Rerum Novarum and the Deep History of Catholic Social Teaching

Many of the older members walking in the procession were reminded of the great demonstrations of two, three decades earlier. In their Sunday best, with the flags and standards of their union confederations, led out by a wind orchestra, the workers walked along the dirt road, between the glittering stream and the hills with the red wooden houses of the villages and the blossoming apple trees.[1]

Peter Weiss wrote about failure. In his The Aesthetics of Resistance, he probed at the history of social change: why, despite the USSR, the German SPD, and the interwar French government, had fascism won out? And, once defeated in its state forms, why did Stalinism endure? Why did Western governments readily absorb their former enemies? Were he alive today, he might still be asking these questions. Why are American rates of unionization half of what they were in 1983? Why, in the face of inflation, price hikes, and a depressed job market do so few seem to care? Why is no one doing anything about it?

In his 1,000-page novel, Weiss pairs these kinds of pessimistic theoretical questions with bittersweet memories of laborers standing up for themselves. They strode forth in dignity, waving banners, playing music, making themselves seen and heard amidst the “red wooden houses of the villages and the blossoming apple trees.” Beauty inheres in the struggle for a better life, for recognition of the fundamental equality and createdness of human beings. Weiss found inspiration in memorializing instances of such beauty. If the call of the medieval itinerant was Brot durch Gott (Bread, for God’s sake), the cry of the secular worker became Brot und Rosen (Bread and roses).

Catholics know this. Or at least we are supposed to. Dignity inheres in every person, and it ought to receive special protection when erased from the abused, exploited, and downtrodden. Concern about the industrially immiserated poor pushed the Church to reckon with the systematic oppression of laboring people. In Rerum Novarum, the founding document of modern Catholic Social Teaching, Pope Leo XIII could not be clearer: “In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class” (§3). And yet, each year brings news of Catholic colleges and universities seeking religious exemptions from the formation of unions. Catholic politicians bash the idea that workers need any protections other than their own two feet. And the American state’s economic policies—backed at least in theory by many Catholic voters—seem poised to make life harder for the average person. What gives?

The answer typically given is that Catholicism long embraced an institution thrown aside by the current of secular modernity, endangering workers, an institution better than the modern, corrupt labor unions of which Pope Leo is so critical. Just this sentiment follows the previous quotation from Rerum Novarum:

For the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition (§3).

The argument goes one of two ways: either we need guilds because they are better than labor unions or the two are essentially the same thing.

The pope was not alone in thinking this way. Similar ideas crop up in the Christian socialism of William Morris, in Dom Bede Jarrett’s Medieval Socialism, and even in the distributism of avowed anti-socialists G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. On this reading, guilds existed as regulatory bodies, guarantors of quality craftsmanship and protectors of the little man from rank exploitation and the deluge of market forces. Unfortunately for everyone from Pope Leo to some writers at The Distributist Review, the scholarship is not on their side. At least not in the way they seem to think.

I propose to dig deep at the roots of Catholic labor history, and, in doing so, I would like to do for our tradition what Weiss tried to do for his own. Weiss’ melancholic remembrance of the radical days of yore, in which beauty and the fight for a better life felt indistinguishable, ought to shame us, who would otherwise shout “beauty will save the world.” We struggle for beauty as we struggle for a better existence, one free of “the widespread destruction of the environment” of which Pope John Paul II spoke, one, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “organized and carried out with full respect for human dignity [. . . that] always serve[s] the common good.” In seeing how deeply this history of aesthetic and pragmatic unity goes back in the Church, it is my hope that we might reclaim some of this vision for the present.

Guilds, Guilds Everywhere

The problem in talking about guilds in medieval Europe is that they did not observe our tidy modern separations—between secular and religious life, professional and personal affairs, and social and individual well-being. When we think of “guilds” we think of so-called “workingmen’s associations,” sometimes of the kind founded in Europe after the promulgation of Rerum Novarum, explicit attempts to wed Catholicism to anti-socialist labor organizing.[2] In reality, the term “guild” can refer to any species of medieval fraternity.[3] There were parish guilds, not unlike modern altar and rosary societies, religious guilds similar to the Knights of Columbus, merchant guilds with their own patron saints, craft guilds of various species, jousting and archery associations for inter-urban sports tournaments, and prestigious social guilds that influenced local government. “Guilds” could thus be anything from a small-town Skull and Bones to a micro-professional organization, like the pinners of post-Black Death York.[4] In fact, many so-called “craft guilds” had their origins in existing religious fraternities. And as we shall see below, many of these organizations combined religious celebrations with organizing opportunities.[5]

This set of distinctions is of immense import. The religious, social, and political spheres did not exist separately in the Middle Ages, certainly not as they do now.[6] While every “craft guild” had a patron saint, not every group with a patron saint regulated or organized workers. These lines must be trodden carefully. We can, however, identify a shared sense of belonging generated by all fraternities, whether for the elite, cross class in orientation, or devoted to a highly specific trade like bladesmithing. In this narrow sense, blanket nostalgia for guilds can be salutary: today we are, as the famous book says, bowling alone. The solidarity generated by membership in these fraternities structured communities and made it possible to work toward goals as groups. Sometimes, this went too far, as with the Norwich Guild of St. George, which effectively merged with the city’s government in the mid-fifteenth century.[7] But their policies did generally attempt to promote peace and stymy unnecessary conflict, as is clear from regulations requiring members to submit to arbitration before bringing their disputes before the courts.[8] In other cases, confraternities acted as forces of horizontal pressure on an otherwise stratified society; they pushed masters, urban patricians, and even aristocrats to feast with paupers, share a space with everyday working people, and acknowledge the fundamental equality of those created in the image and likeness of God. Craft, merchant, and otherwise, then, they were not all bad.

But our concern here is the “crafts.” And, despite their reputation, even these groups devoted to structuring the work of medieval craftsmen did sometimes resist egalitarian impulses. In these cases, especially common in the later medieval period, they served as guarantors of local elite authority against the artisans’ desire for dignified work and a happy life. Thus a clause in a 1467 ordinance of the York girdlers allowed the mayor to “amende correcte and refourme it and every parcell therof at his pleiser,” while a 1515 ordinance from Coventry required an annual review of craft regulations by the mayor, giving him power to change them at will.[9] After the Black Death caused a labor shortage, special courts set up in England worked with craft guilds to prosecute the payment of excessive wages.[10] Authorities similarly used the guilds’ regulations to ensure the maintenance of workday hours despite laborers’ desire to work different lengths depending on the season.[11]

Nostalgia-laden perspectives on craft-guild life tend to ignore the inequities among artisans generated by the system. Many journeymen earned weekly wages, standing around waiting for work in the hope of selection by a particular master like contemporary migrant laborers outside Home Depot praying for a contractor to arrive. In these cases, each week meant renewed insecurity, especially before the Black Death killed enough people to depress the pool of labor and empower workers to bargain more effectively. Many guilds only granted membership to citizens of their city, which could be an expensive process, meaning on average only about half of the male population of a given town might be eligible to join.[12] Still others strictly limited the number of masters, which, while necessary to some extent to protect the scarcity of labor, bred inequity and trapped some journeymen in lives of drudgery.[13] These problems did not afflict rural fraternities in the same way, but these were often parish or other religious guilds, not the craft organizations under consideration here. In other words, craft guilds did not necessarily benefit working people as such (and I use that term purposefully: women could join many guilds, though in some cases only as wives of existing members).[14] The dignity they promoted had limits that pushed back against the principle of solidarity.

Outside of their official setting of standards and other such protections, these organizations often offered charity to indigent members, though the actual scale of the giving belies any idea that they acted anything like today’s workers’ compensation. Most guilds gave surprisingly little to the injured or disabled, and even then, they often imposed strict regulations on who counted for the purposes of charity.[15] Members, of course, were privileged to receive any assistance at all, but the absolute value of such help was low even by the meager standards of our own time.[16]

Still, we ought to admire the solidarity shown both to fellow laborers and to the least of those by medieval confraternities. When we look back at them even in their flawed way, they demonstrate the longstanding Christian commitment to giving to the needy, even if more selectively than would be ideal. Despite their exclusivity, they extended the idea of brotherhood beyond their own affinity—a principled testament that one should give without expectation of receiving, that one should serve the poor as those who most immediately manifest God’s presence.

Pre-modern People Power

If medieval guilds were not rosy workers’ organizations that adeptly set standards, ensured proper training, protected laborers, and fought for their rights, then what can we learn from them? In what way do these groups—in all their imperfections—offer us a model for living the Church’s teachings?

My examples above all come from England because that kingdom developed craft organizations at a relatively late period, in no small part due to the fact that it urbanized somewhat more tardily than the more densely populated parts of Europe like Italy and the Low Countries. More cities meant more and generally stronger guilds. These locales offer us the best examples of craft guilds that fought for their members, that actually worked toward the ends promoted by Popes Leo and Francis and all those in between.

These regions are of special interest because they more closely match the conditions decried by popes in the social encyclicals. Flanders, northern Italy, Brabant, northern France, and various cities along the Rhine hosted large-scale industries by medieval standard, including everything from the famed weaving and fulling of Ypres and Bruges to the metalworking of Lille. My specialty is northern Europe, and I only have so much space, so I will draw my examples from there, though similar points could be made using Italian sources.

While this “Larger Flemish Economic Area”[17] was not industrialized by any modern standard, its close trade linkages formed a dense network of prosperous cities built upon under-compensated and under-represented guild labor. Craft fraternities thus had some degree of power in the region, at least for a time, and demanded more adequate living conditions. Indeed, here the craft guilds seem to have been formed by the petitions of working people, rather than, as was often the case in England, by a top-down desire to regulate labor.[18] They worked in much larger numbers and often in much larger workshops than would be found in other parts of medieval Europe; they relied almost entirely on wage labor, which was not often not true for townspeople of the period. They, in other words, were the closest thing medieval Europe had to nineteenth-century “working men.” And, excepting the Great Flemish Revolt of 1323-1328,[19] they were not revolutionary actors. Even the anti-socialist distributists cannot hope to accuse them of proto-crypto-Marxism. They form the perfect investigative case study for the history of pre-modern Catholic organized labor.

In what ways did they stand up for themselves? Their first steps were often non-violent, which meant submitting petitions to urban governments typically dominated by a patrician merchant class (and, at a later period, the highest echelons of the craft guild infrastructure, that is, what some might call “labor aristocrats”). Least aggressively, they could petition the government for changes, attempting to open negotiations without initially striking, as was the case during the twenty-five-year revolt of Leuven in the mid-late fourteenth century.[20] These petitions, however, could also accompany direct action, as when the crafts of the same city occupied the town hall after the failure of their first attempt at dialogue. In this case, the second petition followed physical movements that implied they meant business; they wanted their demands to be heard and attended to.

Flemish, French, and Brabantian craft organizations developed a whole plethora of such tactics to fight for better working conditions, better representation in urban government, and some control over city finances. A wapeninghe, for example, was a large gathering of guild members on a public square, where they would brandish their banners, showcase images of their patron saint, and generally make their presence known, a kind of implicit threat to those who opposed the betterment of their livelihood.[21] Then there was the uutganc (literally “going out”) which involved a mass movement of workers out of the city, in essence a strike with an added, showier element—leaving the oppressive urban space behind.[22] Combining these two practices, guilds sometimes performed a loop, in which they would rush loudly and angrily through the streets of the town, blessing their actions with patronal banners and other fraternal religious accoutrement.[23] Such strategies could work because the laborers received monetary backing from illegal strike funds, often collected during their fraternities’ religious feasts:

When the city council of Freiburg in 1365 heard the complaint of the craft (Zunft) of master cloth-workers that the journeymen weavers and wool-beaters were maintaining common funds and holding subversive meetings (Einunge) under the cloak of religious fraternities, the journeymen’s answer was candid and plausible enough, and may stand for many others. They said that they had collected money to help the families of poor journeymen and that they were concerned to press for higher wages.[24]

And, of course, when these non-violent means failed, they would revolt.

Lest we think these organizations were only nominally religious, it bears underlining how seriously they took their patron saints and the implicit divine blessing this devotion afforded their efforts. Thus, when guilds merged there were sometimes fights over which patron saint to keep.[25] Patronal feast days meant a shared mass, a grand procession in coordinated outfits—predecessors to Weiss’ wistfully remembered marches—and a meal as a group, coming together in the breaking of bread, hence the French term compagnons. Some guilds started primitive insurance schemes and paid for guaranteed hospital beds for sick members in an effort to perform righteous acts.[26] Sometimes, showing solidarity beyond what we might conceive as their parochial concerns, they even worked together across cities, building early mutual-aid networks and larger-scale “unions.”[27] They began to see themselves as a commun and the gemeente, the common people deserving by God’s grace some say in how they were treated and governed.[28] Their resistance to unfair working conditions cannot be separated from their religious undertakings because, as we explored above, the Middle Ages admitted no such distinction. Why should we?

The Guilds We Have Forgotten

By way of closing, let us return to Rerum Novarum:

When work people have recourse to a strike and become voluntarily idle, it is frequently because the hours of labor are too long, or the work too hard, or because they consider their wages insufficient. The grave inconvenience of this not uncommon occurrence should be obviated by public remedial measures. . . . The laws should forestall and prevent such troubles from arising; they should lend their influence and authority to the removal in good time of the causes which lead to conflicts between employers and employed. (§39)

Here, Pope Leo describes the movement from the uutganc or loop to violent revolt. He saw this process manifest in nineteenth-century capitalism. But was he aware it went all the way back to the Middle Ages, that the guilds about whom he spoke positively acted in the same way? I do not know. But I do know that we seem not to.

There has been neither time nor space here to cover the entirety of the history of Catholic Social Teaching, to show the ways in which it has stressed certain aspects at specific moments while emphasizing others as society changes around the Church.[29] Nor have I been interested in providing every possible example of guilds standing up for working people. There are simply too many to include in this short essay. But that is precisely the point: medieval fraternities are a complicated phenomenon, one not worth romanticizing but rather analyzing with clear sight. Many did not serve the ends of labor, and any such idolization of their processes cannot but work against the purposes of Catholic Social Thought.

Rather, we should recall those who stood up for solidarity, who manifested the principles elucidated by papal encyclicals, who demonstrate clearly and for all time that these principles have pre-modern roots in the Church. These brave guildsmen stood up, banners blowing in the wind. They sipped ale together at their patronal feasts, attended mass with one another, celebrated their victories, and worked side by side, testifying to the unity of beauty and the fight for greater dignity. The Church offers us a treasure trove—let us make use of it.

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