BOOKS.

DR. BRENTANO ON GILDS AND TRADE UNIONS.* THE late Mr. Toulmin Smith had in his life-time almost completed for the Early English Text Society an edition of "The Original Ordinances of more than one hundred early English gilds, together with 'the olde usages of the cite of Wynchestre,' the ' ordinances of Worcester,' the 'office of the Mayor of Bristol,' and the ' Costomary of the Manor of Tettenhall Regis,' from original MSS. of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries." What he left undone of the work of editing has been completed by his daughter, Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, but the general introduction which her father had projected, but never found time to write, has been sup- plied by a different hand. And although the work itself is full of curious and interesting matter, and may perhaps deserve reverting to here in leas busy times, Dr. Brentano's essay on Gilds and Trade Unions (which has been wisely published separately, as well as in connection with Mr. Toulmin Smith's matter) far surpasses it in breadth of scope, and stands out prominently as tending to fill up a singular void in English historic literature. For notwith- standing the valuable materials to be found in Stow, Madox, Eden, Semble, Herbert, Riley, and others, we have no work devoted to the history of gilds generally in our own country, still less in their relation to those of the Continent. Dr. Brentano " emphatically " declares that England is "the birthplace of gilds ;" from England came "the oldest reliable and detailed accounts" which we have of them ; and yet, whilst a whole body of literature has grown up in Germany round the subject, it has been reserved for a learned German to tell us how deeply that subject concerns our own nation, and to show us with historic precision the contemporary workings amongst ourselves of the principle which governs it.

Dr. Brentano's work is divided into five parts,—one, on "the origin of gilds ;" a second, on "religious or social gilds ;" a third, on "town gilds or gild-merchants" (quaere, " gilds-merchant?") ; a fourth, on "craft gilds ;" the last on "Trade Unions," which he maintains to be "no lopsided representatives of the old gilds," but "complete gilds themselves," although their rules are "still very imperfect," and "show merely the outlines of an organization," the system not being "yet worked out into details." Starting from the family as "the original and pattern type after which all the later gilds were formed," Dr. Brentano maintains that where-

* On the History and Development of Gilds, and the Origin of Trade Unions. By Lujo Brentano, of Aschatienburg, Bavaria, Doctor ntriusque Atria et Philosophize. London; Trilbner. 1870. Hence "the one idea which animated the souls of the craftsmen of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" was the abolition of

the patriciate." Already in the thirteenth century the most violent struggles broke out between the craftsmen in their craft- gilds and the patricians. Of the fierceness of this civil war the folllowing are instances:—

" At Magdeburg, in the year 1301, ten aldermen of the Craft Gilds were burnt alive in the market-place. After the Cologne weavers had lost, in 1371, the Weavers Battle' against the ruling families, thirty- three weavers were executed on November 21, 1571; on the day after also houses, churches, and monasteries were searched; all who were found were murdered; lastly, 1,800 of them were exiled, with their wives and families, and their hall, 'a palace,' was demolished. The exiled found a reception at Aix-la-Chapello, where they helped considerably to raise the trade. Further examples could easily be enumerated."

Yet "towards the end of the fourteenth century the victory was almost everywhere on the side of the craft gilds." In England indeed, though the fact of a similar change in the constitution of the towns appears to be unmistakable, a detailed "account of the transition is wanting . . . there is nothing to be found of the severe struggles of the German and Belgian companies against the patriciate." Dr. Brentano attributes this difference, partly to the greater dependence of the English towns on the Sovereign, acting as a check on the tyranny of wealth, partly to the absence, "in the English aristocracy in general," of "that caste-like seclusion which characterizes the Continental nobility " ; perhaps also to the "greater freedom of the lower classes," and to that "gradual formation of political institutions according to the relative amount of the social power of different classes which is so characteristic of England."

In common with others of his countrymen, Dr. Brentano will not admit any connection beyond a mere partial resemblance between the Teutonic gilds and the Roman Collegia. And if we confine ourselves to his data, the development of the former appears to be a quite independent one. It is impossible not to observe, however, that his illustrations are entirely confined to the field occupied by the Teutonic races, including Northern France ; that the domain of the Latin or Latinized races proper, Southern France, Spain, Italy, is entirely ignored. Yet Southern Europe rather than Northern was during the middle ages the chief seat of trade, industry, municipal statecraft. The town-re- publics of Flanders are but miniatures of those of Italy. Nowhere perhaps longer than in the latter country and in

southern France did the corporate organization of trade remain in vigour, whilst the "Santa Hermandad " of Spain offered, till com- paratively modern times, the latest and perhaps the greatest example of one of the older frith-gilds. To ignore, on the one hand, the probability of a connection between the municipal and social organizations of Southern Europe in the middle ages and those of old Rome, and, on the other, the necessary relations of such organizations with those of the North, is surely at least an oversight which we hope may be repaired in a future edition of an otherwise truly valuable work. Without pretending to any such • learning in the history of the subject as that of Dr. Brentano, the writer of this article ventures to think that a letter of Pope Gregory the Great (A.D. 590403) offers earlier evidence of the existence of a craft gild than any which has yet been adduced from Teutonic sources. It stands twenty-seventh in the eighth book of ever there is "the breaking-up of an old system," new forms of association spring up amongst those who suffer from the disorgan- ization thus produced, either "to maintain the old order, or to create a new one," by means of a brotherly union for mutual assistance and support.

It would be impossible in the compass of a single article to do justice to a work so full of learning and thought as the one before us. One of the most curious, and to almost every English reader the most novel, portion of it lies in the history of the struggle between the gilds-merchant, which had monopolized the municipal government of the cities and towns of Northern Europe, and the craft gilds, in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The accumulation of riches and the concentration of power had created a regular merchant patriciate :—

" Idleness became a matter of rank and of honour, and a part only of the gild-members carried on wholesale trade. Even the laws of the land made the distinction between the patrician and the man without hearth and honour, who lives by his labour,' and the former might with impunity

box the ears of the latter for not showing him sufficient respect These patricians also threw the chief burden of the taxes upon the governed . . . . while the income which they afforded, as welt as the corporation property and the revenues it yielded, were employed for the

private uses of the ruling families The law was partially admin- istered, or redress entirely refused to the unprivileged. . . . In Cologne the craftsmen were almost the serfs of the patricians."

his letters, and is written by this greatest perhaps of all the Popes to Fortunatus, Bishop of Naples. Augustine, its bearer, delegate of the other soapmakers of the Bishop's city, has complained that the most illustrious Palatine John plagues them and seeks to impose novelties upon them, making them promise that if any

one should wish to become a member of their craft (arli eoruni sociari), whatever gain should accrue from the admission should profit himself,—adding also that a compact had been made amongst themselves touching certain reasonable rules of their craft, accord- ing to old custom, by consent of all, with a penalty interposed, and that this had been confirmed by interveuient oath, and that

from this some now of their own people, to wit, relying on his patronage, do withdraw ; so that, grievous to say, they presume more on his protection than they think to lose by the penalty, or feel awe touching the oath that they have sworn. If this be so, the Pope bids the Bishop exhort ,John to refrain, and not to subject the soapmakers to damage or unreasonable expense,—and when oaths have been taken, to see that they be observed.

We have here obviously a complete sketch of a South-Italian craft gild of the sixth and seventh centuries, we see its rules, framed according to ancient custom, by common consent, sanc- tioned by oath, and enforced by a penalty ; we see the fees which it received on the admission of new members, fees of sufficient import- ance to be an object of covetousness to the local magnate ; we see even their organization itself to be an object of jealousy to him, so that he seeks to detach members from it, and by inference to be also sufficiently irksome to some of their members to avail themselves of his protection to detach themselves from it. It seems as difficult not to recognize in this passage the indication of a higher state of social development in the industry of the South than existed for several centuries later in the North, as to suppose that the " prisca

consuetudo " of the Naples soapmakers at this period had none of its roots in the usages of those Roman collegia opificune, which

little more than half a cintury or so before are still fully recognized in Justinian's code. It may be that the craft-gild movement in the North had a perfectly independent development, but at some period or other of their existence the two streams must certainly have coalesced ; and, with all due reference to Dr. Brentano, the phrase he quotes from Wilda that "the craft-gilds did not spring from subjection and dependence, they originated in the freedom of the handicraft class," especially when compared with the facts which he immediately proceeds to relate, and which have been in part above referred to, of the oppression of the craftsmen by the patricians (which, if it did not create the craft-gilds, at least lifted them to freedom and prominence), sounds to us little better than clap-trap. No doubt Mme. de Stael's words remain eternally true, "Crest la libertd qui eat ancienne ; la tyrannie seule eat nouvelle." But it is not the less true that oppression and slavery offer often the strongest stimulus to social organization ; nay, that freedom is never wholly absent where organization is really powerful, and an order of some kind, however harsh, stands in the place of individual will. There could, therefore, be no shame for any

middle-age gild to have sprung from a Roman collegian:, to how- ever servile a condition the latter might have sunk. Whatever

of organization it might offer would supply both a form and a protection to the industry of the free handicraftsman ; the dead bones would arise and put on flesh beneath the breath of his free- dom. But indeed, any exalting of the Teutonic handicraftsman over him of the older world would be singularly pharisaical. That gild of gilds called Christendom has a Syrian carpenter for its head, a Cilician tentmaker for its chief teacher. "Subjection and dependence" were hardly the fountain-head of that gild, the characteristics of those its founders. Even if we omit one name of names, the moral status of the handicraftsman in a world which could produce the tentmaker Paul, as well as that noble pair of his fellow-workers Aquila and Priscilla, can scarcely have been one to be altogether looked down upon by our own age.

We have left ourselves no space to speak of Dr. Brentano's very interesting chapter on the history of Trade Unions, further than to say that to no readers should it offer newer matter and more ample food for reflection—so far as may be judged from their reports— than to Sir William Erie and the great majority of his colleagues on the late Trades' Unions' Commission.