CHAPTER II. The Towns and the Gilds

THE TOWNS AND THE GILDS

§ 1. THE ORIGIN OF TOWNS—As in the case of the manor, which was the Norman name for the Saxon “townships,” the town, in the modern sense of the word, had its origin from the primitive settlement known as the mark (p. 6). The only difference between a town and a manor originally lay in the number of its population, and in the fact that the town was a more defensible place than the {23} “township,” or rural manor, probably having a mound or moat surrounding it, instead of the hedges which ran round the villages. In itself it was merely a manor or group of manors; as Professor Freeman puts it, “one part of the district where men lived closer together than elsewhere.” The town had at first a constitution like that of a primitive village in the mark, but its inhabitants had gradually gained certain rights and functions of a special nature. These rights and privileges had been received from the lord of the manor on which the town had grown up; for towns, especially provincial towns, were at first only dependent manors, which gained safety and solidity under the protection of some great noble, prelate, or the king himself, who finally would grant the town thus formed a charter.

§ 2. RISE OF TOWNS IN ENGLAND—Towns first became important in England towards the end of the Saxon period Saxon England had never been a settlement of towns, but of villages and townships, or manors. But gradually towns did grow up, though differing widely in the circumstances and manner of their rise. Some grew up in the fortified camps of the invaders themselves, as being in a secure position; some arose from a later occupation of the once sacked and deserted Roman towns. Many grew silently in the shadow of a great abbey or monastery. Of this class was Oxford, which first came into being round the monasteries of St Frideswide and Osney. Others clustered round the country houses of some Saxon king or earl. Several important boroughs owed their rise to the convenience of their site as a port or a trading centre. This was the origin of the growth of Bristol, whose rise resulted directly from trade; and London of course had always been a port of high commercial rank. A few other towns, like Scarborough and Grimsby, were at first {24} small havens for fishermen. But all the English towns were far less flourishing before the arrival of the Normans than they afterwards became.

§ 3. TOWNS IN DOMESDAY: LONDON—If, now, we once more go back to our great authority, the survey made by William the Norman, we find that the status of these towns or boroughs is clearly recognized, though they are regarded as held by the lord of the manor “in demesne,” or in default of a lord, as part of the king’s demesne. Thus Northampton at that time was a town in the king’s demesne; Beverley was held in demesne by the Archbishop of York. It was possible, too, that one town might belong to several lords, because it spread over, or was an aggregate of, several manors or townships. Thus Leicester seems to have included four manors, which were thus held in demesne by four lords—one by the king, another by the Bishop of Lincoln, another by a noble, Simon de Senlis, and the fourth by Ivo of Grantmesnil, the sheriff. In later times it was held under one lord, Count Robert of Meulan.

Now, in the Domesday Book there is mention made of forty-one provincial cities or boroughs, most of them being the county towns of the present day. There are also ten fortified towns of greater importance than the others. They are Canterbury, York, Nottingham, Oxford, Hereford, Leicester, Lincoln, Stafford, Chester, and Colchester. London was a town apart, as it had always been, and was the only town which had a civic constitution, being regulated by a port-reeve and a bishop, and having a kind of charter, though afterwards the privileges of this charter were much increased. London was of course a great port and trading centre, and had many foreign merchants in it. It was then, as well as in subsequent centuries, the centre of English national life, and {25} the voice of its citizens counted for something in national affairs. The other great ports of England at that time were Bristol, Southampton, and Norwich, and as trade grew and prospered, many other ports rose into prominence (see p. 64).

§ 4. SPECIAL PRIVILEGES OF TOWNS—Even at the time of the Conquest most towns, though small, were of sufficient importance to have a certain status of their own, with definite privileges. The most important of these was the right of composition for taxation, i.e. the right of paying a fixed sum, or rent, to the Crown, instead of the various tallages, taxes, and imposts that might be required of other places. This fixed sum, or composition, was called the firma burgi, and by the time of the Conquest was nearly always paid in money. Previously it had been paid both in money and kind, for we find Oxford paying to Edward the Confessor six sectaries of honey as well as £20 in coin; while to William the Norman it paid £60 as an inclusive lump sum. By the end of the Norman period all the towns had secured the firma burgi, and the right of assessing it themselves, instead of being assessed by the sheriff; they had the right also of choosing a mayor of their own, instead of the king’s bailiff or reeve. They had, moreover, their own tribunals, a charter for their customs, and special rules of local administration, and, generally speaking, gained entire judicial and commercial freedom.

§ 5. HOW THE TOWNS OBTAINED THEIR CHARTERS—It is interesting to see what circumstances helped forward this emancipation of the towns from the rights possessed by the nobles and the abbeys, or by the king. The chief cause of the readiness of the nobles and kings to grant charters during this period (from the Conquest to Henry III.) was their lack of ready money. Everyone knows {26} how fiercely the nobles fought against each other in Stephen’s reign, and how enthusiastically they rushed to the Crusades under Richard I. They could not indulge their love of fighting, which in their eyes was their main duty, without money to pay for their fatal extravagances in this direction, and to get money they frequently parted with their manorial rights over the towns that had grown up on their estates. Especially was this the case when a noble, or king, was taken prisoner, and wanted the means of his ransom. In this way Portsmouth and Norwich gained their charters by paying part of Richard I.’s ransom (1194). Again, Rye and Winchelsea gained theirs by supplying the same king (in 1191) with two ships for one of his Eastern crusades. Many other instances might be quoted from the cases of nobles who also gave charters when setting out upon these extraordinary religious and sentimental expeditions. Indeed, the Crusades had a very marked influence in this way upon the growth of English towns. Someone had to pay for the wars in which the aristocracy delighted, and it is well to remember the fact that the expenses of all our wars—and they have been both numerous and costly—have been defrayed by the industrial portion of the community. And the glories and cruelties of that savage age of so-called knightly chivalry, which has been idealized and gilded by romancers and history-mongers, with its tournaments and torture-chambers, were paid for by that despised industrial population of the towns and manors which contained the real life and wealth of mediæval England.

§ 6. THE GILDS AND THE TOWNS. VARIOUS KINDS OF GILDS—But besides the indirect effect of the Crusades, there was another powerful factor in the growth and emancipation of the towns after the Conquest. I refer to the merchant {27} gilds, which were becoming more and more prominent all through this period, though the height of their power was reached in the fourteenth century. These merchant gilds were one out of four other kinds of gilds, all of which seem to have been similar in origin. The earliest gilds are found in Saxon times, and were very much what we understand by clubs. At first they were associations of men for more or less religious and charitable purposes, and formed a sort of artificial family, whose members were bound by the bond not of kinship, but of an oath; while the gild-feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced the family gatherings of kinsfolk. These gilds were found both in towns and manors, but chiefly in the former, where men were brought more closely together. Besides (1) the religious gilds, we find in Saxon times (2) the frith gilds, formed for mutual assistance in case of violence, wrong, or false accusation, or in any legal affairs. But this class of gilds died out after the Conquest. The most important were (3) the merchant gilds mentioned above, which existed certainly in Edward the Confessor’s time, being called in Saxon ceapemanne gilds, and they were recognized at the time of the Conquest, for they are recorded in Domesday here and there as possessing lands. The merchant members of these gilds had various privileges, such as a monopoly of the local trade of a town, and freedom from certain imposts. They had a higher rank than the members of the (4) craft gilds. These last were associations of handicraftsmen, or artisans, and were separate from the merchant gilds, though also of great importance. If a town was large enough, each craft or manufacture had a gild of its own, though in smaller towns members of various crafts would form only one gild. Such gilds were found, too, not only in towns but in country villages, as is known, e.g., in the case of some {28} Norfolk villages, and remains of their halls in villages have been found. Their gild feasts are probably represented to this day in the parish feasts, survivals of ancient custom.

§ 7. HOW THE MERCHANT GILDS HELPED THE GROWTH OF TOWNS—Now it was only natural that the existence of these powerful associations in the growing boroughs should secure an increasing extent of cohesion and unity among the townsmen. Moreover, the craft and merchant gilds had a very important privilege, which could make many men anxious to join their ranks, namely, that membership in a gild for a year and a day made a tenant in villeinage a free man, as were all the members of a gild. Thus the gilds included all the free tenants in a town, and in becoming a merchant gild the body of free citizens, who formed the only influential portion of a town, began to enlarge their municipal powers. It became their special endeavour to obtain from the king or from their lord wider commercial privileges, grants of coinage, of holding fairs, and of exemption from tolls. Then they asked for freedom of justice and of self-government; and more especially did the gilds, as representing practically the town, buy up the firma burgi, or fixed tax, and thus became their own assessors, and finally bought a charter, as we have seen, from a king or noble in need of ready money. And so gradually, and by other steps which are not always clear, the emancipation of the towns was won by the gilds; the boroughs became free from their lords’ restrictions and dues; till by the end of the twelfth century chartered towns, which were very few at the time of the Conquest, became the general rule.

§ 8. HOW THE CRAFT GILDS HELPED INDUSTRY—So far we have specially noted the work of the merchant gilds, which, as it were, built up the constitution and freedom of the towns. {29}

We must now look for a moment at the work of the artisans’ gilds, or craft gilds, which afterwards became very important. These gilds are found not only in London, but in provincial towns. The London weavers are mentioned as a craft gild in the time of Henry I. (A.D. 1100), and most of these gilds seemed to have existed already for a long period. The Goldsmiths’ Gild claimed to have possessed land before the Norman Conquest, and it was fairly powerful in the days of Henry II. (A.D. 1154), for he found it convenient to try and suppress it. But it did not receive the public recognition of a charter till the fourteenth century. They arose, of course, first in the towns, and originally seem to have consisted of a small body of the leading men of a particular craft, to whom was confided the regulation of a particular industry, probably as soon as that industry was thought of sufficient importance to be regulated. The gild tried to secure good work on the part of its members, and attempted to suppress the production of wares by irresponsible persons who were not members of the craft. Their fundamental principle was, that a member should work not only for his own private advantage, but for the reputation and good of his trade; hence bad work was punished, and it is curious to note that night-work is prohibited as leading to poor work. The gild took care to secure a supply of competent workmen for the future by training young people in its particular industry, and hence arose the apprentice system, which at first, at any rate, had considerable advantages.

The gild, moreover, exercised a moral control over its members, and secured their good behaviour, thus forming an effective branch of the social police. On the other hand, it had many of the characteristics of a benefit {30} society, providing against sickness and death among those belonging to it, as indeed all gilds did.

These institutions, however, did not only belong to the towns, but were found in country districts also; thus we hear of the carpenters’ and masons’ rural gilds in the reign of Edward III. Even the peasant labourers, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, possessed these associations, which in all cases served many of the functions of the modern trade unions. Later on (1381) we shall come to a very remarkable instance of the power of these peasants’ unions in the matter of Tyler’s rebellion.

§ 9. LIFE IN THE TOWNS OF THIS TIME—The inhabitants of the towns were of all classes of society. There was the noble who held the castle, or the abbot and monks in the monastery, with their retainers and personal dependants; there were the busy merchants, active both in the management of their trade and of civic affairs; and there were artisans and master workmen in different crafts. There were free tenants, or tenants in socage, including all the burgesses, or burgage-tenants, as they were called; and there was the lower class of villeins, which, however, always tended to rise into free men as they were admitted into the gilds. “To and fro went our forefathers in the quiet, quaint, narrow streets, or worked at some handicraft in their houses, or exposed their goods round the market-cross. And in those old streets and houses, in the town-mead and market-place, amid the murmur of the mill beside the stream, and the notes of the bell that sounded its summons to the crowded assembly of the town-mote, in merchant gild and craft gild, was growing up that sturdy, industrial life, unheeded and unnoticed by knight or baron, that silently and surely was building up the slow structure of England’s wealth and freedom.”

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