ment of refractory members was by fines, contributions of beer, wine, etc., for the Gild feasts; for more serious offences, exclusion from the Gild, which was equivalent to being deprived of the right to carry on the craft

For enforcing the payment of these fees, contributions, dues, and fines, the old Craft Gilds resorted to rattening, that is, taking away the tools of their debtors, precisely as they do still in Sheffield sometimes".1

After the Great Plague, the combinations of workmen grew apace, masons so distinguishing themselves that they had the honor of having a statute-34 Edward III, c. 9directed especially against them, and we read of a royal mandate against "workmen who have withdrawn from the palace of Westminster", i. e. who had gone out on strike. In 1383, the authorities of the City of London. forbade "all congregations, covins, and conspiracies of workmen in general"; and four years afterwards three bold journeymen cordwainers found themselves in Newgate for trying to found a fraternity under the protection of the Pope. From this time onwards we read of frequent suppressions of fraternities of journeymen, these combinations being formed within the Crafts Gilds, for the protection of the poorer members. As the Crafts Gilds decayed, these internal combinations came more and more to the front, and assumed more and more the character of the modern Trade Union.

It is noteworthy that combinations among the manual workers thus had their rise at a period when the agricultural and artizan population was in a condition of higher material prosperity and comfort that it enjoyed before or has enjoyed since. It was what Thorold Rogers calls "the golden age of the English laborer". Ordinary artizans earned 6d. a day, agricultural laborers 4d.; the cost of maintenance was reckoned, when board was given, at 6d. a week, the highest ever reckoned in this way being ls. a week. Hallam, contrasting wages and prices in the reigns of Edward III and Henry VI, with wages and prices in the reign of Victoria, states that the laboring classes were better provided with the means of subsistence then than now; and after making various allowances, he concludes: "After every allowance of this kind, I should find it diffi1 "The Conflicts of Capital and Labor." By George Howell, p. 48. Ed. 1878.

cult to resist the conclusion, that however the laborer has derived benefit from the cheapness of manufactured commodities, and from many inventions of common utility, he is much inferior in ability to support a family than were his ancestors four centuries ago

The growing strength of the workmen's combinations, despite all attempts to suppress them, is shown by the ferocious statute of Henry VI (3rd Henry VI, cap. 1) against such combinations. The preamble states that Artificers, Handicraftsmen and Laborers have made confederacies and promises, and have sworn mutual oaths not only that they should not meddle with another's work and perform and finish that another hath begun, but also to constitute and appoint how much work they shall do in a day, and what hours and times they shall work, contrary to the laws and statutes of this realm, and to the great impoverishment of his Majesty's subjects". It was therefore enacted that "if any artificers, workmen, or laborers, do conspire, covenant, or promise together, or make oath that they shall not make to do their work but at a certain price or rate, and not entertain to take upon them to finish that another hath begun, or shall do but a certain work in a day, or shall not work but at certain hours and times," they shall be guilty of felony, and be severely punished, the penalty for the third offence being the loss of the ears and infamy.

From this time forward the hand of Parliament weighed more and more heavily on the English workman, until it pressed him down into the position in which he lay at the beginning of the present century. The Gilds, long decaying, were crushed out, while the later combinations were branded as felony.

It is not possible in this brief survey to sketch the causes which led to the lamentable degradation of the workers-the enclosures of common lands, the eviction of cultivators to make large grazing farms, the vagabondage resulting from wars and the break-up of the great feudal houses, the debasing of the currency, etc. It must suffice to roughly outline the resulting legislation.

This legislation, at first, was harshest towards unskilled labor, the old customary protection of the Gilds still

1 "Europe during the Middle Ages." Pp. 649, 650.

influencing some of the laws touching skilled labor, as the clauses in the Statute of Apprentices of Elizabeth, designed to prevent the overcrowding of handicrafts, to the advantage of the skilled artizan. On the landless and the craftless then, as now, fell the heavier hand of the law.

In 1494, by the 11 Henry VII, c. 2, able-bodied vagrants were rendered liable to the stocks and whipping; and this Act was reinforced in 1530, and again in 1535, when death was adjudged as penalty for a third offence. Seventy-two thousand vagrants were, according to Hollinshed, executed in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1547, men and women were forced to hire themselves for "meat and drink" if they had been idle three days, under penalty of branding in the face; and a runaway might be enslaved for two years: if such a slave fled his employment he was branded and enslaved for life; and a third evasion was punished with death. Similar laws, yet more severe, were passed under Elizabeth and James; lack of employment, the curse of the worker's life, being thus judged as crime. Other legislation dealt with combinations, apprenticeship, and wages. By 2 and 3 Edward VI, c. 15, combinations of workmen "concerning their work or wages were made punishable with fine or imprisonment for the first offence, fine or the pillory for the second, and fine, pillory, loss of one ear, and judicial infamy for the third. "This statute was confirmed by 22 and 23 Charles II, and was in force till the general repeal of all such prohibitions on the combinations of workmen, which took effect under 6 George IV, c. 129." 2 By the Statute of Apprentices, 5 Elizabeth c. 4, persons were forbidden to exercise any "art, mystery, or manual occupation without an apprenticeship of seven years, thus still further shackling the unlucky unskilled worker; and the justices in Quarter Sessions were ordered to fix the rates of wage in husbandry and handicrafts. It is sometimes said that all attempts to fix wage by law are rendered nugatory by economic causes. As a matter of historical fact, this is not true. As Thorold Rogers explicitly says, dealing with the period that followed the passing of the Act: The wages of labor do conform, notwithstanding

1 See "Historical Basis of Socialism in England." By H. M. Hyndman. Pp. 40-43. Ed. 1883.

2" Work and Wages." Pp. 64, 65.

the continual increase in the price of the necessaries of life, to the assessments of the Quarter Sessions; and the system is continued under legal sanction till 1812, and by a sufficient understanding for long after that date". And this, although he goes on: "It seems that as long as the practice remained, under which the wages of the peasant were eked out by land allowances and commonable rights, he continued to subsist, though but poorly, under the system; but that when the enclosures of the eighteenth century began, and the full influence of the Corn Laws was felt, during the fourth quarter of that century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, it became necessary to supplement his wages by an allowance from the parish fund, and thus to indirectly qualify the assessment which the magistrate had established." The law of Parochial Settlement, 13 and 14 Car. II, c. 12, tied the people to the soil, though work might be unattainable there; and, if a man found work elsewhere, empowered the church wardens and overseers of the parish into which he had gone, to obtain an order from two justices of the peace to remove him back to his own parish. The 8 and 9 William III, c. 30, permitted churchwardens and overseers to issue licences to migrate, provided that they admitted their liability to take the migrant and any family that he might have back to his original parish, if he became chargeable in the new. Thus the laborer became, as he has been well called, "a serf without land, the most portentous phænomenon in agriculture ".2

The completing touch was put to the degraded helplessness of the worker by extending the law of conspiracy to enmesh all his combinations. This extension was the work of the lawyers, who construed the statutes of Edward and Elizabeth in this sense; until Parliament lightened their labor by passing, in 1799, the 39 Geo III, c. 106, which suppressed all workmen's trade associations, of whatever kind, and forbade them to accumulate common funds. "At the conclusion of the eighteenth century," says Thorold Rogers, "an Act of Parliament was carried which declares that all contracts, except between master and man, for obtaining advances of wages, altering the usual time of working, decreasing the quantity of work, and the 2 Ib. P. 97.

1 "Work and Wages." Pp. 52, 53.

like, illegal. Workmen who enter into such illegal combinations are punishable by imprisonment, and a similar punishment is inflicted on those who enter into combinations to procure an advance of wages, or seek to prevent other workmen from hiring themselves, or procuring them to quit their employment. Meetings and combinations for effecting such purposes are punishable in like manner; and offenders who inform against their associates are to be indemnified." This act followed various others, passed during the century, forbidding combinations in different trades-as 12 George I, c. 34, forbidding combinations of workmen employed in woollen manufactures-and summed up the restrictive legislation which placed the workman helpless in the hands of the capitalist. During the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century the English worker reached the nadir of political and social degradation. He was voiceless in the State, a bondslave in industrial life. Gripped by the law of Settlement, his wages fixed by those who lived on his labor, forbidden to associate with his fellows for his own improvement, gagged if he tried to advise with his mates on the conditions of their labor, he was ringed round by laws that bruised him at his lightest movement. The Government was his tyrant, the law his worst enemy; no marvel that his one cry was to get rid of the interference of the State, that he panted for individual liberty.

While legislation thus fettered the worker, the economic revolution worsened all his life conditions. The invention of steam-machinery brought with it the replacement of home industries by factory production; the aggregations of population consequent on this brought about an overcrowding, a squalor, a mass of festering misery, unknown in the less complex life of simpler times; the rising of new trades, uncontrolled by the apprenticeship legislation, enabled untrained men, as well as women and children, to crowd into the industrial field; and between the dying protective legislation of the past and the yet unborn regulative legislation of modern times, came an interregnum of laissez faire, during which Capitalistic Industrialism exploited the workers at its will, while they, bound hand

1" Work and Wages." Pp. 66, 67.