Previous chapter | Next chapter | Socialism: Index | Works | William Morris Archive
THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES
BY about the year 1350 the craft-guilds received all the development possible to them as societies of freemen and equals; and that date may conveniently be accepted as the end of the first part of the Middle Ages.
By this time serfdom generally was beginning to yield to the change introduced by the guilds and free towns: the field serfs partly drifted into the cities and became affiliated to the guilds, and partly became free men, though living on lands whose tenure was unfree. This movement towards the break-up of serfdom is marked by the Peasants’ War in England, led by Wat Tyler and John 86 Ball in Kent, and by John Lister (dyer) in East Anglia, which was the answer of the combined yeomen, emancipated and unemancipated serfs, to the attempt of the nobles to check the movement. But the development of the craftguilds and the flocking of the freed serfs into the towns laid the foundations for another change in industrialism: with the second part of the mediæval period appears the journeyman, or so-called free labourer. Besides the craftsmaster and his apprentices, the workshop now has these “free labourers” in it—unprivileged workmen, that is, who are nevertheless under the domination of the guild, and compelled to affiliation with it. But so completely was the idea of association innate in medieval life that even this first step towards disruption came for a time under the guild-influence: in Germany especially, the guilds of journeymen Were so important as to form a complete network through all central Europe. The journeyman if he presented himself before the guild in any town was