The Guilds

Morris's belief that ‘the ideas of tribal communism’ and the ‘customary law of the Germanic tribes’ furnished one stream in the emerging feudal system (the other stream was ‘Roman individualism and bureaucracy’) was a historiographical commonplace among Teutonists and socialists alike. The roots of medieval forms of communal association were to be found in primitive Germanic and Anglo-Saxon institutions whose democratic and egalitarian spirit had persisted despite overwhelming social pressures, and in the Middle Ages ‘the real popular history of Europe [was] comprised in that of the guilds’ (Morris 1969, 166, 176; cf. 1910–15, 22: 382–3; 1890, 244). The guilds flourished only in ‘those countries where the undercurrent of the customs of the free tribes was too strong to be quite merged in the main stream of Romanised feudality’ (1910–15, 22: 382). ‘From the assembly of the mark,’ as Engels put it in his contribution to the large literature on land tenure among Teutonic tribes and their medieval descendants, ‘were copied the arrangements of the numberless free associations of medieval times not based upon common holding of the land, and especially those of the free guilds’; ‘the mark in the country, in the town, the guild’ (Marx and Engels 1975–2005, 24: 448–9, 312). Long before the guild socialists of the Edwardian period put an updated version of the concept at the centre of their industrial programme, the guilds (as well as the peasant revolts) were established as primary concerns of socialist historiography, and early twentieth-century educational initiatives like the Labour Colleges and the Socialist Sunday Schools disseminated the idea of the medieval guild as a workers’ community through their textbooks and lectures.