A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [237]
As the masters became richer, the workers sank to the level of day labor, with little prospect of advancement. Membership in the guilds was shut off to the ordinary journeyman and reserved under complicated requirements and fees for sons and relatives of the master class. In many trades, work was farmed out to workers in their homes, often at lower wages to their wives and children, whose employment was forbidden in the guilds. Obligatory religious holidays, which numbered 120 to 150 a year, kept earnings down. Although forbidden to strike and, in some towns, to assemble, workers formed associations of their own to press for higher wages. They had their own dues and treasuries and connections across frontiers through which jobs and lodgings could be secured for members, and which doubtless served as channels of agitation.
Self-consciousness as a class—the “people”—was growing. Christ was often portrayed as a man of the people and shown in frescoes and carvings surrounded by an artisan’s or peasant’s tools—hammer, knife, ax, and wool-carder’s comb—instead of by the instruments of the Crucifixion. In Florence, the workers called themselves il popolo di Dio. “Viva il popolo!” was the cry of the revolt of the Ciompi in 1378. As the greatest industrial center of the day, Florence was the natural starting place of insurrection.
The Ciompi were the lowest class of workers unaffiliated with any guild, but while the revolt came to be called after them, artisans of all levels and degrees below the major craft guilds were involved in the rising. They worked at fixed wages, often below subsistence level, for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and their wages might be withheld to cover waste or damage to raw materials. The alliance of the Church with the great was plain enough in a bishop’s pastoral letter declaring that spinners could be excommunicated for wasting their wool. Workers could be flogged or imprisoned or suffer removal from the list of employables or have a hand cut off for resistance to employers. Agitators for the right to organize could be hung, and in 1345 ten wool-carders had been put to death on this charge.
In the outbreak of 1378, after a storm of violence throughout the city, the workers rushed up the steps of the Signoria’s palazzo to present their demands. They wanted open access to the guilds, the right to organize their own unions, reform of the system of fines and punishments, and, most significantly, the right “to participate in the government of the City.” In an era without guns or tear gas, mobs inspired immediate terror. Although the city hall was well supplied with means of defense, the Signoria were “frightened men,” and capitulated. The workers installed a new government based on labor’s representation in the guilds. It lasted 41 days before it began to crumble under internal stress and the counter-offensives of the magnates. Reforms gained in the revolt slowly eroded, and by 1382 the major guilds had reasserted their control, if not their confidence. Thereafter the fear of another proletarian outbreak contributed to the decline of republican government and the rise of the Medici as the dominant ruling family.
The weavers of Ghent had greater staying power. At Ypres and Bruges the original revolt had been suppressed by the Count of Flanders with fearful vengeance of burning and hanging. But the Gantois, through sieges, truces, treacheries, and brutal retaliations on both sides, had maintained their war despite blockade and near starvation. Ghent’s struggle was not in fact class war, though it came to be perceived as such. Rather it was a stubborn defense of town autonomy against the Count, crisscrossed by the strife of social and religious factions. It was a complex of rivalries between towns, between trades, and among different levels within a trade. The weavers oppressed the lower-class fullers with as much animus as they directed against the Count.
In France, the King