The history of guilds no longer attracts much attention^[1] nor has it for several decades. This is ironic in view of the fact that urban history and social history are both well established fields, receiving a great deal of attention, and that guild history has much to contribute to our understanding of both subjects. Guilds and guildsmen have been ignored for a variety of reasons, one of which is that they were not part of the social extremes of wealth and poverty. The rich and powerful have their historians, the poor and oppressed have theirs, but the merely average seem to inspire little interest. Further problems contribute to the lack of works on guilds and to the highly restricted topics covered in the few works that do appear. The study that follows discusses the misconceptions and limitations found in many guild histories, and seeks to rectify them by examining four different guilds in Augsburg during the early seventeenth century. Before entering on the subject proper, it is necessary to discuss what is meant by the word guild: how it is understood generally, and how it is defined here.

We begin with what a guild was and was not. A guild was neither plant nor animal nor any other living organism. From this it follows that a guild was not born, did not mature or age, and did not die. There were no embryonic forms, no stunted growths, no transplanting or grafting of types. No guild was ever in its infancy, was ever vigorous or decrepit or ossified. The whole vocabulary of the organic metaphor, so often applied to guilds, is fundamentally misleading, as is its close relative, the vocabulary of rise and fall.² I do not wish to excise this vocabulary completely; it has its uses and can be truly illustrative. I do wish to warn of the pitfalls involved in its use and to point out that its use has had unfortunate effects in the area of guild history.

The use of this vocabulary indicates a basic misunderstanding of guilds. Guilds neither rose nor fell, grew nor decayed; they were not organisms or hot-air balloons. They were institutions that began, changed, ended. Once a guild is defined as declining, by whatever standard, the efforts of scholars shift almost wholly to determining the causes of the decline and fall. This is unfortunate because it obscures whatever positive functions the guild may have had during its alleged decline. It also has the effect of removing the guild from its urban context. Connections with the society and polity of the city in which the guild existed are seldom considered when a guild in its decline is being studied, even though such connections may be illuminating and significant.<s2>s

The conventional chronology of the guilds is constructed around the model of growth and decay, and is predicated upon the idea that guilds were medieval in their very essence. Guilds were "born" in the high Middle Ages, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, according to this chronology. Guilds were at their "height" in the fourteenth century when, in many cities from northern Italy to the Low Countries, they attained a significant degree of political power by means of revolution. In Germany these revolutions resulted in the so-called guild constitutions (Zunftverfassungen). The actual power won by the common guildsman now appears much less extensive than it once did, but there were other signs of ''vigor'' as well, usually measured in terms of increased output and rising wages. The first signs of ''decay'', according to the traditional view, set in during the fifteenth century, as access to mastership was made more difficult by the requirement of a masterpiece. The ''decline'' became precipitous in the sixteenth century, when guilds began losing markets to non-guild, largely rural, competitors. In response, the guilds issued more regulations, instituted more controls, and made it increasingly difficult become a master, in a vain attempt to forestall the future. In doing so, they only ensured their death, as they became more rigid in a world that demanded flexibility. Modern forces were at work against which the guilds, not being modern, could not prevail. The putting-out system, an early form of capitalism (Fruhkapitalismus) exploited by the ''rising'' bourgeoisie, cut away the economic foundations of the guilds, while the ''rising'' nation-state, with its absolute kings, destroyed the guilds' political power. By the late seventeenth century, the guilds were insignificant in historical terms, mere havens of privilege for a small group of conservative, tradition-bound masters intent on endless lawsuits designed to protect their position. The French Revolution swept even these away in France in 1791. The progressive state of Prussia eliminated them early, while the rest of Germany had to await unification before the last vestiges were erased. In this last phase, from the later eighteenth century on, guilds were--I am still speaking of the conventional picture--annoying obstructions, medieval survivals whose only historical function was to act as a drag on progress. The fact that guilds existed in Europe well into the twentieth century, as did the conviction that they were worthwhile institutions, is scarcely discussed.

The first criticism I would make of the conventional chronology is that it is absurdly long. From the time that the patient is diagnosed as terminally ill -- most commonly the fifteenth century -- until the actual death in the nineteenth century comes four hundred years of lingering illness. Even Rome did not take that long to die. Any fall of four centuries is simply not a fall, it is successful survival. To claim that a guild was declining in the early modern period simply because it no longer resembled its medieval predecessor is to ignore the very process of historical change. Moreover, any institution that lasts that long has surely undergone some major changes. The problem here is rooted in the deception of words. We have one term -- guild -- to describe a variety of corporate forms over the span of centuries. To a degree not often found in modern historiography, we have mistaken continuity of an institution for what in reality was mere continuity of vocabulary.

The second criticism is that this view lacks any conception of guilds as early modern institutions. A guild in 1600 or 1700 was not a medieval survival but was a contemporary institution.³ It was a product of both past and present; indeed, it could not exist otherwise, for the guildsmen of these centuries used the guild on a daily basis to regulate their activity. A guild was never an anachronism; rather, such a judgment is itself anachronistic.⁴

A third problem with many guild histories is their selection and use of evidence. It is not uncommon to mistake the craft for the guild, the industry for the institution. A historical work may claim to discuss a guild, but in fact may provide only an economic analysis of a trade. The decreasing importance of a particular industry is thus taken to signify a decreased importance of the guild. In fact, in hard times a guild may have actually become more, rather than less important to its members and to the community. General histories of guilds, furthermore, are highly selective<u,>u drawing heavily on evidence from large cities and from a handful of crafts, primarily from the cloth industry. Cloth, however, had always been an industry unusually vulnerable to rural competition, to manipulation by merchants, and to internal unrest. This craft, like mining, is an area in which capitalist practices appeared early, but most towns were not centers of cloth production and even in those that were, other crafts remained for the most part untouched by the vicissitudes of weavers and dyers.

The fourth criticism concerns the organic metaphor which, by anthropomorphizing guilds so they can be born, age and die, has the effect of dehumanizing history. Growing old is an inevitable process, over which there is no control. By transferring the metaphor to institutions, ageing becomes an objective force outside human control and guildsmen become the victims of history, rather than its creators. Similarly, the vocabulary of decay or decline demeans the members of a guild and their actions, making them little more than symptoms discussed in order to illustrate the disease. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that human beings and not abstract forces make history.

To place the history of guilds on a new footing we must begin with a new definition; one that encompasses the major attributes of a guild. The definition I shall use is as follows: a guild was a corporation; a consciously created, sworn association invested with privileges by a public authority. It was a political corporation with civic duties and an economic corporation illustrates a different aspect of guilds significant for their general history.<s12>s

Most basic is that a guild was the product of two wills: the men who sought incorporation as a guild, and the public authority that recognized them. By this definition there can be no ''early'' types of guilds, for the guild was always contemporary and was always seen as a completed form. A guild existed at every point in its history only because both members and sovereign desired its existence, so in terms of a given community a guild can never be treated as unimportant. A guild always had functions, however circumscribed, and we must be very careful about labeling them as negative or frivolous. A guild was not only consciously created, it was continually being consciously shaped and reshaped, as both city and guildsmen adapted the institution to changing circumstances. The process of change did not stop until the guild was formally disestablished. This definition stresses the active role of human beings, consciously responding to actual conditions, and it denies to the guild any life independent of the community in which it existed.

The second element of the definition is that guilds were corporations, which is to say they were but one type in a whole range of corporate forms in early modern Europe. Clubs, brotherhoods, professional associations, universities, city communes, monasteries, chapters, all might exist alongside guilds in a given town, each more or less directly affecting the craftsmen and their craft. Most guildsmen, in fact, belonged to other corporations. It should be remembered, too, that the lack of variety in English guild vocabulary tends to obscure the actual variety of guild forms that existed in early modern Europe. In Germany the principal terms were Zunft, Innung, Handwerk, Amt, and Gild, with Bruderschaft and Gesellschaft being very close relatives. These terms varied in meaning with time and place, but ''craft'' and ''guild'' in English must do the work of covering all the shades of meaning represented by the German terms. Each form was distinct and important, and they can be grouped only with great care. A guild of bondsmen and a guild of freemen were not at all the same thing, though both might be concerned with the regulation of the same craft; nor should a political guild be confused with a craft-specific guild. By''guild'' we must understand that we mean a range of corporate forms that need to be studied in terms of specific local conditions.

The final element of the definition concerns privilege. When speaking of the ''privileged orders'' of the Old Regime, the usual image is of aristocrats and priests, but the Third Estate was hardly without privilege. Every merchant had his commercial privileges, not to mention others won for his family or himself, if he were rich enough and so inclined to seek them. Every citizen of a city had his privileges and so too did every guildsman. By ''privilege'' we are not speaking of rights, of course, for that is a modern notion; privilege meant simply''private law'', a law issued for the benefit of a private person. Few guildsmen possessed such power and prestige as individuals -- individual privilege was indeed the special province of the noble -- but a corporation was a private person in legal terms, able to appear in court and to petition the sovereign, and as such a guild could and did possess privileges. Most guild privileges existed as ordinances elevated to the status of law by virtue of confirmation by the city council or other sovereign. These must not be viewed as being primarily economic in character. It is true that most guild regulations dealt with the regulation of the craft, but this is not prima facie evidence of the priority of economic concerns. Many regulations that appear to have been mainly economic had other aspects that were equally or more important. For example, the common principle that the guild should ensure an ''income appropriate to one's rank (standesgemaßig ) was a moral rather than an economic ideal.

Privilege meant far more than mere economic advantage. It was privilege that gave guildsmen their place in society, their état, their Stand. Within an imperial city like Augsburg the great bulk of the citizens were theoretically equal; that is, they were all of the Third Estate, ''common men''.<s14>sA man might refuse to exercise the rights and responsibilities that came with citizenship or guild membership, but the social standing that these brought was inescapable. Within the body of citizens, guild membership marked the craftsman off from the patricians (Geschlechter) and from the poor (armen Leute). One had to be born a patrician, and patricians rarely joined a guild (at least not willingly). The poor people were by definition on the public dole. Guild membership thus defined one's place within urban society.<s15>s It was in this sense irrelevant whether guild privileges were economic or political or social. The condition of being privileged in itself set a guildsman apart and gave him his status; the plain fact of privilege helped order society.

These, then, are the basic aspects of my definition: that a guild was the continuous product of two wills, that it was but one of many corporate forms, and that privilege--devoid of any special economic emphasis--was the reason for its existence. With these general points in mind it is possible to proceed to a consideration of details that will avoid the errors of determinism and anachronism that have plagued guild history.

 This study is comparative in its approach, examining four guilds instead of the usual one guild. It would be too much to claim that any ''comparative methodology'' is employed here, for that implies a rigor of method that does not exist. Comparison lies, nevertheless, at the heart of both the research and the presentation, for it is one of my purposes to illustrate the variety of guild experience. To my knowledge no one has done such a comparison in any early modern town, for no one convinced of the decay into historical obscurity of early modern guilds would have any reason to undertake such work. There have been histories of all the crafts of a town; there have been histories of guild constitutions; there is even a study comparing the guild of two different towns, but a comparison of guilds within a given city has yet to appear.<s16>sYet, without being aware of the variety that existed, how can we generalize about what was constant or universal? What has been done, in fact, is to make generalizations from a handful of cases.

The comparative approach is based on an assumption that different trades require different corporate forms and are subject to different vicissitudes and opportunities. Some trades had many workers and few masters, others had the reverse. In some the journeyman did not journey, while in others they not only journeyed but were organized into clandestine brotherhoods. Some made things, others sold things; some had many civic functions, others few. Some were vital to the city, others were peripheral. In short, the needs of the industry directly affected the structure of the guild.<s17>s

A word is in order here about the choice of the time period covered. I have chosen the early seventeenth century for three reasons. One is that the guild records prior to the seventeenth century are very sporadic and uneven. The fourteenth century may have been the ''height'' of the guilds, but the plain fact is that the seventeenth century records outnumber the medieval records by factors of ten. There is more to be learned from the later records. The second reason is that the statistical sources for this specific period are exceptionally good, providing a solid foundation for interpretation based on other types of records. Finally, I had originally thought to study a system in its senescence, to learn the reasons why a city lost its vitality and began to decline by studying not the top but the middle layers of society. With that aim in mind, I focused on a century when, as I thought, the guilds were in undoubted decline. I discovered instead that the question was poorly put. The theme became not decline but change, and the task was not to explain why the guilds failed but to show how and why they succeeded.

The guilds studied are these: shoemakers, joiners, barbers and bathers, and millers. The choice of these four over others that have been more extensively studied requires some explanation. The history of guilds, both general surveys and studies of particular crafts, have concentrated on a mere handful of types: weavers, butchers, goldsmiths, bakers, brewers. These dominate the literature while the dozens of other crafts that existed in early modern cities have been neglected. Many of the generalizations about guilds come from studies of these few. I wanted to avoid these guilds because of their wealth and power, and I wanted to discover if more modest trades would yield a different picture of guilds. I also sought to avoid those, such as the weavers, that were dominated by merchants, the putting-out system and other ''proto-capitalist'' cross-currents. The guilds chosen here, although little studied, are more truly typical than the guilds that have been studied extensively, in the sense that most guilds were not rich or powerful and most were not affected by early capitalist forms. Because my guilds are more typical, they provide a better basis for understanding the broad base of guild history.

The guilds chosen also provide the variety of organization in craft and guild that I wanted. The millers were a food processing industry, the barbers were a service industry, while the shoemakers and joiners were in manufacturing and retailing. The joiners were also a construction trade and could retail high-priced items whereas the shoemakers could not. This variety allows comparisons to be made and conclusions to be drawn based upon more than one industrial form.

The state of research in regard to the guilds of Augsburg is typical of that of other cities. Weavers, brewers and goldsmiths have received the attention of several historians, while the rest of the city's guilds are almost untouched.<s18>s Neither shoemakers, millers, barbers nor joiners have been studied at all for Augsburg, although there is one nineteenth century article on the bathers.<s19>s

None of these guilds have received much attention in any German town. There is one long essay from the nineteenth century on shoemakers, nothing at all on millers, one recent work on cabinetmakers (another type of joiner), nothing on barbers (though histories of medicine do discuss barbering), and two works on bathhouse keepers.<s20>sExcept for the work on the cabinetmakers of Alsace, none of these works were written after World War Two.<s21>s There very probably are local studies of which I am unaware. The abbreviated list of works on these guilds, however, compares to a list of dozens of works on weavers, smiths, butchers, bakers, brewers and the like. The fact is that, despite their importance and wide extent throughout Europe, the crafts of shoemaking, barbering, milling and joining have not caught the attention of historians. The present work will therefore contribute both to the social and economic history of Augsburg and will break fresh ground in the area of guild history.

This book is a social and economic study of four slices taken from the lower end of Augsburg's middle class. The aim is to show the variety of form and function that existed among guilds, and to examine how and how well these institutions operated at a time when they were allegedly in decline. These aims are achieved by beginning with the fundamentals. I examine first certain aspects of the city itself, for Augsburg was the specific historical environment in which the guilds existed. Next I examine the crafts themselves -- what each craft's product was, how it was made, how it was sold. The economic conditions of the craft, particularly the market characteristics, are considered along with the technical aspects. I then examine the administrative structure of the guilds themselves. These three chapters provide the foundations of the work, for each element -- city, craft and guild -- is indispensable to a complete understanding of a given guild. The next two chapters examine the guilds in a particular decade (1610 - 1619) in terms of their actual membership and day-to-day administration. In other words, the final two chapters will show how the structural factors of city, craft and guild functioned -- at odds or in concert -- and produced ''guild history''.

NOTES

1. The language simply pervades the literature. To give only one example here, Georges Renard, Guilds in the Middle Ages (London, 1919), has two chapters on the ''decay'' of the guilds, and a third on their ''death''. These chapters make up over half his book.

2. There are two outstanding examples of historians who have recognized and investigated the connections between society and guild and city: Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban Society in an Age of War, Nordlingen, 1580-1720 (Princeton, 1979); and Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca, NY, 1971).

3. The ''guild constitutions'' have been studied at great length. Judgment as to their significance has been varied. For examples of the best work done in recent years, consult Erich Maschke, ''Verfassung und soziale Krafte in der deutschen Stadt des späten Mittelalters, vornehmlich in Oberdeutschland,'' VSWG 46 (1959): 289-349; 433-476; Karl Czok, ''Zunftkampfe, Zunftrevolution oder Burgerkampfe,'' Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität, Leipzig 8 (1958/59): 129-143. See also Karl Czok, ''Die Burgerkämpfe in Sud- und Westdeutschland im 14. Jahrhundert,'' Esslinger Studien 12/13 (1966/67): 40-72. The relevant work for Augsburg in particular is Pius Dirr, ''Studien zur Geschichte der Augsburger Zunftverfassung 1368-1548,'' ZHVSN 39 (1913): 144-243. See also his ''Kaufleutezunft und Kaufleutestube in Augsburg zur Zeit des Zunftregiments (1368-1548)'', ZHVSN 35 (1909): 133-151.

4. Lujo Brentano, On the History and Development of Gilds and the Origin of Trade Unions (London, 1870), p. cxxxvii.

5. George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford, 1904), p. 126.

6. Hermann Kellenbenz says it outright: guilds were ''against progress'' because they ''defended the interests of their members against outsiders''; see his essay, ''Technology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution 1500-1700'', in the Fontana Economic History, ed. C. M. Cipolla, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1976), 2: 243. One must suppose that guilds that did not defend the interests of their members against outsiders would have been ''for progress''.

7. J- F. Bergier, ''The Industrial Bourgeoisie and the Rise of the Working Class'', Fontana Economic History of Europe, The Industrial Revolution 1700-1914, 3: 408.

 8. Brentano, History and Development of Gilds, p. clxiii.

9. Brentano, History and Development of Gilds, p. clxiv.

 10. Samuel Lilly, for example, in his essay, ''Technological Progress and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1914'', blames the guilds for being one cause of the backwardness of the Continent in industrializing, in Fontana Economic History of Europe, 2:222.

11. Mack Walker rightly takes historians to task for failing to recognize that early modern guilds were not the same as medieval guilds in his excellent book German Home Towns, p. 89, n. 21 and p. 90.

 12. I owe the basis of this definition to William Sewell's fine book, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980). His definition is given on page 39 of that work: Guilds were ''hierarchically structured and privileged bodies regulating the practice of different mechanical arts; moral and spiritual bodies expressing the brotherly solidarity of the trade; and publicly recognized bodies that were part of the constitution.''

13. In Augsburg, for example, there was the Fergenamt of fishers under the bishop. In addition, up to 1548 there was the Fischerzunft, which became a Handwerk after that date, while throughout this period the fishers might be referred to as an Einung (Innung). For a discussion of this see Hans Wiedenmann, ''Die Fischereirechte des Augsburger Fischerhandwerks im Lech und in der Wertach und deren Nebenbachen in der Zeit von 1276 - 1806,'' ZHVSN 41 (1915): 27-127. A good study of the variety of terms used in northern Germany can be found in Ferdinand Frensdorff, ''Das Zunftrecht insbesondere Norddeutschlands und die Handwerkerehre,'' Hansische Geschichtsblatter 13 (1907): 1-89. No similar study for southern Germany exists. H. Fischer, Schwäbisches Worterbuch, 7. vols., (Tübingen, 1904), however, is an excellent resource that does explain many obscure terms.

 14. See the definition by Robert Lutz, Wer war der gemeine Mann? Der dritte Stand in der Krise des Spatmittelalters (Munich, 1978), p. 119. The common man, according to Lutz, was non-noble, politically enfranchised, and not a part of the dishonorable sectors of society such as the poor, the Jews, and gypsies.

15. Both Mack Walker and William Sewell have clearly demonstrated the important social role played by guilds in early modern Europe.

16. Walter Hussong, Das Schneiderhandwerk in Frankfurt am Main und das Schneiderhandwerk in Heilbronn: Ein Vergleich (Gelnhausen, 1936).

 17. It is the correlation of the function of the craft to the structure of the guild that has led some historians to speak of the craft as if it were the guild. I do not deny the correlation, but the two must still be considered separately.

18. For the weavers, see Claus Peter Clasen, Die Augsburger Weber, (Augsburg, 1981); and V. Haertel, ''Die Augsburger Weberunruhen,'' ZHVSN 64/65 (1971): 121-268. For the goldsmiths see Sylvia Rathke-Kohl, Geschichte des Augsburger Goldschmiedegewerbes vom Ende des 17. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Augsburg, 1964); Anton Weiss, Das Handwerk der Goldschmiede in Augsburg bis zum 1681 (Leipzig, 1897); and Anton Werner, Augsburger Goldschmiede, (n.p., 1913). For the brewers see A. Vetter, Geschichte der Brauerei in Augsburg, Festschrift fur den III. Bayerischen Brauertag in Augsburg, (Augsburg, 1903); and Hubert Klopfer, Die Entwicklung des Augsburger Braugewerbes, Diss. Maschineschrift, (Wurzburg, 1921).

 19. R. Hoffman, ''Die Augsburger Bader und das Handwerk der Bader'', ZHVSN 12 (1885): pp. 1 - 35.

20. Hermann A. Berlepsch, Chronik der Gewerke, 9 vols., Chronik vom ehrbaren Schuhmacherwerk, (St. Gall, 1850-1853), 4:passim.

21. G. Zappert, ''Über das Badewesen der mittelalterlichen und späterer Zeit'', Archiv fur Kunde österreichischer Geschichtsquellen 21 (1859); better is A. Martin, Deutsches Badewesen in verganen Tagen (Jena, 1906).