Silicon Insider: Going Medieval

Dec. 30, 2004 -- -- Are you ready to go medieval? Don't look now, but you already have.

I recently stumbled across -- in Peter Ackroyd's book "London" -- a description of daily working life in that bustling city during the late Medieval Age. Central to this world was the guild.

We tend to think of guilds as being old-fashioned trade unions, bringing trainees up through the ranks from apprentice to journeyman to master in exchange for a monopoly on their products. But, in fact, guilds were much more than that.

According to Ackroyd, medieval guilds were almost sovereign societies unto themselves: many were even allowed to levy their own taxes. They established quality standards, enforced proper behavior, served local churches, drafted their own members to serve in the military and established neighborhood cultural centers at their guild halls. To enter a guild was not merely to join a union but to embark on a new, rich and largely self-contained way of life.

A few years ago, the very notion of medieval craft guilds seemed hopelessly archaic, an organization of work so deeply buried by centuries of dust that little remains beyond its name and a ragged outline of its shape.

Yet no human invention ever really dies -- a single lifetime may see many ghosts emerge from history books to take on new life. For example, 15 years ago I was in Memphis interviewing historian Shelby Foote for a public television special connected with Ken Burns' "The Civil War" miniseries, in which Foote had played a crucial part. What I remember most from that interview was Foote describing the messianic nature of that era, how every conversation seemed scored with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and men on both sides marched off to slaughter convinced they were doing God's will.

Modern Americans, Foote assured me, would feel much more at home with the Enlightenment men of the Revolution, who enjoyed a dirty joke, a shapely ankle and a glass of claret with their talk of the Rights of Man. The men and women of the Civil War, with their monochromatic beliefs, dour speech and their Gothic apocalypticism would seem utterly alien to us.