Social Disturbances in the 14th Century by Henri Perinne

I

 The beginning of the 14th century may be considered as the end of the period of medieval economic expansion that began in the 12^th.* Up to then progress was continuous in every sphere. The progressive enfranchisement of the rural classes went hand in hand with the clearing, drainage and peopling of uncultivated wastelands.. The development of industry (principally cloth, exchanged for luxury goods in the East) and commerce completely transformed the appearance and the very existence of society. While the Mediterranean and the Black Sea on the one side and the North Sea and the Baltic on the other became the scenes of a great trade, and the ports and trading posts sprang up all along their  coast and and in their islands, continental Europe was covered with towns from which the activity of the new middle-classes radiated in all directions.

Under the influence of this new life, the circulation of money was perfected, all sorts of new forms of credit came into use, and the development of credit encouraged that of capital. Finally, the growth of population was an infallible indication of the health and vigor of society. During the early years of the 14^th century, however, there is  observable in all these directions not perhaps a decline but a cessation of all advance. Europe lived, so to speak, on what it had acquired; the economic front was stabilized. It is clear that Europe was entering upon a period of conservation rather than creation, and social discontent seems to suggest both the desire and the inability to ameliorate a situation which no longer completely harmonized with men’s needs.

It is only fair to point out that if the 14^th century did not continue to progress, the catastrophes which overwhelmed it were largely responsible. The terrible famine which laid waste the whole of Europe from 1315 to 1317 seems to have caused greater ravages than any which had preceded it. Thirty years later, a new and still more appalling disaster, the Black Death, burst upon a world which had hardly recovered from the first shock. To the natural calamities, political calamities no less cruel were added. Italy was torn by civil strife during the whole century. Germany was prey to permanent political anarchy. Finally, the Hundred Years War ruined France and exhausted England. All this weighed heavily upon economic life. The number of consumers decreased and the market lost part of its powers of absorption.

These misfortunes unquestionably aggravated the social troubles which make the 14th century so violent in contrast to the 13th, but their chief cause must be sought in the economic organization itself, which had reached a point when its operations provoked discontent in urban and rural populations alike.

The enfranchisement of peasants, however generally it had taken place in the previous age, had still left behind traces of serfdom. In many countries corvees continued to weigh heavily on the peasants and the disappearance of the manorial regime made them a still greater infliction. For the lord had ceased to consider himself the protector of the men on his estate. His position in relation to his tenants was no longer that of an hereditary chief whose authority was accepted by reason of its patriarchal character; it had become that of a landlord and recipient of dues. Since all the former wastelands of the great estates were now occupied, no more villes nueves were founded and there was no longer any motive for giving serfs their  freedom which, instead of being profitable for their lord, would have deprived him of the rents and services which he continued to extract from them.

Doubtless, the need for money often drove the lords to sell charters of enfranchisement for a good price, or to free a whole village in return for the cessation of a part of the common lands. But the fact remains that now that the period of clearance was over the peasant no longer had any hope of improving his condition by emigrating to virgin lands. Everywhere serfdom remained , it became all the more odious because now being exceptional, it took on a derogatory appearance. The free cultivators on their side were impatient of the manorial courts, by virtue of which they held their  tenures and through which they remained subject to economic exploitation by the lords, whose men they had once been. Ever since the monks, in the course of the 13th century, had lost their early fervor and, with it, their prestige, tithes were paid most unwillingly. The larger farms established in the  demesne lands were crushing weight on the villagers. They claimed the greater part of the common lands as pasturage for their flocks, and rounded off their boundaries at the expense of the villagers. It was easy for them to encroach because they were often in the hands of the lord’s bailiff and or reeve, and thus they were able to oblige a number of  inhabitants to work for them as agricultural laborers.

The these causes of discomfort were added the evils produced by frequent wars. The Hundred Years’ War especially, during which mercenaries continue to live on the country after their disbandment, turned many regions of France into deserts ‘where there was no longer to be heard a cock crowing or a hen clucking.” This desolation was, it is true, a phenomena peculiar to France, and it would no doubt be incorrect to argue that in the rest  of Europe the situation  of the peasants became worse in the course of the 14th century. The social discontent of which it gave so many proofs is not to be explained everywhere in the same way. It may equally well have arisen from excessive misery and from a wish to put an end to a state of thing as all the more shocking because men believed themselves equal to overthrowing it.. If the Jacquerie in the Ile de France in 1357 was an uprising of populations driven to extreme by distress and hatred of the nobles who were held responsible for it, it seems to have been quite otherwise with the rising in Western Flanders in 1323 to 1328 and the insurrection of 1381 in England .  .  .

The rural insurrections  of the 14th century really owed their appearance of gravity to the brutishness of the peasantry. By themselves they could not succeed. Though the agricultural classes formed by far the largest part of society, they were incapable of combining in a common action and more incapable still of any thought of making a new world. All things considered, these risings were but local and short-lives spurts, outbursts of anger with no future. Although the economic contrast between the peasant who tilled the soil and the nobility who owned it was as real as that between the workman and the urban capitalist,, it was less felt, by virtue of the very conditions of rural existence, which bound a man by so many ties to the land which he cultivated and which left him, in spite of everything, a much higher degree of personal independence than was enjoyed by the wage-earner in great industry. Thus it is not surprising that in  bitterness, duration and results alike  the city agitations of the 14th century are in striking contrast with those of the country people.

Throughout the whole of Western Europe the haute bourgeoisie had from the beginning monopolized town government. It could not have been otherwise, if we remember that city life, resting essentially on commerce and industry, made it inevitable that those who promoted the latter should at the same time direct the former. Thus during the 12th and 13th centuries, an aristocracy, recruited from among the most notable merchants, had everywhere exercised municipal government. Their government had been a class government in the full sense of the term, and for long it possessed all the virtues of its class, energy, perspicacity, devotion to the public interest, which was indeed identical with and the chief guarantee of their own private interest. The work which  it accomplished  bears testimony to its merits. Under it urban civilization took on features  which were to distinguish it to the end. It created the whole machinery of municipal administration, organized its various services, founded civic finance and credit, built and organized markets, found the necessary money to build strong ramparts and to open schools, in a word, to meet all the needs of the bourgeoisie. But little by little there were revealed the faults of a system which entrusted the economic regulation of the great industry to the very people who lived upon its profits, and were naturally inclined to reduce the share of the workers to a minimum.

We have already seen that in the greatest manufacturing cities of the medieval world, in the Flemish towns, the cloth-worker had begun to manifest a hostility to the patrician echevins, which is clearly shown in the outbreak of strikes. To their own discontent was added that of a growing number of well-to-do bourgeoisie. For, in the meantime, the patrician regime had in any towns become a plutocratic oligarchy, jealously withholding power from all who were not members of a few families, and exercising it more and more in their own interests. Thus an opposition which was both social and political grew up against town government. It was the social opposition, obviously the most violent, which gave the signal for a conflict which, with many bloody vicissitudes, was to continue right into the 15th century.

 The revolt of the crafts against the patrician regime is often styled a democratic revolution. The term is not wholly exact, if by democracy is meant what the word denotes today. The malcontents had no intention of founding popular governments. Their horizons was bounded by the walls of their city and limited to the framework of their corporation. Though each craft claimed a share of the power it was very little concerned with its neighbors and its action was narrowly circumscribed by particularism. It sometimes happened, of course, that corporations of the same town combined against the common enemy, the oligarchy of the echevins, but they frequently also turned on each other after the victory. It must not be forgotten that these self-styled democrats were all members of industrial groups possessing the enormous privilege of monopoly. Democracy, as they understood it, was nothing but democracy of the privileged.

Not all towns were disturbed by the demands of the crafts, Neither Venice, nor the Hanseatic towns, nor the English cities show any traces of agitation. No doubt the reason was that the government of the haute bourgeoisie did not degenerate there into a closed and selfish oligarchy. New men, enriched by commerce, were constantly renewing and rejuvenating the ruling class. For centuries, the Venetian aristocracy set an admirable example of the highest virtues of patriotism, energy and skill, and the prosperity which they gained for the Republic shone upon all alike, so the people never dreamed of throwing off their yoke. It seems likely that similar causes preserved the rule of the patriciate in the Hanseatic towns. In England, the control exercised by royal authority over the towns was strong enough to check, if necessary, the efforts of the common people. The same is true of the French towns, which, from the end of the 13th century, were increasingly subordinated to the authority of the agents of the Crown, baillis, or seneschals. Elsewhere, as for example in Brabant, the territorial prince constituted himself the protector of the great bourgeois.

It was above all in the large industrial towns of the Low Countries, on the banks of the Rhine and in Italy, that municipal revolutions broke out. Their first cause must be sought in the abuses of the governing oligarchy. Wherever princely power was too weak either to forbid or to control it, nothing remained but to overthrow it, or at least compel it to share the power which it sought to monopolize. As to this everyone, rich and poor alike, was agreed, merchants who were kept out of commercial affairs no less than the craftsmen and wage-earners in the great industry. This movement which started in the second half of the 13th century, reached its conclusion in the course of the 14th. In consequence of riots, which almost always developed into armed struggles, the  ‘great’ were obliged to cede to the ‘small’ a more or less share in the municipal administration. Since the majority of the population was grouped into crafts, the reform necessarily consisted in associating these with government. Sometimes they received the right to dispose of a few seats on the body of the echevins or the town council, sometimes a new body of magistrates elected by them was formed by the side of the old one; sometimes all measures concerning the finances or political organization of the city had to be submitted for the approval of their delegates in general assembly. Sometimes they even succeeded in seizing the whole of this power from which the patriciate had excluded them so long.

But what was  possible in towns, where no one industry had a decided advantage over the others, was impossible where the balance manifestly inclined in favor of one of them. In the large manufacturing cities of Flanders, the numerical superiority of the weavers and fullers, whose crafts counted many thousands of members, prevented them from being satisfied with the role assigned to the small corporations which comprised no more than a few score. They were all the more anxious for ascendency because their condition as wage-earners differed greatly from that of craftsmen serving the local market. For them, the fall of the patriciate was not only a political question, it was first and foremost a social one. In it they looked forward to the end of their economic subordination, hoping that when the power to regulate conditions of work and rates of wages passed into their hands, the precarious condition to which they had been reduced by their profession would be over. Many indulged in confused dreams of equality, in a world where ‘every man should have as much as another.’ It was they who, in all the large towns, at the end of the 13th century, had given the signal for revolt and maintained the momentous struggle which brought them a temporary ascendency after the victory of Courtrai. But  their domination had soon roused the rest of the bourgeoisie against them. The divergence or, rather, the incompatibility of their interests with those the merchants and the artisans, was too great for the latter to submit to being subordinate to the cloth-workers. . . Nothing is more tragic than the situation of the Flemish towns in the 14^th century, in which social hatred raged with the frenzy of madness. . .

Towards the end of the century a proletariat began to make its appearance in the small crafts, in spite of the fact that their whole organization was designed to safeguard the economic independence of their members. Between the master-craftsmen and the apprentices or journeymen whom they employed goodwill had lasted as long as it was an easy matter for the latter to rise to the positon of masters. But from the moment the population ceased to grow and the crafts were faced with the necessity of stabilizing production, the acquisition of mastership had become more and more difficult. The tendency to make it a close family reserve is shown by all sorts of measures , e.g. long terms of apprenticeship, the raising of fees which had to be paid for obtaining the title of master and the exaction of a ‘masterpiece’ as a guarantee of proficiency in those who aspired to it. In short, each corporation of artisans was gradually transformed into a selfish clique of employers, determined to bequeath to their sons and sons-in-law the fixed clientele of their small workshops. . . .But the attempted revolutions of the towns were doomed to certain failure. The provinces and the nobility came to the rescue of all those who were threatened by them, great merchants, rentiers of the haute bourgeoisie and master-craftsmen. During the 125^th century the wave that had arisen in the preceding one fell back on itself, to break against the inevitable coalition of all the interests which had united against it.

II

The period in which the craft gilds dominated or influenced the economic regime of the towns is also that in which urban protectionism reached its height. However divergent their professional interests might be, all industrial groups were united in their determination to enforce to the utmost the monopoly which each enjoyed and to crush all scope for individual initiative and all possibility of competition. Henceforth the consumer was completely sacrificed to the producer .The great aim of workers in export industries was to raise wages, that of those engaged in supplying the local market top raise, or at least stabilize prices. Their vision was bounded by the town walls, and all were convinced that their prosperity could be secured by the simple expedient of shutting out all competition . . .evidence as of this outlook are to be found on all sides . . .( there were exceptions to the rule).

But it was in vain that the towns pursued their policy of taxing and exploiting largescale commerce; they could not escape it, nor indeed did they desire to do so, for the richer, the more active and the more populous a city was, the more commerce was indispensable to it. After all, it provided the town people a great part of their food supply and the crafts with almost all their raw materials. It was trade that the products of urban industry were exported to outside markets. All that the towns could do was to regulate the forms which this multifarious and essential activity assumed within their walls. They were quite unable to exercise any control over its expansion and circulation, the sources from which it was fed, or the credit which it employed; indeed the whole economic organization  which was dependent  on wholesale commerce eluded it. Over this enormous field the power of capital reigned supreme, dominating both large-scale navigation and transport, both the import and the export trade. It spread over the whole of Europe and the towns were borne in its bosom, as islands are born upon the circumambient ocean.

This movement was set on foot by a whole new class of men, who appeared just at the moment when urban economy was being transformed under the influence of the crafts. This was certainly no chance coincidence. The old town patricians, driven from power and thrown out of gear by the new conditions which were henceforth to dominate economic life, became, with few exceptions, a class of rentiers, living on the house and land rents, in which they had always invested a part of their profits. In their place parnvenus formed a new group of capitalists, who were hampered by no traditions and were able to accept without any difficulty the changes which took place in the old order. For the most part they were ‘factors’, commercial agents, or sometimes well-to-do artisans, for whom the progress of credit, speculation and exchange opened a career, but many who had grown rich in the service of princes also ventured their fortunes in business.

Indeed, the advance of administration and the increasing expense of maintaining armies or mercenaries and arming them with artillery, had obliged kings and great territorial lords alike to surround themselves withy a personnel of counsellors and agents of all sorts, who undertook the task which the nobility either disdained or was unable too perform. Their chief occupation was he management of finance . . Indeed, however various their origins, the capitalists of the 14th and 15th centuries were all obliged to enter into relations with princes and a complete solidarity of interests was established between the two. On  the one side the princes could not meet either their public or their private expenses without recourse to the financiers, but on the other the great merchants, bankers and ship-owners looked  to the princes to protect them against excessive municipal particularism, to put down urban revolt, and to secure the circulation of their money and merchandise.

In the favor they showed to the progress of capitalism the kings and princes were not actuated solely by financial considerations. The conception of the State which began to emerge as their power increased, led them to consider themselves as the protectors of the ‘common good’. Hitherto it had intervened there  indirectly, or rather in pursuance of its judicial, financial and military prerogatives. Though in its capacity as guardians of the public peace it had protected merchants, laid tolls on commerce, and in case of war placed embargoes on enemy ships and promulgated stoppages of trade, it had let the economic activities of its subjects to themselves. Only the towns made laws and regulations for them. But the competence of the towns was limited by their municipal boundaries, and their particularism caused them to be continually in opposition to each other and made it manifestly impossible for them to take measures to secure the common good, at the possible expense of their individual interests. The princes alone were capable of conceiving a territorial economy, which could comprise and control the urban economies. At the close of the Middle Ages men were, of course, still far from a decided movement or a conscious policy, directed towards this end, As a rule only intermittent tendencies are to be observed, but they are such as to make it evident that, wherever it had the power, the State was moving in the direction of mercantilism.**



*It was only the abrupt entry of Islam on the scene in the 7^th century and its conquest of the eastern, southern and western shores of the great European lake which altered the position of northern Europe. Henceforth, instead of the age-old link which had hitherto been between the East and the West, the Mediterranean became barrier, though tenuous links with Byzantium remained. By the end of the 11^th century this barrier began to crumble, global trade started to, penetrate Europe and its economy began to grow.


** For early developments in modern State formation see The Crisis of the Twelfth Century; Power, Lordship and the Origins of European Government by Thomas Bisson:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/11/power-in-12th-century-by-thomas-n-bisson.html