BY about the year 1350 the craft-guilds received all the development possible to them as societies of freemen and equals; and that date may conveniently be accepted as the end of the first part of the Middle Ages.
By this time serfdom generally was beginning to yield to the change introduced by the guilds and free towns: the field serfs partly drifted into the cities and became affiliated to the guilds, and partly became free men, though living on lands whose tenure was unfree. This movement towards the break-up of serfdom is marked by the Peasants’ War in England, led by Wat Tyler and John 86 Ball in Kent, and by John Lister (dyer) in East Anglia, which was the answer of the combined yeomen, emancipated and unemancipated serfs, to the attempt of the nobles to check the movement. But the development of the craftguilds and the flocking of the freed serfs into the towns laid the foundations for another change in industrialism: with the second part of the mediæval period appears the journeyman, or so-called free labourer. Besides the craftsmaster and his apprentices, the workshop now has these “free labourers” in it—unprivileged workmen, that is, who are nevertheless under the domination of the guild, and compelled to affiliation with it. But so completely was the idea of association innate in medieval life that even this first step towards disruption came for a time under the guild-influence: in Germany especially, the guilds of journeymen Were so important as to form a complete network through all central Europe. The journeyman if he presented himself before the guild in any town was taken charge of, and livelihood and employment found for him. In England 87 the attempt at founding journeymen-guilds had little success, probably because it came too late.
After this the guildsmen began to be privileged workmen; and with them began the foundation of the present middle-class, whose development from this source went on to meet its other development on the side of trade which was now becoming noticeable. In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and as a consequence Greek manuscripts were being discovered and read; a thirst for new or revived learning outside the superstitions of the medieval church, and the quaint, curiously perverted, and half-understood remains of popular traditions, was arising. The new art of printing began to spread with marvellous rapidity from about the year 1470; and all was getting ready for the transformation of medieval into modern or commercial society.
Before the beginning of the sixteenth century the craft-guilds had gradually reduced the others to insignificance, but the spirit in which they were founded was dying out in the meantime. They 88 were originally societies of equal craftsmen governed by officers of their own choice, and their rules were obviously directed against the growth of capitalism, as e.g. those of the clothiers of Flanders, which limited the number of looms in any master’s shop to four. Inferiority in the guild was only temporary; every apprentice, or bachelor, was bound to become a master in time. But now this had been changing for some while, and the journeyman made his appearance in the workshops under the name of servant. The entrance-fee increased so much that it is clear that it denotes more than the mere fall in the value of gold, and meant the buying of a share in a monopolist company rather than the necessary contribution to a craftsman’s society. In short, by the middle of the sixteenth century the guilds were organisations including somewhat more than the germs of capital served by labour; nothing more was needed than external circumstances for the development from this of complete capitalistic privilege.
Apart from the guilds, the two classes of capitalists and free workmen were 89 being created by the development of commerce, which needed them both as instruments for her progress. Mediæval commerce knew nothing of capitalistic exchange; the demands of local markets were supplied by the direct barter or sale of the superfluity of the produce of the various districts and countries. All this was now being changed, and a world-market was being formed, into which all commodities had to pass; and a mercantile class grew up for the carrying on of this new commerce, and soon attained to power, amidst the rapid break-up of the old hierarchical society with its duly ordered grades.
The fall of Constantinople was followed in thirty years by the discovery of America, and about the same time of the Cape passage, which ultimately superseded the old trade route overland by the Levant and the Bavarian cities. And now the Mediterranean was no longer the great commercial sea, with nothing beyond it but a few outlying stations. The cities of Central Europe—e.g. Augsburg, Nuremberg, Munich, and the Hanse towns—were now sharing the market 90 with Venice and Genoa, the children of Constantinople: there was no longer one great commanding city in Europe. But it was not only the rise in the commercial towns that was overturning feudal society. As they conquered their enemy, the feudal nobles, they fell into the clutches of bureaucratic monarchs, who either seized on them for their own possessions, or used them as tools for their projects of conquest and centralisation. Charles V., e.g., played this game through South Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, and with Venice, under cover of the so-called “Holy Roman Empire,” while at the same time he had fallen into possession of Spain by marriage; and disregarding his sham feudal empire, he bent all his efforts into turning these countries into real bureaucratic states. In France the liberties of the towns were crushed out by Louis XI. and his successors. In England the plunder of the religious houses enabled Henry VIII. to found a new nobility, subservient to his own absolutism, in place of the ancient feudal nobility destroyed by their late civil war.
Everywhere the modern centralised 91 bureaucratic nation was being developed. In France the long and fierce wars of the Burgundian and Armagnac factions gave opportunity for the consolidation of the monarchy, at last effected, as above said by Louis XI., the forerunner of the most successful king of France and the last successful one—Louis XIV. In England the Wars of the Roses were not so bitter as the French wars, and the people took small part in them, except as vassals or retainers of the households of the contending nobles; but they nevertheless played their part in the disruption of feudality, not only by the thinning-out of the nobles slain in battle or on the scaffold, but also by helping directly to draw England into the world-market.
Under the medieval system the workmen, oppressed and protected by the lords of the manor and the guilds, were not available for the needs of commerce. The serfs ate up the part of the produce spared them by their lords; the guild craftsmen sold the produce of their own hands to their neighbours without the help of a middleman. In neither case 92 was there anything left over for the supply of a great market.
But England, one of the best pasture countries of the world, had in her even then capacities for profit-grinding, if the tillage system of the manor and the yeoman’s holdings could be got rid of. The landowners, ruined by their long war, saw the demand for English wool, and set themselves to the task of helping evolution with much of the vigour and unscrupulous pettifogging which has since won for their race the temporary command of the world-market. The tenants were rack-rented, the yeomen were expropriated, the hinds were driven off the land into the towns, there to work as “free” labourers. England thus contributed her share to commerce, paying for it with nothing more important than the loss of the rough joviality, plenty, and independence of spirit, which once attracted the admiration of foreigners more crushed by the feudal system and by its abuses than were the English.