1. The origin of guilds has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and two opposing theories have been advanced. According to the first theory they were the persistence of earlier institutions; but what were these institutions? Some say that, more particularly in the south of France, they were of Roman and Byzantine origin, and were derived from those _collegia_ of the poorer classes (_tenuiorum_) which, in the last centuries of the Empire, chiefly concerned themselves with the provision of funerals; or, again, from the _scholae_, official and compulsory groups, which, keeping the name of the hall in which their councils assembled, prolonged their existence till about the year 1000. According to others they were, particularly in the north, of German origin, and were derived from associations resembling artificial families, the members of which mingled their blood and exchanged vows to help each other under certain definite circumstances; or again, they may have descended in a straight line from the _ministeriales_, the feudal servitors who, in every royal or feudal domain of any extent, were grouped according to their trade, under the authority of a _panetier_,[1] a _bouteillier_,[2] a head farrier, or a chief herdsman. According to others again, the Church, that great international association, had, by the example of its monastic orders and religious brotherhoods, given the laity lessons and examples of which they were not slow to take advantage. According to the opposite theory, each guild was a separate creation, born, as it were, by spontaneous generation, and had no connection with the past. Associations (_gildae_), _scholae_, colleges--all had been killed by the hostility of the central power before they had had time to mature fully. They were children of the necessity which compelled the weak to unite for mutual defence in order to remedy the disorders and abuses of which they were the victims. They were the result of the great associative movement, which, working by turns on political and economic lines, first gave birth to the communes, and so created a social environment in which they could live and develop. The craftsmen, drawn together into one street or quarter by a similar trade or occupation, the tanners by the river, or the dockers by the port, acquired for themselves in the towns which had won more or less freedom the right to combine and to make their own regulations.[3] As is nearly always the case, there is a kernel of truth in each of these opposing theories. Certainly it is hardly likely that the germs or the wreckage of trade associations, existing in the _collegia_, the _scholae_, the associations, the groups in royal, feudal, or ecclesiastical domains, should have totally disappeared, to reappear almost immediately. Why so many deaths followed by so many resurrections?