Excerpt from Two Thousand Years of Gild Life
The following book is an attempt to sketch in outline, so far as is possible in a single volume, the origin and course in this country of that peculiar principle of association which has its typical form in the medi?val Gild.
It is not simply the history of benefit or of trades' societies, or of religious associations. It is rather the history in outline of a form of union which has not been limited to any age, or to any of the special objects for which men band themselves together. If man is above all a social being, the mould in which the lesser social organisations of so many ages took their form and character must be an object of curious interest. The natural association of the family in its various forms of development has become a part of the science of sociology; political union is a science in itself. The class of intermediate associations, chiefly to be found in the sphere which has lately come to bear in a special sense the term social, and which lent itself readily to industrial and mercantile concerns, has been noticed incidentally by many writers, but has hardly had the attention which from many and various aspects it has deserved.
This design is worked out chiefly on the basis of the extant documents, mostly hitherto unpublished, of the Gilds, and especially the Merchant Companies and Craft Fraternities of Kingstown-upon-Hull, thus in part furnishing a chapter in the history of general English economic progress which it is thought will not be without special interest at the present day.
There is indeed hardly any subject more inviting to the student of social history or economic development than that of the ancient and medi?val Gilds.
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