The origins of these societies date back 3,000 years.¹ Hammurabi’s Code of Laws (1,780 B.C.E.) are often cited as an origin:

188. If an artisan has taken a son to bring up, and has caused him to learn his handicraft no one has any claim.

189. If he has not caused him to learn his handicraft, that nursling shall return to his father’s house.

The Oldest Code of Laws in the World, the Code of Laws Promulgated by Ḫammurabi, King of Babylon, B. C. 2285-2242, Translated by C. H. W. Johns. Scotland: T. & T. Clark, 1903, 1903. Print.

Given their ancient origins, many names have arisen to identify them.²

He distributed them [the body of the people] accordingly, by arts and trades, into musicians, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, leatherworkers, curriers, braziers, and potters. the remaining trades he grouped together, and made one body out of all who belonged to them.

Plutarch, Life of Numa 17

Plutarch made a similar reference to the Laws of Solon, where a son was not required to care for his father, if the father failed to teach the son a trade.³

The earliest law recognizing the rights of the collegia occurs in Table VIII of the
Twelve Tables:

Guild members shall have the power … to make for themselves any rule they wish provided that they impair no part of the public law.

(Johnson 1961:12)

“THE COLLEGIA AND ROMAN LAW: State Restrictions on Voluntary Associations, 64 BCE–200 CE.” Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World. Routledge, 1996. 90–105. Web.

Numa Pompilius is a legendary Roman leader, credited with defining different trades, including goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, leatherworkers, curriers, blacksmiths, and potters.⁵  The collegia opificum diversified into many different guilds by the end of the Roman empire.  After the Western Roman Empire collapsed, its collegia traditions were maintained for centuries more in the  Byzantine Christian empire.  Leo VI is credited with the Book of the Prefect, a manual of government probably drawn up  in the year 900.

From this ancient context arose the guilds: the “first and original basis for the theory and practice of popular democratic government in Europe” and the first to give worker organizations a role in the polity.⁶

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¹ David B. Weisberg: Guild structure and political allegiance in early Achaemenid Mesopotamia. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 2, June 1969, pp. 379 – 381
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X0005535X
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bulletin-of-the-school-of-oriental-and-african-studies/article/abs/david-b-weisbergguild-structure-and-political-allegiance-in-early-achaemenid-mesopotamia-yale-near-eastern-researches-1-xviii-131-pp-9-plates-new-haven-and-london-yale-university-press-1967-850-76s/E1A4E3B18183092D50784FAB79E9E6DF

² Terminology is complicated due to the time period covered as well as the different languages involved. For example, the modern term (and spelling) of “guild” has many antecedents. The historical accounts referring to guilds can use the following terms, in Latin: gildonia, confratriae, convivial, fraternitas, confranternitas, consortium, societas, solidatum, convivium, unio, conjuration, or collegia; in English: guild, gild, fraternity, confraternity, mystery, mistery, corporation, brotherhood, company, commonalty, livery company, trading corporation, municipal corporation; in Swedish: gilda, gille, skrå, and ambete; and in German: gilde, zeche, gaffel, genossenschaft, association, verien, einung, and zunft, to list a few of the variations.
Workers, Collectivism and the Law, Chapter 1: Guilds: brother[sister]hood, friendship, and mutual aid, footnote 3.
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788112451.00008

³ Plut. Sol. 22.1 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg007.perseus-eng1:22.1. c.f. https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/chapters/mono/10.4324/9780203854556-8/lawgivers-athens-drakon-solon-matthew-dillon-lynda-garland?context=ubx&refId=3b6780cf-5592-40e3-93e1-e7cbc4337f5f

⁴ Jones, Peter. “Ancient and Modern.” The Spectator (London. 1828) (2017): n. pag. Print.

⁵ Roger B. Ulrich. “The Roman Woodworker.” Roman Woodworking. Yale University Press, 2007. 6–. Print.

⁶ Guild & State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present. Antony Black, p. xvii
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203790373/guild-state-antony-black

Based on an Essay by Howard B. Rock

Artisan societies were an important element of the civic, fraternal and economic lives of many craftsmen living in nineteenth century America. They functioned as benevolent societies providing benefits to those in need because of illness, injury, death or other misfortune; and as sources of fraternity where fellow mechanics could meet, dine, wine and march with their comrades, celebrating the significance of their trade and the blessings of republican government. In addition, societies, if organized by the masters, could look out for their trade in such areas as tariff protection and craft promotion as well as respond to the demands of their journeymen; or, if organized by the journeymen, could maintain wages, hours and work traditions that would guarantee their status even if they were unable to attain master craftsman standing.

The origins of American artisan societies lie in England.  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries artisans organized religious fraternities centering around the patron saint of their craft. They would worship together on their saint’s day and other holidays at a specific church. They also provided death benefits and fraternal outlets through religious services and burials.

Crown or municipal recognition gave the societies a monopoly within their professions. No artisan who was not a freeman (journeyman) of the society could ply his trade in the marketplace except after payment of burdensome taxes. Generally only those who had served a seven year apprenticeship were admitted to freemanship, and admission to apprenticeship in the more prestigious crafts could be costly. The journeymen and apprentices were organized in each craft as it best suited the interest of the masters.  The societies were allowed to “search” the city’s shops in their particular trades to ensure that the quality of the products sold were up to their standards and to prosecute those who violated these standards or who used fraudulent weights and measures.

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the religious orientation had nearly disappeared, yet the associations continued to flourish. While maintaining their functions as sources of benevolence and enhancing their comradely activities with the erection of halls, some quite elaborate, they became significant economic institutions. They were able to control both the quality of their product and the prices and wages within their craft, either through royal incorporation, the preferred and most prestigious route, or through municipal ordinance.

The masters, the livery or “livened” members of a society, more often than not, were retailers and wholesalers rather than as handicraftsmen. Beneath them in the society were independent proprietors of smaller shops and the “yeomen” or journeymen who could never reach livery status. At times the yeomen would organize independently within the society because their interests were so clearly different from those of the livery.

These differences would be harbingers of the conflicts to come during the Industrial Revolution.

Guilds were actually the “first and original basis for the theory and practice of popular democratic government in Europe” and the first to give worker organizations a role in the polity.³

⁴ Guild & State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present. Antony Black, p. xvii
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203790373/guild-state-antony-black

Are you a V for Vendetta fan? Then this lesson is for you.

Guy Fawkes Day remembers a time in the early 17th century when it was a real possibility that the House of Parliament would be blown up by secret, mysterious societies.  Two centuries later, England was again in rebellion, a reaction to the emerging Industrial Revolution.  The conversion of the 17th century indentured servant contracts to Pip in Great Expectations, the emerging role of the apprentice was a fundamental grievance of the guilds, reformed into the first trades unions only a few decades later.  The apex of secret workers societies resisting child labor, debasing skilled labor, and

Read closely the following text.  The links will provide more information on specific events you may be interested in, at least to answer the group questions linked to at the bottom of this page.

“Mysteries” are a common theme in the apprenticeships.  They’re mentioned in the Contracts lesson, even before, in the Artisans Societies lesson, craftmen are given high privilege, for mysterious reasons.

The beheadings of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard and Arthur Thistlewood are convenient bookends for this period English historian E. P. Thomson describes as “collective bargaining by riot.”

When the first machines, stocking frames, gig mills, and the like, began mass producing clothing in midlands England, often operated by women and children at cut-rate wages, a “semi-conscious quasi-insurrectionary movement” began to resist massive unemployment resulting from this extreme disruption of traditional cloth workers.

Much of what the Luddites did, and who they were, was deliberately kept secret to protect themselves from being jailed for illegal assemblies. But in January 1812, an underpaid/out-of-work group of textile workers of a of workers stormed George Ball’s textile workshop.  3 months later, Cartwright’s Mill at Rawfolds was attacked.

The following quote succinctly describes how children workers, previous protected under Indentured Apprentice Contracts, and powerful Artisans Societies, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, were suddenly ripped into the maelstrom of unrestricted industrial capitalism:

Thus we must see the years 1811-13 as a watershed whose streams run in one direction back to Tudor times, in another forward to the factory legislation of the next hundred years.  The Luddites were some of the last Guildsmen, and at the same time some of the first to launch the agitations which lead on to the 10 Hour Movement.  In both directions lay an alternative political economy and morality to that of laissez faire.  During the critical decades of the Industrial Revolution, working people suffered total exposure to one of the most humanly degrading dogmas in history—that of irresponsible and unlicensed competition—and generations of outworkers died under this exposure.  It was Marx who saw, in the passage of the 10 Hour Bill (1847), evidence that for “the first time . . . in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class”.  The men who attacked Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds were announcing this alternative political economy albeit in a confused midnight encounter.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1970), p. 552.

This midnight storm reduced artisans to paupers, relentlessly pushed the beating-down of wages and craft standards – the Medieval Guilds from Tudor times that for centuries gave apprentices an opportunity for future wealth, suddenly collapsed, leaving skilled workers homeless and penniless, focusing their wrath on machine breaking.

As a group, answer the Share Out! questions on the Luddite document.