Hello, legal historian here. As in, I wrote my master's thesis on legal history. Not specifically on medieval guilds, but hey, you pick up a lot of stuff doing massive amounts of reading on the history of law.
Guilds absolutely provided apprenticeships to people. In fact, many guilds required their masters to train apprentices in order to maintain their status as, well, masters. Additionally, many guilds required their masters to take apprentices in order to train replacements to masters and members that had died, to keep funds rolling in for the pension funds of their widows and orphans, and they also had orders to provide services to the cities they lived in. Additionally, masters training apprentices was one of the classic ways in which guildmasters expanded their own network of influence, so they were naturally incentivized to train apprentices. A guild that failed to attract new members and failed to train them would quickly cease to be a guild at all or had its incompetent leadership replaced by others. That doesn't necessarily mean that guilds couldn't be selective about who they apprenticed, because so many medieval people would fight over the chance to have their child apprenticed to a guild. But guilds absolutely required that their guild members trained apprentices.
The ideas of "guilds as regulatory bodies" is only one aspect of their multi-faceted role in society. They were societies of their own, with their own laws and rules. It's important to recognize that video game and fantasy "guilds" have little to nothing in common with the historical reality, but also not to confuse them with a simple regulatory agency that modern people would be familiar with.
See, I've been thinking about this for the last few hours. To wit, requiring masters to train apprentices is
not the same as providing apprenticeships to people. But then, you could point to an example of a guild that did, point in fact, match apprentices to masters.
I'd then ask if this kind of service was common enough to make it an identifying feature of Guilds and then we'd start arguing if the "favour bartering" of the day constituted a way in which the Guilds provided a forum for said work opportunities to happen. The question would then ultimately devolve into: Were guilds rent-seekers or cost-sharers?
Did they actually provide a useful service to the people they represented, or just provide a means for the people who lead the guilds to control the trade?
And the guild in Goblin Slayer; Is it's behavior really that different, therefore, then those guilds we actually saw take place in our world?
The GS guild has:
-Established a monopoly on a trade (Adventuring)
-Has a steady flow of unskilled and skilled trade workers (Adventurers)
-Levies fees on the work of said trade workers.
-Governs the interactions and trade between said trade workers and their consumer base.
It doesn't have apprentices or masters like in a classical guild. But then, if the purpose of a Guild is to
rent-seek and provide
control levers over the trade....does it matter? Adventuring is glamorous. Adventuring is popular. Adventuring is one of the ways the poorest person the GS society has can move upwards in their economic class. There manifestly isn't a need for skilled adventurers to seek out apprentices for the guild to have an influx of new blood to fill their coffers with or for the kingdom to need a way to control them.
