Guild Name Generator

A guild is simply the people who paid in

The word is older and blunter than the thing it describes.

Guild comes from a Saxon word meaning payment. To gild was to pay. A guild was the group of people who had put money into a common pot, and that is the entire original meaning. Not brotherhood, not craft, not honour. Subscription.

What the money bought was worth having. The early guilds of London controlled who could make a thing and who could sell it. They set the standards, checked the weights, fixed the prices, and stopped anybody outside the membership from competing. They trained the apprentices. They also buried the dead and looked after the widows and orphans of members, which is what a common pot is genuinely for.

Some of them are still there. You can walk their old neighbourhoods in the City of London and read the trades off the street signs. Bread Street. Milk Street. Ironmonger Lane.

And the fancy word that came later, livery, just meant clothing. The senior members had the right to wear a distinctive costume, so people called them the livery companies. They are called worshipful companies because the members prayed together.

So the grandest names in English trade decode to: the people who pay, who own the good coats, and who go to church as a group.

The name was a legal weapon

This is the part that modern guild naming forgets entirely.

A medieval guild name was not a mood. It was a claim on a monopoly, granted by royal charter, and enforceable. When the tailors of London got their charter from Edward III in 1327, the name was the instrument. It said who was inside and who was outside, and being outside meant you could not legally trade.

Until 1835 you generally could not trade inside the square mile of the City at all unless you belonged to a livery, which is a remarkable sentence to write about a name.

Which is why the names are so flatly descriptive. The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers sells fish. The Skinners handled furs, which were violently expensive, and different furs were legally restricted to different classes of person. The Merchant Taylors began as tailors and linen armourers, the people who made the padded coats worn under a suit of armour.

Nothing poetic anywhere. The name told the world exactly which monopoly you held, because the whole point was that a stranger could read it and know whether they were allowed to buy from you.

Sixes and sevens

When you have a hundred organisations whose names are their legal status, one question becomes explosive. Who walks first?

The City settled it with an order of precedence, ranked by wealth and by how many Lord Mayors each company had produced. The top twelve are still called the Great Twelve.

Two companies could not be settled. The Skinners and the Merchant Taylors both traced their charters to the same year, 1327, and neither would accept sixth place behind the other. The argument ran for well over a century. In 1484 it turned violent during the Lord Mayor's river procession.

The Lord Mayor of the day, Robert Billesden, produced a judgement that is a small masterpiece of exhaustion. The two companies would simply swap. Each year one takes sixth and the other takes seventh, and the next year they trade.

They still do it. Every year. Over a dispute settled in the fifteenth century.

And this, everybody will tell you, is where we get the phrase at sixes and sevens, meaning in a state of hopeless disarray.

Except it probably is not. Chaucer wrote about setting the world on six and seven around 1375, more than a century before Billesden's judgement, and he used it as though his readers already knew it. The phrase came first. The guilds simply lived up to it so perfectly that everybody assumed they had invented it.

Which is the truest thing anybody has ever said about naming an organisation. Your name will collect stories you did not put there.

Old guilds said what you did. New ones say how you feel.

Set the two traditions side by side and the difference is total.

A medieval guild name is a noun. Fishmongers. Vintners. Mercers. It answers one question, which is what do you sell.

A modern guild name is a mood. Winged Rebels. Righteous Shadow. Ghosts of Betrayal. Grief of Delusion. These answer a completely different question, which is what does it feel like to be one of us.

Neither is wrong. They are solving different problems. The old name had to make a stranger obey it. The new name has to make a stranger want to join.

But look at the shapes the modern ones fall into, because there are only two.

There is the adjective and the noun, jammed together and fast. Aqua Skulls. Winged Rebels. These read like a badge, and they are what you want when the name has to fit above somebody's head in a crowded room.

And there is the older, slower shape, with the preposition in the middle. Heroes of the Mace. Swarm of the Dove. Host of the Stag. That of the is doing something specific. It implies the group belongs to something older than itself, and it is exactly the shape of a religious order or a heraldic house. The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers is built the same way.

One shape is a badge. The other is a claim of inheritance. Choose according to whether you want to look dangerous or ancient.

Naming something people will type every day

A guild name has a job nobody thinks about until it is too late. Members type it, say it in voice chat, and put it in brackets after their own name for months.

It has to shorten to something you can live with. Every guild gets shortened to its initials or its first word. Heroes of the Mace will become the Mace, and possibly HotM, and you do not get a vote. Look at the short form before you fall for the long one.

The noun matters more than the adjective. Skulls, Shadow, Ghosts, Swarm. That word is what people will actually remember, so put your strongest word in the noun and let the adjective do the colouring.

Avoid the words everybody is already using. The problem with a name assembled from the standard fantasy vocabulary is that it collides with forty other groups using the same shelf of words. A concrete noun beats an abstract one every time, because there is only one stag and there are a thousand shadows.

Do not describe your own virtue. Nobody has ever been persuaded by a group calling itself Righteous. Name what you carry, where you come from, or what people say about you afterwards. Let the virtue be somebody else's conclusion.

The medieval companies had this right for the wrong reason. They named the thing itself, and six hundred years later we are still saying it.

How the list was assembled

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, and one is drawn at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about guild names

What does the word guild actually mean?

Payment. It comes from a Saxon word meaning to pay, because members paid into a common fund. Everything else the guilds became, the monopolies, the charters, the robes, grew out of a subscription.

Why are they called worshipful companies?

Because the members prayed together as a body. The livery part refers to the distinctive clothing that senior members had the right to wear.

Did at sixes and sevens really come from a guild dispute?

Probably not, though the story is repeated everywhere. The Skinners and Merchant Taylors have swapped sixth and seventh place annually since a judgement in 1484, but Chaucer used the phrase around 1375. The guilds inherited it and then spent centuries proving it.

Should my guild name use of the?

Only if you want to sound old. That construction implies the group is descended from something rather than founded by somebody, which is why heraldry and religious orders use it. Drop it and you get a badge instead of a lineage.

How long should a guild name be?

Short enough that the abbreviation is not embarrassing. Members will shorten it within a week, so decide now what it shortens to, and make sure the strongest word in the name is the one that survives.

References

1. The Livery Companies. The Skinners' Company. https://skinners.org.uk/collection/the-livery-companies
2. Livery company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livery_company
3. At sixes and sevens. World Wide Words. https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-six1.html