Waterford ordinance, published also by Mr. Gross, says "that all manere of marchandis what so ever kynde thei be of...shal be bought by the Maire and balives which bene commene biers [common buyers, for the town] for the time being, and to distribute the same on freemen of the citie (the propre goods of free citisains and inhabitants only excepted)." This ordinance can hardly be explained otherwise than by admitting that all the exterior trade of the town was carried on by its agents. Moreover, we have direct evidence of such having been the case for Novgorod and Pskov. It was the Sovereign Novgorod and the Sovereign Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to distant lands.
We know also that in nearly all medieval cities of Middle and Western Europe, the craft guilds used to buy, as a body, all necessary raw produce, and to sell the produce of their work through their officials, and it is hardly possible that the same should not have been done for exterior trade--the more so as it is well known that up to the thirteenth century, not only all merchants of a given city were considered abroad as responsible in a body for debts contracted by any one of them, but the whole city as well was responsible for the debts of each one of its merchants. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth century the towns on the Rhine entered into special treaties abolishing this responsibility.(54) And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich document published by Mr. Gross, from which document we learn that the merchant guild of this town was constituted by all who had the freedom of the city, and who wished to pay their contribution ("their hanse") to the guild, the whole community discussing all together how better to maintain the merchant guild, and giving it certain privileges. The merchant guild of Ipswich thus appears rather as a body of trustees of the town than as a common private guild.
In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization. How far this attempt has been successful will be best seen when we have analyzed in the next chapter the organization of labour in the medieval city and the relations of the cities with the surrounding peasant population.
NOTES: 1. W. Arnold, in his Wanderungen und Ansiedelungen der deutschen Stamme, p. 431, even maintains that one-half of the now arable area in middle Germany must have been reclaimed from the sixth to the ninth century. Nitzsch (Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, Leipzig, 1883, vol. i.) shares the same opinion.
3. The composition for the stealing of a simple knife was 15 solidii and of the iron parts of a mill, 45 solidii (See on this subject Lamprecht's Wirthschaft und Recht der Franken in Raumer's Historisches Taschenbuch, 1883, p. 52.) According to the Riparian law, the sword, the spear, and the iron armour of a warrior attained the value of at least twenty-five cows, or two years of a freeman's labour. A cuirass alone was valued in the Salic law (Desmichels, quoted by Michelet) at as much as thirty-six bushels of wheat.
4. The chief wealth of the chieftains, for a long time, was in their personal domains peopled partly with prisoner slaves, but chiefly in the above way. On the origin of property see Inama Sternegg's Die Ausbildung der grossen Grundherrschaften in Deutschland, in Schmoller's Forschungen, Bd. I., 1878; F. Dahn's Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Volker, Berlin, 1881; Maurer's Dorfverfassung; Guizot's Essais sur l'histoire de France; Maine's Village Community; Botta's Histoire d'Italie; Seebohm, Vinogradov, J. R. Green, etc.
5. See Sir Henry Maine's International Law, London, 1888.
6. Ancient Laws of Ireland, Introduction; E. Nys, Etudes de droit international, t. i., 1896, pp. 86 seq. Among the Ossetes the arbiters from three oldest villages enjoy a special reputation (M. Kovalevsky's Modern Custom and Old Law, Moscow, 1886, ii. 217, Russian).
7. It is permissible to think that this conception (related to the conception of tanistry) played an important part in the life of the period; but research has not yet been directed that way.
8. It was distinctly stated in the charter of St. Quentin of the year 1002 that the ransom for houses which had to be demolished for crimes went for the city walls. The same destination was given to the Ungeld in German cities. At Pskov the cathedral was the bank for the fines, and from this fund money was taken for the wails.
9. Sohm, Frankische Rechts-und Gerichtsverfassung, p. 23; also Nitzsch, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 78.
10. See the excellent remarks on this subject in Augustin Thierry's Lettres sur l'histoire de France. 7th Letter. The barbarian translations of parts of the Bible are extremely instructive on this point.
11. Thirty-six times more than a noble, according to the Anglo-Saxon law. In the code of Rothari the slaying of a king is, however, punished by death; but (apart from Roman influence) this new disposition was introduced (in 646) in the Lombardian law--as remarked by Leo and Botta--to cover the king from blood revenge. The king being at that time the executioner of his own sentences (as the tribe formerly was of its own sentences), he had to be protected by a special disposition, the more so as several Lombardian kings before Rothari had been slain in succession (Leo and Botta, l.c., i. 66-90).
12. Kaufmann, Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. I. "Die Germanen der Urzeit," p. 133.
13. Dr. F. Dahn, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Volker, Berlin, 1881, Bd. I. 96.
14. If I thus follow the views long since advocated by Maurer (Geschichte der Stadteverfassung in Deutschland, Erlangen, 1869), it is because he has fully proved the uninterrupted evolution from the village community to the mediaeval city, and that his views alone can explain the universality of the communal movement. Savigny and Eichhorn and their followers have certainly proved that the traditions of the Roman municipia had never totally disappeared. But they took no account of the village community period which the barbarians lived through before they had any cities. The fact is, that whenever mankind made a new start in civilization, in Greece, Rome, or middle Europe, it passed through the same stages--the tribe, the village community, the free city, the state--each one naturally evolving out of the preceding stage. Of course, the experience of each preceding civilization was never lost. Greece (itself influenced by Eastern civilizations) influenced Rome, and Rome influenced our civilization; but each of them begin from the same beginning--the tribe. And just as we cannot say that our states are continuations of the Roman state, so also can we not say that the mediaeval cities of Europe (including Scandinavia and Russia) were a continuation of the Roman cities. They were a continuation of the barbarian village community, influenced to a certain extent by the traditions of the Roman towns.
15. M. Kovalevsky, Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia (Ilchester Lectures, London, 1891, Lecture 4).
16. A considerable amount of research had to be done before this character of the so-called udyelnyi period was properly established by the works of Byelaeff (Tales from Russian History), Kostomaroff (The Beginnings of Autocracy in Russia), and especially Professor Sergievich (The Vyeche and the Prince). The English reader may find some information about this period in the just-named work of M. Kovalevsky, in Rambaud's History of Russia, and, in a short summary, in the article "Russia" of the last edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia.
17. Ferrari, Histoire des revolutions d'Italie, i. 257; Kallsen, Die deutschen Stadte im Mittelalter, Bd. I. (Halle, 1891).
18. See the excellent remarks of Mr. G.L. Gomme as regards the folkmote of London (The Literature of Local Institutions, London, 1886, p. 76). It must, however, be remarked that in royal cities the folkmote never attained the independence which it assumed elsewhere. It is even certain that Moscow and Paris were chosen by the kings and the Church as the cradles of the future royal authority in the State, because they did not possess the tradition of folkmotes accustomed to act as sovereign in all matters.
19. A. Luchaire, Les Communes francaises; also Kluckohn, Geschichte des Gottesfrieden, 1857. L. Semichon (La paix et la treve de Dieu, 2 vols., Paris, 1869) has tried to represent the communal movement as issued from that institution. In reality, the treuga Dei, like the league started under Louis le Gros for the defence against both the robberies of the nobles and the Norman invasions, was a thoroughly popular movement. The only historian who mentions this last league--that is, Vitalis--describes it as a "popular community" ("Considerations sur l'histoire de France," in vol. iv. of Aug. Thierry's OEuvres, Paris, 1868, p. 191 and note).
22. Aug. Thierry, Essai sur l'histoire du Tiers Etat, Paris, 1875, p. 414, note.
23. F. Rocquain, "La Renaissance au XIIe siecle," in Etudes sur l'histoire de France, Paris, 1875, pp. 55-117.
24. N. Kostomaroff, "The Rationalists of the Twelfth Century," in his Monographies and Researches (Russian).
25. Very interesting facts relative to the universality of guilds will be found in "Two Thousand Years of Guild Life," by Rev. J. M. Lambert, Hull, 1891. On the Georgian amkari, see S. Eghiazarov, Gorodskiye Tsekhi ("Organization of Transcaucasian Amkari"), in Memoirs of the Caucasian Geographical Society, xiv. 2, 1891.
26. J.D. Wunderer's "Reisebericht" in Fichard's Frankfurter Archiv, ii. 245; quoted by Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, i. 355.
27. Dr. Leonard Ennen, Der Dom zu Koln, Historische Einleitung, Koln, 1871, pp. 46, 50.
28. See previous chapter.
29. Kofod Ancher, Om gamle Danske Gilder og deres Undergang, Copenhagen, 1785. Statutes of a Knu guild.
30. Upon the position of women in guilds, see Miss Toulmin Smith's introductory remarks to the English Guilds of her father. One of the Cambridge statutes (p. 281) of the year 1503 is quite positive in the following sentence: "Thys statute is made by the comyne assent of all the bretherne and sisterne of alhallowe yelde."
31. In medieval times, only secret aggression was treated as a murder. Blood-revenge in broad daylight was justice; and slaying in a quarrel was not murder, once the aggressor showed his willingness to repent and to repair the wrong he had done. Deep traces of this distinction still exist in modern criminal law, especially in Russia.
32. Kofod Ancher, l.c. This old booklet contains much that has been lost sight of by later explorers.
33. They played an important part in the revolts of the serfs, and were therefore prohibited several times in succession in the second half of the ninth century. Of course, the king's prohibitions remained a dead letter.
34. The medieval Italian painters were also organized in guilds, which became at a later epoch Academies of art. If the Italian art of those times is impressed with so much individuality that we distinguish, even now, between the different schools of Padua, Bassano, Treviso, Verona, and so on, although all these cities were under the sway of Venice, this was due--J. Paul Richter remarks--to the fact that the painters of each city belonged to a separate guild, friendly with the guilds of other towns, but leading a separate existence. The oldest guild-statute known is that of Verona, dating from 1303, but evidently copied from some much older statute. "Fraternal assistance in necessity of whatever kind," "hospitality towards strangers, when passing through the town, as thus information may be obtained about matters which one may like to learn," and "obligation of offering comfort in case of debility" are among the obligations of the members (Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1890, and Aug. 1892).
35. The chief works on the artels are named in the article "Russia" of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, p. 84.
36. See, for instance, the texts of the Cambridge guilds given by Toulmin Smith (English Guilds, London, 1870, pp. 274-276), from which it appears that the "generall and principall day" was the "eleccioun day;" or, Ch. M. Clode's The Early History of the Guild of the Merchant Taylors, London, 1888, i. 45; and so on. For the renewal of allegiance, see the Jomsviking saga, mentioned in Pappenheim's Altdanische Schutzgilden, Breslau, 1885, p. 67. It appears very probable that when the guilds began to be prosecuted, many of them inscribed in their statutes the meal day only, or their pious duties, and only alluded to the judicial function of the guild in vague words; but this function did not disappear till a very much later time. The question, "Who will be my judge?" has no meaning now, since the State has appropriated for its bureaucracy the organization of justice; but it was of primordial importance in medieval times, the more so as self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. It must also be remarked that the translation of the Saxon and Danish "guild-bretheren," or "brodre," by the Latin convivii must also have contributed to the above confusion.
37. See the excellent remarks upon the frith guild by J.R. Green and Mrs. Green in The Conquest of England, London, 1883, pp. 229-230.
38. None 39. Recueil des ordonnances des rois de France, t. xii. 562; quoted by Aug. Thierry in Considerations sur l'histoire de France, p. 196, ed. 12mo.
40. A. Luchaire, Les Communes francaises, pp, 45-46.
41. Guilbert de Nogent, De vita sua, quoted by Luchaire, l.c., p. 14.
42. Lebret, Histoire de Venise, i. 393; also Marin, quoted by Leo and Botta in Histoire de l'Italie, French edition, 1844, t. i 500.
43. Dr. W. Arnold, Verfassungsgeschichte der deutschen Freistadte, 1854, Bd. ii. 227 seq.; Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Koeln, Bd. i. 228-229; also the documents published by Ennen and Eckert.
45. Byelaeff, Russian History, vols. ii. and iii.
46. W. Gramich, Verfassungs und Verwaltungsgeschichte der Stadt Wurzburg im 13. bis zum 15. Jahrhundert, Wurzburg, 1882, p. 34.
47. When a boat brought a cargo of coal to Wurzburg, coal could only be sold in retail during the first eight days, each family being entitled to no more than fifty basketfuls. The remaining cargo could be sold wholesale, but the retailer was allowed to raise a zittlicher profit only, the unzittlicher, or dishonest profit, being strictly forbidden (Gramich, l.c.). Same in London (Liber albus, quoted by Ochenkowski, p. 161), and, in fact, everywhere.
48. See Fagniez, Etudes sur l'industrie et la classe industrielle a Paris au XIIIme et XIVme siecle, Paris, 1877, pp. 155 seq. It hardly need be added that the tax on bread, and on beer as well, was settled after careful experiments as to the quantity of bread and beer which could be obtained from a given amount of corn. The Amiens archives contain the minutes of such experiences (A. de Calonne, l.c. pp. 77, 93). Also those of London (Ochenkowski, England's wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, etc., Jena, 1879, p. 165).
49. Ch. Gross, The Guild Merchant, Oxford, 1890, i. 135. His documents prove that this practice existed in Liverpool (ii. 148-150), Waterford in Ireland, Neath in Wales, and Linlithgow and Thurso in Scotland. Mr. Gross's texts also show that the purchases were made for distribution, not only among the merchant burgesses, but "upon all citsains and commynalte" (p. 136, note), or, as the Thurso ordinance of the seventeenth century runs, to "make offer to the merchants, craftsmen, and inhabitants of the said burgh, that they may have their proportion of the same, according to their necessitys and ability."
50. The Early History of the Guild of Merchant Taylors, by Charles M. Clode, London, 1888, i. 361, appendix 10; also the following appendix which shows that the same purchases were made in 1546.
51. Cibrario, Les conditions economiques de l'Italie au temps de Dante, Paris, 1865, p. 44.
52. A. de Calonne, La vie municipale au XVme siecle dans le Nord de la France, Paris, 1880, pp. 12-16. In 1485 the city permitted the export to Antwerp of a certain quantity of corn, "the inhabitants of Antwerp being always ready to be agreeable to the merchants and burgesses of Amiens" (ibid., pp. 75-77 and texts).
53. A. Babeau, La ville sous l'ancien regime, Paris, 1880.
54. Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Koln, i. 491, 492, also texts.
CHAPTER VI MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY (continued) Likeness and diversity among the medieval cities. The craftguilds: State-attributes in each of them. Attitude of the city towards the peasants; attempts to free them. The lords. Results achieved by the medieval city: in arts, in learning. Causes of decay.
The medieval cities were not organized upon some preconceived plan in obedience to the will of an outside legislator. Each of them was a natural growth in the full sense of the word--an always varying result of struggle between various forces which adjusted and re-adjusted themselves in conformity with their relative energies, the chances of their conflicts, and the support they found in their surroundings. Therefore, there are not two cities whose inner organization and destinies would have been identical. Each one, taken separately, varies from century to century. And yet, when we cast a broad glance upon all the cities of Europe, the local and national unlikenesses disappear, and we are struck to find among all of them a wonderful resemblance, although each has developed for itself, independently from the others, and in different conditions. A small town in the north of Scotland, with its population of coarse labourers and fishermen; a rich city of Flanders, with its world-wide commerce, luxury, love of amusement and animated life; an Italian city enriched by its intercourse with the East, and breeding within its walls a refined artistic taste and civilization; and a poor, chiefly agricultural, city in the marsh and lake district of Russia, seem to have little in common. And nevertheless, the leading lines of their organization, and the spirit which animates them, are imbued with a strong family likeness.
Everywhere we see the same federations of small communities and guilds, the same "sub-towns" round the mother city, the same folkmote, and the same insigns of its independence. The defensor of the city, under different names and in different accoutrements, represents the same authority and interests; food supplies, labour and commerce, are organized on closely similar lines; inner and outer struggles are fought with like ambitions; nay, the very formulae used in the struggles, as also in the annals, the ordinances, and the rolls, are identical; and the architectural monuments, whether Gothic, Roman, or Byzantine in style, express the same aspirations and the same ideals; they are conceived and built in the same way. Many dissemblances are mere differences of age, and those disparities between sister cities which are real are repeated in different parts of Europe. The unity of the leading idea and the identity of origin make up for differences of climate, geographical situation, wealth, language and religion. This is why we can speak of the medieval city as of a well-defined phase of civilization; and while every research insisting upon local and individual differences is most welcome, we may still indicate the chief lines of development which are common to all cities.(1) There is no doubt that the protection which used to be accorded to the market-place from the earliest barbarian times has played an important, though not an exclusive, part in the emancipation of the medieval city. The early barbarians knew no trade within their village communities; they traded with strangers only, at certain definite spots, on certain determined days. And, in order that the stranger might come to the barter-place without risk of being slain for some feud which might be running between two kins, the market was always placed under the special protection of all kins. It was inviolable, like the place of worship under the shadow of which it was held. With the Kabyles it is still annaya, like the footpath along which women carry water from the well; neither must be trodden upon in arms, even during inter-tribal wars. In medieval times the market universally enjoyed the same protection.(2) No feud could be prosecuted on the place whereto people came to trade, nor within a certain radius from it; and if a quarrel arose in the motley crowd of buyers and sellers, it had to be brought before those under whose protection the market stood--the community's tribunal, or the bishop's, the lord's, or the king's judge. A stranger who came to trade was a guest, and he went on under this very name. Even the lord who had no scruples about robbing a merchant on the high road, respected the Weichbild, that is, the pole which stood in the market-place and bore either the king's arms, or a glove, or the image of the local saint, or simply a cross, according to whether the market was under the protection of the king, the lord, the local church, or the folkmote--the vyeche.(3) It is easy to understand how the self-jurisdiction of the city could develop out of the special jurisdiction in the market-place, when this last right was conceded, willingly or not, to the city itself. And such an origin of the city's liberties, which can be traced in very many cases, necessarily laid a special stamp upon their subsequent development. It gave a predominance to the trading part of the community. The burghers who possessed a house in the city at the time being, and were co-owners in the town-lands, constituted very often a merchant guild which held in its hands the city's trade; and although at the outset every burgher, rich and poor, could make part of the merchant guild, and the trade itself seems to have been carried on for the entire city by its trustees, the guild gradually became a sort of privileged body. It jealously prevented the outsiders who soon began to flock into the free cities from entering the guild, and kept the advantages resulting from trade for the few "families" which had been burghers at the time of the emancipation. There evidently was a danger of a merchant oligarchy being thus constituted. But already in the tenth, and still more during the two next centuries, the chief crafts, also organized in guilds, were powerful enough to check the oligarchic tendencies of the merchants.
The craft guild was then a common seller of its produce and a common buyer of the raw materials, and its members were merchants and manual workers at the same time. Therefore, the predominance taken by the old craft guilds from the very beginnings of the free city life guaranteed to manual labour the high position which it afterwards occupied in the city.(4) In fact, in a medieval city manual labour was no token of inferiority; it bore, on the contrary, traces of the high respect it had been kept in in the village community. Manual labour in a "mystery" was considered as a pious duty towards the citizens: a public function (Amt), as honourable as any other. An idea of "justice" to the community, of "right" towards both producer and consumer, which would seem so extravagant now, penetrated production and exchange. The tanner's, the cooper's, or the shoemaker's work must be "just," fair, they wrote in those times. Wood, leather or thread which are used by the artisan must be "right"; bread must be baked "in justice," and so on. Transport this language into our present life, and it would seem affected and unnatural; but it was natural and unaffected then, because the medieval artisan did not produce for an unknown buyer, or to throw his goods into an unknown market. He produced for his guild first; for a brotherhood of men who knew each other, knew the technics of the craft, and, in naming the price of each product, could appreciate the skill displayed in its fabrication or the labour bestowed upon it. Then the guild, not the separate producer, offered the goods for sale in the community, and this last, in its turn, offered to the brotherhood of allied communities those goods which were exported, and assumed responsibility for their quality. With such an organization, it was the ambition of each craft not to offer goods of inferior quality, and technical defects or adulterations became a matter concerning the whole community, because, an ordinance says, "they would destroy public confidence."(5) Production being thus a social duty, placed under the control of the whole amitas, manual labour could not fall into the degraded condition which it occupies now, so long as the free city was living.
A difference between master and apprentice, or between master and worker (compayne, Geselle), existed but in the medieval cities from their very beginnings; this was at the outset a mere difference of age and skill, not of wealth and power. After a seven years' apprenticeship, and after having proved his knowledge and capacities by a work of art, the apprentice became a master himself. And only much later, in the sixteenth century, after the royal power had destroyed the city and the craft organization, was it possible to become master in virtue of simple inheritance or wealth. But this was also the time of a general decay in medieval industries and art.
There was not much room for hired work in the early flourishing periods of the medieval cities, still less for individual hirelings. The work of the weavers, the archers, the smiths, the bakers, and so on, was performed for the craft and the city; and when craftsmen were hired in the building trades, they worked as temporary corporations (as they still do in the Russian artels), whose work was paid en bloc. Work for a master began to multiply only later on; but even in this case the worker was paid better than he is paid now, even in this country, and very much better than he used to be paid all over Europe in the first half of this century. Thorold Rogers has familiarized English readers with this idea; but the same is true for the Continent as well, as is shown by the researches of Falke and Schonberg, and by many occasional indications. Even in the fifteenth century a mason, a carpenter, or a smith worker would be paid at Amiens four sols a day, which corresponded to forty-eight pounds of bread, or to the eighth part of a small ox (bouvard). In Saxony, the salary of the Geselle in the building trade was such that, to put it in Falke's words, he could buy with his six days' wages three sheep and one pair of shoes.(6) The donations of workers (Geselle) to cathedrals also bear testimony of their relative well-being, to say nothing of the glorious donations of certain craft guilds nor of what they used to spend in festivities and pageants.(7) In fact, the more we learn about the medieval city, the more we are convinced that at no time has labour enjoyed such conditions of prosperity and such respect as when city life stood at its highest.
More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact. We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but--"every one must be pleased with his work," a medieval Kuttenberg ordinance says, "and no one shall, while doing nothing (mit nichts thun), appropriate for himself what others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield for application and work."(8) And amidst all present talk about an eight hours' day, it may be well to remember an ordinance of Ferdinand the First relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled the miner's day at eight hours, "as it used to be of old" (wie vor Alters herkommen), and work on Saturday afternoon was prohibited. Longer hours were very rare, we are told by Janssen, while shorter hours were of common occurrence. In this country, in the fifteenth century, Rogers says, "the workmen worked only forty-eight hours a week."(9) The Saturday half-holiday, too, which we consider as a modern conquest, was in reality an old medieval institution; it was bathing-time for a great part of the community, while Wednesday afternoon was bathing-time for the Geselle.(10) And although school meals did not exist--probably because no children went hungry to school--a distribution of bath-money to the children whose parents found difficulty in providing it was habitual in several places. As to Labour Congresses, they also were a regular Feature of the middles ages. In some parts of Germany craftsmen of the same trade, belonging to different communes, used to come together every year to discuss questions relative to their trade, the years of apprenticeship, the wandering years, the wages, and so on; and in 1572, the Hanseatic towns formally recognized the right of the crafts to come together at periodical congresses, and to take any resolutions, so long as they were not contrary to the cities' rolls, relative to the quality of goods. Such Labour Congresses, partly international like the Hansa itself, are known to have been held by bakers, founders, smiths, tanners, sword-makers and cask-makers.(11) The craft organization required, of course, a close supervision of the craftsmen by the guild, and special jurates were always nominated for that purpose. But it is most remarkable that, so long as the cities lived their free life, no complaints were heard about the supervision; while, after the State had stepped in, confiscating the property of the guilds and destroying their independence in favour of its own bureaucracy, the complaints became simply countless.(12) On the other hand, the immensity of progress realized in all arts under the mediaeval guild system is the best proof that the system was no hindrance to individual initiative.(13) The fact is, that the medieval guild, like the medieval parish, "street," or "quarter," was not a body of citizens, placed under the control of State functionaries; it was a union of all men connected with a given trade: jurate buyers of raw produce, sellers of manufactured goods, and artisans--masters, "compaynes," and apprentices. For the inner organization of the trade its assembly was sovereign, so long as it did not hamper the other guilds, in which case the matter was brought before the guild of the guilds--the city. But there was in it something more than that. It had its own self-jurisdiction, its own military force, its own general assemblies, its own traditions of struggles, glory, and independence, its own relations with other guilds of the same trade in other cities: it had, in a word, a full organic life which could only result from the integrality of the vital functions. When the town was called to arms, the guild appeared as a separate company (Schaar), armed with its own arms (or its own guns, lovingly decorated by the guild, at a subsequent epoch), under its own self-elected commanders. It was, in a word, as independent a unit of the federation as the republic of Uri or Geneva was fifty years ago in the Swiss Confederation. So that, to compare it with a modern trade union, divested of all attributes of State sovereignty, and reduced to a couple of functions of secondary importance, is as unreasonable as to compare Florence or Brugge with a French commune vegetating under the Code Napoleon, or with a Russian town placed under Catherine the Second's municipal law. Both have elected mayors, and the latter has also its craft corporations; but the difference is--all the difference that exists between Florence and Fontenay-les-Oies or Tsarevokokshaisk, or between a Venetian doge and a modern mayor who lifts his hat before the sous-prefet's clerk.