1. The origin of guilds has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and two opposing theories have been advanced. According to the first theory they were the persistence of earlier institutions; but what were these institutions? Some say that, more particularly in the south of France, they were of Roman and Byzantine origin, and were derived from those collegia of the poorer classes (tenuiorum) which, in the last centuries of the Empire, chiefly concerned themselves with the provision of funerals; or, again, from the scholae, official and compulsory groups, which, keeping the name of the hall in which their councils assembled, prolonged their existence till about the year 1000. According to others they were, particularly in the north, of German origin, and were derived from associations resembling artificial families, the members of which mingled their blood and exchanged vows to help each other under certain definite circumstances; or again, they may have descended in a straight line from the ministeriales, the feudal servitors who, in every royal or feudal domain of any extent, were grouped according to their trade, under the authority of a panetier,[1] a bouteillier,[2] a head farrier, or a chief herdsman. According to others again, the Church, that great international association, had, by the example of its monastic orders and religious brotherhoods, given the laity lessons and examples of which they were not slow to take advantage.

According to the opposite theory, each guild was a separate creation, born, as it were, by spontaneous generation, and had no connection with the past. Associations (gildae), scholae, colleges—all had been killed by the hostility of the central power before they had had time to mature fully. They were children of the necessity which compelled the weak to unite for mutual defence in order to remedy the disorders and abuses of which they were the victims. They were the result of the great associative movement, which, working by turns on political and economic lines, first gave birth to the communes, and so created a social environment in which they could live and develop. The craftsmen, drawn together into one street or quarter by a similar trade or occupation, the tanners by the river, or the dockers by the port, acquired for themselves in the towns which had won more or less freedom the right to combine and to make their own regulations.[3]

As is nearly always the case, there is a kernel of truth in each of these opposing theories. Certainly it is hardly likely that the germs or the wreckage of trade associations, existing in the collegia, the scholae, the associations, the groups in royal, feudal, or ecclesiastical domains, should have totally disappeared, to reappear almost immediately. Why so many deaths followed by so many resurrections?

The provision trades in particular do not appear to have ceased to be regulated and organized. If, as Fustel de Coulanges says, “history is the science of becoming,” it must here acknowledge that guilds already existed potentially in society. It may even be added that in certain cases, it was to the interest of count or bishop to encourage their formation; for, as he demanded compulsory payment in kind or in money, it was to his advantage to have a responsible collective body to deal with. It is certain, too, that religious society, with its labouring or weaving monks (the Benedictines or Umiliate for instance), with its bodies of bridge-building brothers, with its lay brotherhoods, was also tending to encourage the spirit of association. But it is none the less true that these organisms,—if not exactly formless, at any rate incomplete, unstable, with little cohesion, and created with non-commercial aims,—could not, without the influence of favourable surroundings, have transformed themselves into guilds possessing statutes, magistrates, political jurisdiction, and often political rights. It was necessary that they should find, in Europe, social conditions in which the need for union, felt by the mass of the population, could act on their weakness and decadence like an invigorating wind, infusing new life into them. It was necessary that they should find in the town[4] which sheltered them, a little independent centre, which would permit the seeds of the future, which they held, to grow and bear fruit unchecked.

It may then be concluded that there was, if not a definite persistence of that which had already existed, at least a survival out of the wreckage, or a development of germs, which, thanks to the surrounding conditions, underwent a complete metamorphosis.

2. What we have just said explains both how it was that the guilds were not confined to any small region, and why they were not of equal importance in all the countries in which they were established. They are to be met with in the whole of the Christian West, in Italy as well as in France, in Germany as well as in England. They were introduced simultaneously with town life in the countries of the north. There is sufficient authority for believing that the system which they represent predominated in those days in the three worlds which disputed the coasts and the supremacy of the Mediterranean—the Roman Catholic, the Byzantine, and the Mohammedan. Thus there reigned in the basin of that great inland sea a sort of unity of economic organization.

This unity, however, did not exclude variety. The guilds were more alive and more powerful as the towns were more free. Consequently it was in Flanders, in Italy, in the “Imperial Towns,” in the trading ports, wherever, in fact, the central authority was weak or distant, that they received the strongest impetus.

They prospered more brilliantly in the Italian Republics than at Rome under the shadow of the Holy See. In France, as in England, they had to reckon with a jealous and suspicious royalty which has ever proved a bad neighbour to liberty. The more commercial, the more industrial the town, the more numerous and full of life were the guilds; it was at Bruges or at Ghent, at Florence or at Milan, at Strasburg or at Barcelona, that they attained the height of their greatness; at all points, that is, where trade was already cosmopolitan, and where the woollen industry, which was in those days the most advanced, had the fullest measure of freedom and activity.