In 1997, Gervase Rosser published an article in Past and Present on ‘crafts, guilds, and the negotiation of work in the medieval town’ that would become a classic of the guilds literature. He argued that both the ‘worker’ and the ‘guild’ were much more variegated, and therefore interesting, phenomena than one would assume reading the historical literature. In his latest book, Rosser returns to the topic in a fashion that is simultaneously broader and narrower in scope than the paper. The limitation is, of course, in the focus on England, even though continental Europe creeps in far more often than one would expect from the title of the book. Rosser has much to say about especially Italy and this comparative dimension certainly adds to the richness of the book and helps set the English material in perspective, even if explicit comparisons are seldom made. The broadening is very much in the extensive inclusion of all sorts of guilds; this is not a book about workers alone, but about everyone involved in guild activities in late medieval England.
Those coming to this book from the guilds literature, should be aware that the author makes a distinction between guilds, basically all sorts of associations, and crafts, which are professional associations. The term 'craft guild’ is explicitly rejected as ‘unhistorical, hybrid, and misleading’ (p. 153 n. 13). The crafts are only discussed in the last-but-one chapter. Instead, the author mostly looks at much more numerous parish associations. There were as many as 30,000 of those, he claims, in England between 1350 and 1550, an astonishing number for which, unfortunately, no strong evidence is produced. Still, even if the real number was lower – Rosser, however, claims this to be a ‘conservative estimate’ (p. 50) – the implications are highly significant, for example for statements about the new sociability in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Clark, Withington). According to this book, it was the Middle Ages, rather than the early modern period, that was ‘associational’.
Rosser's topic is precisely this associational dimension of medieval life. With the help of a wide and deep reading of published and archival sources from the period, he reconstructs the ideals, ideas and practices of association. For obvious reasons, those ideals and ideas are infused with a strong dose of religion. One chapter, ‘Sacrament’, is specifically devoted to the religious rituals practised by guilds, but most chapters deal with ideals that straddle the religious and the secular. Even though Christianity had much to offer in all these areas, Rosser reminds his readers that there were also important pre-Christian roots, rediscovered during precisely the late Middle Ages. These values, the author seems to imply, were as such not unique to the period; the guilds were, however, the historically specific form in which they were expressed and practised.
Chapter titles imply that Rosser very much sees the guilds as the embodiments of a set of ideals: ‘Ethics’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Trust’ and finally ‘Community’. Guilds emerged from the ‘social instability’ of the age, but also a ‘new ethical perspective’ in the late Middle Ages (p. 37). This perspective came from Aristotle as much as from Abelard. The congruence between their ideas and the practices in guilds is indeed striking, but one wonders how many of the guildsmen and women had actually read these authors – or had otherwise become acquainted with their ideas. This is an important question, because joining a guild was a voluntary act, and if the number of guilds was as high as Rosser claims, hundreds of thousands must have done so. The ethical perspective was that of mutuality. As the regulations of the fraternity of St Anne, established in 1342 in the church of St Lawrence Jewry in London, expressed the guild's purpose: ‘in maintenance of good love and for to nourish good and true company in destruction and amendment of men of wicked fame and evil bearing by way of alms and charity’ (p. 107).
The guilds, in their religious form, came to an end with the Reformation and the establishment of the Church of England. This next phase of communal life falls outside the scope of the book, but it does raise an issue about the role of these many voluntary associations: if English society could manage without them, what does this imply about the part they played in the preceding centuries. Or, phrased differently: what took their place after the mid-sixteenth century?
Rosser's book is unfashionable in an attractive way. It does not defend a Grand Thesis. It takes seriously forgotten historians from nineteenth-century Germany. Even if the chapters’ titles chime with modern discussions about ‘community’, the author refuses to fall for easy connections with the present. The compact text, dense but easy to read, constantly invites reflection. Historians will ignore this book at their own peril.
