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.
