Individuals may not have believed that threats of mutual assured destruction would be carried out. The incentive to renegotiate was strong. Third, skepticism probably existed about threats to do onto others as they had done onto you. That concept contradicted a fundamental teaching of the church, to do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Thus, indiscriminant retaliation based upon hair-trigger strategies was not an organizing principle likely to be adopted by guilds whose members hoped to speed passage through Purgatory.
A hierarchy existed in large guilds. Masters were full members who usually owned their own workshops, retail outlets, or trading vessels. Masters employed journeymen, who were laborers who worked for wages on short term contracts or a daily basis hence the term journeyman, from the French word for day. Journeymen hoped to one day advance to the level of master.
To do this, journeymen usually had to save enough money to open a workshop and pay for admittance, or if they were lucky, receive a workshop through marriage or inheritance. Masters also supervised apprentices, who were usually boys in their teens who worked for room, board, and perhaps a small stipend in exchange for a vocational education. Both guilds and government regulated apprenticeships, usually to ensure that masters fulfilled their part of the apprenticeship agreement.
Terms of apprenticeships varied, usually lasting from five to nine years. The internal structure of guilds varied widely across Europe. Little is known for certain about the structure of smaller guilds, since they left few written documents. Most of the evidence comes from large, successful associations whose internal records survive to the present day.
The description above is based on such documents. It seems likely that smaller organizations fulfilled many of the same functions, but their structure was probably less formal and more horizontal. Relationships between guilds and governments also varied across Europe. Most guilds aspired to attain recognition as a self-governing association with the right to possess property and other legal privileges. Guilds often purchased these rights from municipal and national authorities. In England, for example, a guild which wished to possess property had to purchase from the royal government a writ allowing it to do so.
But, most guilds operated without formal sanction from the government. Guilds were spontaneous, voluntary, and self-enforcing associations.
Reconstructing the history of guilds poses several problems. Few written records survive from the twelfth century and earlier. Surviving documents consist principally of the records of rulers — kings, princes, churches — that taxed, chartered, and granted privileges to organizations.
Some evidence also exists in the records of notaries and courts, which recorded and enforced contracts between guild masters and outsiders, such as the parents of apprentices. From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, records survive in larger numbers. Surviving records include statute books and other documents describing the internal organization and operation of guilds. The evidence at hand links the rise and decline of guilds to several important events in the history of Western Europe.
In the late Roman Empire, organizations resembling guilds existed in most towns and cities. These voluntary associations of artisans, known as collegia , were occasionally regulated by the state but largely left alone. They were organized along trade lines and possessed a strong social base, since their members shared religious observances and fraternal dinners. Most of these organizations disappeared during the Dark Ages, when the Western Roman Empire disintegrated and urban life collapsed.
In the Eastern Empire, some collegia appear to have survived from antiquity into the Middle Ages, particularly in Constantinople, where Leo the Wise codified laws concerning commerce and crafts at the beginning of the tenth century and sources reveal an unbroken tradition of state management of guilds from ancient times.
Some scholars suspect that in the West, a few of the most resilient collegia in the surviving urban areas may have evolved in an unbroken descent into medieval guilds, but the absence of documentary evidence makes it appear unlikely and unprovable.
In the centuries following the Germanic invasions, evidence indicates that numerous guild-like associations existed in towns and rural areas. These organizations functioned as modern burial and benefit societies, whose objectives included prayers for the souls of deceased members, payments of weregilds in cases of justifiable homicide, and supporting members involved in legal disputes. These rural guilds were descendents of Germanic social organizations known as gilda which the Roman historian Tacitus referred to as convivium.
During the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, considerable economic development occurred. The sources of development were increases in the productivity of medieval agriculture, the abatement of external raiding by Scandinavian and Muslim brigands, and population increases.
The revival of long-distance trade coincided with the expansion of urban areas. Merchant guilds formed an institutional foundation for this commercial revolution. Merchant guilds flourished in towns throughout Europe, and in many places, rose to prominence in urban political structures. In many towns in England, for example, the merchant guild became synonymous with the body of burgesses and evolved into the municipal government. In Genoa and Venice, the merchant aristocracy controlled the city government, which promoted their interests so well as to preclude the need for a formal guild.
Merchant guilds appear in many Italian cities in the twelfth century. Craft guilds became ubiquitous during the succeeding century. In northern Europe, merchant guilds rose to prominence a few generations later. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, local merchant guilds in trading cities such as Lubeck and Bremen formed alliances with merchants throughout the Baltic region.
Social and religious guilds existed at this time, but few records survive. Small numbers of craft guilds developed, principally in prosperous industries such as cloth manufacturing, but records are also rare, and numbers appear to have been small. As economic expansion continued in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the influence of the Catholic Church grew, and the doctrine of Purgatory developed. The doctrine inspired the creation of countless religious guilds, since the doctrine provided members with strong incentives to want to belong to a group whose prayers would help one enter heaven and it provided guilds with mechanisms to induce members to exert effort on behalf of the organization.
Many of these religious associations evolved into occupational guilds. Most of the Livery Companies of London, for example, began as intercessory societies around this time. The number of guilds continued to grow after the Black Death. There are several potential explanations. The decline in population raised per-capita incomes, which encouraged the expansion of consumption and commerce, which in turn necessitated the formation of institutions to satisfy this demand.
Repeated epidemics decreased family sizes, particularly in cities, where the typical adult had on average perhaps 1. Guilds replaced extended families in a form of fictive kinship.
The decline in family size and impoverishment of the church also forced individuals to rely on their guild more in times of trouble, since they no longer could rely on relatives and priests to sustain them through periods of crisis. All of these changes bound individuals more closely to guilds, discouraged free riding, and encouraged the expansion of collective institutions.
For nearly two centuries after the Black Death, guilds dominated life in medieval towns. Any town resident of consequence belonged to a guild. Most urban residents thought guild membership to be indispensable.
Guilds dominated manufacturing, marketing, and commerce. Guilds dominated local politics and influenced national and international affairs. Guilds were the center of social and spiritual life. The heyday of guilds lasted into the sixteenth century. The Reformation weakened guilds in most newly Protestant nations. In England, for example, the royal government suppressed thousands of guilds in the s and s.
The king and his ministers dispatched auditors to every guild in the realm. The auditors seized spiritual paraphernalia and funds retained for religious purposes, disbanded guilds which existed for purely pious purposes, and forced craft and merchant guilds to pay large sums for the right to remain in operation. Those guilds that did still lost the ability to provide members with spiritual services.
In Protestant nations after the Reformation, the influence of guilds waned. Many turned to governments for assistance. They requested monopolies on manufacturing and commerce and asked courts to force members to live up to their obligations.
Guilds lingered where governments provided such assistance. Guilds faded where governments did not. By the seventeenth century, the power of guilds had withered in England. Guilds retained strength in nations which remained Catholic.
Basing, Patricia. Trades and Crafts in Medieval Manuscripts. London: British Library, Cooper, R. London: Guildhall Library, Davidson, Clifford. Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama. Epstein, S. Artisans began to take various measures to protect their proprietary interests, and restrict access to techniques, materials, and markets.
In the Early Middle Ages most of the Roman craft organizations, originally formed as religious confraternities, had disappeared, with the apparent exceptions of stonecutters and perhaps glassmakers. Gregory of Tours tells a miraculous tale of a builder whose art and techniques suddenly left him, but were restored by an apparition of the Virgin Mary in a dream. Michel Rouche has remarked that the story speaks for the importance of practically transmitted journeymanship.
The occasion for the drunken banquets at which these oaths were made was December 26, the pagan feast of Yule. Bishop Hincmar, in , sought vainly to Christianize them. These are defining characteristics of mercantilism in economics, which dominated most European thinking about political economy until the rise of classical economics. By about European guilds or gilds and livery companies began their medieval evolution into an approximate equivalent to modern-day business organizations such as institutes or consortiums.
The latest guilds to develop in Western Europe were the gremios of Hispania that signalled the progress of the Reconquista : Barcelona , Valencia , and Toledo As production became more specialized, trade guilds were divided and subdivided, eliciting squabbles over jurisdiction that produced the paperwork by which economic historians trace their development: there were trades in Paris by , and earlier in the century the metalworking guilds of Nuremberg were already divided among dozens of independent trades, in the boom economy of the thirteenth century.
The appearance of the European guilds was tied to the emergent money economy, and to urbanization. Before this time it was not possible to run a money-driven organization, as commodity money was the normal way of doing business.
Beside their economic and training functions, guilds served social and charitable purposes. Often association with a patron saint, they might maintain a chapel in their local parish church, as well as a guildhall for official events and business.
The Guild of Saint Luke was the most common name for a city guild for painters and other artists in early modern Europe, especially in the Low Countries.
The guild of Saint Luke not only represented painters, sculptors, and other visual artists, but also—especially in the seventeenth century—dealers, amateurs, and even art lovers the so-called liefhebbers. However, as artists formed under their own specific guild of St. Luke, particularly in the Netherlands, distinctions were increasingly made. Guilds also made judgments on disputes between artists and other artists or their clients.
In such ways, it controlled the economic career of an artist working in a specific city, while in different cities they were wholly independent and often competitive against each other. The guilds were identified with organizations enjoying certain privileges letters patent , usually issued by the king or state and overseen by local town business authorities some kind of chamber of commerce. These were the predecessors of the modern patent and trademark system. As the guild system of the City of London decayed during the seventeenth century, the Livery Companies devolved into mutual assistance fraternities along such lines.
In many German towns, the more powerful guilds attempted to influence or even control town authorities. In the fourteenth century, this led to numerous bloody uprisings, during which the guilds dissolved town councils and detained patricians in an attempt to increase their influence.
The guild was at the center of European handicraft organization into the sixteenth century. German social historians traced the Zunftrevolution, the urban revolution of guild members against a controlling urban patriciate, which perhaps were foretastes of the class struggles of the nineteenth century.
In the countryside, where guild rules did not operate, there was freedom for the entrepreneur with capital to organize cottage industry, a network of cottagers who spun and wove from their own premises on his account, provided with their raw materials, perhaps even their looms, by the capitalist who reaped the profits.
Such a dispersed system could not so easily be controlled where there was a vigorous local market for the raw materials: wool was easily available in sheep-rearing regions, whereas silk was not. Despite its advantages for agricultural and artisan producers, the guild became a target of criticism towards the end of the s and the beginning of the s. They were believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development.
Two of the most outspoken critics of the guild system were Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, and all over Europe a tendency to oppose government control over trades in favor of laissez-faire free market systems was growing rapidly and making its way into the political and legal system.
In part due to their own inability to control unruly corporate behavior, the tide turned against the guilds. After the French Revolution the guild system was disbanded and replaced by free trade laws in most European nations.
By that time, many former handicraft workers had been forced to seek employment in the emerging manufacturing industries, using not closely-guarded techniques but standardized methods controlled by corporations. Despite the problems that had emerged with guilds, particularly their exclusivity and monopolistic practices which hampered the adoption of technological and entrepreneurial innovation, the downfall of guilds was not uniformly a public good.
Marxism detailed the problems resulting from the alienation of the worker from the products of work that this created, and the exploitation possible since materials and hours of work were closely controlled by the owners of the new, large scale means of production.
Modern guilds exist in different forms around the world. Craft guilds were made up of craftsmen and artisans in the same occupation, such as hatters, carpenters, bakers, blacksmiths, weavers and masons. Many craft guilds came about because the growing population in cities and towns led to increases in specialization and division of labor.
Merchant guilds included most or all of the merchants in a town or city and were involved in regional and long-distance trade. Merchant guilds were also influential in local governments, and many leaders of merchant guilds were wealthy and influential citizens. The functions of craft guilds and merchant guilds sometimes overlapped when merchant guilds opened shops or craft guilds engaged in trade. Guilds existed in rural areas also, and these were often established largely for social and religious purposes.
Guilds were organized so that workers would learn skills from others connected with the guild. Members traditionally advanced through the stages of apprentice, journeyman, and finally master. An apprentice was a young person, most often male, who learned a trade by working for a guild master.
Apprenticeships often began at age 12, and commonly lasted from two to seven years. After finishing an apprenticeship, the worker could become a journeyman.
Journeymen were often paid wages by the day while working in the trade, and so are comparable to day laborers today. A master, or master craftsman, was a full guild member who could start his own business. If the masterpiece was accepted by guild members, they could vote to accept the journeyman as a master. Guilds served a wide variety of economic, social, and religious functions. An overview of these functions is provided in Table 1. Guilds helped to advance and expand the economies of the era by providing education and training for apprentices and by helping journeymen improve their skills.
The specialization within a trade provided by the guild structure, along with the training and skills, led to increased productivity, increased wages, and higher standards of living. Guilds became a major source of employment for workers in cities, and guild membership was widespread. Guilds functioned as local monopolies. In classic monopolistic style, they sought to raise wages through increased profits by limiting the quantity of goods and services produced and by controlling prices.
Guild membership was limited so as not to flood markets with products and cause prices to fall. In hard economic times when demand was low, fewer journeymen would become masters and fewer apprentices would become journeymen. When times were better and demand for goods and services was higher, promotions within guilds were more common. Guilds also controlled the quality of goods produced, realizing that it was in their self-interest as well as that of consumers to produce high quality products.
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