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guild, also spelled gild , an association of craftsmen or merchants formed for mutual aid and protection and for the furtherance of their professional interests. Guilds flourished in Europe between the 11th and 16th centuries and formed an important part of the economic and social fabric in that era.
Types and functions
The medieval guilds were generally one of two types: merchant guilds or craft guilds. Merchant guilds were associations of all or most of the merchants in a particular town or city; these men might be local or long-distance traders, wholesale or retail sellers, and might deal in various categories of goods. Craft guilds, on the other hand, were occupational associations that usually comprised all the artisans and craftsmen in a particular branch of industry or commerce. There were, for instance, guilds of weavers, dyers, and fullers in the wool trade and of masons and architects in the building trade; and there were guilds of painters, metalsmiths, blacksmiths, bakers, butchers, leatherworkers, soapmakers, and so on.
Guilds performed a variety of important functions in the local economy. They established a monopoly of trade in their locality or within a particular branch of industry or commerce; they set and maintained standards for the quality of goods and the integrity of trading practices in that industry; they worked to maintain stable prices for their goods and commodities; and they sought to control town or city governments in order to further the interests of the guild members and achieve their economic objectives.
There is no direct evidence for the existence of permanent associations of traders or craftsmen in ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt, and little more evidence exists about such societies in pre-Hellenistic Greece. Such associations are known to have existed in ancient Rome, however, where they were called collegia. These craft guilds seem to have emerged in the later years of the Roman Republic. They were sanctioned by the central government and were subject to the authority of the magistrates. From the reign of the emperor Diocletian onward, the imperial government deliberately exploited these guilds in the interests of public authority and social order. The government tried to restrict the membership of the guilds to a hereditary caste of skilled artisans, but the increasing financial demands made upon the guilds by the government in the waning days of the Roman Empire had reduced most guilds to a precarious position by the 4th century ce. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, guilds disappeared from European society for more than six centuries. The collegia did survive in the Byzantine Empire, however, and particularly in the city of Byzantium (Constantinople, now Istanbul). The famous Book of the Prefect, a manual of government probably drawn up by the Byzantine emperor Leo VI in the year 900, provides a picture of an elaborate guild organization whose primary function was the imposition of rigid controls, especially for financial and tax-raising purposes, on every craft and trade in the city.
Some historians have contended that the guilds of medieval Europe derived from the collegia of the Byzantine Empire, but no direct connections have been established between these different institutions, and the origins of the medieval guilds can be found in the changing economies of western and northern Europe as they emerged from the Dark Ages.
Flowering in Europe
Guilds became possible in Europe only with the appearance and growth of towns in the 10th and 11th centuries following the chronic dislocation and agrarian backwardness of the Dark Ages. Until this time, merchants had been merely itinerant peddlers who executed all of their own trading transactions, personally traveling from market to market and from town to town. Such merchants tended to band together in order to protect themselves from bandits or predatory feudal lords as they made their business rounds. Gradually, merchants expanded their activities and delegated such tasks as the transportation of goods to others, while the merchants based themselves and their operations in a particular town. The merchants’ associations soon became more tightly organized and were legalized and recognized by town governments. These merchant associations, or guilds, became intimately involved in regulating and protecting their members’ commerce, both in long-distance trade and in those activities which catered to the needs of the town’s inhabitants. Guilds came to control the distribution and sale of food, cloth, and other staple goods and thereby achieved a monopoly over the local commerce. Such guilds compelled foreign merchants or traders to pay a fee if they wanted to participate in the local trade, and some outside merchants were prohibited altogether from participating in that trade.
By the 13th century, merchant guilds in western Europe comprised the wealthiest and most influential citizens in many towns and cities, and, as many urban localities became self-governing in the 12th and 13th centuries, the guilds came to dominate their town councils. The guilds were thus able to pass legislative measures regulating all economic activity in many towns.
Craft guilds arose soon after merchant guilds did. They originated in expanding towns in which an extensive division of labour was emerging. The body of craftsmen in a town usually consisted of a number of family workshops in the same neighbourhood, with the masters or owners of such workshops related to each other by kinship, acquaintance, or the sharing of apprentices. These craftsmen tended to band together in order to regulate competition among themselves, thus promoting their own and the town’s prosperity in general. The craftsmen would agree on some basic rules governing their trade, setting quality standards, and so on. In this way the first craft guilds were formed. Craft and merchant guilds would often control different areas of a particular industry. The merchant guild in a wool-processing town or city, for instance, would control the purchase of raw wool and the production and sale of the processed fibre, while the craft guilds would control the actual carding, dyeing, and weaving of the wool.
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