London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE.
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL, AND CO.
LEIPZIG: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN AND CO.
Cambridge Historical Essays. No. V.
THE
INFLUENCE AND DEVELOPMENT
OF
ENGLISH GILDS:
AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE HISTORY OF
THE CRAFT GILDS OF SHREWSBURY.
BY
FRANCIS AIDAN HIBBERT, B.A.,
OF ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE; ASSISTANT MASTER IN DENSTONE COLLEGE.
THIRLWALL DISSERTATION, 1891.
Cambridge:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1891
[All Rights reserved.]
Cambridge:
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
TO
THE REV. D. EDWARDES, M.A.,
HEAD MASTER OF DENSTONE,
IN REMEMBRANCE OF MUCH KINDNESS
AND ENCOURAGEMENT.
I should explain that, in the present Essay, I have restricted myself toassociations which had for their object the regulation of trade. FrithGilds and Religious or Social Gilds have received only passing notice.
The Merchant Gild is too wide a subject to be treated in an Essay such asthis. Moreover the records of the Shrewsbury Merchant Gild are too meagreto afford much information, and I would therefore have gladly passed overthe whole question in silence but that without some notice of it the Essaywould have seemed incomplete.
My attention has thus been concentrated on the Craft Gilds, and on thelater companies which arose out of these.
It is greatly to be regretted that we have no work on Gilds which dealswith the subject from an English point of view, and traces the developmentof these pre-eminently English institutions according to its progress onEnglish soil.
The value of Dr Brentano’s extremely able Essay[Pg viii] is very largelydiminished, for Englishmen, not only because he is continually attemptingto trace undue analogies between the Gilds and Trades Unions, but stillmore because he has failed to appreciate the spirit which animated EnglishMerchants and Craftsmen in their relations with one another, and so hasmissed the line of Gild development in England. If he had not confined hisattention, so far as English Gilds are concerned, solely to the LondonCompanies he could hardly have failed to discover his mistake.
Something has been done to set the facts of the case in a clearer light byDr Cunningham briefly in his Growth of English Industry and Commerce[1].
But it is to be feared that Mr J. R. Green’s History is so deservedlypopular, and Mr George Howell’s Conflicts of Capital and Labour is sootherwise reliable, that views differing from those which these writersset forward—following Dr Brentano as it appears—stand little chance ofbeing generally known.
Great as is the weight which must attach to such important authorities, Ihave endeavoured—by looking at the facts in my materials from anindependent standpoint—to avoid being unduly influenced by theirconclusions, or by a desire to find analogies where none exist.
The materials from which I have worked call for but little description.