Note 31 — Chapter I

Jupp’s History of the Carpenters’ Company, p. 313, second edition, 1848. In certain cases we see the workmen seeking incorporation as a gild or company, in order that they might themselves lawfully regulate their trades. Thus, in 1670 the wage-earning woodsawyers of the City of London, who were employed by the members of the Carpenters’, Joiners’ and Shipwrights’ Companies, formally applied to the Corporation to be made a Company. Their employers strongly objected, alleging that they had already by combination raised their wages during the past quarter of a century from 5s. to nearly 10s. per load; that they were only day labourers who worked on material provided by their employers, and consequently not entitled to rank as masters; and that if their combination were recognised by incorporation they would be able to bring the whole building trade to a standstill, as experience had already demonstrated even without incorporation. Moreover, their main object, it was alleged, was to exclude from employment “all that sort of labourers who daily resort to the City of London and parts adjacent, and by that means keep the wages and prices of these sorts of labourers at an equal and indifferent rate; and then success would be an evil precedent, all other labourers, the masons, bricklayers, plasterers, etc., having the same reason to allege for incorporation” (Ibid. p. 307). The London coal-porters in 1699 unsuccessfully petitioned the House of Commons that a Bill might be passed to establish them as “a Fellowship in such government and rules as shall be thought meet” (House of Commons Journals, vol. xiii. p. 69). Professor Unwin suggests that it was “by its failure along these traditional lines” that “the wage-earning class was driven into secret combinations, from the obscurity of which the Trade Union did not emerge till the 19th century” (Industrial Organisation in the 16th and 17th Centuries, 1904).