Why did craft guilds form in the middle ages?
a)to eliminate the growing number of merchant guilds in european towns
b)to address religious and political corruption
c)to eliminate competition between artisans
d)to provide structure and support for artisans who shared a trade

The correct answer is D, as craft guilds formed in the Middle Ages to provide support for artisans who shared a trade.

Guilds were merchant corporations; a habitual form of association during the Late Middle Ages.

They functioned institutionally in an equivalent way to a union of artisans, that is, as the meeting of a group of people who share a common activity, choose managerial positions, endow themselves with specific rules that bind all of them and share the same rights or freedoms. Such concepts did not have the same value that they acquired in the Contemporary Age and were understood as a form of privileges compatible with a marginal situation in the feudal socioeconomic system, which from the last centuries of the Middle Ages (especially since the crisis of the century XIV) was in a slow process of crisis and transformation, in transition to capitalism. The wealthy merchants of the guilds, although they could not be part of the privileged estates, could reach a high economic position.

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