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.
Guilds relied on cooperation among their members to achieve their common goals, and low quality products were not tolerated because all guild members would suffer. Guilds often had a great deal of influence over local governments. Guild leaders, especially those of powerful merchant guilds, frequently also served as local government officials.
This situation enabled guilds to have legislation passed in their favor. Guilds also helped member families in need, and performed functions such as paying for burials and dowries for poorer families. Apprentices were not expected to get married during their apprenticeship.
Going to the inn was usually banned as well. Once an apprenticeship was over, the young person now became a journeyman. He would be paid a wage and once he had saved enough money, he could start up a business of his own. Only members of a guild could sell within a town. Lourens, P. De oprichting en ontwikkeling van ambachtsgilden in Nederland 13ee eeuw.
Lis and H. Soly eds , Werelden van verschil. Thijs, A. Religion and social structure: religious rituals in pre-industrial trade associations in the Low Countries. In: M. Prak, C. 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.
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