Guild and State

European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present

Antony Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138524644
• eBook ISBN: 9781351516549
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Guild and State examines the values of social solidarity and fraternity that emerged from medieval guilds and city-communes, and the effect of traditional corporate organization of labor on socioeconomic attitudes and theories of the state. What ordinary guildsmen and townsmen thought about these issues can be gleaned from chronicles, charters, and reported slogans. But in tracing attitudes toward the guilds of early Germanic times to today's equivalent-trade unions-a distinction must be made between popular "ethos" and learned "philosophy." In Europe, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, the corporate organization of labor and of town-market communities developed side-by-side with the ideals of personal liberty, market freedom, and legal equality. Self-governing labor organizations and civil freedom developed together as coherent practices. The values of mutual aid and craft honor on the one hand, and of personal freedom and legal equality on the other, formed the moral infrastructure of our civilization. Alternate ideals balanced, harmonized, and even cross-fertilized one another-as in the principle of freedom of association. Contrary to preconceptions, however, corporate values were seldom expressed philosophically in the Middle Ages. Political theory and the world of learning from the start emphasized liberal values. It was only after the Reformation that guild and communal values found expression in political theory. Even then only a few philosophers acknowledged that solidarity and exchange-the poles around which the values of guild and civil society, respectively, rotate-are not opposites but complementary, and attempted to weave these together into a texture as tough and complex as that of urban society itself. By showing that the ideals of social solidarity and workers' rights have often been intertwined with liberty and equality rather than in opposition to them, this book provides an unexpected explanation and rationale for the "Third Way." The Enlightenment and industrialization led to an apotheosis of liberal values. Guilds disappeared and were only in part replaced by labor unions; the values of market exchange have since been in the ascendant-though Hegel, Durkheim, and more recently, advocates of liberal corporatism maintain the possibility of a symbiosis between corporate and liberal values. In Guild and State there emerges an alternative history of political thought, which will be fascinating to the general as well as the specialist reader.

Part I
From 1050 to the Reformation

In the first part, we shall consider the development of guilds in general and of craft-guilds in particular (ch.l), and the ethos enshrined in them, together with learned writings about them, which are virtually confined to the great medieval jurists (ch.2). Then we shall consider the emergence of an opposite set of values focused upon personal liberty and market exchange (ch.3). From then on, we shall be chiefly concerned with ideas about political institutions and structures in so far as these appear to reflect the influence of one or the other of these patterns of thought. This will take us, first, to the early urban communes, to the development of civic life and some kind of civic culture in Europe (ch.4); then to the craft 'revolutions' of the later Middle Ages, and the ideology of the more developed cities and city-states (ch.5). Secondly, it takes us into scholastic and juristic ideas about civic communities and, to a limited extent, states in general (ch.6): Marsiglio emerges here as a unique example of a kind of 'corporatist' philosophy in the medieval world (ch.7). In the Renaissance, Bruni applied the ideas of civil society to the state and Machiavelli replaced communal concepts with republican virtu (ch.8). The Reformation reawoke communal stirrings in Germany and produced the first articulation of the guild-town ethos (ch.9).

1
The Guild: History

To most of us today the term 'guild' suggests either a professional organization (the Writers' Guild, for example), or the craft-guilds of medieval Europe. But guild in the Germanic languages (more often, in this context, spelled 'gild') originally meant 'fraternities of young warriors practising the cult of heroes' (Le Bras 1940-1, 316n.), and then any group bound together by ties of rite and friendship, offering mutual support to its members upon payment of their entry fee (geld). In its first known use, some time before AD 450, the word gilda signified a sacrificial meal. This was accompanied by religious libation and the cult of the dead. The sacred banquet, signifying social solidarity, was, and remained throughout medieval times, 'an essential mark of all guilds' (Coornaert 1947, 31; Wilda 1831, 29ff.), which were sometimes actually known as convivia.

Although de facto the craft-guild became to a considerable extent hereditary, guilds in general differed from the caste, which in India functioned partly as a craft group (Lambert 1891, 15—16), on account of the voluntary nature of the bond, which rested not on hereditary status but on the mutual oath, on artificial rather than blood fraternity. The early social guild formed one basis for the later craft-guild, an evolution which may (using Durkheim's language) be described as the development of 'segments' into 'organs' of society: that is, groups originally general and identical in function gradually assumed specialized and differentiated roles in particular branches of economic life. They were indeed the cells of a new kind of society.

Although social groups of this kind have probably had a wider variety of functions, greater diffusion, and a more continuous and varied history in medieval and modern Europe than elsewhere, they are by no means peculiar to Germanic culture. In several tribal societies, young men form distinct groups. Male drinking clubs played an important role in ancient Greece. The Roman collegia (also called corpora, sodalitia), which included social clubs, burial societies and cultic groups, went back 'earlier than recorded history', being mentioned in the Twelve Tables as an imitation of a Greek model (Duff 1938, 103). All such groups were artificial families which differentiated themselves, like the natural family, from the outside world. They have their own special ethos. Sometimes they have played a part in specifying the moral obligations of their members and even, like peer groups, in forming their members' moral consciousness. The modern world too is shot through with such groups. The typical modern private association is more specialized and less tightly-knit, without the same serious and permanent obligations of 'brotherhood' and 'friendship'. Regiments, schools and a variety of 'old-boy networks' bind people together as select groups with a common interest and ethos. Such groups operate, for good or ill, as a counterbalance to the modern state with its legal impartiality and meritocratic criteria. The phenomenon of peer-groups and gangs even suggests a general human tendency to form groups of this kind.

The development of political clubs in the late Roman Republic led to a general suppression of colleges under the consulate of Cicero, and again by Caesar. Augustus stabilized their position as friendly societies for religious purposes, burial and other forms of mutual aid; a distinction now emerged between 'licit' and 'illicit' colleges (Duff 1938, 107-8). To this dates back the juristic and political tradition according to which such guilds are subject to the common law and to government, require a special licence and may be dissolved by the state, and should be excluded from politics (Duff 1938, 110-11, 117).

During the Germanic settlement of northern and western Europe, from the fifth to the tenth centuries, the guilds played an especially important role as a form of social organization not dependent on blood ties but sacred in character, providing security as 'artificial families' (Le Bras 1940-1, 362-3; Michaud-Quantin 1970, 180). Known as gildonia, confratriae or convivia, they were at first most common in lower Germania, Frisia and the Low Countries (Coornaert 1947, 28). They were mutual support groups, an alternative to feudal relations in an age of acute instability when something more than family bonds was required. If their primary religious function was service of the dead, their primary moral ethos was summed up in the oath enjoining 'an obligation of mutual aid' (Bloch 1961, 420). Their members were not necessarily of equal social status, and they might include women (Coornaert 1947, 37; Wilda 1831, 33—4); but within the group the oath was taken not to a single leader or lord but to each other. Their functions were now extended to all kinds of mutual protection: burial funds, support for poor members or dependents of deceased members, an insurance service in case of fire or shipwreck (Coornaert 1947, 37-40; Michaud-Quantin 1970,182—5; Wilda 1831,119ff., 125ff). Their ties were expressed as 'brotherhood' and 'friendship': guilds were confratriae, their members confratres, forming an amicitia (Coornaert 1947,34; Wilda 1831, 124). These ties extended to mutual needs arising from social as well as natural causes: guildsmen must support one another in their quarrels and vendettas, and protect each other from outsiders, even if they have committed a crime (Wilda 1831,124—9, 138). 'For friendship as well as for vengeance we shall remain united, come what may', said the London guild ordinances of the tenth century (Bloch 1961, 420). Guilds settled disputes among their own members, exercising over them a kind of jurisdiction (Coornaert 1947, 34; Wilda 1831, 136-7). The ties contracted in the guild acquired a sacred character from the mutual oath; it was a clearly-defined relationship with specific rights and duties.

These social guilds provoked the opposition of lords and bishops, of the Lombard kings and Carolingian emperors: they were accused of orgiastic rites, drunkenness and lasciviousness. Their rites were suspect to the church, their secrecy to lay rulers too. They made claims, quasi-legal in character, which were bound to stand in the way of feudal lordship and any would-be state. The mutual oath made them appear dangerous; as Cicero and Caesar had banned the Roman collegia as politically subversive, so medieval rulers from time to time charged guilds with the crime of sworn conspiracy (coniuratio) (Michaud-Quantin 1970, 229-30; Wilda 1831, 39-40). As time went on the term coniuratio, an accurate enough description of the guilds, became less pejorative in some contexts, being applied without disfavour to some early urban communes.

During the Dark Ages guilds were gradually Christianized. This obviously affected their religious character; yet in this and other matters their functions were transformed rather than radically altered. Prayers were offered for the departed; guilds adopted patron saints. Since so little is known about the moral language of the pre-Christian guilds, it is difficult to know whether what now emerged as the central guild values — brotherhood, friendship, mutual aid — derived from Christian or Germanic origin. Whatever was the case, these were from now on the essential components of guild moral sentiment. On the other hand, the private execution of justice was forbidden by higher authority and on the whole dwindled in importance.

Many guilds called themselves 'confraternities', as did other groups formed under ecclesiastical influence for pious and charitable purposes, which also had a guild-like organization. Some of these performed charitable work in local society outside their own ranks; some extended to the whole local population (Duparc 1975). Since, on the one hand, such 'grass-roots' organizations of clergy and laymen — in some ways akin to South American 'basic ecclesial communities' today — had previously been frowned upon by the church, and, on the other hand, Germanic guilds had previously confined mutual aid to small groups, this may be seen as a fusion of the Christian ideals of the universal brotherhood of believers and of charity to all men, with the Germanic institution of the guild; or, as an expression of the one through the other (cf. Le Bras 1940—1, esp. 324; Michaud-Quantin 1970, 129ff.). Throughout the Middle Ages, and often beyond, many villages contained one or more such confraternities, sometimes embracing the whole parish community; their basic principle, says Le Bras, was 'spiritual mutuality' (1940—1, 314). This was a territorialization of the guild, a process which contributed not a little to the communal movement in town and countryside during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Like the original guilds, their activities focused upon the communal feast, usually once a year, at which food was distributed to the poor (Duparc 1975; Heers 1973, 322-3, 326). They might include a wide diversity of social ranks and a high proportion of women (Heers, 1973, 328).

The other new development at the end of the Dark Ages was the use of the guild organization by merchants. As Coornaert points out, the Dark Age guild was peculiarly suited to the needs of merchants: mutual aid and insurance against natural or human hazards provided the social instruments by which both long-distance merchants and the local trading community could operate in a period of instability (1947, 45, 50-3). Sometimes, however, 'merchant guild' referred simply to the trading element in a local community, particularly in a fiscal context; not all members were necessarily professional merchants.

The first known medieval European craft-guilds appeared around 1100 in Italy, the Rhineiand and the Low Countries, and they proceeded to spread very quickly over western Europe. It has been suggested that their formal appearance was a rationalization of an already existing practice (Mickwitz 1936, 233; cf. Coornaert 1947, 209). The origin of their existence and of their organization has been disputed and remains obscure (Thrupp 1963, 233). Were they a continuation, or perhaps revival, of the craft colleges of the Roman Empire, or were they a specialization of the Germanic social guild? Mickwitz argues the former as most probable for Italy, and suggests that the practice may even have been borrowed from Constantinople (1936, 166-235). In any case, the degree of continuity is unclear; the Lombard kingdom set up a coiners' guild in the seventh century (to control the money supply?). Coornaert stresses continuity with the Germanic social guilds in view of shared features: the mutual oath, insurance against sickness, poverty and death, ceremonial drinking and communal feasting. This seems highly probable for northern Europe, where many craft-guilds called themselves 'fraternities' from the start; indeed, a similar evolution may well have taken place in the early Roman Republic. In the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries some craft-guilds arose as splinter groups of small retailer-craftsmen out of the all-embracing merchant guild, dominated now by big merchants (Martines 1980, 47). On the other hand, the term 'gild' was less often used of crafts, which in official documents tended to be called arte, métier, Zunft. Craft-guilds seem to have spoken less often of 'mutual aid' than either social guilds or territorial fraternities and communes. Another possibility, particularly in view of the widespread appearance of craft-guilds in other artisan cultures, is that this was a more or less natural and spontaneous response to the needs of manual workers, or a social expression of handicraft production itself (as Unwin (1904) suggests: cf. Martines 1980, 47). But the form of organization (see pp. 23-4), and much of the ethos, appear to have been carried over from the social guilds which were already so widespread in northern Europe. This could be described as a process of secularization (see pp. 63-4). That a living tradition of cultic association was at hand may help explain the relatively sudden diffusion of craft-guilds in the twelfth century, and their peculiar prominence in European culture; that it was being secularized may explain the steady adoption of more practical, less affective language.

Analogous institutions certainly existed among merchants and craftsmen in other parts of the world, for example in China, Japan, India, and in medieval and modern Islam (Klein 1967, 164—8; Weber 1958, 83—4, 87— 8). Hobsbawm suggests that artisan guilds are 'a type of organization which appears to be quite universal wherever and whenever there are preindustrial cities' (1971, 108, 111). In ancient Rome, numerous trades had their own colleges, but from Augustus onwards these functioned only in specified trades under state licence (Duff 1938, 109ff., 126, 148, 150—1). The European crafts seem, in general, to be characterized by a greater degree of independence, at least in the Middle Ages; they functioned in every artisan calling, and, like the European economy itself, underwent a process of continuous development. There may even, as we shall see, be some continuity with the modern labour union under industrial capitalism, which may be seen as a response to needs in some ways analogous to those experienced in the early Middle Ages. Likewise, some trade unions evolved out of friendly societies and manifested the same qualities of brotherhood and mutual support, in short moral ties (see pp. 175-6). There are further similarities with the evolution of the medieval crafts both in cases where trade unions have in their turn become powerful and monopolistic, and in cases where they have become integrated into the governmental process in a system which has been called 'liberal corporatism'.

Were craft-guilds set up by the authorities (lord or town council) or on the initiative of their own members? Again, there would appear to be considerable variety over Europe: there are cases of crafts agitating for corporate recognition and also of towns determining the number of permitted craft associations, usually in collusion with the larger merchants and the more powerful crafts themselves.

In the craft-guild, the 'mystery' of craftsmanship is joined with the dynamic of the pressure group; skill and endurance, on which life and progress depend, are powered by a specific social bond. Craft-guilds varied enormously, not only in the trades or crafts pursued, but in size, social status and the wealth of their members. Although in many cases they developed out of groups of a social and religious character, they were primarily characterized by a concern for economic and above all artisan-manufacturing interests and policies. They were formed specifically to oversee and to regulate the activities of all practitioners of a given craft in the region controlled by the town. While recent scholarship has tended to play down their social and religious affiliations, it seems clear that they in fact combined juridical, political, religious and social aspirations, but that the economic motive of establishing corporate monopoly was primary; it was this which specifically brought together all those engaged in a single craft (Mickwitz 1936,156—62). The economic policy of the merchant guilds and early towns was aimed at maximizing the volume of trade and the consequent benefits to the town and its own merchants: all goods passing nearby must go through the town, tolls must be paid, a certain amount of handling must fall to local men, and so on. The craft-guilds, on the other hand, were concerned with maintaining a steady volume of business for their members. Their chief aims were a satisfactory standard of workmanship and a fair price for its products (Rörig 1967, 150-1; Thrupp 1963, 254), and the restriction of 'the number of apprentices a master might keep, the hours he might work and the tools he could use' (Hibbert 1963, 214). There was thus a mixture of public spirit and self-interest in craft-guild policies. These were particularly entangled over prices. Guilds were 'concerned that a good product should be sold at a fair pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• PART I FROM 1050 TO THE REFORMATION
• PART II FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
• PART III FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT
• CONCLUSION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• APPENDIX: A NOTE ON METHOD
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY (2002)
• NAME INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX