(Source- Wikipedia.com)
A
guild is an association of
craftsmen in a particular trade. The earliest guilds were formed as
confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a
trade union, a
cartel and a
secret society. They often depended on grants of
letters patent by an authority or monarch to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials. A lasting legacy of traditional guilds are the
guildhalls constructed and used as meeting places.
Background of early guildlike associations AD 300 - 600
In pre-industrial cities,
craftsmen tended to form associations based on their trades, confraternities of textile workers, masons, carpenters, carvers, glass workers, each of whom controlled
secrets of traditionally imparted technology, the "arts" or "mysteries" of their crafts. Usually the founders were free independent
master craftsmen.
During the Indian
Gupta-period (AD 300 - 600)
Indian craftsman's associations, which may have had archaic antecedents, 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. Specifically, within the medieval Oyo Empire of present day southwestern Nigeria and Benin, separate guilds developed for professional dancers, mask carvers, and musicians associated with
egungun ancestral masquerade performances often regarded as the predecessor to the traveling Alarinjo theatre.
[1]
Traditional
wrought-iron guild sign of a
glazier - in
Germany. Those signs can be found in many European old towns where guild members had to mark their places of business. Many survived through time or staged a comeback in industrial times. Today they are restored or even newly created, esp. for old town areas.
[edit] European history
In the
Early Middle Ages most of the Roman craft organizations, originally formed as
religious confraternities, had disappeared, with the apparent exceptions of stone cutters and perhaps glass makers.
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
[2] 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 25, the pagan feast of
Jul: Bishop
Hincmar, in 858, sought vainly to Christianize them.
[3]By about 1100, European
guilds (or
gilds) and
livery companies began their medieval progression 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.
[4] 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 Spain: e.g., 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,
journeyman, 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,
[5] 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.
[citation needed] Although many people believe there were guilds for food to travel to soldiers, in Europe during the 16th century there were only craft-making guilds.
[citation needed]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 declined during the seventeenth century, the
Livery Companies transformed into mutual assistance fraternities along such lines.
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".
[6] 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.
[edit] Organization
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.
[citation needed]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 able to work for other masters, unlike apprentices, and generally paid by the day and were thus day labourers. 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, though by no means all journeymen made such travels - they were most common in Germany and Italy, and in other countries journeymen from small cities would often visit the capital.
After this journey and several years of experience, a journeyman could be received as master craftsman, though in some guilds this step could be made straight from apprentice. This would typically require the approval of all masters of a guild, a donation of money and other goods (often omitted for sons of existing members), and the production of a so-called
masterpiece, which would illustrate the abilities of the aspiring master craftsman; this was often retained by the guild.
The medieval guild was established by charters or letters patent or similar authority by the city or the ruler and normally held a monopoly on trade in its craft within the city 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 might be 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 and Italian cities, the more powerful guilds often had considerable political influence, and sometimes attempted to control the city 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.
