A corruption of the name of Aquitaine, which came into use,
apparently, about the 13th century.
See AQUITAINE: A. D. 884-1151.
GUILDS, OR GILDS, Mediæval.
"The history of the Gild Merchant begins with the Norman
Conquest. The latter widened the horizon of the English
merchant even more than that of the English annalist. The
close union between England and Normandy led to an increase in
foreign commerce, which in turn must have greatly stimulated
internal trade and industry. Moreover, the greatly enhanced
power of the English crown tempered feudal turbulence,
affording a measure of security to traders in England that was
as yet unknown on the continent. … With this expansion of
trade the mercantile element would become a more potent factor
in town life, and would soon feel the need of joint action to
guard its nascent prosperity against encroachments. Not until
there was something of importance to protect, not until trade
and industry began to predominate over agriculture within the
borough, would a protective union like the Gild Merchant come
into being. Its existence, in short, presupposes a greater
mercantile and industrial development than that which
prevailed in England in the tenth century. This circumstance
and the absence of all mention of the Gild Merchant in the
records of the Anglo-Saxon period render it probable that this
fraternity first appeared in England soon after the Conqueror
had established his sway and restored order in the land.
Whether it was merely a reorganization of older gilds, a
spontaneous adaptation of the gild idea to the newly-begotten
trade interests, or a new institution directly transplanted
from Normandy, we have no means of determining with certainty.
The last-mentioned view is strongly favoured by the
circumstance that, at the time of the Conquest, the Gild
Merchant doubtless existed in Northern France and Flanders.
From the Frenchmen who became burgesses of English towns, and
from the Norman merchants who thronged the marts of England
after the Conquest, the English would soon ascertain the
advantages of formal trade organization. The earliest distinct
references to the Gild Merchant occur in a charter granted by
Robert Fitz-Hamon to the burgesses of Burford (1087-1107), and
in a document drawn up while Anselm was Archbishop of
Canterbury (1093-1109). … Whether we place the inception of
the fraternity immediately before or after the Norman
Conquest, whether we make it a continuation of older
Anglo-Saxon gilds, or a derivative from Normandy, or a wholly
new and spontaneous growth, it was doubtless at first merely a
private society, unconnected with the town government, having
for its object the protection of its members, the tradesmen of
the borough, and the maintenance of the newly invigorated
trade interests. During the twelfth century it gradually
became a recognised part of the town constitution, thus
entering upon its second stage of development. How this came
to pass can be easily realised from the later history of
English gilds in general. For in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries … a simple social-religious gild at times
attained such power in a community that it came to be regarded
as an important constituent element of the civic
administration. Quite similar must have been the growth of the
Gild Merchant, which from the outset was doubtless composed of
the most influential burgesses, and which, as the exponent of
the mercantile interests, must always have been greatly
concerned in the increase of the privileges and prosperity of
the borough in general. It was very natural that the town
authorities should use such a society for public purposes,
entrusting to it the surveillance of the trade monopoly, in
which its members were particularly interested,—allowing it
to gradually become an important part of the civic
administrative machinery. … The beginning of this third and
final stage of development cannot be definitely fixed; for in
some places it was of an earlier date than in others. The
fourteenth century may in general be called the period of
gradual transition. In the fifteenth century the
transformation was completed. In this and the following
centuries the term 'Gilda Mercatoria' became less and less
frequent. In many places it soon wholly disappeared. Where it
continued to subsist, the Gild no longer had an individuality
of its own. Its alderman and other peculiar officers, its
whole organization as a distinctive entity, had vanished. It
had merged its identity in that of the general municipal
organism. The head of the fraternity was now the head of the
town; borough and Gild, burgesses and gildsmen were now
identical. What had once been a distinct integral part of the
civic body politic became vaguely blended with the whole of it.
{1617}
The old Gild Merchant was now rarely mentioned in connection
with the municipal trade restrictions and regulations, the
latter being commonly applied to burgesses, craftsmen,
freemen, or 'foreigners.' The exegesis of this transformation
… was due mainly to three causes: (1) the expansion of trade
and the multiplication of the craft and mercantile
fraternities, which absorbed the ancient functions of the Gild
Merchant and rendered it superfluous; (2) the growth of the
select governing body, which usurped most of the privileges of
the old burghers at large, and hence tended to obliterate the
distinction between them, or their less privileged successors,
and the ancient gildsmen, leaving both only certain trade
immunities; (3) the decay of the leet—the rallying point of
the old burghers as distinguished from that of the
gildsmen—the functions of which passed, in part, to the crafts,
but mainly to the select body and to the justices of the
peace. But even after the Gild Merchant and the borough had
thus become identical, the old dual idea did not completely
disappear, the Gild being often regarded as a particular phase
or function of the town, namely, the municipality in its
character of a trade monopoly. Hence the modern survivals of
the Gild Merchant help to elucidate its actual functions in
ancient times. In a few boroughs the select governing body of
the town—the narrow civic corporation, in distinction from
the burgesses or freemen at large—succeeded to the name and
traditions of the Gild Merchant. In some of these cases the
signification of the latter gradually dwindled down to a
periodical civic feast of the privileged few. … In the
eighteenth century we meet the word much less frequently than
in the seventeenth; and toward the beginning of the present
century it became very rare. The Municipal Corporations
Commission, in 1835, found it still used in only a few
boroughs. The remnants of the Gild Merchant and of the craft
fraternities were rapidly vanishing before the new ideas of a
more liberal age,—the age of laissez faire. The onerous,
self-destructive restrictions of gilds were now being
superseded by the stimulating measures of Chambers of
Commerce. More than six centuries elapsed before the enactment
of Magna Carta that all merchants 'may go through England, by
land and water, to buy and sell, free from all unjust
imposts,' became a realised fact throughout the realm. The
Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 provided that 'every person
in any borough may keep any shop for the sale of all lawful
wares and merchandizes by wholesale or retail, and use every
lawful trade, occupation, mystery, and handicraft, for hire,
gain, sale, or otherwise, within any borough.' In a single
town of England the Gild Merchant still subsists, but only as
the shadow of its former self—a spectre from the distant
past. At Preston the Gild Merchant has been 'celebrated'
regularly once every twenty years for more than three
centuries, on which occasions the burgesses renew their
freedom and indulge in all the festivities of a civic
carnival. The last Gild Merchant was held in 1882. There was
then much feasting and dancing, there were gay processions of
townsmen, and much talk of the glories of the past. And yet
how few even of the scholars and noblemen there assembled from
various parts of Great Britain knew what an important role the
Gild Merchant had played in the annals of English municipal
history, what strange vicissitudes it had undergone, what a
remarkable transformation the centuries had wrought in it."
_C. Gross,
The Gild Merchant,
chapters 1 and 9 (volume 1)._
"The rise of the craft gilds is, roughly speaking, a century
later [than the rise of the merchant gilds]; isolated examples
occur early in the twelfth century, they become more numerous
as the century advances, and in the thirteenth century they
appear in all branches of manufacture and in every industrial
centre. Craft gilds were associations of all the artisans
engaged in a particular industry in a particular town, for
certain common purposes. … Their appearance marks the second
stage in the history of industry, the transition from the
family system to the artisan (or gild) system. In the former
there was no class of artisans properly so called; no class,
that is to say, of men whose time was entirely or chiefly
devoted to a particular manufacture; and this because all the
needs of a family or other domestic group, whether of
monastery or manor-house, were satisfied by the labours of the
members of the group itself. The latter, on the contrary, is
marked by the presence of a body of men each of whom was
occupied more or less completely in one particular
manufacture. The very growth from the one to the other system,
therefore, is an example of 'division of labour,' or, to use a
better phrase, of 'division of employments.' … When the
place of the young manufactures of the twelfth century in the
development of mediæval society is thus conceived, the
discussion as to a possible Roman 'origin' of the gilds loses
much of its interest. No doubt modern historians have
exaggerated the breach in continuity between the Roman and the
barbarian world; no doubt the artisans in the later Roman
Empire had an organization somewhat like that of the later
gilds. Moreover, it is possible that in one or two places in
Gaul certain artisan corporations may have had a continuous
existence from the fifth to the twelfth century. It is even
possible that Roman regulations may have served as models for
the organization of servile artisans on the lands of
monasteries and great nobles,—from which, on the continent,
some of the later craft gilds doubtless sprang. But when we
see that the growth of an artisan class, as distinguished from
isolated artisans here and there, was impossible till the
twelfth century, because society had not yet reached the stage
in which it was profitable or safe for a considerable number
of men to confine themselves to any occupation except
agriculture; and that the ideas which governed the craft gilds
were not peculiar to themselves but common to the whole
society of the time; then the elements of organization which
may conceivably have been derived from or suggested by the
Roman artisan corporations become of quite secondary
importance. There is, as we have said, little doubt that some
of the craft gilds of France and Germany were originally
organizations of artisan serfs on the manors of great lay or
ecclesiastical lords. This may also have been the case in some
places in England, but no evidence has yet been adduced to
show that it was so. … The relation of the craft gilds to
the merchant gild is a still more difficult question. In many
of the towns of Germany and the Netherlands a desperate
struggle took place during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries between a burgher oligarchy, who monopolized the
municipal government, and were still further strengthened in
many cases by union in a merchant gild, and the artisans
organized in their craft gilds; the craftsmen fighting first
for the right of having gilds of their own, and then for a
share in the government of the town.
{1618}
These facts have been easily fitted into a symmetrical theory
of industrial development; the merchant gilds, it is said,
were first formed for protection against feudal lords, but
became exclusive, and so rendered necessary the formation of
craft gilds; and in the same way the craft gilds became
exclusive afterwards, and the journeymen were compelled to
form societies of their own for protection against the
masters. … The very neatness of such a theory, the readiness
with which it has been accepted by popular writers in spite of
the paucity of English evidence, have perhaps led some
historians to treat it with scant consideration. … At the
end of the reign of Edward III. there were in London
forty-eight companies or crafts, each with a separate
organization and officers of its own, a number which had
increased to at least sixty before the close of the century."
_W. J. Ashley,
An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory,
book 1, chapter 2 (volume 1)._
"The unions known by the names of mystery, faculty, trade,
fellowship, or (from the fact of possessing particular
costumes) livery company, existed in large numbers throughout
the realm, and were frequently divided into two or three
categories. Thus in London the principal crafts were the
twelve 'substantial companies' or 'livery companies' [Mercers,
Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant
Tailors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners,
Cloth-workers]. … A perfect acquaintance with the details of
the trade and the desire as well as the ability to produce
good work were in all cases preliminary requisites [of
membership]. In fact the main provisions of the craft, the
very soul of its constitution, were the regulations intended
to ensure the excellence of the products and the capacity of
the workman. … The whole character of the craft guild is
explained by these regulations, designed to prevent fraud and
deception of the public."
_E. R. A. Seligman,
Mediæval Guilds of England
(American Economics Association,
volume 2, number 5), part 2, section 2._
ALSO IN:
_W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 11._
_W. Herbert,
History of Twelve Great Livery Companies._
See, also, COMMUNE.