中世ロンドンにおける非市民層の増大
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概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
From the second half of the thirteenth century, there was a heavy influx of strangers into London who desired to work there. In the beginning the attitude of the London citizens towards the newcomer was to induce him to obtain the freedom of some raft and to become a citizen, (It was the custom of London to take up citizenship through one of the crafts.) Until the early years of the fourteenth century, in fact, it was easy for the newcomer to follow the trade of a craft as an independent master and to acquire the rights of citizenship by payment of a small sum of money. Soon a separate class of wealthier trading masters arose within many of the crafts. Using the labour of dependent workers, these trading masters made their wares. In order to secure cheap labour, they tried to receive a stranger to the city not as a master but as a serving-man and to force him to remain that status as long as possible. In 1364 the fee for admission to the freedom of the city by redemption was raised to 60 s. or more on the grounds that it was better that those unable to pay this sum should continue to serve others as hired serving-men than that the number of masters should be unduly increased Thus late in the fourteenth century it became difficult for most of the serving-men to obtain the freedom of the city, and consequently the number of the non-citizens supplying the cheap labour for industry increased and they became the lower ranks of London. The increase of the poor non-citizens presented the greater demand for cheap wares-articles of inferior quality and secondhand articles-for their own use. Against the wardens or overseers of crafts whose duty it was to check the quality of wares, the small poorer masters dared to make the articles of inferior quality and to deal in the secondhand articles, while another group of poorer non-citizens who hawked such unapproved wares about the streets came into being. These increasing non-citizens were the very Londoners that Langland described in Piers the Plowman.
- 社会経済史学会の論文
- 1977-03-31