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 them 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 treasury, its sworn organisation? It was for the statesmen "a State within the State"! The State was to destroy the guild, and it destroyed it everywhere: in England, in France, in Germany, in Bohemia, preserving only "the semblance of the guild as an instrument of the exchequer, as a part of the vast administrative machine.
And—should we be astonished that guilds, trade-unions and wardenships, deprived of everything that was formerly their life and placed under royal functionaries, became in the eighteenth century nought but encumbrances and obstacles to the development of industry, after having been the very life of progress four centuries before? The State had killed them.
In fact it did not content itself with destroying the autonomous organsation which was necessary for the very life of the guilds and impeded the encroachments of the State; it did not content itself with confiscating all riches and property of the guilds: it appropriated for itself all their economical functions as well.
In a city of the Middle Ages, when interests conflicted in a trade, or when two guilds disagreed, there was no other appeal than to the city. They were forced to settle matters, to find some compromise, as all guilds were mutually allied in the city. And a compromise was always arrived at—by calling in another city to arbitrate, if necessary.
Henceforth the only arbitrator was the State. All local disputes, sometimes of the most insignificant kind, in the smallest town of a few hundred inhabitants, had to be piled up in the shape of useless documents in the offices of king and parliament. We see the English parliament literally inundated with these thousands of petty local squabbles. It then became necessary to have thousands of functionaries in the capital
- ↑ See Toulmin Smith's work on Guilds.
