GUILDS. (The spelling guild is now the common English spelling, but there are many reasons for preferring the older spell ing gild.) Mediaeval gilds were voluntary associations formed for the mutual aid and protection of their members. Among the gildsmen there was a strong spirit of fraternal co-operation or Christian brotherhood, with a mixture of worldly and religious ideals—the support of the body and the salvation of the soul. Early meanings of the root gild or geld were expiation, penalty, sacrifice or worship, feast or banquet, and contribution or pay ment ; it is difficult to determine which is the earliest meaning, and we are not certain whether the gildsmen were originally those who contributed to a common fund or those who worshipped or feasted together. Their fraternities or societies may be divided into three classes: religious or benevolent, merchant and craft gilds. The last two categories, which do not become prominent anywhere in Europe until the 12th century, had, like all gilds, a religious tinge, but their aims were primarily worldly, and their functions were mainly of an economic character.
No theory on this subject can be satisfactory which wholly ignores the influence of the Christian Church. Imbued with the idea of the brotherhood of man, the Church naturally fostered the early growth of gilds and tried to make them displace the old heathen banquets. The work of the Church was, however, di rective rather than creative. Gilds were a natural manifestation of the associative spirit which is inherent in mankind. The same needs produce in different ages associations which have striking resemblances, but those of each age have peculiarities which in dicate a spontaneous growth. It is not necessary to seek the germ of gilds in any antecedent age or institution. When the old kin-bond or maegth was beginning to weaken or dissolve, and the State did not yet afford adequate protection to its citizens, individuals naturally united for mutual help.
Gilds are first mentioned in the Carolingian capitularies of 779 and 789, and in the enactments made by the Synod of Nantes early in the 9th century, the text of which has been preserved in the ecclesiastical ordinances of Hincmar of Reims (A.D. 852). The capitularies of 805 and 821 also contain vague references to sworn unions of some sort, and a capitulary of 884 prohibits villeins from forming associations "vulgarly called gilds" against those who have despoiled them. The Carolingians evidently re garded such "conjurations" as "conspirations" dangerous to the State. The gilds of Norway, Denmark and Sweden are first men tioned in the i ith, i 2th and 54th centuries respectively; those of France and the Netherlands in the 5 5th.
Many writers believe that the earliest references to gilds come from England. The laws of Ine speak of gegildan who helped one another pay the wergeld, but it is not quite certain that they were members of gild fraternities in the later sense. These are more clearly referred to in England in the second half of the gth cen tury, though we have little information concerning them before the 11 th century. To the first half of that century belong the statutes of the fraternities of Cambridge, Abbotsbury and Exeter. They are important because they form the oldest body of gild ordinances extant in Europe. The thanes' gild at Cambridge afforded help in blood-feuds, and provided for the payment of the wergeld in case a member killed anyone. The religious element was more prominent in Orcy's gild at Abbotsbury and in the fraternity at Exeter ; their ordinances exhibit much solicitude for the salvation of the brethren's souls. The Exeter gild also gave assistance when property was destroyed by fire. Prayers for the dead, attendance at funerals of gildsmen, periodical banquets, the solemn entrance oath, fines for neglect of duty and for im proper conduct, contributions to a common purse, mutual assist ance in distress, periodical meetings in the gildhall—in short, all the characteristic features of the later gilds already appear in the statutes of these Anglo-Saxon fraternities. Some Continental writers, in dealing with the origin of municipal government throughout western Europe, have, however, ascribed too much importance to the Anglo-Saxon gilds, exaggerating their preva lence and contending that they form the germ of mediaeval municipal government. This view rests almost entirely on con jecture; there is no good evidence to show that there was any organic connection between gilds and municipal government in England before the coming of the Normans. It should also be noted that there is no trace of the existence of either craft or merchant gilds in England before the Norman Conquest. Com merce and industry were not yet sufficiently developed to call for the creation of such associations.
Historians have expressed divergent views regarding the early relations of the craftsmen and their fraternities to the gild mer chant. One of the main questions in dispute is whether artisans were excluded from the gild merchant. Many of them seem to have been admitted to membership. They were regarded as mer chants, for they bought raw material and sold the manufactured commodity; no sharp line of demarcation was drawn between the two classes in the 12th and 13th centuries. Separate societies of craftsmen were formed in England soon after the gild mer chant came into existence; but at first they were few in number. The gild merchant did not give birth to craft fraternities or have anything to do with their origin ; nor did it delegate its authority to them. In fact, there seems to have been little or no organic connection between the two classes of gilds. As has already been intimated, however, many artisans probably belonged both to their own craft fraternity and to the gild merchant, and the latter, owing to its great power in the town, may have exercised some sort of supervision over the craftsmen and their societies. When the king bestowed upon the tanners or weavers or any other body of artisans the right to have a gild, they secured the monopoly of working and trading in their branch of industry. Thus with every creation of a craft fraternity the gild merchant was weakened and its sphere of activity was diminished, though the new bodies were subsidiary to the older and larger fraternity. The greater the commercial and industrial prosperity of a town, the more rapid was the multiplication of craft gilds, which was a natural result of the ever-increasing division of labour. The old gild merchant remained longest intact and powerful in the smaller boroughs, in which, owing to the predominance of agriculture, few or no craft gilds were formed. In some of the larger towns the crafts were prominent already in the 13th century, but they be came much more prominent in the first half of the 14th century. Their increase in number and power was particularly rapid in the time of Edward III., whose reign marks an era of industrial progress. Many master craftsmen now became wealthy employ ers of labour, dealing extensively in the wares which they pro duced. The class of dealers or merchants, as distinguished from trading artisans, also greatly increased and established separate fraternities. When these various unions of dealers and of crafts men embraced all the trades and branches of production in the town, little or no vitality remained in the old gild mer chant; it ceased to have an independent sphere of activity. The tendency was for the single organization, with a general monopoly of trade, to be replaced by a number of separate organizations representing the various trades and handicrafts. In short, the function of guarding and supervising the trade monopoly split up into various fragments, the aggregate of the crafts super seding the old general gild merchant. This transference of the authority of the latter to a number of distinct bodies and the consequent disintegration of the old organization was a gradual spontaneous movement—a process of slow displacement, or natural growth and decay, due to the play of economic f orces which, generally speaking, may be assigned to the 14th and 15th centuries, the very period in which the craft gilds attained the zenith of their power. While in most towns the name and the old organization of the gild merchant thus disappeared and the insti tution was displaced by the aggregate of the crafts towards the close of the middle ages, in some places it survived long of ter the 15th century either as a religious fraternity, shorn of its old functions, or as a periodical feast, or as a vague term applied to the whole municipal corporation.
On the Continent of Europe the mediaeval gild merchant played a less important role than in England. In Germany, France and the Netherlands it occupies a less prominent place in the town charters and in the municipal polity, and often corre sponds to the later fraternities of English dealers established either to carry on foreign commerce or to regulate a particular part of the local trade monopoly.
Their organization and aims were in general the same through out western Europe. Officers, commonly called wardens in Eng land, were elected by the members, and their chief function was to supervise the quality of the wares produced so as to secure good and honest workmanship. Therefore, ordinances were made regulating the hours of labour and the terms of admission to the gild, including apprenticeship. Other ordinances required mem bers to make periodical payments to a common fund, and to par ticipate in certain common religious observances, festivities and pageants. But the regulation of industry was always paramount to social and religious aims; the chief object of the craft gild was to supervise the processes of manufacture and to control the monopoly of working and dealing in a particular branch of in dustry.
We have already called attention to the gradual displacement of the gild merchant by the craft organizations. The relations of the former to the latter must now be considered more in detail. There was at no time a general struggle in England between the gild merchant and the craft gilds, though in a few towns there seems to have been some friction between merchants and artisans. There is no exact parallel in England to the conflict between these two classes in Scotland in the 16th century, or to the great Continental revolution of the 13th and i4th centuries, by which the crafts threw off the yoke of patrician government and secured more independence in the management of their own affairs and more participation in the civic administration. The main causes of these conflicts on the Continent were the monopoly of power by the patricians, acts of violence committed by them, their bad management of the finances and their partisan administration of justice. In some towns the victory of the artisans in the 14th century was so complete that the whole civic constitution was remodelled with the craft fraternities as a basis. A widespread movement of this sort would scarcely be found in England, where trade and industry were less developed than on the Continent, and where the motives of a class conflict between merchants and craftsmen were less potent. Moreover, borough government in England seems to have been mainly democratic until the 14th or century; there was no oligarchy to be depressed or sup pressed. Even if there had been motives for uprisings of artisans such as took place in Germany and the Netherlands, the English kings would probably have intervened. True, there were popular uprisings in England, but they were usually conflicts between the poor and the rich; the crafts as such seldom took part in these tumults. While many Continental municipalities were becoming more democratic in the i4th century, those of England were drift ing towards oligarchy, towards government by a close "select body." As a rule the craft gilds secured no dominant influence in the boroughs of England, but remained subordinate to the town government. Whatever power they did secure, whether as potent subsidiary organs of the municipal polity for the regulation of trade, or as the chief or sole medium for the acquisition of citi zenship, or as integral parts of the common council, was, generally speaking, the logical sequence of a gradual economic develop ment, and not the outgrowth of a revolutionary movement by which oppressed craftsmen endeavoured to throw off the yoke of an arrogant patrician gild merchant.
Two new kinds of craft fraternities appear in the 14th century and become more prominent in the 15th, namely, the merchants' and the journeymen's companies. The misteries or companies of merchants traded in one or more kinds of wares. They were pre eminently dealers, who sold what others produced. Hence they should not be confused with the old gild merchant, which origin ally comprised both merchants and artisans, and had the whole monopoly of the trade of the town. In most cases, the company of merchants was merely one of the craft organizations which superseded the gild merchant.
In the 14th century the journeymen or yeomen began to set up fraternities in defence of their rights. The formation of these societies marks a cleft within the ranks of some particular class of artisans—a conflict between employers, or master artisans, and workmen. The journeymen combined to protect their special interests, notably as regards hours of work and rates of wages, and they fought with the masters over the labour question in all its aspects. The resulting struggle of organized bodies of masters and journeymen was widespread throughout western Europe, but it was more prominent in Germany than in France or England. This conflict was indeed one of the main features of German in dustrial life in the 1 sth century. In England the fraternities of journeymen, after struggling a while for complete independence, seem to have fallen under the supervision and control of the mas ters' gilds; in other words, they became subsidiary or affiliated organs of the older craft fraternities.
An interesting phenomenon in connection with the organization of crafts is their tendency to amalgamate, which is occasionally visible in England in the 15th century, and more frequently in the 16th and 17th. A similar tendency is visible in the Netherlands and in some other parts of the Continent already in the 14th century. Several fraternities—old gilds or new companies, with their respective cognate or heterogeneous branches of industry and trade—were fused into one body. In some towns all the crafts were thus consolidated into a single fraternity; in this case a body was reproduced which regulated the whole trade mon opoly of the borough, and hence bore some resemblance to the old gild merchant.
In dealing briefly with the modern history of craft gilds we may confine our attention to England. In the Tudor period the policy of the Crown was to bring them under public or national control. Laws were passed, for example in 1503, requiring that new ordinances of "fellowships of crafts or misteries" should be approved by the royal justices or by other Crown officers; and the authority of the companies to fix the price of wares was thus restricted. The statute of 5 Elizabeth c. 4 also curtailed their jurisdiction over journeymen and apprentices (see APPRENTICE SHIP). ' The craft fraternities were not suppressed by the statute of 1547 (I Edward VI.) . They were indeed expressly exempted from its general operation. Such portions of their revenues as were devoted to definite religious observances were, however, appropriated by the Crown. The revenues confiscated were those used for "the finding, maintaining or sustentation of any priest or of any anniversary, or obit, lamp, light or other such things." This has been aptly called "the disendowment of the religion of the misteries." Edward VI.'s statute marks no break of continuity in the life of the craft organizations. Even before the Ref orma tion, however, signs of decay had already begun to appear, and these multiplied in the 16th and 17th centuries. The old gild sys tem was breaking down under the action of new economic forces. Its dissolution was due especially to the introduction of new in dustries, organized on a more modern basis, and to the extension of the domestic system of manufacture. Thus the companies gradually lost control over the regulation of industry, though they still retained their old monopoly in the 17th century, and in many cases even in the i8th. In fact, many craft fraternities still survived in the second half of the i8th century, but their use fulness had disappeared. The mediaeval form of association was incompatible with the new ideas of individual liberty and free competition, with the greater separation of capital and industry, employers and workmen, and with the introduction of the factory system. Intent only on promoting their own interests and dis regarding the welfare of the community, the old companies had become an unmitigated evil. Attempts have been made to find in them the progenitors of the trade unions, but there seems to be no immediate connection between the latter and the craft gilds. The privileges of the old fraternities were not formally abolished until 183 5 ; and the substantial remains or spectral forms of some are still visible in other towns besides London.