EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM: A DIFFERENT PATH^43hold. Hence pairings like Hamburg-Altona and Niirnberg-Furth: old
wealth, new wealth; decorum, disorder; tight access, free entry.
One inevitable consequence of active trade was selection by merit.
This ran against the parity principle (equality of results), but it was not
possible to impose uniformity of performance. Some craftsmen simply
did better work and attracted buyers beyond their capacity. At the same
time, the very effort to restrain competition by limiting access to mas
tership meant talent unemployed. It did not take much to bring to
gether such masters and journeymen. Since the journeymen were often
not permitted to work in the master's city shop (limits on size), they
worked en chambre or in the suburbs. Here was the beginning of
putting-out and division of labor, with substantial gains in productiv
ity.
Urban closure was also thwarted by the spread of industrial pro
duction to the countryside. Agriculture, with its seasonal and irregu
lar pattern of activity, offered a pool of untapped labor, the greater
because outside the cities constraints on the use of female and child
workers no longer applied. Women and children, grossly underpaid,
gave more product for the penny. Early on (thirteenth century), then,
merchants began to hire cottage workers to perform some of the more
tedious, less skilled tasks. In the most important branch, the textile
manufacture, peasant women did the spinning on a putting-out basis:
merchants gave out (put out) the raw material—the raw wool and flax,
and, later, cotton—and collected the finished yarn.
This shift to outsourcing initially encountered little resistance from
urban workers; but when merchants started putting-out yarn to cot
tage weavers, they were attacking one of the most powerful vested in
terests of the day, the guild weavers of the towns. Then the fat was in
the fire. In Italy, the autonomous cities, which held political control
over the surrounding countryside, managed to destroy much of this
"unfair" competition. In the Low Countries, the other great medieval
center of cloth manufacture, urban weavers marched into the villages
to break cottage looms; and although the country weavers fought back,
the putting-out system was held in check for centuries. The one coun
try where putting-out had a free field was England, where local polit
ical autonomies made it hard for the monarchy to sustain corporate
(guild) claims to monopoly and where guilds were quickly reduced to
ceremonial fraternities. By the fifteenth century, more than half the na
tion's woolen cloth was being made in rural cottages. This recourse to
cheap labor lowered costs over competitors abroad, so that by the six
teenth century a country that had once been largely an exporter of pri-