Although there were naturally numerous frictions between the two classes of guilds respecting wages, working days, hours, and the like, it must not be supposed that there was that irreconcilable hostility between them which would exist at the present time between a trade-union and a syndicate of employers.

Each recognized the right to existence of the other.

In one case, that of the strike of bakers towards the close of the fifteenth century, at Colmar in Elsass, the craft-guilds supported the journeymen in their protest against a certain action of the patrician Rath, which they considered to be a derogation from their dignity.
Like the masters, the journeymen had their own guild-house, and their own solemn functions and social gatherings.

There were, indeed, two kinds of journeymen-guilds: one whose chief purpose was a religious one, and the other concerning itself in the first instance with the secular concerns of the body.

However, both classes of journeymen-guilds worked into one another's hand.