Medieval guilds
In the early medieval period, the collegia which had once flourished across the Roman empire as a form of mutual aid were reinvented as associations of craftsmen, known as guilds.The early medieval guilds regulated working conditions, controlling who was admitted into the profession, and limiting working hours.Guild work was forbidden on the numerous Saints days, which were reserved for civic works such as building churches and cathedrals, and assisting the poor.
The master craftsman’s home was also the workshop and dwelling place for apprentices, and all had meals together; indeed these were the first companies (from the Latin con and panis meaning taking bread together).Grouped by trade, the guilds controlled not only the local economy but also developed the neighbourhood, establishing market squares, schools, hospitals, almshouses, and sweeping and policing the streets.
But following the Black Death, as the centralised state and the merchant class became more powerful, neighbourhood guilds went into decline.From the turn of the seventeenth century, welfare and other municipal services were regulated by national legislation and became a duty on the parish council to deliver, and a burden on the local rates.[1]
The guilds rediscovered
From the mid-nineteenth century, a succession of social historians and reformers began to consider whether the medieval guilds might provide a model for the modern world.
The early English Gild was an institution of local self-help which, before Poor-laws were invented, took the place, in old times, of the modern friendly or benefit society … Gilds were associations of those living in the same neighbourhood, and remembering that they have, as neighbours, common obligations. They were quite other things than modern partnerships, or trading ‘Companies;' for their main characteristic was to set up something higher than personal gain and mere materialism, as the main object of men living in towns; and to make the teaching of love to one's neighbour be not coldly accepted as a hollow dogma of morality, but known and felt as a habit of life.[2]
It did not escape notice that the surviving charters of medieval guilds showed that women as well as men were admitted to membership: ‘there were scarcely five out of the five hundred gilds known to history which were not formed equally of men and of women.’[3]
John Ruskin, William Morris, and Peter Kropotkin all believed that the medieval guild system pointed towards a form of mutual aid quite different from the operations of a modern State, and was much to be preferred, as Kropotkin explained:
It answered to a deeply inrooted want of human nature; and it embodied all the attributes which the State appropriated later on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than that. It was an association for mutual support in all circumstances and in all accidents of life, ‘by deed and advise,’ and it was an organisation for maintaining justice -- with this difference from the State, that on all these occasions a humane, a brotherly element was introduced instead of the formal element which is the essential characteristic of State interference.
In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organisation for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organisation.[4]
[1] Ed Mayo, Henrietta Moore, The Mutual State: How local communities can run public services, 2001.
[2] Lucy Toulmin Smith, introduction, in Joshua Toulmin Smith, English Gilds, 1870.
[3] George Jacob Holyoake, History of Co-operation 1875, rev 1905, ch 10.
[4] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1901.
