Now the guild, in so far as it was a combination of a trade in a town, was a perfectly lawful thing; in so far as it bore upon the right of a man to be a freeman, it was a perfectly lawful thing; it was only from the other end, from this statute I read as to combinations, that two or three centuries later they got the notion that a trades-union was an unlawful thing; so you may say that a trades-union in England has a lawful root and an unlawful root, and it is rather important to see from which each class springs.  The first case in which the modern strike was considered was a case known as the Journeymen Tailors’ case, which happened more than two hundred years ago; and in that case it was definitely held to be an unlawful combination, while the first case on the modern boycott, where an injunction was awarded, is as late as 1868, this being the origin of that process which has evoked so much criticism here, the use of the injunction in labor disputes.  The unskilled laborers in England have never combined; the only people who combined were the guilds, the skilled men, and in so far as they combined they did it rather as capitalists, employees, or as freemen, to govern the town; this was a lawful object; and the guilds rapidly grew into little aristocracies.  They very soon ceased to be journeyman laborers, and became combinations of employers.  Thus, the guild movement didn’t amount to much in bringing about the modern trades-union or combinations of laboring men; it began before it occurred to these latter that they also could combine; just as, even now, it is more difficult among women to get them to join trades-unions, or for working women to combine; they have not apparently got into that stage of evolution; and so with the negroes in the South.  But about the end of the eighteenth century you begin to find the first strikes and combinations of workingmen; and then what the courts promptly applied to them was not the old line of statutes, the historical common-law growth, deriving from a guild which in its origin was a lawful body and so making the union free and lawful, but naturally—­for the magistrates were capitalists and land-owners, and all the courts were in sympathy with that class—­they went back to the long series of Statutes of Laborers, and said “this is a combination of workingmen to break the law by getting more than lawful wages,” and consequently found both combinations unlawful, trades-unions and strikes, as well as when they were combinations to injure somebody, what we should now call a boycott.

The great Statute of Laborers which was for centuries supposed to settle the law of England is that of Elizabeth in 1562.  Meantime, agricultural labor as well as industrial was getting to be free.  A statute of 1377, which requires villeins refusing to labor to be committed to prison on complaint of the landlord, without bail, itself recognizes that villeins fleeing to a town are made free after a year and day’s habitation therein.  In 1383 came Wat Tyler’s rising; the villeins demanded a commutation of agricultural labor to a money rent (four pence) and full freedom of trade and labor in all the market towns; and about this time was great growth of small freeholders.