This membership carried with it a number of other rights besides that of permission to work as a master-workman at full wages whenever the guild was employed. Guilds had certain privileges conferred on them by the towns in which they lived, { 136} by the nobles for whom they worked and the ecclesiastical authorities on whose various church structures they were employed. At the beginning of the Thirteenth Century at least, feudal ideas prevailed to such an extent that no one was supposed to enjoy any rights or privileges except those which had been conferred on him by some authority. Besides the workmen of the same guild were bound together by ties, so that any injury inflicted on one of them was considered to be done to the whole body. When human rights were much less recognized than has come to be the case since, this constituted an important source of protection against many forms of injury and infringement of rights.
Besides the privileges, however, the guild possessed certain other decided advantages which made membership desirable, even though it involved the fulfilment of certain duties. In the various towns in England, after the introduction during the Thirteenth Century of the practice of having mystery plays in the various towns, the guild claimed and obtained the privilege of giving these at various times during the year. The guild of the goldsmiths would give the performance of one portion of the Old Testament; the guild of the tailors another; the guild of the butchers and so on for each of the trades and crafts still another, so that during the year a whole cycle of the mysteries of the Christian religion in type and in reality were exhibited to the people of each region. Almost needless to say, on such festive occasions, for the plays were given on important feast days, the people from the countryside flocked in to see them and the influence was widespread. What was most important, however, was the influence on those who took part in the plays, of such intimate contact for a prolonged period with the simplicity of style, the sublimity of thought, the concentration of purpose and the effectiveness of expression of the Scriptures and the Scripture narratives even in their dramatized form.