PREFACE.
I should explain that, in the present Essay, I have restricted myself to associations which had for their object the regulation of trade. Frith Gilds and Religious or Social Gilds have received only passing notice.
The Merchant Gild is too wide a subject to be treated in an Essay such as this. Moreover the records of the Shrewsbury Merchant Gild are too meagre to afford much information, and I would therefore have gladly passed over the whole question in silence but that without some notice of it the Essay would have seemed incomplete.
My attention has thus been concentrated on the Craft Gilds, and on the later companies which arose out of these.
It is greatly to be regretted that we have no work on Gilds which deals with the subject from an English point of view, and traces the development of these pre-eminently English institutions according to its progress on English soil.
The value of Dr Brentano’s extremely able Essay is very largely diminished, for Englishmen, not only because he is continually attempting to trace undue analogies between the Gilds and Trades Unions, but still more because he has failed to appreciate the spirit which animated English Merchants and Craftsmen in their relations with one another, and so has missed the line of Gild development in England. If he had not confined his attention, so far as English Gilds are concerned, solely to the London Companies he could hardly have failed to discover his mistake.
Something has been done to set the facts of the case in a clearer light by Dr Cunningham briefly in his Growth of English Industry and Commerce[1].
But it is to be feared that Mr J. R. Green’s History is so deservedly popular, and Mr George Howell’s Conflicts of Capital and Labour is so otherwise reliable, that views differing from those which these writers set forward—following Dr Brentano as it appears—stand little chance of being generally known.