chapter 1._

ALSO IN: _O. Browning, Guelfs and Ghibellines._

See, also, SAXONY: A. D. 1178-1183; and GERMANY: A. D. 1138-1268; and, also, ESTE, HOUSE OF.

GUELFS: The outcrop of the contention in Italy. Its beginnings, causes, course and meaning.

See ITALY: A. D. 1215; and FLORENCE: A. D. 1248-1278.

----------GUELFS: End----------

GUÉLFS. White and Black (Bianchi and Neri).

See FLORENCE: A. D. 1295-1300; and 1301-1313.

GUELPHS OF HANOVER, The Order of the.

"The Hanoverian troops having much distinguished themselves at the battle of Waterloo, George IV. (then prince regent) determined to found an order of merit which might, with especial propriety, be conferred upon such of them as deserved the distinction, and the 12th of August, 1815, was fixed upon as the date of its foundation. By the second statute, the Order is inseparably annexed to the possession of the Hanoverian crown, by vesting the grand-mastership in the sovereign of that country for the time being."

_C. R. Dodd, Manual of Dignities, part 3._

GUERANDE. Treaty of.

See BRITTANY: A. D. 1341-1365.

GUERNSEY, The Isle of.

See JERSEY AND GUERNSEY.

GUERRA DOS CABANOS.

See BRAZIL: A. D. 1825-1865.

GUERRILLAS.

A term of Spanish origin, derived from 'guerilla', signifying little or petty warfare, and applied to small, irregular bands of troops, carrying on war against an enemy by harassing, destructive raids.

GUEUX OF THE NETHERLAND REVOLT.

See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1562-1566.

----------GUIANA: Start--------

GUIANA: The aboriginal inhabitants.

See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: CARIBS.

GUIANA: 16th Century. The search for El Dorado.

See EL DORADO.

GUIANA: A. D. 1580-1814. Dutch, French and English settlements and conquests.

"There was one European nation which was not likely to hunt for a golden city, when gold was to be earned by plain and matter of fact commerce. The Dutch had as early as 1542 established a systematic if contraband trade with the Spanish Main; and in 1580 they began to settle in Guiana by planting a depot on the river Pomeroon, in what is now the county of Essequibo. In 1599 they built two forts at the mouth of the Amazon, but were driven out by the Portuguese; and about 1613 they established a colony on the Essequibo, building the fort of 'Kyk over al', 'Look over all,' on an island where the Massaruni flows into the Essequibo. The colony was founded by Zeeland merchants, was known as Nova Zeelandia, and came under the control of the Netherlands West India Company, which was incorporated in 1621. Shortly afterwards colonisation began further to the east on the Berbice river. The founder was a Flushing merchant, Van Peere by name; he founded his settlement about 1624, and he held his rights under contract with the Chamber of Zeeland. … Thus was the present province of British Guiana colonised by Dutchmen. … While English discovery was attracted to the west and Orinoco, the first attempts at English settlement were far to the east on the Wyapoco or Oyapok river. Here, in 1604, while Ralegh was in prison, Captain Charles Leigh founded a colony at the mouth of the river. … In 1609 Robert Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire took up the work in which Leigh had failed. … In 1613 he obtained from King James a grant of 'all that part of Guiana or continent of America lying between the river of Amazones and the river of Dessequebe,' which was not actually possessed or inhabited by any Christian power in friendship with England. … In 1619 a scheme was started for an Amazon Company, the leading spirit in which was Captain Roger North. … The company was fortunate enough to secure the powerful patronage of the Duke of Buckingham. Harcourt threw in his lot with them, and on the 19th of May 1627 a royal grant was made to the Duke of Buckingham and 55 other adventurers, including the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, who were incorporated under the title of 'the governor and company of noblemen and gentlemen of England for the plantation of Guiana.' The Duke of Buckingham was Governor, North was Deputy-Governor, and the grant included the 'royal' river of the Amazon. For about two years the company did some solid work, sending out four ships and 200 colonists; an attempt was then made in 1629 to bring the territory covered by their grant immediately under royal protection, and upon its failure their efforts at colonisation appear to have gradually died away. The English were not the only Europeans who tried their hand at settlement in the east of Guiana. … In 1613, 160 French families settled in Cayenne. The first colony failed, but in 1624 and 1626 fresh attempts were made a little to the west on the rivers Sinamari and Cananama; and in 1643 a Rouen Company, incorporated under the name of the Cape North Company, sent out three or four hundred men to Cayenne under the Sieur de Bretigny. Bretigny ruined the scheme by savage ill-treatment of Indians and colonists alike, and the remains of the settlement were absorbed by a new and more powerful Normandy Company." This failed in its turn, and gave way to a "French Equinoctial Company," organized under the auspices of Colbert, which sent out 1,200 colonists and fairly established them at Cayenne. Colbert, in 1665, placed the colony, "with all the other French possessions in the West Indies, under one strong West India Company. Such were the beginnings of colonisation in the west and east of Guiana. Between them lies the district now known as Dutch Guiana or Surinam." The first settlement in this was made in 1630 by 60 English colonists, under a Captain Marshall. {1616} The colony failed, and was revived in 1650 by Lord Willoughby, then representing the fugitive King Charles II., as Governor of Barbadoes. In 1663, after the Restoration, Lord Willoughby, in conjunction with Lawrence Hyde, second son of the Earl of Clarendon, received Letters Patent "constituting them lords and proprietors of the district between the Copenam and the Maroni (which included the Surinam river) under the name of Willoughby Land." Soon afterwards "war broke out with the Dutch, and in March 1667 the colony capitulated to the Dutch admiral Crynsenn. The peace of Breda between Great Britain and the Netherlands, which was signed in the following July, provided that either nation should retain the conquests which it had made by the preceding 10th of May, and under this arrangement Surinam was ceded to the Netherlands, while New York became a British possession. … Thus ended for many long years all British connexion with Guiana. … When at length the English returned [in 1796 and 1803, during the subjection of the Dutch to Napoleon, and while they were forced to take part in his wars], they came as conquerors rather than as settlers, and by a strange perversity of history, the original Dutch colonies on the Berbice and Essequibo became a British dependency, while the Netherlanders retain to this day the part of Guiana which Lord Willoughby marked out for his own." These arrangements were settled in the convention between Great Britain and the Netherlands signed at London in 1814.

_C. P. Lucas, History Geography of the British Colonies, volume 2, section 2, chapter 8._

ALSO IN: _H. G. Dalton, History of British Guiana._

----------GUIANA: End--------

GUIENNE, OR GUYENNE.

A corruption of the name of Aquitaine, which came into use, apparently, about the 13th century.

See AQUITAINE: A. D. 884-1151.

GUILDS, OR GILDS, Mediæval.

"The history of the Gild Merchant begins with the Norman Conquest. The latter widened the horizon of the English merchant even more than that of the English annalist. The close union between England and Normandy led to an increase in foreign commerce, which in turn must have greatly stimulated internal trade and industry. Moreover, the greatly enhanced power of the English crown tempered feudal turbulence, affording a measure of security to traders in England that was as yet unknown on the continent. … With this expansion of trade the mercantile element would become a more potent factor in town life, and would soon feel the need of joint action to guard its nascent prosperity against encroachments. Not until there was something of importance to protect, not until trade and industry began to predominate over agriculture within the borough, would a protective union like the Gild Merchant come into being. Its existence, in short, presupposes a greater mercantile and industrial development than that which prevailed in England in the tenth century. This circumstance and the absence of all mention of the Gild Merchant in the records of the Anglo-Saxon period render it probable that this fraternity first appeared in England soon after the Conqueror had established his sway and restored order in the land. Whether it was merely a reorganization of older gilds, a spontaneous adaptation of the gild idea to the newly-begotten trade interests, or a new institution directly transplanted from Normandy, we have no means of determining with certainty. The last-mentioned view is strongly favoured by the circumstance that, at the time of the Conquest, the Gild Merchant doubtless existed in Northern France and Flanders. From the Frenchmen who became burgesses of English towns, and from the Norman merchants who thronged the marts of England after the Conquest, the English would soon ascertain the advantages of formal trade organization. The earliest distinct references to the Gild Merchant occur in a charter granted by Robert Fitz-Hamon to the burgesses of Burford (1087-1107), and in a document drawn up while Anselm was Archbishop of Canterbury (1093-1109). … Whether we place the inception of the fraternity immediately before or after the Norman Conquest, whether we make it a continuation of older Anglo-Saxon gilds, or a derivative from Normandy, or a wholly new and spontaneous growth, it was doubtless at first merely a private society, unconnected with the town government, having for its object the protection of its members, the tradesmen of the borough, and the maintenance of the newly invigorated trade interests. During the twelfth century it gradually became a recognised part of the town constitution, thus entering upon its second stage of development. How this came to pass can be easily realised from the later history of English gilds in general. For in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries … a simple social-religious gild at times attained such power in a community that it came to be regarded as an important constituent element of the civic administration. Quite similar must have been the growth of the Gild Merchant, which from the outset was doubtless composed of the most influential burgesses, and which, as the exponent of the mercantile interests, must always have been greatly concerned in the increase of the privileges and prosperity of the borough in general. It was very natural that the town authorities should use such a society for public purposes, entrusting to it the surveillance of the trade monopoly, in which its members were particularly interested,—allowing it to gradually become an important part of the civic administrative machinery. … The beginning of this third and final stage of development cannot be definitely fixed; for in some places it was of an earlier date than in others. The fourteenth century may in general be called the period of gradual transition. In the fifteenth century the transformation was completed. In this and the following centuries the term 'Gilda Mercatoria' became less and less frequent. In many places it soon wholly disappeared. Where it continued to subsist, the Gild no longer had an individuality of its own. Its alderman and other peculiar officers, its whole organization as a distinctive entity, had vanished. It had merged its identity in that of the general municipal organism. The head of the fraternity was now the head of the town; borough and Gild, burgesses and gildsmen were now identical. What had once been a distinct integral part of the civic body politic became vaguely blended with the whole of it. {1617} The old Gild Merchant was now rarely mentioned in connection with the municipal trade restrictions and regulations, the latter being commonly applied to burgesses, craftsmen, freemen, or 'foreigners.' The exegesis of this transformation … was due mainly to three causes: (1) the expansion of trade and the multiplication of the craft and mercantile fraternities, which absorbed the ancient functions of the Gild Merchant and rendered it superfluous; (2) the growth of the select governing body, which usurped most of the privileges of the old burghers at large, and hence tended to obliterate the distinction between them, or their less privileged successors, and the ancient gildsmen, leaving both only certain trade immunities; (3) the decay of the leet—the rallying point of the old burghers as distinguished from that of the gildsmen—the functions of which passed, in part, to the crafts, but mainly to the select body and to the justices of the peace. But even after the Gild Merchant and the borough had thus become identical, the old dual idea did not completely disappear, the Gild being often regarded as a particular phase or function of the town, namely, the municipality in its character of a trade monopoly. Hence the modern survivals of the Gild Merchant help to elucidate its actual functions in ancient times. In a few boroughs the select governing body of the town—the narrow civic corporation, in distinction from the burgesses or freemen at large—succeeded to the name and traditions of the Gild Merchant. In some of these cases the signification of the latter gradually dwindled down to a periodical civic feast of the privileged few. … In the eighteenth century we meet the word much less frequently than in the seventeenth; and toward the beginning of the present century it became very rare. The Municipal Corporations Commission, in 1835, found it still used in only a few boroughs. The remnants of the Gild Merchant and of the craft fraternities were rapidly vanishing before the new ideas of a more liberal age,—the age of laissez faire. The onerous, self-destructive restrictions of gilds were now being superseded by the stimulating measures of Chambers of Commerce. More than six centuries elapsed before the enactment of Magna Carta that all merchants 'may go through England, by land and water, to buy and sell, free from all unjust imposts,' became a realised fact throughout the realm. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 provided that 'every person in any borough may keep any shop for the sale of all lawful wares and merchandizes by wholesale or retail, and use every lawful trade, occupation, mystery, and handicraft, for hire, gain, sale, or otherwise, within any borough.' In a single town of England the Gild Merchant still subsists, but only as the shadow of its former self—a spectre from the distant past. At Preston the Gild Merchant has been 'celebrated' regularly once every twenty years for more than three centuries, on which occasions the burgesses renew their freedom and indulge in all the festivities of a civic carnival. The last Gild Merchant was held in 1882. There was then much feasting and dancing, there were gay processions of townsmen, and much talk of the glories of the past. And yet how few even of the scholars and noblemen there assembled from various parts of Great Britain knew what an important role the Gild Merchant had played in the annals of English municipal history, what strange vicissitudes it had undergone, what a remarkable transformation the centuries had wrought in it."

_C. Gross, The Gild Merchant, chapters 1 and 9 (volume 1)._

"The rise of the craft gilds is, roughly speaking, a century later [than the rise of the merchant gilds]; isolated examples occur early in the twelfth century, they become more numerous as the century advances, and in the thirteenth century they appear in all branches of manufacture and in every industrial centre. Craft gilds were associations of all the artisans engaged in a particular industry in a particular town, for certain common purposes. … Their appearance marks the second stage in the history of industry, the transition from the family system to the artisan (or gild) system. In the former there was no class of artisans properly so called; no class, that is to say, of men whose time was entirely or chiefly devoted to a particular manufacture; and this because all the needs of a family or other domestic group, whether of monastery or manor-house, were satisfied by the labours of the members of the group itself. The latter, on the contrary, is marked by the presence of a body of men each of whom was occupied more or less completely in one particular manufacture. The very growth from the one to the other system, therefore, is an example of 'division of labour,' or, to use a better phrase, of 'division of employments.' … When the place of the young manufactures of the twelfth century in the development of mediæval society is thus conceived, the discussion as to a possible Roman 'origin' of the gilds loses much of its interest. No doubt modern historians have exaggerated the breach in continuity between the Roman and the barbarian world; no doubt the artisans in the later Roman Empire had an organization somewhat like that of the later gilds. Moreover, it is possible that in one or two places in Gaul certain artisan corporations may have had a continuous existence from the fifth to the twelfth century. It is even possible that Roman regulations may have served as models for the organization of servile artisans on the lands of monasteries and great nobles,—from which, on the continent, some of the later craft gilds doubtless sprang. But when we see that the growth of an artisan class, as distinguished from isolated artisans here and there, was impossible till the twelfth century, because society had not yet reached the stage in which it was profitable or safe for a considerable number of men to confine themselves to any occupation except agriculture; and that the ideas which governed the craft gilds were not peculiar to themselves but common to the whole society of the time; then the elements of organization which may conceivably have been derived from or suggested by the Roman artisan corporations become of quite secondary importance. There is, as we have said, little doubt that some of the craft gilds of France and Germany were originally organizations of artisan serfs on the manors of great lay or ecclesiastical lords. This may also have been the case in some places in England, but no evidence has yet been adduced to show that it was so. … The relation of the craft gilds to the merchant gild is a still more difficult question. In many of the towns of Germany and the Netherlands a desperate struggle took place during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries between a burgher oligarchy, who monopolized the municipal government, and were still further strengthened in many cases by union in a merchant gild, and the artisans organized in their craft gilds; the craftsmen fighting first for the right of having gilds of their own, and then for a share in the government of the town. {1618} These facts have been easily fitted into a symmetrical theory of industrial development; the merchant gilds, it is said, were first formed for protection against feudal lords, but became exclusive, and so rendered necessary the formation of craft gilds; and in the same way the craft gilds became exclusive afterwards, and the journeymen were compelled to form societies of their own for protection against the masters. … The very neatness of such a theory, the readiness with which it has been accepted by popular writers in spite of the paucity of English evidence, have perhaps led some historians to treat it with scant consideration. … At the end of the reign of Edward III. there were in London forty-eight companies or crafts, each with a separate organization and officers of its own, a number which had increased to at least sixty before the close of the century."

_W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, book 1, chapter 2 (volume 1)._

"The unions known by the names of mystery, faculty, trade, fellowship, or (from the fact of possessing particular costumes) livery company, existed in large numbers throughout the realm, and were frequently divided into two or three categories. Thus in London the principal crafts were the twelve 'substantial companies' or 'livery companies' [Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Tailors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, Cloth-workers]. … A perfect acquaintance with the details of the trade and the desire as well as the ability to produce good work were in all cases preliminary requisites [of membership]. In fact the main provisions of the craft, the very soul of its constitution, were the regulations intended to ensure the excellence of the products and the capacity of the workman. … The whole character of the craft guild is explained by these regulations, designed to prevent fraud and deception of the public."

_E. R. A. Seligman, Mediæval Guilds of England (American Economics Association, volume 2, number 5), part 2, section 2._

ALSO IN: _W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England,