Actually Wideawake you make an interesting argument here, you say:
(1) The guild system was separate from, conceptually radically different from, and often antagonistic to the feudal system. This is one of the dynamics that caused the "town versus country" rivalry which was a source of such political instability in late medieval Europe.
I've always been under the impression that the Black Death and the devastation it caused had much more to do with the decline of Feudalism and rise of Guilds / Capitialism in late Medieval Europe.
You see without the serf to kick around, Landlords were forced to compete in an open market for labourers.
Political instability was a by product of this.
The plague was even more devastating in the cities than it was in the countryside.
A serf was far more likely to survive than a townsman.
And a serf was a party to a voluntary contract - the medieval towns that blossomed into metropolises from 1000-1350 AD were populated in large part by serfs who had left the manor to seek more remunerative employment.
When the Black Death came, many townsmen returned to the manors their grandparents had left in order to survive. Even then, there weren't enough workers to farm the land so landowners still had to pay more to remain fully staffed.,p>the Black Death caused great economic dislocation and gave laborers significantly more wage leverage, but the Black Death set back the development of urban capitalism by a hundred years.