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The evolution of the guilds of Saint Eloy and Saint Sebastian throughout the history of Santiago

Since the Middle Ages, arts and crafts have been organized in guilds or brotherhoods, equivalent terms.

These working structures controlled the apprenticeship and practice of artisan trades until well into the nineteenth century. After an early stage in the Middle Ages, when we have hardly any data, documentation on the guilds of Saint Eloy (silversmiths) and Saint Sebastian (jet carvers) is relatively common from the Modern Age to the twentieth century. The guild was ruled by a majordomo who ensured compliance with the Ordinances, the legal document which contained their rules. The first ones of the guild of silversmiths of Compostela date back to 1567, and we know that they were revised and renewed on several occasions until the last ones in 1786. The first known Ordinances of the guild of jet carvers are even older, dating from 1443, although no others are known beyond 1581. We can deduce that the guild of Saint Sebastian was gradually assimilated to that of Saint Eloy.

The Ordinances determined the conditions that a silversmith or jet carver had to fulfil to join the guild.

They established a registration fee —for example, in 1567, it was two pounds of wax and one thousand maravedís for silversmiths—. In addition, applicants had to be residents of Santiago and be married. The guild offered help to the widows of the members and paid for their burials. But moreover, the brotherhood regulated the work, controlled the materials, determined the prices, established the marking system to ensure quality and authenticity, and defined the apprenticeship and exams to become a master. In this way, the workers avoided competition among themselves, ensured the technical capacity of the members and the excellence of their products, as well as total control over the foreign product.

One of the most peculiar characteristics of the guilds was their participation in the public life of the city, especially in the organization of festivities.

The City Council forced these brotherhoods to stage and to pay for colourful dances and shows at the celebrations organised around major events such as the entry of new archbishops into the city, royal weddings, coronations, or the birth of princes, and especially the processions of Holy Thursday, Saint Roque and, above all, Corpus Christi. This was the most important procession in the Spanish liturgical calendar, and it was a perfect visual representation of the hierarchy of the Old Regime, because the guilds had to attend in order of importance, being the last one the most important brotherhood, close to the ecclesiastical authorities. In most Spanish cities, the privileged guild was that of silversmiths, due to their work with precious metals and objects of the highest value.

Some of the reasons that weakened that system in the eighteenth century were the tightening of conditions for joining the guilds, the protectionist measures against foreign artists, the pilgrimage crisis, and the export trade with America.

The reformist measures applied by the governments of Charles III and Charles IV, reflecting the European Enlightenment, eventually disintegrated the guild system —extinct in Spain in 1842—. Still, this corporate structure was so deeply rooted that its fall was not immediate. Santiago de Compostela, known as “the guild city par excellence”, maintained certain traces of the medieval system, such as apprenticeship in the workshops, craft techniques, or the family endogamy that ensured the establishment of the great sagas of silversmiths. At the end of the nineteenth century, in 1888, the creation of the School of Arts and Crafts helped to institutionalise and professionalise the field of artistic works, but without ever losing the importance of tradition and craftsmanship.