Mutual Aid Peter Kropotkin (ebook reader 7 inch TXT) 📖

id="noteref-182" epub:type="noteref">182 We may see the same till now in the Kabylian çof:183 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 çof is constituted.

As to the social characters of the medieval guild, any guild-statute may illustrate 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.184

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;185 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 lawsuit 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.186 If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge the offence at once by a new aggression, the brotherhood 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 brödrescap met nidings nafn).187

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,188 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 passion 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.189 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’ artéls as of the budding village communities, and up to the present day the country is covered with artéls.190

These few remarks show how incorrect was the view taken by some early explorers of the guilds when they wanted to see the essence of the institution in its yearly festival. In reality, the day of the common meal was always the day, or the morrow of the day, of election of aldermen, of discussion of alterations in the statutes, and very often the day of judgment of quarrels that had risen among the brethren,191 or of renewed allegiance to the guild. The common meal, like the festival at the old tribal folkmote⁠—the mahl or malum⁠—or the Buryat aba, or the parish feast and the harvest supper, was simply an affirmation of brotherhood. It symbolized the times when everything was kept in common by the clan. This day, at least, all belonged to all; all sat at the same table and partook of the same meal. Even at a much later time the inmate of the almshouse of a London guild sat this day by the side of the rich alderman. As to the distinction which several explorers have tried to establish between the old Saxon “frith guild” and the so-called “social” or “religious” guilds⁠—all were frith guilds in the sense above mentioned,192 and all were religious in the sense in which a village community or a city placed