CHAPTER 2

Guilds and Governments

Know that I have granted to the weavers of London to have their gild in London . . . provided always that for this privilege they pay me each year 2 marks of gold at Michaelmas.

—King Henry II confirms the privileges of the London weavers’ guild, c. 1154–62

I do not believe that Justice will find me guilty for [receiving] some slight contribution, well merited for such tasks, which in the end serve to the advantage of the poor guilds, and not as a burden on them.

—Michiel Campi, clerk of the Giustizia Vecchia law-court, on accepting bribes from guilds, Venice 1665

Many people have great interest in retaining the guilds, both the heads of the guilds themselves and those who benefit along with them, for the conflicts to which the guild system gives rise are one of the most abundant sources of profits for the people of the Palace. So I would not be at all surprised to hear many sophistries advanced in favour of guilds, especially if they were prudently couched in vague reasoning rather than being applied to the facts.

—Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, controller general of France, writing to the French king, January 1776

Guilds are sometimes described as “private-order” institutions—ones formed through voluntary collective action by private persons without any involvement of public authorities.¹ A common view in the literature on economic growth is that history shows that private-order institutions can substitute for public-order ones in enabling markets to function.² Past societies are supposed to have lacked public authorities able and willing to enforce institutional rules for economic activity, and some economists have come to accept the view that private-order substitutes such as guilds were effective surrogates. This is taken to imply that modern developing economies can perform well without good governments or well-functioning legal systems, since private-order substitutes have a successful historical record of supporting growth.³

The social capital literature adopts a similar view of guilds as private-order alternatives to poor government. Guilds are the main historical exemplar of the horizontal social networks believed to create beneficial social capital.⁴ According to social capital theorists, networks and hierarchies are “two broad equilibria toward which all societies . . . tend to evolve and which, once attained, tend to be self-reinforcing”.⁵ Networks foster egalitarian fellowship, reciprocity, and “mutual solidarity”, making it possible to resist the “power asymmetries, exploitation and dependence” created by hierarchies.⁶ European history is widely deployed to support this idea, with guilds as exemplars of beneficial networks, and royal, patrician, and seigneurial governments as the embodiment of malignant hierarchies.⁷ Both historical and modern development failures are ascribed to a lack of horizontal networks able to remedy state failures and abuses.⁸ European guilds are thus used to draw far-reaching lessons for economic development.

But are these lessons justified? Were guilds really private-order institutions? Did guilds indeed constrain royal, patrician, and seigneurial governments? Do private and public institutions, horizontal networks and vertical hierarchies, always work in opposing directions? If governments and guilds were inherently opposed, how was it possible for guilds to survive openly for so many centuries in so many European societies?

This chapter investigates the interaction between guilds and governments in medieval and early modern Europe. It finds little factual support for the idea that guilds were private-order institutions. Rather, virtually every guild voluntarily sought privileges from the public authorities and offered favours in return. Nor, consequently, do the records reveal a fundamental opposition between guilds and governments.

What the historical records do show is that networks and hierarchies could as easily collude as conflict. Guilds offered an institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger slice of the pie for themselves at the expense of the rest of society. Guilds provided an organizational mechanism for groups of businessmen to negotiate with political elites for exclusive legal privileges that allowed them to manipulate markets to profit their members. Guilds then redirected a share of the profits to political elites in return for their support. In short, guilds enabled their members and political elites to negotiate a way of extracting resources from the economy—resources that neither party could have extracted on its own.

GUILD WARS

One set of historical events—the so-called “guild wars”— is often held to show that guilds were private-order networks fundamentally at odds with public-order hierarchies. In the late medieval period a number of European cities saw open struggles between craft guilds and town governments. These are sometimes interpreted as showing that guilds were a force for democratization, opening up economic and political access to broader social groups.⁹

Craft guilds certainly did not always share the interests of governments, and ruling elites did not always share the interests of guilds. City-states were dominated by mercantile patriciates, territorial states by princes and nobles, ecclesiastical states by clergy from the upper professional strata. Craft guilds wanted regulations that would favour their members, and access to the political process to secure these demands. Guilds expressed their members’ discontent in councils and parliaments if they were represented in them, and otherwise through lobbying, petitioning, and litigating.¹⁰ Occasionally, guild discontent broke out in violent action. Such violence escalated in the late medieval period, first in Italy, then in the Southern Netherlands (modern Belgium), and finally in Germany, in a colourful phenomenon known as the “guild struggles” or “guild revolutions”.¹¹ There was even the occasional “guild war”, such as the famous Battle of the Golden Spurs near the Flemish city of Kortrijk (Courtrai) in 1302, in which guild militias fought against the forces of the urban patriciate.¹²

The question is how to interpret these medieval political conflicts. Did they show that craft guilds were a force for democratization? Did guilds seek to curb government and elite extraction? Did they open up economic opportunities and political participation to wider strata of society?

Sometimes guild conflicts with governments were indeed directed at opening up politics—at least for guild members. Where guild struggles pried open the monopoly of power by a patrician, mercantile, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical oligarchy, they could give rise to more pluralistic policy formation.¹³ But most guild struggles were also directed at closing access to people outside the guild—competitors, dependent workers, and adjacent guilds. Often, too, guild struggles were not directed at negotiating a harmonious solution to a problem caused by arbitrary vertical governance, but rather at initiating opposition to horizontal encroachments that threatened guild members’ special privileges.

For one thing, craft guilds used the political representation they gained in the guild struggles to exclude weaker craftsmen and wage-workers. In Bologna, for instance, guilds of craftsmen and retailers secured political representation in 1228, but then used it to prevent poorer workers from forming guilds or swaying economic policy.¹⁴ By the fourteenth century, the Bologna craft guilds were dominated by elite families and had themselves become institutions for hereditary transmission of privilege.¹⁵ In Florence, a guild revolution in the early fourteenth century secured political representation for 21 guilds, which promptly used their new powers to forbid subordinate artisans (sottoposti) and wage-workers to form guilds and “make constitutions or statutes . . . except by special license of the consuls of that craft under whose authority they stand”.¹⁶ The same pattern can be observed around 1300 in the guild struggles in Huy, Dinant, Liège, Douai, Ghent, and other cities of the Southern Netherlands, which sought not just to resist mercantile oligarchies, but to restrict market competition, block large-scale manufacturing, prevent merchants from encroaching on craft cartels, shore up the profits of master craftsmen, and enable guild members to use political posts for personal enrichment.¹⁷ In Ghent by 1360, the guilds of the weavers and other small tradesmen were using their newly attained political representation to suppress poorer craftsmen and labourers.¹⁸ In late medieval German cities, too, guild struggles targeted not just patrician government, but also merchants, manufacturers, Jews, poorer craftsmen, rural cottage producers, journeymen, and wage-workers.¹⁹ Guild struggles thus aimed at opening access for guild members but closing access for everyone else. For guilds, the size of the pie was finite, and the point of politics was to get a bigger piece of it for guild masters.²⁰

During the guild struggles, craft masters certainly opposed governments and elites that threatened their interests. But they readily collaborated with governments and elites that supported their own privileges. In the Bologna guild revolution of 1228, for instance, guilds of craftsmen and retailers allied with guilds of merchants and bankers that had been part of the government since the twelfth century.²¹ In Genoa in 1265, craft guilds entered a secret alliance with one faction of the governing elite to mount a coup against another faction.²² Bologna’s famous revolt of 1376, which adopted the slogan “Long live the commune and the guilds” (Viva il popolo et le arti), was actually driven by a coalition between the guilds and two main factions of the traditional elite.²³ In mid-thirteenth-century Flemish cities, too, craft guilds opposed one component of government (the merchant patriciate), but allied with another (the Count of Flanders).²⁴ In the most famous of all “guild wars”, the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs was actually fought by guild militias in alliance with the Count of Flanders against the urban patriciate supported by the King of France.²⁵ In thirteenth-century Regensburg, similarly, the guilds resisted the archepiscopal authorities—but by allying with the imperial authorities.²⁶ In Goslar in 1290, the guilds opposed the municipal patriciate, but did so by allying with the Emperor, who declared that,

Upon the ardent request of a number of persons we abolished and destroyed particular brotherhoods in our town of Goslar, which are commonly called guilds, in the belief that this was good; but now, possessed of more intelligent council, we see that it was damaging,. . . so we have revived and restored the said brotherhoods and their usages to their earlier state and granted them eternal validity.²⁷

Throughout the fourteenth century, struggles inside German cities typically involved alliances between craft guilds and factions of the ruling elite that offered to support guild privileges.²⁸

After the “guild wars”, therefore, what emerged in late medieval towns was an equilibrium in which guilds collaborated with governments. In the Southern Netherlands from the late fourteenth century onwards, craft guilds collaborated with patrician governments to secure benefits for their members by squeezing the labourers and wage-workers.²⁹ In Germany, craft guilds and town governments cooperated on central issues such as linking town citizenship with guild mastership, swearing in guild foremen as municipal officials, and granting municipal confirmation of guild privileges.³⁰ Italian cities saw a slightly different solution, involving “sectoral” guilds that encompassed all merchants and craft masters in sectors such as wool or silk, and a collaborative relationship between merchant members of these guilds and the city government.

In most pre-modern towns, in fact, there were never any guild struggles. Guild struggles occurred almost exclusively in three societies: northern Italy, the Southern Netherlands, and Germany.³¹ Even here, only a minority of cities had them. Late medieval Germany had about 3,000 guilded towns, of which only a few hundred—perhaps 10 per cent—experienced guild struggles.³² In Italy, guild struggles against governments occurred in Genoa, Florence, and Perugia, but not in Venice or Padua.³³

Guild resistance to government was not typical. In normal times, the horizontal network of the guild and the vertical hierarchy of the government found it much more profitable to collaborate than to lock horns. There were good reasons for this, since a closer look at the evidence reveals a systematic flow of benefits between the two parties, in both directions.

GUILD LEGISLATION

As soon as the first European craft guilds emerge into view in the eleventh or twelfth century, they can be found seeking recognition from the political authorities—a town council, ecclesiastical ruler, seigneurial lord, provincial governor, prince, or emperor.³⁴ Even when craftsmen had previously formed an apparently informal association, they were keen to get the government to grant them formal entitlements over “their” occupation—so keen, as we shall see, that they were willing to pay for it. The basis for these entitlements was a guild “ordinance” or “charter”: a piece of legislation that recognized the guild as the holder of exclusive privileges.

Although many guilds drew up a wish-list when they applied for their charter, and some even presented a complete draft, it was not until these provisions were ratified by the political authorities that the guild could enforce them effectively.³⁵ In London in 1155, the weavers’ guild was already paying for a royal charter to ensure that “none but through them may intermeddle within the City concerning their mistery”.³⁶ In Paris in the 1260s, the “best and most loyal” surgeons asked the crown to recognize them as a guild precisely because without royal recognition they could not prevent “undeserving” men (and women) from practising their craft.³⁷ In Spain in 1351, the crown explicitly ruled that “no men or women will have the audacity to form confraternities nor chapters nor guilds unless the officials of each place [confirm] that they are for the public welfare”.³⁸ In fifteenth-century York, the town councilors refused to enforce any guild ordinance unless and until it had been approved by the town council.³⁹ In Palermo in 1612, a set of rules drafted for the tailors’ guild by a notary was declared to be invalid because the city council had never approved it.⁴⁰ In Madrid in the 1660s, the cabinetmakers’ guild claimed that their rivals the carpenters were not really carpenters at all because they were “without ordinances”.⁴¹ In Württemberg in the 1670s, the weavers’ and dyers’ guilds agreed to restrict output by imposing a ten-year moratorium on admitting apprentices, but “for purposes of greater authority, we saw it as necessary, in addition to the decision reached by the dyers and the weavers, that this agreement be corroborated and confirmed by Your Princely Highness with Your Princely signature”.⁴² In Oporto in 1695, the locksmiths anxiously petitioned for royal confirmation of their privileges because they had become uncertain about the validity of their compromisso, the guild’s document of incorporation.⁴³ A charter or ordinance issued by the political authorities was the fundamental basis for a guild’s privileges, giving the guild formal rights to regulate the occupation internally and defend its interests externally.⁴⁴

A guild’s links to government did not stop when it got its first official charter. Guild privileges were constantly revised, extended, and confirmed. The charter King Henry II granted to the London weavers’ guild in 1155 referred back to earlier privileges granted by his grandfather Henry I, whose 1130 Pipe Rolls record the guild paying him £16 (over £14,000 in 2016 at purchasing power parity).⁴⁵ For almost every guild, the charter was just one item in a much weightier accumulation of privileges, edicts, decrees, bureaucratic decisions, and court judgements issued by different levels of government over a period of centuries. Consequently, guilds maintained extensive archives of the charters, ordinances, and other legislation relevant to their privileges.⁴⁶ They did not just accumulate papers naively but monitored them systematically over the centuries, organizing them for easy reference and retrieval, as in 1607 when the Alzey tinkers’ guild collected all its government privileges from 1377 onwards into a 104-page copybook.⁴⁷ The importance ascribed to these government privileges is demonstrated by their lavish ornamentation, as with the Barcelona guild of tanners and skinners which bound its royal charter together with ordinances, edicts, and other supportive decrees into a large volume with a heavy leather cover, embellished with studs, a massive clasp, and the design of a lion.⁴⁸ Guilds often treated their government charters, ordinances, rule-books, and privileges with ritualistic reverence, reading them out loud at the beginning of every guild assembly or, in the case of the early modern Venetian bakers’ guild, “every first Sunday of the month [placing] the said rule-book . . . open before the most holy Cross”.⁴⁹

The scale of the collaboration between guilds and governments is reflected in the sheer volume of guild legislation. Table 2.1 shows the huge numbers of guild ordinances issued by European municipal and territorial rulers. Governments started issuing such legislation as early as the twelfth century and were still doing so well into the nineteenth, illustrating how viscerally interlinked guilds were with the “public-order” institutional framework from their first re-emergence in Europe after the Dark Ages through to their final dissolution.

Some city governments issued dozens of guild ordinances in short bursts, as with the 101 issued in Paris around 1270, the 44 issued in Dordrecht in 1367, the 40 issued in London in 1487–96, and the 25 issued in Paris in 1673–74. But city governments also issued guild ordinances steadily over much longer periods: on average, Venice issued a guild ordinance every two years from 1218 to 1330, London one every ten months from 1328 to 1377, Toledo one every two years from 1500 to 1598, Vienna one every 15 months over the five centuries between 1300 and 1800, and Bitola an ordinance every two years from 1808 into the 1830s.

Territorial governments issued guild ordinances with similar or greater intensity. The authorities in Hungary issued more than 14 guild ordinances a year between 1600 and 1883, France more than four ordinances a year for much of the eighteenth century, Italy and Lower Austria more than two a year between 1300 and 1800, the Northern and Southern Netherlands 1.5 to 2 a year between 1100 and 1784, and Castile 0.7 (surviving) ordinances a year from 1251 to 1600. Even lightly urbanized Sweden issued 0.4 ordinances a year between 1612 and 1718.

Voluminous though this formal legislation was, it is just a minimum measure of government support for guilds. Not all guild ordinances survive, especially from medieval times. National compilations seldom cover all guilded towns, especially ones that were smaller or lost their archives. Even if such compilations covered all towns and all guilds, they would still provide only a modest measure of the volume of legislation, since most guilds did not just get one ordinance, but instead applied for a new one every few decades. More numerous than ordinances, and even more important in practice, were the multitude of administrative edicts and judicial decisions generated by multiple levels of government to enforce guild privileges.

The sheer volume of guild legislation was understandable. It was the backbone of everything a guild tried to do. Without these legal enactments enshrining their legitimate rights and their claim on public enforcement, guilds would have been much less able to implement their interests. When a guild could not get (or lost) support from the public authorities, it was unable to act like a guild—as we shall see in the chapters to come. It could not impose mandatory membership, restrict entry, regulate its members’ business activities, intervene in adjacent markets, control quality, mandate vocational training, or regulate technological practices. In times and places where the political authorities were unable or unwilling to enforce their privileges, guilds weakened, metamorphosed, or disappeared.

TABLE 2.1: Number of Guild Ordinances Issued by the Political Authorities, Various European Polities, c. 1100–1883
Place	Period	Years	No. guild ordinances issued by authorities	No. ordinances issued per year	Population
Cities
Venice, Italy	1218–1330	112	52	0.5	110,000
Parma, Italy	1253–61	8	13	1.6	15,000–22,000
Paris, France	c. 1270	1	101	101.0	100,000
Vienna, Austria	1300–1800	500	401	0.8	40,000–232,000
London, England	1328–77	49	60	1.2	80,000
Dordrecht, N. Netherlands	1367	1	44	44.0	10,000
Tallinn (Reval), Estonia	1394–1600	206	34	0.2	5,000–8,000
Barcelona, Spain	1395–c.1495	c. 100	38	0.4	c. 20,000
Lübeck, Germany	1400–1599	199	56	0.3	22,000–25,000
Stockholm, Sweden	1450–1604	154	19	0.1	< 8,000
London, England	1487–96	9	c. 40	4.4	50,000
Toledo, Spain	1500–98	98	48	0.5	30,000–62,000
Valencia, Spain	1500–1600	100	24	0.2	< 54,000
Paris, France	1673–4	1	25	25.0	570,000
Växjo, Sweden	1717–70	53	15	0.3	< 1,000
Bitola, Bulgaria	1808–1830s	c. 30	17	0.6	15,000
Territories
S. Netherlands	1100–1784	684	> 1033	> 1.5	n/a
N. Netherlands	1100–1784	684	> 1374	> 2.0	n/a
Castile	1251–1600	349	253	0.7	n/a
Luxembourg	1300–1600	300	88	0.3	n/a
Italy (50 cities)	1220–1800	580	>1385	> 2.4	n/a
Lower Austria, regional ordinances	1300–1800	500	281	0.6	n/a
Lower Austria, local ordinances	1300–1800	500	1,266	2.5	n/a
Hungary	1600–1883	283	3,987	14.1	n/a
Sweden	1612–1718	106	40	0.4	n/a
France	1715–89	74	c. 300	4.1	n/a
Notes: For Italy, the Northern Netherlands, and the Southern Netherlands, the figure is for the number of guilds that existed in the period, so the number of guild ordinances issued was considerably higher. Southern Netherlands (modern Belgium and Luxembourg) includes only those 84 towns with population over 2,500 in 1784. Northern Netherlands (modern Netherlands) includes only towns with population over 2,500 in 1795. Italy includes only those 50 cities with over 10,000 inhabitants in at least 3 of the 6 dates 1300, 1400, 1500, 1600, 1700, and 1800. Sources: Quantitative guilds database: observations of the number of guild charters issued in 16 cities and 10 larger territories at various periods between 1100 and 1883.

So essential was government legislation, administration, and enforcement to all their activities that guilds engaged in constant political action, offering favours to officials and rulers in exchange for reciprocal benefits. This lobbying and rent-seeking continued on an everyday basis, year in year out, from the first formal recognition of a guild to its final abolition. It made up a far more continuous, resource-intensive, and habitual component of guild-government relations than the occasional guild struggle.

WHAT DID GUILDS DO FOR GOVERNMENTS?

But what did governments get in return? To motivate rulers and officials to grant, confirm, and enforce their privileges, guilds offered them a whole array of desirable things. The qualitative guilds database, discussed in Chapter 1, contains 732 observations of guilds delivering benefits to governments in return for official favours. Table 2.2 shows what forms these benefits took and how pervasive they were.

TABLE 2.2: The Flow of Favours from Guilds to Governments, Eleventh to Nineteenth Century
	Cash payment	Share of revenues	Ad hoc fiscal help	Regular tax	Help in tax collection	Loan	Regulation	Military help	Political support	Total
										no.	%
Country
Austria	1	6	2	1	6	–	3	2	–	21	2.9s
Bohemia	–	4	3	–	–	–	1	1	–	9	1.2s
Denmark	–	–	–	1	–	–	–	–	–	1	0.1s
England	18	9	2	14	–	44	11	98	2	198	27.0hh
France	4	111	17	9	1	–	6	8	3	159	21.7hh
Germany	5	22	1	4	4	–	9	16	4	65	8.9ll
Hungary	1	–	2	–	–	–	–	1	–	4	0.5s
Italy	14	41	2	16	14	–	13	31	1	132	18.0hh
N. Netherlands	–	3	–	–	9	–	6	4	–	22	3.0ll
Poland	–	–	–	–	3	–	–	1	–	4	0.5ll
Portugal	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	3	3	0.4s
Scotland	–	–	–	–	2	–	–	–	–	2	0.3s
S. Netherlands	2	–	2	1	7	–	2	18	4	36	4.9s
Spain	2	5	12	4	6	5	2	10	2	48	6.6s
Sweden	1	1	–	–	4	–	2	–	–	8	1.1s
Switzerland	–	3	1	–	2	–	3	8	3	20	2.7s
Period
Medieval	20	142	7	24	14	20	20	63	20	330	45.1hh
Early modern	28	63	37	26	44	29	38	135	2	402	54.9ll
Total no.	48	205	44	50	58	49	58	198	22	732	100.0
Total %	6.6	28.0	6.0	6.8	7.9	6.7	7.9	27.0	3.0	100.0
Notes: s = percentage of observations is not significantly different from percentage in guilds database at 0.10 level. ll = percentage of observations is significantly lower than percentage in guilds database at 0.05 level. l = percentage of observations is significantly lower than percentage in guilds database at 0.10 level. hh = percentage of observations is significantly higher than percentage in guilds database at 0.05 level. h = percentage of observations is significantly higher than percentage in guilds database at 0.10 level. Bulgaria has zero observations in this table, significantly lower (at the 0.05 level) than its percentage of observations in the guilds database overall. Estonia has zero observations in this table, significantly lower (at the 0.10 level) than its percentage of observations in the guilds database overall. For all other countries not represented in this table, their percentage of observations (zero) is not significantly lower than in the guilds database overall. Source: Qualitative guilds database: 732 observations of guild favours to governments.

Favours can be observed flowing from guilds to governments for over eight hundred years, from the eleventh century when craft guilds first emerge into view after the Dark Ages, to the 1880s when the last guilds were finally abolished in central Europe. But the medieval period is significantly over-represented, with 45 per cent of observations in Table 2.2, compared to only 27 per cent of observations in the guilds database as a whole.⁵⁰ This is consistent with the evidence on the emergence of the modern state in Europe after c. 1500. During the sixteenth century, some European states (notably the Low Countries and England) developed more “generalized” fiscal, military, and bureaucratic mechanisms, enabling them gradually to dispense with selling privileges to special-interest groups such as guilds. But others, including prominent polities such as France and Spain, continued to rely on guilds for taxes, loans, and regulatory assistance long into the early modern period.⁵¹ This explains why the database contains more than 400 observations of guilds providing favours to governments in the early modern period.

Guilds can be observed conveying favours to governments almost everywhere. Most of the 16 European societies in Table 2.2 are represented in proportion to their share of observations in the overall guilds database, shown in Table 1.3. However, England, France and Italy are significantly over-represented, possibly because of the precocious development of their political structures—and their guilds—in the medieval period. Conversely, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and Estonia are significantly underrepresented, which may reflect the different pattern of state development in central Europe both inside the Holy Roman Empire and on its outskirts.⁵² The Northern Netherlands is also significantly underrepresented, possibly because its guild system only began to expand in earnest in the early modern period, by which time the Dutch state had developed alternative, non-guild-based, fiscal structures.⁵³

Cash Payments

A first component of the favours guilds delivered to governments, reflected in 7 per cent of the observations in Table 2.2, consisted of direct cash payments to rulers and government personnel. The observations in the qualitative database show how widespread such cash gifts were. They come from nine European societies: Austria, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Southern Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. They are observed as early as 1170, when the Oxford shoemakers’ guild made a cash gift to the king in return for his confirming its privileges,⁵⁴ and as late as 1776 when the Paris guild made gifts to the lieutenant general of police every New Year.⁵⁵

Powerful recipients of guild money can be found at all levels of national, provincial, and municipal government. Sometimes gifts went to the ruler himself, as when the Perpignan drapers gave King Peter III of Catalonia 1,000 gold florins in return for a new charter in 1386.⁵⁶ Sometimes the beneficiary was a noble or junior royal, as in 1222 when half a dozen Viennese guilds delivered precious gifts for the wedding of the Prince of Babenberg,⁵⁷ or in eighteenth-century France where guilds made payments to the Prince de Conti and members of the royal family.⁵⁸ On other occasions, payment went to a courtier or royal official, as in 1440 when the London tailors’ guild gave money to the Clerk of the King’s Council.⁵⁹ Sometimes guilds gave money to princely officials out in the provinces, as on numerous occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Wildberg worsted-weavers’ guild paid “honoraria” to the Public Secretary, the second most important princely bureaucrat in the district administration.⁶⁰ Often the recipient was a municipal official, as in 1446 when the Košice shopkeepers’ guild made gifts of cash and spices to the mayor,⁶¹ or in 1609–10 when the Antwerp peat-carriers’ guild made cash gifts to the municipal secretary and other individuals in the lower ranks of the town administration.⁶² Sometimes the gift went to parliamentary officials, as in 1592–98 when the Wildberg worsted-weavers’ guild made cash gifts to an official of the Württemberg Estates.⁶³

Both guilds and the political recipients of their largesse were quite open about the reciprocity involved. In the 1420s, for instance, the London brewers’ guild described its payment to two subordinates of the mayor as “for to be good friends to our craft”,⁶⁴ while one London mayor “refused their gifts with thanks, but promised to be just as kind as if he had taken them”.⁶⁵ In 1609–10, the Antwerp peat-carriers’ guild made gifts to aldermen and important municipal officials for reasons such as “his favourable intervention on behalf of the guild during its campaign for the peat ordinance”, or “in the interest of an amicable relationship”.⁶⁶ From the late sixteenth through to the late eighteenth century, the Wildberg worsted-weavers’ guild made gifts to officials for reasons including “many exertions with the craft”, “great efforts . . . throughout the year on behalf of the guild”, and having “on various occasions expended effort on behalf of the guild, and taken its part”.⁶⁷ In 1668, imperial officials openly demanded that the Upper Austrian scythe-smiths’ guild give them 186 fl (equivalent to 620 days’ wages for an average guild master) in return for a confirmation of the guild charter, to which the guild foremen responded by declaring that the guild would only pay 150 fl (equivalent to 500 days’ wages).⁶⁸ In eighteenth-century Paris, the lieutenant general of police accepted gifts from the guilds every New Year, and only refused to accept them in January 1776, on the eve of the abolition of the guilds by his boss Turgot, “to avoid [their] engaging his gratitude”.⁶⁹

Sharing Guild Revenues

A second way guilds created incentives for governments to grant and enforce their privileges was by sharing the revenues that those privileges made possible. Guilds collected fees and dues for apprenticeship registrations, mastership admissions, annual or quarterly dues, fines, confiscations, exemptions, and many other purposes. Often, a guild transferred a share of its revenues to governments, providing the authorities with a direct incentive to confirm the guild’s privileges and its right to collect such moneys.

Sharing guild fees and fines with governments was widespread, accounting for 28 per cent of the observations in Table 2.2. These show revenue-sharing between guilds and the government in ten European societies: Austria, Bohemia, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Northern Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Such transfers can be observed as early as 1166, when the bakers’ guild of Bury St Edmunds shared the fines it collected with the local ecclesiastical overlord,⁷⁰ and as late as 1798 when the Zittau furriers’ guild shared its apprenticeship admission fees with the town council.⁷¹

All types of fees were involved, understandably given guilds’ desire to motivate the authorities to enforce their entitlements to collect those fees, which not only generated guild revenues but also—as we shall see in the chapters to come—enabled guilds to set prices on admissions, infringements, and exemptions. Thus guilds often shared apprenticeship enrolment fees, as in Paris in the 1260s when the hat-furriers’ guild gave the crown more than three fifths of the apprenticeship fees it collected.⁷² Guilds also channeled mastership admission fees to governments, as in fourteenth-century Vienna where the victual-traders’ guild transferred all of its mastership fees to the town government,⁷³ or in eighteenth-century Paris where the tailors’ guild shared its mastership fees with the crown.⁷⁴ When a guild fined outsiders who infringed on its cartel privileges (as discussed in Chapter 3), it often simply handed over the revenues to the authorities, since what mattered was not so much to get the money as to deter the encroacher. Thus in Paris in the 1270s, the robe-tailors’ guild paid the crown the entirety of the hefty fine it imposed on outsiders for infringing on the guild’s cartel privileges.⁷⁵ Likewise, when a guild fined members who violated rules about minimum prices or maximum output (as discussed in Chapter 4), it often shared the yield with the authorities. In Paris in 1285, for instance, the woollen-weavers’ guild fined any master who wove cloth for lower than the minimum price set by the guild, with 60 per cent of the fine going directly to the crown.⁷⁶ In Württemberg in 1674, the worsted-weavers’ guild confiscated cloths any master had produced in excess of the output quota, and delivered a share of their value to the princely exchequer.⁷⁷

The sums could be substantial. In many towns in late medieval Spain, councils’ finances largely depended on taxes and fines collected for violations of guild regulations.⁷⁸ In late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century York, fines collected by the guilds to penalize violations of their regulations made up nearly 10 per cent of city government revenues.⁷⁹ In the Upper Franconian town of Wunsiedel in the mid-eighteenth century, the cabinetmakers’ guild levied a mastership admission fee amounting to approximately four years’ wages for a journeymen, of which 75 per cent went to the princely government and another 5 per cent to the town government.⁸⁰

The quantitative importance of guild revenues provided an incentive for governments to enforce guild regulations and even to grant new guild privileges. In the Reichsstift Edelstetten in Swabia in 1726, for instance, the authorities explicitly mentioned revenues from sharing guild fees as a reason to grant privileges to a new rural weavers’ guild.⁸¹ Auriol and Warlters find the same pattern in modern developing economies, where governments impose entry barriers to favour groups of entrenched producers, giving them market power which enables them to extract rents, part of which are channeled to governments as fees and taxes in return for their granting and enforcing the entry barriers.⁸²

Emergency Fiscal Assistance

In return for official privileges and enforcement, guilds often provided fiscal assistance to governments. This took two main forms: the tacit commitment to respond positively to fiscal emergencies; and a formal commitment to pay certain taxes in perpetuity.

Relying on guilds for emergency fiscal assistance comprises 6 per cent of the observations in Table 2.2. Such payments can be observed in ten European societies: Austria, Bohemia, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Southern Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. They occurred across more than seven centuries, from 1264 when the Basel gardeners’ guild got privileges in return for promising to assist the authorities in all emergencies,⁸³ through 1708 when the Apostolic Chamber turned to the 101 Roman craft guilds to pay an extraordinary tax,⁸⁴ to 1813 when all Hungarian guilds were required to pay substantial fees for new royal charters.⁸⁵

Early modern France provides a striking illustration of a state that treated guilds like a milch-cow in fiscal emergencies. Not only did the French crown repeatedly require guilds to pay special fees and taxes. It also created new mastership privileges, which it sold either to men who could not get guild admission in the normal way (e.g., because they had no training) or else to guilds themselves, which then bought up the extra masterships “at inflated prices to maintain their monopolies”.⁸⁶ In 1691, the French royal controller general, seeking military funds, created numerous new guild offices which the guilds then bought up and suppressed so existing officers would retain their positions.⁸⁷ These ploys raised such substantial revenues that French royal ministers turned to the guilds repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century, creating new letters of mastership, new industrial inspectorships, and new supervisorial offices with power over the existing guild officers, which the guilds then purchased so they could suppress or sell them.⁸⁸ To pay these extortions, French guilds increased entrance fees, imposed higher dues on existing masters, and took out large loans; guild masters paid for these out of supra-normal profits they obtained by increasing the prices they charged customers for goods and services.⁸⁹ Officials in ministries concerned with industrial performance repeatedly sought to curtail guild privileges, but officials in the tax department repeatedly foiled reforms: guilds were fiscally too valuable to weaken, since the crown could always create new privileges which the guilds could be compelled to purchase, bailing out the public exchequer over and over.⁹⁰

Every level of pre-modern government can be observed relying on ad hoc fiscal aid from guilds in return for official favour: ecclesiastical governments in thirteenth-century Switzerland⁹¹ and early modern Rome;⁹² municipal governments in medieval and early modern Spain⁹³ and England;⁹⁴ royal governments in fifteenth-century England,⁹⁵ seventeenth-century Spain,⁹⁶ and eighteenth-century Germany⁹⁷ and France;⁹⁸ and imperial governments in Austria and Hungary from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.⁹⁹ Guilds in composite states such as the Spanish Habsburg possessions paid the government of their province for privileges, as in 1627 when the Antwerp second-hand dealers paid the huge sum of 50,000 guilders (equivalent to €642,890 in 2016) to the governors of the Spanish Netherlands in return for a perpetual monopoly over appraising and organizing public sales, and allegedly sent a delegation all the way to Spain to secure confirmation from Philip IV.¹⁰⁰

Guilds took for granted that governments would turn to them in emergencies, as in 1463 when the Viennese retailers’ guild stated explicitly that the main purpose of the fees it collected from members was to ensure a fund to draw on whenever the government demanded money.¹⁰¹ A guild that failed to respond cordially to such demands risked official disfavour. In Spain, for instance, after war was declared on France in 1635, all the Madrid guilds were required to “donate” funds to the crown; the president of the Council of Castile adjured the royal tax collectors,

if, after having summoned the repartidores [allocators] of each guild and calling upon them with the said arguments . . . there was anyone who, minimizing the present situation, was so stubborn as to refuse to give or offer a just amount, the collector may do with him as he sees fit . . ..¹⁰²

Conversely, a guild that responded positively to government calls for assistance could expect favourable treatment, as in 1736 when the Württemberg princely government extended the privileges of the Calw merchant-dyers’ association on the grounds that it “was a substantial national treasure”, as shown “especially on the occasion of the recent French invasion threat and the military taxes proposed to be raised, when it became apparent that no just opportunity should be lost to extend the association a helping hand in all just matters as much as possible”.¹⁰³

Regular Taxation of Guilds

Guilds also committed themselves to paying regular taxes in exchange for government privileges. As 7 per cent of the observations in Table 2.2 show, guilds delivered such taxes to governments in eight European societies: Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Southern Netherlands, and Spain. This practice emerged very early, as in 1130 when the weavers’ guilds of Winchester, Oxford, Lincoln, and Huntingdon promised annual taxes to the English crown in return for royal charters,¹⁰⁴ or in 1169 when the Würzburg shoemakers’ guild got official approval for its numerus clausus of 20 masters in return for promising to pay new taxes to the town’s ecclesiastical lord.¹⁰⁵ But this fiscal arrangement was not just a medieval one. Thus, in 1675 the Paris seamstresses got a guild charter in return for promising new taxes to the crown;¹⁰⁶ in 1738 the Danish king considered making free craft masters in Altona guilded so he could tax the resulting guilds;¹⁰⁷ and in eighteenth-century France, all guilds rendered regular taxes to the crown.¹⁰⁸ In Germany, it was only in the 1840s that most governments reduced the traditionally high share of public revenues derived from guilds.¹⁰⁹

All levels and types of government received regular taxes from guilds: ecclesiastical overlords in medieval England¹¹⁰ and Germany;¹¹¹ seigneurial overlords in medieval France;¹¹² municipal governments in medieval England,¹¹³ Italy,¹¹⁴ and Austria,¹¹⁵ as well as in early modern France¹¹⁶ and the Southern Netherlands;¹¹⁷ and royal governments in medieval England¹¹⁸ and Spain,¹¹⁹ as well as early modern France,¹²⁰ and Denmark.¹²¹

Both guilds and governments openly acknowledged that this was an exchange of favours. In 1154–62, the English king granted the London weavers a charter barring outsiders from practising the craft, “provided always that for this privilege they pay me each year 2 marks of gold at Michaelmas”.¹²² Such fiscal promises could save a guild from annihilation, as in 1202 when the city of London attempted to suppress the weavers’ guild, but King John refused to assent unless the city authorities paid him a sum equal to the guild’s annual tax, which was comparable to the rent of a good manor; the guild made a counter-offer, promising to increase its annual tax from £12 to £18 and then to £20 (from over £10,000 to over £15,000 to over £17,000 in 2016 at purchasing power parity), successfully keeping itself in existence by outbidding the city.¹²³ In Venice in 1612, the canvas-merchants’ guild got new privileges on the grounds that “the public mind . . . has particularly wanted to distinguish one guild from another, in order to give each one the fitting burden of [military taxes] and other dues, in accordance with the benefits and advantages conferred on it [the guild]”.¹²⁴ The same rationale was expressed by the locksmiths’ guild of Aix-en-Provence in January 1790, when it wrote to the National Assembly pleading to be spared abolition, since it “had consistently paid various taxes to the government”.¹²⁵

Conversely, a guild that was not willing to make fiscal commitments reduced its chance of getting privileges. In late-sixteenth-century Poitiers, for instance, when the coverlet-makers petitioned the municipal government to grant them privileges as a “sworn guild”, the town council dictated the normal conditions, in this case that such a guild must commit itself to providing free coverlets to various city institutions. In an unusual deviation from the norm, the coverlet-makers refused. The town council accordingly denied them guild privileges, stating explicitly that “no occupation will be granted the privileges of a sworn guild unless they commit themselves to render some public works”.¹²⁶

Assistance in Tax Collection

Guilds not only paid taxes themselves, but helped governments levy taxes from their members. As 8 per cent of observations in Table 2.2 show, such guild assistance in tax collection was widespread, with examples from eleven European societies: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Northern Netherlands, Poland, Scotland, the Southern Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Chronologically, too, the practice was observed across the entire period during which European guilds existed. Medieval governments frequently devolved taxation responsibilities to guilds, as in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Zürich,¹²⁷ Poland,¹²⁸ and most territories in medieval Germany and Austria.¹²⁹ Some polities replaced guild tax collection with their own fiscal structures in the late medieval or early modern period, as in Strasbourg where guild tax collection gave way to an urban financial administration around 1400,¹³⁰ or in Scotland where guilds’ important role in tax collection vanished (along with many of their cartel privileges) when the tax system was reorganized in 1672.¹³¹ But in many parts of Europe guilds continued to collect taxes for governments throughout the early modern period. Even in fiscally sophisticated societies such as the Northern Netherlands, brewers’ and beer-porters’ guilds were responsible for collecting excise taxes as late as the eighteenth century,¹³² and butchers’ guilds had to collect taxes at cattle markets.¹³³ In the early modern Southern Netherlands, as well, the brewers’, transport-workers’, and second-hand dealers’ guilds played a major role in collecting municipal taxes.¹³⁴ Swedish legislation of 1621 ordered that the foremen of the larger guilds should always be present at the setting of occupational taxes.¹³⁵ In France, the guilds’ role in tax-assessment was so crucial that in the late 1780s Bordeaux’s many non-guilded trades were organized into temporary guilds for the purposes of electing representatives to the Estates General, which would be responsible for granting new taxes.¹³⁶

In Spain, guilds were viscerally integrated into tax collection. In sixteenth-century Castile, the aggregate sum of urban taxes guaranteed to the crown was allocated by quota to each of the eighteen royal cities; each city then allocated a quota to each small town in its district; each city or town allocated a quota to each of its guilds; and finally each guild allocated a quota to each master, collected the tax, and delivered it to the authorities.¹³⁷ In Madrid in 1636, the king made each guild responsible for reporting how many members it had and how much tax each could pay, and the guild representatives then allocated a quota to each guild member; so central was this fiscal function that the guild officers were called the repartidores (allocators).¹³⁸ By the period 1685–1730, the alcabala tax was assessed collectively from the guilds as a whole, giving rise to decades of conflict and litigation.¹³⁹ In the later eighteenth century, the Spanish government relied on the Five Great Guilds (the corporate body of the principal artisanal and commercial guilds of Madrid) to collect taxes not just from guild members, but also from rural producers.¹⁴⁰

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, too, guilds long played a central role in tax collection. In eighteenth-century Vienna, as Josef Ehmer has emphasized, “guilds were the fundamental actors in state and communal taxation”.¹⁴¹ As early as 1702, the Wealth Tax Ordinance (Vermögenssteuerordnung) required each Viennese guild master to pay a tax for each journeyman he employed, subtracting it from his wages.¹⁴² From the 1730s onwards, motivated by the importance of the guilds in collecting taxes, the Austrian government abolished the privileges which Viennese craftsmen had previously been able to purchase exempting them from guild regulation; this pushed many more craftsmen into guild membership.¹⁴³ In 1748–49, wealth and poll taxes were replaced by an income tax, which for industrial producers was set according to income and workshop size (number of journeymen, looms, work-rooms, etc.); each guild was made responsible for determining the taxable income of its members, recording the tax rate for each member, collecting the taxes, and delivering them to the relevant government office.¹⁴⁴ Not until 1801 did the guilds cease to play a major role in tax collection in the Austrian lands.¹⁴⁵

In some European societies, governments deliberately furthered guild formation to help collect taxes. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Poland, many craft guilds were called into existence by the royal or ecclesiastical authorities with fiscal rights over each town, who wanted to regulate and tax the urban economy more effectively.¹⁴⁶ In Sweden from 1604 onwards the crown tried to organize as many craftsmen as possible into guilds to make them easier to tax, and throughout the eighteenth century the government pushed for a nationally homogeneous guild system for the same reason.¹⁴⁷ In Padua, a major motivation for the establishment of guilds by the dyers and the ribbon-makers in the 1670s was to organize collection of new taxes.¹⁴⁸ In German states such as Württemberg by the mid-seventeenth century princes were describing occupational guilds and associations as “extraordinarily advantageous to us in the rendering of all sorts of collected payments, namely taxes, public-debt-repayments, and other assistance moneys, as well as customs, excise, and the like”.¹⁴⁹ In nineteenth-century Bavaria, many small seigneurs encouraged the formation of rural guilds to help collect taxes from rural craftsmen, creating a density of guilds that was extraordinarily high even by German standards.¹⁵⁰

This fiscal collaboration between guilds and governments implies that some of the famous examples of early modern “absolutism”— France, Spain, Austria—should instead be regarded as examples of “state corporatism”, in which core activities of public-order institutions were devolved to corporative organizations in return for public enforcement of corporate privileges.¹⁵¹ Whatever one decides to call it, the close fiscal relationship between guilds and many governments generated effective mechanisms whereby both parties could extract more resources from the economy than they would have been able to get without each other’s help.

Loans to Governments

Guilds also loaned money to governments to get them to grant and enforce craft privileges. Although this practice accounts for 7 per cent of observations in Table 2.2, geographically it was less widespread than most of the other ways guilds channeled favours to governments, since the examples come from only two European societies: England and Spain.

In England, however, guild loans to the government were quite widespread between the fifteenth and the seventeenth century. In fifteenth-century London, the livery companies required their liverymen (the elite 15–20 per cent of guild members) to contribute to levies for loans to the crown; so high were the financial burdens that some companies, such as the mercers, fined members who refused to take on livery status despite being eligible for it.¹⁵² The crown demanded loans from the London livery companies repeatedly, with peaks in 1459, 1487–88, 1490, 1521–24, 1545, 1561–62, 1579, 1604, 1614, 1625, 1640, and 1642.¹⁵³ At times, as in the 1540s, the London companies faced nearly annual demands for such loans.¹⁵⁴ Some were comparatively small, as in December 1562 when Elizabeth I asked the merchant-tailors’ company to “lend” her £100 (equivalent to £30,720 in 2016 at purchasing power parity); the sum was never repaid.¹⁵⁵ Some guild loans were very much more substantial than this, as in 1579 when Elizabeth demanded that the London guilds contribute to suppressing the Irish rebellion with a compulsory loan of £20,000 (equivalent to over £5.6 million in 2016).¹⁵⁶ In 1604 James I demanded a forced loan of £15,000 (equivalent to £3.25 million in 2016) from the city (i.e., the guilds) of London at the beginning of his reign, a pattern followed by Charles I in 1625 with a demand for £60,000 (equivalent to £10.1 million in 2016).¹⁵⁷ By the later 1640s, the London guilds had exchanged an insatiable royal borrower for a slightly less insatiable Parliamentary one, as revealed in the 1647 accounts of the merchant-tailors’ company, where outstanding loans to crown and parliament amounted to £24,731 8s. 2d. (equivalent to over £3.2 million in 2016).¹⁵⁸

In England, guild lending to the government was mainly practised by the London guilds, which in turn enjoyed unusual success in maintaining their privileges into the later seventeenth century. As we shall see in Chapter 9, after c. 1550 English guilds were progressively circumvented by rural industries, suburban competitors, guild-free urban enclaves, and a combination of royal expropriation and neglect. By lending to the crown on such a vast scale, the London guilds staved off these incursions for longer than most English guilds, though their economic influence even in the city itself declined swiftly in the later seventeenth century as they metamorphosed into organizations mainly devoted to business sociability and networking.¹⁵⁹

Spain was the other European society where guilds often made loans to governments. Here the practice lasted to a much later date. As late as the 1760s, the Spanish crown financed the public debt largely through the Five Great Guilds of Madrid. Like the London livery companies, the Madrid Great Guilds could mobilize comparatively large sums, either directly from their members or indirectly through their credibility in financial markets.¹⁶⁰ In a 1775 memorandum to Charles III, Juan Antonio de los Heros Fernandez described the Great Guilds as a “National Bank: solid, secure, useful, and advantageous to the nation and its vassals”.¹⁶¹ During the war against England in 1779–83, the Great Guilds organized almost all the public borrowing required, at much lower interest rates than the crown could have obtained.¹⁶²

Guild lending to governments in England from 1450 to 1650 and in Spain throughout the eighteenth century had common characteristics. The guilds in question were located in the capital city; their members were unusually prosperous; and they often included merchants and big manufacturers alongside owners of small craft workshops. Their wealth gave them an unusual ability to assemble the large sums governments wished to borrow, and their proximity to the centres of power gave them the capacity to put pressure on governments in return for favours—and vice versa. Other, more modest craft guilds in provincial towns tended to reward governments and political elites with gifts and taxes instead. But in London and Madrid, the public loans which the guilds provided contributed to their success in retaining economic privileges.

Regulatory Assistance

Guilds also helped governments regulate industry and commerce.¹⁶³ As shown by 8 per cent of observations in Table 2.2, devolving economic regulation to guilds was geographically widespread, with observations in eleven European societies. It covered all types of pre-modern state: city-states such as those of Italy and Germany; territorial states such as England, France, and Sweden; federal states such as Switzerland and the Northern and Southern Netherlands; and composite states such as Spain and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

Guilds did not just take over regulation in the primitive administrative structures of medieval governments. In England the regulatory role of guilds gradually tailed off after the late medieval period, but elsewhere it continued long past 1500, surviving well into the eighteenth century in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the Northern Netherlands. This is unsurprising, given guilds’ advantages of expertise and information. Governments provided legitimacy and coercion to ensure that regulations were enforced, while devolving to guilds responsibility for everyday implementation. Guilds and governments benefited, though impartiality suffered.

The regulatory functions of guilds fell into two main categories: controlling the specific occupation governed by the guild; and contributing to the wider regulatory framework. Many guilds played a major role in regulating their own occupations, unsurprisingly since this was one of their chief claims to serve the general weal as well as their members’ particular interests. In medieval London many livery companies were entrusted with searching for “false wares” in their occupation at trade fairs throughout the entire country.¹⁶⁴ In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nuremberg, the guild foremen aided the municipal administrators in virtually all aspects of occupational regulation.¹⁶⁵ In eighteenth-century Austria, guild recommendations were indispensable in formulating industrial regulations and guild involvement essential to implementing them.¹⁶⁶ In eighteenth-century Italy, although guilds were not universal in sectors such as the building trades, governments often required the foreman of each building gang to be a guild member so he could be used to regulate industrial conflicts and labour organization.¹⁶⁷

Guilds also helped governments by providing regulatory services unrelated to their own occupations. In fourteenth-century Zürich and Ghent, for instance, craft guilds played major roles in regulating the economic life of town and hinterland.¹⁶⁸ In medieval Germany, the Mainz weavers’ guild had to fill the office of Heimburger (the senior official responsible for market regulation), the Worms weavers’ guild the office of beadle, and the Augsburg sausage-makers’ guild the office of jailer.¹⁶⁹ In medieval Oldenburg, guild officers were appointed as lay judges.¹⁷⁰ The English anti-aliens act of 1463 gave “the masters or wardens for the time being of every craft or mistery in every city, borough, town and village” the responsibility of searching for illegal imports; only later was responsibility shifted to Justices of the Peace.¹⁷¹ In early modern Kassel, fire-protection responsibilities were allocated to guilds according to technical capacities, with the smiths providing ladders and fire-hooks, the shoemakers leather buckets and hoses, and the building trades axes and pickaxes; eighteenth-century Lippstadt applied a similar system.¹⁷² In early modern Rome, guilds were required to act as a medical police force to block entrance of goods and persons which might transmit plague.¹⁷³ In eighteenth-century Vienna, the guild of gold- and silversmiths was responsible for assessing precious metals in inheritance cases.¹⁷⁴ In eighteenth-century Amsterdam, the masons’ guild had to help supervise municipal building, the brewers’ guild enforce regulation of beer quality and imports, and the goldsmiths’ guild ensure municipal charcoal provision.¹⁷⁵

Governments explicitly regarded regulatory assistance as one advantage of establishing guilds. In 1444 the Northampton authorities forced a guild organization on the tailors, in order to “lay down order and good rul [sic]” among them.¹⁷⁶ Spanish governments regarded guilds as crucial for ensuring that, in the words of a 1527 compilation of Seville guild ordinances, “supplies were orderly”.¹⁷⁷ In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden, the government sought to organize as many craftsmen as possible into guilds in order to regulate them more easily.¹⁷⁸ In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century eastern Swabia, the authorities put pressure on craftsmen—including rural proto-industrial producers—to form guilds, partly to help regulate industry.¹⁷⁹

In some cases, governments established new guilds precisely to create an identifiable organization that could be used to regulate the occupation. A vivid example is provided by the book trade in sixteenth-century Venice, where the Council of Ten complained that all the other trades in the city were organized into guilds whereas each printer and bookseller “operates in their own way, with extreme disorder and confusion”. In 1549, therefore, it ordered the printers and booksellers to form a guild in order to ensure effective regulation and censorship. The new guild soon learned to manipulate the government’s regulatory anxieties in such a way as to protect its own privileges. In 1586, for instance, it shored up its entry barriers by claiming that works that incurred the censors’ disapproval were “nearly always . . . printed and sold by people outside of our guild, and not matriculated, who do not know or understand our profession”.¹⁸⁰

Conversely, the absence of guilds was regarded as creating economic disorder. In anomalous French cities such as Brest, which largely lacked formal guild organizations, city leaders repeatedly petitioned the crown to establish a bakers’ guild, on the grounds that “if we had master bakers in a condition appropriate to their craft, the police could operate in Brest as they do in other cities”.¹⁸¹ In 1776, one of the most vigorous arguments against Turgot’s attempted abolition of the French guilds was the threat of a regulatory vacuum: “Today a severe hierarchy contains everyone and guarantees order: each shop is subordinated to a master who exercises a first rampart of police. The master answers to his guild whose officers are constantly at the call of the Lieutenant General of Police.”¹⁸² The Parlement de Paris refused to ratify Turgot’s abolition edict on the grounds that it would “throw all the orders of the State into confusion”.¹⁸³ In the words of the Paris hatters, the guilds were “one of the most precious motors of the Government”.¹⁸⁴

Military Support

Guilds also benefited governments by organizing and delivering military services. This practice was common, accounting for 27 per cent of observations in Table 2.2. Virtually no type of European state refrained from using guilds to organize military provision. We find the practice in zones of territorial fragmentation such as Italy, Germany, and Switzerland; in composite monarchies such as Austria and Spain; in highly centralized polities such as England and France; and in feudal states such as Poland and Hungary.

It might be expected that organizing military provision via guilds would be limited to the medieval period, before the professional armies and logistics of the early modern “military revolution”.¹⁸⁵ But although there are more observations of guilds providing governments with military services before 1500 than after, we still observe the phenomenon in England, Germany, Spain, the Southern Netherlands, and Switzerland in the sixteenth century; England, Italy, the Southern Netherlands, and Spain in the seventeenth century; and France, Poland, and Spain in the eighteenth century. Some of the most powerful states in early modern Europe continued to rely on guilds to organize one of their central activities to a surprisingly late date—further testimony to the state corporatism underlying European absolutism.

The military services guilds provided to governments varied widely. In many cases, guilds were required to provide military defense directly, via the personal service of guild members, as in twelfth-century Montpellier,¹⁸⁶ fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Zürich,¹⁸⁷ fifteenth- and sixteenth-century London,¹⁸⁸ medieval and early modern German Imperial Cities,¹⁸⁹ sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Barcelona,¹⁹⁰ and eighteenth-century Madrid.¹⁹¹ Guild contributions to urban defense could be important at crucial junctures. In London in 1554 during Wyatt’s Rebellion, a guild contingent of 600 soldiers sent to defend the city actually defected to Wyatt, whereas a 60-man contingent organized by the tailors’ guild “kept London bridge contynually duryn the tyme that the Rebelles of Kente laye in Southwerk”.¹⁹² In Poland in the 1760s, in a period of army depredations and widespread insecurity, the seigneurial overlord of Opatów ordered that each town guild be armed and, if the alarm was sounded, guild masters were to assemble and “smash the rebels”.¹⁹³

In some cases, guilds even provided offensive forces. In fourteenth-century Ghent, as we have seen, the city government organized guild militia units and deployed them against the Count of Flanders.¹⁹⁴ In sixteenth-century England, the crown repeatedly demanded that the London guilds provide contingents of soldiers for offensive purposes, as in 1562 when they were ordered to recruit an expeditionary force to Calais,¹⁹⁵ or in 1569 when they had to form a contingent to put down the Rising in the North.¹⁹⁶

In other cases, guilds did not directly form military units, but instead had to provide mercenaries, as in fourteenth-century Vienna¹⁹⁷ or eighteenth-century France.¹⁹⁸ Some governments gave guilds a choice, either to send their own members or to hire substitutes. In fifteenth-century London, guilds often fulfilled their military obligations by hiring mercenaries, but in 1435 the merchant-tailors’ company recorded payments to ten actual tailors who were sent as archers on the king’s Calais expedition.¹⁹⁹ In seventeenth-century Castile, each guild was require to provide a certain number of conscripts from among its own members, who either had to serve as soldiers themselves or find substitutes; a Madrid official reported in 1640 that there were 49 artisans languishing in prison because their guilds had falsely claimed their names had been chosen in a conscription lottery.²⁰⁰

Guilds were also required to provide men and fortifications to defend towns. Guild-based organization of watchmen and guards can be observed in cities as various as thirteenth-century Paris,²⁰¹ fourteenth-century Vienna,²⁰² sixteenth-century London,²⁰³ and seventeenth-century Palermo.²⁰⁴ In other cases, guilds were required to build fortifications, as in Hungary after the Turkish wars in the thirteenth century,²⁰⁵ or in London in 1642 when the city required the guilds to send their members en masse to help erect eleven miles of defenses around the city.²⁰⁶ In Sicily during the revolt of Palermo in 1647, the guilds supported the government by taking over the fortifications, guarding the city gates, and keeping public order.²⁰⁷

Guilds also helped with military logistics. From the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the English crown repeatedly required the London guilds to organize arms, armour, clothing, and food for armies.²⁰⁸ Many town governments required each guild master to provide an outfit of weapons, as in Strasbourg,²⁰⁹ Zürich,²¹⁰ and Basel²¹¹ in the fifteenth century; or Cologne²¹² and many Luxembourg towns²¹³ in the sixteenth. Guilds were sometimes obliged to provide artillery, as in fifteenth-century Münster (to defend the city)²¹⁴ and seventeenth-century London (to send to Ireland).²¹⁵ Such logistical support could play a crucial military role, as in 1683 when the Lech raftsmen’s guilds had to send 100 journeymen to Ingolstadt to transport troops, baggage, and provisions down the Danube to defend Vienna against the Turks.²¹⁶

Even in a strong absolutist state such as France, the crown maintained guild privileges partly for military reasons. In 1728, for instance, the French crown supported the Lille textile guilds against the non-guilded, rural producers of neighbouring Roubaix despite Roubaix’s support from its seigneur, the Prince de Rohan. The reason given by the crown was that Lille was the most important fortified town on the border with Flanders, and its strength had to be maintained by protecting its guilded industries:

It is in vain that the prince de Rohan and the manufacturers of Roubaix wish to establish that it does not matter to the state whether manufacturers are established in the city or in the countryside and that exclusive privileges remove the competition among manufacturers so necessary for the growth and profit of commerce. All these reasons have always been known and weighed; and they have never prevented the government from granting privileges to the city of Lille, for all the sovereigns of Flanders have recognized the necessity of populating such an important city. This could only be done by establishing manufactures.²¹⁷

Even the strongest absolutist state in eighteenth-century Europe thus regarded guilds as central to military interests. In turn, the guilds’ military role directly contributed to their retention of economic privileges.

POLITICAL SUPPORT

Finally, craft guilds provided rulers with political support at crucial junctures. As shown by 3 per cent of the observations in Table 2.2, guilds provided such support in a number of European societies, mainly in the west of the continent, with examples from England, France, Germany, Portugal, the Southern Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. The cases mainly come from the medieval period, starting in Flanders in the twelfth century, and spreading across the Southern Netherlands, France and Germany between then and the fifteenth century. However, political alliances between craft guilds and the crown still operated in provincial French towns as late as the seventeenth century.

Two main motors drove such alliances. First, rulers needed allies against powerful nobles and churchmen: this motivated princes to turn to the bourgeoisie, granting privileges to guilds of merchants and craftsmen. Second, rulers wanted to reduce the power of the urban patriciate: this motivated princes to ally with craft guilds against merchant guilds and town councils.

In the course of the medieval period, European princes increasingly sought to diversify their sources of political support so as to move away from exclusive reliance on the nobility and the church, which were fiscal and often political rivals to the crown.²¹⁸ By the twelfth century at latest, the bourgeoisie had become an important source of political support for many European rulers.²¹⁹ This bourgeois support was often effectively delivered through guilds. The merchant guilds had the greatest formal political powers, of course, since they dominated most medieval town governments. But merchants alone were often unable to govern a town, or at least to mobilize its fiscal, military, and regulatory capacities, without cooperation from the craft guilds. So craft guilds could affect whether their towns would deliver bourgeois political support to princes, either directly or tacitly by refraining from supporting the nobility or the church.

As early as the eleventh century, many German towns and their constituent guilds got princely recognition and privileges, which helped towns to resist noble or ecclesiastical overlords and helped princes to control over-mighty vassals.²²⁰ In twelfth- and thirteenth-century Flanders, too, rulers granted far-reaching privileges to the towns and the guilds that dominated them, in return for assistance against recalcitrant nobles.²²¹ In medieval France, particularly during the baronial rebellions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, monarchical power expanded partly through political support from towns and guilds.²²² In fourteenth-century Portugal, the crown deliberately strengthened the guild system and ensured representation of guild masters on town councils as a way of creating a countervailing force against the nobility and clergy.²²³ In all these cases, towns and their constituent guilds gained institutional powers as part of a wider process that saw princes moving away from political dependence on nobility and church.²²⁴

The second political configuration that gave rise to an exchange of political favours between craft guilds and princely rulers was the triangular struggle between craft guilds, urban patriciates (including merchant guilds), and royal authority. We have already seen how in the Southern Netherlands during the “guild struggles” of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, craft guilds allied with the Count of Flanders against municipal patricians allied with the King of France.²²⁵ In the medieval German guild struggles, likewise, craft guilds allied with princes in situations where both of them needed to curb the power of the urban patriciate.²²⁶ In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Cologne, the craft guilds allied with the Archbishop of Cologne against the urban patriciate, securing a strong position that survived to the end of the Ancien Regime; a similar alliance in Stendal between the craft guilds and the Margrave gave rise to an urban “guild constitution” which also brought the guilds far-reaching and long-lasting privileges.²²⁷ In England between 1272 and 1307, Edward I exerted his influence in support of the craft guilds, which he regarded as a useful counterpoise to the governing bodies of the towns.²²⁸ Portugal provides a particularly vivid illustration of this political configuration. When in 1383–84 a crowd consisting mainly of craftsmen pressed the future king João I to remain in the country rather than fleeing to England, a mob led by a member of the tanners’ guild browbeat the municipal elite into confirming João, who duly reciprocated by granting each craft guild two representatives in the municipal government.²²⁹ In mid-fifteenth-century Catalonia, likewise, Alphonse V sought to counteract the powerful Barcelona patriciate by granting extensive privileges to the city’s craft guilds.²³⁰

The triangular struggle between craft guilds, town patriciates, and princes continued in some polities into the early modern period. Between 1580 and 1640, the Spanish crown responded favourably to appeals from the Barcelona guilds as a way of stemming the power of the city elite.²³¹ In early modern France, the crown was often willing to grant craft guilds greater autonomy as part of a wider strategy to undermine urban governments and subject towns to royal authority. In Dijon, for instance, whenever the town council tried to constrain the craft guilds during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the guilds appealed to the crown, which duly overruled the urban government and confirmed guild privileges.²³²

QUANTIFYING THE COST

Guilds’ willingness to provide so many benefits to governments suggests that they valued the favours they got in return. Is there any way we can measure this value? Calculating a quantitative measure is difficult for both theoretical and empirical reasons, as we shall see shortly. But this does not mean we should shy away from such calculations, just that we should be clear in interpreting them.

One way to estimate the minimum value guilds ascribed to their government privileges is to analyze guilds’ expenditures on activities directed at getting and keeping such privileges. Guilds certainly regarded such expenditures as a worthwhile investment. As the officers of the Rouen linen-drapers’ guild put it when they undertook an expensive lobbying campaign to defend their corporate privileges in 1778-80, “We must spend the little money we have in the treasury to expedite the affair of the guild.”²³³

The quantitative guilds database contains 43 observations of guilds’ annual expenditures on specific campaigns to obtain or defend their official privileges. These are shown in Table 2.3. They include expenditures to influence different levels of government to grant guild privileges, and also to fight legal battles over such privileges. The observations span a 434-year period between the mid-fourteenth and the late eighteenth century, and thus provide information about both medieval and early modern guilds. They shed light on guild lobbying expenditures in seven major European economies: Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Southern Netherlands, and Spain. They cover the gamut of pre-modern industry, from luxury crafts in the largest and most cosmopolitan cities to proto-industrial worsted-weaving and scythe-making in remote rural regions.

To calculate the opportunity cost of guild lobbying, Table 2.3 converts the annual lobbying expenditures of each guild into the number of days’ earnings for masters and journeymen in that society at that time. The wage rates used in Table 2.3, as in all other tables in this book, are derived from the databases compiled by Bob Allen.²³⁴ Allen’s wage rates are those recorded for craft workers in large towns, typically capital cities. These were the most highly paid guild workers in each society, earning much higher wages than masters and journeymen in the provincial, small-town, or partly rural guilds shown in Table 2.3. Thus, for instance, to calculate the opportunity cost of lobbying for the Wildberg worsted-weavers’ guild in 1668–69, Table 2.3 uses wages from the nearest German city, Augsburg. Here, a master earned 91 kr daily and a journeyman 66.5 kr. These wage rates greatly exceed the actual daily earnings recorded for the Wildberg region, where a male servant earned 9 fl a year (2 kr a day), a master worsted-weaver earned 50 fl a year (8 kr a day), and a town councilor—a member of the highest stratum of small-town society—claimed compensation of 20 kr a day for working on council business.²³⁵ The calculations in Table 2.3, and in later tables in this book, thus provide a very conservative minimum estimate of the true opportunity cost of the sums involved.

TABLE 2.3: Guild Expenditures on Individual Lobbying Campaigns, 1363–1797
Place	Period	Occupation	Sum per annum per guilda	Days’ wages for master	Days’ wages for journeyman
London	1580–1605	skinners	£2	25	40
Venice	1668	furriers	32 ducats	59	83
Wildberg district	1688–9	worsted-weavers	> 200 fl	> 132	> 180
Wildberg district	1689–90	worsted-weavers	c. 200 fl	c. 132	c. 190
Venice	1656	painters	450 lire	133	188
Venice	1674	box-makers	> 100 ducats	> 183	> 259
Rouen	1778–80	linen-drapers	> 441 livres	> 219	> 353
Rouen	1762	ribbon-makers	355 livres	222	374
Antwerp	1609–10	peat-carriers	310 guilders	258	431
Rouen	1736	spinners	350 livres	259	389
Rome	c. 1700	poulterers	> 90 scudi	> 309	> 568
London	1575–89	clothworkers	> £21.43	> 322	> 514
Venice	1633	all (c. 100)	200 ducats	366	518b
Venice	1667	mercers	200 ducats	366	518
Venice	1636	smiths	c. 220 ducats	403	570
Venice	1674	shoemakers	223 ducats	408	577
London	1551–2	tailors	£21 2s. 6d.	423	654
Venice	1689	mercers	234 ducats	429	606
Venice	1679	box-makers	c. 300 ducats	549	777
Kirchdorf-Micheldorf	1668	scythe-smiths	150–186 fl	500–620	750–930
London	1550–1	tailors	£26 4s. 9d.	575	873
London	1604–5	clothworkers	£45	600	900
Venice	1635	coppersmiths	350 ducats	641	906
Venice	1660	mercers	350 ducats	641	906
London	1363	tailors	£20	720	1,920
Bologna	1797	rag-pickers	1,100 Lit.	753	1,410
London	1605–6	clothworkers	£62	827	1,240
Toledo	1562	silk-weavers	112,500 maravedis	938	1,875
Venice	1670	distillers	c. 640 ducats	1,172	1,657
Venice	late 1620s	smiths	679 ducats	1,244	1,758
Rouen	1738	spinners	> 2,000 livres	> 1,356	> 2,105
Upper Styria	1720	brewers	> 600 fl	> 1,500	> 2,400
London	1438	brewers	£53 6s.	1,599	2,558
Paris	1778	cabinetmakers	1,507–5,157 livres	763–2,611	1,206–4,126
London	1440	tailors	£79 18s. 3d.	2,397	3,836
London	1503	tailors	£87 10s. 6d.	2,626	4,201
Kirchdorf-Micheldorf	1605	scythe-smiths	661 fl	2,644	3,605
Kirchdorf-Micheldorf	1718	scythe-smiths	> 1,500 fl	> 4,000	> 6,000
Upper Styria	1720	brewers	> 1,500 fl	> 4,000	> 6,000
Paris	c. 1750	all (c. 133)	6,015–7,519 livres	4,078–5,097	5,729–7,161c
London	1473	pewterers	£200	6,000	9,600
Paris	1771	mercers	23,130 livres	12,850	23,130
Venice	1682	“some”	> 56,000 lire	> 16,544	> 23,382d
Notes: aSum per annum per guild = total expenditure divided by number of years and number of guilds involved. bper-guild expenditures = all-guild total of 20,000 ducats divided by 100 guilds. cper-guild expenditures = all-guild total of 800,000-1,000,000 livres divided by 133 guilds. dper-guild expenditure cannot be reported since number of guilds covered is not given. Source: Quantitative guilds database: 43 observations of guild expenditures on specific lobbying campaigns.

The estimates in this table (and all others in this book) must also be interpreted in the context of the length of the working year in pre-industrial Europe. On the high end, we find a 260-day working year in the German town of Xanten between 1356 and 1495,²³⁶ 270 non-work-free days (i.e., days other than Sundays and holidays) for craft journeymen in early modern Dijon,²³⁷ 275 days in the Parisian building trades in the 1320s,²³⁸ and 285 non-work-free days in 14 German guild ordinances between 1425 and 1578.²³⁹ On the low end, the pre-industrial working year has been estimated at 208 days in England in the 1750s,²⁴⁰ 210 days in the medieval Low Countries,²⁴¹ and 225 days in France in 1785.²⁴² The higher figures are likely to be over-estimates, since they are based on statutory holidays given in guild ordinances or on account-books showing how many days a year at least one worker on a building site was paid a wage. The lower figures probably lie closer to actual practice, since they are based on observations of working hours, wage payments, and workers’ own testimony. Even the lower figures are almost certainly over-estimates, however, at least for journeymen and labourers, since such workers did not have permanent positions and were often unemployed between jobs. Analyses of surviving employment records suggest that some journeymen spent nearly half their time without jobs: one seventeenth-century furrier journeyman from Marburg was in work for only 3 years 11 months out of 7 years (56 per cent of his time), while a tailor journeyman from Alsace around 1600 worked only 4 and a half years out of a total of 8 (also 56 per cent of his time).²⁴³ For England, Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf have estimated that the working year may have been as short as 110 to 120 days in the second half of the fourteenth century, rising to over 300 days only after c. 1750.²⁴⁴

But we have no way of knowing how typical such under-employment rates were, how they varied across European societies, or how they changed over time. This book therefore uses the figures reported above, according to which the average working year lay somewhere between 208 and 285 days in western Europe in the period from 1300 to 1800 period, and thus the average working week lay somewhere between 4 and 5.5. days. To assess the number of days’ earnings represented by the sums of money expended or collected by guilds, the discussion in this book will assume an average five-day working week for a fully employed person, while recognizing that this almost certainly over-estimates the earning capacity of a medieval or early modern wage-earner.

Table 2.3 displays the observations of guild lobbying expenditures in ascending order of the number of days’ wages it would have taken to pay for them. On the low end of the spectrum, we find guilds such as those of the London skinners, the Venice furriers, painters and box-makers, the Wildberg worsted-weavers, and several all-female or mixed-sex guilds in Rouen. These guilds spent less than 300 days’ wages for a master on a year’s lobbying. In the middle range, we find a miscellany of guilds in London, Madrid, Venice, Rome and Bologna, which spent the equivalent of 300 to 1,000 days’ wages for a master in annual lobbying. On the high end, spending the equivalent of over 1,000 days’ wages for a master in just one year’s lobbying, we find a surprising number of guilds. Some are the guilds of well-off craftsmen and traders in large cities—the Venice distillers, mercers, and smiths; the London brewers and pewterers; and the Paris cabinetmakers and mercers. But some are the guilds of poor but desperate producers such as the Rouen spinners and the Kirchdorf-Micheldorf scythe-smiths. Across the 43 observations in Table 2.3, average annual expenditures on lobbying amounted to the equivalent of 1,759 days’ wages for a master (6.5 years of 270 workable days) and 2,744 days for a journeyman (10.2 years). Guild lobbying was thus costly in terms of individual earnings.

Lobbying also consumed a non-trivial share of guilds’ funds. The quantitative guilds database contains 14 observations of the percentage of guild expenditures devoted to lobbying. These are shown in Table 2.4. The observations span a period of nearly three hundred years, between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, and include guilds in France, Germany, and Italy. They cover nine different occupations in the textile, food, furniture, luxury, and retail sectors, as well as a sample of mixed occupations in nineteenth-century Sardinia. The guilds in question include some that were partly rural, such as those of the worsted-weavers in the district of Wildberg, who operated in villages and small towns of less than 1,500 inhabitants; and some in huge cities such as Paris, with nearly 600,000 inhabitants. They include some extremely poor guilds, such as those of the Bologna rag-pickers, and some that were very rich, such as those of the Paris and Venice mercers.

The share of guild resources spent on lobbying varied widely. Poor (or desperate) guilds spent between 33 and 100 per cent of their revenues on lobbying in some periods. The small Venetian box-makers’ guild, for instance, allocated all of its outgoings in 1679 to a life-and-death struggle with the carpenters’ guild to retain its official privileges. The Wildberg worsted-weavers’ guild spent 32 to 41 per cent of its outgoings in the seventeenth century in lobbying, mainly against the powerful association of merchant-dyers which was putting pressure on the princely government to curtail the weavers’ privileges. The Bologna rag-pickers spent 37 per cent of their revenues in 1797 lobbying ministers and officials to let the guild stay in existence. But even rich guilds such as the Venetian bakers could find themselves spending a third of their resources on lobbying at crucial junctures when they found their privileges under attack, even though in normal years lobbying accounted for just 6 to 17 per cent of their spending.

TABLE 2.4: Guild Expenditures on Lobbying as a Share of Total Expenditures, 1540–1835
				Lobbying as % of total expenditures:
Place	Period	Occupation	Wealth	minimum estimate	maximum estimate	average
Venice	1679	box-makers	poor	c. 100.0	c. 100.0	100.0a
Sardinia	1835	all	mixed	42.2	42.2	42.2b
Wildberg district	1598–1647	worsted-weavers	poor	40.9	40.9	40.9
Bologna	1797	rag-pickers	poor	36.9	36.9	36.9
Venice	1608–47	bakers	rich	< 33.3	33.3	< 33.3c
Wildberg district	1666–99	worsted-weavers	poor	32.2	32.2	32.2
Wildberg district	1700–60	worsted-weavers	poor	18.6	18.6	18.6
Paris	1778	cabinetmakers	rich	16.4	56.2	36.3d
Venice	1671–2	furriers	rich	< 13.6	13.6	< 13.6
Venice	1540–53	goldsmiths	rich	13.4	37.5	25.5e
Venice	1660	mercers	rich	13.0	13.0	13.0
Paris	1771	mercers	rich	11.0	11.0	11.0f
Venice	1689	mercers	rich	8.0	8.0	8.0
Venice	1667	mercers	rich	6.5	6.5	6.5
Average				< 27.6	32.1	< 29.9
Notes: a an “exceptional” year. b “conservatore Judge” (28.0%) + “lawyers” (3.3%) + “gifts” (10.9%). c legal costs reached “a maximum of around one-third of the total.” d “legal fees and visits” (16.4%) + some portion of “office rental and expenses, wages of clerks, printing, wood, candles” (39.8%). e craft fraternity allocates 34.7% of expenditures to temporal purposes, 19.9% to charity, and 45.4% to religious ceremonial; “government-legal” accounts for 37.5% of temporal expenditures and 13.4% of total expenditures. f legal fees (6.3%) + “honoraria for the secretaries of magistrates in the different tribunals” (4.9%). Sources: Quantitative guilds database: 14 observations of guild lobbying expenditures as % of total.

At a minimum estimate, the 14 guilds in Table 2.4 devoted an average of 28 per cent of their expenditures to lobbying. However, the average was 45 per cent across the five poor guilds and just 14 per cent across the eight rich ones. The low percentages for some guilds in Table 2.4 arose not because they were spending small absolute amounts on lobbying but because they were spending even more on other purposes.

How should we interpret these estimates of the pecuniary costs of guild lobbying? They do not provide a measure of the total value of the cartel rents obtained by guild members, as some have argued.²⁴⁵ Rather, they provide a minimum measure of the value of the rents the guild hoped to obtain through that particular act of lobbying. Lobbying costs will equal cartel rents only if there is a competitive market in lobbying. If this condition is not met, then the lobbying costs incurred will typically be lower, and possibly very much lower, than the cartel rents, and the lobbyist will be in a position to offer the political authorities a much smaller amount than the value of the rents to its members.²⁴⁶ Guilds did lobby against one another at times, but this did not give rise to a competitive market in lobbying. Competition among guilds almost never focused on a single, defined set of cartel rents. Instead, guilds focused on rival bundles of disparate rent-yielding privileges. The issue was not which guild obtained a specific set of cartel privileges over a specific occupation, but whether there would be a cartel, what types of market manipulation that cartel would legitimize, and how it would be demarcated and enforced vis-à-vis the cartel privileges and market manipulations of other guilds and organizations with which the guild was jostling in the wider institutional system.

This can be seen by analyzing a well documented example. In 1503, the London tailors’ guild spent over £87 (equivalent to 2,626 days’ wages for a master) lobbying the crown for a new charter. The haberdashers’ and mercers’ guilds engaged in counter-lobbying because the new tailors’ charter infringed on their privileges. The City of London offered the crown £5,000 (150,000 days’ wages for a master) to annul the tailors’ guild charter and issue the city itself with a new charter. The tailors’ guild then spent further unspecified sums to persuade the crown to maintain its new charter. Each institution in this “lobbying competition” was spending money to obtain a package of rent-yielding privileges for itself and to oppose the granting of a different package of rent-yielding privileges to other corporate bodies which it thought would damage its members.²⁴⁷

This was typical of guild lobbying. Because the different guilds involved in “lobbying competitions” did not focus on the same, defined pool of rents, the money they spent on such lobbying did not reflect the entirety of the rents arising from one specific set of cartel privileges. Rather, they reflected the minimum valuation placed by each guild on the benefits of getting a particular bundle of privileges and persuading the state not to grant the bundles of privileges sought by adjacent organizations.

Similar findings emerge from analyses of lobbying in present-day economies. Modern business groupings spend considerably less on lobbying than the value of the rents they obtain. Thus, for instance, the American pharmaceutical industry spent $130 million on lobbying the government in 2003, the year the US Medicare Modernization Act passed. However, the value of the benefits these firms thereby secured over the ensuing ten years has been estimated at $242 billion, more than 1,800 times the firms’ investment in lobbying.²⁴⁸

There is a second reason the money guilds spent on lobbying represents only a minimum estimate of the value of the rents they obtained. Many of the benefits guilds provided to governments, as we have seen, were not measured in money terms. Cash gifts, shares of guild revenues, ad hoc payments, regular taxes, and loans had a money value that could be recorded in guild accounts. But other types of benefit guilds provided to governments did not have a money value, even though they comprised 46 per cent of observations in Table 2.2 and unquestionably absorbed the material resources of guilds. When a guild helped the government to tax industry, regulate the economy, wage war, or control political opponents, this was not reckoned in terms of money. But such favours to governments nonetheless consumed resources and must be included in any assessment of the value the guild placed on the benefits it got from governments in return.

A third reason the sums guilds spent on lobbying provide only a minimum estimate of the value of the rents involved is that lobbying activities—persuading, petitioning, negotiating, litigating, demonstrating—consumed other resources in addition to money. Guild micro-studies show that “buying” economic privileges from governments and agitating for a favourable regulatory environment consumed huge quantities of time. In early modern Toledo, the carpenters’ representatives had to lobby for 10 years between their first request for guild privileges in 1541 and the confirmation of the resulting charter in August 1551.²⁴⁹ In 1643, the clerk of the Kirchdorf-Micheldorf scythe-smiths’ guild had to spend more than six months waiting around in Vienna in order to obtain from the royal cameral office a confirmation of the guild privileges and a patent of protection for the guild.²⁵⁰

Even after a guild got its first charter, guild officials spent many days each year planning, writing petitions, travelling to the seat of government, pestering bureaucrats, testifying in court, and negotiating with municipal, parliamentary, and royal offices.²⁵¹ In 1624, the former officers of the Venetian carpenters’ guild described how pursuing lawsuits in defense of the guild’s privileges caused them to “lose a great deal of time . . . abandoning their shops and work with considerable loss”.²⁵² By the later seventeenth century, the time required for such activities meant that members of the Venetian bakers’ and painters’ guilds were paying fines of 25 ducats (equivalent to about 50 days’ wages for a guild master) and members of the mercers’ guild were paying fines of 50 ducats (100 days’ wages) in order to get out of having to act as officers of the guild.²⁵³

Guild lobbying also consumed the time of ordinary masters who had to attend guild assemblies to discuss lobbying strategy, keep their eye on the guild officers, travel on guild business, testify in guild lawsuits, make presentations to parliamentary committees and royal commissions, and demonstrate in front of government offices.²⁵⁴ To give just one example, in May 1689 a delegation of 43 members of the Wildberg worsted-weavers’ guild, along with similar delegations from the guilds of neighbouring districts, spent five days marching to Stuttgart to perform a so-called “footfall”, abasing themselves in front of the chancellery to persuade the prince to maintain their guild privileges and limit those of the merchants and dyers.²⁵⁵

The opportunity cost of allocating time to putting pressure on government was an unquantified but non-trivial component of the lobbying process.²⁵⁶ However high the sheer monetary cost of lobbying, it was only a minimum measure of the resources consumed in the activities undertaken by a pre-modern guild to put pressure on government. It was thus only a minimum estimate of the value the guild placed on the resulting rents.

CONCLUSION

This chapter began by asking three questions about the relationship between guilds and governments. How justified is it to regard European guilds as private-order institutions, given their intimate interdependence with adjacent, public-order institutions? What light do guild-government relations cast on the interplay between horizontal networks and vertical hierarchies? And if governments and guilds were intrinsically at odds, how were guilds able to operate publicly for so many centuries in so many European societies?

The relationship between guilds and governments in medieval and early modern Europe was both competitive and collaborative. The interests of craft guilds did not always coincide with those of the patrician or mercantile governments of city-states, the monarchical governments of territorial states, the ecclesiastical governments of papal or episcopal states, or the seigneurial governments of feudal domains. Both guilds and governments wanted to regulate the economy in their own interests, and sometimes these interests collided. Guilds of craftsmen and other non-merchant occupations sometimes organized opposition to city governments, and in a few polities in late medieval Europe craft guilds engaged in violent clashes with the established authorities.

But these guild struggles do not provide grounds for viewing craft guilds as a force for democratization. Nor do they support the idea that guilds encouraged the emergence of generalized, open-access institutions. Sometimes the conflict between a guild and a government was directed at opening access for guild members to economic and political participation.²⁵⁷ But often struggles of guilds against governments were directed at closing access to economic participation by outsiders to the guild, whether these consisted of members of other craft guilds, dependent employees, or competitors such as Jews, cottage workers, women, or migrants who competed with guild members. Nor is it appropriate to regard guild-government struggles as providing a horizontal playing field on which conflicting groups could negotiate agreements that benefited the wider economy.²⁵⁸ Rather, guilds used such conflicts to oppose changes that threatened their members’ particularistic privileges.

The relationship between guilds and governments also casts doubt on the notion that guilds were private-order institutions. Guilds were not formed through voluntary association among individuals without involvement of the public authorities. On the contrary, guilds were legally and politically constituted entities that spent substantial resources on getting privileges from the public authorities. As soon as the first European craft guilds emerge into view in the eleventh or twelfth century, they are found seeking recognition from the political authorities—municipal governments, ecclesiastical rulers, provincial governors, princes, emperors.²⁵⁹ Every guild we know anything about deliberately sought formal status from the political authorities and exercised formal coercion with the support of the public powers. This was understandable, for when a guild could not get (or lost) support from the public authorities, it was unable to act like a guild. It could not oblige anyone who wanted to practise a particular occupation to join it, exclude applicants for membership, regulate its members’ business activities, manipulate markets for their inputs and outputs, control female participation, enforce quality controls, mandate training systems, or regulate innovation. In short, without public recognition, legitimacy and enforcement, no guild could effectively undertake any of the activities explored in later chapters of this book. When the political authorities were unable or unwilling to grant and enforce their privileges, guilds weakened, metamorphosed, or disappeared.²⁶⁰

Guilds therefore offered favours to the public authorities in exchange for formal, public privileges that they believed would benefit their members. This rent-seeking process continued on an everyday basis, year in year out, from the first formal recognition of any guild to its final abolition. It made up a far more continuous, typical, and resource-intensive component of guild-government relations than the occasional riot or rebellion against the authorities, in which guilds, like other groupings in pre-modern societies, sometimes played a role.

As this chapter has shown, the day-to-day relationship between guilds and governments was characterized by far-reaching collaboration. Guilds cooperated with governments using multiple mechanisms: making gifts, paying bribes, sharing fees, paying taxes, helping to collect taxes, regulating industry, providing loans, delivering political support, and supplying military assistance. This systematic cooperation explains why the public authorities granted guilds privileges and continued to confirm, enforce, and maintain them for centuries.

To regard guilds as private-order, horizontal networks which were completely at odds with the public-order, vertical hierarchies of government is therefore misleading. As this chapter shows, whatever may have been the case in the exceptional arena of a guild rebellion, in everyday life the horizontal social network of the guild collaborated systematically with the vertical hierarchy of the government. To all appearances, both parties regarded this cooperation as benefiting them. Both the guild and the government (or its agents) profited from the rent-seeking process. More broadly, this casts doubt on the notion that horizontal networks such as guilds are inherently antagonistic to vertical hierarchies such as governments. Craft guilds did sometimes enter into conflict with certain components of government. But much more often they collaborated with governments in taxation, regulation, military activities, and politics, in return for the grant of economic privileges backed by the legitimate coercive power of the political authorities. Horizontal networks and vertical hierarchies, these findings demonstrate, cooperated far more than they competed.

What does this imply about why guilds existed? It is sometimes argued that the sheer fact that craft guilds survived for such a long time in so many different economies shows that they must have been efficient solutions to economic and social problems.²⁶¹ The evidence in this chapter supports a very different explanation. Institutions do not necessarily exist because they are economically efficient, in the sense that they maximize the size of the aggregate economic pie. Instead, they often arise and survive because they are good at distributing resources to powerful individuals and groups, at the expense of others and the economy at large.²⁶²

This was certainly the case for European guilds. Guilds were so widespread and long-lived because they offered a highly effective way for two sets of powerful beneficiaries—rulers and businessmen—to redistribute larger slices of the pie to themselves, even at the cost of diminishing its overall size. Craft guilds were institutions that enabled business-owners and rulers to negotiate and manage a complex, two-way flow of benefits which neither party could have extracted from the pre-modern economy without the cooperation of the other.

Governments liked craft guilds because guilds increased the ability of small and medium-sized businessmen to combine together to offer desirable things to the government or its agents: gifts and bribes, emergency bailouts, regular taxes, help in tax collection, favourable loans, regulatory co-operation, and political support. Governments had incentives to restrict industry by segmenting it into a series of privileged cartels enjoyed by guild members instead of increasing its volume by opening it to all comers.

Pre-modern governments were typically conducted by individual rulers with limited life expectancies who often faced urgent crises. Guilds, by contrast, outlasted the lives of their members and although an individual craft business might go bankrupt, it was rare for the craftsmen of an entire city to go out of business. As the patriarch of Constantinople remarked to the grand master of the tailors’ guild in 1873, “Show me a letter of authorization sealed by the Guilds, and not mere signatures of merchants, because the word of the Guilds is respected, for the Guild never dies, is never lost, while the merchants are seen to-day and are no more to-morrow.”²⁶³ Rulers discounted the future more than craft guilds. So they often decided they could be made better off now by trading with a closed group of small businessmen so as to get immediate benefits from the latter’s guilds. This was preferable to waiting to collect tax receipts from a larger population of unincorporated craft businesses in future. Moreover, since governments typically faced higher risks than guilds, granting guilds economic privileges in return for fixed payments gave governments certainty about what benefits they would receive. This spared them having to rely on revenue streams from taxation and public borrowing whose price and availability, in the absence of effective fiscal mechanisms and a market for government debt, were uncertain.

In the absence of effective bureaucracies, this fiscal bargain with guilds also saved governments the costs of revenue collection. For one thing, the craft guild incurred all the costs of assembling the benefit from its members before transferring it to the ruler. Guilds also enabled small craftsmen to commit themselves to providing rulers with political and military support which even the richest individual craftsmen were not usually in a position to guarantee. Guilds were much more highly informed than governments about the taxable capacities of their industry and their members, as recognized in Swedish legislation of 1621 which required guild foremen to help collect industrial and professional taxes, “for they know best what the status of each and every fellow craftsman is and how high taxes can be imposed on them”.²⁶⁴ Finally, the value of the benefits craftsmen were willing to offer for privileges conveyed information to governments about how good business conditions were, and this in turn enabled governments to tax that occupation more profitably.

For all these reasons, both governments and master craftsmen supported the existence of guilds which made possible a two-way flow of benefits that neither party could obtain without the other. Guilds enabled pre-modern governments to transcend the limits on their ability to extract resources from many industrial, commercial and service occupations. In so doing, they foreshadowed similar patterns observed in modern developing economies, where governments grant entry barriers to groups of entrenched producers in return for a share of the rents generated for those producers by the resulting market power.²⁶⁵

The owners of small and medium-sized businesses liked guilds because they reduced the per capita costs of negotiating to get privileges from governments. Such privileges gave guild members the exclusive right to engage in particular activities, use certain inputs, and trade in certain goods and services within a particular geographical area. This, as we shall see in the coming chapters, gave guilded craftsmen advantages over potential competitors and enabled them to extract a bigger slice of resources at the expense of the rest of the economy.

Epigraph sources: King Henry II, quoted in Mundy and Riesenberg 1958, 173–74; Michiel Campi, quoted in Shaw 2006, 59; Anne-Robert-Turgot, quoted in Schelle 1913–23, vol. 5, 159.

¹ Richardson 2008 [EH.net Encyclopedia], for instance, describes guilds as “spontaneous, voluntary and self-enforcing organizations” and states that “most guilds operated without formal sanction from the government”.

² North and Thomas, 1970, 1971, 1973; North, 1981; Milgrom et al. 1990; Greif, 1989; Greif 2006 [Institutions]; Greif 2006 [History]; Greif et al. 1994.

³ Helpman 2004; Dixit 2004; Dixit 2009; World Bank, 2002.

⁴ See Coleman 1988, esp. S101–102; Putnam et al. 1993; Putnam 2000; Putnam et al. 2005.

⁵ Putnam et al. 1993, 177.

⁶ Putnam et al. 1993, 135.

⁷ See Putnam et al. 1993, 123–35, 167, 171–78, 181; La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny 1997.

⁸ See Putnam et al. 1993, 101–104, 107, 115, 124–31, 173–82; on modern development see Stiglitz and Ellerman 2000.

⁹ Bailey 2007, 149; Van Bavel 2010, 69, 112, 122, 386.

¹⁰ Ehmer 2005, 62.

¹¹ Farr 2000, 164–89.

¹² Kluge 2007, 86–91; Van Bavel 2010, 119–20, 252–53, 271–72.

¹³ Van Bavel 2010, 69, 112, 122, 386.

¹⁴ Blanshei 2010, 16.

¹⁵ Lantschner 2015, 576.

¹⁶ Farr 2000, 180–81; Najemy 2006, 136–38, 156–58; Munro 2011, 21–22; Mineo 2012, 329; Rosser 2015, 182 (quotation); Van Steensel 2016, 40–41.

¹⁷ Blockmans 1999, 58; Van Bavel 2010, 253, 278.

¹⁸ Blockmans 1999, 58; Van Bavel 2010, 273–74; Van Steensel 2016, 42–43, 45–46.

¹⁹ Kluge 2007, 88–91.

²⁰ Institut für Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR 1981, 471; Farr 2000, 170–72, 175–76.

²¹ Blanshei 2010, 15.

²² Epstein 1991, 195–96.

²³ Lantschner 2015, 563.

²⁴ Van Bavel 2010, 119, 278.

²⁵ Verbruggen 1952/2002.

²⁶ Kluge 2007, 87.

²⁷ Quoted in Kluge 2007, 87.

²⁸ Welter 1895, 88–89; Czok 1963, 5, 7, 50, 65, 68–79, 98, 104, 113; Lentze 1964, 227; Simon-Muscheid 1988, 244; Kluge 2007, 89–90.

²⁹ Farr 2000, 176–77; Van Bavel 2010, 273.

³⁰ Farr 2000, 177–80; Kluge 2007, 94–95.

³¹ Pitz 1995, 680–92; Epstein 1991, 193–206.

³² Farr 2000, 177; Kluge 2007, 89.

³³ Romano 1987, 4–8; Mackenney 1987, 4, 29; Epstein 1991, 194–95.

³⁴ Gouron 1958, 188; Epstein 1991, 53; Ehmer 2001 [Artisans], 818; Ehmer 2005, 62.

³⁵ On this, see e.g., Menjot 2014, 49; Córdoba de la Llave 2016, 85.

³⁶ Consitt 1933, 180–81.

³⁷ Lespinasse-Bonnardot 1879, 208–209.

³⁸ Quoted in Katz 2002, 7.

³⁹ Palliser 1979, 152.

⁴⁰ Lombardo 2001, 74.

⁴¹ Quoted in MacKay 2006, 135.

⁴² Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, A228, Bü. 256, Nr. 1b, fol. 1r.

⁴³ Hanson 1981, 53.

⁴⁴ Ehmer 2005, 62; Córdoba de la Llave 2016, 77–78.

⁴⁵ Consitt 1933, 180–81.

⁴⁶ Ehmer 1998 (Austria), 39; Davies and Saunders 2004 (England); Ogilvie 1997, 89–95; Scheler 1977–79, 108, 122 (Germany); MacKay 2006, 139–41; Corteguera 2002, 6–7 (Spain).

⁴⁷ Göttmann 1977 [Keßler], 138.

⁴⁸ Corteguera 2002, 7.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Shaw 2006, 107.

⁵⁰ As a reminder, throughout this book, “significant” means that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the 0.05 level.

⁵¹ On the transition from a “particularized” fiscal and regulatory system based on granting privileges to special-interest groups to more “generalized” state structures after c. 1500, see the survey in Ogilvie 2011, esp. 182–91 (with references to a wider specialist literature).

⁵² On the distinctive, “composite state” pattern of political development in central Europe, see Koenigsberger 1986; Ogilvie 1992; Ogilvie 1999.

⁵³ Gelderblom and Jonker 2011.

⁵⁴ Mickwitz 1936, 153.

⁵⁵ Kaplan 1986 [Social Classification], 180.

⁵⁶ Riu 1983, 224.

⁵⁷ Eulenburg 1893, 267.

⁵⁸ Kaplan 1986 [Social Classification], 180 n. 7.

⁵⁹ Davies and Saunders 2004, 76.

⁶⁰ Ogilvie 1997, 372–73 n. 25.

⁶¹ Slezáková 2013, 33.

⁶² Deceulaer 1996, 188.

⁶³ Ogilvie 1997, 92.

⁶⁴ Quoted in Unwin 1908, 235.

⁶⁵ Unwin 1908, 232.

⁶⁶ Deceulaer 1996, 188.

⁶⁷ Ogilvie 1997, 92, 372–73.

⁶⁸ Fischer 1966, 51 (guild correspondence); wage equivalents based on Allen n.d., Vienna database.

⁶⁹ Kaplan 1986 [Social Classification], 180.

⁷⁰ Mickwitz 1936, 154.

⁷¹ Thoß 2012, 49.

⁷² Saint Léon 1897, 78.

⁷³ Eulenburg 1893, 301.

⁷⁴ Deceulaer and Panhuysen 2000, 90.

⁷⁵ Depping 1837, 142.

⁷⁶ Depping 1837, 394.

⁷⁷ Ogilvie 1997, 202.

⁷⁸ Córdoba de la Llave 2016, 77.

⁷⁹ Palliser 1979, 85.

⁸⁰ Kluge 2007, 240.

⁸¹ Sczesny 2004, 74.

⁸² Auriol and Warlters 2005, 635–40.

⁸³ Mickwitz 1936, 135.

⁸⁴ Caselli 2007, 5.

⁸⁵ Bácskai 1997, 201–202.

⁸⁶ Hauser 1931, 132–33, 151–52; Fairchilds 1993, 231 (quotation).

⁸⁷ Kaplan 1981, 263; Hafter 2007, 32–33.

⁸⁸ Hafter 2007, 33–34; Shephard 1986, 112; Marraud 2010, 8.

⁸⁹ Hafter 2007, 34; Shephard 1986, 112; Marraud 2010, 9.

⁹⁰ Hafter 2007, 34–35.

⁹¹ Mickwitz 1936, 135.

⁹² Rodocanachi 1894, 1:239; Caselli 2007, 5.

⁹³ Leonhard 1909, 739–40.

⁹⁴ Davies and Saunders 2004, 202.

⁹⁵ Davies and Saunders 2004, 74.

⁹⁶ MacKay 2006, 53–54.

⁹⁷ Troeltsch 1897, 84 n. 2.

⁹⁸ Fairchilds 1993, 231; Kaplan 1981, 263; Hafter 2007, 32–34; Shephard 1986, 112.

⁹⁹ Commenda 1959, 102–103; Bácskai 1997, 201–202.

¹⁰⁰ Deceulaer 2008, 19. PPP currency conversion according to http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/calculate.php.

¹⁰¹ Eulenburg 1893, 304.

¹⁰² Quoted in MacKay 2006, 54.

¹⁰³ Troeltsch 1897, 84 n. 2. This guild-like association had its origins in the Calw dyers’ guild which got princely privileges in 1650.

¹⁰⁴ Mickwitz 1936, 139.

¹⁰⁵ Mickwitz 1936, 134–55.

¹⁰⁶ Coffin 1994, 777.

¹⁰⁷ Kluge 2007, 253.

¹⁰⁸ Hafter 2007, 33–34; Shephard 1986, 112.

¹⁰⁹ Kluge 2007, 240.

¹¹⁰ Bailey 2007, 140.

¹¹¹ Mickwitz 1936, 134–35; Anon. 1866, 118–19.

¹¹² Mickwitz 1936, 78.

¹¹³ Lipson 1915, I: 324 n. 5.

¹¹⁴ McCray 1999, 44.

¹¹⁵ Mickwitz 1936, 135.

¹¹⁶ Boissonnade 1900, II:20.

¹¹⁷ Deceulaer 1996, 188.

¹¹⁸ Mickwitz 1936, 139.

¹¹⁹ Mickwitz 1936, 72.

¹²⁰ Mickwitz 1936, 80; Coffin 1994, 777; Fitzsimmons 1996, 138.

¹²¹ Kluge 2007, 253.

¹²² Quoted in Mundy and Riesenberg 1958, 173–74.

¹²³ Mickwitz 1936, 139; Fryde 1985, 226.

¹²⁴ Quoted in Shaw 2006, 135.

¹²⁵ Fitzsimmons 1996, 138.

¹²⁶ Quoted in Boissonnade 1900, 20–21.

¹²⁷ Schmid 1996, 60.

¹²⁸ Samsonowicz 1985, 60–63.

¹²⁹ Kluge 2007, 306.

¹³⁰ Kluge 2007, 306.

¹³¹ Whyte 1989, 232–34; Whyte 1995, 170–71.

¹³² Unger 2001, 64, 100, 206, 286.

¹³³ Buchner 2004, 216.

¹³⁴ Deceulaer 1996, 187 n. 69; Deceulaer 2008, 19.

¹³⁵ Quoted in Kotkas 2014, 143.

¹³⁶ Pontet 1997, 123.

¹³⁷ Casey 1999, 81.

¹³⁸ MacKay 2006, 53.

¹³⁹ MacKay 2006, 141.

¹⁴⁰ Herr 1989, 581; Stein and Stein 2003, 133.

¹⁴¹ Ehmer 2000, 207.

¹⁴² Ehmer 2000, 207.

¹⁴³ Ehmer 1997, 178; Ehmer 1998 [Guilds], 127.

¹⁴⁴ Ehmer 2000, 207; Ehmer 1998 [Guilds], 127.

¹⁴⁵ Kluge 2007, 306.

¹⁴⁶ Samsonowicz 1985, 60–63.

¹⁴⁷ Lindström 2000, 169, 187; Edgren 1997 [De svenska], 112; Edgren 2002, 233; Edgren 2006, 52.

¹⁴⁸ Caracausi 2014, 148.

¹⁴⁹ Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, A228, Bü. 256, Nr. 1b, fol. 1r.

¹⁵⁰ Kluge 2007, 62.

¹⁵¹ For more detailed exploration of this term, see Ogilvie 1997; Ogilvie 1999.

¹⁵² Davies 1998, 135–37.

¹⁵³ Unwin 1908, 238–40; Davies 1998, 135–37, 140; Davies and Saunders 2004, 78, 93, 146, 148, 171, 183, 186, 188.

¹⁵⁴ Unwin 1908, 239.

¹⁵⁵ Davies and Saunders 2004, 146.

¹⁵⁶ Unwin 1908, 240.

¹⁵⁷ Davies and Saunders 2004, 171, 183.

¹⁵⁸ For all the currency conversions in this paragraph, see http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/.

¹⁵⁹ Gauci 2002, 130, 134.

¹⁶⁰ Stein and Stein 2003, 133.

¹⁶¹ Quoted in Hamilton 1949, 326 n. 55.

¹⁶² Casey 1999, 84.

¹⁶³ Ehmer 2005, 63; Córdoba de la Llave 2016, 77.

¹⁶⁴ Lipson 1915, I: 228–29, 346.

¹⁶⁵ Wiest 1968, 69–70.

¹⁶⁶ Ehmer 2000, 205–206.

¹⁶⁷ Mocarelli 2004, 71.

¹⁶⁸ Hutton 2011, 23–29; Schmid 1996, 53.

¹⁶⁹ Luther 1968, 29.

¹⁷⁰ Kluge 2007, 306.

¹⁷¹ Lipson 1915, I: 347.

¹⁷² Kluge 2007, 307.

¹⁷³ Caselli 2007, 8.

¹⁷⁴ Buchner 2004, 216–17.

¹⁷⁵ Buchner 2004, 216; Unger 2001, 287.

¹⁷⁶ Lipson 1915, I: 332–33.

¹⁷⁷ Quoted in MacKay 2006, 45.

¹⁷⁸ Edgren 1997 [De svenksa], 112; Edgren 2002, 233.

¹⁷⁹ Sczesny 2004, 75.

¹⁸⁰ Quoted in Salzberg 2011, 757.

¹⁸¹ Quoted in Locklin 2007, 62 (petition dated 1748).

¹⁸² Quoted in Kaplan 1986 [Social Classification], 192.

¹⁸³ Quoted in Truant 1986, 140.

¹⁸⁴ Quoted in Kaplan 1986 [Social Classification], 198.

¹⁸⁵ Parker 1988.

¹⁸⁶ Leguay 2006, 103.

¹⁸⁷ Schmid 1996, 50, 53, 59–60.

¹⁸⁸ Unwin 1908, 242; Davies and Saunders 2004, 78.

¹⁸⁹ Eitel 1972, 82.

¹⁹⁰ Corteguera 2002, ix.

¹⁹¹ Stein and Stein 2003, 41.

¹⁹² Quoted in Davies and Saunders 2004, 104.

¹⁹³ Quoted in Hundert 1992, 43.

¹⁹⁴ Hutton 2011, 23.

¹⁹⁵ Davies and Saunders 2004, 148.

¹⁹⁶ Davies and Saunders 2004, 148.

¹⁹⁷ Eulenburg 1893, 304–305.

¹⁹⁸ Hafter 2007, 110–11; Pontet 1997, 123.

¹⁹⁹ Davies and Saunders 2004, 78.

²⁰⁰ MacKay 1999, 147–48, 152, 163.

²⁰¹ Dixon 1895, 215–16.

²⁰² Eulenburg 1893, 305.

²⁰³ Unwin 1908, 371.

²⁰⁴ Koenigsberger 1946, 133.

²⁰⁵ Weiss 1914, 558.

²⁰⁶ Davies and Saunders 2004, 187.

²⁰⁷ Koenigsberger 1946, 133.

²⁰⁸ Davies 1998, 141; Davies and Saunders 2004, 188.

²⁰⁹ Wachendorf 1934, 32.

²¹⁰ Schmid 1996, 50, 53, 59–60.

²¹¹ Simon-Muscheid 1990, 384;

²¹² Kluge 2007, 308, 310.

²¹³ Yante 1994, 389 n. 39.

²¹⁴ Kluge 2007, 308.

²¹⁵ Davies and Saunders 2004, 186.

²¹⁶ Filser 1986, 229.

²¹⁷ Bossenga 1988, 698–99.

²¹⁸ Bisson 1984, 86, 137.

²¹⁹ On this development, see Spruyt 1994, esp. 86–108.

²²⁰ Spruyt 1994, 114.

²²¹ Blockmans 2000, 414.

²²² Spruyt 1994, 105, 107.

²²³ Rodrigues 1993, 23; Disney 2009, I:123; Subrahmanyam 2012, 39.

²²⁴ Stephenson 1933, esp. 150.

²²⁵ Van Bavel 2010, 119, 278.

²²⁶ Welter 1895, 88–89; Czok 1963, 5, 7, 50, 65, 68–79, 98, 104, 113; Lentze 1964, 227; Simon-Muscheid 1988, 244; Kluge 2007, 89–90.

²²⁷ Anon. 1866, 122.

²²⁸ Ashley 1888, I:87.

²²⁹ Disney 2009, I:123.

²³⁰ Corteguera 2002, 10–11, 22.

²³¹ Corteguera 2002, 10–11, 22.

²³² Farr 1988, 44–59.

²³³ Quoted in Hafter 2007, 155.

²³⁴ For Table 2.3, wage rates were taken from the following databases: Allen n.d., database Vienna (for Kirchdorf-Micheldorf, Upper Styria); London (for London); Paris Northern (for Paris, Rouen); Northern Italy Venice (for Venice); Italy Milan (for Rome, Bologna); Antwerp (for Antwerp); Madrid (for Toledo). Calculation uses closest year (for Venice latest available date is 1630) or average wage for period. Toledo “journeyman” wage is actually “labourer” wage.

²³⁵ Troeltsch 1897, 221–25; Ogilvie 2003, 111–14, esp. tab. 3.8.

²³⁶ Abel 1980, 59.

²³⁷ Farr 1988, 45 n. 115.

²³⁸ Geremek 1968, 83.

²³⁹ Wesoly 1985, 165, 179.

²⁴⁰ Voth 1998, 37.

²⁴¹ Abel 1980, 312 n. 6.

²⁴² Sonenscher 1989 [Work], 204.

²⁴³ Wesoly 1985, 292.

²⁴⁴ Humphries and Weisdorf 2017, 5.

²⁴⁵ The error made in Epstein 2008, 167–68.

²⁴⁶ Kay 1983, 328.

²⁴⁷ Davies and Saunders 2004, 86.

²⁴⁸ “The Washington Wishing-Well: the Unstoppable Rise in Lobbying by American Business is Bad for Business Itself”, Schumpeter column, The Economist, June 13, 2015, 70; Friedman 2009, 3.

²⁴⁹ Montemayor 1996, 209.

²⁵⁰ Fischer 1966, 77–78.

²⁵¹ On these characteristics of guild lobbying in late medieval England, see Davies 2004; in early modern Germany, see Ogilvie 1997, 89–95, 113–26, 366–78; in early modern Dutch cities, see Unger 2001, 289.

²⁵² Quoted in Shaw 2006, 117.

²⁵³ Shaw 2006, 117 (guild fines in 1660s and 1670s); Allen n.d., Northern Italy database, 1630 (latest Venice data point) day-wage for master masons and carpenters in Venice is 67.7 soldi; 1660 (data point for Milan) day wage for master masons is 40 soldi; 1 Venetian ducat = 124 Venetian soldi.

²⁵⁴ For evidence of these non-monetary costs incurred in the guilds of early modern London, see Davies and Saunders 2004, 130–31; in early modern Germany, see Ogilvie 1997, 366–78.

²⁵⁵ Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, A573, Bü. 842 (Oct. 1688–Oct. 1689), fols. 94–101.

²⁵⁶ “Opportunity cost” means the cost of the next-best alternative that was given up when a person or organization chose to do something.

²⁵⁷ Van Bavel 2010, 69, 112, 122, 386.

²⁵⁸ Persson 1988, 50–54; Ehmer 2005, 68.

²⁵⁹ Epstein 1991, 53.

²⁶⁰ See the discussion in Ogilvie 1997, 438–46; Ogilvie 1999.

²⁶¹ Epstein 1998, 692, 704; Epstein 2008, 158; Epstein and Prak 2008, 4, 11, 24; Epstein 2013, 33.

²⁶² This is consistent with the “conflict” view of institutions put forward in Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005, esp. 389–95, 427–28; and Ogilvie 2007 [Whatever].

²⁶³ Quoted in Mishew 1919, 250.

²⁶⁴ Quoted in Kotkas 2014, 143.

²⁶⁵ Auriol and Warlters 2005, 635–40.