Guilds - history of

 

Guilds 

Trade unions differed significantly from ancient merchant guilds which predominated in the medieval period were the feudal order of society predominated.   These were first extensively documented in southern England by a royal inquiry of 1388/89.  This was at the height of the feudalism, the structure of society immediately preceding the growth of commercial capitalism.  

 

Where there were enough people in urban areas in a given trade there was also formed artisan /craft guilds that incorporated masters, journeymen (someone who is fully educated in their craft) and apprentices into the one organisation in their field of handicraft. According to Chase (1) these  "existed to advance the masters and to protect the consumer by regulating the quality of work, as well as to regulate waged labour". 

 

Guilds enjoyed from the monarch certain privileges, which were overseen by town and city corporations. This allowed them to exclude outsiders and establish a monopoly on product standards and prices and working conditions, including apprenticeship training, and wages. 

 

 As such guilds were not incipient trade unions although there were some occasions when the journeymen, often successfully, sought to exert pressure on their masters by independently pushing for increased pay. As early as 1299 there is a record of journeymen carpenters and smiths being accused of forming illegal associations reported as 'parliaments'. There are also some reports of a small number of unskilled waged workers — mainly working on a quayside — who combined to successfully seek privileged access to work and thus demonstrated a recognition of the positive impact of collective bargaining. 

 

However, as long as the guild could be relied upon to defend the interests of their journeymen and protect the interests of the craft as a whole then they did well. English guilds reached a renewed membership peak in the first 20 years of the eighteenth century. Thereafter they began a steady decline as free trade and technological innovation swept them aside as, armed with the revolutionary ideas of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, governments abandoned control over trades in favour of laissez-faire free market systems. Many former handicraft workers had to seek work in the newly emerging manufacturing corporations where there was a clear workers-bosses divide and a wage system in place.