Guild

Lets say we have an bronze age or iron age village which grows into a town. It's population expands and because there are more people who need (for example) carpentry done by a full time carpenter in said town and can pay for it. So you get more carpenters emerging and being able to make a living doing that job. These carpenters will also often work on projects together, pooling their efforts and skills and sharing tools. They also help train up new carpenters, work together to make sure that they get a decent income by agreeing on prices for their work and helping each other out when they get down on their luck. Over time, this fellowship of carpenters gets more formalized in the way it functions and eventually emerges as an institution with recognition by the established government known as a Guild.

As they regulated the affairs of manufacturing and various services in preindustrial societies, Guilds could become very wealthy and powerful in their own right. They often ended up being controlled by a select few stuffy old bastards who were set in their ways, pocketed as much money as they could and would do anything they could to keep hold on power, especially when it meant quashing upstarts with clever new ways of doing things.

This article is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it