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.

Great as is the weight which must attach to such important authorities, I have endeavoured—by looking at the facts in my materials from an independent standpoint—to avoid being unduly influenced by their conclusions, or by a desire to find analogies where none exist.

The materials from which I have worked call for but little description. They are simply the records of the Shrewsbury Gilds—either in their original form as preserved in the town Museum and Library, or as printed in the Shropshire ArchÆological Society’s Transactions.

Though my view has been thus confined it has been kept purposely so. English local history is its own best interpreter, and although in some instances the documents have required illustrating and supplementing from extraneous sources, these occasions have been few. At the same time I have not omitted to notice how the effects of national events were felt in provincial changes, and I have especially striven to point out how the Shrewsbury records bear upon the various theories which have been put forward respecting Gilds. Writing thus in a historical rather than an antiquarian spirit I have not considered it necessary to overburden the pages with needless footnotes referring repeatedly simply to the records of the Shrewsbury Gilds.

October, 1890.

Note.—The Gild Merchant, by Charles Gross, Ph.D. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1890), appeared after the above had been written and the Essay sent in. I have since had the advantage of reading it. The general conclusions at which the writer arrives are so similar to those I had already formed, that I have not found it necessary to alter what I had written. I have however to some extent made use of the material he has brought together in Vol. II., chiefly by way of strengthening the authorities in the footnotes to which reference is made in the text.