merchant guild

merchant guild, a European medieval association composed of traders interested in international commerce. The privileged fraternity formed by the merchants of Tiel in Gelderland (in present-day Netherlands) about 1020 is the first undoubted precursor of the merchant guilds, and the statutes of a similar body at St. Omer, France, actually use the term gilda mercatoria before the end of the 11th century. Although associations of merchants from different towns continued to flourish in the later Middle Ages (the so-called Hanse of London is the best-known 12th-century example), most merchant guilds naturally confined their membership to the inhabitants of one city. In most European towns the imposition of a high entrance fee gave the merchant guild an exclusive character, although it is clear that the merchant patriciate normally exercised authority through its control of the urban constitution rather than through the merchant guild as such. It followed that such guilds were unlikely to survive the urban social upheavals of the late 13th and 14th centuries, the so-called Zunftrevolution (“guild revolution”), which transferred all or part of the political and economic powers of the patriciate to the craft guilds, or mysteries. By the early years of the 15th century most European merchant guilds had disappeared into oblivion or survived as attenuated bodies, deprived of any genuine economic function.