The Guild was above all else an ideological movement, one which owed its existence to a particular understanding of how society should organise itself. The ideology it propagated, one which it wished to propagandise by acting as an exempla, was essentially a response to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and the social and moral problems it brought with it. These ideas though did not arise spontaneously; the three key areas where the Guild supported a distinctive ideology , religious, political and artistic, had been the subject of the deliberations of key thinkers of the Victorian era who had often proposed a social model much in keeping with aspects of that which emerged at Ditchling. The distinctive feature of the Ditchling experiment however was the way these ideas were brought together to form a original and important attempt to re-establish much of that was desirable about pre-industrial and, indeed Medieval society. This will become clear by examining these different strands of thought which contributed to the Guild philosophy.
1. Artistic - Ruskin, Morris and the Arts and Crafts movements
2. Political - Chesterton, Belloc and Distributism
3. Religious - Medieval Catholicism
