There was not much room for hired work in the early flourishing periods of the medieval cities, still less for individual hirelings.  The work of the weavers, the archers, the smiths, the bakers, and so on, was performed for the craft and the city; and when craftsmen were hired in the building trades, they worked as temporary corporations (as they still do in the Russian artels), whose work was paid en bloc.  Work for a master began to multiply only later on; but even in this case the worker was paid better than he is paid now, even in this country, and very much better than he used to be paid all over Europe in the first half of this century.  Thorold Rogers has familiarized English readers with this idea; but the same is true for the Continent as well, as is shown by the researches of Falke and Schonberg, and by many occasional indications.  Even in the fifteenth century a mason, a carpenter, or a smith worker would be paid at Amiens four sols a day, which corresponded to forty-eight pounds of bread, or to the eighth part of a small ox (bouvard).  In Saxony, the salary of the Geselle in the building trade was such that, to put it in Falke’s words, he could buy with his six days’ wages three sheep and one pair of shoes.(6) The donations of workers (Geselle) to cathedrals also bear testimony of their relative well-being, to say nothing of the glorious donations of certain craft guilds nor of what they used to spend in festivities and pageants.(7) In fact, the more we learn about the medieval city, the more we are convinced that at no time has labour enjoyed such conditions of prosperity and such respect as when city life stood at its highest.

More than that; not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted then as a matter of fact.  We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but—­“every one must be pleased with his work,” a medieval Kuttenberg ordinance says, “and no one shall, while doing nothing (mit nichts thun), appropriate for himself what others have produced by application and work, because laws must be a shield for application and work."(8) And amidst all present talk about an eight hours’ day, it may be well to remember an ordinance of Ferdinand the First relative to the Imperial coal mines, which settled the miner’s day at eight hours, “as it used to be of old” (wie vor Alters herkommen), and work on Saturday afternoon was prohibited.  Longer hours were very rare, we are told by Janssen, while shorter hours were of common occurrence.  In this country, in the fifteenth century, Rogers says, “the workmen worked only forty-eight hours a week."(9) The Saturday half-holiday, too, which we consider as a modern conquest, was in reality an old medieval institution; it was bathing-time for a great part of the community, while Wednesday afternoon was bathing-time for the Geselle.(10) And although school meals did not exist—­probably