union of which peasants were deprived for centuries belonged to them without contention in the Middle Ages,—belonged to every man, free or serf. Slaves that we are, we believe it to be a "conquest of democracy"!
IX
"If you have any common interests in the city or the village, ask the Church and the State to look after them. But you are forbidden to combine in a direct way to settle matters for yourself!" Such is the formula reëchoing through-out Europe since the sixteenth century. Already in an edict of Edward III, issued at the end of the fourteenth century, we read that "all unions, combinations, meetings, organised societies, statutes, and oaths already established or to be established by carpenters and masons, will henceforth be null and void." But when the defeat of the towns and of the popular insurrection of which we have spoken was completed, the State boldly laid hands on all the institutions (guilds, fraternities, etc.) which used to bind artisans and peasants together, and annihilated them.
This is plainly seen in England, where a mass of documents exists showing every step of that annihilation. Little by little the State laid hands on all guilds and fraternities. It pressed them closely, abolished their leagues, their festivals, their aldermen, and replaced these by its own functionaries and tribunals; and at the beginning of the fifteenth century, under Henry VIII, the State simply confiscated everything possessed by the guilds without further ado. The heir to the great protestant king finished his father's work.[1]
It was robbery carried on in open daylight, "without excuse" as Thorold Rogers has so well put it. And it is this robbery which the so-called scientific economists represent as the "natural death" of the guilds under the influence of economic laws!
In truth, was it possible for the State to tolerate a guild or corporation of a trade, with its tribunal, its militia, its
- ↑ See Toulmin Smith's work on Guilds.
