Secular Brotherhoods: The Germanic and Anglo-Saxon Guilds 61The first artisan guilds or trade guilds (craft guilds) appeared in
England and Normandy during the reign of Henry I (1100-1135).
Similar guilds in Germany and the Scandinavian countries seem to date
from the same era. These craft guilds (made up of bakers, carpenters
and builders, tailors, weavers, and so on) were first started as associa-
tions for protection and mutual aid and gradually expanded until they
became veritable professional corporations.
The origins of the craft guilds, as for the French brotherhoods, fol-
lowed a line of descent—at least indirectly—from the collegia and
monastic associations such as the Benedictines. Like their earlier coun-
terparts, merchant and craft guilds were important cogs in the emanci-
pation of cities. The case has even been made that municipal governing
bodies and merchant guilds were one and the same from the very
beginning. In fact, in the town of Saint Omer the merchant guild went
on to become the commune.*
In the second half of the twelfth century, London may not yet have
had a builders guild. In fact, we know that craftsmen and artists capa-
ble of building in stone were few in number in that city. In chapter 5 we
will learn that in order to build their church on Fleet Street, the
Templars had to import an architectural brotherhood from the Holy
Land and thus may well have been responsible for the formation of the
original masons guild in London.
The statutes of the earliest Germanic, English, and Scandinavian
guilds include precious little information on their professional hierar-
chy. In the twelfth century in the Norwegian city of Bergen, however,
there existed the classic tripartite division of discipuli (apprentices), for-
muli (journeymen), and magistri (masters). In part 2, we will look more
closely at the English guilds as they existed in the fourteenth century.
* Esmein, Histoire du droit francois, 292-93. [A commune is equivalent to the English
or American district. —Trans.]