Guilds in the Middle Ages

by Georges François Renard

In the great days of the Guild system the industrial market was almost entirely local. Long-distance or overseas trade existed only in a few commodities, and, in this country, these were almost entirely raw materials or easily portable luxuries. England was, as we have seen, an agricultural country, and the nascent industry of the towns existed only to supply a limited range of commodities within a restricted local market. While these conditions remained in being, organization developed in each town separately, and industry came hardly at all into touch with the national State. Then, gradually, the market widened and the demand for manufactured commodities increased. As this happened, industry began to overflow the boundaries set to it by the purely local Guild organization. Foreign trade, and to a less extent internal exchange, increased in variety and amount; and a distinct class of traders, separated from the craftsmen-producers, grew steadily in power and prominence. New industries, moreover, and rival methods of industrial organization began to grow up outside the towns and to challenge the supremacy of the Guilds; while, in the Guilds themselves, the system of regulation began to break down, and inequality of wealth and social consideration among the Guildsmen destroyed the democratic basis of the earlier Guild organization.

These developments coincided in time with a big growth in the power and organization of the national State, a growth based largely on the imposition of a common justice and the establishment of a common security. This made possible, while the parallel economic developments made necessary, a national economic policy; and the State, beginning with the woollen industry, then after agriculture of by far the greatest national and international importance, began to develop a policy of economic intervention. The State had intervened in agriculture after the Black Death; even earlier it had begun its long series of interventions in connection with the woollen industry; in 1381 the first Navigation Act was passed; and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries complicated codes of industrial regulation by the State became the rule and practice of English statecraft.

We have then to distinguish already two periods in which the State assumed differing relations to mediaeval industrial organization. In the earlier days of the Guild system industry was local in character, and the Guilds came into relations primarily with the municipal authority, and only occasionally with the State, even when the Guild charter was obtained directly from the Crown. In the second period, when the Guild system was already at the beginning of its long period of disintegration, the State was developing a comprehensive economic policy which covered every aspect of industrial organization.

Let us look rather more closely at the first of these two periods, the period of the rise and predominance of Guild organization; and let us repeat our question as to the relations which existed between the Guilds and the State or municipal authority. The first form of Guild organization in this country was undoubtedly that of the “Guild Merchant,” a general organization including both trading and manufacturing elements, and deriving special privileges for its trade by virtue of a Charter secured directly from the Crown. Here, then, is our first clear relation. The Guild Merchant derived, if not its organization, at any rate its privileges and authority, from the direct grant of the State. In practice the principal power thus acquired was the right to trade throughout the kingdom. The relations of the Guild Merchant to the municipal authorities are far more obscure. It used to be maintained that they were identical; but this view has been clearly disproved. We cannot, however, trace many signs of the active intervention of the municipality in the affairs of the Guild Merchant, though it is clear that the jurisdiction of the City authorities remained, in form at least, unaffected by the creation of a Guild Merchant.

The Guilds Merchant reached their zenith in the twelfth century. Thereafter, as trade and industry grew in extent and complexity, the general organization of all merchants and master-craftsmen in a single body gave way to a system of Craft Guilds, each representing as a rule a single craft or “mistery.” Some of these Guilds were predominantly Guilds of traders, some of producers; while some included both trading and producing elements. By the fourteenth century the Guilds Merchant had everywhere disappeared, and the Craft Guilds were in possession of the field. Thus came into being the organization of industry generally known as the “Mediaeval Guild system.”

What, then, were the relations of these Craft Guilds to the municipalities and to the State? They arose, we have seen, out of the ashes of the Guild Merchant. Often they were definitely created and fostered by the municipal authorities. The borough claimed the right of regulating production and trade in the interest of its burgesses, the right to uphold quality of product and fair dealing, to punish offenders, and in the last resort to fix both the prices of commodities and the remuneration of journeymen and apprentices. The greater part of these functions was actually exercised by the Crafts themselves, which, as we have seen, made their own regulations for the ordering of trade and production; but the city authorities always maintained and asserted a right of intervention in the affairs of the Guilds whenever the well-being and good service of the consumer were involved; and this right was frequently exercised in the case of the Guilds which organized the supply of food and drink. Neither the limits of Guild authority nor the limits of municipal intervention were accurately or uniformly defined. In practice the system oscillated from the one side to the other. Sometimes the Guilds asserted and maintained a comparative immunity from municipal regulation, and sometimes a recalcitrant Guild was brought to book by a strong-handed municipal authority. The poise and balance between the parties was in many cases made the more even because both alike often derived their authority from a special Charter granted by the Crown. Indeed, one of the regular resorts of the Craft Guild, in its battle for independence from outside control, was to get from the Crown a definite Charter of incorporation, granting to the Guild the widest range of powers that it was able to secure.

The Guild was essentially a local organization, and, in placing it in its relation to the municipal authority, we are describing it in its essential economic character. Its relation to the national State, like that of the municipality itself, was far more occasional and incidental, and, apart from one or two broad issues of policy connected mainly with the woollen industry, the interest of the national State in the towns, and therefore in industrial organization, was primarily financial. The protection of the consumer was a very minor motive; the stimulation of urban industry had hardly become a general object of policy systematically pursued; and the granting of Charters, whether to town or to Guild, was far less a matter of economic policy than an obvious device for raising the wind. Charters were always most plentiful when the Crown was most in need of money.

The period of merely occasional intervention in industry by the State lasted down to the time of Elizabeth, when for the first time the State undertook a comprehensive system of industrial regulation. This, however, no longer meant the exclusive dominance of financial considerations, although the need for raising money was always very present to the minds of Elizabeth and her ministers. The new policy was primarily political in motive rather than economic, and was directed on the one side to the fostering and development of trade, and on the other to the conservation of the man-power of the nation. The Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, passed in 1563, laid down elaborate provisions both for regulating the flow of labour into various classes of occupations and for prescribing the conditions under which the work was to be carried on. Attention in modern times has been mainly directed to the clauses dealing with wages; but the principle of the Act was very much wider than any mere regulation of wages. It rested upon the principle of compulsory labour for all who were not in possession of independent means; and its basis was the obligation upon every one who could not show cause to the contrary to labour on the land. At the same time it aimed at protecting the supply of labour for the urban industries, and, still more, at giving to urban industry an advantage against the growing competition of the country-side. In short, it incorporated a general scheme for the redistribution of the national man-power in accordance with a definite conception of national policy. This distribution was accomplished mainly by an elaborate code of regulations for apprenticeship, parts of which lived on right into the nineteenth century.

With this regulation of trade and commerce went also a regulation of wages. As in the case of the Statute of Labourers, the object was primarily that of preventing the labourer from earning more than his customary standard, allowing for variations in the cost of living. The rates of wages which the Justices of the Peace were ordered to fix were thus primarily maxima, and the Act contained stringent penalties against those who obtained, or paid, more than these maxima. In some cases, however, if rarely, the rates laid down were also minima, and employers were fined for paying less. This was, however, clearly exceptional, and a special declaratory Act passed under James I., which clearly empowered the justices to fix binding minimum rates, shows that there had been legal doubt about it.

In any case the general tendency of the Tudor legislation is clear. It aimed at establishing and enforcing by law the existing social structure, at standardizing the relations between the classes, and at putting them all in their places under the direction of the sovereign State. In short, the Tudor system represents, in the most complete form possible, the State regulation of private industry.