No sooner did the worsted industry begin to expand in the Württemberg Black Forest, as we saw in Chapter 4, than the weavers began to set up guilds. In law, these guilds enjoyed wide powers over the industry from their foundation until well into the nineteenth century. How effective were they in practice, though? Theorists of proto-industrialization, insofar as they have had to acknowledge the existence of corporate organizations in proto-industries, have dismissed them as ‘the remains of guild and corporative rights’ – merely a last, ineffective remnant of ‘feudalism’. Despite the outward semblance of a corporative organization in some proto-industries, this argument continues, the decline of guilds and their replacement by the market was ‘inevitable’. To find out whether this was the case, we cannot argue from theoretical assumptions. We need to know exactly what these proto-industrial guilds did, and how they changed over time.

One way to assess the effectiveness of an organization is to look at its finances. The account-books of the Wildberg worsted-weavers' guild survive from 1598 to 1647, and from 1666 to 1760. This chapter uses them to investigate the financial effectiveness of the guild. If guilds were really broken down by proto-industrialization, one would expect them to lose their ability to collect fees and dues from their members, especially in the countryside. Lack of revenues should in turn have led to diminished expenditures on internal enforcement or external conflicts.