Guilds were associations of craftsmen or merchants. They were established primarily to protect the interests of their members. As they protected members from competition, they also protected the customers from poor quality work by people who were not skilled, established standards for members and the work they produced, and provided a united approach to economic policies and politics.
The earliest medieval guilds may actually have been established during the time of the ancient Roman Empire. Guilds also developed in other places, and Anglo-Saxon guilds probably arose from a separate tradition. As the Middle Ages went on, more guilds were established, and they became more involved in politics. There were a number of towns and cities run by guilds, especially in Italy and parts of Germany. The political power of guilds probably increased the attractiveness of starting new guilds. Combinations of guilds, such as the Hanseatic League, eventually had a great deal of strength, with military and diplomatic power independent of any country.
The earliest universities in Western Europe appear to have been established as guilds of educators.
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Guilds were created to protect the interests of people who worked in a particular trade or craft. They did this by creating and enforcing standards on quality, price, and education of the guild members. They often had charters or patents from the governing authorities of the places where they existed, and were able to enforce their own regulations. This gave them the ability to prevent outsiders from entering into competition with them.
They were a form of early union and when people work as a group instead of individuals they can get more done as well as protections for the group to promote their product or services.
so the the peoples could follow the orders they got...
Among the oldest guilds were those for stone masons and glass makers. But there were guilds of all sorts, and in guild oriented cities, many or most jobs were involved in the guild structure. There were carpenters' guilds and bakers' guilds and cobblers' guilds. There were even guilds that were entirely female, such as the silk guilds of Paris and Cologne. In time, there were also merchant guilds, in addition to craft guilds. Please use the link below for more information.
There were many guilds. They were divided into two main types, guilds for craftsmen and guilds for merchants. Each of these types had many different kinds of guilds within it. Examples of crafts guilds included stone masons, carpenters, wax candle makers, brewers, soap makers, and fine shoe makers. Industries such as textiles sometimes had many guilds associated with them, each for a different kind of operation. Wool weavers would have one guild, and another would be for makers of linen or silk, and tailors had their own guilds separately. Guilds were often affiliated with each other, and this included trade guilds and merchant guilds both. In some places, the town or city governments were run by guilds, and such cities built alliances of their own.
The ancient Romans had a guild for just about everything, from funeral guilds to musician's guilds. Any occupation could have a guild or union as we would call them today. The guilds set guidelines for wages and some of them were politically important.
Universities were not called guilds, but they functioned very much as guilds did. The undergraduate education in the universities was very like the journeyman stage of becoming a guild member, and the post graduate work leading to the master's degree was very like the production of a master work for the guilds. The structure of the university was quite possibly modeled on crafts guilds. Some guilds even had a higher level of membership than master, which was analogous to a doctorate.