PURSUIT OF ALBION^243ond, the priority of moral criteria over commercial. So long as a crafts
man did his work conscientiously and to standard, he was entided to a
living.
Against this good worker ethic, however, beat the forces of greed
and ambition—the morality of market and money. As we have seen in
our discussion of putting-out, merchants learned to bypass guild re
strictions by finding workers in the countryside; or when, as in clock-
and watchmaking, the work called for skills not found in cottages, by
hiring journeymen (once apprentices, not yet masters) to work in their
own rooms or in suburbs outside guild jurisdiction. That was a great
weakness of these corporate monopolists: they were closely bound with
municipalities and ill-equipped to impose themselves on a changing
turf.
Not that they did not try. In Italy, industrial centers typically annexed
the surrounding countryside, and guild controls extended beyond city
limits. In the Low Countries (the other great manufacturing center of
medieval Europe), urban masters and their henchmen sallied forth into
the countryside to break looms and terrorize their rural competition.
Such expeditions succeeded only until the country weavers learned to
defend themselves, giving blow for blow, and from the seventeenth
century on, rural manufacture was tolerated if not recognized. In Ger
many, the complication of political boundaries was such that every ex
clusive center had a potential rival next door, only too happy to
welcome interlopers, "botchers," Jews, and similar fee- and taxpaying
oudaws.
In France, on the other hand, the guilds were well placed to defend
their interests because they were sanctioned and defended by the
crown, pardy for fiscal reasons, pardy as instruments of social control.
The crown's writ extended almost everywhere.* Even so, maverick
masters found ways to bypass constraints. Some of them, for example,
enjoyed the kind of reputation that created demand beyond their
shop's capacity. So they hired others to do their work and signed it with
their own name. Such outsourcing was strictly forbidden, and occa
sionally guild representatives came searching, accompanied by bailiffs,
confiscated the contraband, fined the culprit. For every master turned
in and caught, dozens got away with it.
* There were exceptional jurisdictions: Alsace, much of it acquired in 1648 (Stras
bourg in 1681); the Franche-Comté of Burgundy, won from Spain in 1678; Lorraine,
annexed in 1766; and recent conquests in Flanders—all in part subject to their own
laws and customs. European nation-states were still in the making.