What were Medieval Guilds really like? | Medieval Misconceptions

[Music] greetings i'm shad and i've talked tangentially about guilds in multiple videos already but i've never done a dedicated video to really give all the details that i'm able to find or even have researched on the matter so that's what the purpose of this video will be because guilds is something that most people kind of are aware of in regards to a medieval setting we see it often in say the adventurers guild but a lot of people seem to not understand the very significant role actual guilds played in medieval history and so when we adapted into you know fantasy or anything like that we often can misunderstand or sometimes miss them completely they're not even present or we just kind of get them a bit wrong so the best way to understand how what guilds were how they operate and how we could adapt them to fantasy but also just to understand them better well let's look to the actual historical period to get a better understanding that's what the purpose of this video is so what is a guild to begin with it's an association of artisans or merchants who oversee the practice of their craft or trade in a particular area the earliest types of guilds formed as organizations of tradesmen who belong to say some type of professional association this is somewhat similar to a trade union but they're not exactly the same as a trade union they're actually kind of a bit of a cross between a trade union and a cartel the free market didn't fully exist in the medieval period and so especially with the formation of guilds because the formation of guilds particularly arose to limit the free practice of a certain type of craft or just to limit the trade generally though there are there were distinct benefits that came from the guild practices and benefits but also detriments as well one of the first things to cover is that they actually weren't always called guilds the medieval period or spanned a very long time and in different languages and things and even though we kind of summarized these are guilds they were you know there were times when they were called uh legitimately different things in england for instance in certain periods they were called livery companies in france they were called the cor de metiere and i'm really bad at pronouncing french but it's m-e-t-i-e-e-r-s guilds for the vast majority formed in towns and cities it was very difficult for them to form in areas that were decentralized along the countryside so it's very rare to find guilds in small village town communities and in those areas they operated trade more freely for a guild to form they sometimes depended on grants of letters or patents from monarchs and other rulers they then use their position to actually kind of regulate control the flow of trade to their employed members and to retain ownership of tools and supplies of materials but for the most part guilds were regulated by the city officials unless the guilds gained influence and power which actually was quite common and in that instance the guilds themselves became not only part of the city governance but sometimes ran it so benefits and detriments there was a couple of key fundamental things that a guild first does when i guess when it's formed and it's to determine who can be members and if you're a member you then have the right to either practice your trade or craft within their given jurisdiction and that is usually as i mentioned determined by the local governor by restricting who can actually practice this trade they actually kind of develop a certain type of monopoly over the given area because they get to regulate the competition essentially how many other people will be allowed to trade one of the reasons that they justified this was to ensure that there was enough demand for the supply if they allowed too many tradesmen to flood the area the members of their guild might not have enough customers to make a living guilds did also in certain instances regulate uh price control uh the minimum price and the maximum price you're allowed to sell the given goods for they could also regulate the hours of trading the number of apprentices a given that craftsman could employ and these are just a few examples because the medieval period again very big very diverse and so there are different guild practices just based on location that you can find when you really dig into the minutia here so i'm trying to give a kind of general representation of what guilds were more commonly like but if you were wanting to adapt guilds and to say a fantasy or something like that you should also understand you have the freedom like what regulations would a guild possibly put in place anything that they felt justified really they also had strict standards though by having a guild they would enforce and regulate quality control something that really couldn't exist apart from general customer satisfaction outside of this there were also other protections that a guild could offer their members that obviously they wouldn't get if they're outside of the guild for instance if one of their members their tradesmen got sick the guild could actually subsidize their wages or even just support them during the time that they're sick there are often instances of them actually taking care of their members families if the tradesmen died they would take care of the widows and family so you can see some distinct benefits and attractions also by being a member of a guild it kind of gave you a stamp of approval saying because you could only be a member if your quality of work was up to this level so then you could simply say i'm a member of this guild to imply your works was up to the appropriate standardy and quality level that people would expect and the guilds would often enforce this quite strictly even issuing fines to their members when they made work that was substandard not up to their regulated quality levels other benefits also included are paying for funeral rights if members died but also subsidizing travel expenditures as well if guild members needed to move location you could also see how some of these systems can be abused if the guilds are now saying only members of our guild are making the products to the requisite you know required quality anyone who's not in the guild could be easily slandered by saying they're not in the guild so they're not making the quality up to their standard even if they actually were and so this could make it really hard for any up-and-coming tradesmen who wanted to practice their craft outside the group almost impossible because when they gained more influence and control they legitimately able to bar people from trading within the city flat and that was separate if they could actually practice the trade sometimes they bought it for reasons they just simply weren't a citizen but there are other instances and i'll elaborate this a bit more later in which a guild would not allow people to practice a craft or even trade within their jurisdiction such as if they were a woman or being non-christian now that one in particular isn't a universal there are many exemptions to that where there are historical evidence documents of females being members of gills okay so this is the thing and i reiterate this in many misconceptions all the time the medieval period was a very diverse place it also changed over period and you have many such a large area and so certain practices that were the case in one area wasn't always the case sometimes rarely was the case in other areas as well so you can really see some legitimate benefits and problems with the guild system and they had to tackle with them in the medieval period like quality control legitimately good point but also being prevented from practicing a trade unfairly if you have the skills well they're trying to enforce a monopoly so you can see there are distinct benefits but also problems and opportunities for abuse in the guild system and they existed in the medieval period and there's even some more complex things that elaborate on a bit later but i do like that they had very high standards and remember how i said that they would find people for uh selling substantive products and sometimes they'll just full-on expel people so i like the idea of guaranteeing a quality product because that's what i like if you find a good quality product you tend to like to use it a lot and one of the ways that i personally really like getting a uh you know a reliance that you can be assured that the product is going to be of good quality is actually funnily enough the sponsor of this video hello fresh because the quality of food that they consistently give i found out because of you i used hella fresh heaps before they were a sponsor and the reason being the food was really nutritious and really delicious consistently so and so i got that kind of guarantee as a result one of the key differences of course between say hello fresh and a guild system is that uh you have a lot of options but it's by comparing the options which is why i've found them to be of such value i first tried hello fresh by using one of their great deals just like the one i'm able to offer you all you have to do is go to hellofresh.com and use code shadowversity16 for up to 16 free meals and three surprise gifts seriously free food very easy to try i tried it and i was hooked ever since with calorie smart and carb smart recipes you can indulge in delicious meals without the worry of it being unhealthy and it really did help me break out of the recipe right i found i was just always defaulting to the same recipes over and over hello fresh opened up my family's options to more nutritious and delicious meals there's also a wide variety of quick and easy recipes including 20-minute meals easy clean up and low prep options and on top of all this they're also very mindful of sustainability that packaging hellofresh uses to ship your food is already recycled content it's really easy to try you won't be disappointed all you have to do is go to hellofresh.com and use code shadowversity16 for up to 16 free meals and three surprise gifts the next part that i want to discuss is how common guilds were they were very common but not to think that they were necessarily everywhere but if there was a large city or town it's a very good chance that a guild system arose because there were some very distinct benefits more so for the people at the top because one of the conditions of being a member of a guild is of course paying a certain fee for membership now this could be a type of recurring fee or a percentage of whatever sale you made operating under their authority being a member of the guild and as a result those guilds could end up becoming quite wealthy but in regards to just the numbers the way the guilds start usually is in more broader categories like you would have the trading guild or the merchant skill where people of many different trades kind of are members of but the larger the population grows and the more individual craftsmen are required to give the supply to the man for instance in a small town you might only need one local merchant or blacksmith and is doing all their needs the village might get a bit bigger and you might need a dedicated weapons merchant separate to the blacksmith you don't necessarily need two weaponsmiths to give all the supply and so in those instances if these craftsmen tradesmen want to form a guild together the single guild would kind of cover multiple trades it's when there's a kind of a need for multiple tradesmen in the same job to supply the demand that there is in which you get kind of more specific subsets of guilds in a given area where the weaponsmiths might form their own guilds are separate to the general blacksmiths and then that actually increases so much so to the point where we get some really specific types of guilds organizations just for nail makers helmet makers knife makers sword makers right they all had their individual guilds because there was enough individual say knife makers to have their own individual guild but what usually happened when they had many different kind of more specific subsets of guilds they still kind of operated somewhat together kind of like an umbrella where they might have a larger guild hall where all they all the you know tradesmen across all the guilds could meet together to do any number of things because it's interesting they wouldn't uh plan set policies for regulations as what defines this practice separate to another guild that might be doing something similar and so we need to make sure our charters define exactly what's what but they also got together in types of almost like fraternities the these communities where tradesmen in the same craft and they would hold feasts and sometimes even festivals or stuff just for fun there's even cases of them holding individual tournaments that only guild members could come to like an archery tournament and then out of the archery champion of this guild or something like and so there was a lot of community a role around these guilds separate to the strict kind of overseeing governing of the trade or craft that they're a part of as an example of the number of guilds and also how they eventually came more specific if we look to paris in france in the 13th century there was more than a hundred guilds in paris but by the 14th century that rose to more than 350 different guilds just in paris alone and they had subsets of guilds even in trades that are very similar like for instance metalworking there were subset trades in just metal working with the specific defined guilds in paris and these were the ferriers knife makers sword makers locksmith chain forges nail makers helmet makers armorers excusion makers harness makers and even harness polishes and so when i said like armor is like even armor has had subsets for helmets excusion and just also a separate guild for polishing and there are even more subsets than the ones i just listed we've recorded from germany so in hamburg they had over 100 guilds in cologne 90 guilds and lubeck 70 guilds there's a lot of guilds were very common and they helped frame an essential part of medieval trade and economy and so if you're going to kind of adapt medieval period to different possible periods and you want it to accurately reflect what medieval what the medieval economy was really like you really should be putting guilds and try and give them a good representation of what they were like historically because it's also a great source for conflict and story and i'll be talking about the classic adventurers guild a bit later on how you could more accurately adapt the historical guilds to an adventuring setting even with how common they were not all city economies were controlled by guilds that was just they were just very common to be so when guilds are in control they helped shape labor production and trade practices and they also tried to define exactly what a certain guild was allowed to make versus another guild so remember all those specific sub-categories where you could have a helmet maker who wasn't necessarily a harness maker someone actually made the breastplates or something like that they probably had the skills to do so but the guilds made charters and if you're a member of this specific guild the helmet makers guild no you weren't allowed to make a breastplate that was being made by another guild which had their own members in some instances this could actually become quite difficult because there are kind of gray areas and we see examples of this historically as a result which can cause a lot of confusion for instance what's the difference between a knife and sword and how big can a knife become before it becomes a sword and how small can a sword be before it is a knife there's a lot of gray area there and so then how did they try and regulate what one guild was allowed to make when it was so similar to what another guild was doing and we have a really interesting historical kind of point that helps us understand where one of these divisions might have been and that's specifically on this division between knife making and sword making and it seems like one of the divisions they made in germany was by the hilt construction that if you made a blade with a hilt construction of a knife knife makers could make it and if you made a blade with the hill construction of a sword it would then be a sword the reason why we believe this is the case is because there is a certain type of sword that became quite popular in medieval germany that is called the messer messer literally translates to knife there is a bladed tall easily as big as swords that they legitimately literally called a knife and anyone looks like that's not a knife it's a clearly a sword but it was called a knife and it was sold as a knife why the thing that they were using to define it as a knife was the hilt construction if you took the same blade and changed the hilt construction so it had a tang that went through the middle of a handle and then was pinned on a pummel to make the hook construction like that it would be a sword same blade but now suddenly it's a sword and it seems like knife makers were legally permitted to make these knives because they were knife makers making them in the set in the way that the charter defined this is a knife has to have the hill construction of a knife and there might not have been enough definition of the length of blade because there is that gray area there is almost a crossover area where is it a knife or is it a sword it's kind of hard to tell and then someone might have abused it now medieval people honestly even with complex and stupid bureaucracy they're also pragmatists okay and in regards to the lethality of a weapon and everything who was allowed to carry a certain weapon if it was a sword or knife they didn't define it by sword or knife they defined it by blade length uh there was actually in certain instances in germany right i'm talking about because this is where i've been now to get the point of reference and research i'll go into more detail on this in the medieval misconceptions video on uh the legality of wearing and using swords and just carry them in everyday life but when swords were regulated they usually had a blade hanging on either the town hall or one of the entrances to the city which defined the maximum length of blade that you're legally allowed to carry into the city regardless of field construction but there we go this is just one really interesting example of the difficulties and conflict that could arise in the differences between these guilds when they became so specific in regards to the power and influence that guilds could achieve well when they have more members and they're you know trading making lots of money and they're paying you know a certain amount to their actual guilds and the guilds are you know getting some type of influence in regards to city they could gain quite a certain level of power and influence so much so that it was very common for guilds to have their own coat of arms that defined and you know identified them the coat of arms themselves are usually quite simple and usually had symbols that reflected the type of craft that they were making whether it was baking or money changing or any number of things so the coat of arms were reflected and we have actual historical either documents or things showing guild coat of arms with guilds also came designations of skill because they could now start to regulate it and this is where we get you know apprentice to a qualified tradesman but then after tradesmen you get journeyman to master and then even grand master and on top of that certain positions of leaderships in guilds required certain ranks of craftsmanship that you attained and you might have to actually be a grand master of a given trade to even be considered for roles of leadership in that guild to move from journeyman to master sometimes was even more regulated than you might think one practice for attaining the master rank was to go on a three-year voyage called the journeyman years and this practice of the journeyman years is still exists in certain places in germany and france the title journey win derives from the french word day and it kind of relates to being a day laborer journeymen were able to work for other masters where apprentices were not apprentices usually had a fixed master you worked for them solely until you were graduated from being an apprentice and unlike apprentices this is where we'll get the difference a journeyman was paid for their day's labor apprentices not necessarily were hence day laborer french word for day being jewel or juradani i bad pronunciation but hence the title journeyman so after being employed for several years an apprentice if they produced i like usually that was like a test piece is like you know are you gonna try and conduct your test to graduate from being a craftsman and they have to make a specific piece of work that had to meet certain you know quality criteria it'd be judged by their master who they're being trained by and if it was passes all the quality checks the master would grant them the title of journeyman and they graduate and what's interesting about this in a guild system okay because the master is a member of a guild he has the authority under the guild to give the stamp of approval to say you are now a journeyman in this guild they would be given documents as evidence for it and these documents would be given the authority and weight of the guild that they're a part of and so instead of just some random thing saying you can do x it's like no this has the weight of the knife makers guild behind it this man can make the quality up to our standards and so that means when they traveled to try and seek further employee they could present these documents as proof and evidence yeah i can do the job a bit similar to university qualifications so these documents were like uh certificates letters from his master or the guild itself saying yes this rank they can do this all that stuff this is actual further evidence of reading and writing being far more common for the regular person in the medieval period i've done a whole well actually two videos the second one going right into the source because people it's such a foreign thing i thought medieval people couldn't read and write well there are so many points of evidence to show that actually it was far more common than the stereotype of them being uneducated and i go through a lot of those in those videos and here's just another one okay if uh people weren't reading and writing how could they rely on certificates of qualification when they traveled to different cities to prove where they were that was obviously common enough that either the journeyman the actual crafts people could read to test by the way it's very important for a craftsman and trades person to be able to read and write and also know math to regulate prices and everything like that to also make supply orders or any other things like really important reading writing in the trading and crafting spheres and this is just another point of evidence yeah much more common than people think medieval people reading writing so after traveling and trading as a journeyman for several number of years they could then seek qualification to be a master as i mentioned sometimes there were specific things that they needed to do but sometimes there was less if they could just do the produce the product to that level of quality there are instances of people going straight from apprentice to master in one jump of course that would require approval from the master themselves or the guild heads and to go up in qualification sometimes it also required a donation of money or other goods and there's interesting practices sometimes this was actually not needed if you were the son of an existing guild member and also in relation to the possible donation you would need to produce a piece a master crafted product which would then illustrate and prove your capability in the craft and this was often retained by the guilds themselves sometimes even put on display now even with the more specific separation of guilds i did mention how they often would still associate forming larger guild halls and sometimes these guild halls became the actual location of the city's governance for example uh london's guildhall became the seat of the court of the common council of the city of london in many german and italian cities the more powerful guilds often had considerable political influence and sometimes even went so far to attempt to control city authorities and government in certain instances in the 14th century this actually led to bloodshed during which guilds outright went to dissolve town councils and detained the members of those councils so basically the city government uh to increase their own influence guild sometimes enforced biased practices uh in the 14th century in northeast germany people of wendish slavic origin were not allowed to join some guilds some were even restricted i mentioned that they would sometimes restrict the practice of women and non-christians a bit more on the women thing a bit later because in contrast to this but aligned with the instances of conflict there were certain guilds denounced by the catholic clergy and they did this for their conjurations in 858 west frankion bishop hinckmur so he basically tried to bring more christian practices into the guild practices to not great success but he preached against their binding oath sworn amongst themselves to support one another in adversity that's not necessarily a bad thing but when it's only in this group to the exclusion of other groups and not helping or using your resources to help the general people it could be seen as a bit of a negative there were also instances of them conspiring to kill specific enemies and also back one another in certain feuds and other ventures and things and so there's just interesting machinations the whole actual medieval guild system is so interesting i went out of my way to incorporate many aspects of it in my novel shadow of the conqueror because it is so interesting they're influencing government the power that they can attain and also the problems existed and so much so that there are key characters that have very strong history with guilds in my book and they have effects in the story just because there is rife opportunity for additional conflict so with guilds and their inclination to gain more power if they were capable of it we see instances in the medieval period of the uh rising of greater guilds because when certain guilds gain more influence and power wasn't a universal thing it wasn't they weren't purposely going out of the way to lift all the other guilds with them usually it would be only the guilds within their close group or just their guilds themselves and there were competition and rivalry between different guilds and as a result there were certain guilds that gained so much power that they were considered greater guilds and all the other guilds that didn't have as much power influence were looked down they are the lesser guilds and so we see this kind of division of greater guilds and lesser gods not in every instance but in the instances where guilds did gain a lot of power this kind of dichotomy also rose greater guilds lesser guilds but trades that more commonly were able to rise to the status of being a greater guild were the wool silk money changes guild with less often the uh doctors and druggist guilds and the furry is killed less cases but it did happen with them as well the guilds more commonly being in the lesser category was say like the saddle makers uh the baker's guild iron workers and other artisans specifically in many instances the lesser guild still had very sizable membership and was still very wealthy but they didn't have as much social influence in the local government in florence italy there were seven to twelve greater guilds and fourteen lesser guilds the most important of the greater guilds were for the judges and notaries who handled the legal businesses of all other guilds and often served as arbiters in disputes and so you can kind of see how they would be out of rise to being the greater guilds if they're actually taking a role of officiating disputes and other things like that so medieval guilds did limit women's participation uh but usually only to the widows and daughters of known masters so if they were a widow or daughter of an own master even in cases where women's roles were restricted there would be exceptions and the widows and daughters would be allowed to practice the trade or and even be members of the guilds themselves but not in every instance the afternoon again such a broad thing so many different things happening in period and location there's exceptions and differences just on region and time period so much so that there's actually multiple accounts of women's participations in guilds in england and on the continent in the study ah london silk woman of the 15th century by maria k dale she notes that medieval women could inherit property belong to guilds manage estates and run the family businesses if widowed the book of trade of paris documents that five out of the 110 parisian guilds were female monopolies and that only a few guild systematically excluded women only a few some other professions are also open to women surgeons glass blowers chainmail forges now it's interesting because chainmail doesn't require huge amounts of muscle it's often working with wire and lots of winding in things entertainment guilds also had a significant number of women members and as i've already mentioned there were cases when women were denied you know being out of practice trade and stuff so to say that women's rights were universally bad or universally oh much better than other historical periods of middle period it's not a blanket same you can't say that it very much depends on location and period and if you're wanting to adapt the medieval period more accurately you can have a bit of freedom as to what you think the dynamics could be and so with all the things that we've gone through i hope we can really see how interesting and also kind of complex and diverse the whole guild system was in the medieval period and when you're wanting to adapt it in fantasy there are so many inspiration sources that you can look to and i'll focus kind of on one that idea of the adventurous guild now the first thing that i would want to frame this around is my previous video on the very idea of the fantasy adventure and how likely they would be in a more kind of accurate medieval setting doesn't have to be fully accurate but just if you're drawing inspiration from medieval history what would the adventure really look like and with those conclusions that i came to in that video really encourage you to go watch it there is the question i rose in that video would the uh be enough adventurous to even warrant the actual uh role of the ventra would they that be a common task and there were some takeaways like what if they were the local heroes and if there was enough kind of influence and power i could see a group of inventors maybe the local heroes to form guilds to regulate the uh practice of adventuring in the local area especially if there were problems with uh you know murder hobos basically the other crazy adventures and stuff like that there might be a certain type of regulation that wants to be instituted one of the tricky things is and this is going to lead to a different video i have that i want to do is the fact that adventuring very much is related to the military protection and there's a lot of fighting involved and when it comes to the practice of the military in the medical setting that was more often state associated more decentralized medieval feudal setting but the lord would often be running the kind of local military to help protect the area and it would be more rare for just the random adventurer to just do it on his own free will and there would be an interesting interplay between the state authority protecting and fighting monsters versus the local heroes the random adventurer just wants to do it because he's got the skills and ability to it and that then would greatly influence the possibility or the way in which an adventuring guild might appear but you could certainly incorporate certain historical elements that we talked about in an adventuring guild system where to actually operate as an adventurer i like to kill monsters and everything like that or to help things you need to go to the local adventuring guilds to get their permission to even do it and if you did it without their permission well you could have the actual adventure guild coming after you could employ it in a fantasy setting in a really fun interesting way like if you have a d d setting everything what if you actually have to earn membership in the adventuring guild and that could be becoming an apprentice or proving your worth in a certain quest something like that and you get certain benefits access to certain craftsmen magical items who knows if you're a member of the adventuring guild it could also help the adventures in certain ways that subsidize travel like you know we see instances in the medieval period if they get sick look after the family and widows if they die there would be very specific benefits that i could see adventurers kind of getting together and wanting to support one another in their profession if the profession is warranted based on the setting again go check out that video what would mini adventures be like because again if you want to patent the adventuring guild you know more closely after the historical period we wouldn't just have a blanket adventuring guild remember how they became more specific when there was more members and specific roles and so what would also be more common is that an adventuring guild might end up splitting between combative and magic based and then it could split again too specific the rangers guild versus the fighters guild the rogues guild the mage is guild sorcerer's guild and you could even split it further than that to specific the monster hunting adventurers or any number of things by role occupation with perhaps an overarching authority of the adventuring guilds collective or they could be separate rivals there are interesting things that you could look at historically and then switch up the stereotypical blanket it's an adventuring guild kind of thing so there are lots of opportunities for interesting fun things that you could explore and there we go the medieval guild system really interesting topic i hope you have enjoyed or perhaps even learned something share your thoughts in the comments below i look forward to reading them and of course i look forward to seeing you here on the next video on chat adversity so until that time farewell [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 256,315

Keywords:

Id: ZWyXhaHOq7Q

Length: 33min 55sec (2035 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Ooh, yes please! Always been curious about this.

[u/Wcm1982]

Nice use of Gwent card art.