THE STATE we read that "all unions, combinations, meetings, organised societies, statutes and oaths already established or to be estAblishedby carpenters and masons, will henceforth be null and void." But when the defeat of the towns and of the popular insurrection of which we· have spoken was completed, the State boldly laid hands on all the institutions (guilds, fraternities, etc.) which used to bind artisans and peasants together, and annihilated them. This is plainly seen in England where a mass of documents existsshowing every step of that annihilation. Little by little the State laid hands on all guilds and fraternities. It 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 confiscated everything possessed by the guilds. without further ado. The heir to the great protestant king finished his father's work.* It was open robbery, "without excuse" as Thorold Rogers has. 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 fact, it was impossible for the State to tolerate a guild or corporation of a trade, with its tribunal, its militia, its treasury, its swom organisation. It was, for the statesmen, "a State within the State". The State had to destroy the guild, and it destroyed it everywhere, in England, in France, in Germany, in Bohemia, preserving only its semblance as an instrument of the exchequer, as a part of the vast administrative machine. Should we be astonished that guilds, tradeunions and wardenships, deprived of everything that was formerly their life and placed under royal functionaries, became in the eighteenth century mere 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 organisation 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 their riches and property: it appropriated to itself aJl their economic 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 but 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 wasalways 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, ha? to be piled up in the shape of useless •see Toulmin Smith's work on Guilds. 37 Biblloteca Gino Bianco
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