Craft guilds were essential for the organisation of urban society in the late middle ages. They not only had their role to play in structuring the urban economy; in the dense urban system of the Low Countries they very often also had important political, cultural and social functions. Historical research has focused during the past decades on the latter functions in particular, leaving aside a reassessment of the older assumptions of the negative impact of guilds on the urban economy. This paper argues that a multifaceted approach to guild life is necessary, whereby the economic role of guilds is integrated into newly acquired knowledge about guild life. In general guilds functioned as much more open and flexible economic institutions than has been acknowledged by most scholars. Guild regulation, ubiquitous in the documents, must, therefore, be reinterpreted and contrasted with its actual implementation. Moreover, the analysis of artisan careers and of the traditional life cycle (apprenticejourneyman-master) clearly shows how demographic realities such as high death rates and high migration rates cannot but have stimulated the open character of many of the urban guilds, in particular those involved in the export-oriented industries. #

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De hoge vlucht die de lakennijverheid gedurende de middeleeuwen had genomen, is een van de belangrijkste determinanten geweest van de sociaal-economische en politieke ontwikkeling in de Nederlanden. De hoge graad van verstedelijking en kapitaalsaccumulatie die in hun kielzog een progressieve landbouw, een sterke commercialisering van de maatschappij in haar geheel en een dynamisch proces van veranderende sociale verhoudingen met zich meebrachten, zou niet mogelijk geweest zijn zonder de impact van deze, naar middeleeuwse normen, mas sale exportnijverheid. Vlaamse, maar ook Brabantse en Hollandse lakens, werden verkocht van het Iberisch schiereiland tot N owgorod, van Constantinopel tot Scandinavie.Het is daarom des te schrijnender dat er nauwelijks kwantitatieve indicatoren voorhanden zijn, die deze industriele expansie nader kunnen duiden. De conjunctuur van de lakennijverheid is eigenlijk vooral bekend door al bij al, verspreide en soms weinig representatieve vermeldingen van lakenexport. De analyse van deze vermeldingen en diverse monografieen over individuele industriesteden, hebben niettemin een vrij betrouwbaar beeld mogelijk gemaakt van algemene ontwikkelingen en tendensen binnen deze secundaire sector. De wolnijverheid was in de 12de en 13de eeuw ontstaan als een gedifferentieerde, stedelijke exportnijverheid. Ze zou in de 14de eeuw, door het wegkwijnen van de actieve handel en de Champagne-jaarmarkten en een substantiele verhoging

From their very early history, even before the craft guilds came of age, regulation of labour time was ubiquitous in most Flemish and Artesian cloth manufacturing cities. Nearly everywhere the working day was decided by the urban authorities and announced by bells; the working year was divided in working days and Sundays/religious festive days. Regulation, however, was refined and intensified in the course of the second half of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century when craft guilds pushed away the traditional relations between merchant-entrepreneurs and textile workers and replaced them with the late medieval small artisanal workshops. Labour time regulation was also clearly more developed in export-oriented cities: rules were stricter and the requirements of flexible workshops that could adapt to changing demand cycles necessitated more complex systems of regulation. Hence, labour time was not evenly organised across the different production stages. Cloth weavers have always been at the heart of regulation, while also cloth finishing and fulling were targeted. It is time-rate wages of journeymen weavers and subcontracting masters that set the standard for the intensification of labour time regulation once the guilds stepped in. Small-scale entrepreneurs needed to control more firmly the various production stages and adapt the scope of the enterprise to changing demand. Their mere economic survival depended, therefore, on the flexibility of labour markets. Once they gained access to political power, therefore, regulating labour time certainly became one of their main tools to control the organisation of labour.