On Guilds, etc (part 2)
(I’d like to begin by thanking James Davis at Queen’s University, Belfast for his useful response to an email query that sped this second half of the essay along. He is, of course, not responsible for my arguments and errors. I’m also grateful to Jan Delaeter for sourcing a citation to a text of Werner Sombart not available in English).
This is part two of an essay considering the recent work of legal scholar Sanjukta Paul. Read the first part here. In this second part, I consider Paul’s claims about medieval guilds and medieval market regulations more generally, as well as her idea of a “moral economy.”
5. Just Prices, Wise Men
“Once upon a time,” goes the just-so story about guilds familiar from Smith and mainstream economics, “there were guilds, which were organizations basically devoted to suppressing competition and fixing prices, which was Bad, and then we got rid of the guilds and replaced them with firms and this promoted competition and that was Good.” Following the trail of her critique of Bork, Paul ends up positing an alternative just-so story in its stead: “Once upon a time there were guilds, which were organizations basically devoted to the horizontal allocation of coordination rights, and that was Good, but then we replaced them with the firm, which was Bad because it actually reduced competition by integrating many small producers into a few large firms, and, moreover, because it created an arbitrary framework within which legal regulation allocates coordination rights to firms and no-one else.” Thus, the idea of “the guild” is the guiding star of Paul’s work in that it holds out the promise of being able to recover, from within the resources of the legal tradition itself, something she refers to as “moral economy regulation.”
Paul’s first major claim about guilds relates to the “marketing offenses” in restraint of trade we considered in part 1: “Traditional market regulation,” she argues, was “steeped in the concept of ‘just price.’ Late medieval prices were traditionally administered in the context of the social institutions of markets and fairs, and in the context of craft guilds and municipal regulation, which were inherently seen as embedded in ethical relations between people.” The consequence of this was that “moral economy regulation” sought to “confine exchange to these socially managed contexts” and that “economic coordination would be evaluated in terms of whether it was a departure from these socially administered prices” (“Recovering,” 186). Paul here is arguing that prices in medieval markets were, unlike prices in modern markets, “embedded in ethical relations between people,” and that it was for this reason that market regulation sought to contain transactions within the time-space “container” of the authorized market. I have already claimed, in part 1, that Paul is wrong to think that medieval markets were characterized by stable, “customary” prices, and that the common law discourse about the “restraint of trade” had anything directly to do with a reference to such a price. We now need to consider these claims a little more carefully and try to get a firmer grasp on what exactly it meant for there to “be a price” in a medieval English market.
For economics in the tradition of Smith, there is not really a meaningful question to ask about “where” the market is, because the market is simply everywhere. In this tradition, “the market” becomes little more than the immanent substance of the social body. In part 1, we saw how Smith developed a notion of the ideal market as a situation in which no single participant was even aware of the specific existence of any other participant: there would only be a sort of direct, “I-Thou” relationship between the market participant and “the market” as a mystical whole. This is, of course, purely a fantasy, and a serious analysis of markets would have to begin by asking what it means for “a market” to exist in time and space. The first thing we have to understand about a medieval market is that it was not an immanent social substance but rather an event in time and space. Everything else depends on this one crucial axiom.
Elsewhere, I have described the question of the existence of a market in terms of the existence of a dealer market, by which I meant a place in time and space at which dealers congregate to quote “the inside spread,” thereby “making the market.” In the case of a medieval English “market,” however, we are dealing with something a bit different: indeed, the English “market” in some ways was constituted precisely by the (more-or-less successful) attempt to negate or exteriorize the dealer market, to cast the dealers out of the market or prevent them from entering in the first place. Thus, what I am going to say here represents something of a revision of the view I presented in chapter 1 of The Difference That Money Makes (although ultimately this revision is only a clarification of terminology). It’s not that what I said there was wrong: if what we care about is the pricing of money, or the pricing of assets as collateral, and thus the liquidity of “a market” in those monies or those assets, then what we mean by “a market” is the dealer market. But when we talk about “markets” in medieval England, referring to the event in time and space that contemporaries referred to by that word, we are using the same word to refer to another thing. The medieval English “market” was not a dealer market, but something else.
In relation to the dealer market, the English “market” was, in a way, incomplete. The dealer market is “complete” in the sense that, given that it exists, it will accommodate the demand to transact in either direction: one can access the market in X and receive a quoted price for either buying or selling X. That is what we mean when we talk about a stock market or a market in money (and it what I meant by “a market” in my previous work). The medieval English “market,” by contrast, represented only one half of this spread. It was a place where people offered to sell to those who demanded to buy, but not the other way around. One could not — at least in theory — go to an English market and offer to buy from those who demanded to sell. There was, in other words, no actor within an English market standing ready to buy on demand at a quoted price. There were, however, actors standing ready to sell on demand at a quoted price: these were, for the most part, merchants acting as intermediaries between town and country, who arrived at the market in order to sell farm products to their immediate consumers. The central question of English market regulation, then, was how and by whom this quoted ask should be determined.
This price was most emphatically not a price that could be quoted freely by sellers however they wished. It was, rather, a publicly known price that was enforced on the market by the market authorities. At any given moment, that is, everyone in the market knew what the selling price of a good was to be, and it was illegal to sell at a higher price than that. It is perhaps on these grounds that Paul suggests, in various places, that prices in the medieval market were both “customary” and “socially administered.” These claims, however, are a misinterpretation of what was actually happening. First of all, nothing about these prices was “customary”. Just because the asking price in the market was quoted publicly by the market authority does not mean that this price did not change: it did, often even over the course of a single market day. Second of all, it would be an overreach to conclude that this meant that prices were “socially administered” in the sense of being administered by “society” in general, because important actors capable of exercising pricing power existed outside of the market, or might be capable of exercising pricing power prior to entering the market, and thus it cannot be taken for granted whether the authority in charge of any given market was “taking” or “making” a price in any given moment. Understanding the relations of pricing power that governed price formation in medieval markets will require a more granular (and less romantic) understanding.
Paul, in other words, is ultimately too close to Smith’s notion of a market as an immanent social substance: she begins with the (true) observation that asking prices in a given medieval market are posted by that market’s authorities and then tries to proceed to the conclusion that this means that markets are administered by, and thus subsumed into, a social totality. Ultimately, however, Paul is confused about medieval markets because, in drawing on a fantasy of the medieval economy as the inspiration of her project to reform the modern bureaucratic state, she forgets that the absence of precisely such a “rational state” is in many ways what made the medieval economy what it was. In medieval England, we are not dealing with a situation in which there exists a “unified” national market over which territorially defined bureaucratic units exercise relatively unambiguous jurisdiction. Rather, we are dealing with a situation in which there exist a large number of different markets constituted under a hodgepodge of noble, royal, ecclesiastical, or municipal rights and privileges. Thus, the medieval “market” is something that is a very specific part of society rather than being, as we now imagine it, something that is coterminous with society as such. The medieval market, in other words, is subject to social forces that are outside itself, and thus cannot be understood as having been socially subsumed under the regulation of market authorities.
Moreover, no one source of right or privilege granted anybody exclusive right to hold a market in a region. While holders of the right to make a market could sometimes bring suit against those whose opened new markets that were too close to one that had already been established, the fact that they had to sue demonstrates that the offending new market had in fact already acquired the right or privilege of opening. There was clearly competitive pressure, as early as the 12th century, to open up markets as sources of revenue for the founding market authority, whether an Earl or a Bishop or a municipal corporation. As Masschaele puts it:
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, well over a thousand new markets were licensed… Some never made it past the licensing stage, while others did not attract enough business to warrant their maintenance and eventually withered away. But… some also proved to be wildly successful. Why some failed while others flourished is difficult to know. Founders of markets were prone to speculative optimism, setting up new ventures in the fervent-but ultimately unwarranted-hope that their site might somehow strike the fancy of toll-paying traders. Some of these ventures failed to overcome legal challenges launched by the holders of other markets; some were founded too late to acquire a footing in established networks of transportation and trade; some were simply unable to compete with the attractions of rival markets in the same area. (“Public Space,” 385)
Masschaele analogizes the business of markets in medieval England to the business of restaurants today: many were opened, most failed, and a few survived and thrived. Many of those that failed did so simply because nobody showed up to do business there, and those that thrived (and thriving, in this sense, meant being successful as a revenue stream for the market authority) on the basis of charging relatively small fees over a large volume of transactions. This has a simple implication for Paul’s argument, which is that no sellers were ever forced to attend any particular market. Rather, they had to be attracted to the market, and those markets that failed to attract sellers inevitably failed themselves. This meant that, however much it might have liked to, the market authority could not simply set prices at whatever low ceiling it liked. It was, rather, subject to price-formation forces that exceeded its jurisdiction. And this jurisdiction was often not very big: in many cases, not even beyond the literal walls of the town.
The existence of strong seasonality in farm product prices, moreover, meant that the market authority could not simply post a price and forget about it (much less chalk it up to “custom”). Rather, this price had to be determined anew at the beginning of each market day. Thus, in order to understand the market, we will need to try to get a grasp on how market authorities determined the prices they posted and the power relations that structured this price-setting activity. R.H. Britnell presents an authoritative and clear account of how prices were set in medieval markets, from which I will draw heavily in what follows. Basically, “the market” was a buyer’s club of consumers, and the market authority was acting as a representative of this club for the perhaps dual purposes of collecting toll revenues as well as the opportunity to exercise social authority in a local milieu of which they were a member of the elite. Thus, the goal of the market authority was generally to maintain in their market the lowest possible asking price for goods that would nonetheless continue to attract sellers. It is likely — although probably not testable — to assume that the skill of the market authorities in consistently setting the correct maximum ask that would alienate neither sellers nor buyers was an important determinant in the success and failure of individual markets.
How, then, were these prices set? Medievals had a vague notion, inherited from Roman law, that in the case of disputes about the valuation of goods and assets that the price should be determined as the “just price” assessed by a “wise man.” The market authority and his agents, here, are thus operating in the capacity of such a “wise man.” In what, though, consists his wisdom? There is a long-running debate in the literature about whether the “just price” is identical with, or something different from, what we now call the “market price.” Medieval theologians did develop a sort of cost-plus theory of “just price” that is the predecessor of classical political economy’s theory of value: they sought to produce a theory that would explain, from first principles, what the merchant ought to charge for their goods on the basis of what they cost to produce plus a “just” level of profit. Theologians, however, did not run the markets. In practice, as Britnell suggests, the market authorities determined their prices in a much simpler way: they simply inquired of the merchants what price they were willing to sell for, and posted the lowest ask as the official price. Thus, the question of whether the “just price” was or was not (or should or should not be) equal to the “market price” is ill-posed, because it is simply true by definition. The “just” or “common” price had to be quoted by the market authority in order to bring the market itself into existence, and thus for there to be a “market price” at all. Thus, there is not any real question of whether the just price was, normatively, equal to the market price, because the market price was already, performatively, whatever the market authority had determined to be the just price.
In soliciting asking prices from merchants, the lowest of which would become the price at which the market would open, market authorities tried to keep them as much in the dark as possible about local conditions of supply and demand. They sought to prevent merchants from gaining any information that might inform them about when it might be possible to flex their pricing power by raising asks. This was one of the reasons that “forestalling” was an affront to the market authority’s power: the forestaller might be a local who was tempted to “break ranks” with the buyer’s club by meeting the merchant ahead of the market and informing them about about local conditions that might raise the price in return for a share of the profit.
Once the initial asking price that made the market had been set, however, it might continue to change even over the course of the market day. But it could not be changed simply because the sellers wished to change it. Once sellers had brought their goods into the market, they did not have the right to withdraw them in order to wait for a better price, or even in response to a reduction in the posted price. Nor, if they thought the current price too low, were they permitted to buy up the goods in order to sell them again later once the price had risen (such an activity is the direct meaning of “regrating”). The official price did, however, sometimes change over the course of the day, just in case the market authority decided to change it. They seem to have done so in basically two circumstances. The first was in the case that a new merchant (who is, remember, kept ignorant of current market conditions) should arrive at the market willing to sell their goods for a lower price than that currently obtaining. In this case, the market authority might simply declare a lower price. All of the merchants already in the market would be on the hook for this price reduction, and did not — as examples given by Britnell illustrate — have the option to withdraw their goods. In the opposite case, if the supply of goods being brought into the market should dry up over the course of the day with demand left unfulfilled, the market authority might be forced to raise the maximum ask in the hopes of enticing new supply. Once merchants had brought their goods into the market, they gave up the option not to sell them at the official price. But they could nevertheless exercise pricing power outside the market, by deciding whether to bring their goods to one market or another.
Thus, while it is true that buyers and sellers inside a given market did not compete with one another but rather transacted at an officially administered price, not all of the relevant price-setting dynamics were enclosed within this time-space container. Markets also competed *with each other* for the business of buyers and sellers. The “just price” was thus indeed both a market price, by definition, and a competitive price, in fact, but this was a kind of competition that took place between markets-plural rather than inside the market-singular, and a market price that was simply constituted (rather than retroactively condemned or justified) by the “just price” determined by a “wise man.” It is therefore misleading to suggest, as Paul does, that the medieval notion of a “just price” was somehow opposed to or in contradiction with the existence of a floating market price, or that this price was understood to be “customary” in the sense of being a known, unchanging quantity.
The authorities of any given market were not, then, as Paul suggests, concerned with the health or well-being of the “ethically embedded medieval society” as a generality. They were, rather, concerned to make a profit for themselves by representing the interests of a buyer’s club of relatively sedentary consumers against those of the relatively mobile merchants who acted as the middlemen between these consumers and primary agricultural production. They did, certainly, have a “moral” vision of what a just market should be like, which was a market in which all of the available supply had brought into the market where it could become publicly known information that would contribute to the finding of a “just” price at which the market could be successfully cleared in the sense of satisfying all of the available demand. But this is not any more or less “moral” than the neoclassical vision of a world in which all markets are perfectly transparent and “competitive”. They are simply moral visions from different points of view.
Here, however, we have been speaking primarily about markets of urban consumers buying agricultural products. These markets serving highly inelastic demand for the basic necessities of survival were more highly regulated (at least when it came to bargaining and prices) than the selling of durable goods, which is generally the kind of good that is more relevant to what Paul means when she talks about “price fixing in the context of the guild system” (by which she really means specifically craft guilds rather than the various other kinds of guilds, be they mercantile guilds or social guilds with no direct link to any particular economic function). Durable goods of this sort have much more elastic demand and are thus not as susceptible to “price gouging” as are primary agricultural commodities and subsistence goods: medieval people were very concerned about the prices of wheat and herrings, and rather less worried about the price of saddles and horseshoes and spoons. In the next section, then, we will move on from Paul’s claims about market regulation to those concerning guilds as a structure for the organization of artisanal labor.
6. Return of the Guilds
It is now necessary to say a few words about Paul’s citational practice and use of sources. There exists, in the recent historical literature, a debate known to historians as the “return of the guilds,” whose primary protagonists are Sheilagh Ogilvie and Stephen Epstein. This debate centers largely around the question of whether or not craft guilds encouraged or inhibited something called “innovation” and therefore “progress.” The debate is split between those we might call rehabilitationists, like Epstein, who want to rescue the craft guilds from the assessment that they inhibited innovation and progress by emphasizing the way that their practices and structures encouraged the circulation of technical knowledges. Opposed to them are the anti-rehabilitationists, mainly Ogilvie, who wish to defend a more-or-less Smithian view of guilds as enemies of progress and the free market. The very framing of this debate, of course, is itself anachronistic, because medieval people did not really have the idea that “progress” and “innovation” were things they should care about. Their concerns lay elsewhere. Nevertheless, the renewed attention to guilds generated by the heat of this debate has produced a rich body of literature that offers us today a much clearer and more precise picture of these organizations than that available to authors in the early 20th century.
Paul, misleadingly, wants to claim the authority of the “rehabilitationist” literature — or what she refers to as the “best informed recent scholarship” — in support of her assertions. The actual claims she makes about guilds, however, are not supported by this literature. In reality, her view of guilds is an older one, deriving from late 19th and early 20th century German writers such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart, who saw guilds as part of a medieval ethical social totality that had been catastrophically ruptured by modernity and capitalism. Paul’s main source for receiving this tradition, and the claim that it is supported by the “rehabilitationist” view ala Epstein, seems to be a review essay by the economist Gary Richardson, whose primary goal is to argue that the meaning of “monopoly” changed between the 19th and 20th centuries and that guilds were monopolies in the former sense but not the latter — that is, guilds did not, contrary to popular belief, constitute monopolies in the sense of having a legal right to be sole sellers in a given market. There is an element of truth in this claim, which is that guilds did not always and everywhere have a legal right to be sole sellers in a given market: that is to say, having the right of being sole sellers was not a *defining* characteristic of guilds. But they sometimes did: for example, the Pepperers of London in the 12th century had the right to be the sole sellers in the local retail trade in spices; foreign merchants being restricted to dealing solely in wholesale quantities (Nightingale, op. cit.). But regardless of the details of this particular point, the overall picture of guilds painted by Richardson in the course of making this argument is tendentious and unreliable (and, at times, willfully dishonest), and is therefore an extremely unstable foundation for proceeding to an overall historical assessment of guild organizations.
Richardson’s work, in general, falls prey to the basic historiographical sin of rushing immediately to universal claims from particular facts and events. That is, Richardson finds one example of something happening and then triumphantly concludes that this was what always happened, without paying much attention to whether what emerges from this procedure is a coherent or plausible picture of the medieval economy. In one particularly egregious example, he even flatly contradicts himself from one page to another. First, he claims that “Guilds were inclusive, not exclusive. Royal charters required them to admit all applicants. Barriers to trade and power over product markets did not appear in their bag of tricks” (“Tale,” 229). Then a few pages later, we read that “Guilds were voluntary cooperatives. No one was forced to join, and no one had to be admitted. Guilds… requir[ed] applicants to serve apprenticeships, pay entry fees, and demonstrate the skills necessary for the profession” (“Tale,” 236). In another essay, we find that guild charters “required everyone to join the organization. They did not prohibit anyone from entering the craft… Guilds could not deem some men competent, and therefore able to work, and others incompetent, and therefore ineligible for employment” (“Guilds, laws,” 15). It is impossible for all of these statements to be true, or at least to all be true as universal claims about guilds in general. But Richardson, it seems, cannot make up his mind about which he prefers, so he simply asserts them all at once and hopes nobody will notice.
The problem here seems to be generated by the fact that Richardson wants to reconcile two claims about guilds that are actually in tension: he wants to claim, both at once, that guilds were “voluntary” and also that they were “inclusive.” But of course, if an organization lacks the power to exclude anyone, then there can be nothing voluntary about the way it includes them. Thus we find that royal charters forced guilds to admit everyone, and also that nobody had to be admitted; or that guilds both required applicants to demonstrate skills and also had no such power to do so. It is difficult to assess each specific claim that Richardson makes, because he often does not give any evidence for them (no evidence whatsoever, for example, is given for the assertion that “royal charters forced guilds to admit everyone”; this is simply asserted as a fact following the block quotation of three 12th century proclamations that say something else). What is likely, however, is that somewhere, sometime, all of these things did actually happen: somewhere, probably, there was a king who ordered a guild to accept some applicants it wanted to deny, and somewhere else, there was probably a guild that denied some applicants without any such challenge. Somewhere, there was probably a guild that tried to disqualify certain practitioners of a craft on the basis that they lacked the required skills, and failed, and elsewhere there were guilds that tried to do so and succeeded. All of Richardson’s assertions, in other words, wherever he ultimately got them from, are probably true existentials that have been recklessly transformed into false universals.
Richardson here — like any good economist — is giving incoherent answers to a poorly posed question. There’s no point in asking, as a general rule, what guilds did or what powers they had or didn’t have: the only historically serious answer that could be given to such a question is “it depends.” Even worse would be to begin by asking, as Paul and Richardson both do, whether guilds were good or bad: nothing can come of this but mythology. Rather, we should begin with an ontological question: not whether guilds are good or bad, or even what they did, but simply what guilds *are*. We should then proceed from there to asking what problems or tensions might arise as a consequence of the fact that guilds are what they are, at which point we might begin to have a secure foothold for analyzing specific moments of historical conflict over what guilds could or should do.
Let’s begin with an example of such a conflict supplied by Richardson. “Did the law permit guilds to erect barriers to entry?” he asks. “No, the law prohibited the erection of impermeable barriers and permitted townsmen to practice any profession they chose… A well-known example appears in London’s Plea Roll of 1355 [sic]” (“Guilds, laws,” 14). At this point he turns to a citation to a book by Robert Unwin written in 1904. Here is Richardson’s version of Unwin:
the weavers [of London] complained to the Mayor and the Aldermen that the burellers were exercising the trade of weaving in their houses without being qualified by membership of the craft. The burellers boldly claimed the right as freemen of the city to carry on any trade or mystery... The weavers attempt to establish their sole right to their craft was so little countenanced by the city authorities, that they did not venture to appear on the day appointed; and the judgement was given to the effect that it should be henceforth lawful for all freemen to set up looms in their hostels and elsewhere, and to weave cloth and sell it at will... (Unwin, 1904, p. 30).
This quotation, according to Richardson, plainly demonstrates that guilds were not guilty of the charge of “erecting barriers to entry”: in other words, they didn’t engage in the “anti-competitive” behavior of “artificially” restricting who could or couldn’t engage in a certain craft. It is supposed to demonstrate this by the fact that, in 1355, the weavers tried to prevent the burellers from weaving and failed. At this point, however, Richardson’s work transitions from being merely bad to raising the suspicion of active scholarly dishonesty.
Where is this passage in Unwin? There is one item by Unwin in Richardson’s bibliography: “Unwin, G., 1904. The Guilds and Companies of London.” But Unwin’s “The Guilds and Companies” was published in 1908, and this passage does not appear on page 30. Richardson is in fact citing another text that does not appear in his bibliography: another book by Unwin, actually from 1904, titled “Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” A reader who has not given up by this point will find something very interesting on page 30 of that text, which is the clause eliminated by Richardson’s ellipsis: “…any trade or mystery; but added that the weaving was actually done by members of the weavers’ craft in their employment” (Unwin, 30). This addition significantly complicates the picture, as well as the conclusion that Richardson wishes to draw from it. It is clear from the full text that the burellers are staking their position via alternative pleading, or joint arguments with incompatible premises. In response to being accused by the weavers of weaving without being members of the guild, the burellers respond: “as freemen of the city, we have the right to engage in whatever crafts we like; also, these are apprentices of the weaver’s guild we’re hiring anyways.”
It is thus clear that the “right of the freemen” to practice whatever craft they liked was a principle that was in play, but not entirely certain. There was also an alternative, competing principle, which was that those who practiced a craft must belong to the appropriate guild. The burellers did not wish to stake their entire argument on one principle or the other. In the moment, their interests were best served by “boldly claiming” the right of freemen in the city, but they also offered a fallback argument that ceded the principle that weavers should belong to the weavers guild but nonetheless supported the burellers’ cause, which was that those doing the weaving in the burellers’ houses were nonetheless apprentices of the weavers. In the very next of paragraph of Unwin, moreover, we learn that, three decades later in 1364 (the dispute Richardson is referencing actually occurred in 1335, not 1355), the drapers (who were, it seems, a rebranding of the “burellers”) acquired the “sole right of making cloth,” at the expense of the “dyers, weavers and fullers” (Unwin 1904, 30). Thus, the drapers won a right in 1364 that their predecessors the burellers had seemingly rejected on principle three decades earlier (and which Richardson presents as paradigmatic for determining what guilds did or did not do in general, on the basis of an obscured citation to this very page). Perhaps this is a scholarly error that can be chalked up to hasty notes or telephone games… but it cannot but be observed that the error serves Richardson very conveniently.
At any rate, all of this merely goes to demonstrate what we should have begun by assuming: that the medieval past was hardly an epoch of ethically embedded moral principles and “relations between people”, but rather a world much more like our own, in which people are generally happy to claim whatever self-contradictory bullshit they like as long as it serves their purposes at the moment. Thus, again, there is less a question of some absolute general answer to the question of what guilds do, than there is a question of what guilds are, and what problems and conflicts arise as a result of the fact that they are what they are.
7. The Freedom of the Town
So, what are guilds? Let’s begin here, and then return to the burellers and weavers of 14th century London to see what light we can shed on that episode by beginning in a more secure place. To understand what guilds are, we should begin with two pieces of data: first, the word “guild,” and, second, the idea of “freedom”, specifically the “freedom of the town.”
The word “guild” derives from “geld,” meaning gold, but with the additional meaning of a tax: specifically, the geld was a tax on land (organized into “hides,” a variable unit of area theoretically equal to the amount of land necessary to feed a single family). This was one of the most “advanced” fiscal systems of the period in Europe if by that word we mean “centralized”: pretty much everyone was liable for the geld, and it was paid directly to the crown, and as such collecting it was an immense administrative undertaking. To facilitate the collection of this tax, therefore, English population centers created central structures known as geld halls. These buildings were, in essence, the kernel of what would develop into the municipal governments of cities and towns (Nightingale, op. cit.). And even after the geld as such fell into disuse after 1161, when direct taxation of land in England was replaced by the tax on movable property that was to become the hallmark of the English fiscal structure, the geld/guild halls and the organizations associated with them remained a source of direct crown income. The town endowed with a guild hall was “free” in the sense that its residents enjoyed a set of privileges and liberties that were not possessed by the peasants in the countryside. But this freedom had a price, which had to be paid to the king; often, specifically in gold, rather than in the king’s own silver coinage (a topic for another time). Thus, what a guild really was, at the kernel of its being, was an association of municipal taxpayers — a constituency composed of subjects who were, unlike the great barons and bishops, individually insignificant, but who might strive to make their interests known through the mediation of a corporate entity. That is what the word means and it is the best place to begin understanding the social and economic significance of these organizations. And what they got in return for their taxes was “the freedom of the town.”
It was not, however, the town that was “free” so much as it was the townsmen themselves who were free “of” it. This “freedom” might, like most things in the medieval world, be composed of a grab bag of various liberties and privileges, but most fundamentally what it meant was the right to own land (and, by extension, to set up shop or engage in commerce) within the municipal walls. Medieval towns and cities were not “open” in the sense of allowing anyone who happened to have money to purchase land within their boundaries. This was, rather, a privilege belonging to those who were free of the town, and it was jealously guarded — not surprisingly, since it was a liberty that had to be purchased from the king in the form of a royal charter. Thus, originally, guilds were simply associations of those who paid the geld and were thus free of the town, and there was not necessarily any connection betweens guilds and some particular form of trade or economic activity. Guilds could be formed of any subset of townsmen who felt that they had a shared set of identities or interests that they wished to be represented in the municipal government and, by extension, to the crown (although they could not, as Richardson asserts without evidence, be formed purely voluntarily or without royal permission; our first attestation of the existence of the Pepperers is precisely a reference to their being fined by the king for incorporating without a license).
Ultimately, then, this was the fundamental basis of the social power of guilds: they controlled access to the rights and liberties appertaining to the freedom of the town. This fact has a great deal of bearing on the internal organization of the guilds and the divisions of rank between “apprentices”, “journeymen”, and “masters” — to which topic we will return shortly. Before we move on, however, it will be necessary to apply this “ontological” analysis of the guild — that the guild is fundamentally an association of those who pay the geld in return for the freedom of the town — to the 14th century dispute between the London weavers and burellers. Once we realize that the guilds were not “fundamentally” organizations created in order to manage industrial or mercantile activities, but came to assume these roles as a derivative consequence of the fact that they were organizations representing the interests of municipal taxpayers, the puzzle about what the “rules” of what guilds could or could not do or what principles governed their activities mostly vanishes. The burellers in 1335 could plead according to two alternative and incompatible principles — that that those engaged in weaving either must or need not be members of the weavers guild — because nobody at the time was actually sure about which of these alternatives was or should be the case. These conflicts were new and contemporaries were still in the process of struggling to work them out.
The first thing to understand in relation to this dispute is that, within the subset of guilds that were directly related to some sort of obvious economic interest, there was a broad division between mercantile and industrial groups. The aforementioned Pepperers, for example, was obviously not an association of craftsmen, since they dealt in a commodity that ultimately came from very far away. Moreover, this division between producers and merchants could and did exist within a single industry: the division between the weavers and burellers was precisely such a division of this type. The 14th century disputes between the various guilds within the cloth industry reveal that the making of cloth was generally understood as being divided into four distinct activities: weaving, fulling, dying, and “making cloth.” Spinning — an activity largely carried out by peasant women in their cottages — lay outside the guild structure entirely and does not seem to have entered into these disputes. The final activity of “making cloth” seems to refer to a variety of finishing processes (napping, shearing, printing, embossing, etc) that, upon conclusion, would result in cloth in its final, salable form. The burellers/drapers were those in charge of this final step in the process and thus differed from the weavers, fullers, in dyers in that they were producers of a final rather than an intermediate good and thus also in charge of marketing the product to consumers. Thus, they straddled the line between industrial and mercantile capital, and — crucially — all of the cash receipts that flowed into the cloth industry would pass through their hands first before flowing to the intermediate branches of the industry. This gave them power over the other guilds, and what emerges from the broad strokes of the history of these disputes is the growing domination of the burellers/drapers over their suppliers lower down on the value added hierarchy.
The story, as it appears to us in the records of the City of London, took nearly 60 years to play out. The first glimmer of it appears in the year 1300, when the fullers complained to the Warden and Sheriffs of London “that whereas it had always been the custom for cloths which had been delivered by fullers and dyers to be fulled, to be fulled by the feet of men of the craft or their servants in their houses within the City, certain men lately using the craft… had sent such cloth to the mills at Stratford to be fulled.” To this, the accused men confessed their fault, and “the said Warden and Sheriffs summoned certain dyers, tailors, burellers, weavers, and fullers, to make provision for better regulating the said craft (officium) of fullers” (Calendar of the Letter Books of the City of London, C.xxxvii). Thus, in 1300, a set of regulations were made in response to the complaint of the fullers that cloths were being taken out of the city to be fulled at Stratford, thus cutting them out of the production hierarchy. These regulations, which can be found in the Liber Custumarum, basically specify two things: 1) cloths were not to be taken out of the city to be fulled, and would be seized at the gates if attempted, 2) masters were not to entice away the journeymen of other masters, or — interestingly — to employ any servant that was in debt to another master (LC p. 129). About ten years later, we see the burellers being sworn in “to examine cloths manufactured contrary to the ordinance made between the Burellers and the Weavers of London” (Calendar, D.cxxiib).
Then, in 1335, tensions between the guilds seem to be heating up. First, we see the burellers petition for and receive a writ of certiorari affirming “the right of Burellers of Candelwykestrete to exercise their craft in the City without becoming members of the Weavers' Guild” (Calendar, E.ccxliii). A little later, both parties are hauled into court and the weavers “plead their charter… that no one in the City or in Suthewerk should meddle with the Weavers' craft unless a member of the Guild, under penalty prescribed, and as the said Burellers acknowledged that their servants meddled with the craft they were acting contrary to the charter.” What happens after this is somewhat curious. First, it seems that the burellers are in a bit of a hurry, because they “produced another writ addressed to the Mayor and Sheriffs, bidding them to continue their inquiry into the dispute that justice might be the sooner done.” Subsequently, the court summoned “the parties for a certain day, on which day the Burellers came, but the Weavers made default” (Calendar, E.ccxlvii).
Many aspects of this story are obscure. Why were the burellers so anxious about the timely resolution of the problem? Presumably they were under some real pressure in a venue other than that of the London court itself. Why, in the event, did the weavers not even appear to plead their case? Perhaps they were intimidated from appearing, or perhaps something had occurred in the meantime to make them feel it a lost cause. The answer to the second question may be unrecoverable, but the answer to the first is probably that the burellers were subject to some kind of action in the court of of the weaver’s guild itself. Again, we must remember that the world of medieval English law was hardly one of unambiguous jurisdiction, and — perhaps surprisingly for those who imagine themselves as “recovering” some sort of pure or original common law — the weaver’s guild itself had a court of its own: “The grant of a gild gave them a private jurisdiction, a soke, a collective lordship over their trade… and if any one of their guild is impleaded elsewhere than in the guild, viz., in a plea of debt, contract, agreement, or small transgression, they ought to claim him from the Court and have him before the Court of their Gild” (Unwin 1904, 44). Presumably, then, the dispute between burellers and weavers was not only a dispute about the rights and prerogatives of guilds, but a dispute about the jurisdiction of competing courts, one of which was the essentially private court of the weavers guild itself.
Thus, we can see quite clearly that, over the course of the 14th century, the group of merchants most directly responsible for marketing cloth — the burellers or drapers — engaged in a struggle for power with those who were most directly concerned with making it: the weavers. This struggle was not structured by any kind of “moral principles” or “ethical relations between people,” but rather by a conflict of material interests in the context of a considerable amount of uncertainty about rights, privileges, and precedents. The drapers at one point denounced a privilege — that of restricting others from a certain line of business — that they later turned around and claimed for themselves. Not only were medieval people not clear about what exactly guilds did or could do, but they were not even totally clear about which courts had jurisdiction to decide the matter. It would thus be a significant mistake to read some kind of coherent, “moral economy framework” backwards onto this history.
8. (Im)moral economies
Now, then, let’s take stock of the major claims that Paul makes about guilds in support of her assertion that there exists, within the “common law tradition,” a “moral economy framework” to be recovered by contemporary policy makers. The first of these claims was that prices in medieval markets were embedded within the framework of a “just price,” and that the “marketing offenses” — forestalling, regrating, engrossing — were defined in relation to their deviance from such a just price. As we saw above, this claim is quite misleading, because the reality was the other way around: the just price itself was defined simply in terms of a market price (i.e. the price quoted by the “wise men” who made the market) that was assumed to obtain in the absence of the external pricing pressure that might be exercised through these illicit sorts of off-market transactions.
Paul’s second major claim is this: “Generally speaking the organization of material production in [the guild] context was looser, more horizontal, and less formalized: there were far fewer distinctions between workers and owners, and crucially, many or most workers (journeymen and apprentices) could usually look forward to becoming owners, such that much (though of course not all) hierarchy was defined by the life-cycle,” (“On Firms,” 10). Here, in other words, she is claiming that labor organization in the guild system was less exploitative because the vast majority of the workers were simply future masters-in-training. This claim has not yet been addressed and we’ll turn to it in a minute.
The third claim: “Many or even most producers would have sold directly to the market rather than through an intermediary collective unit corresponding to the firm, further diminishing the economic significance of an enterprise exemption” (“On Firms,” 10). As we’ve already seen, this claim is false, because it ignores the fact that many guilds were concerned with the production of intermediate rather than final goods, and were therefore selling their products up the value-added hierarchy to other guilds, rather than to the final consumers — often at a price determined by some kind of collective bargaining agreement between the guilds. As in the case of the weavers and burellers, this provided a framework through which guilds most directly concerned with marketing could dominate other guilds lower down the value-added hierarchy. The fantasy of an independent guild master who is both horizontally independent and vertically integrated — a true sole proprietor — is ahistorical.
Fourth claim: “It is uncontroversial that the hierarchical organization of production, in the “putting-out system,” actually somewhat preceded the technological advances associated with factories, which are broadly understood to justify the hierarchical organization of the firm on technical efficiency and integration grounds… The technological change that led to the industrial revolution started and was well underway under the older, supposedly inefficient guild system. The fact that further technological change took place after both coordination rights and flow of incomes at the production level had been consolidated obviously does not show that this legal organization was required for further technological change.” (“On Firms,” 13). This claim has two parts. The first is indeed fairly uncontroversial, and is the one claim Paul makes about guilds that is actually supported by the “rehabilitationist” literature: Epstein and others in this school argue convincingly that guild institutions — especially that of “tramping” or the itineracy of journeyman laborers — were catalysts for technological development and the diffusion of technical skills. The second half of the claim, concerning the consequences of the rise of the firm and the coordination of “flows of income,” deserves more examination, which we will turn to in a moment.
Out of Paul’s four basic claims, then, two have already been addressed: the idea that medieval markets were structured by “customary prices” and that, in the guild system, independent producers sold directly to the market thus avoiding domination by commercial middlemen. Neither of these claims is true, or supported by recent scholarship. Two remain to be examined: first, that the hierarchy of labor organization in the guild system was “defined by the life cycle,” and, second, that there is no obvious connection between the “legal organization” of the firm and technological change.
The first claim is little more than a romantic fantasy, and derives not from recent scholarship but from Werner Sombart (op. cit., 120). The idea that the guild system — and medieval society in general — were harmonious totalities devoid of social conflict was popular among what we might call “reactionary anticapitalists” in the early 20th century, especially in the Germanophone tradition. Modern scholarship, however, paints a very different picture. For one thing, most apprentices seem to have simply ran away (Wallis, op. cit.). For another thing, there does not seem to have been any strictly linear progression through the three ranks of “journeyman, apprentice, master.” That is to say, one did not enter a guild as an apprentice, progress to being a journeyman, and eventually become a master. Journeymen may have been apprentices, or not; the term “journeyman” simply means “day-worker” and referred simply to wage laborers hired by the guild master: “So far as we can judge, it was not necessary for a journeyman to be apprenticed, though in the fifteenth century the rule against employing any but apprenticed men was growing stricter” (Dunlop, 196).
It was neither a rule of the guilds nor a sociological fact about the guild system that either apprentices or journeymen would be necessarily expect to one day be masters. To be a master meant that one had been granted the freedom of the town, by the townsmen. In becoming a master, one acquired social and political power within the town as an owner of property within its walls, and also acquired liberties — including exemption from some forms of taxation — that were quite valuable and jealously guarded by those who already possessed them. Most important, as a freeman of the town, one would necessarily enter into the local credit economy: one would constantly owe, or be owed by, other townsmen. Thus, the town, and by extension the guilds, were intensely concerned to police entry to the freedom and restrict it to those who had proven themselves to have “good credit,” a category that was, for medieval people, not only economic but intensely moral. It is therefore an absurdity to discuss “moral economy” without an eye towards the intense policing of moral character that was a key feature of the social reproduction of medieval credit networks.
To become a master and thereby gain the freedom of the town in a way other than inheritance, one had to earn it — partly by proving one’s competence to work at a certain craft, but also by proving one’s creditworthiness and moral character. In order to complete the progression between apprenticeship and master-status, therefore, one had not only to complete the training but also be in possession of capital: the money funding required not only to set up shop for oneself, but also to meet the demands of the guild itself, such as being required to host a banquet for the assembled guild masters. It was presumably for the purpose of trying to earn these moneys that an former apprentice might “go tramping” as a journeyman on the itinerant labor market (and presumably the motivation for the apprentices of the weavers guild who were, in the early 14th century, moonlighting in the houses of the burellers).
This necessity of proving one’s credit by raising enough capital to go into business as a master was also accompanied, in the apprentice system, by an intense scrutiny of sexual activity, drinking habits, religious scrupulosity, and the like: since the ideological framework of the guild system was that of the patriarchal household as an independent unit of production, apprentices were legally considered to be under the parental discipline of their employer, the master. Once we understand this, it is not at all surprising that the apprentices might prefer to simply run away: they were, in effect, laboring for lower wages than other people doing the same work (the journeymen), in return for the hope of one day — perhaps quite some time away — of surviving the moral scrutiny of the masters and raising enough money to gain the freedom. Apprentices who began to realize that they were laboring for their master in return for the mere hope of something that might never materialize might very understandably decide to abscond in search of greener pastures. (If you think this sounds a bit like graduate school, you’re right; we’ll return to this in a bit).
In sum, it is just not the case that the hierarchy between the different “ranks” in the guild system was “defined by the life cycle.” Rather, masters benefited from hiring from a pool of labor only a fraction of whom might ever occupy their own position: a revolving door of apprentices who might serve some of their indenture before running away, and a pool of journeymen who may or may not have ever been apprenticed and who might remain (and who might perhaps even be content to remain) journeymen. The boundaries between the masters and those they hired were established by the moral economy of their credit system: a barrier that, as we must imagine, many of the apprentices and journeymen found it forbidding or even impossible to hurdle.
Perhaps more importantly, however, it would be a mistake to assume that the masters were equal amongst themselves. While the ideology of the guilds emphasized as its ideal the small workshop organized under the auspices of the pater familias, in reality there existed growing divisions within the ranks of the guild masters themselves between the big and small masters. Essentially, the fortunes of the masters seem to have diverged such that many of the small masters were acting as de facto subcontractors working on credit provided by the big masters. Lis and Soly argue that masters working in export trades could be, as early as the 13th century, divided into three distinct social groups: affluent masters, small masters (who “lacked sufficient capital and credit to market their finished goods themselves”), and proletarianized masters “who might own their own workshop but worked exclusively on commission” (Lis and Soly, 82).
This observation brings us to Paul’s fourth and final claim, regarding the relationship between legal organization of production and technological change. Here, she is indeed at least partly supported by scholarship by and after Epstein, which is fairly centrally interested in rebutting the received notion that guilds somehow “stifled” technological innovation by emphasizing the way that guilds supported the reproduction of high-status, high-skill professions and stimulated the diffusion of technical knowledges. There is, however — and contra Paul — an obvious relationship between the rise of the firm and continuing technological chance, which is that advancing technology tended to come along with larger and larger requirements for the financing of capital assets. The question is less about what makes technological innovation itself possible than about what allows for investment in what technology makes possible. At a certain point, the requirements of financing the fixed capital necessary to enter a line of business might well exceed that which could ever reasonably be acquired by a single individual over the course of their “life cycle.” At that point, the only way to enter into the business would be to work on borrowed machines… and in such a situation the era of the guild would, necessarily, be well and truly over.
“Guild” is derived from “geld” — the physical cash in metallic specie that was levied by Aethelred II and other Saxon kings upon the towns, and in relation to which the towns began to develop their own distinctive forms of governance. The “firm,” by contrast, derives from the “firma” — the signature. The firm, in essence, is nothing but a signature that can be written by more than one person, thereby enabling its “factors” at their “factories” to conjure into being a legally fictitious person capable of owning property and bearing obligations. It is — although this will have to be a topic for another time — a form of organization that grew out of the international houses of merchant bankers rather than the organs of municipal governance. Whether guilds or firms are better at leading to technological innovation, therefore is somewhat beside the point. What matters is that technological innovation leads to firms, by heightening the importance of raising large amounts of capital funding beyond the limits of what could even plausibly be underwritten on the scale of the ideal patriarchal household. The divisions between the big masters and the small ones had always existed; at some point, the conflict within the guilds intensified beyond some breaking point under the pressure of technological change, they snapped.
Finally, I must note that Paul’s reference to E.P. Thompson in employing the language of a “moral economy” is worthy of some scrutiny, and is part of a larger trend within neochartalist adjacent literature. I had intended to address it here, but will leave it to another place for lack of space. To anticipate: when Thompson talked about a “moral economy of the English crowd,” he was talking about riots, and not the benevolence of enlightened lawyers and policy makers. He was discussing, in a word, illegalism. Writers today who appropriate the phrase to refer to their desired normative legislative programs fundamentally miss Thompson’s point: what they are discussing is “political economy,” not a moral one. In their pious claims to moral superiority over other schools of political economy, these writers gloss over the fairly deep problem that a “moral” economy can also be an evil one: the lynch mob is an expression of moral economy, as is the racial/ethnic discrimination of the country club. This is a problem that will have to be explored at another time.
In conclusion, then, I want to offer a final protest about a claim Paul makes not so much about guilds as about ourselves. “The professions today,” she writes, “in a way represent the limited survival of guild-like economic organization, which once obtained throughout manufacture as well. It is… worth considering whether the relatively privileged strata of society, who retain more power to choose or at least influence the economic organization of their work, also tend to choose relatively horizontal organization for themselves, their peers, and those they view as their descendants or successors in social terms” (“On Firms,” 30). The suggestion that the “professions” — by which she means, in large part, academia and the legal profession — should be celebrated on the grounds of their similarity to “the guild system” is, in some ways, the key to unlocking Paul’s ideological investments into the topic.
There is, however, a somewhat more cynical interpretation of this similarity than the one she puts forth. Guilds were, in the first instance, the gatekeepers of the freedom of the town. What they enjoyed was a distinction of status and privilege, and their organizations functioned, centrally, to reproduce that status and privilege. Now, status and privilege are relative, rather than absolute, goods: one has high status because others are low status, and one has privilege because it is not a universal right. What the guilds were protecting and reproducing was a positional good: the capacity for freedoms that others in society did not possess. If everyone had them, they would be worthless. It is much the same with “the professions” today. There is, in fact, perhaps no better analogy to the basic social structure of the guilds to be found in our contemporary society than that of academia: the professors are the masters, who are now enjoying the benefits of their heavy investments of financial, social, and human capital at the top of the hierarchy (although, among the professors themselves, there is still a hierarchy, between those who have the ideas and those who merely cite them, those whose students become professors and those whose students do not). The adjuncts are the journeymen, who may have run away from their apprenticeships with MA or ABD, or who may have finished them but found themselves locked out of the networks of social credit that lead to the professoriate. And then there are the grad students, who work for even less than the journeymen in exchange for the vague promise that they will be the lucky ones.
So, do those who are privileged create guild-like organizations because, being privileged, they have the power to do what they want? Or are they, perhaps, privileged because of the fact that they still have guilds — that they have somehow heroically resisted the rise of the firm and retained their autonomy? Paul seems to suggest one or the other, or a combination of both. But there is a more serious explanation available: guild-like organizations are prevalent in sectors in which labor has a high status and in which, therefore, the boundaries between those with high status and those without it must be intensely policed. It is, of course, of intensely overriding importance — if one wishes to enter “the professions” — that one attend a Good School. And there can only be Good Schools if other schools are Bad. Status is a positional good, a zero sum relation between humans. We would, therefore, do well to pause a moment and consider this before entertaining breathless praise of the past.
What is the lesson of all of this? One is that nobody is checking any of the historiographical citations in anything that the lawyers or economists write, or expects for them to be checked (but we knew that already). It might be protested that it doesn’t matter: that history is something only cared about by cranky nerds, and that it is the legal and economic controversies that really matter. But this raises the question: why make these historical claims at all, and thereby expose oneself to unforced errors, if they don’t really matter and nobody cares about them?
Paul’s work is, like MMT, motivated by an admirable desire to challenge the current state of our political-economic life by means of an intervention into the foundational concepts of the ruling ideology. The problem is that these foundational concepts come with foundational myths, and there is no real way to challenge the concepts without somehow engaging with the myths that come with them. Thus, the challenge to the concept is invariably couched rhetorically in an attack on the myth: the myth of barter or the myth of the guild. Inevitably, however, they end up immediately positing a counter-myth: a story which they insist is the real history supported by the real historians, but which is in reality only slightly better supported than its rival, if at all. They tend, in fact, to ignore recent scholarship altogether and reach back ultimately to early 20th century German writers, who told a different — but no less ahistorical — story than their counterparts in the Anglophone world. That’s an interesting pattern; it’s worth thinking about; and that, I think, is conclusion enough for now.
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