Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/253

Rh Hundreds of those craftsmen, forced by want, swelled the companies of marauders known in history as the "Routiers," "Cottereaux," and "Brabançons." Owing to this reënforcement, their plunderings grew to frightful proportions.

Between the years 1180 and 1182, a pious carpenter of Puy, named Durand, in an outburst of honest and patriotic indignation at sight of the disorders committed by his fellow tradesmen, declared that he had been intrusted by the Lord with the mission of restoring peace. Such was the enthusiasm aroused by his preaching a crusade against the Brabançons, the most terrible of those adventurers, that in a short time he gathered around him a powerful army which were called the "Brothers of the Peace." The Brabançons were exterminated, the other companies having disbanded on learning the successes of the "Pacifies." Durand was hailed as a hero, and the savior of his country. But fanaticism and ambition engendered excess; the Brothers of the Peace became a cause of dread to the community; and France, which, during this moral ebullition, had rejected a part of its impure elements, now cast aside the others, by dispersing the chiefs of the Brotherhood of the Pacifies. Durand, as was often the case under similar circumstances, met with death by order of the powerful lords, for the safety of whom he had worked.

With the organization of commons, carpenters organized themselves in various brotherhoods. Every community was independent, had its peculiar privileges, laws, traditions, and usages. An officer called "Master Carpenter of the King" presided over each one of the French brotherhoods. He was as a brake put to the wheels of the organization by the shy despotism of the monarch. The Church, too, of course, interfered and gave them the character of religious associations. According to the statutes of the Paris brotherhood, carpenters were bound not to work from nine o'clock on Saturday night till Monday morning. The brothers were apprentices or masters. The apprenticeship lasted four years, in the first of which the apprentice was forced to pay his master from one to three farthings per diem. A carpenter could not be compelled to work in the night, except for the royal family and the Bishop of Paris. Every corporation had jurors who were selected among masters having at least ten years' experience, and whose business was to settle, as referees, all questions arising in business transactions. As the choice of materials was of paramount importance for the security of the community at large, it was the jurors' duty to examine all wood before it could be used; the use of wood upon which the jurors had not thought fit to put their seal entailed heavy fines and even the suspension of the transgressor. The purchases of wood made in advance did not bind the carpenter, if the jurors failed to find it satisfactory; on the arrival of the merchandise, too, the purchaser could not take possession of the whole cargo, if his brother-tradesmen were not provided with sufficient materials to go on with work in hand.