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I was curious if there was anyone here with more in-depth knowledge of the guild system in the Middle Ages, particularly in western and northern Europe. I found an interesting paper that's very negative in terms of how it views the guilds, particularly in terms of their exclusiveness and impact on trade and production (perhaps unsurprisingly, the author is a professor of economic history in England). My general view beforehand was that the guilds were a mixed bag - they constrained trade, were exclusive, and the benefits were exaggerated, but they also provided a bulwark against the power of the nobility and generally served as a base of power for city governments.

Here are some excerpts:

On the numbers and sizes of guilds:

The number and size of guilds covered a wide spectrum. Some cities had
many: London had 72 livery companies and 14 other occupational associations in
1500 (Rappaport 1989); Paris had 103 guilds in 1250, 124 in 1700, and 133 in 1766
(Saint-Léon 1922; Bourgeon 1985). But other cities had very few: Florence, one
of the largest cities in Europe, had only 21 guilds in 1300 (Najemy 1979). Some
guilds had only a handful of members: in seventeenth-century Paris, with half a
million inhabitants, the metal-engravers’ guild permitted a maximum of 20 masters,
the clockmakers a maximum of 72 (Saint-Léon 1922). Other guilds did not have a
formal upper limit, but nonetheless restricted entry via a required career track of
apprenticeship, journeymanship, and mastership with strict conditions for admission
(discussed below). Even in Florence, with 100,000 inhabitants in 1300, each of
the 21 guilds averaged only about 350 members, ranging from 100 in the smallest
to 1,600 in the largest (Najemy 1979). In the small German town of Fulda in 1784,
with just 8,500 inhabitants, the 21 guilds averaged only 13 members apiece, ranging
from the four dyers to the 60 shoemakers (Walker 1971).

On the exclusivity of guilds, and their minority status:

Most guilds also excluded Jews, bastards, migrants, laborers, farmers, propertiless
men, former serfs and slaves, gypsies, members of other guilds, adherents of
minority religions, men of “impure” ethnicity, and those who couldn’t afford the
admission fees (La Force 1965; Walker 1971; Ogilvie 1997; Caracausi 2014). As
one nineteenth-century Spaniard put it, those without funds “called in vain at the
door of the guild, for it was opened only with a silver key” (as quoted in La Force
1965, p. 92).

Guild membership was reserved to a privileged minority, even in towns. At the
high end lay sixteenth-century London or Augsburg, where guild masters made
up 50–60 percent of householders and 12–13 percent of inhabitants (Rappaport
1989; Roper 1989). In the middle range lay Barcelona, Rouen, or Venice, with guild
masters comprising 40–50 percent of householders and 9–10 percent of inhabitants
(Amelang 1986; Hafter 1989; Rapp 1976). But in Paris, Florence, or Turin, guild
masters made up at most 20 percent of householders and 5 percent of inhabitants
(Bourgeon 1985; Becker 1962; Cerutti 2010). Guilds were not all-encompassing
workers’ associations but exclusive organizations for middle-class businessmen.

Case of guild law violation, in this case with two women:

Archival records are replete with cases of guild members penalized by the public
authorities for producing above their guild quota, using prohibited techniques, or
employing women. In 1669, for instance, when the weaver Hannss Schrotter broke
his guild’s rules by employing a female servant to weave, his town court fined him the
equivalent of a maidservant’s average annual wage (Ogilvie 2003). Public law-courts
also punished black-market producers for illegally infringing on guild monopolies,
as in 1711 when the Württemberg state responded to complaints by the retailers’
guild against a converted Jew’s widow by closing down her village shop, or in 1742
when a town court jailed a villager’s wife after a complaint by the local nailsmith
that she was “dealing in foreign nails, which violated the nailsmiths’ guild ordinance,
and damaged him in his craft” (as quoted in Ogilvie 2003).

The costs of getting into a guild, which the author uses as an argument against claims that the guilds were so ineffectual in restraining trade that their impact was minimally harmful:

Although not all guilds have been investigated in detail, where documents
survive they show that people at the time were willing to pay money to obtain, defend,
attack, circumvent, or subcontract into guild privileges, suggesting strongly that
those privileges were enforced sufficiently to have a real economic impact (Kisch
1989; Rosenband 1997; Wiesner 2000; Ogilvie 2005, 2011; Horn 2006; Boldorf 2009;
Lindberg 2009; Caracausi 2014). Applicants paid high fees to get into guilds: the
sixteenth-century Parisian grocers’ guild charged a journeyman the equivalent of
about nine years of wages for mastership (Larmour 1967); the eighteenth-century
Parisian furriers’ guild charged even a master’s son (who paid the lowest fees) the
equivalent of over nine years of wages (Kaplan 1981). Outsiders spent large sums
circumventing guild monopolies or subcontracting into them, as in 1706 when
illegal wigmakers were bribing Paris guild officials with sums equivalent to 1–2 years’
journeyman’s wages to let them practice without a license (Gayne 2004). Guilds themselves
engaged in costly political lobbying and interguild conflicts to obtain, defend,
and extend their privileges: one German weavers’ guild spent a sum equivalent to
115 days of earnings for a guild master on lobbying and external conflicts every
year between 1598 and 1760 (Ogilvie 1997).

Some examples of expansion happening when guild restrictions were relaxed:

In the 1750s, when some Dutch town governments compelled guilds
to lower their entry barriers, crafts and trades saw a huge influx of poorer entrants,
especially women (van den Heuvel 2007). In the 1760s, when the woolen-weavers’
guilds of the Bohemian town of Brno lost their power to regulate entry and technology,
the industry immediately took off (Freudenberger 1960).

In 1791, when France abolished its guilds in the wake of the Revolution, tens of thousands
of women and men applied for permission to practice previously guilded occupations
(Fitzsimmons 2010). In the early nineteenth century, when the German city
of Aachen abolished guilds, the textile industry expanded in the countryside and
factories sprang up in neighboring Burtscheid and Monschau (Kisch 1989).

A criticism of claims that the guilds enforced quality control:

Moreover, guild guarantees of quality were often weak because guilds existed
not primarily to constrain or penalize their members, but rather to secure and
defend those members’ rents. As a result, guilds typically penalized their members’
quality violations too mildly to deter them (Homer 2002; Forbes 2002; Ogilvie 2005).
Customers often described guild quality controls as inadequate, and wholesale
merchants added their own quality inspections at point of purchase. As one German
guild inspector declared in 1660, “the cloth-sealing takes place very badly, and when
one says anything about it, one incurs great enmity” (as quoted in Ogilvie 2004a,
p. 295). Guild inspectors lacked the incentive to develop the skills and deploy the
effort necessary to detect low-quality work beyond superficial features (such as
size), which were readily apparent to wholesale merchants and consumers anyway
(Ogilvie 2005; Boldorf 2009).

And finally, an argument about problems with the Guild training systems (specifically nepotism):

Contemporaries often complained that guilds failed to penalize
neglectful masters of apprentices, issued certificates to apprentices without examination,
or granted mastership without training or examination to masters’ relatives
and well-off youths who paid for “privileges” (La Force 1965; Kaplan 1981; Horn
2006). A Thuringian merchant explained in 1681 that he preferred to buy textiles
from nonguilded rural producers because among the guilded urban weavers,
“masters’ sons hardly ever went traveling [as journeymen], were not required to
demonstrate their knowledge through any masterpiece, and hence did not know
how to do anything” (as quoted in Ogilvie 2004a, p. 312). In the mid-eighteenth
century, the Paris goldsmiths’ guild admitted one-quarter of its new masters via
special “privileges,” one-third as nonapprenticed masters’ offspring, and less than
half by proper apprenticeship (Kaplan 1981). The Rouen ribbon-makers’ guild
admitted one-third of its masters via “privileges,” over one-half as nonapprenticed
masters’ sons, and less than one-tenth after guild apprenticeship (Hafter 2007).
Situations such as these were widespread because guilds, as associations of masters,
had an incentive to certify the relatives of members regardless of skill and to reap
rents by selling admission to untrained entrants who could afford to pay for privileges
(Kaplan 1981; Ogilvie 2007a; Hafter 2007).

I think that's probably enough in terms of citation - the link is here. Some of it is problematic because she includes citations to her own work, but it looks like she's been doing some academic work in the area of research in question for some time going off her google scholar citation list.

I liked that article, it is a very good one.

Though the problem is that she approaches a one-size fit for all guilds, treating the German Hansa and a local town guild the same. This of course dooms the whole paper. For example, the Hansa guaranteed the security and freedom of the seas against the strongest pirate alliance we had ever seen in Northern Europe. I also find it unfair to criticize them for excluding women considering the time period.

The guild was a necessary structure to empower tradesmen against nobility in a time where citizenship (back in that time definded as 'not peasants, but people living in a city'), and the term of 'rights' was still less of a concept.

If all the tradesmen in the whole city/region were united in a single group, other people, and especially nobility had to treat them with some modicum of respect, or they would face reprisals from the whole group.

Of course, this also meant that the guild could only survive if they managed to keep non-guild tradesmen out of their sphere of influence.
Letting other people in was also detrimental to the guild member's ability to earn money, so the right had to be bought at high prices.

You can easily see how such a group would quickly forge an agreement with the people in power to do that pesky regulation stuff for them in return for the state enforcing their rule, accumulate more wealth&power, and then start to abuse both to create even more of it for their members, while letting the duty side of that agreement slide.

That's what I figured as well. I've read elsewhere that guilds tended to be involved in popular uprisings in the Middle Ages, so they may have been a useful political bulwark of non-noble power even if they were troubling from an economic perspective in terms of the restraint of trade, production, and labor. There's a potential comparison there with the more recent influence of industrial unions here in the US and elsewhere (and more troubling the trades unions in skilled work), but I'll avoid talking more on that here because this is the history forum, not politics or off-topic.

Thanas wrote:I liked that article, it is a very good one.

Though the problem is that she approaches a one-size fit for all guilds, treating the German Hansa and a local town guild the same. This of course dooms the whole paper. For example, the Hansa guaranteed the security and freedom of the seas against the strongest pirate alliance we had ever seen in Northern Europe. I also find it unfair to criticize them for excluding women considering the time period.

Indeed. Even up to the 1800s, it was considered 'Bad Luck' to have a woman aboard a ship that wasn't carrying passengers, if you recall. Plus, women were still in a limbo between 'property of responsible male relative' and 'able to own property/business on their own'. The guilds that did have women were most often the ones that did 'women's work' -- weaving, seamstress/tailor, baker, etc. The various metal-smithing, cobbling, sailing, and boatmaking were 'men's work', needing a strong back and sure hands, which of course women didn't have. ( )

The guilds did get more power as the Medieval Age wore on, and truly took off after the Black Plague, when they became a true Middle Class between peasants and nobles.

Guardsman Bass wrote:That's what I figured as well. I've read elsewhere that guilds tended to be involved in popular uprisings in the Middle Ages, so they may have been a useful political bulwark of non-noble power even if they were troubling from an economic perspective in terms of the restraint of trade, production, and labor. There's a potential comparison there with the more recent influence of industrial unions here in the US and elsewhere (and more troubling the trades unions in skilled work), but I'll avoid talking more on that here because this is the history forum, not politics or off-topic.

Politics and history tend to be the same, at least if you do social history. Back in 2010/11 I did a paper on the introduction of (more or less) universal healthcare in imperial Germany while Obamacare was heavily discussed. It was funny to read the same arguments from 1870s German liberals in the library books and from 2010s US conservatives and vice versa.

But to add something: Afair in Prussia the kings started to diminish the influence of guilds to increase the government's power. The guilds were one of the strongest bulwarks for the citizens. However, the kings didn't ban the guilds and partly even took back some of the anti-guild measures. The guilds provided an early form of social insurance and thus kept the common members silent. Also the elder guild masters tended to be more conservative and helped suppress agitation by the workers (apprentices).

And as Thanas said, the guilds were quite heterogeneous. In Germany for example you had on one end the miner's guilds ("Knappschaften") who were very tightly knit and had model social security. Their institutions had strong influences on worker's unions and healthcare in Germany. On the other end you had for example textile guilds with few masters and many apprentices who worked more for the masters.

A few nitpicks after skimming the text:

Guardsman Bass wrote:The number and size of guilds covered a wide spectrum. Some cities had
many: London had 72 livery companies and 14 other occupational associations in
1500 (Rappaport 1989); Paris had 103 guilds in 1250, 124 in 1700, and 133 in 1766
(Saint-Léon 1922; Bourgeon 1985). But other cities had very few: Florence, one
of the largest cities in Europe, had only 21 guilds in 1300 (Najemy 1979).

Florence at that point of time was IIRC a republic for over 200 years. Which is why the claim it didn't have mechanisms to check noble power (due to, you know, lacking nobles) doesn't fit. It's like checking pro-worker laws looking only at number of work unions, ignoring the fact people might skip joining one if work law is already good enough.

Some guilds had only a handful of members: in seventeenth-century Paris, with half a
million inhabitants, the metal-engravers’ guild permitted a maximum of 20 masters,
the clockmakers a maximum of 72 (Saint-Léon 1922). Other guilds did not have a
formal upper limit, but nonetheless restricted entry via a required career track of
apprenticeship, journeymanship, and mastership with strict conditions for admission
(discussed below). Even in Florence, with 100,000 inhabitants in 1300, each of
the 21 guilds averaged only about 350 members, ranging from 100 in the smallest
to 1,600 in the largest (Najemy 1979). In the small German town of Fulda in 1784,
with just 8,500 inhabitants, the 21 guilds averaged only 13 members apiece, ranging
from the four dyers to the 60 shoemakers (Walker 1971).

Here text ignores the fact engraver/dyer produces luxury good with small demand compared to guilds like shoemakers who make something with far more sought and sees no implications to guild size? Namely, how many people can live off that demand? Did they consider dimensionless perferfectly spherical guilds in vaccuum?

Most guilds also excluded Jews, bastards, migrants, laborers, farmers, propertiless
men, former serfs and slaves, gypsies, members of other guilds, adherents of
minority religions, men of “impure” ethnicity, and those who couldn’t afford the
admission fees (La Force 1965; Walker 1971; Ogilvie 1997; Caracausi 2014). As
one nineteenth-century Spaniard put it, those without funds “called in vain at the
door of the guild, for it was opened only with a silver key”

Read, they did what humans did through whole history, including today? It would be interesting comparison if we saw if guild was more or less exclusive than its contemporary society, but alas, we don't see that.

Guild membership was reserved to a privileged minority, even in towns. At the
high end lay sixteenth-century London or Augsburg, where guild masters made
up 50–60 percent of householders and 12–13 percent of inhabitants (Rappaport
1989; Roper 1989). In the middle range lay Barcelona, Rouen, or Venice, with guild
masters comprising 40–50 percent of householders and 9–10 percent of inhabitants
(Amelang 1986; Hafter 1989; Rapp 1976). But in Paris, Florence, or Turin, guild
masters made up at most 20 percent of householders and 5 percent of inhabitants
(Bourgeon 1985; Becker 1962; Cerutti 2010). Guilds were not all-encompassing
workers’ associations but exclusive organizations for middle-class businessmen.

It's like saying today people with university degree don't belong to workers’ associations but to middle-class. And that CEOs own majority of nice property and belong to upper class. I don't see how this says anything new.

And again, he ignores geographical context. In Paris I'd expect nobles and king to own a lot more property there than in average French town. Florence? Merchants and bankers. It's like pointing out in modern London people working in finance have abnormally high property % compared to say Manchester.

Archival records are replete with cases of guild members penalized by the public
authorities for producing above their guild quota, using prohibited techniques, or
employing women. In 1669, for instance, when the weaver Hannss Schrotter broke
his guild’s rules by employing a female servant to weave, his town court fined him the
equivalent of a maidservant’s average annual wage (Ogilvie 2003).

Wouldn't he be equally fined if it was male servant? If so, this 'finding' is useless. Even if no male servants would help with weaving, it would be nice to find out why - I'd suspect it was due to weaving seen more as female occupation and more women being unemployed than men. That would be interesting research on its own, but alas.

[..]

Education, especially in master/student relation, is expensive. What it tells us? Was non guild education less expensive? More? Here we need more context.

Same for licence system, a lot of trades even today are regulated, and author doesn't give context to judge if they were managed better, worse, and if so, why. He just tells us you can't practice difficult craft without learning it and yet people tried to dodge it.

In the 1750s, when some Dutch town governments compelled guilds
to lower their entry barriers, crafts and trades saw a huge influx of poorer entrants,
especially women (van den Heuvel 2007). In the 1760s, when the woolen-weavers’
guilds of the Bohemian town of Brno lost their power to regulate entry and technology,
the industry immediately took off (Freudenberger 1960).

In 1791, when France abolished its guilds in the wake of the Revolution, tens of thousands
of women and men applied for permission to practice previously guilded occupations
(Fitzsimmons 2010). In the early nineteenth century, when the German city
of Aachen abolished guilds, the textile industry expanded in the countryside and
factories sprang up in neighboring Burtscheid and Monschau (Kisch 1989).

But was it good or bad? Were these people manning sweatshops to be exploited or did they earn a living? Was 'industry took off' unsustainable bubble/boom, or permanent development? If so, why? Due to new technology? Guilds really being inefficient? Again, we lack context or any research effort. GNP isn't the only way to measure economy.

Moreover, guild guarantees of quality were often weak because guilds existed
not primarily to constrain or penalize their members, but rather to secure and
defend those members’ rents. As a result, guilds typically penalized their members’
quality violations too mildly to deter them (Homer 2002; Forbes 2002; Ogilvie 2005).
Customers often described guild quality controls as inadequate, and wholesale
merchants added their own quality inspections at point of purchase. As one German
guild inspector declared in 1660, “the cloth-sealing takes place very badly, and when
one says anything about it, one incurs great enmity” (as quoted in Ogilvie 2004a,
p. 295). Guild inspectors lacked the incentive to develop the skills and deploy the
effort necessary to detect low-quality work beyond superficial features (such as
size), which were readily apparent to wholesale merchants and consumers anyway
(Ogilvie 2005; Boldorf 2009).

One wonders why these guild members didn't went out of business then if they made so terrible products. Were purchasers forced to buy there instead at competent guild member shop? Did guild members share profits? And what about shoddy quality outside of the guild system? Again, we learn little here.

Contemporaries often complained that guilds failed to penalize
neglectful masters of apprentices, issued certificates to apprentices without examination,
or granted mastership without training or examination to masters’ relatives
and well-off youths who paid for “privileges” (La Force 1965; Kaplan 1981; Horn
2006). A Thuringian merchant explained in 1681 that he preferred to buy textiles
from nonguilded rural producers because among the guilded urban weavers,
“masters’ sons hardly ever went traveling [as journeymen], were not required to
demonstrate their knowledge through any masterpiece, and hence did not know
how to do anything” (as quoted in Ogilvie 2004a, p. 312). In the mid-eighteenth
century, the Paris goldsmiths’ guild admitted one-quarter of its new masters via
special “privileges,” one-third as nonapprenticed masters’ offspring, and less than
half by proper apprenticeship (Kaplan 1981). The Rouen ribbon-makers’ guild
admitted one-third of its masters via “privileges,” over one-half as nonapprenticed
masters’ sons, and less than one-tenth after guild apprenticeship (Hafter 2007).
Situations such as these were widespread because guilds, as associations of masters,
had an incentive to certify the relatives of members regardless of skill and to reap
rents by selling admission to untrained entrants who could afford to pay for privileges
(Kaplan 1981; Ogilvie 2007a; Hafter 2007).

Okay, and how these goldsmiths made anything without knowing their craft? What they sold? It's one thing to point out guild's faults, another to actually try to research why they worked regardless but sadly, we don't learn that either.

Cross-country comparisons also cast doubt on whether guilds were essential
institutions for ensuring appropriate levels of human capital investment. Many
occupations were guilded in some premodern European societies and unguilded
in others. Linen weaving, worsted weaving, cotton production, scythe making,
ribbon making, knitting, lace making, and the making of small iron goods were
guilded in many regions of Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Bohemia, Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Greece, but unguilded in many parts of England, the Low Countries,
Scotland, Switzerland, and Ireland (Ogilvie 1997, 2004a, 2007a). What decided
whether an activity would be guilded was not its skill requirements but whether
a group of practitioners was politically able to secure and maintain guild privileges over that activity

Um, that was the exact point of the guids. Work like trade unions do today, protecting the living of their members. To secure sound wage instead of inevitable "will forge/weave/knit for bowl of food". I feel like the author ignores it and instead bashes guilds like Thatcher drones bashed unions, "they make human resource managing less elastic and drive work costs up". Yes, but this is looking at the something from entirely wrong viewpoint.

Irbis wrote:A few nitpicks after skimming the text:

Guardsman Bass wrote:The number and size of guilds covered a wide spectrum. Some cities had
many: London had 72 livery companies and 14 other occupational associations in
1500 (Rappaport 1989); Paris had 103 guilds in 1250, 124 in 1700, and 133 in 1766
(Saint-Léon 1922; Bourgeon 1985). But other cities had very few: Florence, one
of the largest cities in Europe, had only 21 guilds in 1300 (Najemy 1979).

Florence at that point of time was IIRC a republic for over 200 years. Which is why the claim it didn't have mechanisms to check noble power (due to, you know, lacking nobles) doesn't fit. It's like checking pro-worker laws looking only at number of work unions, ignoring the fact people might skip joining one if work law is already good enough.

This is a really bad nitpick. Florence had the largest concentrations of nobility ever for any Medieval city. Heck, at least ten families moved entirely to Florence. Just because they called it a republic it was not a popular republic. It was a noble republic, one whose aristocratic factions were so powerful that they took control of it and engaged in high politics among European rulers.

Thanas wrote:This is a really bad nitpick. Florence had the largest concentrations of nobility ever for any Medieval city. Heck, at least ten families moved entirely to Florence. Just because they called it a republic it was not a popular republic. It was a noble republic, one whose aristocratic factions were so powerful that they took control of it and engaged in high politics among European rulers.

That was more mental shortcut to make the post shorter. Ok, you're right on face value, they had nobles, but did their title meant the same as in the North? What I meant by lack of nobility was lack of feudal order. Florence was an urban commune ruled by fractions that, while having nobility among their ranks, didn't base their power on birthright. Unless you're going to tell me power-makers like Bardi, Peruzzi, and especially Medici were nobles?

Yes, I guess I could have been more precise but the post was too long as it is. I disagreed with author's insisting Florence had small guilds thus no organized citizens - they were just organized in different way. Commune was a city unified against outside threat (like that several Hohenstaufen emperors who for some reason though Northern Italy had not enough nobility ruling them). They had less need of guilds, as they had no king or other overlord above them (factions in city did a fine job countering each other). So argument comparing them to German or English cities in one breath despite fundamental differences in each society was rather ignorant, IMO.

Also - I was in Florence only twice, but from what I remember from guided travel was fact that local nobles were at best tolerated, and in fact Republic often confiscated/demolished their defensive works or even banished them from the city when they dared to act too bold. That is rather big difference with true noble republics, or was I informed wrong back then?

Ghetto edit - I checked something that was nagging me in back of the head from the trip and it turns out the author's claim is doubly laughable as guilds (noble-less) had in fact big political power in Florence and it was the big guilds who banned less influential arts from making their own organisations. Both to not share the power and to force the lesser artisans to swear allegiance to city, not to each other. So, author was in fact comparing steam engine to electrical one and remarking remarkably little steam emitted from the second apparatus...

Irbis wrote:Also - I was in Florence only twice, but from what I remember from guided travel was fact that local nobles were at best tolerated, and in fact Republic often confiscated/demolished their defensive works or even banished them from the city when they dared to act too bold. That is rather big difference with true noble republics, or was I informed wrong back then?

I don't know what they told you, but the whole Ghibelline / Guelf split in Florence was essentially a case of warring noble fractions. Nobles always played a significant part, if not dominated the local politics. Note that as soon as the renaissance arrived Florence reverted to the rule of the noble Medici family, who after a short period even bred into the kings of France. You really can't get more noble than that.

Same goes for the demolitions - outside of Savanorolla very few popular politics persisted. Most really was a case of one faction trying to undo another faction.

RE: Irbis

A lot of your concerns seem to be that it's an essay, not a full length book with room to go into detail about some of the side issues.

Irbis wrote:Here text ignores the fact engraver/dyer produces luxury good with small demand compared to guilds like shoemakers who make something with far more sought and sees no implications to guild size? Namely, how many people can live off that demand? Did they consider dimensionless perferfectly spherical guilds in vaccuum?

That's why she points out the average guild size, and also points out the range - for example, she mentioned in the section you quoted that the largest guild in Florence (city of 100,000 people) had 1600 members, and the average guild size was much lower than that. I don't see how this refutes her point.

Irbis wrote: Read, they did what humans did through whole history, including today? It would be interesting comparison if we saw if guild was more or less exclusive than its contemporary society, but alas, we don't see that.

Most modern unions are not as racially or religiously exclusive as the guild were, although that's not a fair comparison - the era in general was more sexist, religious, etc. It's worth pointing out, though, that it's a recurring problem. This post from a labor historian (Erik Loomis of the University of Rhode Island) points out that the construction and trades unions (probably the closest counterpart to the guilds in how they worked) were very exclusive as late as the 1960s. Not just in terms of excluding non-whites or women, but in passing down jobs to family members of existing union members. It was why it led to some serious political conflict when they were put under pressure to desegregate in the 1960s.

Whenever you have a fraternal, closely knit organization, odds are you're going to get nepotism and exclusion for outsiders.

Irbis wrote:It's like saying today people with university degree don't belong to workers’ associations but to middle-class. And that CEOs own majority of nice property and belong to upper class. I don't see how this says anything new.

And again, he ignores geographical context. In Paris I'd expect nobles and king to own a lot more property there than in average French town. Florence? Merchants and bankers. It's like pointing out in modern London people working in finance have abnormally high property % compared to say Manchester.

I think the point she's trying to make is that the guilds were not some incipient working-class organization, or really some broad-based popular entity. They were quite well off compared to the general population, even if they weren't nobility or really "rich" per se.

Not that that's surprising. The Skilled Trades Unions have generally been like that compared to the unions that rose up for working-class folks in the 1800s, and onward. Professional Associations tend to take a similar tack.

Irbis wrote: Wouldn't he be equally fined if it was male servant? If so, this 'finding' is useless. Even if no male servants would help with weaving, it would be nice to find out why - I'd suspect it was due to weaving seen more as female occupation and more women being unemployed than men. That would be interesting research on its own, but alas.

No, because it specifically mentioned that the person was fined for employing a female servant in weaving against guild rules. Apparently there were specific rules that barred women from employment in guild work, although in practice I suspect their wives were almost always involved in some fashion or another.

Irbis wrote:Education, especially in master/student relation, is expensive. What it tells us? Was non guild education less expensive? More? Here we need more context.

Same for licence system, a lot of trades even today are regulated, and author doesn't give context to judge if they were managed better, worse, and if so, why. He just tells us you can't practice difficult craft without learning it and yet people tried to dodge it.

It's in one of the citations later in your post. She points out that the guilds had bad quality control and lax punishment for not keeping production at a certain level of quality, thus undermining the societal rationale for allowing guilds to have the legal ability to restrict trade in what they produced. As for "managed better", that's why she points out that production was higher in places where the guilds were weaker.

Irbis wrote: But was it good or bad? Were these people manning sweatshops to be exploited or did they earn a living? Was 'industry took off' unsustainable bubble/boom, or permanent development? If so, why? Due to new technology? Guilds really being inefficient? Again, we lack context or any research effort. GNP isn't the only way to measure economy.

If, as she mentions in the case of France, you had tens of thousands of people applying to do what was guild work and production took off within the space of a single year, it's probably fair to say that it was only partially due to new technology at best. And yeah, she's saying the guilds were inefficient - in fact, that's a big crux of the whole essay, and why she points out the lack of real quality control by the guilds for production.

As for who it was better for, presumably the tens of thousands of people who voluntarily jumped into the work, and anyone who got access to the larger production of products. Not good for the guild masters, but guild rights were supposed to be for a social benefit reason anyways - if they no longer served that purpose, and there's a much greater good to be gotten by abolishing them, then why maintain them?

Irbis wrote:One wonders why these guild members didn't went out of business then if they made so terrible products. Were purchasers forced to buy there instead at competent guild member shop? Did guild members share profits? And what about shoddy quality outside of the guild system? Again, we learn little here.

They had exclusive rights to produce something in a certain area, which makes it harder for them to go out of business if they made shoddy products. As the article mentions, buyers either had to simply bite the bullet and try to pick out the best products from guild production, or go to the rural area producers - or try and economize on using guild products.

Irbis wrote:Okay, and how these goldsmiths made anything without knowing their craft? What they sold? It's one thing to point out guild's faults, another to actually try to research why they worked regardless but sadly, we don't learn that either.

That ties into her point about the complaints of low guild quality and little punishment by the guilds for guild members producing substandard quality products. If new guild members were being chosen on the grounds of nepotism and bribery rather than capability, then they might very well have less knowledge of their own work, and thus produce substandard quality products.

Irbis wrote:Um, that was the exact point of the guids. Work like trade unions do today, protecting the living of their members. To secure sound wage instead of inevitable "will forge/weave/knit for bowl of food". I feel like the author ignores it and instead bashes guilds like Thatcher drones bashed unions, "they make human resource managing less elastic and drive work costs up". Yes, but this is looking at the something from entirely wrong viewpoint.

Except that we don't, at least officially, give special privileges to guild-like entities just because they give benefits to their members (such as the right to control and limit production of certain goods and services). We grant it because it was seen as socially beneficial, that guild-like rules would enforce quality control and accountability. If it was doing neither of those things, then why have the rules protecting it?

I'd strongly recommend you do a read-over of it, versus just skimming it.