» Sat Apr 02, 2011 9:27 pm A guild, is at its heart, a BUSINESS.
Be it a pottery guild, a lapidary guild, a carpentry guild, etc.
A mage's guild is an umbrella corporate structure, which ensures that the craft will be practiced, and more importantly, that fees will be charged for the service.
The way the guilds in TES gameplay are portrayed would NEVER work. In most ACTUAL guilds, progressing from apprentice to journeyman required several years of tutelage, often with a prescribed number of years of apprenticeship before being risen in rank. Journeymen then refined their arts, added their own touches, and blossomed to become master craftsmen, and took on apprentices.
Be it a pottery guild, a lapidary guild, a carpentry guild, etc.
A mage's guild is an umbrella corporate structure, which ensures that the craft will be practiced, and more importantly, that fees will be charged for the service.
The way the guilds in TES gameplay are portrayed would NEVER work. In most ACTUAL guilds, progressing from apprentice to journeyman required several years of tutelage, often with a prescribed number of years of apprenticeship before being risen in rank. Journeymen then refined their arts, added their own touches, and blossomed to become master craftsmen, and took on apprentices.
That's assuming that the guild has ranks. Take guilds such as those of Italy from about 1200 until the end of the city-states; only masters were actually members of the guild, and you had to be in a guild to be a full-fledged citizen. Apprentices basically just worked under the master waiting for them to die off so they could take their master's place in the guild, luckily for them the black death came which created alot of upward mobility...
