The Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities
128
The Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities
128eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781605700175 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | IHS Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Guild State
Its Principles and Possibilities
By G. R. Stirling Taylor
IHS Press
Copyright © 2006 IHS PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932528-40-4
CHAPTER 1
The Historical Basis of the Guild System
THERE IS A FANTASTIC RUMOUR, circulating in the main among historical dons and in political clubs, that progress is the discovery of something new. Whereas, in truth, it is far more often the return to something old. One looks in baffled search for the origin of this most amazing error; for it is without proof either in the records of the past or in the facts of the present. The historians and the politicians have seemingly made an unpardonable mistake; which, fortunately, that sane creature, the normal healthy man, has not shared with them. For the common people are not so easily lured into the quicksands of loose thinking as are those who spend their lives in libraries and parliament chambers. It has been the rarest of events when the people have asked for new laws: in their times of revolt they have so persistently desired that they should return to something already possessed in the past. When William the Conqueror intruded himself into our social system, his subjects (being somewhat troubled by his "higher" civilization) could think of nothing more to their minds than a return to the customs of the Confessor; a request which they continued to make until the new Norman laws had become old enough to be bearable. The Great Charter of John was really a poor thing in any democratic sense, for it said so little about anyone except the barons; yet it was popular – probably because it contained very little that was new. A few hundred years afterwards, when the growth of the politicians' new parliamentary system was obviously sapping the liberty of the people, there arose a cry for reform – Englishmen began to demand again the liberties of the Feudal Ages, as written in John's charter. However, this is not a history book; what one desires here is to recall the historical fact that common men rarely ask for anything new in their social structure. They have a stubborn belief that the old ways are better.
It is remarkable that so many people are asking today for some explanation of the guild system, for the guilds are not a new idea. They are, on the contrary, probably the most widely spread idea on the earth, and one of the very oldest. In asking for a guild system, one is not asking for anything new, but for something exceedingly old. This is not another of those new-fangled notions of political circles, but something so old and well established in the history of the world that the politicians have never heard of it. For a long part of the history of mankind, the guilds have been an essential element in almost all societies. Since men first became craftsmen and industrialists, instead of nomads and cave-dwellers, the almost universal judgement of mankind has accepted the guild system as the most rational manner in which the work of the world can most easily be done. This is not the place to offer proofs of that statement; they are to be found in the whole of history, and concerning almost every people under the sun. In India, China, Greece, Rome; in all Europe since it gave up barbarism; in the whole world even before it became quite civilized – as police court magistrates understand that term – the guilds have had a universal place. But it was in those days which we now collect together under the name of the "Middle Ages" that the guilds reached their prime. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the guilds ranked in Western Europe with the barons and the kings, as the dominant factors in the social structure of their period.
The observer in England today can so easily lose a sense of proportion in judging the guild idea; he thinks of it as past and somewhat local, while with equal ease he imagines that our presenteconomic system is universal; whereas it is only local even today. In the pages of history, modern capitalism is a mere novelty, an upstart theory without a pedigree — and perhaps without a future. It is all-important to start our analysis with a proper sense of proportion between the old and the new; it will restore that due balance of the mind which the insistent shriek of "the new" in every morning paper so unconsciously tends to overturn.
It must not be forgotten that the guild system even at its prime was only one part of a greater whole. That great adventure of man which we tell as the tale of the Middle Ages; that very subtle blending of mind and matter, of spirit and craft, which we call the medieval social system, was the whole which we must realize if we are to understand the guilds, which are only a part of it. For they are not something which can be torn from its setting, as a jewel can be dislodged from a ring. They were too organic a part of the medieval age to survive such an outrage. The sceptics are right when they continually chatter in our ears: "You cannot go back" — if they mean that it is impossible to tear a part from the old, in the vain hope of fitting it into a new system that is as the Pole from the Pole apart. When we understand a little of what the Middle Ages were, then we may know what the guilds meant in a social system which they did so much to build.
It was written above that the guilds ranked with the kings and the barons as the foundation of medieval society. But strictly speaking the king, although the centre of the picture, was less important in detail than the other two; and by understanding why we shall understand also that main principle of medievalism — local independence — on which the guilds themselves depended, and must always depend — for it is the root principle of their existence.
The king and his law are almost modern ideas, and certainly as we know them both today, would have been entirely beyond the conception of a medieval mind. We think of the king as the symbol of a great central government, imposing his law on his subjects by all the majesty of the police, from the Lord Chancellor to the village constable. When the guilds were alive, their members would have found it difficult to grasp any such idea. The king was to them a faraway creature whose main function was to lead the nation in war and defend it from attack. It was certainly not his function to interfere as a legislator or judge in their private affairs, which they felt quite capable of managing themselves. Parliament, insofar as it was a fact at all, they regarded as a body of representatives sent to Westminster to make as good a bargain as possible in the matter of taxation; and then return home again as quickly as possible and get to their honest work. Scarcely anyone would have thought of Parliament as an institution to make "laws."
"Law" was a rare event in the history of the Middle Ages; and kings were people of modest claims. The medieval man governed himself in a democratic sense which seems beyond the realms of fantasy in these despotic days of universal suffrage and innumerable popular councils. Instead of electing delegates to make laws at Westminster, the people of the Middle Ages were their own legislators at home. It may sound very rural; but we have failed to grasp the fact that it is really far better to be so safe in our freedom that we do not need to be protected by representatives at all. It is only necessary to send our man to Parliament when we have reason to believe that somebody there is going to take away our rights. But in the Middle Ages there was so little intrusion of that sort by autocratic gentlemen at Westminster. Indeed, they had scarcely invented that impertinent thing we now call "government."
The origin of our Parliament is a case in point. It was not any desire of the people that created it. It never entered their heads that somebody at Westminster should make laws for Somerset or Yorkshire. Parliaments began because the Crown had, in some way or another, to persuade the people to be taxed. It was only as an afterthought that the members of the House of Commons thought that, if they had to pay, it would be as well to get something in return. So they asked for laws – not laws to tell the people what they must do, but mainly to tell the king what he must not do. However, the kings also saw their chance, and they soon invented the autocratic, compelling "law" which we know today. But that was not an idea of the Middle Ages, and when it was invented, and imposed, then the medieval system rapidly disappeared. For the very heart of it was that the people had to an extraordinary degree the liberty to make their own law and order. That is a historical fact, which some people imagine a mere light-hearted paradox — but that is because they know very little about history.
The compelling force of the Middle Ages was not law, but custom. One has said that the people made their own laws at home; but the statement requires instant qualification. For they can scarcely be said to have "made" laws at all. They did not vote new rules. They rather lived after the traditions which their fathers had handed down to them; for men that possess the traditions of centuries have little need for the laws of yesterday or today. For tradition is the everlasting memory of mankind; remembering the great lessons of its past, storing them up in the mind of man, until they become instinctive, even as the half-conscious knowledge of the beast is stored as a protection from danger.
The government of the Middle Ages, such as it existed at all, was almost purely local. The great modern state was unknown. There was certainly a man who called himself King of England, and one who called himself King of the French; but compared with the kings and presidents of today, they were mere babes at the game of ruling: they were far too gentlemanly to think of anything so crude and unmannerly. The government was accomplished by manorial courts, and burgesses of the towns; abbots in their monasteries, and barons in their castles, were the factors of public life with which they reckoned in those days, in a much deeper sense than they reckoned with the king. Kent did not much mind what they were doing in Warwickshire, and would certainly have resented it keenly if Warwickshire men had been too inquisitive about Kent. That very exaggerated social factor, rather cleverly termed "public business," had then scarcely been invented. (Now that it has arrived as a much-extolled social function, it is interesting to notice that so much of it is still mainly the private business of the councillors and their personal friends, and has comparatively little to do with the interest of their constituents. But the disadvantages of central government will be discussed later.) Private business, in its more legitimate sense, was good enough for the wise creatures of the Middle Ages. Their main business was doing their daily work; and they were not over-anxious about what was happening somewhere else. In earlier days, even the murder of one's neighbour to a large extent was private business, which mainly concerned the two families of the victor and the victim. Such public business as there was had rather the air of the parish council than of the more pompous Houses of Parliament; it was a question for a guild regulation, a municipal or manorial custom. They never discussed the best method of conquering the other ends of the earth, and rarely even discussed a constitution for their own country. Government dealt with homely facts, not with faraway theories.
Since there were in those days such shadowy great nations and such small governing units, it is not surprising that government was so local an institution. National affairs had not been found necessary, because there were scarcely any nations. They are only a modern idea. We read of the mighty struggle between Athens and Sparta; and perhaps picture it in terms of two states as we know them today. We forget that they were neighbouring towns, about forty miles apart as the crow flew. It was as if Birmingham had challenged Manchester to mortal combat. The moral for the moment is that in the Middle Ages towns were as important as great states today, not that they were as trivial as modern towns. The Middle Ages built up a gorgeous structure of intellect and economics and art on a basis that knew nothing of such a modern notion as an empire.
Here we are faced with a grave exception; and it is the exception which may help to prove the rule. The Catholic Church of Rome claimed that it gathered under its guiding hand the whole sweep of the world of Western Europe. It deliberately, in the very heyday of the medieval ideals, conceived of the great society of the Holy Roman Church. Now the essence of the modern great state is that it is based on the idea of coercion of arms, and maintained by the compulsion of magistrates and policemen and prison warders. Note how far away all this was from the ecclesiastical claims. The Catholic Church, in the theory of the Middle Ages, refused to sanction the shedding of blood. If it was to build itself a great state it must be by moral persuasion. It could excommunicate the sinner; it could not hang him. The Inquisition and the War of the Waldenses were the practical and mainly local lapses of man from his theory, but if we are to make history the record of lapses, then indeed it will be a thing without form. If the Catholic Church had won its great contest with the emperors, then it is possible that we might have escaped this nightmare of great autocratic nations, tearing out each other's vitals. Europe might well be now governed by a moral force which had banished the crudity of physical force from civilization; and without physical force there could be no "nationalism" as we know it today. The nationalism of races will survive, as the individuality of individuals will survive in a reasonable society; but it will not be that artificial thing, the "nationality" which has grown round the ambitions of kings and their bureaucrats. The victory of the Church of Rome would have been the defeat of physical tyranny, and it was the physical tyranny of the armies of autocratic kings that broke the local freedom of the Middle Ages as a martyr was broken on the wheel. But it was the bureaucrat and the politician — not the king so much — who reaped the fruits of that conquest.
It is natural that in this medieval society of commonsense people the guilds should take a supremely important part. In an age when government was both local and economic, instead of centralized and political — that is, when the town or village mainly ruled itself, and when its "laws" were the rules of everyday business affairs — then the guild, being the collective assembly of the local wisdom and business experience, naturally took a foremost place in public life. If the king did endeavour to interfere in local government, for a long time it was merely to acknowledge by his approval the laws which the local assemblies had already acknowledged for themselves. It was merely a tactful courtesy on the part of the local councils. Thus the king would grant a charter recognizing the customs of the burgesses of a town or the members of a guild. They were rarely new laws; they were those that were already obeyed. Slowly the central powers built up a governing hierarchy of their own: the sheriffs, the justices of the King's Court, the lord-lieutenants of the counties, gradually sucked the power from the local assemblies and held it in the hands of the councils and officers of the Crown. But when that was accomplished, the Middle Ages were no more; the modern system had begun. In medieval days government was, in the main, the laws of town council and guild. It was a matter of the serious practical affairs of everyday life – not the discussion of vague sentimentalities, which newspaper editors now call "politics." And of this very practical businesslike medieval society, the guilds were the most substantial foundation – while the kings and their parliaments were the gay flags and gilded weathercocks which gave colour and sparkle to the show – and have confused the childlike minds of the orthodox historical dons ever since.
There are those who will say that this theory of the Middle Ages is a pleasant dream for the idealists. But there is really no need to leave the discussion in the field of vague theory. The period can be approached as a fact. Let us agree to differ as to what the medieval men possessed in the way of a political or social constitution; let us doubt all their ideals; let us dismiss medievalism as a dream of the "modern romantic imagination." But there are certain survivals of the Middle Ages which cannot be so airily dismissed. It requires more imagination to dismiss Chartres Cathedral and Westminster Abbey than to accept them. We may argue that we do not like the thousands of medieval facts that are still dotted over Western Europe, in its churches and sculptures and manuscripts, but they cannot be flicked away by that phrase "romantic imagination." There are few with sufficient intellectual nerve to deny that the medieval constitution produced a very great architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, and philosophy of life, against which the products of modern society seem too often the refuse of a rummage sale. If we intend to prove that the modern system is better than the medieval system, then we must bravely face our task. We must prove, for example, that Manchester is better than Bruges, that Chicago is better than Florence. We must work out with some accuracy of detail that Mr. Churchill is a greater statesman than St. Anselm, and that Lord Curzon is a nobler figure than Simon de Montfort. These are not questions that can be avoided in a maze of generalities and theories. They are facts, which are the very foundation of the argument.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Guild State by G. R. Stirling Taylor. Copyright © 2006 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Publisher's Preface by the Directors, IHS Press,Foreword by Roger McCain, Ph.D.,
Introduction by Anthony Cooney,
Preface,
The Guild State,
Chapter I - The Historical Basis of the Guild System,
Chapter II - The First Principle: Organization by Function,
Chapter III - The Second Principle: Self-Management,
Chapter IV - The Third Principle: Decentralization and Small Units,
Chapter V - Consequent Results of Main Principles,
Chapter VI - Relations Between Guilds and State,
Chapter VII - A Guildsman's Philosophy of Life,
Notes,