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[Middle English gild, from Old Norse gildi, payment, guild.]
A group of species that utilize the same kinds of resources, such as food, nesting sites, or places to live, in a similar manner. Emphasis is on ecologically associated groups that are most likely to compete because of similarity in ecological niches, even though species can be taxonomically unrelated. The term was derived from the guild in human society composed of people engaged in an activity or trade held in common.
The guild concept focuses attention on the ways in which ecologically related species differenough to permit coexistence, or avoid competitive displacement. For example, new places to live for some plants are provided by badger mounds in dense tall-grass prairie vegetation.
The guild is also commonly used as the smallest unit in an ecosystem in studies relating to environmental impact, wildlife management, and habitat classification. A representative speciesof a guild may be selected for study involving the uncertain assumption that environmental impact will influence this species in the same way as other guild members. See also Ecosystem.
Medieval organization, predecessor to unions; usually association of artisans or merchants; any association where the interests and needs of a particular professional or business group are represented. An example would be the Author's Guild.
noun
Musicians have formed guilds first to promote their interests and rights, secondly to regulate the profession and establish welfare provision. The earliest known guilds were formed in Vienna (1288) and Paris (by 1321) by freelance musicians emulating the trade guilds and religious fraternities: this helped them gain professional acceptance and legal protection. A guild of parish clerks was formed in London in 1240; in Germany there were guilds of court trumpeters and drummers. Civic musicians are reported in the 13th and 14th centuries; they played at weddings and other festive occasions. See also
For more information on guild, visit Britannica.com.
The guild was one of the most characteristic organizations of the later medieval period and an instrument of local urban monopoly operated by a particular craft or by the market guild. Major towns had specialized guilds for different trades and London had a great variety of both mercantile guilds, such as grocers, goldsmiths, and vintners, and manufacturers like tailors and saddlers. The purpose of the guild was to regulate the local market. This took the form of control of the price and quality of goods. Membership conferred substantial advantages. Members of Southampton's guild were exempt from local tolls and customs and enjoyed the right of the first option to purchase goods brought to the town.
Organizations of merchants in groups called a "hundred" (sto or sotnya) existed in medieval Novgorod and in Muscovy. The first organization of merchants in guilds (gildy; singular gildia) occurred in December 1724, when Peter I divided the urban population into a first guild, composed of wealthy merchants, doctors, pharmacists, ship captains, painters, and the like; a second guild, comprising retail traders and artisans; and all others, called the "common people."
Although the word guild was borrowed from medieval European practice, guilds in Russia had purely administrative functions: to categorize merchants according to the extent of their economic activities and to collect fees from them. Merchants also bore heavy responsibilities of unpaid state service, such as tax collection and service on municipal boards, law courts, and other local institutions.
A decree issued on January 19, 1742, specified three merchant guilds. In a decree of March 17, 1775, Catherine II freed merchants from the soul tax and set 500 rubles of declared capital as the minimum requirement for enrollment in the merchant estate, subject to the payment of 1 percent of declared capital each year. A law issued on May 25, 1775, set specific minimum amounts: 10,000 rubles for the first guild, 1,000 rubles for the second, and 500 rubles for the third. In her Charter to the Cities, promulgated on April 21, 1785, Catherine II increased the minimum capital requirements to 5,000 rubles for the second guild and 1,000 rubles for the third. By abolishing the merchants' former monopoly on trade and industry, Catherine allowed the gentry and serfs to engage in ruinous competition with the merchants, free of the annual guild payment. Many enterprising merchants fled this precarious situation by rising into the gentry. The merchant estate therefore remained small and weak.
In 1839 a first-guild certificate, costing 600 rubles, entitled a merchant with at least 15,000 rubles in assets to own ships and factories, to offer banking services, and to trade in Russia and abroad. Second-guild certificates, sold for 264 rubles, entitled merchants whose stated wealth surpassed 6,000 rubles to manage factories and engage in wholesale or retail trade in Russia. Members of the third guild were permitted to conduct retail trade in the city or district where they resided, provided they owned assets worth 2,400 - 6,000 rubles and purchased certificates costing 1.25 percent of the declared amount.
The third guild was abolished in 1863 and a new fee structure established, but the link between largescale economic activity and membership in the merchant estate was already dissolving. Laws issued in 1807, 1863, and 1865 allowed non-merchants engaged in manufacturing and wholesale commerce to enroll in a merchant guild while maintaining their membership in another social estate as well. From 1863 onward, anyone, regardless of social status or even citizenship, could create and manage a corporation. Still, many industrialists and traders enrolled in merchant guilds, as their fathers and grandfathers had done, to demonstrate their commitment to a group identity separate from the gentry.
Bibliography
Baron, Samuel H. (1980). Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays. London: Variorum.
Bushkovitch, Paul. (1980). The Merchants of Moscow, 1580 - 1650. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hittle, J. Michael. (1979). The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600 - 1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
—THOMAS C. OWEN
Medieval European Guilds
By the 11th cent. in Europe, associations of merchants had begun to form for the protection of commerce against the feudal governments. Those merchant guilds became extremely powerful as trade in the Mediterranean and across Europe increased. Some of the Italian merchant guilds, such as those in Genoa and Florence, became dominant in local government. In England and in Germany the merchant guilds also exercised enormous power in the growing towns. Commerce was becoming less and less a local affair, and the guilds in some cases developed into intercity leagues for the promotion and protection of trade. The most striking example was the Hanseatic League of N Europe, which established and controlled some of its own trading cities. The merchant guilds had vast influence in the development of commerce during that period.
No less important were the craft guilds, the associations of artisans of a particular industry, e.g., the weavers guild. These grew with great rapidity as towns developed in the 12th cent. and tended to share power with the merchants or even, in some cases, to supplant them in power. Generally the members were divided into masters, apprentices, and journeymen. The masters were the owners of the shops and instructors of the apprentices. The apprentices were bound to the masters; they were accepted for a stipulated sum paid to the masters for training and were given a subsistence wage for a number of years; the amount paid and the length of time varied from one craft to another and one place to another. The apprentices were strictly under the control of the masters, but the conditions of control were set by guild regulation. The journeymen were men who had finished their training as apprentices but could not attain the status of masters, the number of masters being limited.
The guild reflected a predilection for ordering society. Each guild set the terms of its craft: the forms of labor, standard of product, and methods of sale. With the rise of nationalism in the West, those things were increasingly subject to royal and national law. The relationship of the feudal ruler to the guilds was ideally one of cooperation. Actually the wealthy guilds were able to gain some immunity from interference by noble or king either by paying them large sums of money or by intimidating them. Sometimes, as in the weaving towns of Flanders, the guilds led revolts against feudal authority (e.g., in Bruges and Ghent). The tendency in the industrial towns was for the guilds to assume dominance in municipal government, and traces of that control have persisted in the local governments of Western Europe. The guilds of London (see livery companies) had wide social obligations and prominence in the city government.
The strengthening of the power of nations in the 15th and 16th cent. tended to increase royal power, and the king in some instances was able to reduce the guilds to subservience. The improvement of communications, the expansion of trade, with the introduction of foreign-made goods, and finally the appearance of the capitalist and the entrepreneur hastened the end of the guild system. The guilds, with their rigorous controls and emphasis on stability and quality, were not equipped to cope with the expanding production of a more capitalistic age. They tended to guard their monopolies jealously and to oppose change.
As time went on, the guild system became increasingly rigid, and the trend toward hereditary membership grew very marked. Thus the development of new trade and industry fell to the capitalists, who adapted themselves to new demands in an age of exploration and expansion. By the 17th cent. the power of the guilds had withered in England, and their privileges were officially abolished in 1835. In France the guilds were abolished (1791) in the French Revolution. The German and Austrian guilds were abolished in the 19th cent. as were those in the Italian cities. In Eastern Europe guilds grew numerous in the great market cities, and the power of some long persisted, notably in Novgorod and Kraków.
Other Guilds
Guildlike organizations of merchants and artisans have been known at various times in many parts of the world. Greek merchants' associations were of considerable significance in both the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Under the Roman Empire each provincial city had, as did Rome, its various collegia (some of which were clubs as well as economic guilds); Constantinople later had its efficiently organized corpora. Those guilds were continued in the East and in some of the cities of Italy, where they persisted at least until the 10th cent. Their effect on the creation of medieval guilds is debatable. Some scholars have found the origin of guilds in the old tribal or religious guilds of the Germans.
Elsewhere in the world associations of merchants and of artisans developed and followed a pattern similar to that of the medieval European guilds, flourishing as protective devices or as regulatory instruments of the state. The guilds of the Muslim Middle East developed in the 9th cent. and persisted into the 20th cent., although they never attained the political influence equivalent of those of medieval Europe. In India guilds were highly developed before the time of the Maurya empire, and they continued in existence long after British control was established. The history of the Indian guilds was closely tied in with the caste system. The guilds in Japan were opposed and weakened by the stronger medieval rulers, but they were later used as powerful regulatory devices; they were swept away in the Meiji restoration in 1868. Chinese guilds of unknown antiquity persisted as powerful bodies into the 20th cent.
Bibliography
See C. Gross, The Gild Merchant (1890, repr. 1964); L. F. Salzman, English Industries of the Middle Ages (new ed. 1964); H. Sée, Economic and Social Conditions in France during the Eighteenth Century (tr. 1927, repr. 1968); S. Kramer, The English Craft Gilds (1927); H. B. Morse, The Gilds of China (2d ed. 1932, repr. 1967); G. Unwin, Gilds and Companies of London (4th ed. 1963); G. Clune, The Medieval Gild System (1943); R. Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe (1987).
Organizations of skilled workers or artisans.
The earliest evidence for workers in Middle Eastern urban trades and crafts associating in guilds for their common economic and social benefit dates from the fourteenth century, though there are hints of looser groupings before that time. The Ottoman and Safavid Empires and the kingdom of Morocco developed extensive guild systems with each guild being self-governing through a hierarchy of ranks. Government approval or oversight, variously expressed, kept them from being totally independent, however. The goal of the guilds was to ensure a stable level of production and an equitable distribution of work among guild members. The guilds thus constituted a generally conservative force disinclined to change with evolving economic conditions. Nevertheless, they were often important foci of communal and religious life for their members, as in annual guild-organized commemorations of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn by Shiʿites in Iran. The terms used for guilds include sinf (category), taʾifa (group), jamaʿa (society), and hirfa (craft). Guilds were commonly subjected to collective taxation administered by the market inspector (muhtasib) or other government official. Jews and Christians were members of guilds in some cities, but exclusively Christian or Jewish guilds, like that of the kosher butchers of Aleppo, were rare.
Records of the city of Aleppo mention 157 guilds in the middle of the eighteenth century. Cairo had 106 in 1814. The survival of guilds in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries varied according to country and rate of Westernization. In northern Egypt, for example, guilds had virtually disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century because of the influx of mass-produced European goods and the growing market for labor created by European investment. By contrast, the guilds of Fez in Morocco escaped severe crisis until the worldwide depression of the 1930s. Even so, municipal statistics of 1938 show the continued domination of small-scale craftwork. The largest guild, that of the slipper-makers, counted 7,100 members, 2,840 of them employers. There were also 800 tanners, 280 of them employers; and 1,700 weavers, of whom 520 were employers. Altogether the guilds numbered 11,000 members.
The potential for guild political activity had manifested itself from time to time over the centuries, as in occasional revolts by workers in the food trades in Cairo at the end of the eighteenth century. By the time modern political life focused on constitutions and participatory government developed, however, economic forces had diminished the importance of guilds in most areas. Iran, where guilds survive to the present day, provides an exception because of its comparatively late exposure to economic and political influences from Europe. The guilds formed the most cohesive group in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. In Tehran, separate guilds formed seventy political societies (anjoman). The guild leaders lacked a sophisticated understanding of politics, however, so the guilds found themselves barred from political power by the electoral law of 1909. With the advent of the Pahlavi regime in 1926, 230 guilds lost government recognition as corporate entities in an effort to dissipate the coalescence of popular feeling around them; but
because the new system of individual taxation proved unworkable, they regained their status in 1948. Many guild members were drawn to the communist Tudeh Party or to the movements led by Mohammad Mossadegh, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and other critics of the monarchy. In 1969 the 110 guilds of Tehran had a membership of about 120,000. Guild members played an important role in the demonstrations that led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Bibliography
Lawson, Fred H. The Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism during the Muhammad Ali Period. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Marcus, Abraham. The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity:Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
— RICHARD W. BULLIET
The guild, a formal organization of craftspeople, held an important place in a theoretical system of order called corporatism that emerged in the late Middle Ages in Europe and survived until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Medieval guilds began as devotional and mutual aid societies, but by the early modern period they had become identified with governance as well as with the regulation of economic activities. Guild masters responded to indiscipline in the workplace by drafting statutes or guild bylaws. Municipalities, and eventually monarchs, sanctioned these statutes for a fee, oversaw their enforcement by imposing fines for transgressions, and increasingly conferred legal status upon the guilds.
Corporatism laid out organizing principles that shaped social, political, and economic organization, embracing the concept of paternalism and restricting competition to preserve the livelihood of artisans and channel quality goods, fairly priced, to the consuming public. In keeping with these principles, monopoly over the manufacture and sale of particular items was a privilege widely protected by guild statutes. Statutes also frequently regulated the labor supply to reduce competition among masters, restricting the allowable number of journeymen a master might employ.
Guilds also had a social function. Membership placed an artisan—master, journeyman, apprentice, or widow—in the finely graded hierarchy that structured Old Regime society. Such a system was equally a power structure, and distinction and difference issued from a concern among male masters for subordination of inferiors, be they journeymen, apprentices, wageworkers, or women. Numerous provisions in guild statutes throughout Europe focused on status, above all by strictly regulating the access of workers to the corporation and to mastership within it. They also increasingly excluded women. Escalating fees, extended periods of apprenticeship, and the continuing refinement of masterpieces all pointed to a mounting preoccupation with discipline and a growing hierarchization in the world of work; the barriers between male and female, master and journeyman (that is, a worker with some institutional claim to guild membership), and journeyman and nonguild worker (those with no guild membership whatsoever) were being raised higher than ever before. Master guildsmen and the political authorities shared these values of institutionalization, and their common interests came together in the formulation of the corporate regime, enshrined in part in guild statutes.
Expansion of the Guild Regime
Guilds proliferated throughout Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries; in some places such as Sweden and Austria the high point was reached in the eighteenth century. The fifteenth century was a time of corporate expansion in most French towns, and the sixteenth century witnessed a similar development in the towns of the southern Netherlands and England, where expansion continued into the seventeenth century. The towns of the new United Provinces in the northern Netherlands, for example, had few guilds before the seventeenth century, but by 1700 there were about two thousand. The German "home towns" of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—polities that were relatively independent of external political authority and held between one thousand and five thousand inhabitants—epitomize the early modern European guild system. The guilds in these locations were political, economic, and social entities. All possessed statutes that stipulated, as elsewhere, the nature and duration of apprentice training, regulations for recruitment of workers and their distribution among the shops of the town, and monopolies. Guild masters enforced these rules with the sanctioning of the municipality. Regulating economic competition had the higher goal, however, of securing community peace and maintaining the social order. This order was rooted in social position defined by Ehrbarkeit or 'honorable status'. Guild masters everywhere, not just in the home towns, possessed this quality, characterized by "the respect of the respected," and jealously guarded it, for it defined one's exclusive position at the upper levels of society.
Guilds and Economic Regulation
Determining the role that regulation played in economic practice has formed the research agenda of many historians of the early modern period, and the function of guilds is a central concern in this inquiry. Guilds were empowered and enjoined by municipal, ducal, ecclesiastical, or royal governments to regulate the economy—workshop inspections and access to courts are evidence of this. Many instances of artisans' workshops being searched for illegal materials or unacceptable workmanship can be cited, as can examples of litigation between guilds over encroachment of monopolies. The high-water mark of regulation came in the late seventeenth century and is best illustrated by the policies of the French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) and his immediate successors. Between 1673 and 1714 in France, the crown enacted 450 règlements, or rulings, on manufacture, and another 500 on the policing of the guilds and on jurisdictions between them. Similar regulatory policies were imitated by nearly every state in eighteenth-century Europe.
Historians have long been aware of this regulatory system but only recently have they probed its actual impact on economic activity. Indeed, historians now point to overwhelming evidence that reveals that in many places, normal economic practice was largely beyond regulation, as it comprised a flexible and spontaneous mixture of licit and illicit activity in production, distribution, and consumption. The early modern craft economy was too dynamic to be contained by regulation, since illegal activities such as operating multiple shops, smuggling, unlicensed peddling, and clandestine workers working outside of guilds proliferated. In 1748 in Amsterdam, for instance, nonguild workers—both male and female—were making more clothes than master tailors.
So what can we conclude about guild regulation and the craft economy? Certainly guilds did not suffocate the free-market economy. The regulatory regime, however, was not totally ineffective or irrelevant. Rather, it was extremely flexible, responding to the various needs of artisans and governments. There were different kinds of markets in the early modern economy, and regulation fit differently in them. There was the sprawling, heterogeneous, and unregulated clandestine and illegal craft economy. Alongside this economy there was the licensed one, but even here within the official organization of the guild we find ample room for flexibility and economic growth. Indeed, within this official, "regulated" structure, masters of the same guild competed with one another, even inviting regulation of their products as a form of advertising their quality precisely so that they could have an advantage over fellow guildsmen.
From Corporatism to Liberalism: the End of Guilds
Corporatism and guilds were embodied in most polities of early modern Europe. Guilds were simultaneously empowered by political authorities and rendered vulnerable to them, and so if these political authorities abandoned corporatism, guilds would disappear. In the eighteenth century, corporatism was increasingly challenged by a rival system, liberalism, and as governments came to embrace the principles of free trade and unregulated markets, corporatism was eventually displaced. Such a displacement, however, was hardly rapid or unconflicted. There was considerable ambivalence within the ranks of political authority about just what liberalism was and how it might be implemented. An episode involving the French controller general of finance, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), illustrates this confusion. Turgot attempted to abolish the guilds in February 1776 and was abruptly dismissed in May. An advocate of free trade and therefore an opponent of the regulatory corporate regime, he saw guilds as impediments to growth in the French economy and asserted that abolishing them would liberate commercial and industrial activity. Turgot, however, was not thinking in simply narrow economic terms; nor were his opponents, the staunch defenders of corporatism. Both parties were fundamentally concerned with preserving social order, but equally fundamentally disagreed on how best to secure such order. Turgot sought to replace what he thought was the unnatural and stultifying hierarchy of corporatism with a natural and free one, and so he had no sympathy for his opponents, who clamored that his edict would dissolve the bonds of subordination and invite anarchy. Turgot assumed that masters and workers would form natural hierarchical relationships in the marketplace, that the natural law of the market would maintain order. Corporatists countered that Turgot's natural hierarchy was a dangerous illusion, and because the principle of incorporation linked all of France in a chain that led directly to the throne, to sever one link (as with the abolition of the guilds) would cut the chain and ultimately destroy the entire system and even the monarchy itself.
Turgot lost the battle, but liberalism eventually won the war. Over the long run liberalism did prove corrosive to corporatism in general and to guilds in particular, as attested by the liberal-inspired legislation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abolishing guilds all across Europe. The assault on corporations may have been largely inspired by demands for free trade and unregulated markets, but guilds were more than simply economic entities; rather, they were a fundamental unit of the entire early modern system of social representation and social control. Their dissolution, therefore, had widely felt cultural ramifications. As guilds disappeared, the very nature of the artisanry, and the identity of the artisan, was redefined.
Bibliography
Black, Antony. Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present. Ithaca, N.Y., 1984.
Chevalier, Bernard. "Corporations, conflits politiques et paix sociale en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles." Revue historique 268 (1982):17–44.
Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900. Aldershot, U.K., 1997.
Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Kaplan, Steven L. The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775. Durham, N.C., 1996.
Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650. Totowa, N.J., 1987.
Prothero, I. J. Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth- Century London: John Gast and His Times. Baton Rouge, La., 1979.
Sewell, William H., Jr. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1980.
—JAMES R. FARR
Organizations of artisans in the Middle Ages that sought to regulate the price and quality of products such as weaving and ironwork. Guilds survived into the eighteenth century.
The knitters guild made many warm hats for people on the streets.
Tutor's tip: An art "guild" (organization of craftsmen) might "gild" (apply gold to) a many "gilled" (slits in the side used for breathing) fish.
A guild is an association of craftspeople in a particular trade. The earliest guilds are
believed to have been formed in India circa 3800 BC,
and though they are not as commonplace as they were a few centuries ago, many guilds continue to flourish around the world today.
Guilds are less common now than many years ago.
In pre-industrial cities, craftsmen tended to form associations based on their trades. Usually the founders were free independent master craftsmen. The earliest craftsmen's organizations are purported to have been formed in India during the Vedic-period from 2000 - 500 BC.
During the Indian Gupta-period (300 - 600 AD) the craftmen's associations were known as shreni. Greek organizations in Ptolemaic Egypt were called koinon. Starting from their third century BC. origins the Roman collegia spread with the extension of the Empire. The Chinese hanghui probably existed already during the Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 220), but certainly they were present in the Sui Dynasty (589 - 618 AD). Roman craftsmen's organizations continued to develop in Italy of the Middle Ages under the name ars. In Germany they are first mentioned in the tenth century. The German name is Zunft (plural Zünfte). Métiers in France and craft gilds in England emerged in the twelfth century. Craft organizations (senf, sinf) stemmed from the tenth century in Iran, and were seen to spread also in Arabia and Turkish regions under the name futuwwah or fütüvvet. 900 of the carvers of Benin are said to have founded their own organization. In the neighbouring tribes of Yoruba and Nupe the organizations were given the names egbe and efakó.
Islamic civilization extended the notion of guilds to the artisan as well — most notably to the warraqeen, or "those who work with paper." Early Muslims were heavily engaged in translating and absorbing all ilm ("knowledge") from all other known civilizations as far east as China. Critically analyzing, accepting, rejecting, improving and codifying knowledge from other cultures became a key activity, and a knowledge industry as presently understood began to evolve. By the beginning of the 9th century, paper had become the standard medium of written communication, and most warraqeen were engaged in paper-making, book-selling, and taking the dictation of authors, to whom they were obliged to pay royalties on works, and who had final discretion on the contents. The standard means of presentation of a new work was its public dictation in a mosque or madrassah in front of many scholars and students, and a high degree of professional respect was required to ensure that other warraqeen did not simply make and sell copies, or that authors did not lose faith in the warraqeen or this system of publication. Thus the organization of the warraqeen was in effect an early guild.
Local guilds also served to safeguard artisans from the appropriation of their skills: The publication industry that spanned the Muslim empire, from the first works under the warraqeen system in 874 and up to the 15th century, produced tens of thousands of books per year. A culture of instructional capital flourished, with groups of respected artisans spreading their work to other artisans elsewhere, who could in turn copy it and perhaps "pass it off" as the original, thereby exploiting the social capital built up at great expense by the originators of techniques. 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 (1987 pp 431ff) remarks that the story speaks for the importance of practically transmitted journeymanship.
The early egalitarian communities called "guilds" (for the gold deposited in their common funds) were denounced by Catholic clergy for their "conjurations"—the binding oaths sworn among artisans to support one another in adversity and back one another in feuds or in business ventures. The occasion for the drunken banquets at which these oaths were made was December 26, the pagan feast of Jul: Bishop Hincmar, in 858, sought vainly to Christianize them (Rouche 1987 p 432).
By about 1100 European guilds (or gilds) and livery companies began their medieval evolution into an approximate equivalent to modern-day business organizations such as institutes or consortia. The guilds were termed corps de métiers in France, where the more familiar term corporations did not appear until the Le Chapelier Law of 1791 that abolished them, according to Fernand Braudel[1] The guild system reached a mature state in Germany circa 1300 and held on in the German cities into the nineteenth century, with some special privileges for certain occupations remaining today.
The latest guilds to develop in Western Europe were the gremios of Hispania that signalled the progress of the Reconquista: Barcelona (1301), Valencia (1332) and Toledo (1426). Not all city economies were controlled by guilds; some cities were "free". Where guilds were in control they shaped labour, production and trade; they had strong controls over instructional capital, and the modern concepts of a lifetime progression of apprentice to craftsman, journeyer, and eventually to widely-recognized master and grandmaster began to emerge. As production became more specialized, trade guilds were divided and subdivided, eliciting the squabbles over jurisdiction that produced the paperwork by which economic historians trace their development: there were 101 trades in Paris by 1260 (Braudel), 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. In Ghent as in Florence the woolen textile industry developed as a congeries of specialized guilds. 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.
The guild was at the center of European handicraft organization into the sixteenth century. In France, a resurgence of the guilds in the second half of the seventeenth century is symptomatic of the monarchy's concerns to impose unity, control production and reap the benefits of transparent structure in the shape of more efficient taxation.
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. The guilds also maintained funds in order to support infirm or elderly members, as well as widows and orphans of guild members, funeral benefits, and a 'tramping' allowance for those needing to travel to find work. 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.
Like their Muslim predecessors, European guilds imposed long standardized periods of apprenticeship, and made it difficult for those lacking the capital to set up for themselves or without the approval of their peers to gain access to materials or knowledge, or to sell into certain markets, an area that equally dominated the guilds' concerns. These are defining characteristics of mercantilism in economics, which dominated most European thinking about political economy until the rise of classical economics.
The guild system survived the emergence of early capitalists, which began to divide guild members into "haves" and dependent "have-nots". The civil struggles that characterize the fourteenth century towns and cities were struggles in part between the greater guilds and the lesser artisanal guilds, which depended on piecework. "In Florence, they were openly distinguished: the Arti maggiori and the Arti minori—already there was a popolo grasso and a popolo magro" (Braudel p. 316). Fiercer struggles were those between essentially conservative guilds and the merchant class, which increasingly came to control the means of production and the capital that could be ventured in expansive schemes, often under the rules of guilds of their own. German social historians trace the Zunftrevolution, the urban revolution of guildmembers against a controlling urban patriciate, sometimes reading into them, however, perceived 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 in 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.
The structures of the craftsmen's associations tended everywhere in similar directions: a governing body, assisting functionaries and the members' assembly. The governing body consisted of the leader and deputies. In Ptolemeic Egypt the presidents were known as presbyter, in Roman Egypt as proestotes, egoymenos or archonelates, in Byzantine Egypt epistates, in the Roman Empire as decurio, in Florence of the Middle Ages as consul, officialis or rector, in France as consul, recteur, baile or surposé, in Germany Zunftmeister or Kerzenmeister, in England alderman, graceman or master, in Iran as rish safid or pishavaran, in India as adhyaksha, mukhya, pamukkha or jettaka, in Tibet as dbu chen mo, in China as hangshou, hangtou or hanglao, in the West African Yoruba region as bale or baba egbe and in the Nupe region as dakodza, muku or ndakó, depending on the type of craft.
The guild was made up by experienced and confirmed experts in their field of handicraft. They were called master craftsmen. Before a new employee could rise to the level of mastery, he had to go through a schooling period during which he was first called an apprentice. After this period he could rise to the level of journeyman. Apprentices would typically not learn more than the most basic techniques until they were trusted by their peers to keep the guild's or company's secrets.
Like journey, the distance that could be travelled in a day, the title 'journeyman' derives from the French words for 'day' (jour and journée) from which came the middle English word journei. Journeymen were generally paid by the day and were thus day laborers. After being employed by a master for several years, and after producing a qualifying piece of work, the apprentice was granted the rank of journeyman and was given documents (letters or certificates from his master and/or the guild itself) which certified him as a journeyman and entitled him to travel to other towns and countries to learn the art from other masters. These journeys could span large parts of Europe and were an unofficial way of communicating new methods and techniques.
After this journey and several years of experience, a journeyman could be received as master craftsman. This would require the approval of all masters of a guild, a donation of money and other goods, and in many practical handicrafts the production of a so-called masterpiece, which would illustrate the abilities of the aspiring master craftsman.
The medieval guild was offered letters patent (usually from the king) and held a monopoly on its trade in the town in which it operated: handicraft workers were forbidden by law to run any business if they were not members of a guild, and only masters were allowed to be members of a guild. Before these privileges were legislated, these groups of handicraft workers were simply called 'handicraft associations'.
The town authorities were represented in the guild meetings and thus had a means of controlling the handicraft activities. This was important since towns very often depended on a good reputation for export of a narrow range of products, on which not only the guild's, but the town's, reputation depended. Controls on the association of physical locations to well-known exported products, e.g. wine from the Champagne and Bordeaux regions of France, tin-glazed earthenwares from certain cities in Holland, lace from Chantilly, etc., helped to establish a town's place in global commerce — this led to modern trademarks.
In many German towns, the more powerful guilds attempted to influence or even control town authorities. In the 14th century, this led to numerous bloody uprisings, during which the guilds dissolved town councils and detained patricians in an attempt to increase their influence.
In Chester England the earl had given a charter to the guild merchants at the end of the 12th century assuring them of the exclusive rights for retail sales within the city (excepting fairs and some markets where 'foreigners' could pay for the privilege of selling).
Guildsmen had to be freemen of the city. They had to take an oath to serve the city and the king. There were four ways to become a freeman: by apprenticeship of five or seven years, by being born as the son of a freeman (in 1453 dues were remitted to a token 10s1/2d), by purchasing membership (in 1453 this was 26s8d), or by becoming an honorary freeman as a gift of the assembly.
As well as running local government, by electing the 78 common councillors, the guilds took responsibility for the welfare of their members and their families. They put on the Chester Mystery Plays and the Chester Midsummer Watch Parade. Guildsmen had to attend meetings, often in local inns or in the towers on the city walls. No person of any 'arte, mystery syence, occupacion, or crafte' could 'intermeddle' or practice another trade. In the 15th century the Innkeepers threatened to brew their own beer and the Brewers took them to court and won.
Charters of incorporation were given to each guild, the earliest to the Bakers in 1462. Of the original 25, 19 companies were recorded in 1475. In 1533 another company formed. This was the Merchant Venturers who were the only traders allowed to merchandise in foreign ports and, at first, they were not able to do any manual trade or retail in the city.
In 1694 rules were regularly being broken and it was ordered that 'No man shall have any commerce, Trade or Dealing with any man that shall sett up Stale (stall) or Hake in the street of ye said Citie neither at the ffaire or market but to dispose of his goods at his shoppe or house he keeps all the yeare'. But this was the beginning of the end for the guild's monopoly of city trade.
Despite its advantages for agricultural and artisan producers, the guild became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s. They were believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts, but the neutrality of these claims is doubted. It may be propaganda.
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 favour of laissez-faire free market systems was growing rapidly and making its way into the political and legal system. Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto also criticized the guild system for its rigid gradation of social rank and the relation of oppressor/oppressed entailed by this system. From this time comes the low regard in which some people hold the guilds to this day. For example, Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter X, paragraph 72):
In part due to their own inability to control unruly corporate behavior, the tide turned against the guilds.
Because of industrialization and modernization of the trade and industry, and the rise of powerful nation-states that could directly issue patent and copyright protections — often revealing the trade secrets — the guilds' power faded. After the French Revolution they fell in most European nations through the 1800s, as the guild system was disbanded and replaced by free trade laws. 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.
This was not uniformly viewed as a public good: Karl Marx criticized 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.
Guilds are sometimes said to be the precursors of modern
The exclusive privilege of a guild to produce certain goods or provide certain services was similar in spirit and character with the original patent systems that surfaced in England in 1624. These systems played a role in ending the guilds' dominance, as trade secret methods were superseded by modern firms directly revealing their techniques, and counting on the state to enforce their legal monopoly.
Some guild traditions still remain in a few handicrafts, in Europe especially among shoemakers and barbers. Some of the ritual traditions of the guilds were conserved in order organizations such as the Freemasons. These are, however, not very important economically except as reminders of the responsibilities of some trades toward the public.
Modern antitrust law could be said to be derived in some ways from the original statutes by which the guilds were abolished in Europe.
Modern guilds exist in different forms around the world. In many European countries guilds have had a revival as local organisations for craftsmen, primarily in traditional skills. They may function as fora for developing competence and are often the local units of a national employers organization.
In the United States guilds exist in several fields. The Screen Actors Guild and
Quilting guilds are also very common and are found in almost all areas of the United States.
Real estate brokerage is an excellent example of a modern American guild. Telltale signs of guild behavior are on display in real estate brokerage: standard pricing (6% of the home price), strong affiliation among all practitioners, self-regulation (see National Association of Realtors), strong cultural identity (see Realtor), little price variation with quality differences, and traditional methods in use by all practitioners. In September 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors challenging NAR practices that, DOJ asserts, prevent competition from practitioners who use different methods. The DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission in 2005 advocated against state laws, supported by NAR, that disadvantage new kinds of brokers. For a description of the DOJ action, see [1]. U.S. v. National Assoc. of Realtors, U.S. District Court Norther District Illinois, Eastern Division, September 7, 2005, Civil Action No. 05C-5140.
The practice of law in the United States is also an example of modern guilds at work. Every state maintains its own Bar Association, supervised by that state's highest court. The court decides the criteria for being admitted to, and remaining a member of, the legal profession. In most states, every attorney must be a member of that state's Bar in order to practice law. State laws forbid any person from engaging in the unauthorized practice of law and practicing attorneys are subject to rules of professional conduct that are enforced by the state's high court.
Other associations which can be classified as guilds, though it isn't evident in their names, include the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association.
Scholars from the history of ideas have noticed that consultants play a part similar to that of the journeymen of the guild systems: they often travel a lot, work at many different companies and spread new practices and knowledge between companies and corporations.
Many professional organizations similarly resemble the guild structure. Professions such as architecture, engineering, and land surveying require varying lengths of apprenticeships before one can be granted a 'professional' certification. These certifications hold great legal weight and are required in most states as a prerequisite to doing business there.
Thomas Malone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology champions a modern variant of the guild structure for modern "e-lancers", professionals who do mostly telework for multiple employers. Insurance including any professional liability, intellectual capital protections, an ethical code perhaps enforced by peer pressure and software, and other benefits of a strong association of producers of knowledge, benefit from economies of scale, and may prevent cut-throat competition that leads to inferior services undercutting prices. And, as with historical guilds, resist foreign competition.
The free software community has from time to time explored a guild-like structure to unite against competition from Microsoft, e.g. Advogato assigns journeyer and master ranks to those committing to work only or mostly on free software. Debian also publishes a list of what constitutes free software.
In the City of London, the ancient guilds survive as Livery Companies, most of which play a ceremonial role. Guilds also survive in the UK in Preston, Lancashire as the Preston Guild Merchant where among other celebrations descendants of Burgesses are still admitted into membership.
In Australia there exists the Guild of Commercial Filmmakers, a collection of commercial, short film and feature filmmakers.
In online computer games players form groups called Player guilds who perform some of the functions of ancient guilds. They organize group activities, regulate member behavior, exclude non-conforming individuals, and react as a group when member safety or some aspect of guild life is threatened. In games where fictional "building" is possible they may cooperate on projects in their online world. The practice was taken from the Guilds in the quasi-medieval settings of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The first graphical online RPG to provide guilds was Neverwinter Nights, which ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.
Due to guild expenses (such as advertising costs), membership fees were often charged heavily to keep the guild running.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Dansk (Danish)
n. - gilde, lav
Français (French)
n. - guilde, association
Deutsch (German)
n. - Gilde, Zunft, Vereinigung
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - συντεχνία (κν. σινάφι), σωματείο, ένωση
Italiano (Italian)
corporazione, gilda
Português (Portuguese)
n. - associação (f), corporação (f)
Русский (Russian)
ассоциация (союз), гильдия
Español (Spanish)
n. - guilda, gremio, corporación, cofradía
中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
行会, 协会, 同业公会
中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 行會, 協會, 同業公會
한국어 (Korean)
n. - 길드 (중세 상인 단체), 조합
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) جمعيه او نقابه وبخاصه جمعيات التجار والحرفيين في القرون الوسطى
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - איגוד, גילדה
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