guild of St. John at Winchester, which comprised men and women of all sorts and conditions, supported a hospital for the poor and infirm of the city.

The very mass of material at hand makes the task of selecting examples for illustrating some of the objects for which mediæval guilds existed somewhat difficult. I take a few such examples at haphazard. The organisation of these societies was the same as that which has existed in similar associations up to the time of our modern trades unions. A meeting was held at which officers were elected and accounts audited; fines for non-acceptance of office were frequently imposed, as well as for absence from the common meeting. Often members had to declare on oath that they would fulfil their voluntary obligations, and would keep secret the affairs of the society. Persons of ill-repute were not admitted, and members who disgraced the fraternity were expelled. For example, the first guild statutes printed by Mr. Toulmin Smith are those of Garlekhithe, London. They begin: “In worship of God Almighty our Creator and His Mother Saint Mary, and all Saints, and St. James the Apostle, a fraternity is begun by good men in the Church of St. James, at Garlekhith in London, on the day of Saint James, the year of our Lord 1375, for the amendment of their lives and of their souls, and to nourish greater love between the brethren and sisters of the said brotherhood.” Each of them has sworn on the Book to perform the points underwritten.

“First: all those that are, or shall be, in the said brotherhood shall be of good life, condition, and behaviour, and shall love God and Holy Church and their neighbours, as Holy Church commands.” Then, after various provisions as to meetings and payments to be made to the general funds, the statutes order that “if any of the foresaid brethren fall into such distress that he hath nothing, and cannot, on account of old age or sickness, help himself, if he has been in the brotherhood seven years, and during that time has performed all duties, he shall have every week after from the common box fourteen pence (i. e. about £1 a week of our money) for the rest of his life, unless he recovers from his distress.”³³⁷ In one form or other this provision for the assistance of needy members is repeated in the statutes of almost every guild. Some provide for help in case of distress coming “through any chance, through fire or water, thieves or sickness, or any other haps.” Some, besides granting this kind of aid, add: “and if so befall that he be young enough to work, and he fall into distress, so that he have nothing of his own to help himself with, then the brethren shall help him, each with a portion as he pleases in the way of charity.”³³⁸ Others furnish loans from the common fund to enable brethren to tide over temporary difficulties: “and if the case falleth that any of the brotherhood have need to borrow a certain sum of silver, he (can) go to the keepers of the box and take what he hath need of, so that the sum be not so large that any one may not be helped as well as another, and that he leave a sufficient pledge, or else find a sufficient security among the brotherhood.”³³⁹ Some, again, make the contributions to poor brethren a personal obligation on the members, such as a farthing a week from each of the brotherhood, unless the distress has been caused by individual folly or waste. Others extend their Christian charity to relieve distress beyond the circle of the brotherhood – that is, of all “whosoever falls into distress, poverty, lameness, blindness, sent by the grace of God to them, even if he be a thief proven, he shall have seven pence a week from the brothers and sisters to assist him in his need.”³⁴⁰ Some of the guilds in seaside districts provide for help in case of “loss through the sea,” and there is little doubt that in mediæval days the great work carried on by such a body as the Royal Lifeboat Society would have been considered a work of religion, and the fitting object of a religious guild.

It would be tedious to multiply examples of the purposes and scope of the old fraternities, and it is sufficient to repeat that there was hardly any kind of social service which in some form or other was not provided for by these voluntary associations. As an illustration of the working of a trade or craft guild, we may take that of the “Pinners” of the city of London, the register of which, dating from A.D. 1464, is now in the British Museum.³⁴¹ These are some of the chief articles approved for the guild by the Mayor and Corporation of the city of London: (1) No foreigner to be allowed to keep a shop for the sale of pins. (2) No foreigner to take to the making of pins without undergoing previous examinations and receiving the approval of the guild officers. (3) No master to receive another master’s workman. (4) If a servant or workman who has served his master faithfully fall sick he shall be kept by the craft. (5) Power to the craft to expel those who do ill and bring discredit upon it. (6) Work at the craft at nights, on Saturdays, and on the eves of feasts is strictly prohibited. (7) Sunday closing is rigidly enforced.

It is curious to find, four hundred years ago, so many of the principles set down as established, for which in our days trades unions and similar societies are now contending. It has been remarked above, that even in the case of craft guilds, such as this Society of Pinners undoubtedly was, many of the ordinary purposes of the religious guilds were looked to equally with the more obvious object of protecting the special trade or handicraft of the specific society. The accounts of this Pinners’ Guild fully bear out this view. For example: We have the funeral services for departed brethren, and the usual trentals, or thirty masses, for deceased members. Then we find: “4d. to the wax chandlers’ man for setting up of our lights at St. James.” One of the members, William Clarke, borrowed 5s. 10d. from the common chest, to secure which he placed a gold ring in pledge. There are also numerous payments for singers at the services held on the feast days of the guild, and for banners and other hangings for processions.