Guilds

During period groups of craftsmen would band together in Guilds.

Guilds would help their members in a number of ways:

• Supporting the families of dead members
• Setting price ranges for wares (thus preventing uncompetitive pricing)

Guilds in the SCA

There are a number of Guilds in the SCA which cover most of the major arts and crafts.

Some of the Guilds are:

• The Cooks Guild
• Brewer's Guild
• The Bardic Circle
• Dance Guild of the Silver Rondell
• Woodworker's Guild
• Fibre guild (spinning, weaving, dying, braiding)
• Worshipful Company of Embroiderer's
• Costumer's guild
• Falconer's guild
• Cheese maker's guild
• Metalwork/Jeweller's guild
• Herbalry/Gardening Guild
• Guild of Scribes (illumination and calligraphy)
• Rapier Guild (or Guild of Defence)

Guilds in the sca offer ways to improve and share your knowledge in the subject area, through in person meetings and correspondance (snail mail and email list). They also encourage their artform to be practised more - more lessons, competitiions in that topic, etc.

Some guilds use a structure of names (eg novice,journeyman, master, unranked) to indicate the assesed skill of a member. This rank generally indicates a few things:

• the assessed skill of the guild-member (ie how well they make/do guild-specific things - inc how well-documented the things are)
• the productivity of the guild-member (ie how many things they've made or how many variants of skills they've learned)
• how skilled the guild member is at *teaching* the skill to others

For example, in the Guild of Defense:

• Journeyman is an apprentice teacher and has mastered 3? different styles of period fencing
• Provost is an accepted teacher and has mastered 5? different fencing styles
• Guild-master is an exeptional teacher and has mastered 7? differnt styles

(Taryn - not sure of exact numbers, but they are approx right and give the basic idea).

see also: mailing lists