I can speak for the tradecraft guilds (construction guilds, so masons and carpenters and plasters and such) in Europe during what I grew up calling The Middle Ages (a phrase AskHistorians has educated me beyond using, but still a useful guidepost). It’s safe to say that it would be very rare for tradecraft guilds to take care of disabled workers. Explaining why is a good window into the purposes of a guild.

Today, trade craft guilds are highly associated with unions. Indeed, many of them are some of the oldest unions in the U.S. And so we’re accustomed to thinking of tradecraft guilds as unions—as organizations who care about the well being, financial and otherwise, of the workers in that guild. European guilds of the Middle Ages would find that concept shocking and foreign. Guilds did not exist to protect workers back then. They existed to protect the guild masters, who were almost exclusively business owners—the owners of the local masonry shops and carpentry shops, etc. Guilds existed to squash competition, fix prices, and assure quality of the finished product. In the three-tiered worked of guild hierarchies (apprentice, journeyman, master), the apprentices were completely fungible, the journeymen were only as valued as the profitability of their last project, and the masters were back in the office tallying the profits, a task that seldom crippled anyone.

The rates of injury and fatality in the trade crafts were, bluntly, horrifying. Even up to what we’d call modern construction, in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century, injury was essentially unavoidable if you stayed at it long enough. There’s a famous Depression-era quote about iron workers, where the author notes that, upon observation, every single man on the iron working crew was injured. Some had a limp, some a bad back, some an injured hand. But all were injured in a permanent way. Such was merely the state of the industry. And it wasn’t better historically, it was worse.

It’s hard to cite a source for a negative. It’s not impossible, or even unreasonable, to suspect that here and there, now and then, you might find a guild member who was supported, official or otherwise, by the guild, by their fellow workers, or by the master they had worked for. But all of it would be acts of charity, not the normal operation of the guild. Bluntly, such was not the purpose of the guild. The guild existed for the masters, and for their business. Sources for the general operation, function, and purposes of the guilds: Ogilvie, Sheilagh; Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000–1800 (2001).