What Were Medieval Guilds? Trade Associations With Legal Teeth

A guild's powers over its trade within a town were extensive and legally backed by a charter from the town or the crown:

• •Entry, since only members could practise the trade, and membership required completing the training and being admitted
• •Training, through a defined apprenticeship of typically seven years, during which the apprentice lived in the master's household and received board and instruction rather than wages
• •Quality, through inspection of work and the power to destroy substandard goods and fine the maker, which is the origin of hallmarking in the precious metal trades
• •Prices and wages, set to prevent undercutting, which is the cartel function and was explicitly justified as preventing ruinous competition
• •Scale, by limiting the number of apprentices and journeymen a single master could employ, which prevented any member growing large enough to dominate
• •Materials and methods, specified to maintain the standard and to prevent innovation that would advantage one member

The three stages gave the trade its vocabulary. An apprentice was bound by a formal indenture, usually in their early teens, to a master who undertook to teach the craft and to house and feed them, and who received their labour in exchange. On completing the term the apprentice became a journeyman, from the French for day, meaning a qualified worker paid by the day and free to work for any master, and in several trades and regions expected to travel between towns gaining experience, a practice that survives formally in the German journeyman years. To become a master, and thereby to open a workshop, take apprentices and join the guild's governance, a journeyman was required to produce a masterpiece, a single item demonstrating full command of the craft, submitted for judgement by the existing masters. That structure trained people effectively and became progressively harder to enter, since masters had an interest in limiting competition, so that by the later medieval period the masterpiece requirement and the associated fees were being used to restrict entry to sons and relatives of existing masters.

The trade regulation is the part usually remembered and the guild was also a social institution. It operated as a mutual insurance society, supporting members who were sick or injured, providing for widows and orphans, paying for funerals and maintaining almshouses, which in the absence of any state provision was the principal safety net available to an urban craftsman. It was a religious fraternity, with a patron saint, an altar or chapel in a parish church, masses for dead members and participation in processions. It regulated conduct between members, adjudicating disputes and punishing behaviour that reflected badly on the trade. And it was a political unit, since in many towns civic government was organised through the guilds, with council seats allocated to them and the wealthier guilds dominating, which is why the livery companies of London retain a formal role in the City's government and why several European town halls were built by guild money.

The historical assessment has swung considerably. The traditional view, from Adam Smith onward, treats guilds as monopolistic conspiracies against the public that raised prices, blocked innovation and retarded economic growth, and Smith wrote about them with real hostility. Revisionist economic history has argued that they solved genuine problems, providing credible quality assurance in markets where a buyer could not assess a product, supplying the enforcement that made long apprenticeships worth entering for both parties, and transmitting skills that had no other institutional home. The counter-revisionist position, argued at length by Sheilagh Ogilvie, marshals evidence that the rent-seeking dominated, that guilds excluded women, Jews and migrants systematically, that they suppressed competing techniques, and that the regions where they weakened earlier grew faster. What is not disputed is that they declined from the seventeenth century as rural production outside their jurisdiction expanded, as merchant capitalists organised work outside the towns, and as states abolished them, which France did in 1791 and other countries followed.

A guild controlled entry to a trade, the length and content of apprenticeship, quality standards, prices and the size of any member's workshop, backed by a legal charter. Its three-stage career of apprentice, journeyman and master, with a masterpiece submitted for judgement, supplied vocabulary still in use and became a mechanism for excluding outsiders. It was also a mutual insurance society, a religious fraternity and a political bloc in town government. Historians dispute whether it solved genuine quality and training problems or mainly extracted rents.