by Will Durant
The wits of men found many subterfuges from the law. A borrower would sell land cheap to the lender, leave him the usufruct as interest, and later repurchase the land. Or the landowner sold to the lender some or all of the annual rents or revenues of his land; if, for example, A sold to B for $100 the rents of a parcel yielding $10.00 a year, B was in effect lending A $100 at ten per cent. Many monasteries invested their funds by buying such “rent charges”—above all in Germany, where the word for interest, Zins, grew out of the medieval Latin for rents, census.67 Towns borrowed money by deeding to the lender a share in their revenues.68 Individuals and institutions, including monasteries, lent money in return for secret gifts or fictitious sales.69 Pope Alexander III complained in 1163 that “many of the clergy” (chiefly monastic) “while they shrink from common usury as from a thing too plainly condemned, do notwithstanding lend money to others who are in need, take their possessions in pledge, and receive the fruits therefrom accruing beyond the principal lent.”70 Some borrowers pledged themselves to pay “damages” increasing for every day or month of delay in repaying a loan; and the date of payment was placed so early as to make such concealed interest inevitable;71 on this basis the Cahorsians lent money to certain monasteries on terms equivalent to sixty per cent per year.72 Many banking firms openly lent at interest, and claimed immunity on the theory that the law applied only to individuals. The cities of Italy made no excuses for paying interest on their government bonds. In 1208 Innocent III remarked that if all usurers were excluded from the Church as canon law demanded, all churches might as well be closed.73
The Church reluctantly adjusted herself to realities. St. Thomas Aquinas, about 1250, courageously formulated a new ecclesiastical doctrine of interest: the investor in a business enterprise might legitimately share in the gain if he actually shared in the risk or the loss;74 and loss was interpreted to include any delay in the repayment of the loan beyond a stipulated date.75 St. Bonaventura and Pope Innocent IV accepted the principle, and widened it to legitimize a payment made to a lender in return for the temporary loss of the use of his capital.76 Some fifteenth-century canonists admitted the right of states to issue interest-bearing bonds; Pope Martin V in 1425 legalized the sale of rent charges; after 1400 most European states repealed their laws against interest; and the Church prohibition survived as a dead letter which all agreed to ignore. The Church tried to find a solution by encouraging St. Bernardino of Feltre and other ecclesiastics in establishing, from 1251 on, montes pietatis—“hills of love”—where trustworthy persons in need, by depositing some article as a pledge, might obtain loans without interest. But these precursors of our pawnbrokers’ shops touched only a small sector of the problem; the needs of commerce and industry remained, and capital rose to meet them.
The professional moneylenders exacted high rates of interest not so much because they were conscienceless devils as because they ran great risks of loss and head. They could not always enforce their contracts through appeals to the law; their accumulations were subject to requisition by kings or emperors; they could at any moment be banished, and were at all times damned. Many loans were never repaid; many borrowers died bankrupt; some went on crusades, were excused from paying interest, and never returned. When borrowers defaulted, the lenders could only make up the loss by raising rates on other loans; the good loan had to pay for the bad one, as the price of commodities bought must include the cost of commodities spoiled before sale. In twelfth-century France and England the interest rate ranged between 33⅓% and 43⅓%;77 sometimes it rose to 86%; in prosperous Italy it sank to 12½% to 20%;78 Frederick II, about 1240, tried to lower the rate to 10%, but soon paid more than that to Christian moneylenders. As late as 1409 the government of Naples allowed 40% as the legal maximum.79 The interest rate fell as the security of loans rose, and as the competition of lenders increased. Gradually, through a thousand experiments and errors, men learned to use the new financial tools of a progressive economy, and the Age of Money began in the Age of Faith.
V. THE GUILDS
In ancient Rome there were countless collegia, scholae, sodalitates, artes—associations of artisans, merchants, contractors, political clubs, secret fraternities, religious brotherhoods. Did any of these survive to beget the medieval guilds?
Two letters of Gregory I (590–604) refer to a corporation of soap makers at Naples, and to another of bakers at Otranto. In the law code of the Lombard King Rotharis (636–52) we read of magistri Comacini—apparently master masons from Como, who speak of one another as collegantes—colleagues of the same collegium80 Associations of transport workers are mentioned in seventh-century Rome and in tenth-century Worms.81 The ancient guilds continued in the Byzantine Empire. In Ravenna we find references to many scholae or economic associations—in the sixth century to bakers, in the ninth to notaries and merchants, in the tenth to fishermen, in the eleventh to victualers. We hear of artisan ministeria in ninth-century Venice, and of a gardeners’ schola in eleventh-century Rome.82 Doubtless most of the ancient guilds in the West succumbed to the barbarian invasions, and the resulting reruralization and poverty; but some seem to have survived in Lombardy. When commerce and industry recovered in the eleventh century the conditions that had begotten the collegia regenerated the guilds.
Consequently these were strongest in Italy, where the old Roman institutions were best preserved. In Florence, in the twelfth century, we find arti—“arts,” craft unions—of notaries, clothiers, wool merchants, bankers, physicians and druggists, mercers or silk dealers, furriers, tanners, armorers, innkeepers….83 These guilds were apparently modeled on those of Constantinople.84 North of the Alps the destruction of the ancient collegia was presumably more complete than in Italy; yet we find them mentioned in the laws of Dagobert I (630), the capitularies of Charlemagne (779, 789), and the ordinances of Archbishop Hincmar of Reims (852). In the eleventh century the guilds reappear in France and Flanders, and multiply rapidly as charités, frairies (brotherhoods), or compagnies. In Germany the guilds (hanse) stemmed from old Markgenossenschaften—local associations for mutual aid, religious observances, and holiday hilarity. By the twelfth century many of these had become trade or craft unions; and by the thirteenth century these were so strong that they contested political as well as economic authority with the municipal councils.85 The Hanseatic League was such a guild. The first mention of English guilds is in the laws of King Ine (688–726), which speak of gegildan—associates who helped one another to pay any wergild assessed against them. The Anglo-Saxon word gild (cf. the German Geld, the English gold and yield) meant a contribution to a common fund, and later the society that administered the fund. The oldest reference to English trade guilds is dated 1093.86 By the thirteenth century nearly every important town in England had one or more guilds, and a kind of municipal “guild socialism” held sway in England and Germany.
Nearly all the guilds of the eleventh century were merchant guilds: they included only independent merchants and master workmen; they excluded all persons dependent upon others. They were frankly institutions in restraint of trade. They usually persuaded their towns to keep out, by a high protective tariff or elsewise, goods competitive with their own; such alien goods, if allowed to enter the town, were sold at prices fixed by the affected guild. In many cases a merchant guild obtained from commune or king a local or national monopoly in its line or field. The Paris Company for the Transit of Merchandise by Water almost owned the Seine. By city ordinance or economic pressure the guild usually compelled craftsmen to work only for the guild or with its consent, and to sell its products only to or through the guild.
The greater guilds became powerful corporations; they dealt in a variety of goods, purchased raw materials wholesale, provided insurance against losses, organized the food supply and sewage disposals of their towns, paved streets, built roads and docks, deepened harbors, policed highways, supervised markets, regulated wages, hours, conditions of labor, terms of apprenticeship, methods of production and sale, pric
es of materials and wares.87 Four or five times a year they fixed a “just price” that in their judgment gave fair stimulus and reward to all parties concerned. They weighed, tested, counted all products bought or sold in their trade and area, and did their best to keep inferior or dishonest goods from the market.88 They banded together to resist robbers, feudal lords and tolls, refractory workmen, tax-levying governments. They took a leading part in politics, dominated many municipal councils, effectively supported the communes in their struggles against barons, bishops, and kings, and themselves evolved into an oppressive oligarchy of merchants and financiers.
Usually each guild had its own guild hall, which in the later Middle Ages might be architecturally ornate. It had a complex personnel of presiding aldermen, recorders, treasurers, bailiffs, sergeants…. It had its own courts to try its members, and required its members to submit their disputes to the guild court before resorting to state law. It obligated its members to help a fellow guildsman in sickness or distress, to rescue or ransom him if attacked or jailed.89 It supervised the morals, manners, and dress of its members, and fixed a penalty for coming to meeting stockingless. When two members of the Leicester Merchants’ Guild engaged in fisticuffs at Boston Fair, their fellows fined them a barrel of beer, to be co-operatively drunk by the guild.90 Each guild had an annual feast for its patron saint, when a brief prelude of prayer sanctioned a day of moist exuberance. It shared in financing and adorning the city’s churches or cathedral, and in preparing and performing those miracle plays which mothered the modern drama; and in municipal parades its dignitaries marched in gorgeous liveries, displaying the banners of their trade in colorful pageantry. It provided for its members insurance against fire, flood, theft, imprisonment, disability, and old age.91 It built hospitals, almshouses, orphanages and schools. It paid for the funerals of its dead, and for the Masses that would rescue their souls from purgatory. Its prosperous decedents seldom failed to remember it in their wills.
Normally excluded from these merchant guilds, and yet subject to their economic regulations and political power, the craftsmen in each industry began in the twelfth century to form in each town their own craft guilds. In 1099 we find guilds of weavers in London, Lincoln, and Oxford, and, soon afterward, of fullers, tanners, butchers, goldsmiths…. Under the names of arti, Zunfte, métiers, “companies,” “mysteries,” they spread throughout Europe in the thirteenth century; Venice had fifty-eight, Genoa thirty-three, Florence twenty-one, Cologne twenty-six, Paris one hundred. About 1254 Étienne Boileau, “provost of merchants”—secretary of commerce—under Louis IX, issued an official Livre des Métiers, or Book of Trades, giving the rules and regulations of 101 Paris guilds. The division of labor in this list is astonishing: in the leather industry, for example, there were separate unions for skinners, tanners, cobblers, harness makers, saddlers, and makers of fine leather goods; in carpentry there were distinct unions of chest makers, cabinetmakers, boatbuilders, wheelwrights, coopers, twiners. Each guild jealously guarded its craft secrets, fenced in its field of work against outsiders, and engaged in lively jurisdictional disputes.92
In the spirit of the times the craft guild took a religious form and a patron saint, and aspired to monopoly. Ordinarily no one might follow a craft unless he belonged to its guild.93 The guild leaders were annually elected by full assemblies of their craft, but were often chosen by seniority and wealth. Guild regulations determined—as far as merchant guilds, municipal ordinances, and economic law would allow—the conditions under which the members worked, the wages they received, the prices they charged. Guild rules limited the number of masters in an area, and of apprentices to a master; forbade the industrial employment of women except the master’s wife, or of men after six P.M.; and punished members for unjust charges, dishonest dealing, and shoddy goods. In many cases the guild proudly stamped its products with its “trademark” or “[guild]hallmark,” certifying their quality;94 the cloth guild of Bruges expelled from the city a member who had forged the Bruges hallmark on inferior goods.95 Competition among masters in quantity of production or price of product was discouraged, lest the cleverest or hardest masters become too rich at the expense of the rest; but competition in quality of product was encouraged among both masters and towns. Craft, like merchant, guilds, built hospitals and schools, provided diverse insurance, succored poor members, dowered their daughters, buried the dead, cared for widows, gave labor as well as funds to building cathedrals and churches, and pictured their craft operations and insignia in cathedral glass.
The fraternal spirit among the masters did not prevent a sharp gradation of membership and powers in the craft guilds. At the bottom was the apprentice, ten to twelve years old, bound by his parents, for a period of from three to twelve years, to live with a master workman, and serve him in shop and home. In return he received food, clothing, shelter, and instruction in the trade; in the later years of his service, wages and tools; at the end of his term, a gift of money to start him on his own. If he ran away he was to be returned to his master and punished; if he continued to abscond he was forever debarred from the craft. On completing his service he became a journeyman (serviteur, garçon, compagnon, varlet), passing from one master to another as a day (journée) laborer. After two or three years the journeyman, if he had enough capital to open his own shop, was examined for technical ability by a board of his guild; if he passed he was made a master. Sometimes—but only in the later Middle Ages—the candidate was required to submit to the governors of the guild a “masterpiece”—a satisfactory sample of his craft.
The graduate craftsman, or master, owned his tools, and usually produced goods directly on order of the consumer, who in some cases provided the materials, and might at any time come in and watch the work. The middleman, in this system, did not control the avenues between the maker and the user of goods. The scale of the craftsman’s operations was limited by the market for which he produced, which was usually his town; but he was not dependent upon the fluctuations of a general market, or the mood of distant investors or purchasers; he did not know the economic paranoia of alternating exaltations and depressions. His hours were long—eight to thirteen hours a day; but he chose them himself, worked in a wisely leisurely way, and enjoyed many a religious holiday. He ate nourishing food, bought sturdy furniture, wore simple but durable clothing, and had at least as wide a cultural life as the master workman of today. He did not read much, and was spared much stupefying trash; but he shared actively in the song and dance, the drama and ritual, of his community.
Throughout the thirteenth century the craft guilds waxed in number and power, and provided a democratic check on the oligarchic merchant guilds. But the craft guilds in turn became an aristocracy of labor. They tended to restrict mastership to masters’ sons; they underpaid their journeymen, who in the fourteenth century weakened them with repeated revolt; and they raised ever higher barriers against entry into their membership or their towns.96 They were excellent organizations for an industrial age when difficulties of transportation often narrowed the market to local buyers, and capital accumulations were not yet sufficiently rich and fluid to finance large-scale undertakings. When such funds appeared the guilds—merchant or craft —lost control of the market, and therefore of the conditions of work. The Industrial Revolution destroyed them in England by the slow fatality of economic change; and the French Revolution abruptly disbanded them as hostile to that freedom and dignity of work that for a bright moment they had once sustained.
VI. THE COMMUNES
The economic revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, like those of the eighteenth and the twentieth, caused a revolution in society and government. New classes rose to economic and political power, and gave to the medieval city that virile and pugnacious independence which culminated in the Renaissance.
The question of heredity versus environment affects the cities, as well as the guilds, of Europe; were they the lineal descendants of Roman municipalities, or new concretions deposi
ted by the stream of economic change? Many Roman cities maintained their continuity through centuries of chaos, poverty, and decay; but only a few in Italy and southeastern France kept the old Roman institutions, and fewer still the old Roman law. North of the Alps, barbarian laws had overlaid the Roman heritage; and in some measure the political customs of the German tribe or village had seeped even into ancient municipalities. Most transalpine towns belonged to feudal domains, and were ruled by the will and appointees of their feudal lords. Municipal institutions were alien, feudal institutions natural, to the Teutonic conquerors. Outside of Italy, the medieval city rose through the formation of new commercial centers, classes, and powers.
The feudal town had grown up, usually on elevations, at the junction of roads, or along vital waterways, or on frontiers. Around the walls of the feudal castle or fortified monastery the modest industry and trade of the townsmen or burgesses had slowly developed. When Norse and Magyar raids subsided, this extramural activity expanded, shops multiplied, and merchants and craftsmen, once transient, became settled residents of the town. In war, however, insecurity returned; and the extramural population built a second wall, of wider circumference than the feudal moat, to protect itself, its shops, and its goods. The feudal baron or bishop still owned and ruled this enlarged town as part of his domain; but its growing population was increasingly commercial and secular, fretted under feudal tolls and controls, and plotted to win municipal liberty.
Out of old political traditions and new administrative needs an assembly of citizens and a corps of officials took form; and more and more this “commune”—the body politic—regulated the affairs of the city—the body geographical. Towards the end of the eleventh century the merchant leaders began to demand from the feudal overlords charters of communal freedom for the towns. With characteristic shrewdness they played one overlord against the other—baron against bishop, knight against baron, king against any of them or all. The townsmen used diverse means to achieve municipal freedom: they took a solemn oath to refuse and resist baronial or episcopal tolls or taxes; they offered the lord a flat sum, or an annuity, for a charter; on the royal domain they won autonomy by money grants, or services in war; sometimes they bluntly announced their independence, and fought a violent revolution. Tours fought twelve times before its liberty was won. Lords in need or debt, especially in preparing for a crusade, sold charters of self-government to the towns that they held in fief; many English cities in this way won their local autonomy from Richard I. Some lords, above all in Flanders, granted charters of incomplete freedom to cities whose commercial development enhanced baronial revenues. The abbots and bishops resisted longest, for their consecration oath bound them not to lower the income of their abbeys or sees—by which their many ministrations were financed; hence the struggle of the towns against their ecclesiastical owners was most bitter and prolonged.