نطق چهارم

listen to part of a lecture in a history class.

now, we’ve said that during the second half of the middle ages, starting with uh, the 10th century, really the towns in western europe began to grow, and many new towns appeared. now the economic activity of these medieval pounds. Well, it began to be controlled by two kinds of groups. what happened is that merchant started to band together to, uh, well, it was a way to maximize their power and impose more control over economic activity of a town. and in response to the merchants, the crafts people of the town also started to organize and to form groups or um, associations. and these groups were called guilds. so craft guilds were groups of people who share the same occupation.

he had a guild for butchers, and guild for bakers, one for weavers, one for metalworkers, and um, so on. For all different crafts, the merchant guilds were associations of people who sold and traded goods, all sorts of goods. they controlled the market for buying and selling goods. Okay? and there were other guilds too, but the craft and merchant guilds, well, these were the businesses that contributed most to the expansion of trade and to the economic situations in towns. for one, they standardized weights and measures. And well, just about every aspect of the work of the guilt. this increased consumer confidence, because you see once there were standards of weights and measures, you could be sure that a loaf of bread from one baker, say would be the same size as a loaf of bread from another. they also standardized the way things were made, the quality of production.

So they were really beneficial for production. gills were also beneficial to their members because they regulated prices and work hours. and they didn’t allow crafts people or merchants to come from other towns to sell their goods. so not only did this kind of regulation give consumers more confidence in what they were buying, right? Because you got standardized weights and measures, but it also protected guild members. and all of this helped increase trade. wait a second. So so you’re saying that if I were a baker in one town, I couldn’t go to the next town over and sell my bread. it hard to believe. I know. But think about it. Each town had its own guilt. there was more than one baker in town, and they’d all belong to the same guilt. but breads from other towns not allowed. that protected the local crafts people from outside competition, which of course made their own jobs more secure. now, to join a guild, you had to go through a specific process first parents contracted with a master craftsperson to take on their son as an apprentice, uh, for a fixed term of service, usually seven years. during this time, the apprentice was trained in the elements of the trade and then became a journeyman.

Now journey, men would often travel from town to town to work for different masters for wages. that way. They could learn different methods and ideas before returning home. um, I have a question you keep saying sons, men journey men were all people in the guilds men. What about women? good question. now, most people don’t realize this, but women were also members of guilds. Usually they worked with their husbands, and some of them were considered unofficial masters of the craft. sometimes women were also involved in a related business like, oh, say, though the wife of a baker might run an inn or a small hotel, so she’d be serving her husband’s bread to the guests. and of course, innkeepers had their own guilds, and widows often took over their husband’s profession and became guild members. so women did play a role in guilds. so even though the term is journey, man, some of the journey men were actually women. now, uh, where were we? Oh, okay. The apprentice became a journeyman, and once the journeyman was ready to become a master, members of the guild would test the person’s skills by assigning a task called a masterpiece.

now, if the guild members approved the masterpiece, the journeyman was admitted into the guilt and paid the membership fee. he was then considered a master, and he could open up his own shop. um, some craft guilds became increasingly difficult to join because they increase the fees and the masterpiece requirements. now, often a journeyman was skilled enough to join, but he couldn’t afford the materials for the masterpiece of let alone the membership fees. also, gilts could no longer regulate procedures as trade and industry kept expanding more and more and became harder to control. so eventually, guilds lost their importance. And oh, by the 17th century, most of them had dissolved. but guilds did leave a mark on society, even though they no longer exist. we do see remnants of them in today’s labor unions and in certain professions which still have a type of apprenticeship.