Merchant Guilds

12 Key excerpts on "Merchant Guilds"

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  Women at Work in Preindustrial France

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

    (Publisher)

  Having grouped together as a means of protecting their trade from competition in a medieval economic resurgence, the guilds formed cooperative associations that acquired prestige and power in their municipalities. As the locus of skilled work, guilds imparted training and commercial monopolies to their members. They drew trades into units that o¤ered prestige, Wscal beneWts, and social organization, bringing potential trade rivals into bonds of local community and national resource. From the viewpoint of its members, a guild provided a way of life, opportunities in self-government, oªcials to regulate technology and protect them from unauthorized competition, a guaranteed place in town processions, and, Wnally, a burial society. One of the constant elements in guild history is the variety in their structure, membership, products, and technology. Some historians have found their precedents in the trade associations of classical Rome and the Byzantine Empire, but the guilds of the early modern period have a the political economy of guilds  23 4. Étienne Martin Saint-Léon, Histoire des corporations des métiers depuis leurs origins jusqu’à leur suppression en 1791 (Paris, 1922), 208–9 (rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1975). He found guild statutes also dating to the twelfth century. more direct link to the twelfth-century upsurge in trade and manufacture than to the capitalistic factories of ancient Europe. Medieval guilds began as spontaneous trade unions of skilled artisans, who were seeking collec- tive help in fending o¤ the competition stimulated by the new economic dynamism. 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.

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  The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business

  • Teresa da Silva Lopes, Christina Lubinski, Heidi J.S. Tworek, Teresa da Silva Lopes, Christina Lubinski, Heidi J.S. Tworek(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Venetian’s account, however, shows that guild members could also contribute to the overall prosperity of England’s economy. Guild members allowed natural resources to reach international markets, and their craft skills added value to raw materials. Guild officials policed the quality of the goods distributed and manufactured by members, allowing customers to shop with confidence and contributing to the positive reputation of English products. Guild members also contributed to the economic performance of the town in which they were located. A large town or city, such as London, might have many specialist guilds producing a wide range of consumer products that attracted buyers for the domestic and global markets. An overview of crafts and companies in London in 1328–1518 demonstrates that, in the area of metal working alone, there were guilds of “armourers, bladesmiths, braziers, cardmakers [who made combs for carding wool], coppersmiths, cutlers, ferrours, founders, goldsmiths, ironmongers, latteners, lorimers, pewterers, pinners, plumbers, smiths, spurries and wiresellers” (Barron 2004: 220).

  Early discussion of guilds

  Having considered the views of a medieval commentator, it is useful to examine the views of the earliest academics who studied the operation of guilds. Scholars have varied in their emphasis or marginalization of the functions of religious observance, social interaction, and trade promotion. They have also differed in their opinions on the benefits that guilds provided to individual members and to the overall economic performance of the town or city in which they were based (Richardson 2001).

  Gross is credited with establishing guilds as a field of study. Focusing on the Merchant Guilds of medieval England, Gross emphasized their contribution to the regulation of trade at the local level (1890: 37). He was especially interested in the relationship between Merchant Guilds and local government and viewed the merchant guild as essentially “a department of town administration” whose members had the right to trade freely in the town, usually in return for a small entrance fee (

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  The Global Foundations of Public Relations

  Humanism, China and the West

  • Robert E. Brown, Burton St. John III, Jenny Zhengye Hou, Robert E. Brown, Burton St. John III, Jenny Zhengye Hou(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In London, the Merchant Adventurers had extensive and not atypical powers, including The right to hold a court with power to make ordinances and to enforce them by fines and punishments. The jurisdiction of this court, as in the case of other gilds, was not only supported by the mayor, but, since it was implicitly delegated by him, was exercised strictly in subordination to him. (Carus-Wilson, 1933, p. 160) This idea of business as an assertive, collective, unapologetic and very public activity owed much to the conjunction of humanism and reputation man-agement in the public sphere. The demand for money by warring kings, the concentration of business in small and privileged cities, and the charity, art, religious patronage, and networks of great trading and banking houses and of guilds had played their part in projecting a powerful, secular, humanist identity for Europe’s merchants, business people, and craftsmen (at least to those that mattered: the church, the monarchy, customers, and fellow-traders). Guilds developed and closely managed their own personalities, a benefit for business practitioners and perhaps too for their towns. The two groups might work together to secure local monopolies, regulating but not entirely excluding competitors (Richardson, 2001). That might be done by the right to set local professional standards which controlled membership as well as trade. Guilds, traders, and merchants had discovered the real advantages of managing their secular public identities with as much if not more care than the church or a ruler. For its social impact alone reputation management by merchants and guilds is as significant to humanism as Petrarch’s writings. Humanism needed cit-ies. Cities needed trade, banks, and crafts. Church and state needed money, artifacts, and trade. Business needed a good earthly and heavenly reputation. Mercantile PR in later medieval Europe was stimulated by these intersections and stimulated humanism in the process.

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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)

  But guilds did play an important role in sounding out the opinions of artisans during politically troubled times, as subsequent centuries were to prove. 14 Map 2.2 Inhabitants per guild c. 1400 Turning now to developments in the various sectors of the medieval urban economy, it is apparent that by 1400 the guilds had fully matured. While at first only merchants and woollen workers had guilds, within a few centuries a whole range of occupations had become organized particularly in industry. In the Southern Netherlands industry was somewhat more important than in the North, but transport in the Northern Netherlands was relatively more important than in the South. The distribution of guilds across the various sectors was fairly stable and after 1400 most new guilds probably resulted from existing guilds being split up. The North was somewhat more dynamic than the South — the result largely of the great expansion in services in the North from the end of the sixteenth century. Before concluding this section on developments in the Middle Ages, we would like to touch on the formal labour relations within the craft guilds. As noted earlier, the organizations discussed here generally included only masters. Occasionally, there were separate associations of journeymen and apprentices. In the case of the Southern Netherlands little research has been carried out into these associations, with the exception of the unusually active journeymen hatters. 15 The journeymen associations we know of from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seem initially to have been organized principally for religious purposes. However, they also served to express a collective identity, and their underlying objective might well have been to defend social and economic interests. 16 Whatever the case, it is clear that here too a critical mass was necessary before associations of journeymen could be formed

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  The Organization of Ancient Economies

  A Global Perspective

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

    (Publisher)

  216 THE ORGANIZATION OF ANCIENT ECONOMIES One of the concerns of merchants was fair trade. They were always directly involved in the operation of the local marketplace, and to the degree possible in fair dealings abroad (Braudel 1986:314–315). The behavior of medieval merchants in Europe was governed in general terms by the lex mercantoria, a body of customary law that varied from region to region. To avoid exploit- ation from local rulers, merchants in Europe lobbied for legal jurisdiction over economic disputes as early as the 9th century AD. In Italy this was confirmed in community charters where merchants claimed the right to establish guild courts to mediate commercial disputes. This was especially important in fairs and marketplaces where merchants needed to have contracts upheld and be able to travel securely without having their goods confiscated to pay the debts of others (Pounds 1994:427–428). It was over a concern for fair merchant practices that led the Reverend Johannes Nider (1966) to write De Contractibus Mercatorum in AD 1468, which is the earliest known printed discussion of business ethics in the western world. His work was intended as a moral guide to business practices that was guided by Christian doctrine. Merchant associations also had more than just economic functions. In the Hanseatic league, merchant associations also had religious, choral, and recre- ational purposes in addition to their professional ones. They shared a house or a meeting hall where they held their meetings, which usually was the most important structure in the community. When merchant associations traded in a single commodity, they often became involved in production to ensure they had a sufficient supply of goods to trade. This was common in China where specialization in a single product (e.g., opium) frequently made membership in a specific merchant association dependent on regional or ethnic origin (Golas 1977:563).

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  Monopolies and Patents

  A Study of the History and Future of the Patent Monopoly

  • Harold G. Fox(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  Instances of abuse of guild' monopoly privileges usually occurred when several guild members combined to enhance and maintain prices unduly, as, e.g., the chandlers of Norwich in 1300, the London lime-burners in 1329, and the London pursers in 1344. Cf. Lipson, Economic History of England; Unwin, Guilds and Companies of London, 92. 30 Cunningham, English Industry and Commerce, I, 341; Riley, Liber Custu-marum, 424. TRADE REGULATION AND THE GUILDS 33 was of profound influence in the growth of the towns. At first independent of municipal authority, it gradually coalesced with it, monopolizing the rights which had originally belonged to all the free inhabitants. This development, arising before the Norman Conquest, occurred chiefly during the two centuries following so that in the reign of Henry II there can be little doubt that the possession of a merchant-guild had become the sign and token of municipal independence; that it was in fact, if not in theory, the governing body of the town in which it was allowed to exist. It is recognized by Glanvill as identical with the communa of the privileged towns, the municipal corporation of the later age. 31 Thus, the charter granted by Henry II to Oxford distinctly laid down the principle that the merchant guild had an exclusive right of regulating trade except in specified cases 32 and in addition, it seems clear that it had also, originally, the right of regulating the craft guilds. While the growth of the towns in England and of the Merchant Guilds as being the regulators and supervisors of trade and commerce and the privileges thereto appertaining within the towns, had much to do with the shaping and trend of the monopoly system, there existed also the influence of the great federation of towns and cities, the Hanseatic League. This was, during the Middle Ages, the most powerful of the commercial institutions.

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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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  Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature

  • R. Ladd(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The key to the social range of merchants and their distinction from similarly prosperous rural gentry comes from a single social institution, the franchise, or the freedom of a town. As we can see in the examples of Brembre, Walworth, and Philpot, in London there was not a single Merchants’ Guild that defined one as a merchant in the later Middle Ages, though several guilds were primarily mercantile. 51 Brembre and Philpot, grocers (sellers of bulk spices, dyes, and other commodities), traded in wool as well, while fishmongers like Walworth could also grow wealthy by investing in wool the profits of London’s dependence on fresh and preserved fish. Instead of there being a single guild of merchants, the franchise in gen- eral diffused the term “merchant” throughout the crafts and urban gentry by allowing a citizen with the franchise of a given town to trade in almost any commodity, at the same time that it labeled any trader a “merchant.” 52 Craft guilds allowed one route to the franchise, but not the only one. For E NGLI SH LI T E R A RY M E RCH A N T S 11 example, in London, the craft guilds collectively with the council of Aldermen controlled access to the franchise and thus to trade, and by the fourteenth century the franchise was available through inheritance, paying a fee (redemption), or through apprenticeship. 53 While in early fourteenth-century London purchasing the freedom from ward alder- men was the more common model (72 percent of freedoms in 1309–12), by mid-century the guilds had used the “Great Charter” of 1319 to gain control of most entries to the franchise. 54 The franchise allowed the estate of merchants to include successful craftspeople, who might then occupy the same social stratum as a member of the gentry who bought the fran- chise. That status could then be inherited. The franchise also granted the potential for, if not the promise of, a wide variety of merchant activity often unrelated to the craft in which an apprentice had succeeded.

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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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  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)

  Whereas a guild had to basically determine and manage its membership structure, there were other factors that could compromise the official rules. The guild, while being a collective organism constituted basically of shops, probably did not exercise full command over the latter. Individual guild members could bring in outsiders by contracting partnerships and sublets. Shop owners, waqf administrators and renter-investors also seem to have had a say in determining who the new practitioner would be since they could select the tenants for their shops from pre-designated trades. Although it is unclear how readily guilds recognised those who came into the trade with these connections, the barriers do not seem to have been insurmountable. As long as such room for encroachment did not create new competition or disorder beyond the level that the established guild masters could tolerate, it seems to not have worried them much. For example, when the numbers and locations of shops involved remained the same, as in the case of sublet or transfer of a shop lease that kept the facilities in place, the established masters did not have reason to be concerned about heightened competition. In addition, a guild could be relaxed and not object to intruders engaging in their members’ trade as long as the newcomers paid a fair share of taxes. The multitude of soldiers and immigrants found in many trades by the mid-seventeenth century is evidence for the 71 GUILD MEMBERSHIP IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ISTANBUL flexibility and unintentional ‘openness’ of the guilds. However, in the seventeenth century, the relaxed attitudes of guildsmen started to change, beginning with the service trades that were vulnerable to outside competition. Membership control seems to have gradually strengthened over the next century with the spread of gedik , but probably not to the extent that it stifled any new development.

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  Historical Dictionary of Late Medieval England, 1272-1485

  • Ronald H. Fritze, William B. Robison, Ronald H. Fritze, William B. Robison(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Craft guilds were increasingly influential in regulating various sectors of the urban economy. Best known among these are the London livery companies, which played an extremely important role in both pageantry and politics. Many guilds and fraternities also served charitable functions, for their members as well as the urban poor. Another interesting feature of late medieval towns was the growth of literacy (see BOOKS AND READING), a useful skill in an increasingly commercial age. This, in turn, was sometimes associated with the rise of heresy, particularly LOLLARDY, which emphasized reading the BI- BLE in English (see also LITERATURE, VERNACULAR). However, more traditional religious belief also inspired a wave of church building and wide- spread orthodox devotional activity in the late Middle Ages. The most common form of government for late medieval English towns was by mayor and council, as in London and elsewhere, though there were excep- tions, for example, rule by bailiffs in Colchester and Worcester. Prior to the fourteenth century there usually was only a single council, whose members became known in the late Middle Ages as alderman and who sometimes were former mayors and often served for life. Thereafter, however, many towns added a second body, often known as the common council, which was intended to be more representative and in some cases was popularly elected, though there was much variation on this point. There has been much controversy about whether there was increased class conflict in the late medieval period and (if so) whether it led toward oligarchy or democracy. Though there is certainly evidence of conflict in some towns, this debate perhaps misses the point that townsmen sought to steer between the twin evils of domination by a corrupt faction and rule by the mob. Moreover, many expected a government of the worthy few to govern in the interests of all citizens. The franchise varied significantly from town to town.

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