Craft Guilds

11 Key excerpts on "Craft Guilds"

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  The Organization of Ancient Economies

  A Global Perspective

  • Kenneth Hirth(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  basis of a common profession, artisans continued to work independently of one another in their individual shops and workshops. The origin of Craft Guilds in medieval Europe was a function of both economic and historical processes. Crafting as an economic process was built into the domestic economy. In addition to being important to the subsistence livelihoods of households who practiced it, skilled artisans (smiths, tanners, saddlers, carpenters, weavers, harness makers, etc.) were indispensable for the operation of rural manorial estates. Craft Guilds developed historically within the independent towns across Europe. Rural artisans could achieve a level of independence by moving to towns and practicing their crafts under the jurisdiction of town lords independent of manorial control. Towns became the seats of craft groups who produced for the local and broader regional market. The prerogatives of artisans to town lords included forms of town service and some form of tax or rent payment. As guilds developed and became stronger over time, they sought to free themselves from these obligations, often converting them to a fixed payment for the group as a whole (Weber 2003a:149). While it can be argued whether the Roman collegia did or did not operate as guilds (Epstein 1991:11–13; Finley 1985:138), it was not until the 12th century AD that guilds began to flourish in many urban centers across Europe. 28 As might be expected, guilds grew rapidly in cities located along important trade routes. By the middle of the 13th century, guilds were well established, with as many as 101 separate guilds operating in the city of Paris in AD 1260 (Braudel 1986:315). Craft Guilds were first and foremost protectionist organizations. They were designed to protect the livelihood of their members and the integrity of their craft. They regulated work and working conditions, and attempted to build a monopoly against outside competition.

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  Women at Work in Preindustrial France

  • Daryl M. Hafter(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Penn State University Press

    (Publisher)

  Born in the ateliers of the Middle Ages, they conformed to the requirements of the craft in their particular economic environment. They emerged throughout feudal Europe, tied to individual cities by family links and political inXuence. Guilds developed naturally from the domestic production of urban families. Their earliest records, from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, show them to be as much a part of the urban evolution as city charters and annual fairs. The development of crafts and the honing of particular skills depended on population centers large enough to accommodate spe- cialization. Their techniques expanded only as quickly as workers could master the available natural resources. Skills grew out of earlier experi- mentation with tools in rural areas and housing clusters, based on the medieval need to make the most of the small supply of labor. A nearby river that could accommodate mills or a source of copper that could be extracted, for instance, lent particular advantages to a locale and shaped its development. Traditional practices of working with particular mate- rials might point artisans in special directions, for example, the gold and silver workers of Florence or the woolen workers of Flanders. Guilds grew out of the resources and the product needs of cities. It is easy to see why these associations emerged as family businesses, since tools and materials took over the living space in workers’ homes and dominated their days. Every family member was drawn into the process, from the young children running to get wood to the wife Wnishing the process or weaving on an auxiliary loom. The master’s entire family par- ticipated in each guild workshop for their collective support.

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  Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries

  Work, Power, and Representation

  • Catharina Lis, Hugo Soly, Maarten Prak(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  Map 2.1  The Low Countries in the late sixteenth centrury (divided into nine sub-regions)

  key: numbers to the regions in table 2.1

  Put another way, an analysis of the incidence of Craft Guilds (as we have defined them) in the Low Countries by subregion (see map 2.1 ) and subperiod or for a cross section of years, can provide a good basis for a further study of their specific functions later in this book. However, we will not be limiting ourselves to just a series of bare facts. We will also be endeavouring to point out similarities and differences, principally concerning the relationship between the foundation and existence of Craft Guilds on the one hand and demographic, economic and political-institutional developments on the other. One way of doing this is to track as many Craft Guilds as possible in the Low Countries from the early eleventh century until the abolition of the guilds eight hundred years later. For this purpose, datasets for Belgium and Luxembourg and for the Netherlands have been compiled and as much as possible, analysed in a consistent fashion.

  2. The earliest guilds

  The earliest reference to an organization of fellow tradesmen in the Low Countries is almost a thousand years old and comes from Tiel, now in the Dutch province of Gelderland. According to an account written by the monk Alpertus of Metz between 1021 and 1024, an association of merchants existed in Tiel. Apart from having a social function (drinking-bouts were popular), the association also played a role in providing credit and in mediating in trade disputes.2 Soon afterwards, Tiel ceased to be a significant commercial settlement, and the association too disappeared. It is quite possible that associations of fellow tradesmen had existed even earlier in the Roman cities of the Low Countries, but they are not documented for this period — unlike those in the South and southeast of the Empire;3 nor, then, do we have any evidence regarding the possible continuity between such early associations and their later medieval counterparts. We are on firmer ground when we look at the cities founded from the eleventh century onwards. The earliest extant texts we have relate to cities in the extreme northwest of present-day France — governed at that time by the counts of Flanders and Hainault. There, associations of tradesmen developed into permanent organizations, officially recognized by the government, and whose aim it was to secure and defend a monopoly against the claims of fellow citizens and competitors from elsewhere. We know from a charter possibly drawn up around 1067 that the city of Valenciennes in Hainault had an organization of cloth merchants; a similar document dating from 1072–1083 has survived for Sint Omaars in Artois.4 Other larger urban agglomerations, almost all of which lay south of the line between Maastricht and Antwerp at that time (the main exception being Utrecht), might also have had such organizations, but no written documentation has survived.5

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  The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900

  • Geoffrey Crossick(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These were a town’s most basic institutions, bridging the private world of economic interests and the public sphere of urban government and ritual. Municipal governments saw in guilds a means to police both production standards and labour and market relations. Guild formation was encouraged in much of North-Western Europe from the fifteenth century onwards, and through the early modern period they became intermediary bodies for the regulation of prices, quality and the behaviour of apprentices and journeymen. 74 In much of Europe artisanal corporations sustained the civic as well as the social order of the town, often constituting the institutional core of urban government. They were not generally dominant – though where the urban patriciate was rooted in local mercantile activity they might maintain their corporate links – but they frequently played a significant role. In early sixteenth-century Augsburg, for example, a careful equilibrium of patrician and guild power saw the guilds overwhelmingly dominant on the Great Council, but in a more careful balance with wealthy patricians on the more influential Small Council. 75 Those may have constituted the peak years for guild masters in German urban politics for, as Friedrichs shows in his essay, artisanal representation on city councils declined during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In much of early modern Europe the right to practise a trade as a master, the rights of citizenship, and the rights of residence were closely related, especially in the German areas of Central Europe, and even within the rather different institutional setting of England until the seventeenth century a man often had to be free of the city to practise an independent economic activity

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  The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories

  Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914

  • John T. Chalcraft(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  In this way guilds protected the market share of their members, as well as maintaining production to provision the city. Further, ownership of a fixed gedik (which gave the artisan the right to practice in particular premises) lent guild members important leverage against the landlords seeking to evict them or to raise rents. 38 Guild control over new membership was also the mechanism by which the guilds could maintain their reputation and guarantee the quality of their work, which in turn worked to ensure the livelihoods of their members. 39 This feature of craft corporate activity was only regulated by the government in exceptional cases. Raymond gives an example of where the agha “examined the workers who proposed to exer- cise the profession of goldsmiths, and levied a due on all those which he admitted to the mastership.” 40 This unusual situation resulted from the particularly crucial role that goldsmiths played in monetary activity. Third, although recent research has been less than clear on this point, Baer’s claim that “any strong sense of belonging to a guild and being proud of it” was “more or less absent” is rather too emphatic a generaliza- tion, given the state of the evidence to which he had access, and is certainly not the last word on the subject. 41 Guilds at some level formed a commu- nity for crafts and service workers in particular professions. First, although it is not known how widespread initiation ceremonies were in the eigh- teenth century, descriptions of such ceremonies continue to appear for various guilds into the nineteenth century. Lane’s reference to the shadd Crafts and Guilds Before 1863 21 ceremony, 42 involving the binding of the girth of an initiate with a sash tied with knots and performed “when a son is admitted a member of some body of tradesmen or artisans,” is well known.

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  State and Crafts in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)

  • Christine Moll-Murata(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  Conversely, the guilds with the most influence in municipal governments in the later nineteenth century were merchant guilds that could af ford to finance the ‘liturgical service’ of charity, maintaining infrastructure, and installing local militia, rather than the Craft Guilds. Relationships within the guilds were hierarchical, and shopowners domi-nated the decisions of the associations. Evidence of separate journeymen’s guilds is from the late nineteenth century. Before that, local authorities would rarely allow journeymen or unskilled labour to set up their own guilds or to formulate unilateral guild regulations in existing guilds where employers and employees were both represented. Craft Guilds survived until the twentieth century, even if central govern-ments tried to eliminate and transform them into bodies that could be more easily controlled than the traditional associations. However, the Qing government did not touch the Craft Guilds. By the 1920s and 1930s, the formally acknowledged guilds slowly disappeared, but groups that had always existed as proto-guilds remained. Religious associations and the veneration of a common patron saint played an important role from early on and could also serve as a rationale of occupational assembly until the mid-twentieth century. In the Republican era, industrial workers in the cities probably preferred to organize themselves in workers’ unions rather than to join the tradi-tional guilds. Power and decision-making structures in unions were more democratic, while in the pre-existing guilds, the masters frequently decided questions of price fix ing, wages, and hours of work among themselves. 110 Moreover, membership in trade unions had to remain voluntary, unlike in the traditional system in which persuasion and pressure could be applied informally in order to make everybody in the trade or from a particular home region join the guild. Instances of fusion of guilds with labour unions were also reported.

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  Geographies of Making, Craft and Creativity

  • Laura Price, Harriet Hawkins, Laura Price, Harriet Hawkins(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Craft Guilds certainly have an enduring presence in the UK context: they emerged as powerful trade institutions in the early modern period; experienced a revival in association with the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th century; and developed in a new form as practitioner-led networks during the 20th century. One of the enduring features of the guild system is the necessary achievement of standard of skill in order to join, recognising that members are professional makers, using their craft skills to secure their livelihood. This requirement of ‘standard’ in order to join a guild was established within the medieval guild system. Medieval guilds had strict regulations of standards, offered a system for the division of labour in the market, offered a degree of care for the welfare of their members, and sought to enable the intergenerational passing on of skill and standard through the training of apprentices. Although there are debates amongst economic historians on whether these practices fostered innovation or stagnation (see Richardson, 2001; Richardson, 2004), the standard was seen as a mark of trust in the quality of a person’s work, and this ‘stamp’ of approval continues to be a powerful signifier of the guild ideal. Although the guild system was weakened by the time of the industrial revolution in the UK, the 19th century saw a revival of guild ideals through the anti-industrial critiques and the spirit of new-medievalism in the Victorian period. The 19th century socialist Arts and Crafts Movement railed against the demeaning impacts of mass production, and promoted the standards of medieval hand-skilled labour and collective workshop organisation. Such sentiments were found in the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris and through figures such as Charles R. Ashbee, a noted architect and designer of silver and jewellery. For Ashbee, ‘The Arts and Crafts movement then, if it means anything, means Standard, whether of work or of life, the protection of Standard, whether in the product or in the producer, and it means that these two things must be taken together’ (Ashbee, 1908: p.10). His reflections on standards were written in 1908 shortly after he moved his workshops called the ‘Guild of Handicrafts’ from London to Chipping Camden in rural Gloucestershire. This enterprise was ultimately to fail, but Ashbee had attempted to run his workshop with a vision of a standard that brought together the value of craft and human labour.

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  The Organization of Craft Work

  Identities, Meanings, and Materiality

  • Emma Bell, Gianluigi Mangia, Scott Taylor, Maria Laura Toraldo, Emma Bell, Gianluigi Mangia, Scott Taylor, Maria Laura Toraldo(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These two organisational case studies enabled us to collect data from a large cohort of professional designer-makers who have successfully forged their livelihood in rural areas. Understanding their motivations for joining a membership organisation, and their reasons for supporting it enabled us to learn about the professional needs of crafts practitioners in the contemporary creative economy. Paying attention to the way in which makers value their guild membership and the practices of the guild enabled us to consider what makes these organisations robust communities of practice. We should guard against over-romanticising such organisations simply because they have been sustained over long periods of time. Instead we should use them to understand how organisations might serve the needs of contemporary craft workers, and the challenges for enabling dispersed rural creative workers to gain the advantages of working together in mutually supportive ways.

  The original impetus to undertake this research was recognition that for several decades guild organisations had successfully served a growing membership and navigated the challenges of sustaining a grass-roots, volunteer maker-led network. Each guild had followed a slightly different path with varying degrees of professional administration but maintained their status as member-led organisations. For a sector that is dominated by sole practitioners, the organisations offered something that makers valued, and wished to invest in, year after year. The creative industries sector often overlooks the crafts, as a sector of limited economic value; however, Craft Guilds, as modes of organisational support, may in fact offer much to the wider creative economy (see also Luckman (2015: 27 and 63) for an acknowledgment of the place of Craft Guilds in the creative economy). They have shown how it is possible to sustain and improve the livelihoods of dispersed creative workers who wish to connect to their peers, gain validation, receive recognition and ensure that the outputs of their creative labour are appropriately placed in the market.

  Achieving Membership within a Craft Community of Practice

  To join the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen or the Devon Guild of Craftsmen a maker must put forward an application including examples of their work and a written explanation of their craft practice. Both guilds have committees which meet to discuss prospective members’ work and to judge it against their collective understanding of what makes up ‘guild quality’. This takes into account the skill of the maker, their individual style and design qualities, quality of the product and attention placed on the finish of the work. A maker is expected to have a style that is recognisably theirs, not derivative, and individual elements are expected to make up a coherent portfolio of work. Both guilds accept makers who have professional standards, with Associate membership being available for those who are starting out on their career path.

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  The European Guilds

  An Economic Analysis

  • Sheilagh Ogilvie(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Guilds were most robust in European societies where there were virtually no towns that were guild-free or that had guild-free crafts and trades. In most of German-speaking central Europe, Scandinavia, and Spain, from c. 1500 onwards governments increasingly made the guild system standard and universal, both for fis-cal reasons and to prevent conflict between guilded and guild-free towns. Spain, for instance, had no guild-free cities, and guilds increasingly extended their regulation into small towns and rural areas from the later fifteenth century onwards. 113 In the German territory of Württemberg, the sixteenth century saw all crafts compulsorily organized into district-level guilds that regulated both towns and villages. 114 In Swe-den, the national guild code required any craftsman in a town lacking a guild in that 111 Deceulaer 1996, 189–202. 112 Archer 1991, 114–15; Carlin 1994, 226–27. 113 Enciso 1982, 1–3; Thomson 1996, 88, 90; Torras 1998 [Small Towns], 92, 95–96; Molas Ribalta 2002, 216; Casado Alonso 2004, 314; Navarro 2013, 104. 114 Raiser 1978. 540 • Chapter 9 occupation to join the relevant guild in another town; the only exception was Eskil-tuna, founded in 1771 as a deliberate exception—a “free town” without guilds. 115 On the other end of the spectrum we find societies such as England and the Northern Netherlands, where guilds were absent from a surprising number of towns and occupations. 116 In England, even in the medieval period there were virtually guild-free towns such as Wilton (famous for carpet-making), where all guilds but one disappeared in the thirteenth century and the final guild vanished in the fifteenth, creating a safe haven for one of the few permanent Jewish communities in England. 117 More English towns lost their guilds permanently after 1546, when the crown abol-ished religious guilds and confiscated the religious property of Craft Guilds.

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  Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East

  Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean

  • Suraiya Faroqhi, Randi Deguilhem(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  Although guilds rapidly declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is, in a period with relatively ample documentation, very little research on this question has as yet CRAFTS AND CRAFTSMEN OF THE MIDDLE EAST 30 been undertaken. Thus, John Chalcraft, who has studied this momentous development with respect to the Egyptian case, must be regarded as a real pioneer. Chalcraft takes issue with the notion, invoked by the few authors who have reflected on the guilds’ demise, that it was the collapse of Ottoman handicraft production, due to the importation of European factory-made goods, which led to the dissolution of craft organisations. According to the existing secondary literature on Egypt, the matter is quite simple: artisans disappeared and guilds dis-appeared with them. By contrast, Chalcraft proposes a more sophisticated model. Basing himself on Donald Quataert’s study of the survival strategies of nineteenth century Ottoman craftsmen, he points out that it was exactly those strategies that made the guilds appear increasingly irrelevant. 62 In an attempt to escape ruinous taxation, handicraft production moved from the urban centres, particularly from Cairo, to the countryside, where guilds had never existed. 63 In addition, at least in the textile sector, women, who also had not been guild members in the past, were employed in their homes at derisory wages. Rural textile production, under-taken by a labour force in which wretchedly poor females formed a significant share, could, of course, function only because of the capital investment of merchants who operated a putting-out system. And, as is well known from studies of putting-out systems in other cultures, the survival of guilds in such an environment is difficult if not impossible.

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  The Later Medieval City

  1300-1500

  • David Nicholas(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  55 Several criteria determined the status of trades:

  1. The antiquity of the guild;
  2. Its strategic value to the survival of the community, such as through food procurement or production;
  3. Whether the local market was large;
  4. Whether the local market was captive;
  5. Whether the guild controlled the supply of raw materials that its craft manufactured into consumer goods;
  6. Whether the guild’s product could be exported outside the city;
  7. Whether the trade was unhygienic;
  8. Whether it offered access to wholesale trading or control of strategic commodities.

  Rising mobility was clearly in trade, which was less regimented than industry, and in guilds with an export market.

  The rank order of the guilds in civic processions is a key to their standing. It was not invariable and combined elements of prestige with size of membership, particularly in places that were still giving corporate recognition to new trades. Direct access to the market was thus important, and guilds that sold finished products had higher rank than those whose members merely laboured. In 1392 the council of Valencia fixed the order in which the twenty-four guilds would appear during royal entries. The butchers led, followed by the silkworkers, tanners, tawyers, cutlers, drum makers, bakers, mat makers, weavers, fishmongers, smiths, millers, animal brokers, carpenters. The list ended with tailors, silversmiths (both of which were among the most prestigious trades elsewhere), curriers and cloth preparers. By 1459 there were twenty-nine recognised trades, with butchers still at the top, followed by tawyers, lacemakers, masons, manual labourers, tanners, and the others in roughly the same order except for some new trades.56

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