Industrial organization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Front matter

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CORNELL UNIVERSITY ** LIBRARY

Cornell University Library HD6460 .U62

Preface

This book has grown up out of a piece of research which I planned as a student of Berlin in 1898, and commenced to carry out as a student of the London School of Economics in the following year. An article published in the Economic Journal for September 1900, under the title ' A Seventeenth-Century Trade Union,' which was the first outcome of this investigation, has, with the kind permission of the editors, been reproduced almost in full in Section 4 of Chapter VIII.

Setting out with the detailed examination of the records of a single London company, I was gradually led to include within the scope of my inquiry, first, the other industrial companies of London, then the similar organizations in other English centres of industry, and finally the parallel development in continental cities, and especially at Paris. In this way I came to entertain the idea of doing something, however tentative, to bridge over the gap which appeared to exist in industrial history between mediaeval England and the England of the eighteenth century.

The chapters on mediaeval industrial organization in Professor Ashley's Introduction to Economic History and Theory on the one hand, and on the other hand the History of Trade Unionism, and Industrial Dem.ocracy of Mr. and Mrs. Webb, have supplied me not only with a starting-point, but with an invaluable and constantly renewed stimulus. I should not, however, have ventured to undertake the task, if it had not been for the inspiration and the guidance derived from the lectures and writings of Professor Gustav Schmoller of Berlin, and if I had not been able to avail myself very largely of the researches in German economic history of the school which Professor SchmoUer may be said to have founded.

iv PREFACE

No one, whatever his special subject or period, who attempts to make a contribution to English economic history can avoid laying- himself under obligations to the work of Dr, Cunningham. My own debt would have been much greater if I could have taken advantage of the enlarged edition of the later portion of the Growth of English Industry and Commerce — which, however, did not appear till my book was ready for the press. I have done my best by the addition of references to enable the reader to avail himself of this great storehouse of economic learning.

In the case of the French work to which that of Dr. Cunningham most nearly corresponds — the Histoire des classes ouvrieres et de f Industrie enFrance of M. Levasseur — I have been somewhat more fortunate. More than forty years after the first appearance of what has since been the standard work on the subject, M. Levasseur is at present engaged on a revised edition embodying the results achieved by historical research in the interval. The first two volumes of this edition, which appeared in 1900 and 1901, furnish the student with an indispensable guide to the sources of French social history. Those sources are rapidly becoming accessible in printed form, and amongst them are many records of industrial organization, the most valuable of all for the purpose of comparison with English contemporary records being the edition by M, Rene de Lespinasse of the ordinances of the Parisian corporations — which forms part of a magnificent series of volumes, designed to illustrate the history of Paris in all its aspects.

Although London certainly has fallen behind Paris in this respect, the progress made of late in the publication of municipal records in England generally has been very marked. Many old cities and boroughs have taken the matter in hand for themselves, with excellent results ; the Historical MSS. Commission have reported on the records of many others; and the, local historian, thanks no doubt in some degree to the influence of Mrs. J. R. Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, has begun to show far more appreciation than formerly of the value of local

PREFACE V

records as material for social and economic history. Two books exemplifying this tendency which I have found especially helpful are Miss Harris's Life in an Old English Town and Canon Morris's Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns.

With regard to the sources from which materials have been drawn, this book will be found to fall into two fairly distinct halves. The first of these is based almost entirely on the published histories, articles, and records of which a list wiU be found in Appendix C ; whilst the materials for the second portion, which begins on p. 112, have been mainly derived from the manuscript sources indicated in Appendix B.

In this difference of material there is implied almost inevitably a difference of method. In the earlier chapters an attempt has been made to exhibit the transformation of the London craft organizations as part of a development which belongs to the general history of Western Europe, and this has involved an extensive use of the comparative method. It may perhaps be thought that too much stress has thus been laid upon the parallelism between English economic development and that of continental nations. This, however, has not been put forward as the final aspect of social history ; although it certainly seems to deserve more attention than has been commonly bestowed upon it. At a later stage of inquiry it would, no doubt, be necessary to insist upon the element of differentiation due to the working of causes peculiar to each nationality.

If this task has not been undertaken in the later chapters, it is because an almost entire dependence upon manuscript material precludes any extensive application of the comparative method. In attempting to give a somewhat detailed account of the activity of the new type of industrial organization which displaced the craft gild, I have been obliged to confine myself, not merely to England, but to London, and even to certain selected industries of the metropolis. The court books of two Livery Companies, constituting between them a continuous weekly record of administrative activity for nearly three centuries, served vi PREFACE

as a backbone to the investigation ; whilst a large amount of supplementary material relating to these and to the other companies was found among the Domestic State Papers, in the MS. department of the British Museum, in the Privy Council Register, in the Repertories of the City of London or in the archives of the House of Lords. It would be impossible for an individual student with less than a lifetime at his disposal to exhaust the unpublished material to be derived from these sources. The Calendars of State Papers— especially those more recently issued— have enormously facilitated the task of the historian by enabling him to dispense, in the great majority of cases, with a reference to the original MS. ; whilst the volumes issued by the Historical MSS. Commission, and Mr. Dasent's edition of the Acts of the Privy Cotmcil, are gradually rendering the same service even more completely. But, in spite of the excellent example set by lesser towns, there is, as far as I know, no immediate prospect of the Repertories of the City of London, which form perhaps the richest storehouse of material for the history of industrial regulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, being made more accessible to the student. The records of the Livery Companies are a very uncertain quantity; but it is probable that of the seventy-odd surviving companies a third at least possess records of considerable value, whilst the published histories of individual companies which give any satisfaction to the economic historian can be easily reckoned on the fingers of one hand. One of the main purposes with which this book was written was, by attempting to indicate the place occupied by the Livery Companies in the course of industrial development, to enable those interested in their records to do fuller justice to their value as material for the economic history of England during a very important period.

I am encouraged to hope that this purpose will not entirely fail of fulfilment by the sympathetic readiness with which I have been assisted by the three companies, the Feltmakers, the Haberdashers, and the Clothworkers, whose records I had selected for special investigation. I am

PREFACE

Vll especially grateful to Mr. Peachey, Clerk to the Feltmakers' Company, whose kindness did much to smooth the difficult path of a beginner ; and to Sir Owen Roberts, who courteously placed at my disposal the exceptionally interesting records of the Clothworkers' Company. Mr. W. E. Carrington of Stockport has supplied me with some valuable documents relating to the history of feltmaking.

My thanks are also due to the Library Committee of the City Council for permission to make some extracts from the City Repertories ; to Mr. J. R. Dasent of the Board of Education, and Mr. J. C. Ledlie of the Privy Council Office, for free access to the Privy Council Register ; and to Mr. J. C. Tingey, Honorary Archivist of Norwich, and the Rev. W. Hudson his predecessor in that office, who did all in their power to assist my somewhat cursory examination of the admirably arranged records on the basis of which they are about to make an important contribution to the history of that famous city. In conclusion I wish to express my indebtedness to Mr. L. L. Price, Bursar of Oriel College, and to Mr. Joseph Owen, Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, who took the trouble to read some of the earlier chapters in manuscript, for much timely encouragement and helpful suggestion ; and to Mr. J. C. Dore of Cardiff, and my wife, for valuable assistance in getting the book through the press.

Chelsea, May 7, 1904.

NOTE AS TO REFERENCES The edition of M. Levasseur's Histoire des classes otivrihres en- France referred to in this book is the greatly enlarged one just published of the first two volumes dealing with the period before the Revolution. The references to Dr. Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce are taken from the third edition. The two divisions of the work, Early and Middle Ages and Modern Times, are referred to as i and ii respectively. The third edition of the latter portion is in two parts, but is paged as one volume. The Jahrbuch fiir Gesetzgebung, Verivaltung und Volkswirthschaft im Deutschen Reich, and the Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, both edited by Professor Gustav Schmoller of Berlin, are referred to as Schmoller's/a^riSwirA and Schmoller's Forschungen.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction • • "

Chap. I. The Amalgamation of the Crafts • • • 'o II. Differentiation of Classes within the Craft

Introduction

To the eye of the scientific observer, human society, as industrial 1 it lives and moves at the present day, embodies an endless survivals at variety of survivals from almost every age since the dawn j'^j^ P"^^^*^"' ' of history ; and nowhere is the past more closely intermingled with the present tlian in the complicated and world-wide ramifications of modern industry. As a con- ' Crete illustration of this truth it will suffice to take the case ( of any English town of average size — ^with a population of, say, between 50,000 and 100,000 — and to enumerate the ■ main industrial channels through which the primary wants of the inhabitants are supplied.

In the first place a part— though a much smaller part Home-prothan formerly — of what is worn by the members of each ductjon a household is produced by the domestic labours of the from\he family circle. Home-knitted stockings, home-made under- village '^' wear, and home-contrived children's garments, though not community

common in large cities, are still worn to some extent in ij provincial towns. Most working-class families do some )! home tailoring, and not a few, even in London, repair their ij own boots. With the natural progress of the division of ,. labour, these domestic activities, along with others, such as baking, brewing, and preserving, tend to be replaced by the labours of the workshop and of the factory. The fragments that remain may be considered as survivals from the 'li domestic economy of the primitive village community, in if which every household supplied almost all its own wants, and the only professional craftsman was the smith ^. When Dr. Johnson made his famous tour of the Hebrides with his feithful Boswell, he found this simple mode of life still prevailing in some of the western islands of Scotland ; and „the modern traveller who ventures his life amongst the ''Albanians describes them as employing no craftsman but the alien and wandering smith.

J^ ' K. Biicher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft, translated by S. M. Wickett, under the title Industrial Evolution, pp. 15577- The later village community, survivals of vi^hich are still found in India,

ijiembraced often a variety of artisans, such as potters, shoemakers, barbers, who were not 'free craftsmen,' working for their own gain, but officials of the community. See H. Maine, Village Community, p. 125 ; B. H. Baden-Powell, Indian Village Community, pp. 16, 23.

uNwm B

The handi- The nearest source from which the labours of the nouseoHnduT ^°^'^ '" °^^ typical modern town can be supplemented or o in us ry j.gpj^j,gj jg ^^ ^^ found in the small tradesman — the baKer and the butcher, the working- tailor and the cobbler of the immediate neighbourhood. The characteristics of this class are — that its members deal directly with the consumer; that they work with their own hands, though sometimes assisted by an apprentice or a journeyman ; and that they possess a very limited amount of capital. Sometimes indeed they work upon material supphed by their customers. This used to be the case even with the baker, to whose oven the household sent its daily bread and its weekly joint. Nowadays it is no doubt more general for the small tradesman to furnish his own material, but the amount of his circulating capital is often restricted to a week's supply — a side of leather, a few sacks of flour, or a beast for slaughtering — which in some cases may be obtained on credit. It is to work carried on under these conditions — only removed by one degree from the simplicity of household production — that the name of handicraft has been applied i- And just, as home-production is a survival from the period of the village community, so handicraft represents the industrial conditions of the later period when civilization took a step forward from the village to the town. is a survival There had been very little division of labour in the from the village community. Nearly all its members had been me^aeva gjjg^gg^j \^ directly Supplying their own elementary wants, or in assisting- to supply the similar wants of their lord. The town arose as a centre in which the surplus produce of many villages could be profitably disposed of by exchange. Trade thus became a settled occupation, and trade prepared the way for the establishment of the handicrafts, by furnishing capital for the support of the craftsmen, and by creating a regular market for their products. In the mediaeval town, therefore, it was possible for a great many bodies of craftsmen—the weavers, the tailors, the shoemakers, the butchers, the bakers, the carpenters, the masons, &c., to find a livelihood, each craft devoting itself to the supply of a single branch of those wants which the village household had attempted very imperfecdy to satisfy by its own labours 2. represented In respect of their relations to a wider economic enby the poor vironment, there is of course the greatest possible difference hold ofTo"- between the position of the mediaeval craftsman and that

^^ 1 Biicher, Industrial Evolution, pp. 168-71, 188; G. SchmoUer

Grundrisse der allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre, i. 419 (igoo). ' ^ Cf. Ashley, Economic History, Pt. II, p. 99.

INDUSTRIAL TYPES OF THE PAST 3

of his modern representative, the working tailor or shoemaker of our back streets. The mediaeval craftsman was a pioneer engaged in opening up the virgin soil of industry ; whilst the modern craftsman is a poor gleaner in a field which has been already swept by the machinery of larger systems of production. But in the more immediate conditions of his employment, in the smallness of the capital invested, and the directness of the relation between producer and consumer, the modern craftsmen preserves for us the features of the earliest stage of industrial development. If we wish to assist our imaginations to form a conception of a mediaeval town by a reference to existing facts, we must set aside the trading centre of the modern town, with its large shops, its railway station, post oflSce, and public buildings, and take as our starting-point some poor neighbourhood in the town, inhabited by the working class. Such a neighbourhood has often an individuality and a name ,of its own. It has its parish church, its lifelong residents, its centres of gossip, its familiar characters, its customs and traditions not shared by the rest of the town. These things supply the social setting to which the lingering element of handicraft in modern industry properly belongs.

But the inhabitant of such a neighbourhood looks beyond The doits limits, not only for almost all the higher interests of his ™estic or life, but also for the supply of the greater part of his material ^^^^ system needs. If he wants a new suit of clothes, if his wife desires a new dress or new furniture for her parlour, these are generally obtained at the large shops in the centre of the i town. Here we are brought into contact with a more 1 advanced phase of industrial development. The tailor ! with the large shop and an extensive stock of materials, I who supplies the suit of clothes, is not so much a craftsman ( as a trader. His business is to elicit an order. He probably i sets a workman to measure the customer, and when the J materials have been cut out he hands them over to be made i up by one of a number of workmen, whom he keeps em- 1 ployed in their own homes. The advantage of this inter- 1 position of the trader between the producer and the ■ consumer is that the producer obtains a larger market for I his work, and the consumer a wider choice in the satisfaction » of his wants. No very satisfactory name has been found 1 for this method of employment. It has generally been called the domestic system.^ because the work is carried '' on in the home, but this does not sufficiently distinguish it from the handicraft system. Another proposal is to

B 2 call it the commission system. ', which applies well ^".°^^ to cases like that already described, but is not so apphca-ble to other cases where the 'small master,' instead of waitmg for a commission, produces at his own risk articles oi a type in common use, and then endeavours to dispose of them to a dealer. If, for instance, the inhabitant of our typical neighbourhood should decide to invest his savings in furniture rather than clothes, it is not improbable that the sideboard or the wardrobe, which is henceforth to adorn his house, will have been made in the domestic workshop of a Shoreditch cabinetmaker, sold to a dealer in Curtain Road, and sent by him to replenish the stock of the shopkeeper in our provincial town, belongs to The last illustration helps to explain the place of the the period domestic system as a stage in the historical development of national of industry. Tust as the rise of the handicrafts is associated with the subordination of the village to the larger economic unity represented by the town, so the appearance of the domestic system was part of a later development by which the town was subordinated to the still larger economic unity of the nation at large ^. The mediaeval town had aimed at being nearly as self-contained as the primitive household. There was, of course, division of labour between the town and the country round about it. The country people brought their foodstuffs, their wool and hides, to the town market, and were supplied in return with the various products of the town handicrafts. In addition to this, as the population of the town increased, there was further division of labour amongst its workers, leading to a multiplication of separate handicrafts. But of that division of labour between distant centres of industry, by virtue of which SheflSeld makes cutlery for Northampton, Northampton makes boots for Burslem, and Burslem makes pottery for Sheffield, there was exceedingly little in mediaeval times. So free an interchange as now takes place implies the existence of many social and political conditions which have been of slow growth. But considered merely as a matter of industrial development, it was first rendered possible by the transition from the handicraft system to the domestic system. From the fifteenth century onwards, bodies of craftsmen in the various industrial centres were enabled, through the agency of the trading

' Bucher, Industrial Evolution, p. 171. The word in the original is Verlagssystem ; cf. SchmoUer, Grundrisse, i. p. 424.

"^ Ashley, Economic History, Pt. II, pp. 8, 42, 220 ; Bucher Industrial Evolution, pp. 83-149. '

THE DOMESTIC SYSTEM 5

middleman, to find a market for their wares in distant parts of the country. With such a machinery of distribution at his command the producer did not need to remain within reach of the consumer. Secure of a national market industry was free to concentrate in the most favourable localities, and by this process the more important industries lost their local limitations, and acquired a national character, during the period between the Reformation and the Revolution. We may therefore regard the cases already cited from the tailoring and furniture trades as survivals exemplifying the type of industrial organization which predominated in the days of Shakespeare and Milton.

But all the three sources of supply, so far enumerated, The taken together probably fail to account for more than factory half the commodities regularly consumed by our typical ^^g^^^j-n working-class family. Their hats, and boots, and ready- form of made clothing, the sheets and blankets on their beds, the "dnstry beds themselves, and a score of other things were made in factories by wage-earners organized in large numbers imder the immediate direction of capitalist employers, and generally with the assistance of elaborate and expensive machinery^- This is so universally recognized as the normal method of modern industry that the instinctive tendency would probably be to overrate rather than underrate the proportion of wants which it supplies. The couple of centuries which have elapsed since England gave birth to the factory system have not sufficed, as our survey has shown, for the elimination of the earlier methods of production. In every manufacturing town, craftsmen, who preserve the industrial type of Chaucer's day, and small masters, whose status resembles that of Shakespeare's Bottom the Weaver, are to be found in considerable numbers side by side with factory workers of the modern type. It is not superiority of numbers but superiority of organization which gives the factory-worker the leadership of the working-classes.

The survival of the handicraftsman is rendered a familiar The sweatfact to most people by the daily contact into which he is ing system brought with the customers whose wants he supplies. But sodai'^'"^ the case of the small master working for a middleman is problem not obtruded upon the public notice. Numbers of this class are hidden away in the unexplored regions of our great cities. They are exempt from the visits of the factory inspector, and most of them belong to no organization. Probably few of those who read the evidence given before ' Biicher, Industrial Evolution, pp. 173-8.

INTRODUCTION the Lords' Committee on the sweating system had bee aware how extensive and various were the industries still

The

domestic system in modern England carried on in domestic workshops, and fewer still are i y to have realized that the evils then brought to light were the lingering traces of what constituted the great mdustrial problem of Tudor and Stuart times, just as the contlict between organized wage-earners and their employers constitutes the great industrial problem of to-day. . , The great survey accomplished by Mr. Charles Idooth and his assistants has not only shown that the 'domestic system,' i. e. the employment of workers in their homes or in larger domestic workshops under small masters, is the predominant method of employment in the East^ End of London, but has also supplied us with a vivid picture of the conditions under which the typical industries of this class, the tailoring and shoe-making of Whitechapel, the silk-weaving of Bethnal Green, and the cabinet-making of Shoreditch, are carried on ^ More recently a careful German observer has enumerated a list of English industries in which the domestic system prevails, including the cutlery trade of Sheffield, the pottery and the chain and nail- making of the Black Country, the lace-making and hosiery of Nottingham, the straw-plaiting of Bedford, the glove industry of Worcester and Oxfordshire, the smallware trades of Birmingham and the silk-weaving of Macclesfield ^. In some of these cases — at Nottingham and Sheffield, for instance — an arrangement is found which is half-way between the domestic workshop and the factory. The small master continues to undertake the work upon his own account, but he hires from a larger capitalist, not only the room in which his occupation is carried on, but also the power necessary to keep his wheel or his loom in motion.

And if in England, the birthplace of the factory system, continental the amouut of industry carried on under the older form of countries organization is still so considerable, the proportion is even greater throughout the rest of Europe. In the cotton and woollen manufactures, in which England remains unrivalled, the factory system has long been completely triumphant ; whilst the handloom of the small master still lingers in many parts of France and Germany, and is much commoner in Eastern Europe '^. Most of the domestic industries' spoken

^ C. Booth, Lz/e and Labour of the People of London, vols, i, ii.

^ W. Hasbach, Zur Characteristik der englischen Industrie vci Jahrbuch fur Gesetzgebung (ed. Schmoller), 1902, pp. 1032-52.

^ E. Helm, British Cotton Industry in ' British Industries,' edited by Professor Ashley, p. 88.

and in

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GILD 7

of as existing in England are to be found in the other countries of Europe, and most countries have industries of this kind peculiar to themselves. Such are, for example, the production of articles of fashion in Paris, of toys in the Black Forest, of watches in Switzerland, and of samovars in the Russian villages. The Russian village industries carried on in this way are most varied and extensive. Some twenty years ago it was estimated that the population so employed numbered seven and a half millions^. It must be remembered that in the brief history of Russian civilization that development of town life, which did so much to forward the social and political and economic progress of Western Europe, has no place. The production carried on by the village community for the satisfaction of its own wants has been directly converted, without passing through the handicraft stage, into a number of domestic industries, which are provided with a distant market by the enterprise and capital of the merchants in the trading centres ^.

The scope of this book is confined to England as repre- It is here sentative of West European civilization. Its purpose is to considered

r ^1 • J- 1 J i- • • as a modi-

give some account of the rise of the domestic or commission fication of system, not as springing out of the home-production of the handicraft village community, but as displacing the handicraft system of the town. The Craft Gild was the institution in which the handicraft system found its social embodiment. The transformation of the gild with which we are concerned is the process by which a social institution called into existence by one set of economic conditions, was gradually adapted and remodelled from within and from without to meet the requirements of another and more complex set of economic conditions arising out of the progress of civilization. The new type of organization which was the result of this transformation has left behind no name by which it can be clearly distinguished ^. In England it was generally called a company, and the London Livery Companies, as they existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have supplied this book with most of its examples. But the term company does not distinguish the industrial organizations, with which this book is specially concerned, from the purely commercial companies of the same period

' Conrad, Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, article Hausindustrie,

^ Biicher, Industrial Evolution, p. 171.

' SchmoUer's article Recht und Verbdnde der Hausindustrie in his Jahrbuch, vol. xv, gives the best account of similar French and German organizations.

engaged in home or foreign trade, or from the joint-stock companies of the present day.

The COD- In the absence of a distinctive name it is important to nexionbe- make our conception of the thing signified as clear as anrxrade possible ; and perhaps the best way to do this is to set out Union is from the two kindred conceptions that have acquired disleal. tinctive names— the Handicraft Gild and the Trade Union.

The uncritical attempts that have sometimes been made to bring these two widely different forms of industrial association into some sort of historic connexion have had a sound instinct behind them. However erratic they may have been in result i, they have been animated by a dim recognition of the truth that a social institution needs to be explained by a reference to antecedents of its own kind. Economic conditions will not of themselves produce a trade union, nor religious convictions a church. Nor is it sufficient to say that those conditions or convictions taken together with the social nature of man are the causes of these institutions. Man is no doubt everywhere a social animal, but there is nothing in which the races of mankind and the separate branches of those races differ so much as in their aptitude for free association, and in the forms which that aptitude takes. It is a divergence not so much of religious convictions as of social characteristics, which makes the Christian Church such a different institution in Germany and in England, in Scotland and in South Africa. And social character of this kind must not be thought of as innate and as springing up spontaneously in each fresh generation. To a large extent it is transmitted through conscious imitation of the older generation by the younger, of the class which has already achieved organization by that which has not. There is no harm in calling this the influence of environment, as long as it is realized that mere environment cannot produce social progress without the co-operation of willing and congenial subjects. The maxim omne vivum ex vivo, 'no life without antecedent life,' which has recently been transferred from the sphere of biology to that of the higher life of the soul, is a truth that certainly holds good in the intermediate domain of that science which deals with the growth of the social mind. And if we cannot always detect the kindling process of living contact, it is our business as students of social science to arrange the kindred forms of social life as nearly as possible in the order of their natural succession.