Weiszklee

yet unfortunately their very existence is entangled in geopolitical nonsense about which horrific state has the biggest cock or which company has tithed the most to a bunch of corrupt sociopaths.

Trying to parse whether this reblog is making:

An extremely inaccurate assumption about how widespread witch trials were in the early modern period

An extremely specific point about the prevalence of different execution methods (most accused witches in Britain were hanged, not burnt)

But is there a thieves guild with a legitimate monopoly on theft outside of the Discworld? In normal fantasy, they're bribing the government and murdering competitors, right?

As for where the Thieves' Guild came from, Fritz Leiber did indeed invent it. My theory is that The Court of Miracles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (not so much the novel, but specifically the 1939 film, the one with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo) was a major influence both for Leiber's story and the trope as a whole. See here:

Allegedly they did have their own opaque jargon and oaths of loyalty and silence. They also absorbed crooked priests, merchants, and lawyers into their faction.

The only problem is that Green treats the legend more or less as fact, and it's really not. There was indeed a big trial in 1455 in Dijon, and people got hanged, and intriguingly left behind a record of their jargon, cant, argot. But these Coquillards were just a group of miscreants hanging about in brothels, pimping, and doing petty crime (theft, counterfeiting, fraud, that sort of thing). And okay, counterfeiting was actually considered a major crime at the time, hence the gallows, but in the context of the complete fucking mayhem that was the Hundred Years' War and its aftermath, all this was peanuts. Others had been killing and pillaging indiscriminately, slaughtering babies, mutilating people for laughs, and occasionally eating them, and here was a bunch of… frat boys that somehow got painted as this sinister criminal organisation.

The activity of these Coquillards was highly localised, and it lasted a few years. It's a stretch to even call them a gang. But over the next centuries, itinerant beggars also got called Coquillards (there's zero evidence that they called themselves that), and there's nothing respectable law-abiding people (so. our historical sources.) love more than vilifying an already marginalised group, especially when they roam and don't stay put. So the two got conflated, and the Coquillards were now painted as a sinister and strictly hierarchical criminal organisation that had spread all over France, like miasma. Good people, beware!

You know how Trump started calling Antifa (with a capital A!) a terrorist organisation, as in a single group and indeed organised (lmao), and inventing wholecloth Latin American cartels and calling them narcoterrorists, and wildly exaggerating the scope, scale, reach, and danger of criminal groups that do exist? It's kind of like that, though the moral panic was less engineered with intent, and more spontaneously springing from the prejudices and narrow interests of those respectable people.