   #copyright

Guild

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Business

   A guild is an association of craftspeople in a particular trade. The
   earliest guilds are believed to have been formed in India circa 3800
   BC, and though they are not as commonplace as they were a few centuries
   ago, many guilds continue to flourish around the world today.

Early guilds

   In pre-industrial cities, craftsmen tended to form associations based
   on their trades. Usually the founders were free independent master
   craftsmen. The earliest craftsmen's organizations are purported to have
   been formed in India during the Veda-period from 2000 - 500 BC.

   During the Indian Gupta-period (300 - 600 AD) the craftmen's
   associations were known as shreni. Greek organizations in Ptolemaic
   Egypt were called koinon. Starting from their third century B.C.E.
   origins the Roman collegia spread with the extension of the Empire. The
   Chinese hanghui probably existed already during the Han Dynasty (206 BC
   - AD 220), but certainly they were present in the Sui Dynasty (589 -
   618 AD). Roman craftsmen's organizations continued to develop in Italy
   of the Middle Ages under the name ars. In Germany they are first
   mentioned in the tenth century. The German name is Zunft (plural
   Zünfte). Métiers in France and craft gilds in England emerged in the
   twelfth century. Craft organizations (senf, sinf) stemmed from the
   tenth century in Iran, and were seen to spread also in Arabia and
   Turkish regions under the name futuwwah or fütüvvet. 900 of the carvers
   of Benin are said to have founded their own organization. In the
   neighbouring tribes of Yoruba and Nupe the organizations were given the
   names egbe and efakó.

Guilds in the Muslim world

   Islamic civilization extended the notion of guilds to the artisan as
   well — most notably to the warraqeen, or "those who work with paper."
   Early Muslims were heavily engaged in translating and absorbing all ilm
   (" knowledge") from all other known civilizations as far east as China.
   Critically analyzing, accepting, rejecting, improving and codifying
   knowledge from other cultures became a key activity, and a knowledge
   industry as presently understood began to evolve. By the beginning of
   the 9th century, paper had become the standard medium of written
   communication, and most warraqeen were engaged in paper-making,
   book-selling, and taking the dictation of authors, to whom they were
   obliged to pay royalties on works, and who had final discretion on the
   contents. The standard means of presentation of a new work was its
   public dictation in a mosque or madrassah in front of many scholars and
   students, and a high degree of professional respect was required to
   ensure that other warraqeen did not simply make and sell copies, or
   that authors did not lose faith in the warraqeen or this system of
   publication. Thus the organization of the warraqeen was in effect an
   early guild.

   Local guilds also served to safeguard artisans from the appropriation
   of their skills: The publication industry that spanned the Muslim
   empire, from the first works under the warraqeen system in 874 and up
   to the 15th century, produced tens of thousands of books per year. A
   culture of instructional capital flourished, with groups of respected
   artisans spreading their work to other artisans elsewhere, who could in
   turn copy it and perhaps " pass it off" as the original, thereby
   exploiting the social capital built up at great expense by the
   originators of techniques. Artisans began to take various measures to
   protect their proprietary interests, and restrict access to techniques,
   materials, and markets.

European history

   In the Early Middle Ages most of the Roman craft organizations,
   originally formed as religious confraternities, had disappeared, with
   the apparent exceptions of stonecutters and perhaps glassmakers.
   Gregory of Tours tells a miraculous tale of a builder whose art and
   techniques suddenly left him, but were restored by an apparition of the
   Virgin Mary in a dream. Michel Rouche (1987 pp 431ff) remarks that the
   story speaks for the importance of practically transmitted
   journeymanship.

   The early egalitarian communities called "guilds" (for the gold
   deposited in their common funds) were denounced by Catholic clergy for
   their "conjurations"—the binding oaths sworn among artisans to support
   one another in adversity and back one another in feuds or in business
   ventures. The occasion for the drunken banquets at which these oaths
   were made was December 26, the pagan feast of Jul: Bishop Hincmar, in
   858, sought vainly to Christianize them (Rouche 1987 p 432).

   By about 1100 European guilds (or gilds) and livery companies began
   their medieval evolution into an approximate equivalent to modern-day
   business organizations such as institutes or consortiums. The guilds
   were termed corps de métiers in France, where the more familiar term
   corporations did not appear until the Le Chapelier Law of 1791 that
   abolished them, according to Fernand Braudel The guild system reached a
   mature state in Germany circa 1300 and held on in the German cities
   into the nineteenth century. The latest guilds to develop in Western
   Europe were the gremios of Hispania that signalled the progress of the
   Reconquista: Barcelona (1301), Valencia (1332) and Toledo (1426). Not
   all city economies were controlled by guilds; some cities were "free".
   Where guilds were in control they shaped labour, production and trade;
   they had strong controls over instructional capital, and the modern
   concepts of a lifetime progression of apprentice to craftsman,
   journeyer, and eventually to widely-recognized master and grandmaster
   began to emerge. As production became more specialized, trade guilds
   were divided and subdivided, eliciting the squabbles over jurisdiction
   that produced the paperwork by which economic historians trace their
   development: there were 101 trades in Paris by 1260 (Braudel), and
   earlier in the century the metalworking guilds of Nuremberg were
   already divided among dozens of independent trades, in the boom economy
   of the thirteenth century. In Ghent as in Florence the woolen textile
   industry developed as a congeries of specialized guilds. The appearance
   of the European guilds was tied to the emergent money economy, and to
   urbanization. Before this time it was not possible to run a
   money-driven organization, as commodity money was the normal way of
   doing business.
   A center of urban government: the Guildhall, London (engraving, ca
   1805)
   A centre of urban government: the Guildhall, London (engraving, ca
   1805)

   The guild was at the centre of European handicraft organization into
   the sixteenth century. In France, a resurgence of the guilds in the
   second half of the seventeenth century is symptomatic of the monarchy's
   concerns to impose unity, control production and reap the benefits of
   transparent structure in the shape of more efficient taxation.

   The guilds were identified with organizations enjoying certain
   privileges ( letters patent), usually issued by the king or state and
   overseen by local town business authorities (some kind of chamber of
   commerce). These were the predecessors of the modern patent and
   trademark system. The guilds also maintained funds in order to support
   infirm or elderly members, as well as widows and orphans of guild
   members, funeral benefits, and a 'tramping' allowance for those needing
   to travel to find work. As the guild system of the City of London
   decayed during the seventeenth century, the Livery Companies devolved
   into mutual assistance fraternities along such lines.

   Like their Muslim predecessors, European guilds imposed long
   standardized periods of apprenticeship, and made it difficult for those
   lacking the capital to set up for themselves or without the approval of
   their peers to gain access to materials or knowledge, or to sell into
   certain markets, an area that equally dominated the guilds' concerns.
   These are defining characteristics of mercantilism in economics, which
   dominated most European thinking about political economy until the rise
   of classical economics.

   The guild system survived the emergence of early capitalists, which
   began to divide guild members into "haves" and dependent "have-nots".
   The civil struggles that characterize the fourteenth century towns and
   cities were struggles in part between the greater guilds and the lesser
   artisanal guilds, which depended on piecework. "In Florence, they were
   openly distinguished: the Arti maggiori and the Arti minori—already
   there was a popolo grasso and a popolo magro" (Braudel p. 316). Fiercer
   struggles were those between essentially conservative guilds and the
   merchant class, which increasingly came to control the means of
   production and the capital that could be ventured in expansive schemes,
   often under the rules of guilds of their own. German social historians
   trace the Zunftrevolution, the urban revolution of guildmembers against
   a controlling urban patriciate, sometimes reading into them, however,
   perceived foretastes of the class struggles of the nineteenth century.

   In the countryside, where guild rules did not operate, there was
   freedom for the entrepreneur with capital to organize cottage industry,
   a network of cottagers who spun and wove in their own premises on his
   account, provided with their raw materials, perhaps even their looms,
   by the capitalist who reaped the profits. Such a dispersed system could
   not so easily be controlled where there was a vigorous local market for
   the raw materials: wool was easily available in sheep-rearing regions,
   whereas silk was not.

Organization

   The structures of the craftsmen's associations tended everywhere in
   similar directions: a governing body, assisting functionaries and the
   members' assembly. The governing body consisted of the leader and
   deputies. In Ptolemeic Egypt the presidents were known as presbyter, in
   Roman Egypt as proestotes, egoymenos or archonelates, in Byzantine
   Egypt epistates, in the Roman Empire as decurio, in Florence of the
   Middle Ages as consul, officialis or rector, in France as consul,
   recteur, baile or surposé, in Germany Zunftmeister or Kerzenmeister, in
   England alderman, graceman or master, in Iran as rish safid or
   pishavaran, in India as adhyaksha, mukhya, pamukkha or jettaka, in
   Tibet as dbu chen mo, in China as hangshou, hangtou or hanglao, in the
   West African Yoruba region as bale or baba egbe and in the Nupe region
   as dakodza, muku or ndakó, depending on the type of craft.

   The guild was made up by experienced and confirmed experts in their
   field of handicraft. They were called master craftsmen. Before a new
   employee could rise to the level of mastery, he had to go through a
   schooling period during which he was first called an apprentice. After
   this period he could rise to the level of journeyman. Apprentices would
   typically not learn more than the most basic techniques until they were
   trusted by their peers to keep the guild's or company's secrets.

   Like journey, the distance that could be travelled in a day, the title
   'journeyman' derives from the French words for 'day' (jour and journée)
   from which came the middle English word journei. Journeymen were
   generally paid by the day and were thus day laborers. After being
   employed by a master for several years, and after producing a
   qualifying piece of work, the apprentice was granted the rank of
   journeyman and was given documents (letters or certificates from his
   master and/or the guild itself) which certified him as a journeyman and
   entitled him to travel to other towns and countries to learn the art
   from other masters. These journeys could span large parts of Europe and
   were an unofficial way of communicating new methods and techniques.

   After this journey and several years of experience, a journeyman could
   be received as master craftsman. This would require the approval of all
   masters of a guild, a donation of money and other goods, and in many
   practical handicrafts the production of a so-called masterpiece, which
   would illustrate the abilities of the aspiring master craftsman.

   The medieval guild was offered letters patent (usually from the king)
   and held a monopoly on its trade in the town in which it operated:
   handicraft workers were forbidden by law to run any business if they
   were not members of a guild, and only masters were allowed to be
   members of a guild. Before these privileges were legislated, these
   groups of handicraft workers were simply called 'handicraft
   associations'.

   The town authorities were represented in the guild meetings and thus
   had a means of controlling the handicraft activities. This was
   important since towns very often depended on a good reputation for
   export of a narrow range of products, on which not only the guild's,
   but the town's, reputation depended. Controls on the association of
   physical locations to well-known exported products, e.g. wine from the
   Champagne and Bordeaux regions of France, tin-glazed earthenwares from
   certain cities in Holland, lace from Chantilly, etc., helped to
   establish a town's place in global commerce — this led to modern
   trademarks.

   In many German towns, the more powerful guilds attempted to influence
   or even control town authorities. In the 14th century, this led to
   numerous bloody uprisings, during which the guilds dissolved town
   councils and detained patricians in an attempt to increase their
   influence.

The example of Chester

   In Chester England the earl had given a charter to the guild merchants
   at the end of the 12th century assuring them of the exclusive rights
   for retail sales within the city (excepting fairs and some markets
   where 'foreigners' could pay for the privilege of selling).

   Guildsmen had to be freemen of the city. They had to take an oath to
   serve the city and the king. There were four ways to become a freeman:
   by apprenticeship of five or seven years, by being born as the son of a
   freeman (in 1453 dues were remitted to a token 10s1/2d), by purchasing
   membership (in 1453 this was 26s8d), or by becoming an honorary freeman
   as a gift of the assembly.

   As well as running local government, by electing the 78 common
   councillors, the guilds took responsibility for the welfare of their
   members and their families. They put on the Chester Mystery Plays and
   the Chester Midsummer Watch Parade. Guildsmen had to attend meetings,
   often in local inns or in the towers on the city walls. No person of
   any 'arte, mystery syence, occupacion, or crafte' could 'intermeddle'
   or practice another trade. In the 15th century the Innkeepers
   threatened to brew their own beer and the Brewers took them to court
   and won.

   Charters of incorporation were given to each guild, the earliest to the
   Bakers in 1462. Of the original 25, 19 companies were recorded in 1475.
   In 1533 another company formed. This was the Merchant Venturers who
   were the only traders allowed to merchandise in foreign ports and, at
   first, they were not able to do any manual trade or retail in the city.

   In 1694 rules were regularly being broken and it was ordered that 'No
   man shall have any commerce, Trade or Dealing with any man that shall
   sett up Stale (stall) or Hake in the street of ye said Citie neither at
   the ffaire or market but to dispose of his goods at his shoppe or house
   he keeps all the yeare'. But this was the beginning of the end for the
   guild's monopoly of city trade.

Fall of the guilds

   Despite its advantages for agricultural and artisan producers, the
   guild became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 1700s
   and the beginning of the 1800s. They were believed to oppose free trade
   and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business
   development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became
   increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each
   other and against free practitioners of their arts, but the neutrality
   of these claims is doubted. It may be propaganda.
   An example of the last of the British Guilds meeting rooms c1820
   An example of the last of the British Guilds meeting rooms c1820

   Two of the most outspoken critics of the guild system were Jean-Jacques
   Rousseau and Adam Smith, and all over Europe a tendency to oppose
   government control over trades in favour of laissez-faire free market
   systems was growing rapidly and making its way into the political and
   legal system. Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto also criticized the
   guild system for its rigid gradation of social rank and the relation of
   oppressor/oppressed entailed by this system. From this time comes the
   low regard in which some people hold the guilds to this day. For
   example, Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations (Book I, Chapter X,
   paragraph 72):

          It is to prevent this reduction of price, and consequently of
          wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which
          would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations, and the
          greater part of corporation laws, have been established. (...)
          and when any particular class of artificers or traders thought
          proper to act as a corporation without a charter, such
          adulterine guilds, as they were called, were not always
          disfranchised upon that account, but obliged to fine annually to
          the king for permission to exercise their usurped privileges.

   In part due to their own inability to control unruly corporate
   behaviour, the tide turned against the guilds.

   Because of industrialization and modernization of the trade and
   industry, and the rise of powerful nation-states that could directly
   issue patent and copyright protections — often revealing the trade
   secrets — the guilds' power faded. After the French Revolution they
   fell in most European nations through the 1800s, as the guild system
   was disbanded and replaced by free trade laws. By that time, many
   former handicraft workers had been forced to seek employment in the
   emerging manufacturing industries, using not closely-guarded techniques
   but standardized methods controlled by corporations.

   This was not uniformly viewed as a public good: Karl Marx criticized
   the alienation of the worker from the products of work that this
   created, and the exploitation possible since materials and hours of
   work were closely controlled by the owners of the new, large scale
   means of production.

Influence of guilds

   Guilds are sometimes said to be the precursors of modern trade unions,
   and also, paradoxically, of some aspects of the modern corporation.
   Guilds, however, were groups of self-employed skilled craftsmen with
   ownership and control over the materials and tools they needed to
   produce their goods. Guilds were, in other words, small business
   associations and thus had very little in common with trade unions.
   However, the journeymen organizations, which were at the time illegal,
   may have been influential.

   The exclusive privilege of a guild to produce certain goods or provide
   certain services was similar in spirit and character with the original
   patent systems that surfaced in England in 1624. These systems played a
   role in ending the guilds' dominance, as trade secret methods were
   superseded by modern firms directly revealing their techniques, and
   counting on the state to enforce their legal monopoly.

   Some guild traditions still remain in a few handicrafts, in Europe
   especially among shoemakers and barbers. Some of the ritual traditions
   of the guilds were conserved in order organizations such as the
   Freemasons. These are, however, not very important economically except
   as reminders of the responsibilities of some trades toward the public.

   Modern antitrust law could be said to be derived in some ways from the
   original statutes by which the guilds were abolished in Europe.

Modern guilds

   Modern guilds exist in different forms around the world. In many
   European countries guilds have had a revival as local organisations for
   craftsmen, primarily in traditional skills. They may function as fora
   for developing competence and are often the local units of a national
   employers organization.

   In the United States guilds exist in several fields. The Screen Actors
   Guild and Writers Guild of America are capable of exercising very
   strong control in Hollywood because a very strong and rigid system of
   intellectual property respect exists (as with some medieval trades).
   These guilds exclude other actors and writers who do not abide by the
   strict rules for competing within the film and television industry in
   America.

   Quilting guilds are also very common and are found in almost all areas
   of the United States.

   Real estate brokerage is an excellent example of a modern American
   guild. Telltale signs of guild behaviour are on display in real estate
   brokerage: standard pricing (6% of the home price), strong affiliation
   among all practitioners, self-regulation (see National Association of
   Realtors), strong cultural identity (see Realtor), little price
   variation with quality differences, and traditional methods in use by
   all practitioners. In September 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice
   filed an antitrust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors
   challenging NAR practices that, DOJ asserts, prevent competition from
   practitioners who use different methods. The DOJ and the Federal Trade
   Commission in 2005 advocated against state laws, supported by NAR, that
   disadvantage new kinds of brokers. For a description of the DOJ action,
   see . U.S. v. National Assoc. of Realtors, U.S. District Court Norther
   District Illinois, Eastern Division, September 7, 2005, Civil Action
   No. 05C-5140.

   The practice of law in the United States is also an example of modern
   guilds at work. Every state maintains its own Bar Association,
   supervised by that state's highest court. The court decides the
   criteria for being admitted to, and remaining a member of, the legal
   profession. In most states, every attorney must be a member of that
   state's Bar in order to practice law. State laws forbid any person from
   engaging in the unauthorized practice of law and practicing attorneys
   are subject to rules of professional conduct that are enforced by the
   state's high court.

   Other associations which can be classified as guilds, though it isn't
   evident in their names, include the American Medical Association and
   the American Bar Association.

   Scholars from the history of ideas have noticed that consultants play a
   part similar to that of the journeymen of the guild systems: they often
   travel a lot, work at many different companies and spread new practices
   and knowledge between companies and corporations.

   Many professional organizations similarly resemble the guild structure.
   Professions such as architecture, engineering, and land surveying
   require varying lengths of apprenticeships before one can be granted a
   'professional' certification. These certifications hold great legal
   weight and are required in most states as a prerequisite to doing
   business there.

   Thomas Malone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology champions a
   modern variant of the guild structure for modern "e-lancers",
   professionals who do mostly telework for multiple employers. Insurance
   including any professional liability, intellectual capital protections,
   an ethical code perhaps enforced by peer pressure and software, and
   other benefits of a strong association of producers of knowledge,
   benefit from economies of scale, and may prevent cut-throat competition
   that leads to inferior services undercutting prices. And, as with
   historical guilds, resist foreign competition.

   The free software community has from time to time explored a guild-like
   structure to unite against competition from Microsoft, e.g. Advogato
   assigns journeyer and master ranks to those committing to work only or
   mostly on free software. Debian also publishes a list of what
   constitutes free software.

   In the City of London, the ancient guilds survive as Livery Companies,
   most of which play a ceremonial role. Guilds also survive in the UK in
   Preston, Lancashire as the Preston Guild Merchant where among other
   celebrations descendants of Burgesses are still admitted into
   membership.

   In Australia there exists the Guild of Commercial Filmmakers, a
   collection of commercial, short film and feature filmmakers.

   In online computer games players form groups called Player guilds who
   perform some of the functions of ancient guilds. They organize group
   activities, regulate member behaviour, exclude non-conforming
   individuals, and react as a group when member safety or some aspect of
   guild life is threatened. In games where fictional "building" is
   possible they may cooperate on projects in their online world. The
   practice was taken from the Guilds in the quasi-medieval settings of
   the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The first computer
   implementation was in the ground-breaking MUD Avalon. The first
   graphical online RPG to provide guilds was Neverwinter Nights, which
   ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
