GUILDS

1. History.
The origins of guilds remain obscure, as in their medieval form they appeared to combine characteristics that recall both the social solidarity of the Roman collegium and a concern for skilful craftsmanship that is more easily identified with Germanic societies in the early Christian centuries. Following the expansion of towns and trade after c. AD 1000, the social strata of the commune---a sworn association of equals---developed into subgroups of people who practised a common trade. This was particularly true in Europe's towns and cities, although it must be seen in the context of an overwhelmingly rural society. From the 13th century guilds became essential to most aspects of civic life and reflected the advance of the division of labour. They were responsible for, among other trades, the production of leather and textiles (e.g. cloth merchants, dyers, stretchers, fullers, weavers, tailors, tanners and cobblers) and for building (e.g. masons, tilers, plasterers, carpenters and blacksmiths). In Nuremberg in the 13th century, for instance, there were craft organizations for goldsmiths, cutlers, furriers, beltmakers, cloth-weavers, armourers, swordsmiths, scythesmiths, pewterers and mirrormakers. Shortly after 1300, papermakers, wiresmiths, bottlemakers, brass-smiths, parchmentmakers and bell-founders also formed guilds. Gunsmiths, glaziers, saddlers and carpenters soon followed, and in 1400 the city council listed 141 separate crafts. Demarcation was strictly enforced: for example, Veit Stoss had great difficulty obtaining permission to cast a statue in bronze because the brass-smiths complained that this was not his trade. Approval for the project was eventually obtained through pressure from Stoss's patron, the Emperor Maximilian.

To protect their members, guilds tended to resist the dependence of large numbers of artisans on a single entrepreneur. In London from 1271 no cordwainer was allowed to employ more than eight journeymen. In Venice in 1457 the number of looms for silk-weaving that any individual producer was permitted to own was limited to six. Merchants themselves, however, also formed guilds to manage the local staple, sometimes providing insurance schemes to cover members engaged in long-distance trade. Guild membership was often a prerequisite for involvement in city government. The role of guilds in public life was celebrated in such processions as that of the Lord Mayor in London. The different interests represented by craft and merchant guilds were sometimes institutionalized, as in the major and minor guilds of Florence and the livery companies and trade guilds of London. The conflict of interest between different guilds frequently erupted in dispute: for example, around 1300 textile workers in the South Netherlands were denied the right to form guilds and expressed their solidarity through strikes; the revolt of the Ciompi in Florence in 1378 was partly a popular reaction to the efforts of merchants to reduce the number of guilds and thereby restrict the franchise. A similar conflict in Nuremberg at about the same time resulted in the suppression of guilds as political organizations.

Trade guilds were also religious organizations, and many guilds met only as devotional confraternities. In England such devotional confraternities were often parish-based. A small town such as Bodmin, for instance, had c. 40 such organizations in the 14th century. At Stratford-upon-Avon the guild of the Holy Cross was in existence by 1269. It employed four chaplains to say mass for the souls of all members in the Guild chapel (founded 1269) and at altars that it maintained in the Holy Trinity Church. It later built almshouses (c. 1427; partly rebuilt) and the Guildhall (1417; now the Grammar School). A Florentine observer in 15th-century Venice recorded that there were 200 such confraternities in the city, and records show that membership of each, which included men and women, may sometimes have run into hundreds.

In the 16th century the traditional economic and religious functions of guilds were subjected to new pressures. The conventional view is that the rise of merchant capitalism in cities that were rapidly expanding beyond the old limits marked by medieval walls, broke down guild privileges by operating in suburbs where guild jurisdiction did not apply; this was compounded in the 17th century by the increasing practice of putting out work to rural areas. At the same time, religious reformers criticized the confraternities. Martin Luther himself attacked them for having devoted themselves to the 'collecting of money for beer': 'if a sow were made the patron saint of such a brotherhood she would not accept' ('The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods', Works, ed. J. Pelikan and H. T. Lehmann, xxxv (Philadelphia, 1955--), p. 68). The perceived decline of religious sodalities into Trinkstuben, or drinking clubs, along with their reorganization did not necessarily indicate the demise of all the guild systems of Europe, however. In some towns in Germany medieval corporatism flourished during the Reformation. In the Roman Catholic world guilds remained essential components of the urban economy and adapted to the new religious climate. Confraternities were of enormous importance in the promotion of post-Tridentine Catholicism, and in many ways were among the most powerful expressions of a 'Counter-Reformation'. They opposed iconoclasm with the splendour of holiness, they defended the veneration of the Virgin Mary and they gave new life to the cult of the saints. Most important, perhaps, brotherhoods of the Holy Sacrament gave special prominence to the eucharistic cult.

Guilds were closely involved in the production and patronage of art. The artistic importance of guilds, however, waned with the rise in status of the individual artist and the quest for princely patronage. Under Pope Urban VIII (reg 1623--44), for example, the Accademia di S Luca, Rome, was allowed 'to establish its absolute authority in the art world of Rome and finally crush any opposition from the guilds' (F. Haskell: Patrons and Painters: Art and Society in Baroque Italy (New Haven, 1980), p. 17), which gave its members a new status. Courts and academies were far removed from medieval workshops. Guilds survived, however: in the 17th century in the Dutch Republic painters in Utrecht and Leiden, for example, formed guilds. Elsewhere, too, while courts and academies commissioned paintings, sculptures and architecture, the luxury market was still dominated by the high-quality, expensive products of the traditional workshop, which were much in demand among wealthy visitors in the age of the Grand Tour. In the 19th century the Industrial Revolution swept aside the patterns of production that had allowed guilds to flourish. Factories that employed vast numbers of people on production lines (which turned out thousands of identical objects) were alien to the guilds' traditions of small-scale enterprise, a highly trained workforce and individually crafted products. Some guild traditions survived only as ceremonies (such as the Lord Mayor's Show in London), while the guild ethos of solidarity within a specific trade proved influential in the formation of trade unions.

2. Function.
As Christian confraternities under the protection of a patron saint, guilds met regularly for Mass, for the celebration of a saint’s day and for an annual feast. They also played an important role in ensuring the burial of members and occasionally provided a member’s surviving dependants with material help. Guild statutes make it plain that practical work and religious devotion were never clearly distinguishable. Attendance on the dead and provision for the washing of bodies were among the most significant responsibilities of guild officers, and occasionally there are macabre references in the documents to the need to empty a guild tomb.

Craft guilds ensured the maintenance of standards of production and of wage levels through their elected officers: a warden, a secretary, a treasurer and perhaps a committee. The guild was also responsible for the training that took the apprentice to the status of journeyman and then master; work produced by the trainee in the workshop was submitted to a board of examiners, which consisted of qualified guild masters. Craft traditions were essential to the training of the artist; to become a master involved the production of a Masterpiece. The place of training and production for painters and for sculptors not working on site was the workshop.

Masons’ lodgeswere the administrative centre of that craft. They often controlled large areas; the master of the Strasbourg lodge, for instance, held jurisdiction over a number of subordinate regions in the 14th and 15th centuries. At the Expertises of masons held at this time, the masters present represented an area c. 800 km across. Masons’ lodges were places where technical problems were discussed, as well as being storehouses. An inventory at York Minster in 1399 recorded the contents of the lodge as including 69 stone-axes, 96 chisels, 24 mallets, an iron compass, two drawing-boards, a wheelbarrow, buckets and ropes. Guilds also monitored competition; the cloth guild at Ypres imposed strict limitations on competition, and cloth was stamped with a seal of approval only after careful inspection.

3. Patronage.
Merchant guilds were often patrons of great civic monuments. Their buildings often defined the urban space, for example the Guildhall and various livery halls in the City of London. On a grander scale, members often contributed to such projects as the great Cloth Hall in Ypres, which was built between 1200 and 1304. It was a vast, communal warehouse, with most of the space given over to textiles. In Chartres a variety of guilds sponsored many of the cathedral’s stained-glass windows. At Orsanmichele in Florence the city’s guilds sought to outdo each other in their sponsorship of sculptures for the niches in the walls of the church. The Wool Guild commissioned Ghiberti to cast a bronze statue of St Stephen (1425–9): ‘it shall be done in whatever mode or form seems most honourable…provided that the said niche exceeds or at least equals in beauty and adornment the more beautiful of the others’ (D. S. Chambers, ed.: Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance (London, 1970), p. 46). The patronage of religious brotherhoods often operated at a comparatively modest level, maintaining a chapel or altar. Such organizations as the scuole in Venice sponsored more celebrated projects. For example, the Scuola di S Orsola (founded 1300) agreed at a meeting in 1488 to commission a cycle of paintings depicting the Life and Martyrdom of St Ursula (1490–95; Venice, Accad.) from Vittore Carpaccio, who also executed comparable cycles for other scuole.

The Counter-Reformation gave enormous impetus to Catholic patronage of the arts by religious confraternities, which commissioned works to celebrate the cults of the Virgin and the saints, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. In a great assertion of the importance of the splendour of holiness as an essential accompaniment to good works, the Scuola Grande di S Rocco in Venice spent large sums on its building projects and on Jacopo Tintoretto’s great cycle of paintings. Tintoretto also painted many versions of the Last Supper, often for scuole del sacramento. Outside Venice the idea of good works beyond the membership of the confraternity was emphasized in Federico Barocci’s Madonna del popolo (1579; Florence, Uffizi) for the confraternity of S Maria della Misericordia in Arezzo. Caravaggio’s two altarpieces (Naples, Monte della Misericordia, and S Domenico Maggiore, on dep. at Capodimonte), which he produced for the Neapolitan confraternity Pio Monte della Misericordia in 1607, are more powerful as pieces of propaganda. However, as the economic importance of guilds declined, so did their ability to finance great artistic projects. In the Netherlands, Calvinism restricted the artistic interpretation of religious subject-matter, which, together with the absence of a court, increased the importance of commissions by wealthy corporations. Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild (1662; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) commemorates the wealth of the company, and Frans Hals’s Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard Company (1616; Haarlem, Frans Halsmus) illustrates the continuance of ritual feasting and a confraternal solidarity that seem to hark back to the Middle Ages.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Ruskin: The Stones of Venice, 3 vols (London, 1851–3)
G. Unwin: The Gilds and Companies of London (London, 1908, rev. 4/1963)
S. Kramer: The English Craft Gilds (1927/R 1976)
N. Pevsner: Academies of Art Past and Present (London, 1940, rev. NY, 1973)
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