Friedrich Engels commented on the tendency of rebellions to frequently turn to sexual liberties: “It is a curious fact that in every large revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the foreground.”187
The heretics exerted strict regulations on their followers’ social and economic lives, but had difficulties in generating incomes to support themselves. They took what they wanted from others, and when sufficiently large in numbers, they attempted common farms and gardens.
Fortunately, as their stridency finally calmed, there arose a unity in the faith that put a rational work ethic back into the groups. True Christianity started to make its comeback—sort of. As countries established national religions, persecution took on a new form in the guise of local law—If you’re not one of us, you’re not welcome. For many, they had no viable option to exercise their free choice of religion except to leave and start fresh in the New World.
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179 J. Macek, Tabor in the Hussite Revolutionary Movement, Vol. 2, 1959, p. 85.
180 Ibid., p. 94.
181 Ibid., pp. 99-100.
182 Ibid., p. 113.
183 Ibid., p. 478.
184 L. Keller, Johann von Staupitz un die Anfange der Reformation, 1888, p. 306, cited in Shafarevich, p. 35.
185 F. Bezold, Geschichte der deutschen Reformation, 1886, p. 703, cited in Shafarevich, p. 39.
186 Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649.
187 Engels, The Book of Revelation, in ME: On Religion (Moscow, FLPH, 1957), p. 205.
Chapter 28: Rise of the Guilds
Meanwhile, back in Europe: Before socialism infiltrated modern free trade under the guise of unions, there were first the ancient associations and guilds.
The butcher, the baker and candlestick maker conjure up pleasant images of a simpler time in faraway medieval European towns where everyone looked like roly-poly cartoon characters and there was no violent crime, disease or outhouses.
Well—Maybe Not
In earlier centuries, the cobblers, tinkerers and craft makers were members of a guild—an association of specialists organized in Middle Ages Europe to guard and protect trade secrets. The guild movement was a great engine of self interest at work, established to protect their businesses and exclude competition.
The word “guild” is from the Anglo-Saxon gildan, meaning “to pay” or “to contribute.” Guild members paid regular dues to the central fund to pool the risks of life and business. This helped secure against an emergency such as sickness, accidents, funerals, financial collapse, bad economic times, etc.
Early Milestone Dates
Organizing skilled people into groups was not a medieval invention. Associations of talented people appear to have existed in many eras and numerous places. They were not always so organized or retained the level of bargaining power as those of recent centuries, but pooling talent appeared to be popular.
800 B.C.—Homer mentions associations of builders, potters, carpenters, and specialists in metal and leather in ancient Greece.
700 B.C.—Numa, thought to be the second king of Rome, divided craftsmen into nine guilds or collegia.
400 B.C.—India’s caste system had guilds called shrenis.
200 B.C.—A Chinese guild system began to form at least during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 200), called the hanghui. Chinese guilds were well established by the Sui Dynasty (A.D. 589-618).
A.D. 600—Earliest guilds reported in England.
A.D. 900—Craftsmen started organizing in Iran.
Merchant Guilds—in Like a Lamb ...
The most powerful associations during the medieval period were the merchant guilds. These were associations of artisans, craftsmen, merchants and traders, and membership was voluntary.
The Christian church played a large role in setting the right spirit of philanthropy that was adopted by most guilds, but the Church as an institution was not connected. It opposed the binding oaths that guild members swore to keep the secrets of their crafts hidden among themselves.
The merchant guilds were initially organized to resist the arbitrary tax hikes imposed by the land-owning lords and kings. As a group, the guilds could tell the kings where to get off if the rulers wanted to benefit from their services. But individuals had no such power. Telling off the king meant a trip to the dungeon. An individual didn’t wield enough power in such matters—he was too insignificant.
The guilds often united with other guilds and formed a formidable group that could rise up and refuse services or products unless certain demands were met. For example, the guilds insisted tax rates had to be locked in and unchanged for at least one year. Those agreements were drawn up as charters or letter patents, which were the predecessors of today’s patent and trademark system.
Guilds built their own meeting places called the guildhall. The buildings gave the members a safe and distinguished place of privilege to conduct business and receive payment of guild taxes. The members wore special apparel to advertise their guild association at formal occasions and parades, and hung signs out in front of their businesses to let people know that only the best was available there.
... And Out Like a Lion
The merchant guilds grew so powerful, they melded in with the town structure. Politics and favoritism began to monopolize everything—including the craftsmen.
The craftsmen didn’t like being smothered by the merchants and wanted to form their own associations. It wasn’t always a scene of pitchforks and torches, with peasants shaking fists and shouting insults at the gates of guildhall. But, the craftsmen succeeded in starting their own silent revolution. Over time, these craft guilds eventually overpowered and replaced many of the merchant guilds.
Craftsmen Unite
The first to form a craft guild were the weavers and fullers in England in A.D. 1130. They successfully established their own authority over various trades, and other craftsmen soon followed suit.
The craft guilds were organized along similar lines as the merchants. They built guild halls, they corralled skills into a pool, and they controlled the sale and availability of their services in a way to strengthen their business profits and foot traffic. After a few years no one could practice a particular craft without being a member of the local craft guild.
The new guilds prevented outside competition, and they worked together to fix prices as well as to ensure high levels of quality. They conspired to keep their products in great demand by limiting the numbers of craftsmen working in any particular art or trade, or reduced the quantity of product available.
Tutoring the Apprentice
The son of a guild member typically joined the guild as an “apprentice” who worked under the professional tutorship of a “master.” This training lasted 5-9 years. The youth received no income during this period except free room and board. He couldn’t even marry until he graduated to the level of “journeyman.”
A journeyman could receive wages for his work. His goal was to make the next level of master. To qualify for the top job, a journeyman had to successfully create an acceptable “masterpiece.” This was a work of such precision and professionalism (he hoped) that it would convince the guild leadership and other masters that he was ready.
As a master he could set up his own shop and begin training (and exploiting) the next generation of apprentices.
101 Models of Crafts on the Wall ...
The craftsmen formed hundreds of guilds from apothecaries to armor makers, bakers, barbers, surgeons, dentists, embroiderers, butchers, carpenters, candle makers, cordwainers (leather workers), cutlers (knife makers), dyers, farriers, fishmongers, fletchers (arrow makers), girdle makers, goldsmiths, stirrup and harness makers, masons, needle makers, plasterers, plumbers, writers of legal documents, skinners, winders and packers of
wool—and more.
Church and Emperors Not Happy
During the reign of the Carlovingians (also known as the Carolinians, the family dynasty that ruled Germany, France and Italy during A.D. 700-900) the guilds’ control threatened the emperors’ ruling power. In A.D. 779, one such emperor declared,
“Let no one dare to take the oath by which people are wont to form guilds. Whatever may be the conditions which have been agreed upon, let no one bind himself by oaths concerning the payment of contributions in case of fire or shipwreck.”188
Other emperors issued similar decrees.
There was little the emperors could do to stop these organizations. Their feudal co-dependencies complicated matters even more—exerting too much force could chase away the hired help.
Lost in all of these machinations was the individual. The best way up the ladder of success was guild membership, but what if a person wanted to go solo, do it alone, venture into entrepreneurship, innovate, and invent something that would compete with the guild? Those who tried were punished by the guilds or by the town fathers, who, in some places were one and the same.
Legal Authority to Oppress
By the start of the new millennium, guilds in England were asking for government protection (with charters)—and were getting them. They started organizing everywhere. By A.D. 1093, they had large groups in Bristol, Carlisle, Durham, Lincoln, Oxford, Salisbury, and Southhampton. Chartering gave the guilds power to make legal rules of conduct that often carried the legal authority of local law.
Participation records from the parliaments of Edward I (1272-1307) show that there were some 160 towns represented in his government. Of these, at least 92 were known to have strongly organized guilds—it’s easy to surmise from the business and trading activities of the time that all villages and towns had guilds of one kind or another.
Records show that organizations were forming elsewhere—Gilde and Confrerie (France and the low countries); Zunft, Bruderschaft, and Hansa (Germany); Komtoor (Bruges), and others in Novgorod (Russia), Prussia, Westphalia, Livonia, Sweden, and just about everywhere that a man could buy a good plow and horse collar, and a woman a good stove pot and sewing needles.
Equal Opportunity Guilds?
Widows were allowed to participate in guilds if their husbands had been members in good standing when they died. Women and children could resume the trade to bring in some income so long as the quality and production standards were met.
Government Force Turned Them Into Socialists
The story of guilds is important in the history of socialism because guilds corrupted the free market with elements of Ruler’s Law.
For the most part, guilds were capitalistic. They tried to control wealth for private benefit. Freedom to associate and form a guild did not violate the rights of others. Setting rules for participation, and out-producing with superior products didn’t hurt either.
But when the guilds’ rules carried the force of public law, when they created monopolies and prevented workers from exercising their unalienable rights of choice and association by switching jobs—such as preventing a shoemaker from being a shoe repairer, or more broad, such as preventing a carpenter from becoming a plumber—that’s when the guilds became little combines of socialism.
Violating the basic freedom to try, by using coercion and violence to keep competitors from honing in on the business, was the precursor to today’s modern trade unions. Thugs and mobs of guild members found a fresh way to kill the competition—literally.
Early Thuggery: In 1397, a case was brought before the Lord Chancellor in England complaining of local merchants who had attacked a competitor: “... Because he sold his merchandise at a less price than other merchants of the said town of Yaxley did theirs ... [angry merchants] and many other evil-doers of their coven, lay in wait with force and arms to kill the said William Lonesdale, and they assaulted him, beat him and ill-treated him, and left him there for dead, so that he despaired of his life.”189
Dying Dyers: Another case in that same period dealt with snuffing out a competitor who offered to dye cloth at below the going rates. Official court records of the late 1300s report: “Dyers guild undertook to work only at certain rates; and when a number of dyers refused to be bound by these rates, the guild hired Welshmen and Irishmen to waylay and kill them.”190
First Picket Line: What might be the first union-type picket line recorded in history was formed in 1538. A bishop reported to Oliver Cromwell that: “...Twenty-one journeymen shoemakers of Wisbech have assembled on a hill without the town, and sent three of their number to summon all the master shoemakers to meet them, in order to insist upon an advance in their wages, threatening that ‘there shall none come into the town to serve for that wages within a twelve month and a day, but we will have an arm or a leg of him, except they will take an oath as we have done.’”191
With lethal force taking care of business on the outside, secret handshakes and ceremonial initiations among the associations were taking care of business on the inside.
Super Secret Societies
The compagnonnages192 were secretive societies of journeymen in medieval Europe. Unlike the local guilds, the compagnonnages were international, with groups organized over all of the western continent.
Another secretive group was the Masons. There is little mention of these before the 1400s, but the Masons participated and developed their own initiations and recognitions to help one another advance in business, education and life. The Masons claimed their origins stretched clear back to the stonework performed on the temple of Solomon around 900 B.C. However, a more probable origin was during the heydays of cathedral building that started in the A.D. 700s in Germany, or A.D. 1040 in England. To join the Mason’s building construction fraternities, a person was initiated into the mysticism with secret handshakes, oaths, passwords, and ceremonies. Violating these oaths could mean death.
Working the System
Be they secretive, coercive or voluntary, when workers organized themselves to control the means of production and distribution, they were in violation of natural law because they prevented others from exercising the same rights. Organizing to increase quality and decrease price is the positive way of building wealth. Organizing to prevent competition and keep prices high is the negative way to build wealth. Socialism builds on the negative side, capitalism builds on the positive side.
These are lessons in economics that even the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker understood until the guilds crept in and corrupted that path. The guilds laid the groundwork for future trade unions that would infiltrate the marketplace in similar ways—this time with the iron fist of federal regulation and supreme law to back them up.
The Guilds Decline
The strength of the guilds began to decline in the 1600-1700s.
When France was teetering on the brink of complete conflagration in the 1790s, the king banished the guilds to restore peace. He allowed any craftsman to freely compete by paying a fee for a business license. Suddenly, that made things fair again—but it was short-lived, and then abandoned. At the time, the French people had much larger issues exploding in their faces.
* * *
188 Burton, E., & Marique, P. (1910). Guilds, paragraph 7, In The Catholic Encyclopedia.
189 Great Britain, Court of Chancery; Baildon, W. Paley (William Paley), 1859-1924, Select Cases in Chancery, A.D. 1364 to 1471, London, B. Quaritch, 1896.
190 Quoted in Howard Dickman, Industrial Democracy In America, 1987, p. 28.
191 Calendars of State Papers: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Vol. xiii, Part i, 1538, No. 1454, p. 537.
192 George Francois Renard (1847-1930), Guilds of the Middle Ages, pp. 87-89.
Chapter 29: How the French “Revolutionized” Socialism
Centuries of socialistic management under a monarch cha
nged when France’s citizens woke up to the possibilities of freedom. The potential to be free was theirs—but they missed it, and ended up swapping one dictatorship for another.
Before the great revolution in 1789, France had all the earmarks of a typical socialist society.
It was feudalism, it was a monarchy, it was regimented, it was regulated, and it was maddening.
Its name was Ancien Régime, the “old system.” Everyone—old, young, rich, poor, high, low—knew it was failing to meet the needs of the growing populous and had to be replaced.
Setting the Stage
Here’s where the country stood in 1774 when Louis XVI took the throne.193 Although the largest and wealthiest nation in Europe with about 25 million people, it was having problems—
Scattered Villages: France was not an all-together nation. For centuries the various kings had patched it together by conquest and deal-making—even marrying heiresses for political purposes. The various kings broke down the old feudal dynasties and drew new lines. Some provinces came on board with their own laws, customs, and system of government. So long as they paid taxes, the kings didn’t see a need to impose a universal law on everyone. Some of these districts were very self-sufficient with their own assemblies and historical independence.
Scattered Laws: In France’s west and north, there were at least 285 separate codes of law. If you moved from one village to another, you might get arrested for some crime you never knew existed.
Gridlock: Attempting to trade goods between towns and regions was like trading to a foreign country. Merchants had to pay duties to cross “state” lines.
The Salt Tax: The government had a monopoly on salt. This earned the king a great deal of money. Once a year every household was compelled to purchase from the state warehouse seven pounds of salt per person who was over age seven—the price was arbitrarily set at any given place or time. Some of the districts paid horrific prices, perhaps 30 times more than their neighbors. For example, if people in Dijon wanted to salt their potato fries, they paid seven francs. But go east a few miles in Franche-Comté and it was 25 francs. Up in Burgundy, it was 58 francs, but over in Gex, it was zero. (Gex must have made great fries). A man caught smuggling this precious commodity could be fined, flogged, sent to the gallows, or executed.
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