Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/597

1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 589 intermediate sense. The drapers' journeymen in 1643 proposed to in- stitute a beurs (as established in other towns) to relieve cases of need and presumably of unemployment, without reference to sickness, but it does not appear that the authorities approved their scheme. The first actual beurs ordinances are those of a sick and burial club authorized amongst the weavers of says and rays, ' married or unmarried, widowers or bachelors ' ' under the age of forty-five, of good health and not afflicted with scurvy, gout, rheumatism, or other visitation of the Lord ', and a similar society was authorized in 1667 for the journeymen of the laken finishers, but open to journeymen of other trades, offering benefits for sickness, accidents, old age, and death. There are nearly a score of these clubs recorded amongst the small masters and journeymen in the textile industries of Ley den in the eighteenth century, and Professor Blok informs us that friendly societies of the same type, but not confined to any one trade, were then very common. The problem of their relation to the medieval fraternity on the one hand and to the modern trade union on the other has gained a new interest through the researches of M. Des Marez, who has shown trade unionism developing from 1682 in connexion with a beurs of journeymen hatters at Brussels, and who conjectures that this beurs was a fraternity from which the masters had dropped out. There are some glimpses of this possibility in the Ley den records. In 1559 the woollen weavers complained of the wages paid by the drapers. In the ordinance fixing new rates, a portion of the fine to be inflicted on those paying or receiving more or less was assigned to the brotherhood of St. Severus. St. Severus was the patron saint of weavers, but the fraternity at Leyden is said in 1434 to have been one of drapers. It seems likely from the award in 1559 that both drapers and weavers had a share in it. It is possible, therefore, that the beurs was in some cases based on an earlier fraternity, and the copious libations at funerals suggests the gild drinkings of the primeval Teutons, but the evidence of continuity between 1550 and 1650 is still weak. Most of the beursen were set up in branches of textiles that had come to Leyden since 1550, and the beurs when we first meet with it in 1664 bears some of the marks of a new institution. The provisions for sickness, old age, and accident are not, as in the fraternity, occasional, charitable, and elastic. They constitute the main avowed purpose of the organization, and are of the nature of a serious contract of insurance based upon actuarial calculation which was just then gaining a scientific character. The authorization of such societies and the constant revision of their rules with a view to their actuarial soundness by the municipal government, so far from implying an encouragement of trade unionism, was exactly the policy actually adopted from the opposite motives in England a century later. But in Leyden as in England and at Brussels unlawful combination may well have developed in secret connexion with authorized friendly societies. Of continuous organization for bargain- ing purposes there is plenty of independent evidence in the case of the journeymen cloth- finishers from the middle of the seventeenth century. Amongst the handloom weavers combinations more probably ceased when the several recorded strikes were over. Mr. Posthumus and the commission for official historical publications