WORKING MEN OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2968, 1 February 1911, Page 82

WORKING MEN OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

[Copyright] The cities of Europe were squalid, plague-stricken, and half desolate; the open country a scene of human degradation. Famine raged over the land, the people were starving serfs, the nobles coarse and fearful tyrants; the baron from his impregnable castle plundered the merchants and swept away the last relics of the wealth of fallen cities; society had sunk into barbarism, and Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries seemed tending to its final decay. Its working men were slaves, and labour was dishonoured. But at the same period the brilliant Arabs had swiftly risen to the very height of civilisation. When they ceased to be conquerors, they became agnation of workingmen, and their united labours were followed by the most wonderful results. New cities" like Corinth and Athens arose i:pon the coasts of Africa and the rivers of Spain. When London and Paris were still collections of wretched hovels, their streets muddy lanes, their palaces strewn with rushes and blackened with smoke, when fever and plague lingered perpetually in their narrow lanes and comfortless homes, Cordova and Bagdad shone with elegant mansions, and the working men of Arabia had surrounded themselves wherever they went with all the conveniences of cultured life. THE MOSLEM CIVILISATION. The. industrious Arabs revived those useful arts which the barbarians of Europe seemed anxious to forget. They wove the richest fabrics of wool, cotton, or silk ; they manufactured cloth of gold and carpets of unequalled splendour; their divans were covered with satin cushions and velvet hangings; and muslins and lac© of fairy -likfe 'texture adorned the Moslem bride. In metals the Arabs were also excellent workmen. They forged huge chains and bars of iron; the steel of Damascus was renowned in the cities of Euroue. Their jewellery was the fairest and "costliest of the age; they lavished gold and silver in decorating their mosques and palaces; and their mints produced a coinage that was the model of the European world. As architects they inverted a strangely graceful style of building in which the fancy of the artist seemed to revel in new creations, and of which the lovely ruins of the Alhambra form a living example, in their private houses they gathered the richest marbles, the costliest mosaics, fountains of dancing waters, and gardens of perpetual beautv. " MOOES AS WORKMEN. The Arab workman was usually temperate almost to austerity. Mohammed had enforced the doctrine of total abstinence with a rigour unsurpassed by the most austere of modern reformers. He de nouiiced temporal and eternal woes against the Mussulman who should touch the accursed wine. He had himself set an example of perfect abstinence, and in their purer age his followers obeyed the precept of their prophet. It was only in the decline of the nation that the Mohammedans learned to imitate the drunkenness and license of the Europeans. Temperate in their diet, frugal in their mode of life, the Arabs possessed sound intellects in sound bodies; they soon began to display an intellectual vigour that raised them to the front of civilisation. The eagerly-sought-for knowledge amidst the ruins of .Grecian literature, and the poets and philosophers of Athens and of Rome were translated for the benefit of the students of Bagdad and Cordova. The colleges and schools of the Arab cities were thronged with attentive scholars when the great nobles of France and England could neither read nor write; they produced eminent poets and graceful writers when Europe had neither a literature nor a language; their libraries numbered thousands of volumes when Oxford possessed only a few imperfect manuscripts chained to the walls, and the poorest merchant of Bagdad lived with far more comfort, and was far better, informed, than the proud knight who came at the head of his barbarous squadrons to die on the burning plains of .Syria in an ineffectual crusade. OUR JEWISH BENEFACTORS. The most important class of our benefactors at this period were the Jews. Despised and rejected of men, driven from city to city, and from land to land, shut up in foul quarters of the mediaeval towns, plundered by ruthless barons, and racked and tortured by infamous kings, the hapless Israelites, in all their cruel wanderings, never lost their frugal habits, their painful industry, their commercial ardour, their probity, and their hope. They settled in almost every land. Wherever the Jew came he either brought capital or created it. He was the moneylender of Europe before the Florentine and Venetian bankers engrossed that gainful trade. He supplied the means with which merchants made their purchaises, nobles supported their lavish establishments, and monarchs waged their destructive wars ; and the usurious interest which he exacted for his loans made him hated and envied by the less prudent Christians. Jewish communities grew up in all the European cities, distinguished from their barbarous neighbours by the regularity of their habits, the nurity of their morals, their learning and scholarship, no less than their commercial thrift; and when the Semitic Saracens had sunk into indolence and decay, their relatives the Semitic Hebrews, continued to impart to Saxons and Franks the higher traits of a higher civilisation. While Greek and Roman, Babylonian and Carthaginian died out from the earth, the chosen people still preservsd their mental and moral vigour. THE DIGNITY" OF LABOUR. Slowly the Europeans followed in the ; path of the Saracens and HebrovV3, and j acknowledged the dignity of labour. Tho '

' working men of the Middle Ages b'igan at ler;gth to make their power felt amidst the decay of the feudal monarchies, buiit their commercial and manufacturing cities under the shadow of frowning caotles and robber strongholds, and beat oil noble plunderers with the arms they had learned to wield as well as to forge in their Republican communities. On a cluster of barren islets in the upper Adriatic arose Venice, the bride of the sea. Her working men, with incessant; toil, laboured for centuries in covering their native sand banks with a display of wealth and splendour such as no other European capital could surpass. They buili. and navigated those advcmurons galleys and pennons soon waved in every part of the East or the North ; that filled the harbour of Alexandria or the canals of Bruges; and whose priceless cargoes again made barbarous Europe familiar with Oriental luxury. Venetian enterprise once more revived the intercourse of nations. THE SPLENDOUR OF VENICE, Its architects had covered the once desolate site with a multitude of palaces and churches, its canals glittered with gilded gondolas, and were spanned by graceful bridges; its warehouses were rilled with the silks and luxuries of the East; its countless factories employed its citizens in profitable labour; its store of gold flowed to the public mint; and every year in the beginning of the fifteenth century 1,000,000 golden ducats were coined for the Venetian Treasury. Venice was particularly famous for its glass manufactures. Its tasteful artisans produced the splendid mirrors that filled the saloons of Euprope with a rich ornament unknown to the ancient world; its goblets and vases were seen on every table. The Venetian factories produced almost every article of luxury or 'use ; in the beginning of the sixteenth century its famous Aldine press sent forth those numerous editions of the classics which even the most practised modern printer cannot surpass ; artists of rare excellence arose, who covered its walls with the most gorgeous of paintings; its citizens lived in an opulence and comfort unknown to London or Paris; and the splendour of their dress and the elegance of their taste awakened the envy and the emulation of the rude nobles of the North. But the achievements of the working men of Venice were surpassed by the democratic population of its sister city, Florence, The banks of the Arno, indeed, must ever be immortal as the birthplace of modern labour. It was here that a busy throng of armourers, clothiers, mechanics, traders, in the thirteenth century threw off the yoke of their feudal tyrants and declared themselves free and independent. A Republic was established, in which all offices were elective, and in which every Florentine had a share. The armourer or the trader was often taken from his foundry or his stall to become one of the magistrates of his native city. The mechanic often outstripped the nobly born in the strife for public honours. The vigorous democracy in which labour was honoured grew rich and powerful in the midst of despotic monarchies and haughty empires. The working men of Venice, corrupted by prosperity, learned to despise the labour that had made them great; the people of Florence lost their freedom, partly by their own imprudence, nartly by the force of circumstances, and all the free cities of Italy fell into the power of feudal tyrants. From the declining Republics of Italy we turn to the next great field of human industry, the Netherlands, or the Low Countries. JThe name properly includes all that flat and once desolate waste of marsh and bog which had grown up in the German Ocean from the gradual deposits of the Rhine. It embraces Flanders, Belgium, Holland, and what has been for many centuries the chosen home of the working man. THE FLEMISH BURGHERS. The rich burghers of Ghent and Bruges learned to look with a kind of pity upon their feudal dukes and theii royal neighbours. It was better to be a clothier of Flanders, honest, self-respecting, and the peer of all his neighbours, than to haunt the court of a perjured and faithless prince like Louis XI The valour and the turbulence of the workmen of Ghent, their fierce democracy, their contempt for lords and kings, their magnificence in living, and their enormous wealth, formed a political problem which few of the statesmen of that age could understand. It is even now quite startling to observe how wide a gulf lay between the trend of thought in the industraial cities of mediaeval Europe and that which prevailed in the feudal capitals. In London a rich merchant was treated little better than a Jew. He was scoffed at by the meanest follower of the Court, plundered by the rapacious King, excluded from the higher ranks of society, and often merited all these indignities by the serf-like subservience with which he cringed to the vile and brutal noble. In Florence or in Ghent the self-respecting mechanic was the peer of counts and barons. In Flanders the wealthy traders controlled the policy of their duke, and surpassed the nobles in splendour. The noble who engaged in trade was degraded and lost his nobility. A still wider difference prevailed in conduct and morals. The working men of industrial cities were remarkable for their 'honesty arid truthfulness. The faith of the great bankers and manufacturers of Florence or Bruges was preserved unsullied. Their promises were relied upon all over Europe, and their drafts and bills of exchange passed current wherever they were known. But the Flemings did not confine themselves to any simple branch of trade. They possessed almost the patent right of every kind of From the commonest utensils to the richest cloth of gold they made everything pay them a tribute. Often the least expensive produced the- largest return. But the most brilliant and beautiful of all the cities of the working men, the richest in costly paintings, and works of art, the most curious in ornate media;val architecture, the most important in its

influence upon the progress of mankind, was Bruges, the Venice of the North. A melancholy charm, the loveliness of decay, still hangs over the silent streets of this once-crowded mart of commerce, where the merchants of every land were accustomed to resort to buv and sell, and whose name was renowned in the Middle Ages as the wealthiest of European cities. PIONEERS OF INVENTION. From the intellectual working men of the Middle Ages have come most of the remarkable inventions of modern times. One of these was printing. To this race we are accustomed to attribute the soread of knowledge, the rise of the Reformation, the discovery of America, the general intercourse of mankind. Yet printing was given to th world by a working man of Germany. It would be impossible to enumerate the varied inventions of the working men of this creative period—the countless refinements that sprang from a happy union of intellect and labour. The looms 01 Flanders produced cloths of unrivalled excellence that were afterward the models of those of England. The foundries and workshops of Liege and Ghent poured forth a profusion of utensils in metal that added to" the domestic comfort of millions. Carpets of Oriental beauty were woven to take the place- of the rushes that once covered the floors of baronial castles. Laces and silks, velvets and satins, once the exclusive workmanship of the Saracen and the Greek, became familiar to the European; and glass and earthenware of singular excellence supplanted the pewter service of an earlier age. A Dutch spec-tacle-maker of Middleburg about 1690, produced the first telescope,., and suggested to Galileo the instrument by which he was enabled to unfold the machinery of the heavens. In all the arte of domestic life, indeed, the working man was the teacher of his barbarous lords. His cities were models of comfort and neatness when those of France and Holland were clusters of wooden hovels. His houses were built of brick or stone, the streets of the cities paved, the apartments provided with chimneys, the city protected from fire when the English towns were desolated by constant conflagrations, and often levelled to the ground .