We have seen that guilds were militarily significant for their town and their prince and that their membership came from across civic society to form members into a unified socio-devotional community. The guilds must now be placed within their civic and wider political context(s). The purpose of the present chapter is to look at the support given to guilds by towns and by lords and to try to explain their place within both civic culture and court–civic interactions. The significance of civic honour – indeed, honour as a concept – will be discussed and the guilds will be used to offer new insight into relationships between nobles and towns and, in particular, the rule of the dukes of Burgundy as counts of Flanders. The guilds were part of civic culture and part of their urban communities, but they were also part of the shared society and shared forms of cultural expression that developed between the ducal court and urban activities.

‘Honour’

Before analysing the archery and crossbow guilds’ relationship to civic honour, and indeed why the guilds were perceived as bringing honour to the dukes, the term itself must be considered. In medieval sources ‘honour’ is an even more ubiquitous term than ‘community’. A 1443 civic charter from the Lille aldermen on the occasion of the ‘reunion’ of the two crossbow guilds – the grand and the petit – gave the guild rights organised for the ‘honour, fortune and grace’ of the duke of Burgundy and the town of Lille. The guild-brothers were to uphold ‘good and honour’ in their conduct and at all times behave in an ‘honourable’ manner. If a competition was to be held in another town, then the best men must be sent ‘for the honour’ of the confraternity and of the town. The guild officials were to be ‘suitable for the good and honour of the town’ and all of the guildbrothers must be sufficiently armed and skilled ‘for the honour of the town’ and were to follow their regulations ‘profitably and honourably for the good and honour of the town and of the duke’.

Honour can be understood in numerous different ways and it is likely that the term meant different things to different writers, even within the towns of the late medieval Low Countries.