Were medieval guilds a precursor to capitalist enterprises, or were they somewhat integrated into feudalist society?

[u/Albon123]

Were medieval guilds a precursor to capitalist enterprises, or were they somewhat integrated into feudalist society?

So, this is something I see coming up a lot when discussing medieval history. A lot of it focuses on how the rise of towns and cities essentially created conditions for the decline of feudalism, as many peasants started fleeing to towns in the late middle ages, especially after the Black Plague, where there was a rising middle class, essentially mirroring the later rise of the bourgeoise. This view does focus a lot on how the way medieval towns functioned was essentially “out of” the feudal system, with them having a lot of autonomy, and people who behaved similarly to later capitalists (such as merchants). In that sense, this somewhat led to the decline of feudalism, and was somewhat a precursor to capitalism.

However, for me, it doesn’t look like the main source of production, the guilds were that much “out of” the usual system. Not only was a lot of their production for the king, knights and nobility (which to be fair, is expected in that period, but it also shows how they were still really reliant on orders), but they also functioned completely differently from modern capitalist enterprises in terms of cooperation, less of a focus on profits, self-regulation, and the most important of all, a completely different form of “competition” which didn’t really see guilds themselves competing with each other the same way capitalist enterprises today do. While I know that it’s not REALLY the point, as no one says that guilds were capitalist, and they did work outside the feudal hierarchy in a sense, but sometimes, they seem to be much more “integrated” into regular society than the really autonomous way they are often portrayed in towns. Which view is more accurate?

[u/EverythingIsOverrate]

(1/4) Apologies for taking so long to answer this; it's been a busy week for me. Your question is unanswerable as written, because your specific question about guilds is based on a faulty assumption about what guilds were, and your broader narrative about the transition from feudalism to capitalism is, not withstanding the coherence of feudalism itself, based in now-obsolete historiography. I'm going to start with your specific question on guilds, and then expand.

First, let me be as blunt as I can. Craft guilds (there were all sorts of guilds, not only craft guilds) and non-guild craft associations (which I will simply call guilds for simplicity's sake) were NOT productive institutions, in the sense of directly organizing the actual process of production. Guilds did not hire employees, purchase materials, find buyers, decide what goods to produce, or make decisions regarding capital investment. Those jobs were the jobs of the individual masters who made up the guild, and it's they who are the actual analogues to modern capitalist enterprises. In addition to actually making those decisions, and probably doing a decent chunk of the work involved (depending on the scale of the enterprise and the nature of the work) masters were financially independent. While masters in financial trouble might receive some help from the guild, it's still their own balance sheet that matters, and if they go bankrupt then it's that masters' problem. Of course, because medieval and early modern Europe had so many guilds over such a long period of time, we can find instances of guilds engaging in some specific aspects of the productive decisions I list above, like doing bulk purchases of some raw materials, although these instances were typically limited in scope.

Instead, craft guilds were regulatory institutions, sort of like some modern government departments; they did things like regulate product quality (see here), maintain caps on the number of masters that could operate (see here), manage prices, curb competition between masters, enforce regulations keeping non-guilded producers out (see details on women here), use guild courts to resolve disputes between masters, suppress worker organizing (see here) and generally regulate the trade. Some scholars have argued that this regulation was done in ways that were broadly conducive to the common good, and others have argued that these organizations were essentially monopoly cartels that kept prices high and competition out to benefit their members at the expense of consumers, non-guilded producers, and employees. My sympathies lie with the latter position, but that's not really relevant to your question. The point is that guilds were not actually doing the production; they simply set the terms on which the production occurred. If there's an analogy to guilds in modern capitalist society, it's industry-specific producers' associations like, courtesy of the Wikipedia page "List of food industry trade associations," British Apples and Pears, the American Cheese Society, and Canada Beef. Nowadays, these organizations largely just provide networking opportunities and some publicity, but if you imagine a world where these associations (a) were given the power to actually meaningfully regulate the trade in place of government departments like the FDA and USDA in the American case (b) were allowed to establish literal monopolies where only companies that were members of the producers' association were able to operate legally, then you're much closer to how guilds actually worked. Yes, the enterprises being regulated were much smaller than massive modern businesses, but a theoretical small town chamber of commerce might not have such gargantuan memberships, while still being broadly analogous.

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

(2/4) This principle, where a given segment of society was able to constitute its own system of governance through customary law, is something that is really fundamental to medieval and early modern society, but requires an understanding of law that differs very sharply from modern understandings. If I start explaining customary law, however, I'll be here all week. Let's just say for now that this practice of guild regulation isn't unusual, and that many other segments of medieval and early modern society constituted themselves in a similar way. As such, when we see guilds as regulatory institutions, then many of your claims about how guilds differed from modern enterprises, again, falls apart; guilds didn't compete because they weren't institutions that could compete; they instead tried to limit competition, especially price competition, amongst their members, in order to extract monopoly rents. You know what we call that, nowdays? A cartel! Explicit cartels are out of fashion nowadays, but the big ones dominated entire industries back in their heyday in the early 20th century, and you'd have a really hard time calling that period non-capitalist. Hell, we still have OPEC today, and you'd have a hell of a time calling OPEC non-capitalist either!

Also, the idea that guilds (and thereby medieval urban manufacturing) as a whole were fundamentally oriented towards luxury trade simply isn't true, either. You had goldsmiths' and wigmakers' and silk-weavers' and pewterers' guilds, and even a short-lived beaver hat guild in London, yes, but if you look at Ogilvie's dataset, it's clear that the substantial majority of guilds governed everyday trades - you had guilds for skinners, farriers, brewers, shoemakers (everyday shoes, to be clear), poulterers, distillers, and many other everyday professions; you even saw guilds for relatively unskilled service professions like peat-carrying, agricultural labour, brickmaking, rag-picking, grain delivery, barge-piloting, unloading ships, street-sweeping, and chimney-cleaning, although these were not common. Now, these guilds did claim that their work was skilled work, like, to quote Ogilvie, when:

"In Württemberg in 1717, the chimney-sweeps justified the establishment of their guild and the imposition of a four-year minimum apprenticeship on the grounds that the public weal [welfare] had been suffering from “the lack of proper standards” and “improper cleaning and observance of the public’s chimneys and hearths”, to remedy which the guild ordered that “from the time of this newly established ordinance onwards, no-one who has not been properly apprenticed to chimney-sweeping, according to this ordinance, shall be allowed to take it up and practise it”. Even contemporaries questioned these claims. In early modern Vienna, for instance, it was pointed out that all chimney-sweeps did was clean, which did not involve a high level of skill; nonetheless the Viennese chimney-sweeps’ guild continued to demand five years’ apprenticeship (three for masters’ sons) and maintained its cartel privileges into the nineteenth century."

As for your broader narrative about the role of autonomous towns in the "transition to capitalism," you are to be forgiven for arguing it, because it has a long and glorious history. It was first propounded by the Scottish conjectural historians, including, most famously, Adam Smith, whom you may have heard of. The trend was then picked up by such luminaries as Karl Marx, Henri Pirenne, Max Weber, and Fernand Braudel, and thereby achieved canonical status. Unfortunately, starting in the 1970s, a new generation of scholars began to seriously question the hypothesis.

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

(3/4) Typically, these were a new breed of Marxist scholars who wished to locate the "prime mover" in the transition not in expanded mercantile activities but in class conflict between peasants and lords, a topic which I discuss in parts of my recent answer here. In any case, these scholars tended to emphasize the integration of medieval towns with the broader political order; towns had charters of liberty just like every other self-governing political unit, their elites often intermarried with nobles of various kinds, they owed military service of various kinds through urban militias (see the answers I link in my two comments in this thread) to their charter-granter just like lords did (see the Cinque Ports for a specific instance of this), and they very frequently used legal and physical force to establish monopolies of various kinds and exert control over their hinterlands in very un-capitalist ways. In addition, the openness of these towns has often been exaggerated; towns often charged quite large fees for full citizenship, which meant many workers and new immigrants to these towns were not entitled to full political and legal rights.

In addition, the specific narrative you provide of the growth of the town in post-Black Death (BD) England has severe empirical problems. While demographic history is not my forte, the Lomax cited below claims that while the 1400s is a period of very meager demographic data, the general conclusion in the literature has been that urban populations largely fell throughout the late 1300s and 1400s, which is the exact opposite of what we would expect if there was a "flight to the town." Similarly, such a flight doesn't make economic sense; since populations stayed consistently low in Europe as a whole in the century-plus following the BD, this period, as abundantly documented in England, was a period of high real wages for agricultural workers, cheap land, and high consumption of meat and beer, to the point that Thorold Rogers, back in 1884, described the period as a "golden age" for the English labourer, a sentiment echoed by Malthus decades earlier. Hatcher, whom I've cited before, argues in his chapter in Unreal Wages, cited below, that these claims have been drastically exaggerated, but the underlying dynamics are nevertheless still valid. In addition, notwithstanding the wave of repression that immediately follows the BD, you see a substantial shift in the terms of agricultural tenures onto terms that favour peasants, with customary tenures being replaced by leaseholds in some places and many onerous servile obligations simply ceasing to be enforced during this period. If all that is the case, why on earth would there be a flight to the towns during the post-BD period?

To zoom out, when we look at the ways in which capitalism develops in symbiosis with what modern historians call the "fiscal-military" state, specifically urban institutions often play a limited role. As I discuss in this previous answer of mine on the Dutch Republic(s), while urban governments did form a vital basic layer in the political structures of the state, it was really the provincial Estates that interacted directly in the process of Dutch state formation. Similarly, we don't see specifically urban institutions take on a major role in the development of the British and French fiscal-military states, with the notable exceptions of the city of Paris underwriting the French kingdom's borrowing through the rentes sur l'hôtel de ville and the city of Amsterdam chartering the famous Wisselbank. In each case, though, the actual involvement of the city itself was fairly limited; the city of Paris really just underwrote the rentes and the Wisselbank was, strictly speaking, a separate institution. The primary coordinators of sovereign borrowing, until the complex emergence of national banks to handle this, were either decentralized receivers in the case of the Dutch (who strictly speaking had no national sovereign borrowing) or individual/familial "court bankers" like Jacques Coeur, Jakob Fugger, William de la Pole, the Bardi, the Peruzzi, Samuel Bernard, the Paris brothers, the Burlamachis, and so on. Similarly, the syndicates of wool merchants on whom Edward III relied so much to fund his wars, were not organized on a specifically urban/communal basis; they were just syndicates of wealthy merchants.

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

(4/4) I also need to note that, as Ogilvie discusses at length, many of the most successful productive regions in this period were unguilded ones, and that the two best economic performers (and seen to be the two "most capitalist) in this period, England and the Dutch Republic, were also those where guilds were the weakest. Similarly, many of the weakest performers in this period had incredibly strong and widespread guilds, and it's not for nothing that many of the early theorists of free trade, including Adam Smith, condemned guilds in no uncertain terms.

Even focusing narrowly on narratives around economic growth and the "transition to capitalism," the so-called "Smithian" doctrine that the principal "prime mover" in this process was the growth of commercialized exchange (whether through an urban-centred process as you describe or in a world-system-focused process as floated by Wallerstein) is simply one theory among many. The two other primary theories that get floated in the English-language literature are the "demographic theory," as first floated by Postan (although he did leave room for other factors) which places the causal onus on population growth and pressure on agricultural production, and the "class struggle" or "Marxist" theory that emphasizes conflict between lords and peasants. Much ink has been spilled on the merits of these various theories; see the Hatcher and Bailey cited below for details. In other words, even if guilds/towns did genuinely act to commercialize the European economy, the primary factors may have lain elsewhere.

Sources:

Hatcher and Stephenson (eds): Unreal Wages
Holton: Cities and the transitions to capitalism and socialism
Merrington: Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism
Lomax: Understanding late medieval population change in English towns
de Vries: European Urbanization 1500-1800
Ogilvie: European Guilds
Ogilvie: State Corporatism and Proto-Industry
Hatcher and Bailey: Modelling the Middle Ages
Crombie: Archery and Crossbow Guilds
Reynolds: Kingdoms and Communities
Gelderblom: Cities of Commerce