Guilds in the Middle Ages

by Georges François Renard

While these measures were being taken by the State, the Guild system was in decay. As wealth grew and accumulated, the tendencies towards oligarchy within the Guilds and exclusiveness in relation to outsiders grew more and more marked. Among the Guildsmen wide social distinctions appeared, and the master-craftsman before long found himself, in relation to the rich trader or large-scale manufacturer, very much in the position of a labourer in relation to his employer. The richer Guilds, especially those connected with trade, sought by the limitation of entry and the exaction of high entrance fees and dues after entry, to keep the Guild “select” and establish an oligarchy in its government. At the same time the growth of new industries which had never come under Guild regulation, and the grant by the Crown of special privileges to individual monopolists and patentees, contributed to the downfall of the old system. Where the Guilds did not die, they were transformed into exclusive and privileged companies which in no sense carried on the mediaeval tradition.

Especially in the later stages of Guild development, and with growing intensity as they drew nearer to decay and dissolution, struggles raged in many of the Guilds and between Guild and Guild among the diverse elements of which they had come to be composed. M. Renard speaks of struggles in the Guilds of Florence between the more and less capitalistic and powerful elements, and Mr. George Unwin, in his book on Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, has presented a picture of similar struggles in the Guilds of England. These conflicts, however various in some respects, assumed mainly the form of a constant struggle for supremacy between the craftsmen-producers who were typical of the great days of the Guilds and the trading or merchant class which was gradually extending its control over production as well as sale. Gradually, as capital accumulated in the hands of the traders, the rift between them and the master-craftsmen widened and, gradually too, the master-craftsmen lost their independence and their status as free producers. Not only the marketing of the goods which they produced, but also the essential raw materials of their crafts, passed under the control of the traders, either by the operation of economic forces alone, or by the purchase of some valuable concession or monopoly from the Crown. Moreover, where the actual producer retained his power, he did so by a transformation of function. Gradually, he turned into a capitalist trader and lost all unity of interest and outlook with the working craftsman.

We need not here follow the Guild system through its later stages of decay and dissolution. Where the Guilds did not die they shrank up as a rule into capitalistic and oligarchical associations. Step by step, power within the Guild was taken away from the ordinary Guild member by the creation of privileged orders, access to which was possible only to “men of substance.” This process of oligarchization can be traced very clearly in Mr. George Unwin’s admirable history of the Guilds and Companies of London. No doubt its coming was more obvious in London than in smaller industrial centres; but the essential features of the change were everywhere substantially the same. The constant attacks on patents and monopolies in the later years of the reign of Elizabeth and under the Stuarts were, in part, attacks upon the privileges granted to mere courtiers and adventurers; but when monopoly came their way, the undemocratic Guilds and Livery Companies were to the full as forward in abusing their powers as the merest of adventurers who found or bought the royal favour.

From the time of the Stuarts, at least, the Guild system had ceased to count at all as a method of industrial organization. It is doubtful whether, even in their greatest days, the Guilds ever included the whole personnel of the trades and industries which they controlled, and it is certain that, as the tendency towards oligarchy became manifest in them, they included a steadily decreasing proportion of those whose work they claimed to regulate. Moreover, even of those whom they included, a steadily decreasing number retained any control over their policy.

This decay of the Guilds, however, is not of primary importance for those who seek to learn lessons from their experience. If we would judge them and learn from them, we must study them as they were in the time of their greatest prosperity and power, before the coming of capitalistic conditions had broken their democracy in pieces and destroyed their essential character. Viewed in this aspect, the Guild system was essentially a balance, made the easier to maintain because it was not so much a balance of powers between different groups of persons with widely divergent interests as a balance between the same persons grouped in different ways, for the performance of different social functions. The municipal authority was, as a rule, largely dominated by the Guilds; and in turn the Guilds were largely dominated by the civic spirit. The distinction between producer and consumer was important; but it was not so much a distinction between opposing social classes as between friendly and complementary forms of social organization. In proportion as this was not the case, the balance on which the Guild system rested tended to break down; but the occasion of its breakdown was not the irreconcilable opposition of producer and consumer, but the struggles within the Guilds themselves between traders and craftsmen, or between exclusive and democratic tendencies.

The mediaeval organization of industry, then, was based upon the twin ideas of function and balance. It was an organization designed for an almost self-contained local type of Society, and before the coming of national and international economy it broke down and fell to pieces. As a local system of organization it reached its greatest perfection in those countries in which town life was strongest and national government weakest (e.g. in the Hanse towns of Germany; in Italy, and in Flanders). In this country the towns never possessed the strength or the independence necessary for the perfect development of the Guild system; but even so all the essential principles of the Guilds were operative.

The period since the breakdown of the Guilds has been a period of national and international economy. From the point of view of economic organization, it falls into two contrasted halves—a period of State supremacy in which the State assumed the supreme direction of industrial affairs, and a period of State abdication in the nineteenth century, during which there was no collective organization, and economic matters were left to the free play of economic forces working in a milieu of competition. Positively, these two periods stand to each other in sharp contrast; negatively there is a point of close resemblance between them. In neither was there any functional organization co-ordinating and expressing the economic life of the nation. In the first period the State regulated industry as a universal and sovereign authority; in the second period nobody at all was allowed to regulate industry, which was supposed to regulate itself by a sort of pre-ordained harmony of economic law. In both periods the purely economic organizations directed to the performance of specific functions which were characteristic of mediaeval organization had disappeared, or at all events had ceased to be the vital regulating authorities in industrial affairs. Local functional organizations had ceased to be adequate to the task of control; national functional organizations had not yet come into being, or, at all events, had not yet secured recognition.

To-day we stand at the beginning of a new period of economic history. The Trade Union movement, created mainly as a weapon of defence, is beginning to challenge capitalist control of industry, and to suggest the possibility of a new form of functional organization adapted to the international economy of the modern world. Already in Russia chaotic but heroic experiments in workers’ control are taking place, and, in every country, the minds of the workers are turning to the idea of control over industry as the one escape from the tyranny of capitalism and the wage system. It is, then, of the first importance that, in framing the functional democracy of twentieth-century industry, we should cast back our minds to the functional industrial democracy of the Middle Ages, in order that we may learn what we can from its successes and its failures, and, even more, gain living inspiration from what is good and enduring in the spirit which inspired the men who lived in it and under it.

G. D. H. COLE.

November 1918.