23. O. Miller and M. Kovalevsky, "In the Mountaineer Communities of Kabardia," in Vestnik Evropy, April, 1884. With the Shakhsevens of the Mugan Steppe, blood feuds always end by marriage between the two hostile sides (Markoff, in appendix to the Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Soc.
xiv. 1, 21).
24. Post, in Afrik. Jurisprudenz, gives a series of facts ill.u.s.trating the conceptions of equity inrooted among the African barbarians. The same may be said of all serious examinations into barbarian common law.
25. See the excellent chapter, "Le droit de La Vieille Irlande," (also "Le Haut Nord") in Etudes de droit international et de droit politique, by Prof. E. Nys, Bruxelles, 1896.
26. Introduction, p. x.x.xv.
27. Das alte Wallis, pp. 343-350.
28. Maynoff, "Sketches of the Judicial Practices of the Mordovians," in the ethnographical Zapiski of the Russian Geographical Society, 1885, pp. 236, 257.
29. Henry Maine, International Law, London, 1888, pp. 11-13. E. Nys, Les origines du droit international, Bruxelles, 1894.
30. A Russian historian, the Kazan Professor Schapoff, who was exiled in 1862 to Siberia, has given a good description of their inst.i.tutions in the Izvestia of the East-Siberian Geographical Society, vol. v. 1874.
31. Sir Henry Maine"s Village Communities, New York, 1876, pp. 193-196.
32. Nazaroff, The North Usuri Territory (Russian), St. Petersburg, 1887, p. 65.
33. Hanoteau et Letourneux, La Kabylie, 3 vols. Paris, 1883.
34. To convoke an "aid" or "bee," some kind of meal must be offered to the community. I am told by a Caucasian friend that in Georgia, when the poor man wants an "aid," he borrows from the rich man a sheep or two to prepare the meal, and the community bring, in addition to their work, so many provisions that he may repay the debt. A similar habit exists with the Mordovians.
35. Hanoteau et Letourneux, La kabylie, ii. 58. The same respect to strangers is the rule with the Mongols. The Mongol who has refused his roof to a stranger pays the full blood-compensation if the stranger has suffered therefrom (Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, iii. 231).
36. N. Khoudadoff, "Notes on the Khevsoures," in Zapiski of the Caucasian Geogr. Society, xiv. 1, Tiflis, 1890, p. 68. They also took the oath of not marrying girls from their own union, thus displaying a remarkable return to the old gentile rules.
37. Dm. Bakradze, "Notes on the Zakataly District," in same Zapiski, xiv. 1, p. 264. The "joint team" is as common among the Lezghines as it is among the Ossetes.
38. See Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, Oldenburg, 1887. Munzinger, Ueber das Recht und Sitten der Bogos, Winterthur 1859; Casalis, Les Ba.s.soutos, Paris, 1859; Maclean, Kafir Laws and Customs, Mount c.o.ke, 1858, etc.
39. Waitz, iii. 423 seq.
40. Post"s Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Familien Rechts Oldenburg, 1889, pp. 270 seq.
41. Powell, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, Washington, 1881, quoted in Post"s Studien, p. 290; Bastian"s Inselgruppen in Oceanien, 1883, p. 88.
42. De Stuers, quoted by Waitz, v. 141.
CHAPTER V
MUTUAL AID IN THE MEDIAEVAL CITY
Growth of authority in Barbarian Society. Serfdom in the villages.
Revolt of fortified towns: their liberation; their charts. The guild.
Double origin of the free medieval city. Self-jurisdiction, self-administration. Honourable position of labour. Trade by the guild and by the city.
Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle--the village community--was called into existence by the social genius of man. This inst.i.tution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social inst.i.tutions and to pa.s.s through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social inst.i.tutions, several of which have survived down to the present time.
We have now to follow the further developments of the same ever-living tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable wants of the ma.s.ses in the middle ages, and especially in the medieval guilds and the medieval city.
Far from being the fighting animals they have often been compared to, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era (like so many Mongolians, Africans, Arabs, and so on, who still continue in the same barbarian stage) invariably preferred peace to war. With the exception of a few tribes which had been driven during the great migrations into unproductive deserts or highlands, and were thus compelled periodically to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours--apart from these, the great bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and so on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered abodes, reverted to the spade or to their herds. The earliest barbarian codes already represent to us societies composed of peaceful agricultural communities, not hordes of men at war with each other. These barbarians covered the country with villages and farmhouses;(1) they cleared the forests, bridged the torrents, and colonized the formerly quite uninhabited wilderness; and they left the uncertain warlike pursuits to brotherhoods, scholae, or "trusts" of unruly men, gathered round temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their adventurous spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare for the protection of populations, only too anxious to be left in peace. The warrior bands came and went, prosecuting their family feuds; but the great ma.s.s continued to till the soil, taking but little notice of their would-be rulers, so long as they did not interfere with the independence of their village communities.(2) The new occupiers of Europe evolved the systems of land tenure and soil culture which are still in force with hundreds of millions of men; they worked out their systems of compensation for wrongs, instead of the old tribal blood-revenge; they learned the first rudiments of industry; and while they fortified their villages with palisaded walls, or erected towers and earthen forts whereto to repair in case of a new invasion, they soon abandoned the task of defending these towers and forts to those who made of war a speciality.
The very peacefulness of the barbarians, certainly not their supposed warlike instincts, thus became the source of their subsequent subjection to the military chieftains. It is evident that the very mode of life of the armed brotherhoods offered them more facilities for enrichment than the tillers of the soil could find in their agricultural communities.
Even now we see that armed men occasionally come together to shoot down Matabeles and to rob them of their droves of cattle, though the Matabeles only want peace and are ready to buy it at a high price. The scholae of old certainly were not more scrupulous than the scholae of our own time. Droves of cattle, iron (which was extremely costly at that time(3)), and slaves were appropriated in this way; and although most acquisitions were wasted on the spot in those glorious feasts of which epic poetry has so much to say--still some part of the robbed riches was used for further enrichment. There was plenty of waste land, and no lack of men ready to till it, if only they could obtain the necessary cattle and implements. Whole villages, ruined by murrains, pests, fires, or raids of new immigrants, were often abandoned by their inhabitants, who went anywhere in search of new abodes. They still do so in Russia in similar circ.u.mstances. And if one of the hirdmen of the armed brotherhoods offered the peasants some cattle for a fresh start, some iron to make a plough, if not the plough itself, his protection from further raids, and a number of years free from all obligations, before they should begin to repay the contracted debt, they settled upon the land. And when, after a hard fight with bad crops, inundations and pestilences, those pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into servile obligations towards the protector of the territory. Wealth undoubtedly did acc.u.mulate in this way, and power always follows wealth.(4) And yet, the more we penetrate into the life of those times, the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, the more we see that another element, besides wealth and military force, was required to const.i.tute the authority of the few. It was an element of law and tight, a desire of the ma.s.ses to maintain peace, and to establish what they considered to be justice, which gave to the chieftains of the scholae--kings, dukes, knyazes, and the like--the force they acquired two or three hundred years later. That same idea of justice, conceived as an adequate revenge for the wrong done, which had grown in the tribal stage, now pa.s.sed as a red thread through the history of subsequent inst.i.tutions, and, much more even than military or economic causes, it became the basis upon which the authority of the kings and the feudal lords was founded.
In fact, one of the chief preoccupations of the barbarian village community always was, as it still is with our barbarian contemporaries, to put a speedy end to the feuds which arose from the then current conception of justice. When a quarrel took place, the community at once interfered, and after the folkmote had heard the case, it settled the amount of composition (wergeld) to be paid to the wronged person, or to his family, as well as the fred, or fine for breach of peace, which had to be paid to the community. Interior quarrels were easily appeased in this way. But when feuds broke out between two different tribes, or two confederations of tribes, notwithstanding all measures taken to prevent them,(5) the difficulty was to find an arbiter or sentence-finder whose decision should be accepted by both parties alike, both for his impartiality and for his knowledge of the oldest law. The difficulty was the greater as the customary laws of different tribes and confederations were at variance as to the compensation due in different cases. It therefore became habitual to take the sentence-finder from among such families, or such tribes, as were reputed for keeping the law of old in its purity; of being versed in the songs, triads, sagas, etc., by means of which law was perpetuated in memory; and to retain law in this way became a sort of art, a "mystery," carefully transmitted in certain families from generation to generation. Thus in Iceland, and in other Scandinavian lands, at every A11thing, or national folkmote, a lovsogmathr used to recite the whole law from memory for the enlightening of the a.s.sembly; and in Ireland there was, as is known, a special cla.s.s of men reputed for the knowledge of the old traditions, and therefore enjoying a great authority as judges.(6) Again, when we are told by the Russian annals that some stems of North-West Russia, moved by the growing disorder which resulted from "clans rising against clans," appealed to Norman varingiar to be their judges and commanders of warrior scholae; and when we see the knyazes, or dukes, elected for the next two hundred years always from the same Norman family, we cannot but recognize that the Slavonians trusted to the Normans for a better knowledge of the law which would be equally recognized as good by different Slavonian kins. In this case the possession of runes, used for the transmission of old customs, was a decided advantage in favour of the Normans; but in other cases there are faint indications that the "eldest" branch of the stem, the supposed motherbranch, was appealed to to supply the judges, and its decisions were relied upon as just;(7) while at a later epoch we see a distinct tendency towards taking the sentence-finders from the Christian clergy, which, at that time, kept still to the fundamental, now forgotten, principle of Christianity, that retaliation is no act of justice. At that time the Christian clergy opened the churches as places of asylum for those who fled from blood revenge, and they willingly acted as arbiters in criminal cases, always opposing the old tribal principle of life for life and wound for wound.
In short, the deeper we penetrate into the history of early inst.i.tutions, the less we find grounds for the military theory of origin of authority. Even that power which later on became such a source of oppression seems, on the contrary, to have found its origin in the peaceful inclinations of the ma.s.ses.
In all these cases the fred, which often amounted to half the compensation, went to the folkmote, and from times immemorial it used to be applied to works of common utility and defence. It has still the same destination (the erection of towers) among the Kabyles and certain Mongolian stems; and we have direct evidence that even several centuries later the judicial fines, in Pskov and several French and German cities, continued to be used for the repair of the city walls.(8) It was thus quite natural that the fines should be handed over to the sentence-finder, who was bound, in return, both to maintain the schola of armed men to whom the defence of the territory was trusted, and to execute the sentences. This became a universal custom in the eighth and ninth centuries, even when the sentence-finder was an elected bishop.
The germ of a combination of what we should now call the judicial power and the executive thus made its appearance. But to these two functions the attributions of the duke or king were strictly limited. He was no ruler of the people--the supreme power still belonging to the folkmote--not even a commander of the popular militia; when the folk took to arms, it marched under a separate, also elected, commander, who was not a subordinate, but an equal to the king.(9) The king was a lord on his personal domain only. In fact, in barbarian language, the word konung, koning, or cyning synonymous with the Latin rex, had no other meaning than that of a temporary leader or chieftain of a band of men.
The commander of a flotilla of boats, or even of a single pirate boat, was also a konung, and till the present day the commander of fishing in Norway is named Not-kong--"the king of the nets."(10) The veneration attached later on to the personality of a king did not yet exist, and while treason to the kin was punished by death, the slaying of a king could be recouped by the payment of compensation: a king simply was valued so much more than a freeman.(11) And when King Knu (or Canute) had killed one man of his own schola, the saga represents him convoking his comrades to a thing where he stood on his knees imploring pardon. He was pardoned, but not till he had agreed to pay nine times the regular composition, of which one-third went to himself for the loss of one of his men, one-third to the relatives of the slain man, and one-third (the fred) to the schola.(12) In reality, a complete change had to be accomplished in the current conceptions, under the double influence of the Church and the students of Roman law, before an idea of sanct.i.ty began to be attached to the personality of the king.
However, it lies beyond the scope of these essays to follow the gradual development of authority out of the elements just indicated. Historians, such as Mr. and Mrs. Green for this country, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and Luchaire for France, Kaufmann, Janssen, W. Arnold, and even Nitzsch, for Germany, Leo and Botta for Italy, Byelaeff, Kostomaroff, and their followers for Russia, and many others, have fully told that tale. They have shown how populations, once free, and simply agreeing "to feed" a certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the serfs of these protectors; how "commendation" to the Church, or to a lord, became a hard necessity for the freeman; how each lord"s and bishop"s castle became a robber"s nest--how feudalism was imposed, in a word--and how the crusades, by freeing the serfs who wore the cross, gave the first impulse to popular emanc.i.p.ation. All this need not be retold in this place, our chief aim being to follow the constructive genius of the ma.s.ses in their mutual-aid inst.i.tutions.
At a time when the last vestiges of barbarian freedom seemed to disappear, and Europe, fallen under the dominion of thousands of petty rulers, was marching towards the const.i.tution of such theocracies and despotic States as had followed the barbarian stage during the previous starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord"s castle, defied it first, attacked it next, and finally destroyed it. The movement spread from spot to spot, involving every town on the surface of Europe, and in less than a hundred years free cities had been called into existence on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, down to the fjords of Scandinavia; at the feet of the Apennines, the Alps, the Black Forest, the Grampians, and the Carpathians; in the plains of Russia, Hungary, France and Spain.
Everywhere the same revolt took place, with the same features, pa.s.sing through the same phases, leading to the same results. Wherever men had found, or expected to find, some protection behind their town walls, they inst.i.tuted their "co-jurations," their "fraternities," their "friendships," united in one common idea, and boldly marching towards a new life of mutual support and liberty. And they succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe.
They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, expressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is only a further development. And when we now look to the forces which have produced these grand results, we find them--not in the genius of individual heroes, not in the mighty organization of huge States or the political capacities of their rulers, but in the very same current of mutual aid and support which we saw at work in the village community, and which was vivified and reinforced in the Middle Ages by a new form of unions, inspired by the very same spirit but shaped on a new model--the guilds.
It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a dissolution of the village community. Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities: the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction.
In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked him--which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him? And, in the first case, they handed him the flowers and accepted him; while in the second case they fought him.(13) Now, they accepted the king"s or the lord"s official whom they could not refuse; but they maintained the folkmote"s jurisdiction, and themselves nominated six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord"s judge, in the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders. In most cases the official had nothing left to him but to confirm the sentence and to levy the customary fred. This precious right of self-jurisdiction, which, at that time, meant self-administration and self-legislation, had been maintained through all the struggles; and even the lawyers by whom Karl the Great was surrounded could not abolish it; they were bound to confirm it. At the same time, in all matters concerning the community"s domain, the folkmote retained its supremacy and (as shown by Maurer) often claimed submission from the lord himself in land tenure matters. No growth of feudalism could break this resistance; the village community kept its ground; and when, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the invasions of the Normans, the Arabs, and the Ugrians had demonstrated that military scholae were of little value for protecting the land, a general movement began all over Europe for fortifying the villages with stone walls and citadels. Thousands of fortified centres were then built by the energies of the village communities; and, once they had built their walls, once a common interest had been created in this new sanctuary--the town walls--they soon understood that they could henceforward resist the encroachments of the inner enemies, the lords, as well as the invasions of foreigners. A new life of freedom began to develop within the fortified enclosures.
The medieval city was born.(14)
No period of history could better ill.u.s.trate the constructive powers of the popular ma.s.ses than the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the fortified villages and market-places, representing so many "oases amidst the feudal forest," began to free themselves from their lord"s yoke, and slowly elaborated the future city organization; but, unhappily, this is a period about which historical information is especially scarce: we know the results, but little has reached us about the means by which they were achieved. Under the protection of their walls the cities"
folkmotes--either quite independent, or led by the chief n.o.ble or merchant families--conquered and maintained the right of electing the military defensor and supreme judge of the town, or at least of choosing between those who pretended to occupy this position. In Italy the young communes were continually sending away their defensors or domini, fighting those who refused to go. The same went on in the East. In Bohemia, rich and poor alike (Bohemicae gentis magni et parvi, n.o.biles et ign.o.biles) took part in the election;(15) while, the vyeches (folkmotes) of the Russian cities regularly elected their dukes--always from the same Rurik family--covenanted with them, and sent the knyaz away if he had provoked discontent.(16) At the same time in most cities of Western and Southern Europe, the tendency was to take for defensor a bishop whom the city had elected itself; and so many bishops took the lead in protecting the "immunities" of the towns and in defending their liberties, that numbers of them were considered, after their death, as saints and special patrons of different cities. St. Uthelred of Winchester, St. Ulrik of Augsburg, St. Wolfgang of Ratisbon, St.
Heribert of Cologne, St. Adalbert of Prague, and so on, as well as many abbots and monks, became so many cities" saints for having acted in defence of popular rights.(17) And under the new defensors, whether laic or clerical, the citizens conquered full self-jurisdiction and self-administration for their folkmotes.(18)
The whole process of liberation progressed by a series of imperceptible acts of devotion to the common cause, accomplished by men who came out of the ma.s.ses--by unknown heroes whose very names have not been preserved by history. The wonderful movement of the G.o.d"s peace (treuga Dei) by which the popular ma.s.ses endeavoured to put a limit to the endless family feuds of the n.o.ble families, was born in the young towns, the bishops and the citizens trying to extend to the n.o.bles the peace they had established within their town walls.(19) Already at that period, the commercial cities of Italy, and especially Amalfi (which had its elected consuls since 844, and frequently changed its doges in the tenth century)(20) worked out the customary maritime and commercial law which later on became a model for all Europe; Ravenna elaborated its craft organization, and Milan, which had made its first revolution in 980, became a great centre of commerce, its trades enjoying a full independence since the eleventh century.(21) So also Brugge and Ghent; so also several cities of France in which the Mahl or forum had become a quite independent inst.i.tution.(22) And already during that period began the work of artistic decoration of the towns by works of architecture, which we still admire and which loudly testify of the intellectual movement of the times. "The basilicae were then renewed in almost all the universe," Raoul Glaber wrote in his chronicle, and some of the finest monuments of medieval architecture date from that period: the wonderful old church of Bremen was built in the ninth century, Saint Marc of Venice was finished in 1071, and the beautiful dome of Pisa in 1063. In fact, the intellectual movement which has been described as the Twelfth Century Renaissance(23) and the Twelfth Century Rationalism--the precursor of the Reform(24) date from that period, when most cities were still simple agglomerations of small village communities enclosed by walls.
However, another element, besides the village-community principle, was required to give to these growing centres of liberty and enlightenment the unity of thought and action, and the powers of initiative, which made their force in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With the growing diversity of occupations, crafts and arts, and with the growing commerce in distant lands, some new form of union was required, and this necessary new element was supplied by the guilds. Volumes and volumes have been written about these unions which, under the name of guilds, brotherhoods, friendships and druzhestva, minne, artels in Russia, esnaifs in Servia and Turkey, amkari in Georgia, and so on, took such a formidable development in medieval times and played such an important part in the emanc.i.p.ation of the cities. But it took historians more than sixty years before the universality of this inst.i.tution and its true characters were understood. Only now, when hundreds of guild statutes have been published and studied, and their relationship to the Roman collegiae, and the earlier unions in Greece and in India,(25) is known, can we maintain with full confidence that these brotherhoods were but a further development of the same principles which we saw at work in the gens and the village community.
Nothing ill.u.s.trates better these medieval brother hoods than those temporary guilds which were formed on board ships. When a ship of the Hansa had accomplished her first half-day pa.s.sage after having left the port, the captain (Schiffer) gathered all crew and pa.s.sengers on the deck, and held the following language, as reported by a contemporary:--
""As we are now at the mercy of G.o.d and the waves," he said, "each one must be equal to each other. And as we are surrounded by storms, high waves, pirates and other dangers, we must keep a strict order that we may bring our voyage to a good end. That is why we shall p.r.o.nounce the prayer for a good wind and good success, and, according to marine law, we shall name the occupiers of the judges" seats (Schoffenstellen)."
Thereupon the crew elected a Vogt and four scabini, to act as their judges. At the end of the voyage the Vogt and the scabini abdicated their functions and addressed the crew as follows:--"What has happened on board ship, we must pardon to each other and consider as dead (todt und ab sein la.s.sen). What we have judged right, was for the sake of justice. This is why we beg you all, in the name of honest justice, to forget all the animosity one may nourish against another, and to swear on bread and salt that he will not think of it in a bad spirit. If any one, however, considers himself wronged, he must appeal to the land Vogt and ask justice from him before sunset." On landing, the Stock with the fredfines was handed over to the Vogt of the sea-port for distribution among the poor."(26)
This simple narrative, perhaps better than anything else, depicts the spirit of the medieval guilds. Like organizations came into existence wherever a group of men--fishermen, hunters, travelling merchants, builders, or settled craftsmen--came together for a common pursuit.
Thus, there was on board ship the naval authority of the captain; but, for the very success of the common enterprise, all men on board, rich and poor, masters and crew, captain and sailors, agreed to be equals in their mutual relations, to be simply men, bound to aid each other and to settle their possible disputes before judges elected by all of them. So also when a number of craftsmen--masons, carpenters, stone-cutters, etc.--came together for building, say, a cathedral, they all belonged to a city which had its political organization, and each of them belonged moreover to his own craft; but they were united besides by their common enterprise, which they knew better than any one else, and they joined into a body united by closer, although temporary, bonds; they founded the guild for the building of the cathedral.(27) We may see the same till now in the Kabylian. cof:(28) the Kabyles have their village community; but this union is not sufficient for all political, commercial, and personal needs of union, and the closer brotherhood of the cof is const.i.tuted.
As to the social characters of the medieval guild, any guild-statute may ill.u.s.trate them. Taking, for instance, the skraa of some early Danish guild, we read in it, first, a statement of the general brotherly feelings which must reign in the guild; next come the regulations relative to self-jurisdiction in cases of quarrels arising between two brothers, or a brother and a stranger; and then, the social duties of the brethren are enumerated. If a brother"s house is burned, or he has lost his ship, or has suffered on a pilgrim"s voyage, all the brethren must come to his aid. If a brother falls dangerously ill, two brethren must keep watch by his bed till he is out of danger, and if he dies, the brethren must bury him--a great affair in those times of pestilences--and follow him to the church and the grave. After his death they must provide for his children, if necessary; very often the widow becomes a sister to the guild.(29)
These two leading features appeared in every brotherhood formed for any possible purpose. In each case the members treated each other as, and named each other, brother and sister;(30) all were equals before the guild. They owned some "chattel" (cattle, land, buildings, places of worship, or "stock") in common. All brothers took the oath of abandoning all feuds of old; and, without imposing upon each other the obligation of never quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should degenerate into a feud, or into a law-suit before another court than the tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was involved in a quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed to support him for bad and for good; that is, whether he was unjustly accused of aggression, or really was the aggressor, they had to support him, and to bring things to a peaceful end. So long as his was not a secret aggression--in which case he would have been treated as an outlaw--the brotherhood stood by him.(31) If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge the offence at once by a new aggression, the brother-hood supplied him with a horse to run away, or with a boat, a pair of oars, a knife and a steel for striking light; if he remained in town, twelve brothers accompanied him to protect him; and in the meantime they arranged the composition.
They went to court to support by oath the truthfulness of his statements, and if he was found guilty they did not let him go to full ruin and become a slave through not paying the due compensation: they all paid it, just as the gens did in olden times. Only when a brother had broken the faith towards his guild-brethren, or other people, he was excluded from the brotherhood "with a Nothing"s name" (tha scal han maeles af brodrescap met nidings nafn).(32)
Such were the leading ideas of those brotherhoods which gradually covered the whole of medieval life. In fact, we know of guilds among all possible professions: guilds of serfs,(33) guilds of freemen, and guilds of both serfs and freemen; guilds called into life for the special purpose of hunting, fishing, or a trading expedition, and dissolved when the special purpose had been achieved; and guilds lasting for centuries in a given craft or trade. And, in proportion as life took an always greater variety of pursuits, the variety in the guilds grew in proportion. So we see not only merchants, craftsmen, hunters, and peasants united in guilds; we also see guilds of priests, painters, teachers of primary schools and universities, guilds for performing the pa.s.sion play, for building a church, for developing the "mystery" of a given school of art or craft, or for a special recreation--even guilds among beggars, executioners, and lost women, all organized on the same double principle of self-jurisdiction and mutual support.(34) For Russia we have positive evidence showing that the very "making of Russia" was as much the work of its hunters", fishermen"s, and traders" artels as of the budding village communities, and up to the present day the country is covered with artels.(35)