have direct evidence of such having been the case for Novgorod
and Pskov. It was the Sovereign Novgorod and the Sovereign
Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to distant lands.

We know also that in nearly all mediæval cities of Middle and
Western Europe, the craft guilds used to buy, as a body, all
necessary raw produce, and to sell the produce of their work
through their officials, and it is hardly possible that the same
should not have been done for exterior trade--the more so as
it is well known that up to the thirteenth century, not only all
merchants of a given city were considered abroad as responsible
in a body for debts contracted by any one of them, but the
whole city as well was responsible for the debts of each one of
its merchants. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth century the
towns on the Rhine entered into special treaties abolishing this
responsibility. ¹ And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich
document published by Mr. Gross, from which document we learn
that the merchant guild of this town was constituted by all who
had the freedom of the city, and who wished to pay their con-
tribution ("their hanse") to the guild, the whole community
discussing all together how better to maintain the merchant
guild, and giving it certain privileges. The merchant guild of
Ipswich thus appears rather as a body of trustees of the town
than as a common private guild.

In short, the more we begin to know the mediæval city, the
more we see that it was not simply a political organization for
the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt
at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village com-
munity, a close union for mutual aid and support, for con-
sumption and production, and for social life altogether, without
imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full
liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate
group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and
political organization. How far this attempt has been successful
will be best seen when we have analyzed in the next chapter
the organization of labour in the mediæval city and the relation
of the cities with the surrounding peasant population.

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