ion, and
though his fellows might be journeymen or apprentices, they all belonged
to the same social class, and throughout the Guild there was a spirit of
comradeship which was consecrated by the sanctions of religion.

For it was the Guilds which were the prime movers in organising those
Miracle Plays which were the delight of the Middle Ages, and which
formed the main outlet for that dramatic instinct which used to be so
strong in England, and which paved the way for Shakespeare and the
modern stage.

The Guild was not concerned mainly with money but with work, and still
more with the skill and happiness of the worker, and its aim was to
resist inequality. It was, in the pointed words of Mr Chesterton,

to ensure, not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed,
but that every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to
rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give any faded
whitewasher a new white coat. It was the whole aim of the Guilds to
cobble their cobblers like their shoes and clout their clothiers
with their clothes; to strengthen the weakest link, or go after the
hundredth sheep; in short to keep the row of little shops unbroken
like a line of battle[23].

The Guild in fact aimed at keeping each man free and happy in the
possession of his little property, whereas the Trade Union aims at
assembling into one company a large number of men who have little or no
property at all, and who seek to redress the balance by collective
action. The mediaeval Guild therefore will certainly go down to history
as one of the most gallant attempts, and for the time being one of the
most successful, to create a true comradeship among all who work, and to
keep at a distance those mere class distinctions which, though their
foundations are often so flimsy, tend to grip men as in an iron vice.

But I must not pass by another social organisation which looms very
large in the old days, and which approached social unity from a side
wholly different from those I have mentioned, namely from the military
side: I mean the Feudal System. Here there has been much
misunderstanding. Its very name seems to breathe class distinction. We
have come casually and rather carelessly to identify it with the tyranny
and oppression which exalted the few at the expense of the many. This
point of view is however a good deal less than just. It is quite true
that as worked by William the Norma