A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [30]
Medieval theory intended that the lord or ruler should respond to charges of oppression by investigating and ordering the necessary reform to ensure that taxes fell equally on rich and poor. But this theory corresponded to reality no more than other medieval ideals, and because of this, wrote Philippe de Beaumanoir in 1280–83, “there have been acts of violence because the poor will not suffer this but know not how to obtain their right except by rising and seizing it themselves.” They formed associations, he reported, to refuse to work for “so low a price as formerly but they will raise the price by their own authority” and take “certain pains and punishments” against those who do not join them. This seemed to Beaumanoir a terrible act against the common good, “for the common interest cannot suffer that work should stop.” He advocated that such persons should be arrested and kept long in prison and afterward fined 60 sous each, the traditional fine for rupture of the “public peace.”
The most persistent ferment was among the weavers and cloth-workers of Flanders, where economic expansion had been most intense. The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages, and Flanders was a hothouse of the tensions and antagonisms brewed in urban society by capitalist development.
Once united by a common craft, the guild of masters, journeymen, and apprentices had spread apart into entrepreneurs and hired hands divided by class hatred. The guild was now a corporation run by the employers in which the workers had no voice. The magnates, who married into the nobility and bought country estates in addition to their city real estate, developed into a patrician class that controlled the government of the towns and managed it in their own interest. They founded churches and hospitals, built the great Cloth Halls, paved the streets, and created the canal system. But they made up the greater part of municipal expenses from sales taxes on wine, beer, peat, and grain, which fell most heavily on the poor. They favored each other in governing groups like the Thirty-nine of Ghent, named for life and serving in annual rotation of three parties of thirteen, or the twelve magistrates of Arras, who rotated among themselves every four months, or the oligarchy of the Hundred Peers of Rouen, which appointed the mayor and town councillors each year. The lower bourgeois who made fortunes and pressed upward could frequently penetrate the monopoly, but the artisans, despised as “blue nails” and vulnerable to unemployment, had no political rights.
Beneath the cry of protest much of medieval life was supportive because it was lived collectively in infinite numbers of groups, orders, associations, brotherhoods. Never was man less alone. Even in bedrooms married couples often slept in company with their servants and children. Except for hermits and recluses, privacy was unknown.
As nobles had their orders of chivalry, the common man had the confrérie or brotherhood of his trade or village, which surrounded him at every crux of life. Usually numbering from 20 to 100 members, these groups were associations for charity and social service as well as for entertainment and religious observance in lay life. They accompanied a member to the town gates when he went off on a pilgrimage and marched in his funeral when he died. If a man was condemned to be executed, fellow members accompanied him to the scaffold. If he drowned accidentally as in a case at Bordeaux, they searched the Garonne for three days for his body. If he died insolvent, the association furnished his shroud and the costs of the funeral and helped to support the widow and children. The furriers of Paris paid sick members three sous a week during incapacity for work and three sous for a week of convalescence. The associations’ money came from dues scaled according to income and payable weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
The brotherhoods staged religious plays, furnished the music, and served as actors and stagehands. They held competitions, sports and games, awarded prizes, and invited