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blog History for Fantasy Writers: Craft Guilds

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
skip.knox submitted a new blog post:

History for Fantasy Writers: Craft Guilds
by E.L. Skip Knox

tradesmen.jpg


Guilds have long been a popular device in fantasy writing. They are used all the time in gaming, where they serve as a place for the player to get missions and rewards. These guilds bear little resemblance to historical guilds, and that's fine. But can historical guilds provide writers with useful details?

I think they can.

A bit of context, first. This essay is specifically about craft guilds. I'll post another that concerns mercantile guilds, a rather different sort of organization. Though they have some points in common, a merchant guild offers some different avenues to explore.

The word guild covers a wide range of organizations, and of course there were different words in different languages, some of which are perhaps better translated as "association" or "brotherhood" (Zunft, compagnie). There were guilds that were little more than drinking clubs. But we'll stick with the mainstream for now, the guild centered on a particular economic activity.

Also, guilds don't really appear until the 12th century or so. Guilds were not a part of early medieval society. No Viking guilds. No Carolingian guilds.

The Basics
Despite a wide diversity, there are a few characteristics common to most guilds. Guilds had rules. These were written down, filed with the City Council, and backed up by public authority. Some of these guild charters were few and general while...
Continue reading the Original Blog Post.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
"Gild" is okay. It's an alternate spelling most often found in 19thc books. I used that spelling for quite a while in graduate school until my dissertation advisor more or less beat it out of me. :)

Thanks for the comment!
 
This was really interesting and made me look up the history of old guilds in my country. I was also inspired to invent a guild for my WIP; a group of storytellers who are very concerned with their reputation, heh, and I got a lot of new ideas from your article, making the guild a lot more fleshed out. Thank you for posting this, I loved it!
 

Gwynndamere

Dreamer
Some great information here. Thank you. I have written briefly about Guilds in one of my books, but they will feature a more prominent role in the current WIP, so this information will definitly help.
 
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