Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

even friends and vassals, and of course his widow. It required a strong reaction against this custom on behalf of the moralists to put an end to it. With the gipsies in England the custom of destroying all chattels on the grave has survived up to the present day. All the personal property of the gipsy queen who died a few years ago was destroyed on her grave. Several newspapers mentioned it at that time. IX The “Undivided Family”

A number of valuable works on the South Slavonian Zadruga, or “compound family,” compared to other forms of family organization, have been published since the above was written; namely, by Ernest Miler (Jahrbuch der Internationaler Vereinung für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft und Volkswirthschaftslehre, 1897), and I. E. Geszow’s Zadruga in Bulgaria, and Zadruga-Ownership and Work in Bulgaria (both in Bulgarian). I must also mention the well-known study of Bogisic (De la forme dite ‘inokosna’ de la famille rurale chez les Serbes et les Croates, Paris, 1884), which has been omitted in the text.

X The Origin of the Guilds

The origin of the guilds has been the subject of many controversies. There is not the slightest doubt that craft-guilds, or “colleges” of artisans, existed in ancient Rome. It appears, indeed, from a passage in Plutarch that Numa legislated about them. “He divided the people,” we are told, “into trades⁠ ⁠… ordering them to have brotherhoods, festivals, and meetings, and indicating the worship they had to accomplish before the gods, according to the dignity of each trade.” It is almost certain, however, that it was not the Roman king who invented, or instituted, the trade-colleges⁠—they had already existed in ancient Greece; in all probability, he simply submitted them to royal legislation, just as Philippe le Bel, fifteen centuries later, submitted the trades of France, much to their detriment, to royal supervision and legislation. One of the successors of Numa, Servius Tullius, also is said to have issued some legislation concerning the colleges.319

Consequently, it was quite natural that historians should ask themselves whether the guilds which took such a development in the twelfth, and even the tenth and the eleventh centuries, were not revivals of the old Roman “colleges”⁠—the more so as the latter, as seen from the above quotation, quite corresponded to the medieval guild.320 It is known, indeed, that corporations of the Roman type existed in Southern Gaul down to the fifth century. Besides, an inscription found during some excavations in Paris shows that a corporation of Lutetia nautae existed under Tiberius; and in the chart given to the Paris “water-merchants” in 1170, their rights are spoken of as existing ab antiquo (same author, p. 51). There would have been, therefore, nothing extraordinary, had corporations been maintained in early medieval France after the barbarian invasions.

However, even if as much must be granted, there is no reason to maintain that the Dutch corporations, the Norman guilds, the Russian artéls, the Georgian amkari, and so on, necessarily have had also a Roman, or even a Byzantine origin. Of course, the intercourse between the Normans and the capital of the East-Roman Empire was very active, and the Slavonians (as has been proved by Russian historians, and especially by Rambaud) took a lively part in that intercourse. So, the Normans and the Russians may have imported the Roman organization of trade-corporations into their respective lands. But when we see that the artél was the very essence of the everyday life of all the Russians, as early as the tenth century, and that this artél, although no sort of legislation has ever regulated its life till modern times, has the very same features as the Roman college and the Western guild, we are still more inclined to consider the eastern guild as having an even more ancient origin than the Roman college. Romans knew well, indeed, that their sodalitia and collegia were “what the Greeks called hetairiai” (Martin-Saint-Léon, p. 2), and from what we know of the history of the East, we may conclude, with little probability of being mistaken, that the great nations of the East, as well as Egypt, also have had the same guild organization. The essential features of this organization remain the same wherever we may find them. It is a union of men carrying on the same profession or trade. This union, like the primitive clan, has its own gods and its own worship, always containing some mysteries, specific to each separate union; it considers all its members as brothers and sisters⁠—possibly (at its beginnings) with all the consequences which such a relationship implied in the gens, or, at least, with ceremonies that indicated or symbolized the clan relations between brother and sister; and finally, all the obligations of mutual support which existed in the clan, exist in this union; namely, the exclusion of the very possibility of a murder within the brotherhood, the clan responsibility before justice, and the obligation, in case of a minor dispute, of bringing the matter before the judges, or rather the arbiters, of the guild brotherhood. The guild⁠—one may say⁠—is thus modelled upon the clan.

Consequently, the same remarks which are made in the text concerning the origin of the village community, apply, I am inclined to think, equally to the guild, the artél, and the craft- or neighbour-brotherhood. When the bonds which formerly connected men in their clans were loosened in consequence of migrations, the appearance of the paternal family, and a growing diversity of occupations⁠—a new territorial bond was worked out by mankind in the shape of the village community; and another bond⁠—an occupation bond⁠—was worked out in an imaginary brotherhood⁠—the imaginary clan, which was represented: between two men, or a few men, by the “mixture-of-blood brotherhood” (the Slavonian pobratimstvo), and between a greater