of the House of Lancaster marks the culmination of the ascendancy of Parliament and the definite subordination of the king to the limitations upon the royal power imposed by the feudal aristocracy. Heedless of the new economic and social forces that were undermining the foundation of the feudal order and which found concrete expression in the growth of towns and in the Peasants' Revolt, the great noble families thoughtlessly hurried into the War of the Roses and committed class-suicide.

The peasants' rebellion is a significant landmark in the disintegration of the feudal system. Long before the Great Plague, the commutation of labor dues and the rise of a wage-paid working class had gone far toward the elimination of servile features from the villein tenure. The Black Death, by its decimation of the population, caused a rise in wages which legislation was powerless to prevent. The attempts of the landlords to restore the obsolete feudal services proved abortive and finally provoked the peasants to revolt. This uprising of the lower classes, though technically a failure, actually resulted in the practical extinction of villeinage. "Their own rebellion failed; but the slow agricultural revolution gradually set the villeins free." 62 But the changes among the classes immediately subordinate to the feudal aristocracy were as great as the transformation of the service-performing villeins and cotters into small tenants and wage-earners. The Great Plague, in thinning the gentry, tended to the consolidation of estates and the consequent formation of an influential landholding class below the baronage. At the same time the increase in wages for economy of cultivation tended toward the multiplication of small holdings, thereby augmenting the numbers of the yeoman class. The bare enumeration of the tendencies indicate how far economic changes were at work in weakening and in loosening the old personal ties. Yet, though the economic personal ties were breaking asunder, the psychic personal ties persisted in the intimate relation of the squire and the tenant. Even when the peasants rose against their lords, their purpose was to form a peasant monarchy in which the king would be the immediate patron of the countrymen.64

69 Gibbins, op. cit., pp. 150–51.

61Ibid., p. 171.

63 Gibbins, op. cit., p. 157.

60 Ibid., p. 153.

62 Cunningham, op. cit., I, 361.

64Cf. Green, op. cit., I, 476, 479; Cunningham, op. cit., p. 360.

We may now briefly recapitulate the steps traced in the decay of the social system of feudal personal arrangements. In its unadulterated form, the relations between man and man are personal; social organization is a complex of arrangements of mutual services and obligations of a man to his lord and of a lord to his man. Even in Anglo-Saxon times there was a strong tendency toward the substitution of territorial for personal relations, which the Norman Conquest brought about in full. Magna Charta was a definite stage in the supplanting of the personal relation of the king to his vassals. in the Great Council by an impersonal constitution regulating the powers and duties of sovereign and subject. The destruction of the feudal aristocracy, while causing a reversion under the Tudors and the Stuarts to personal absolute rule, at the same time involved an immense development of the impersonal mechanism of administration. Finally, the economic changes in progress undermined the feudal order and made necessary a reorganization of society on a new basis. But before considering the long period of transition from personal to impersonal relations, we turn to a discussion of the type of personal relations which developed in the mediaeval town.

CHAPTER IX

THE PERSONAL STAGE OF SOCIALIZATION

II. THE TOWN TYPE

The town type of personal relations.-The growth of towns and the rise of a middle class of merchants and artisans coincident with the differentiation of the group of yeomen in the country was a process of socialization characterized by the formation of appropriate mental attitudes and habits which were to play a dynamic rôle in English life. The mercantile system in politics, the Reformation in England, and the Puritan movement were but the projected expression of the everyday thinking, sentiment, habits, and activities of men engaged in trade, in craftwork, and in small manufacture. This new type of socialization finds objective expression in the industrial organization of the town and the occupational experiences of its inhabitants.

Though the towns originated at the time of the Danish invasions,' though they were stimulated by the consequences of the Norman. Conquest, they but gradually increased in population, wealth, and influence. For example, at the time of the Domesday survey there were only ten towns with over 5,000 inhabitants. London, with but 40,000 inhabitants, was the only city; York and Bristol were mere towns of 12,000.2 England was predominantly rural and continued so. Two hundred years later the proportion of town to country population is estimated at one to fourteen. Even in the first third of the sixteenth century London is not credited with more than 60,000 inhabitants. While the number of towns summoned to send representatives to Parliament in the reign of Edward I was 166," these must be thought of as small settlements, the majority of which had not over 1,000 inhabitants.

The village community and the manor contained in embryo those tendencies which were to develop into the economic system of the

1Cunningham, op. cit., I, 88.

2Gibbins, op. cit., pp. 107-8.

Rogers, op. cit., p. 283.

"Creighton, in Social England, III, 375.

"Gross, The Gild Merchant, 1890, I, 22.

town. The function of the pedlar, with his itinerant circuit to the markets and fairs, devolved later upon local dealers. The division of trades, which exempt in whole or in part certain persons from agricultural labor, furnished the germ of the guild crafts. The development of human nature in the personal, social, and economic relations of the town furnished the new type of mental attitude found in the merchant and the artisan.

The organization of the merchant guild, like that of the village and the manor, is built upon personal and local relations. But here the resemblance ceases. The guild is an association of men engaged in buying and selling for the common promotion of their common ends. The object of the organization is both exclusive and inclusive. The guild secured a monopoly of the local market by the exclusion of non-members from the trade. The welfare of its members was secured both by mutual aid and by the limitations upon competition within the guild. For "the members of the guild had a right to claim to have a part with another member in a successful bargain. If he fell into poverty he might count on their aid, and if he was imprisoned, or even unjustly accused, they would assist him." " Thus the organizing principle of the merchant guild was the mutual advantage of its members with reciprocal aid against the outside world.

Partly within and partly without the guild organization, there developed during the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries associations known as craft guilds. Each of these guilds was an organization of the artisans of a single trade. But the mastercraftsman differed from the merchant in manufacturing the goods which he sold to the public or to a complementary craft. With the rapid expansion of industry and the consequent growth of subdivision and specialization of trades in the reign of Edward III, the crafts multiplied so that in London, for example, there were forty "mysteries." 10 The natural result was that the merchant guilds gradually disintegrated into an aggregate of distinct crafts." With this break-up

"Gross, op. cit., I, 43.

"Cunningham, op. cit., I, 207.

Cunningham hints that the origin of the craft guilds may be traced to association of foreign artisans (op. cit., I, 180–81).

"Gross, op. cit., I, 116.

10Cutts, op. cit., p. 507.

11Gross, op. cit.,

P. 117.

of the old unity of the trades came an increase in the municipal regulation of industry. Although in a few places the crafts became integral parts of the common council and in most places subordinate organs for the regulation of industry, still the community as a whole. in its corporate capacity controlled the crafts in the public interest and acted as arbiter in all trade disputes. "The mediaeval world was fully convinced that since all trade and manufacture was carried on for the benefit of the public, all trade and manufacture should be subject to public control; and no one then questioned that it was the duty and the right of the State or the municipality to fix hours of labor, rates of wages, prices of goods, times and places of sale, the quality of the wares to be sold, and so on." 12 So, then, we may look upon the guild crafts of a town as (a) an aggregate of separate associations, each organized to secure a monopoly in its particular trade and complete control over it;13 and (b) as a system of industrial organization utilized by the civic government for the regulation of industry in the interests of the whole community.1

This sketch of the external organization of the guild cannot but indicate the revolution in industrial habits and mental attitudes involved in the transition from agriculture to trade. The resulting mental type is determined by the play of occupational activities within the circumference of human relations. The mental makeup of the merchant and the artisan was a particular organization of human nature and mind, functionally related to the economic situation of the time.

The relation of the merchant to his customers embodies in inchoate form the Mercantilistic theory. The trader desires a fair profit; the community demands public welfare. The impulse for gain is not instinctive, but is developed in the exchange situation. The merchant's answer in the book of Saxon dialogues indicates that traders were early conscious of a fundamental principle of economics: "Will you sell your things here as you bought them there?' 'I will not, because what would my labor profit me? I will sell them here, dearer than I bought them there, that I may get some

12 Green, Mrs., Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, 1894, II, 135. 13Ibid., II, 113.

14Seligman, "Mediaeval Guild," in the Proceedings of the American Economic Association, II (1887), 466; and Green, Mrs., op. cit., II, 145-54.