FARR, James Richard, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914

Artisans in Europe,
1300-1914
ae
Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914
This book is a survey of the history of work in general and of European

urban artisans in particular, from the late Middle Ages to the era of
industrialization. Unlike traditional histories of work and craftsmen,
this book offers a multifaceted understanding of artisan experience
situated in the artisans’ culture. It treats economic and institutional
topics, but also devotes considerable attention to the changing
ideologies of work, the role of government regulation in the world of
work, the social history of craftspeople, the artisan in rebellion against
the various authorities in his world, and the ceremonial and leisure life
of artisans. Women, masters, journeymen, apprentices, and nonguild
workers all received substantial treatment. The book concludes with a
chapter on the nineteenth century, examining the transformation of
artisan culture, exploring how and why the early modern craftsman
became the industrial wage-worker, mechanic, or shopkeeper of the
modern age.
JAMES R. FARR is Professor of History at Purdue University, West

Lafayette, Indiana. He is a specialist in French history and the history
of work, and has published Hands of Honour: Artisans and their World in
Dijon, 1550-1650 (1988) and Authority and Sexuality in Burgundy,
1550-1730 (1995).
NEW APPROACHES TO EUROPEAN HISTORY
Series editors
WILLIAM BEIK Emory University
T. C. W. BLANNING Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
New Approaches to European History is an important textbook series,

which provides concise but authoritative surveys of major themes and
problems in European history since the Renaissance. Written at a level
and length accessible to advanced school students and undergraduates,
each book in the series addresses topics or themes that students of
European history encounter daily: the series embraces both some of
the more “traditional” subjects of study, and those cultural and social
issues to which increasing numbers of school and college courses are
devoted. A particular effort is made to consider the wider international
implications of the subject under scrutiny.
To aid the student reader scholarly apparatus and annotation is light,

but each work has full supplementary bibliographies and notes for
further reading: where appropriate chronologies, maps, diagrams, and
other illustrative material are also provided.
For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book.
Artisans in Europe
1300-1914
JAMES R. FARR
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Cambridge University Press 2000
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2000
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
Typeset in Plantin 10/12pt [cE]
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Contents
List offigures page vi

List of illustrations vii
List of tables viii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
1 ‘The meaning of work: ideology and organization 10
2 The craft economy 45
3 The workplace 95
4 Authority and resistance (J): artisans in the polity 159
5 Authority and resistance (II): masters and journeymen 191
6 Communities PP fs
7 Ceremonies, festivals, taverns, and games 258
8 Epilogue: artisans in the era of industrial capitalism 276
Index 300
Figures
Nordlingen, 1579-1724: percent of all taxed, male page

artisans, selected craft groups 99
York, 1500-1600: artisans in percent of all admissions to
freedom, selected craft groups 100
Frankfurt am Main, 1587: percent of artisan householders
by craft group 102
Dijon, 1464-1750: percent of artisan heads of households
(male and female) 103
Rome, 1526-7: percent of artisan household heads 104
VI
a Cuenca, 1561-1771: percent of artisans by craft group 105
Greater London, 1540-1700: percent of artisans, selected
craft groups 106
Florence and Pisa, 1427: average per capita wealth in florins,
selected occupations 114
Frankfurt am Main, 1587: distribution of wealth By assessed
worth in gulden, selected occupations 116
10 Dijon, 1556: distribution of wealth, by percentile, in percent
of selected taxable occupational groups 118
11 Dijon, 1643: distribution of wealth, by percentile, in percent
of taxable selected occupational groups 119
12 Madrid, 1757: distribution of wealth (assessed worth) by
percent of occupational category 22
13 Nordlingen, 1579: distribution of wealth in florins, in
percent of taxpayers in selected crafts 124
vi
Illustrations
Seventeenth-century tailor page 67

Seventeenth-century shoemaker 68
Fifteenth-century clockmaker’s shop 69
Sixteenth-century stonemason a.
Early fifteenth-century builders at work hic
Carpenter’s workshop 74
Sixteenth-century weaver 109
Nailmaker, 1529 es:
FE
WN
US Shoemaker, 1520
CANADA 1 a
Reliquary maker, 1458 120
Turner, 1485 120
Butcher, 1436 125
Cabinet-maker, 1484 129
Sixteenth-century wood turner by Jan Joris van der Vliet 130
Sixteenth-century tanner 131
Seventeenth-century edge-tool maker 132
Seventeenth-century carpenter 133
An eighteenth-century bakery: kneading bread 136
An eighteenth-century bakery: weighing, shaping,
baking bread 136
20 Hatmaking: tearing and shaving fur from pelts 138
2A Hatmaking: bowing the fur 138
22 Hatmaking: building a hat 139
23 Hatmaking: felting a hat 139
24 Hatmaking: dyeing and finishing hats 140
vii
Tables
31 Artisans as percentage of population, selected cities page 97

3.2 Madrid, 1757: distribution of occupations by product,
in percent 105
3:3 Dijon, 1464-1750: median tax assessment (the taille, a
tax on personal wealth), selected trades (minimum ten
instances) ZZ
3.4 No6rdlingen, 1579: average wealth of male citizens,
selected occupations, in florins 125
3D Delft, 1620—31: average real estate taxes paid, selected
occupations (number of taxpayers in parentheses) 125
350 Reutlingen, 1745: average value of homes owned, selected
occupations, in florins (number of home-owners in
parentheses) 125
AT Madrid, 1757: percent of occupational group with income
above (in reales) 123
3.8 Lyons, 1728-89: average apports (livres) brought by males
to marriage, bakers and shoemakers (number of marriages
in parentheses) 124
3.9 Dijon, 1556, 1643: distribution of wealth by percentile, in
percentile of taxpaying shoemakers and tailors (numbers
of taxpayers in parentheses) 126
3.10 Frankfurt, 1701: wealth assessment of master tailors, in
florins 126
Paris, 1773: distribution of wealth, goldsmiths, in percent
of goldsmiths paying capitation assessment 126
astZ Dijon, 1464-1750: distribution of wealth among female
artisans, by percentile of total taxpaying population 127
viii
Acknowledgments
Although this book carries my name as the sole author, no work of

history stands alone. In the last decade or so there has been an out-
pouring of publications on Europe’s artisans before 1900. Most of this
literature centers on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but
enough exists on the late medieval and early modern period that a book
like this can be written. This was decidedly not the case scarcely fifteen
years ago. I am, therefore, first and foremost indebted to the scores of
authors who, while I was working on my monograph on Dijon’s artisans
in the early 1980s, were working silently on the multifaceted artisanal
experience in many other European towns and cities. The fruits of their
labor I have harvested in this survey, although, of course, I alone bear
the responsibility for how I have woven their findings into my own
interpretation — reflecting a “new approach,” to invoke the title of the
series in which this book appears — of the meaning and cultural
significance of this collective experience.
I also owe deep debts of gratitude to several scholars who graciously
read drafts of the manuscript, sometimes more than once, and who
generously offered bibliographic suggestions. Without the criticism and
fruitful suggestions of Steve Kaplan, Gail Bossenga, Len Rosenband,
Chris Friedrichs, Phil Benedict, and Jim Amelang, this book, whatever
its current merits, would have been distinctly inferior. Several institu-
tions have likewise contributed to this project. I warmly thank the
American Council of Learned Societies and the Shelby Cullom Davis
Center at Princeton University for their generous support.
Finally, I thank my mother, Mary Margaret Farr. She has always
carried an almost mystical veneration for the past within her, and no
doubt on those family vacations of my youth when historical sites and
monuments constantly dotted our itineraries, she instilled in me an
appreciation of the connectedness between the present and the past,
between the living and the dead.
West Lafayette, Indiana, 1998 JAMES R. FARR
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Introduction
reine eet AVE ee es to ee
This book is about artisans in Europe’s cities and towns from the late
Middle Ages into the era of industrialization. It is also about moderniza-
tion which, as we will see, was a process that partly shaped and was
shaped by the unfolding history of labor, laborers, and labor relations.
On such a large canvas, how does one rough out meaningful general-
izations? Historians who make comparisons across vast stretches of time
and place tread upon a knife’s edge: on one side lurks the trap of endless
listings of difference; on the other dwells the danger of underrepre-
senting the heterogeneity and diversity of the European artisanry by
overdetermining similarities. It is difficult to generalize about crafts and
craftsmen and craftswomen, for, as we will see, trades in urban society
varied greatly from one to another. And yet, amid all of this diversity, we
can still make out an outline of a more or less coherent artisan culture
that endured for half a millennium.
To speak of artisan culture sets this book apart from most previous
histories of craftsmen and craftswomen. In the mid- to late nineteenth
century artisans became subjects of historical investigation, and since
then three types of writings have emerged. One longs nostalgically for a
world that was rapidly disappearing. This romantic vision of artisan life
emphasizes the organic and communal nature of the artisan world, and
overtly contrasts it with the emergent industrial society which these
authors perceive to be plagued by anomie and social fragmentation.
These histories are marked by their authors’ implicit conviction that the
artisanal, preindustrial past was a better world that had fallen victim to
the destructive, antisocial forces of industrial capitalism. In these
accounts we find the guild as the central institution in artisan life, and a
ready assumption that prescription — the dictates of guild statutes and
by-laws which so often sought to harmonize the relationships between
guild brethren — reflected practice, or the actual behavior of artisans.
From the pens of economic historians also have flowed guild histories,
and these, too, generally have accepted prescription as practice; but
here, guild regulations against competition, for example, have not been
1
2 Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914
viewed positively as guarantors of societal harmony. Rather they have

been taken to task for impeding the emergent free economy of liberal
capitalism. The guild as millstone around the neck of economic growth
is a theme that has had a near stranglehold on historical writings on
guilds for most of the twentieth century.
The third perspective that has distinctly marked artisan histories
written since the late nineteenth century is one that, like the nostalgic
guild histories, equally emerged from assumptions about the impact of
capitalism on traditional social relations. Here, however, the authors
intend to account for the history of working-class formation. If the guild
histories have tended to focus our attention upon master craftsmen,
working-class histories have shifted our scrutiny to journeymen.
Each of these perspectives on artisan history has merit, but it tells
only part of the story and, moreover, the explanatory power of each is
often sapped by an overdetermined economism that informs its author’s
assumptions. At worst, such histories are teleological and even tautolo-
gical, positing capitalism as the natural economy and guild or govern-
mental regulation, therefore, as artificial and somehow unnatural. This
liberal fallacy rests upon two questionable assumptions that have
weakened guild histories for decades: first, that the existence of govern-
ment or guild regulations in historical records is evidence for their
effectiveness, and second, that regulatory activity in the economy
“distorts” it and renders the system within its stultifying grasp “inade-
quate” to meet the demand that would otherwise be met in a “free,”
self-regulating economy. To measure economies and the role of guilds
within them in this way, however, is ahistorical, misleading, and even
tautological, for it assumes without empirical proof that a natural
economy (if such existed) would function in an expansionary and
developmental mode. This hypothetical system then becomes the
measuring stick for actual economies which, like the craft economy of
early modern Europe, are then in turn declared inadequate and
distorted.
Yet even the working-class or guild histories that avoid such tenden-
tious and circular reasoning often are narrowly informed by economistic
assumptions, and so ignore a multiplicity of other logics that went into
the construction of artisan culture. Surely an understanding of the
artisan experience requires more than examining its economic dimen-
sion, important as that was? As Gervase Rosser recently wrote, “Much
of the over-simplification of traditional views [of artisans] results from
the failure to recognize that an individual simultaneously possessed
plural identities ... The very concept of the ‘artisan’ in modern
historiography has tended to be too unitary and too static.” He rightly
Introduction 3
concludes that “the categories of 19th century discourse have blinkered

modern interpretation.”!
What, then, was an artisan? A deceptively simple question becomes
surprisingly complex when we shift away from the traditional frame-
works in which this question could be answered toward one informed by
cultural analysis. One could respond to this question, as many historians
have before, that artisans were members of guilds, or one could offer a
production-centered definition, that artisans were skilled people who
fashioned artifacts with their hands and tools but without the aid of
machinery, the classic handicraftsmen. Yet even according to this defini-
tion we must note diversity, since “artisans” can be placed on a
spectrum with, at one end, a journeyman working for wages little
distinguishable (from our labor-centered perspective though, as we will
see, certainly not from the journeyman’s perspective) from wage-
workers with no connection to the world of journeymen. At the other
end of the spectrum we find entrepreneurial artisans no longer working
primarily with their hands, spending most of their time wholesaling
products or managing their enterprises. These men and women are
almost indistinguishable (again from an economistic perspective) from
merchants. Indeed, the boundaries at each end of the spectrum were
porous, with men and women sliding into and out of what we think of as
artisanal activity. In this book we will encounter “artisans” involved in
many types of labor and production. As we will see, however, such a
definition, important as it is, is only partial.
Karl Marx has been immeasurably influential in how historians have
thought about craftsmen in particular and labor history in general. He
isolated labor as the quality that makes us truly human, and assumed
that economic rationality was essential to the labor process. Marx, for all
his historicism, nonetheless “naturalized” labor no less than classical
economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo had before him, making
it the foundation of the edifice of culture. Most historians of artisans,
Marxist or not, have similarly “essentialized” labor, assuming that this
activity defined an artisan’s identity.
These traditional institutional and economic frameworks, however,
are insufficient to analyze important aspects of the experience of the
groups of people —- men and women — whom we have labeled “artisans.”
Not every such person in fact belonged to a guild (few women did in
their own right), nor were weavers (as they would be the first to tell us)
simply men or women who happened to weave thread, bakers simply
men or women who happened to cook bread. To grasp the sense that
1 Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, guilds and the negotiation of work in the medieval town,” Past
and Present 154 (1997), 8-9.
these men and women had of themselves and that others had of them,
requires moving beyond an institutional or productive (even economic)
framework toward one that can accommodate both meaning and
questions of identity.
To explain how artisans fashioned their identities and shaped their
culture, let us consider the matter of status. As we will see, artisans from
the late Middle Ages well into the nineteenth century were defined and
defined themselves not primarily as producers as their labels may
suggest, but rather as members of an état, a rank or “degree,” a Stand.
They designated themselves (and were so designated by the authorities)
by occupational label not just because this described what they did (it
often did not), but rather because it signaled status, for in the old regime
status was in part contained through naming and the possession of titles.
In the historical context of the hierarchical world of early modern
Europe, identity (artisanal, or any other) was formed through erecting
and maintaining boundaries between an imagined “us” and “them,”
and so identity was rooted in, as Peter Sahlins puts it, “a subjective
experience of difference.”* It was, therefore, relational, and contingent
upon context. If we think of cultures as “meaningful orders of persons
and things,”’ then we might also recognize that groups of people cohere
around shared values and activities. To keep the howling chaos of
experience at bay, groups imagine boundaries of their communities in
part by locating and defining activities in specified places — homes,
workplaces, churches, taverns, and so on — and delimiting who belongs
within them. By including or excluding individuals from those places or
from performing those activities, they spell out the membership of the
group, and so contribute to the ongoing process of shaping a culture. Of
course, individuals can and do belong to multiple groups, resulting
often but not necessarily in a hierarchical valuation of the various groups
by the individuals so engaged.
Work, I would suggest, can best be understood when it is imbedded in
cultural relations of which it was only a part, however important. Again,
to quote Rosser:
work . . . so far from being a mere function of socio-economic relations,
was a
varied, complex and evolving process, negotiated between individual
s, which
itself contributed significantly to the formation of ideas about society
as a whole.
Social structure, far from being a given, is the constantly renewed
and revised
product of human agency, however much that agency is framed
by inherited
circumstances.
2 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley,
1989), p. 271.
3 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976),
p. x.
4 Rosser, 3.
Introduction 5
Rather than assuming that an artisan found his or her social being
defined by his or her labor, then, we might profit from thinking of an
artisan’s life (and his or her work) as being in important ways a product
of what we might call symbolic exchanges, where labor was a sign of
social place as well as a means to survival or material accumulation.
Such exchanges were brief encounters in continually shifting situations,
and so were simultaneously dynamic and structured by a shared system
of communication in which meaning inhered. Because incessant change
rendered friendships fleeting and social groups fragile, networks and
alliances were continually recreated and reconstituted. It was through
these infinite encounters and exchanges of “symbolic capital” that
artisans continually fashioned and refashioned their sense of a coherent
identity, remembering from the immediate past the attributes that
defined them while plunging ineluctably into the future, a context
forever in flux. Simultaneously and inextricably they established and
reestablished their place within the taxonomic structure of society
through an apprehension of difference, distinction, and status.
Late medieval and early modern society was increasingly organized
across the intersecting axes of hierarchy and subordination, and so it
was taken as natural that some people commanded more power, more
resources, and more respect than others. Everywhere Europeans divided
themselves more and more into a series of graduated ranks. Sometimes
this was done formally by institutions authorized by political authorities
(for example, through sumptuary laws which dictated what one could
wear), sometimes informally. Nor was occupation the only or even the
chief determinant of social place or social status, which was mostly
determined by a mixture of criteria based on family, office, wealth, or
membership in particular institutions (like guilds, or confraternities,
which served as devices for social distinction, differentiation, and rank
as well as placement in the social and political firmament). Old regime
taxonomy was a structured system of hierarchical differences which
reached its highwater mark in the seventeenth century, a structure
which was nonetheless dynamic, fragile, and unstable. It was within this
structure, a product of an incessant interrelationship of prescription and
practice, that individuals and groups of individuals made their lives
meaningful. Social and self-definition were rooted in cultural experi-
ences which included, but also transcended, production; these defini-
tions were profoundly influenced by shifts in political, legal, intellectual,
as well as economic, developments across these centuries. Artisans did
not make themselves in isolation, nor were they hapless victims simply
own
molded by forces beyond their control. They were products of their
to maintain rank and a
ceaseless struggle, not just to earn a living, but
sense of socialplace in the face of powerful, often inimical forces in their

world, turning these forces to their advantage when they could, suffering
fragmentation or transformation when they could not.
As society’s elites increasingly distanced themselves from the crafts-
men, artisans in turn became increasingly keen on defining the distance
between themselves and their inferiors. At all social levels, this process
of dissociation was visualized by cultural markers, and the key badge of
artisanal status could be summed up in the word “honor.” This swung
on the hinge of respectability, and was the stuff of the dreams of all
artisans, be they master, journeyman, or nonguild worker, as they were
of the inimitable eighteenth-century French glazier and author of A
Journal of My Life, Jacques-Louis Ménétra. Honorable, however, could
mean a variety of things. For the master craftsman it could mean
economic solvency and heading one’s own reputable business and
respectable household, while for a journeyman it surely meant being
subject to no one’s discipline, with no restrictions on one’s freedom of
movement.
Honor carried multiple meanings, but everywhere it cemented cul-
tural ties. It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of
honor in the daily life of medieval and early modern artisans. Honor was
society’s measure of social standing in the hierarchy as it was a marker of
personal self-esteem. At both levels, honor was a paramount social value
that enforced standards of accepted conduct and measured an indivi-
dual’s actions and worth against a norm recognized by peers, superiors,
and inferiors. Duty and obligation, revenge and redress against insult
and humiliation, even vindication by violence, were all subsumed in a
code of honor which relied on the notion that the social hierarchy was
established by God and was mediated through signs and symbols by
which the hierarchy could be “read.”
The obverse of the coin of status and honor was discipline and
subordination. Indeed, in many ways, as we will see, they were inter-
dependent. These interlocked themes — status, honor, discipline, sub-
ordination — are woven like so many colored threads through most of
this book.
One thread that can only intermittently be included in this tapestry is
the history of female artisans. This book will largely be about men and
about their activities and their identities. We now know that huge
amounts of artisanal work was done by women, and we know that the
household economy, largely the preserve of the woman, was inextricably
linked to the craft and market economy beyond the home. All of these
activities will receive attention in the pages that follow, but the fact
remains that artisanal organization, political expression, public life, and
Introduction 7
identity in early modern Europe were overwhelmingly masculine, and it

is precisely because of the strongly gendered assumptions of the Old
Regime and their ubiquitous inscription in the historical record left to
the scrutiny of historians that the primary subject of this book will
be men.
Bibliography
In the bibliography of this chapter the reader will find general histories of
European artisans as well as titles of a more theoretical nature. Some works
contain material covered in subsequent chapters, but for the sake of space, those
titles will only be listed here.
Entries marked with a * designate recommended readings for new students of

the subject.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. St. Louis, 1975.
*Berlanstein, Lenard R., ed. Rethinking Labor History. Urbana, 1993.
*Block, Fred, and Margaret Somers. “Beyond the economistic fallacy: the
holistic social science of Karl Polanyi.” In Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and
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Canning, K. “Gender and the politics of class formation: rethinking German
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*Cerutti, Simona. La Ville et les métiers. Naissance d’un langage corporatif (Turin,
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Coornaert, Emile. Les Corporations en France avant 1789. Paris, 1968.
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Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. The Artisan and the European Town, 1500-1900.
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*Davis, Robert C. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in
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Epstein, Steven. Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe. Chapel Hill, 1991.
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“Cultural analysis and early modern artisans.” In Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The
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Geremek, Bronislaw. Le Salariat dans l’artisanat parisien aux XITe—XVe siécles.
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Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Chicago, 1980.
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*Lucie-Smith, Edward. The Story of Craft: The Craftsman’s Role in Society. Ithaca,
1981.
Martin Saint-Leon, Etienne. Histoire des corporations de métiers. Geneva, 1976.
*Mackenney, Richard. Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice
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*Ménétra, Jacques-Louis. A Journal of My Life. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer.
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Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress.
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*Rule, John. The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century English Industry. New
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*Safley, Thomas M., and Leonard Rosenband, eds. The Workplace before the
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*Sewell, William, Jr. Work and Revolution in France. Cambridge, 1980.
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*Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French
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Introduction 9
*Swanson, Heather. Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England.
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*Walker, Mack. German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate,
1648-1871. Ithaca, 1971.
*Wiesner, Merry E. Working Women in Renaissance Germany. New Brunswick,
1986.
Woodward, Donald. Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns
of Northern England, 1450-1750. Cambridge, 1995.
Zeitlin, Jonathan. “Social theory and the history of work.” Social History 8:3
(1983), 365-74.
1 The meaning of work: ideology and
organization
Worthy or disgraceful?
From the Middle Ages to the industrial age men (and it was exclusively
educated men who wrote about this) have had an ambivalent, even
sometimes paradoxical, attitude to work. In the contemporary western
world where the work ethic is so firmly embedded in our assumptions
about nearly all of our activity, it seems peculiar that work could ever
have been anything but positively valued. After all, are not the fruits of
labor the goods and services western society so voraciously consumes
and ostensibly values? And yet, it has not always been so. Indeed, only in
the last 200 years has a positive connotation of work held sway, largely
because of the triumph of a particular way of thinking about society and
the role of economics within it. We call it modernity. As theorists like
Adam Smith or Karl Marx reified and abstracted economics as the
essential force shaping particular societies (notably their own), work, at
least among the educated, was viewed more positively. How did this
dramatic transformation in the thinking about labor come to pass? And
how did educated men think about labor before?
The Greek philosophers Plato, and especially Aristotle, had an en-
ormous influence on the way medieval men thought about nearly every-
thing, and these Greek sages had considered manual labor as base
activity, marking the laborer as inferior to men (like themselves) who did
not work. They placed higher value upon intellectual activity than
technical skill, and ranked men hierarchically in proportion to their
possession of these qualities. Thus the pensive philosopher was superior
to the craftsman who was nonetheless, by virtue of his possession of
some creative genius, superior to the manual laborer (quite often a
slave) who simply carried out the ideas of someone else.
For no medieval philosopher or theologian was work a central pre-
occupation, but we can glean from the writings of many of the leading
minds of the age what work meant to them, and how they believed that
it should be organized in society. Not surprisingly, all were influenced by
10
The meaning of work 11
the Classical legacy, and though it was cast now in the Christian mold,
the negative connotation about the value of work remained. In the fifth
century CE, Saint Augustine incorporated in The City of God the
Pauline dictum that man’s original sin of disobedience had condemned
him to labor “by the sweat of his brow.” Augustine also asserted that sin
had created servitude “by which man is subjected to man by the bonds
of his condition.”' Bringing these two postulates together — sin and
servitude — justified the principles of hierarchy and discipline in society
and in the workshop. These principles, although eventually purged of
their religious trappings, were to guide the thinking of men about work
and its organization for the next 1,500 years.
Augustine certainly contributed to the continuation of a negative
valuation of work by associating it with hierarchy and servitude, but he
injected ambiguity when he also wrote that man’s rational faculties were
applied in work (thus setting the species apart from and above the
animals), and that the products of labor help man to realize God’s
designs. Both the positive and negative ideas about work were appro-
priated by medieval theologians, as were Aristotelian teachings.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Hugh of Saint Victor and
Thomas Aquinas believed that manual labor protected against the vice
of sloth, while Saint Bonaventure even identified God Himself as the
first worker. In the twelfth century John of Salisbury envisioned society
as a human organism, and represented workers — peasants and
craftsmen — as the feet of the respublica, lowly but necessary.
Still, despite the tepidly positive spin these thinkers placed on labor,
they remained convinced that work must be organized according to
hierarchy and discipline. John of Salisbury placed workers at the feet,
not the head, of the social organism. Bonaventure may have exalted God
as the first worker, but he also viewed work by humans as servile and
therefore base activity. Aristotelians in the new universities taught that
the liberal and mechanical arts were utterly distinct, that the former
dealt with the mind and the latter the hands, and furthermore that the
liberal arts were superior to the mechanical. Aquinas may have noted
that society was stitched together in part by mutual exchange of goods
and services and that artisans thereby made an essential contribution to
the good life, but he also taught that the social system must have a ruling
part which decidedly did not include the craftsman, and that the
equilibrium of the system depended upon hierarchy and obedience.
Indeed, every theologian believed in the Christian virtue of obedience,
and agreed that work inescapably must contribute to it. Work was, in
1 Quoted in Peter Anthony, The Ideology of Work (London, 1977), pp. 26-7.
short, a spiritual discipline. Medieval theologians, therefore, did not

think about work in terms of economic calculation or the material value
of production, that effort would somehow create wealth and better one’s
position in life. Instead, they conceived of work in moral terms, a
distinctly premodern notion.
Inherited from the Middle Ages and stamped on the minds of early
modern men was, in Michel Foucault’s words, “a certain ethical
consciousness of labor” which possessed “a certain force of moral
enchantment.”” The theological component of this mentality, as we
have seen, held that labor was a penance imposed on humankind for
original sin; redemptive, but also a curse. Man did not labor to nurture
the fruits of nature. Indeed, in the sixteenth century the Protestant
reformer John Calvin taught that labor had no such power, that the
fertility of nature was the special and exclusive preserve of God’s will.
The French Catholic bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet would effectively
concur more than a century later: “At each moment, the hope of the
harvest and the unique fruit of all our labors may escape us; we are at
the mercy of the inconstant heavens that bring down rain upon the
tender ears.”? No, the value of labor was not its productive capacity, but
its moral force. This was a view still current in sermons in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As the well-known French
Oratorian, professor of theology, and influential preacher Jean-Baptiste
Massillon succinctly put it at that time, “to work is to be saved.”*
As Augustinianism enjoyed increased influence in the early modern
age, so too did the theological notion that work is spiritual discipline
and, as such, is closely tied to ideas of obedience and servitude.
Augustine had taught that the greatest enemy of the soul was idleness,
and that work was the soul’s greatest defense against it. Because God
had ordered man to labor “by the sweat of his brow,” idleness was rank
rebellion against God and society. Labor, in this way of thinking, was at
once the bulwark against the social disorder which inevitably followed
idleness, and the assault of evil upon the soul. It thus contributed to
security in this world and salvation in the next. Louis Bourdaloue, a
tremendously popular French preacher and one favored by Louis XIV
in the second half of the seventeenth century, said in a sermon: “‘What
then is the disorder of an idle life? It is . . . in its ttue meaning a second
rebellion of the creature against God.’”’? For the priest, the jurist, the
2 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York, 1968), p.55.

3 Quoted in Foucault, p. 56.
* Quoted in Abel Poitrineau, Ils travaillaient la France. Meétiers et mentalités du XVIe au
XIXe siécle (Paris, 1992), p. 8.
> Quoted in Foucault, p. 57.
government administrator, idleness became “the mother of all vices”

and the poor and unemployed the a priori culprits of disorder. Every-
where in the seventeenth century sloth, the inverse of labor, replaced
avarice as the most “deadly sin” and was considered the absolute form
of rebellion.
Of course, the men voicing these views on idleness and work were
prescribing a regimen applicable not to themselves, but to those of
inferior social rank whose lot it was to labor. Here they betray a deeply
held belief in a supposed “naturalness” of rank hierarchy, that certain
people are naturally situated in society to perform certain functions.
Obedience, servitude, and hierarchy were thus thought to go hand in
hand and were all legitimated by nature, and thus by God, and labor as
a form of discipline suitable to certain ranks of society was assumed to
be entirely natural and good. Early seventeenth-century English poets
and playwrights Thomas Deloney, Thomas Heywood, and Thomas
Dekker all chose craftsmen as subjects of some of their works, and each
assumed that diligent labor was neither a good in itself nor a means to
escape a lowly social position. Rather, as service and obedience, it was a
fundamental prop to right, that is hierarchical, order.
Later in the century the widely read author of treatises on political
economy, Sir William Petty, wrote from the same perspective that the
poor must be kept at work, however useless, “to keep their minds to
discipline and obedience.”° His contemporary Thomas Firmin wrote in
Some Proposals for the Imployment of the Poor in 1681 that it matters not
“what you employ these poor children in, as that you do employ them in
some thing, to prevent an idle, lazy kind of life, which if once they get
the habit of, they will hardly leave.”
In the next century Voltaire still conceived of work, in Candide, not as
a generator of wealth, but rather as an agency of social control, an
antidote to vice, and, above all, to idleness. For most commentators
(although not for Voltaire), industry was seen as a virtue with a religious
quality. Josiah Tucker wrote in 1757 that “the rules of religion and the
rules of social industry do perfectly harmonize ... [and] all things
hurtful to the latter are indeed a violation of the former.” Jonas Hanway
added ten years later that “honest industry is an essential part of
religion, and the ways of it are a reward of virtue, and an earnest of
happiness after death.” Indeed, idle persons were vilified; as the eight-
eenth-century verse put it, “Satan finds some mischief still/for idle
6 Quoted in Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England

(Princeton, 1978), p. 144.
7 Quoted in ibid., p. 141.
hands to do,” and idleness was considered by some, like Edward Barry
in 1789, to be “the fruitful root of every vice.”’®
People who worked with their hands, of course, bore the brunt of this
moralizing. They were often seen as naturally inclined toward idleness,
which in turn revealed them as an insubordinate multitude. In 1770 the
author of An Essay on Trade and Commerce intoned that “the labouring
people should never think themselves independent of their superiors; for
if proper subordination is not kept up, riot and confusion will take [the]
place of sobriety and order.”®
Already in 1649 Peter Chamberlen was anticipating what the likes of
Firmin, Tucker, or Hanway were writing decades later, associating work
with discipline. Chamberlen even added the important concept of
civility to the mix. He wrote in The Poore Man’s Advocate “it is certain
that employment and competencies do civilise all men, and makes [szc]
them tractable and obedient to superiors’? command.”!° That labor
disciplines and contributes to the “civilizing process,” a development
Norbert Elias, Robert Muchembled, and Georges Vigarello, among
others, have shown was grounded in social distinction and thus had
profound hierarchical qualities, was an opinion that had become com-
monplace across Europe in the 1700s. In 1753, in a treatise On the
Utility of the Sciences and the Arts, the Abbé Talbert wrote that man is
distinguished from animal not by soul or morality, but by, among other
qualities, his capacity for work which has, he continued, a civilizing
effect. Work teaches self-discipline, a hallmark of the civilized individual:
“[Work] is the file that smoothes away our rough edges and polishes
away. . . disorder and vice.”!!
Ideas about obedience, discipline, labor, hierarchy, and civility thus
came together in the minds of many men of letters, but they also found a
home among government administrators. Indeed, perhaps the clearest
application of these ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is
the workhouse, first an institution of punishment for incarcerated con-
demned criminals, and later a repository of idle beggars and the
unemployed. In France in 1611, 1612, 1617, and 1618 for the first time
statutes authorized that incarcerated criminals be forced to work.
Similarly, many condemned criminals were sentenced to forced labor,
either pulling the oars aboard the king’s galleys in the Mediterranean, or
building the vessels in the vast shipyard in Toulon, the bagne.
8 Quoted in Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850
(Cambridge, 1973), pp. 91, 92.
° Quoted in ibid., p. 96.
10 Quoted in Appleby, p. 144.
11 Quoted in Cynthia Koepp, “The order of work: attitudes and representations in
eighteenth-century France,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1992, pp. 395-6.
As the number of beggars increased across Europe in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, especially after 1650, workhouses were en-
listed more and more to treat this severe social problem. Workhouses
like the Hopital Général system in France, the Spinhuis and Rasphuis in
the Netherlands, the Zuchthaus in Hamburg, or the 126 such establish-
ments established in Britain and Ireland between 1697 and 1800,
demanded that labor be performed as an exercise in moral reform and
discipline. These “fortresses of moral order,” as Foucault calls them,
were designed during this “age of confinement” first to discipline the
interned beggars, infirm, and unemployed — idle all, and many of them
children — for their moral well-being and, by their removal from the
streets of Europe’s cities, for the social order of the world beyond the
walls of the workhouse. In 1684 a royal decree concerning the H6pital
in Paris dictated that work must occupy the greater part of the day of the
inmates, but it must also be accompanied by “the reading of pious
books.” Earlier in the century the directors of the Zuchthaus in
Hamburg were similarly morally preoccupied: they were to see that “all
in the house are properly instructed as to religious and moral duties. .
[The schoolmaster] must take care that they attend divine service, and
are orderly at it.” !?
Morality and productivity

From one perspective, quite clearly, labor performed in workhouses had
a primarily moral rather than productive purpose — it instilled discipline
— and so was in step with what we might call the premodern or
traditional view of labor. During the seventeenth century, however, new,
what we might call modern, ideas about the meaning of labor which did
have productive qualities began to gain currency. In the minds of some
men, forced labor was thought of not only as a moral tonic, but also as
an economic strategy. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, France’s Controller-
General and mastermind of his king’s economic policies in the second
half of the seventeenth century, regarded labor in workhouses, beyond
its moral contribution, as a remedy for unemployment as well as a
contribution to the development of manufactories. Similarly, when the
workhouse in Bristol was established in 1697, its founder John Carey
hoped that his interned workers would produce cheaply and thus
restrain prices in the local markets where the products of the workhouse
would be sold. Early the next century Daniel Defoe observed what was
becoming apparent everywhere as workhouses competed in local econo-
12 Quoted in Foucault, pp. 60, 61.

mies, usually producing textiles: that such institutions, by their cheap

labor and cheap products, provided such competition for nearby trades
that it created more of what it was designed to eliminate — unemploy-
ment and poverty.
These views on the productive potential of forced labor are but part of
more general ideas about the productivity of labor being heard in the
seventeenth century. Mercantilists focused on strengthening the state,
and sought to organize and regulate its economic life to accomplish this.
Increasing the productivity of a regulated society, therefore, garnered
their attention more than did the means of distribution, and mercanti-
lists like Colbert concluded that productivity would be increased by
employing as many individuals as possible as much of the time as
possible. They framed their regulatory ideas according to an intellectual
tradition of long standing, that is, corporatively and thus hierarchically,
viewing society as an organism, akin to a living body where the parts
obey the head. When Antoine de Montchrestien wrote in his Traité
d’économie politique in 1615 that the kingdom’s idle poor were a vast,
untapped reservoir of a workforce, he was a harbinger of later voices,
some that were mercantilist, others like Adam Smith’s that would
hypostasize the idea of productivity inherent in labor. When this latter
way of thinking became dominant in the late eighteenth century, a
seachange in the meaning of labor and its “proper” organization had
occurred. Indeed, this rethinking of the meaning of work took a central
place in an even broader reconceiving of the role of economies in human
affairs. The traditional was giving way to the modern.
Although in 1600 the idea of an abstract “market” as a “representa-
tion of countless exchanges that regularly took place” did not exist in the
minds of men, it began to take hold shortly after.!? Paralleling ideas in
the sciences that posited motion rather than rest as the natural state of
matter, Englishmen like Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden theorized
that economies were no less a part of the natural order and thus were
naturally in motion. In the 1620s Mun conceived of an economy as “a
flow of goods and money,” while Misselden, in The Circle of Commerce
published in 1623, held that there were natural laws that guided
economic activity. In the early seventeenth century ideas like these were
deeply subversive, for they challenged the inherited mental construct of
order on intellectual, social, and political levels. First, these ideas about
motion and natural economic laws undermined the belief that the
natural and social order were, by God’s design, immutable, that God’s
creation was structured in fixed statuses. Second, as Misselden explicitly
13 Appleby, p. 21.
The meaning of work Vs
pointed out, the operation of these laws was beyond the power of the
prince, or the head of the body, to control.
Of course, men expressing these ideas were not anarchists; they, like
everyone else in the early modern period, believed in a determinable
order. Indeed, their theorizing was an attempt to conceive of a satisfying
order. They simply but profoundly disagreed on its properties. Whatever
the motivation, by 1700 some economic theorists had extracted and
isolated economic reasoning, and endowed it with ordering principles of
its own. Now the market mechanism, which was thought to obey
inexorable economic laws, was the regulator of human activity. It placed
a premium upon utility and efficiency, and brought commodities, land,
and people within the logic of the market — calculable, quantifiable, and
valuated through prices as products of economic processes rather than
of moral precepts of tradition and authority.
Bringing people as objects into the logic of the market, of course, had
profound implications for how labor was conceptualized. Indeed, fully
trusting the market mechanism to regulate labor and discipline laborers
was an expectation few men of the early modern period, despite the
theorizing about liberty in general and free markets in particular, were
prepared to hold. The prevalence of the discourse on idleness and its
assumed remedy, forced labor by incarcerated workers, testify to that.
Labor was increasingly reified as production, but simultaneously con-
tinued to be immersed, in practice and in theory, in moral systems of
authority. The English revolutionary, the Digger Gerard Winstanley, for
example, in the mid-seventeenth century conceived of a reconstructed
society based fundamentally on a particular organization of work asso-
ciated with a pronounced disciplinary regimen. His society would
embody a patriarchal hierarchy, where the first level of enforcement
would be the father and master “who is to command [his inferiors in]
their work and see they do it.” The second level was to be a council of
elected overseers who supervised trades, “to see that young people be
put to masters, to be instructed in some labour . . . that none be idly
brought up...” Finally, this disciplinary system was to be backed up
by a criminal code which held the draconian provision that runaways
from workshops would “dye by the sentence of the Judge when taken
again.”’!4
Winstanley was, of course, a utopian, but in his reification of work he
was in tune with later, less politically revolutionary thinkers, like Daniel
Defoe or Adam Smith. In The Compleat English Tradesman which Defoe
published in 1723, this celebrated novelist and essayist saw work as the
14 Quoted in Anthony, p. 49.

central preoccupation of a tradesman’s life, arguing that even the duties

of religion “must be kept in their places.” Defoe connects hard work
with money-making and social advancement:
Nothing can give a greater prospect of thriving to a young tradesman, than his
own diligence . . . without application nothing in this world goes forward as it
should do; Let the man have the most perfect knowledge of his trade, and the
best situation for his shop, yet without application nothing will go on. . . Trade
must. . . be worked at. . .}°
Half a century later Adam Smith carried to his monumental Wealth of
Nations these same assumptions about the causal links between diligence
and “improving.” In keeping with the hypostasizing of nature so
common in eighteenth-century thinkers, he added that the connection
between work and progress was assumed to be a law of nature rather
than socially acquired, and he joined these thoughts with perhaps his
most famous economic maxim: that labor is “the real measure of the
exchangeable value of all commodities,” and that gains in productivity
were directly related to the division and specialization of labor.!°
Competing during the early modern centuries, then, were two world
views of work. One, which we have called premodern or traditional,
emphasized work as a degrading activity, but one that served primarily
moral purposes and was structured upon the principles of hierarchy and
discipline. The other view no doubt rings more familiar to modern ears
since this newer view of work saw it as productive energy in a market
economy.
True, eventually the modern view of work would eclipse the tradi-
tional, and tracing the trajectory of modern economic ideas to Adam
Smith and beyond well illustrates how the abstraction of the market
mechanism and the reification of labor became a hallmark of modern
economic thinking, but it oversimplifies. It must be emphasized that
these ideas co-existed awkwardly and, at times, even paradoxically in the
intellectual, social, and political constellation of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. This can be seen quite clearly in the Enlighten-
ment thinkers’ attempts to reconcile a certain view of the value of work
with their beliefs about how society should be properly organized.
William Sewell writes that work was for Enlightenment thinkers the
application of the mechanical arts to nature from which all true know-
ledge and order in society ultimately derive,'’ but, as he has also pointed
out elsewhere, this is only partly true. Enlightenment thinkers were
15 Quoted in Laura Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan
Popular Literature (New York, 1984), p. 197.
16 Quoted in Anthony, p. 54.
17 William Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 64-72.
much more ambivalent about the value of work in society than this
statement suggests. True, one can find in the Encyclopédie the view that
the value of work springs from its utility to society, and is the bond that
unites humanity by way of commerce. One can even find extolled in
these pages the craftsman who brings order and progress to the world:
“the lowly artisan to whom all society [is] in debt.” Indeed, the leading
encyclopedist Denis Diderot wrote that the mechanical arts were equal
to the liberal because they were equally complex productions of know-
ledge and order-giving applications of intelligence, and since all useful
knowledge was knowledge of nature, the mechanical arts, with their
direct contact with production from the materials of nature, were the
greatest reflection of this useful knowledge.
Interspersed with these words of praise for artisan production,
however, are engravings that visually portray the artisan himself as
“alienated, abstract labor power,” as a mechanical automaton only
ancillary to technology.'!® Indeed, often the text praises the machines as
much as the men who operated them. Juxtaposed to praise of the
mechanical arts, in fact, one can find Diderot distrusting artisans as
obscurantist, secretive, and ignorant guildsmen who jealously clung to
obsolete modes of production and who described their work processes
in maddeningly inexact terminology. The overarching design of Diderot
and his fellow encyclopedists was to “prise the vocabulary of the manual
arts away from the domain of the workers, to change it, to bring it under
control, and finally, to create a new language of the mechanical arts
available to ‘all.’”!9
In this design of separating technical aptitude from knowledge in the
production process, the encyclopedists were anticipated by the German
alchemist and natural philosopher Johann Joachim Becher. In 1672 he
published Chymisches Laboratorium in which he described the ideal
workshop. Judging the typical organization of artisanal guild workshops
chaotic and inscrutable, he elaborated a system that would order the
world of work philosophically. He focused on production, and struc-
tured his workshop hierarchically. At the top would be the “counselor,”
a natural philosopher who possessed the necessary knowledge of pro-
duction and who controlled the men beneath him in ironclad and
unquestioning discipline. On the next rung down stood the “dispen-
sator,”? a man who simply took instructions from the counselor and
assigned tasks and materials to the appropriate laborers. He was not to
18 William Sewell, Jr., “Visions of labor: illustration of the mechanical arts before, in and
after Diderot’s Encyclopédie,” in Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp, eds., Work in
France (Ithaca, 1986), pp. 258-96.
19 Koepp, p. 100.
“tinker with [the instructions] or add anything to [them], but should

perform [them] as [they] are written ...”2° At the bottom of this
workshop hierarchy stood the laborer, whose sole responsibility was
mindless toil at assigned tasks. Becher’s detailed plan, in short, wrested
knowledge from the craftsman and lodged it with the counselor in
service, in good mercantilist fashion, to his prince.
Becher’s workshop organization never became commonplace, but,
like the subsequent encyclopedists, for all their praise of the creativity of
the mechanical arts and the knowledge of nature that craftsmen pos-
sessed, he was in step with many economic theorists, philosophes, and
government administrators of the eighteenth century. They all sought,
in the name of the rationalization of the work process, to replace the
inefficient, inarticulate, mysterious, and indisciplined art of the
craftsman with a public, open, and widely available mechanical practice
that was built upon a strict, mindless, and hierarchically ordered division
of labor. These men wanted to encourage productivity while retaining
an essentially unchanged social order. But how could the former be
unleashed without destroying the latter?
Guilds and the organization of work
When readers first encounter the topic of guilds, most likely an image of
a workshop with a master craftsman toiling alongside a couple of
journeymen and apprentices comes to mind. Furthermore, the quaint
picture is often filled out by an assumption that the workers in the shop
turn out items specific to their trade — thus shoemakers shoes and boots,
tailors clothing, weavers bolts of cloth, locksmiths locks, and so on.
Some readers may even know that specific trades were associated in
organizations we call guilds, and that these institutions had regulatory
powers governing economic activities. This is an accurate picture — as
far as it goes — but the guild was more than an economic institution.
More broadly and more fundamentally, in fact, it was a device designed
to organize and order society.
Indeed, the guild was a central cog in a theoretical system of order
that emerged in the late Middle Ages which historians have come to call
corporatism. It may be useful to think of corporatism as a cosmology, or
as a rhetorical system for ordering the world and making sense of it. It
laid out organizing principles which shaped social, political, as well as
economic, organization, embracing the principles of paternalism, hier-
archy, and discipline in the social and political realm, and the economic
20 Quoted in Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy
Roman Empire (Princeton, 1994), p. 236.
principle of containing competition to preserve the livelihood of artisans

and channel quality goods to the consuming public at a fair price. It may
have had only partial and often ineffective hold on economic practice,
but as an idea corporatism was fundamentally important. As William
Sewell has noted, the idea of order is imbedded in the very word corps.
Like the physical, organic corps, or “body,” the corporation was a single
entity, its members subsumed in a common substance and presumed to
possess a united interest. As the human body had a rational and order-
giving soul, so the social “body” had its esprit de corps expressed in
confraternal solidarity.?!
Corporatism entailed a view of work, therefore, as a collective social
responsibility and one that was public in character. Political authorities
everywhere, unlike Marx, did not consider work the “natural and free
exercise of the activity of man,” but rather deemed its practice a
concession of the public authority. That is, they believed it their duty to
regulate the world of work for the public welfare, or la chose publique, as
it was called in France. By law and custom, artisans were to be faithful
producers of items for public consumption, and for this reason
craftsmen were required to work with their shop windows and doors
open, visible to public scrutiny. The corporate guilds to which masters
belonged were public bodies whose purpose was to provide the essential
needs of society. In return for this service they were granted corporate
privileges, among them the power to police their own members in
accord with their own statutes and regulations. They were thus tightly
linked to the public authority, beginning with the municipality and
sometimes ending there, as in Baroque Rome and the cities of the
United Provinces like seventeenth-century Amsterdam. More often, the
hierarchy of public authority extended beyond the town council, ulti-
mately reaching, as in Germany, England, France, Spain, Sweden, and
the duchies of northern Italy, the monarch, since it was theoretically the
king’s, prince’s, or duke’s duty to ensure the public good of the entire
realm.
Probably the best-known privilege that guilds possessed was the
monopoly over the manufacture and sale of particular items. To be sure,
guild statutes or by-laws everywhere did specify such a privilege, and
specific provisions were made for preventing one guild’s craftsmen from
encroaching upon another’s, a most pressing concern among tradesmen
working with the same materials like leather (tanners, curriers, shoe-
makers, cobblers), wood (joiners, cabinet-makers, carpenters), or metal
21 William Sewell, Jr., “Etats, corps, and ordre: some notes on the social vocabulary of the
French old regime,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Sozialgeschichte heute: Festschrift fiir
Hans Rosenberg (Gottingen, 1974), p. 55.
22, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914
(smiths of all kinds). Guild by-laws also regulated economic relations

within the guild. No master, for instance, was permitted to monopolize
the purchase of raw materials or the hiring of workers. These provisions
were to protect the public against abuses by certain masters, but also to
shield all masters of a trade from unfair competition, from both within
the guild and outside of it. The governing idea of monopoly was
therefore moral as much as it was economic, for this privilege was
intended to secure public order and harmony by precluding excessive
price fluctuation and inordinate enrichment or impoverishment within
the guild community. Such harmony was the measure of civic peace, a
distinctly Christian value at this time. A guild, as Ellis Knox has
observed for Augsburg, was expected to “ensure an income appropriate
to one’s rank.”22
Old regime society everywhere in Europe was, as Harold Perkin has
said of England, “a finely graded hierarchy of great subtlety and
discrimination, in which men [and women] were acutely aware of their
exact relation to those immediately above and below them.”?? At one
level, without question, life was a struggle for access to material
resources, but at another level, and one which had much to do with
identity, life was, as Steven Kaplan has noted, a struggle over classifica-
tion, over accession to or preservation of status. For an artisan of the
early modern period, this hierarchical quality was represented by his or
her position vis-a-vis a guild — as master, journeyman, apprentice,
widow, or wage-worker, each a distinction which related to the securing
of a living, but also which conferred a social identity in relation to one’s
place in the social order.
Whenever men theorize about the meaning of work, its “proper”
social classification, like its value, is never far from mind. This was
certainly the case in the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century theologians
and philosophers increasingly theorized that particular classes of Chris-
tians were particularly suited to particular kinds of activity. Moreover,
they placed manual labor at the bottom of a valuated hierarchy, to be
held in place by discipline. That this kind of thinking clearly emerged in
the twelfth century no doubt has much to do with the economic
expansion and urbanization that marked that dynamic century, More
and more craftsmen flocked to existing trades or created entirely new
ones as the population continued to grow. How to order society, and the
world of work within it, became an increasingly pressing concern.
22 Ellis Knox, “The guilds of early modern Augsburg,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Massachusetts, 1984, p. 8.
*3 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London, 1969),
p. 24.
The meaning of work
23
Theologians made their contribution to the resulta
nt social theory,
but regarding the theoretical organization of work,
the writings of
Roman law jurists are more significant, for it is here
that we find a
discussion of guilds. A century or more before jurists
incorporated
guilds in their theoretical structure, however, the new
communes, or
self-governing towns, were assimilating them in their new
political
firmament. As early as the eleventh century we find in the commu
nes of
the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and northern Italy eviden
ce of
groups of craftsmen and merchants (significantly not necessarily
of the
Same occupations) in sworn associations which were devotional groups
and mutual aid societies. We will return to this in a later chapter, but
it
should be pointed out that whatever the origin of craft guilds, we would
be mistaken in assuming that they emerged uniquely because of eco-
nomic pressures; rather, they emerged from confraternal associations
that organized a way of life, and that gradually incorporated work
activity as economic conditions changed. More than anything, they
provided their members with a modicum of social security, a moral and,
by the thirteenth century, a political identity, and a sense of place in a
rapidly changing world.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, jurists, appropriating Roman
law for reasons of political theory and governance, associated the guild
with the collegium of late Roman law and granted to constituted
authority (notably the monarchs for whom most of these jurists were
writing and who claimed to be descendants of the Roman emperor)
the power to create and regulate it. The jurists thereby grafted a
Roman legacy of hierarchical political authority on to guild organiza-
tion. Guildsmen, for their part, clung to a theoretical legacy of
autonomy, citing the Germanic custom of sworn, voluntary association
and self-governance. Were these bodies of oath-swearing craftsmen
and merchants to be self-governing, or political creatures of other
authorities?
The answer for the next 600 years was to be both. Medieval and early
modern guilds continued to function as devotional and mutual aid
societies, but they increasingly became identified with governance as
well as the regulation of economic activities. Population growth and
commercial expansion accelerated from the eleventh to the early four-
teenth centuries, creating ever larger pools of increasingly mobile
laborers to be absorbed into the productive and social system. In some
places in the twelfth century, and everywhere in the thirteenth, muni-
cipal authorities sensed a threat to order from these developments, and
responded with regulatory decrees to attempt to secure it. Like munici-
palities, guild masters also were troubled by indiscipline in the work-
place and the home (since most workers, probably until the eighteenth
century, lived with their employer, the master) and drafted statutes, or
guild by-laws, to deal with it. Municipalities sanctioned these statutes
for a fee, oversaw their enforcement by imposing fines for transgressions
(in part payable to the municipal treasury), and, in the fourteenth
century, increasingly conferred legal status upon the guilds.
This politicizing of the trades for regulatory and fiscal purposes
embodies that new theoretical system of order called corporatism.
Corporation theory played a vital role in medieval legal and political
thought, and although few jurists specifically theorized about guilds as
corporations, increasingly in the fourteenth century guilds were referred
to, as in French, as corps de métiers. For jurists, “corporations” (or
universitas, which was the generic term these intellectuals invoked to
refer to organized groups claiming the privileges of corporations as
specified in Roman law in the Digest) were quasi-public associations,
which were empowered to make their own rules governing their internal
affairs and submitting their members to a collective discipline, but
which simultaneously gained this privilege from a public authority. A de
facto situation of confraternal association was thereby appropriated and
systematized in a sweeping theory organizing socio-political and, in-
creasingly, economic life. Confraternities and guilds of merchants and
craftsmen predated the corporate regime, but corporate theory of the
fourteenth century joined hands with demographic and economic forces
to formalize a political and juridical system that would last into the
nineteenth century.
The idea of confraternal community was a wetteer one in the early
modern period. Indeed, as spiritual Gemeinde, it is expressed time and
again in Protestant tracts during the Reformation in the sixteenth
century. Moreover, it informs the most substantial exposition of guild
ideas of the era, the Systematic Analysis of Politics first published in 1603
by Johannes Althusius of Emden. This German Calvinist rooted eco-
nomic exchange in the moral soil of guild values. He asserted that
exchange originates in mutual needs, and that reciprocity is thus
inherent in all exchange. When transacted within a political system
based upon contract — and thus, he explained, upon the guild values of
trust, friendship, and mutual aid — then social solidarity and harmony
will result.
No less a champion of the moral values of corporatism, of guilds, but
also of hierarchy and status, was the eighteenth-century German Justus
Moser. He believed that what naturally governed men’s affairs were the
values so evident in the guild communities: not unrestrained competi-
tion or unchained economic growth, but rather honor, mutual respect,
The meaning of work
25
and propriety — Ehre, Erfahrung, Eigentum. The respect
of the respected
was, for Moser, the great mainspring of human affairs.
According to the historian of medieval corporatism Bernar
d Cheval-
ier, Corporatism was a “new system” whose rules express
ed by intellec-
tuals at once were inspired by and inspired the “real behavio
r” of
people.** The best evidence supporting Chevalier’s point is the
guild
statutes that multiplied everywhere in Europe from the mid-thi
rteenth
century to 1600. These statutes, which originated with guildsmen
but
were brought to political authorities for sanction, were fundam
entally
about discipline. They articulated in minute detail how guilds were to
be
regulated; but the logic of this regulation is social and moral. Dictate
s
on religious practice and mutual aid among “brothers” are central
to
these by-laws. Even ostensibly purely economic matters, like regulations
restricting masters to the operation of only one shop, were informed by
social concerns. For example, in eighteenth-century Paris it was argued
by officers of the furrier guild that the “common law of the realm”
prohibited subjects from holding two social ranks at once and s0 it
followed that any master operating two enterprises simultaneously was
seeking unfairly to enrich himself at the expense of his confréres and so
to vault himself out of his assigned rank in the hierarchy. This is tortured
logic from the perspective of liberal economics, but eminently rational
to men who believed that status was the soul of identity and the sign of
hierarchical position in the social order.
As we will see, these theoretical prescriptions of guild values had an
incomplete hold on economic practice; but we must never discount the
moral, juridical, social, and political significance of the corporate idiom
during the early modern period. If it never subsumed all work activity in
its fold and had only a partial impact on the actual practice of produc-
tion, distribution, and consumption, it was nonetheless of inestimable
moral importance in articulating rank in an increasingly hierarchical
society. And, as Steven Kaplan so perceptively observes, the organizing
principles of the corporate idiom were imbedded in a social taxonomy,
which in turn was closely linked to the exercise of power: “the tools of
distinction used to forge the classification system are tools of social and
political control . . .”?° This is why, to take an illuminating example, in
eighteenth-century Paris the inspections of goldsmith workshops by the
officers of the guild were orchestrated with such pomp. The inspectors
24 Bernard Chevalier, “Corporations, conflits politiques et paix sociale en France aux

XIVe et XVe siécles,” Revue historique 268 (1982), 17—44.
25 Steven L. Kaplan, “Social classification and representation in the corporate world of
eighteenth-century France: Turgot’s carnival,’ in Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia
Koepp, eds., Work in France (Ithaca, 1986), p. 177.
wore ceremonial robes and scrupulously kept “in marching line ac-
cording to rank.”2°
Such a hierarchical system was, then, equally a power structure, and
distinction and difference were animated by a concern for subordination
and discipline of inferiors, be they journeymen, apprentices, wage-
workers, or women. Breach of discipline by journeymen or wage-
workers reflected more than instability in the labor market, but also and
more dramatically, a perceived threat to hierarchy and the principle of
distinction itself. Masters were deeply sensitive to insubordination by
journeymen and nonguild wage-workers, and journeymen were keen, in
turn, on maintaining the inferiority of noncorporate wage-workers
beneath them. As we will see, guild statutes had a great deal to say about
this as well.
If regulations over the production and distribution of goods, or even
wages, gain minor if any attention in guild statutes, matters relating to
labor discipline attract much more. Labor relations come more and
more to be submitted to legal formulations, especially, for reasons we
will explore in later chapters, in matters concerning disciplining the
labor force. Numerous provisions in statutes in guild after guild and
town after town throughout Europe strictly regulated the access of
workers to the corporation, and to mastership within it. Entry examina-
tions, rising fees, extended periods of apprenticeship, the making of a
masterpiece (widespread by the fifteenth century) all pointed to a
mounting preoccupation with discipline and an increasing hierarchiza-
tion in the world of work where the barriers between master and
journeyman (that is, a worker with some institutional claim to guild
membership) and between journeyman and nonguild worker (those
with no guild membership whatsoever) were raised higher than ever
before. Master guildsmen and the political authorities (and the theorists
that gave them voice) shared these values of hierarchy, status, and
discipline, and their common interests came together in the formulation
of the corporate regime, enshrined in part in guild statutes.
Already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries political authorities in
France and Germany were increasingly grouping guilds within
an
administrative structure called a ministerium which included guild
offices
sanctioned by public authority and charged with regulating the
world of
work. The famous Livre des métiers demonstrates this well.
Compiled by
the prévot, or mayor of Paris, Etienne Boileau in 1268,
the Livre not only
lists the various trades of Paris at the time, but also records
the statutes
or by-laws governing the various crafts. Its purpose,
above all, was to
2© Quoted in Steven L. Kaplan, “The luxury guilds
in Paris in the eighteenth century,”
Francia 9 (1981), 262.
The meaning of work D7
enumerate administrative units (the trades or métiers) and then authorize

their officers to “fulfill their public charge” under the aegis, in this case,
of the crown of France.
The history of the corporate regime has been most studied in France,
but it was clearly a European phenomenon. In the towns of the various
kingdoms in Spain evidence for economic organization along craft lines
emerges in the thirteenth century within the institution of the religious
confraternity. In the following century, the corporate guild emerged, an
administrative unit with the principle of classification of members
according to rank finding a constitutional place both within the guild
and in the town ordinances and charters drafted by the municipal
authorities. Membership in such guilds (often still called cofradia and
not clearly distinguishable from the spiritual brotherhoods which ante-
dated them) was voluntary until the early fourteenth century, but there-
after obligatory membership and ever sharper hierarchical classifications
took hold on the Iberian peninsula. Paralleling the development of
corporatism in France, the number of incorporated guilds, increasingly
called gremios, expanded sharply in the fourteenth and fifteenth centu-
ries, and they became creatures of the king. Monarchs like Peter of
Aragon may have granted royal “protection” to “all the artisans of
Barcelona” in 1218, but it was one of his successors, James I, who
actually conferred privileges on the municipality in 1249 which granted
guildsmen the right to participate politically. The first corporate statutes
extant from Barcelona date from 1308 (that of an amalgamated textile
guild of dyers, woolweavers, fullers, and carders), and after that many
follow, each with statutes ultimately sanctioned by privileges emanating
specifically from the king.
The situation in Castile was similar. King Peter the Cruel might in the
mid-fourteenth century delegate to the municipal authorities the right
to issue guild ordinances, but the king reserved the right of final
approval, and, of course, exacted funds for the privilege. In the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries both Aragon and Castile witnessed com-
pulsory membership, tightening of apprenticeship rules, and increasing
attention to discipline within the guild hierarchy (masters controlling
journeymen). With the unification of the peninsula under Ferdinand
and Isabella in the late fifteenth century, the corporate regime was
systematically expanded, incorporating formerly nonguild trades. As in
France, craft corporations served multiple purposes for the authorities:
they organized the economy, in conformity with the increasing hierarch-
ization of society they were expected to maintain discipline in their
ranks, and they were lucrative sources for fiscal expropriation.
A similar story can be told of the guilds of the towns of medieval
Flanders. The critical date is 1302. Following the defeat of the French
at the battle of Courtrai, the French-allied patricians of Ghent, Ypres,
and Bruges were overthrown and the craftsmen who had supported
Count John of Namur against the French were rewarded for their
support of the count with corporate privileges, granted, of course, by the
count. Flemish incorporated guildsmen may have had greater rights of
political participation in their municipal government than some of their
counterparts elsewhere (the range of this across Europe was great), but
the guilds of Flanders show similar patterns to those elsewhere in
Europe in matters pertaining to the organization of work, the discipline
of workers, and accelerating hierarchization. With incorporation came
statutes which specified privileges of mastership. Among these were sole
rights to own shops, to employ journeymen, and to train apprentices.
With an eye toward disciplining the worker, masters were also empow-
ered, subject to the count’s approval, to set hours and conditions of
work, the length of apprenticeship service, and the number of workers
allowed in the employ of a master. Increasingly in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries masters sought to restrict access to their ranks by
workers who were not sons of masters, first by raising entry fees, then by
demanding the making of an increasingly expensive “masterpiece” (a
requirement waived for masters’ sons).
In the city states of Italy guilds had varied constitutional histories. In
Venice, already in the 1270s guildsmen swore an oath to abide by guild
regulations; but it was an oath that simultaneously declared their
allegiance to the republic. Before long, with the Serrata of 1297, they
were excluded from exercising any formal political power in the state.
Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florentine communal politics, in
contrast, rested on guilds as autonomous, self-governing corporations
composed of equal members. These guilds had extensive powers,
ranging from legislative to judicial to regulatory, which were articulated
in written statutes and which were in turn delegated to elected
officials.
The Florentine republic, therefore, according to John Najemy,
was
effectively “a sovereign federation of equal and autonomous guilds,
with
each guild free to elect its own representatives to the
governmental
committees through which the sovereignty of the full
community was
exercised.”27
Everywhere in the fourteenth century, even in Florence as guild
governance gave way to oligarchy, stratification and differentiation were
becoming increasingly articulated, reaching their apogee in the seven-
teenth century and continuing in many places into the eighteenth and
27 John Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400
(Chapel Hill, 1982), p. 9.
even nineteenth centuries. Chevalier has persuasively contended that in

the fourteenth century in the “good towns” of France an internal
hierarchy emerged which loosely divided the urban populace into three
vertically ranked categories, granting diminishing degrees of “honor” to
each rank, from Jes bons (the bourgeois), to les communs (including
craftsmen of guilds), to les vulgaires (including laborers outside the
guild).** This loose structure heralded the establishment of the corpo-
rate regime in which craft guilds became defined constitutionally as the
corps de métiers. Craft guilds, of course, predated the corporate regime,
but only in the fourteenth century do we find them specifically organized
as corps and correspondingly assuming an état, a quality which placed
them socially and constitutionally in the city. The gens de bras, or
workers not organized in corps, had no état, and thus were gens sans
qualité (people of no status).
From the outset, then, corporatism as a new system of order was
imbedded in the economy, but everywhere it was also inextricably linked
to social hierarchy and distinction as well as to politics. It was grounded
in a demand for subordination and discipline of inferiors. Indeed, the
corporate regime gained definition by the principle of exclusion.
Workers without état were defined outside the system of order, and
consigned to the netherworld of disorder. Even journeymen were
liminal figures, in some ways part of the guild order, but simultaneously
excluded from the respectable ranks of masters. These men and women
were imagined to “have in their head only the inversion of all values, the
abolition of providential differences.”?° Thus, when workers did chal-
lenge their masters over control of the labor market, for example, their
actions were interpreted by masters no less than municipal and later
royal authorities as violence against order per se, and were invested with
cosmological and not just narrowly economic importance.
The Middle Ages bequeathed to the early modern era a society
politically organized by corporation, in which a host of collective bodies,
including guilds, were considered legal persons. Empowering corpora-
tions to own property, plead in public courts, and in some locales to
participate in governance, corporatism dominated the thinking about
and, in some ways, as we will see in subsequent chapters, the practice of
economic, social, and juridical life. By the fifteenth century, corporatism
was established as the legal armature of nearly every polity of Europe.
Even in the kingdom most commonly associated with weak guilds,
England, the corporate regime took hold in the fourteenth century and
expanded in the fifteenth and sixteenth. Incorporated by the crown as
28 Bernard Chevalier, Les Bonnes Villes de France du XIVe au XVIe siécle (Paris, 1982).
29 Chevalier, “Corporations, conflits politiques et paix sociale,” 36.
“mysteries” or, as they were called in London, livery companies

membership in these bodies entailed a purchase of the “freedom’
payable to the municipal authority of the town in which the artisan
lived, a payment which in turn granted the right of citizenship (this
entailed a range of political rights, depending on the city). Citizenship in
turn permitted the practice of a trade within the city. In the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries the freedom was continually extended by munici-
palities (for fiscal reasons), so that its purchase became essentially
obligatory for any craftsman wishing to open a shop. In exchange for
purchasing the freedom (and channeling funds to the increasingly
financially strapped municipalities), mysteries or companies were
granted the right to manage their internal affairs, specifically including
the disciplining of subordinates. Within each London company hier-
archical status was defined precisely, descending from liverymen, to
yeomen (subdivided into “householders” or masters, and journeymen),
to apprentices, and authority over others within the structure was clearly
stated. Masters, for example, by the sixteenth century were demanding
the compulsory employment registration of journeymen, which required
the journeyman to remain with the master as long as the master
provided work. Indeed, the brewers of London stipulated that no
journeyman could be hired without a “passport” from his former master
certifying his “lawful departure.”*°
In parts of fifteenth-century France guilds had come to be referred to
as choses du rot, literally belonging to the king. In 1467, for instance,
Louis XI demanded that all new masters take an oath of fidelity directly
to him. Still, however important the royal sanction for legitimacy was
and would increasingly become, nearly everywhere the first line of
authority the guilds encountered was the municipality. The corporate
guild system in France, which lasted until 1791, was organized in métiers
statués (either jurés or réglés, but in either case regulated by the munici-
pality), that is, guilds with statutes sanctioned by the government.
These
by-laws, as elsewhere in Europe, stipulated an internal hierarchical
structure descending from master to apprentice. The municipal
author-
ities appointed guild officers (or, in some cases like the
goldsmiths and
pastrycooks of Dijon, approved the officers elected by
the guild), called
variously jurés, prud’hommes, gardes, or syndics, and
granted them the
authority to “police” their own guild and to assure
that their monopoly
would not be encroached upon by other trades. These
men (usually two
per guild, but upwards of six in some guilds in
some places, like the
bakers’ guild in Paris in 1719) were thus empowered
to enforce the
°° Steve L. Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth
-Century London
(Cambridge, 1989), p. 239.
provisions of the statutes, and their powers could be far reaching. They
ranged from inspection of guild shops to guarantee quality of manufac-
ture (with the authority to seize and destroy poorly made objects and to
fine the craftsman for shoddy workmanship), to inquiry into the morals
of candidates for mastership, to presiding over guild assemblies, to
representing the guild’s interests before the town council.
Guilds proliferated everywhere from the fifteenth to the seventeenth
centuries, while in some places like Sweden or Austria the high point was
reached in the eighteenth. The fifteenth century was a time of corporate
expansion in most French towns, like Dijon, and the sixteenth century
witnessed a similar development in the towns of the southern Nether-
lands and England. Expansion surged into the seventeenth century, too.
In London alone between 1600 and 1640 twenty-seven new livery
companies were formed (the crown encouraging their establishment
because of the revenues that could be extracted from them). The towns
of the new United Provinces in the northern Netherlands had few guilds
before the seventeenth century, but by 1700 could count about 2,000 of
them. The same growth marked contemporary Catalonia.
Though corporate organization of work in France never included all
trades, it was not for want of trying. The Colbertian edict of 1673,
“Pour l’établissement des Arts et Métiers en Communauté,” attempted
to universalize the corporative regime among the trades, a stated goal of
the royal edict of 1581 as well as that of 1767. Frederick William I of
Prussia endeavored to do the same in his state. From 1736 to 1738 he
issued a series of edicts making corporate statutes uniform, each guild
being theoretically subjected to the surveillance of the state. Regardless
of the incomplete reach of such legislation, or even its paradoxical
nature (one can find royal edicts that exempted trades from incorpora-
tion), the importance of corporatism per se in terms of status and politics
should not be underestimated.
Outside of France and Prussia, perhaps no other regions of Europe
have been associated so closely with corporatism as the German “home
towns,” that analytical category created by Mack Walker to encompass a
type of town which was relatively small (fewer than 10,000 inhabitants)
and marked by relative isolation, both political and economic. The
constitutional characteristics of the guilds of these towns and their
hinterlands show some divergences from those of most other European
towns, notably in their degree of independence from outside political
influence (here they are sharply different from their Prussian counter-
parts); but in important ways they represent the highwater mark of
corporatism which crested in much of Europe in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. Guilds in these polities possessed statutes
which stipulated, as elsewhere, the nature of apprentice training, regula-

tions for recruitment of workers and their distribution among the shops
of the town, and monopolies. Guild masters were the watchdogs of
these rules, and they were empowered by the municipality to prosecute
Béohnhasen or “groundrabbits,” those nonmasters who encroached on a
guild’s monopoly. Regulating economic competition may have partly
inspired this legislation, but it was but a piece of a larger constitution
which safeguarded the community by laying out its imagined bound-
aries. The goal of the guilds of the “home towns” was to secure
community peace, to maintain a certain order. They imagined, in its
most extreme manifestation, what corporate regimes throughout
Europe imagined: an order rooted in definition of social exclusivity and
hierarchy. Ehrbarkeit, or “honorable status,” was the quality that an-
nounced this in the “home town,” and to possess it, as guild masters
did, included one in the orderly community; not to possess it, as the
nonguild outsiders did not, allocated the individual to the dishonorable
lower elements of society and, generally, to the realm of disorder.
Nuremberg offers an instructive point of comparison, illustrating the
similarities as well as the varieties of artisanal regulation in Germany
and Europe. A free imperial city, Nuremberg’s governing elite never
permitted artisans to form independent corporations (having crushed
an artisan rebellion in 1349), and the town council directly regulated the
work activity deemed essential to the welfare of the community. The so-
called free crafts, or Freie Kiinste, had no rules governing apprentices,
quality of products, price, and so on, but patrician dominance spelled
strict statutes and regulations for the masters, journeymen, and appren-
tices of the “essential” trades. Admission to mastership, wage levels, and
marketing were all overseen by municipal officers. If technically there
were no guilds in Nuremberg, there were nonetheless organizations
called “sworn crafts,” each with a “sworn master” elected
by its
members and invested by the town council to be its agent
in the
enforcement of the provisions comprehensively articulated
in the Book
of Handicrafts. In a sense, Nuremberg as a whole
functioned like a
corporation, as patrician Nurembergers embraced
the idea that, as
Gerald Strauss put it,
to be in society meant to be in possession of a body
of rules and statutes defining
one’s life and actions. Society. . . was thought to
consist of groups and classes,
each a legally provisioned component with
shared rights and enumerated
responsibilities toward itself, toward other groups,
and toward society at large.
Each constituent group had its distinguishing
peculiarities of dress, habit,
manner, style.?!
31 Gerald Strauss, Nuremburg in the Sixteenth

Century (New York, 1966), pp. 116-17.
Apprentices, journeymen, and women

The rhetoric prescribing the corporate regime was embodied in most
polities of medieval and early modern Europe. As creations and
creatures of political authority, incorporated guilds were simultaneously
empowered and rendered vulnerable to political authority. Throughout
the old regime, hierarchy and discipline were joined by paternalism in
defining corporatism. Society was theoretically structured on the micro-
cosm of the family, the prescriptive model of which was the paterfamilias.
A well-ordered society, as theorists never tired of proclaiming, was
based upon the well-ordered family, which was supposedly regulated
and disciplined by the father, the male head of household. Of course,
women were construed to be, in the nature of things, inferior to men,
and journeymen and apprentices were treated as children and thus
owing filial obedience to their master. Patriarchy as a specific legal
construct may have been directly challenged in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, notably by Locke and his followers, but patern-
alism did not die a sudden death. Indeed, legislation prohibiting worker
insubordination continued to be cast in a paternalistic idiom, even in
England, from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.
Insubordination, then, challenged paternalism and undermined hier-
archy. Hierarchy rests on vertical distinction, and distinction rests on the
definition of otherness. Masterless men (and women) behaving as
masters (working in their own “shops,” taking on customers) blurred
these distinctions which were given meaning by the corporate ethos. To
obscure the distinction between a master artisan, an apprentice, and a
wage-worker, not to mention a woman, was a threat to the constituted
order and the master’s place within it. The boundary separating the
guild master from the gens de bras was societally fundamental because it
marked the boundary between order and disorder. This was the
meaning and value of corporatism: it was a constitutional system that
did not simply organize work, but that translated the various activities of
work into a moral representation of status and rank.
Consequently, corporate statutes purported to discipline labor and to
erect clear boundaries between masters and nonmasters. The master
guildsmen who drafted these by-laws hoped to accomplish such distinc-
tion and discipline by regulation of entry to the guild, apprenticeship
within it, restrictions on admission to mastership, and control of the
labor market.
Admission to the guild and eventual mastership was closely regulated
nearly everywhere from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. As
Kaplan neatly and correctly observes: “apprenticeship was at the heart
of the corporatist conception of work and of hierarchy.”*? It was a moral

and political socialization as much as it was an initiation to the trade.
Apprenticeship could be a promising avenue to mastership, and masters
often made sure that this track was open only to boys who met with their
approval (this is why statutes invariably state that only masters may train
apprentices). Apprenticeship regulations were enshrined in most guild
statutes (of the 101 statutes collected by Boileau in Paris in the Livre des
métiers in 1268, for example, 82 specifically address apprenticeship), but
by no means did every worker within the guild serve one. That was
because apprenticeship was to be a means to institutionalize distinctions
and hierarchy within the guild. Upon payment of a placement fee
(which also varied widely from guild to guild, and in time and place — in
Lyons in 1786 such fees ranged from 24 livres for a shoemaker to 13332.
hvres for a hatter), apprentices took their place in their master’s house-
hold, agreeing to obey and respect him as a father. These hand-picked
and potential future masters received food, clothing, lodging, and
training in return. Their training, it should be noted, was more than
technical aptitude — nonapprenticed “skilled” workers received that, too
— but a special education through which these hopeful future masters
were introduced to the “mysteries” of the trade. Thus, only rarely do
guild statutes or apprenticeship contracts inform us of the skills
ac-
quired, referring instead to the “customs” or “secrets” of the trade. This
knowledge was not to be shared with everyone (although in practice
it
was well-nigh impossible to keep other workers toiling shoulder
to
shoulder with the apprentices from learning these secrets as
well), and
its possession theoretically set one apart and defined.one’s
sense of
belonging, not just to the guild, but more generally to an
état. This sense
of inclusion and exclusion spanned the guilds — indeed,
as we will see in
chapter 6, master artisans appear to have self-consciously
reached
across guild lines to secure social bonds by marriage,
godparenthood, or
the placement of their sons as apprentices with other
masters not of
their guild.
Not all apprentices reached mastership (many
died, ran away, or
simply failed to learn adequately the mysteries of
the trade), but this
does not gainsay the fact that the purpose
of apprenticeship was
selection and the goal a direct route to mastership.
This is why appren-
tices were often sons of other masters (and
usually not of the same
guild), boys who learned from an early age that
they were distinguished
from workers outside the guild — the “unqualified
,” the “unskilled” — as
ae, Steven L. Kaplan, Le Meilleur Pain du monde.
Les Boulangers de Paris au XVIIIe siécle
(Paris, 1996), p. 213. For the recent English
translation, see The Bakers of Paris and the
Bread Question, 1700-1775 (Durham, 1997),
well as from nonapprenticed workers within. Upon completion of one’s

term (which varied widely from guild to guild and place to place,
ranging from two years to twelve years, and which began at ages ranging
from ten to twenty), the apprentice would be hopeful of acceding
directly to mastership. In most places this required the approval of the
existing masters as well as sufficient capital to open a shop. It also
required the approval of the political authorities — the city magistrates
and, in some places, the king. Family connections were all important for
gaining guild approval nearly everywhere. In late fifteenth-century
Barcelona, for instance, prospective masters had to present their bap-
tismal certificates and full proof of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood,
while would-be masters in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century German
“home towns” as well as large cities like Augsburg likewise had to
demonstrate in writing the legitimacy of their birth.
Would-be masters with insufficient quantities of either capital or
goodwill from existing masters found themselves confronting exclu-
sionary-minded masters who were interested in bringing only enough
young men into the charmed circle of mastership as were minimally
necessary to continue the community. Municipalities or crowns, on the
other hand, had good reasons (ranging from fiscal to economic) to be
less exclusionary. Masters usually paid an entry fee to the authorities,
and on occasion magistrates came to believe that local economies were
harmed by too few masters in town. Masters keen on restricting access
to mastership and governments (sometimes municipal, as in Dijon,
sometimes royal, as in the Holy Roman empire) desiring to open it up is
a story that can be told about towns of every country of Europe except
England in every century from the fourteenth to the eighteenth — Spain,
Flanders, France, Germany, all saw master guildsmen in different times
and places raise entry fees, demand exorbitantly expensive banquets
hosted by the prospective entrant, or require increasingly difficult and
expensive masterpieces of the candidate for mastership. These criteria,
as we will see in chapter 6, were all reduced or ignored for sons and
sons-in-law of masters.
England was an exception in some respects, for there admission to
mastership seems to have been relatively open. In the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, though apprenticeship was established, many
masters bypassed it by purchasing the freedom (and thus the legal right
to open a shop and practice a craft) directly from the municipality. In
1563 the Statute of Artificers stated explicitly that an apprenticeship of
at least seven years had to be served before anyone could be admitted to
citizenship, but the law implicitly allowed that one could legally practice
a craft different from the one in which apprenticeship had been served.
From the 1570s this became commonplace among craftsmen, aS

apprenticeship more and more into a political institution. But if admis-
sion to “householder” or master status was relatively easy to attain,
advantageous apprenticeship placement still carried a premium (and
required family connections to obtain) because political advancement
within the guilds (which were sharply pyramidal in their internal
hierarchy), and thus within the city, was eased for those who were
placed with masters already well established in politics.
Apprenticeship was clearly an important institution in the world of
guilds from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Many future
masters passed through it, but demographics, economics, politics, and
social ambitions, as we will see in subsequent chapters, created condi-
tions in which, in some circumstances, there were too many candidates
for mastership and in others too few. Some local boys and even girls
(and certainly many immigrants), then, found themselves with appren-
ticeship certificates but denied access to mastership. For many, journey-
manship (or domestic service for the girls) would be a lifelong state.
At
other times in other places and in different circumstances, some out-
siders might find the gates to mastership wide open. This
was the
situation in Vienna during the Thirty Years’ War among the
joiners and
corsetmakers, where 70 percent of the men admitted to mastership
were
immigrants. The admission of outsiders, or “foreigners”
as they were
called, might follow formal apprenticing. Or it might
result from out-
right purchase. Or it might entail admitting to mastership
a man who
had simply paid some dues for use of the guild’s chapel
in the local
parish church and had worked faithfully in his master’s
employ or even
in his house for many years, earning the master’s
trust and favor, maybe
even marrying his daughter or widow. Such journeymen
who had not
completed apprenticeship but who learned the
trade through experi-
ence, be they local boys or immigrants, occupied
an important if legally
imprecise status within the guild. They might
aspire to mastership when
and if the conditions permitted it, and with
their sense of community
grounded in an identity that was every bit
as exclusionary as their
masters’, they sharply distinguished themselves
from the “unqualified”
or “unskilled” wage-workers that masters
hired on a short-term basis to
do prescribed tasks and who clearly were
not affiliated with the guilds at
all. But, like those “unskilled” workers next
to whom these journeymen
sweated at the workbench or on the construction
site but from whom
they were so keen on distinguishing
themselves, they, too, were usually
paid a wage. Thus, within the ranks
of nonmasters, there were many
layers. There were apprentices destined
to slide smoothly into master-
ship and apprentices who, for whatever
reason, and some despite
The meaning of work BT
receiving their certificate, were not so fortunate. There were journeymen

who became masters without serving an apprenticeship, and there were
journeymen like them who remained journeymen their entire lives.
Then there were noncorporate wage-workers, possessing some of the
skills of apprentices and journeymen, but jealously excluded from their
ranks.
Guild statutes and regulations say very little about journeymen, and
when they do both the terminology by which these workers are referred
to and the powers within the guild that they possess are imprecise. In the
thirteenth-century Livre des métiers the men who had completed their
apprenticeship but who had not, for whatever reason, become masters,
were called valets (a term in use in France into the fifteenth century).
Such terminology blurred any distinction between a journeyman and a
domestic servant and thus carried clear expectations of servile obedi-
ence. In most places and in most guilds, journeymen participated not at
all. There are, however, some exceptions to this generalization, at least
during the Middle Ages. In the textile guilds in fourteenth-century
Flanders, for example, journeymen had the right to vote in guild affairs,
even if in most other trades there they did not. In a handful of guilds in
some towns in late medieval France — Paris, Toulouse, Rheims, Rouen —
in exchange for an oath of fidelity and regular payment of dues to the
guild, journeymen were granted the privilege of attending guild assem-
blies, though it is unclear and unlikely that they had any formal power.
More rarely, as in Arras, Montpellier, and among the fullers of Paris,
journeymen participated in the election of jurés. Nowhere, however, did
journeymen even approach the masters in terms of institutional or
juridical power or privilege, and whatever participation in the guild they
were allowed in the Middle Ages disappeared in the early modern
epoch. This does not mean that journeymen had no organizational life,
for they certainly did, but it does mean that it was primarily outside the
guild and sometimes illegal. If journeymen are seldom mentioned in
guild statutes, as we will see in chapters 5 and 6, they certainly garner
their share of attention from governmental authorities bent on disci-
plining the workforce.
The institutional world of work was overwhelmingly male, and so
women hold a very small place in our discussion of guilds, if not in the
world of economic practice, as we will see. In general, all across Europe
women saw their formal, independent participation in guilds narrow
from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Although their pre-
sence was not entirely eroded, guildsmen and magistrates joined to
increasingly exclude them from a range of guilds, leaving them in guilds
upon which society placed little social value and deemed “unskilled.”
This gender division of labor was firmly supported by patriarchal theory

and takes its place in the accelerating hierarchical disciplining of society
— in this case, women — and increasingly relegated independent women
to poorly paid, insecure, and politically powerless, in a word, inferior
occupations.
The situation had not always been so gloomy for women. In late
medieval Leiden women were well represented institutionally in the
cloth industry, sometimes actively organizing production (called
“draping”) in their own shops with their own apprentices and wage-
workers, sometimes involved in large-scale distribution of the finished
cloth, sometimes involved in finishing and dyeing. In fourteenth-century
Frankfurt am Main ordinances permitted women the right to practice
many trades — of twenty, nine had women in their ranks. The formal
situation in Cologne was even brighter for some women. In the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries they were constitutionally restricted to
certain guilds by the guild regime that took power in 1396, but they
dominated four important ones: yarntwisting, goldspinning, silk-
weaving, and silkthrowing. Each of these guilds had their own statutes
sanctioned between 1397 and 1456 and stipulating what all guild by-
laws did — length and terms of apprenticeship, admission to the “mys-
teries” of the craft, workshop visitation and quality control, regulation of
monopoly. The women of these guilds ran their own shops, took on their
own apprentices, purchased their own materials, and marketed their
finished products, often in wide-ranging import/export businesses. To be
sure, Cologne was the only medieval German city to grant women such
independence, but even here the male, patriarchal hand rested heavily,
for none of the women from these all-female guilds, in contrast to their
male counterparts, was permitted a political voice in the municipal
governance of this “guild regime.” Indeed, the statutes of the silkweavers
stipulated that the two female guild officers elected by the guild be joined
by two males, although these males had to be husbands of silkweavers.
It would be unwise, therefore, to look upon the Middle Ages as some
golden age of female artisans, for not even then were women on a level
with men. Indeed, even in Cologne in the fifteenth century women were
only represented in six of the forty-two official guilds. In medieval
Flemish and provincial English cities the situation was no .better.
Women were never permitted to hold civic or guild office there, seldom
were placed in apprenticeship, and rarely became masters in guilds. In
Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges until the fourteenth century a woman was
permitted legally to form a business partnership with her husband, and
as a widow she could expect her son to accede to mastership. Following
the guild revolution of 1302, however, the guilds actively purged women
from their ranks, and even denied widows of masters any control over
the heritability of the mastership, now relegating it exclusively to the
male line.
It would be a mistake, then, to assume that women had easy or
widespread access to guilds in medieval cities. As restricted as female
autonomy was, however, from the fifteenth to eighteenth century it was
to become even more circumscribed. For example, in Frankfurt the
number of guilds with women in them dropped from nine in the
fourteenth century to three by 1500, to two by 1550. In Leiden, when
the linenweavers ascended to ambacht status (that is, as an official guild
with a charter) in 1563 there were five “mistresses” in their ranks. Five
years later there were none.
This trend to exclude categorically women from official guilds oc-
curred in towns all across the Holy Roman empire — Frankfurt, Mem-
mingen, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Munich. In the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, many guilds in these towns admitted girls to
apprenticeship, but in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries some
guild ordinances and statutes specifically prohibited the practice, while
others simply masculinized the language. Similarly, craft ordinances
from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries often mention
female masters, and none specifically prohibits women from their ranks.
Indeed, women represented 10—15 percent of the membership of some
guilds. But in the revised and expanded statutes of guilds in these same
cities which appear increasingly after the mid-fifteenth century, refer-
ence to female masters has gone the way of female apprentices — they are
no longer mentioned.
These same revised and expanded statutes tightened restrictions on
widows of masters, too. Whereas the earlier ordinances do not mention
widows, these later ones restrict how long they can continue to operate
the shop (ranging from two months to two years, depending on the town
and guild). By 1550 we often find regulations prohibiting widows from
taking on apprentices, and a century later forbidding them to use
journeymen at all. Widows in many towns in France seem somewhat
better off, in that statutes usually permitted them to keep their deceased
husband’s shop open and staffed with journeymen (although they were
always forbidden to take on apprentices) until remarriage or until a son
came of age. Remarriage had strings attached, however, for if a widow
married outside of the guild, she had to close her shop, and if she
married another master within the guild, the couple could merge their
resources but could only retain one of the shops. If a widow married a
journeyman, however, she could keep her shop if her new husband
became a master.
In England customary law did not officially deny married women or

widows the right to carry on a trade, nor were there laws impeding such
women from gaining the “freedom.” A woman designated legally as a
“feme sole” could trade, enter binding contracts, and sue in court just
as any man. Even “femes coverts,” or women with no legal personality
independent from their husband, could exploit a legal technicality that
emerged in the sixteenth century called the doctrine of “separate
estate,” by which women could enter marriage retaining certain prop-
erty in a separate estate and thus employable in a business independent
from that of her spouse. Similar legal latitude was granted to women by
the weavers of Copenhagen in 1550. This new guild originally permitted
even single women as masters who could hire workers and train
apprentices, just like the male masters of the guild. Shortly thereafter,
however, mirroring a trend nearly everywhere, female independence was
restricted, in this case as the status of mastership was confined to wives
and daughters of male guild members.
All across Europe female artisans found their autonomy — never very
liberally granted, in any case — increasingly eroded. In 1550 the livery
company of London weavers officially excluded women from their
ranks, adding to their ordinances the following prescription: “[no
weaver] shall keep, teach, instruct, or bring up in the use, exercising, or
knowledge of the same art or mystery of weaving any maiden, damsel, or
other woman.”*? By the eighteenth century, although women were
widely apprenticed in the towns of the southern and eastern counties
(Keith Snell finds women in one-third of the apprenticeship contracts in
fifty-one trades there)** if not in London (very few female apprentices
are on the books of the livery companies there), their roles were
circumscribed and confined to menial aspects of the trade, and they
were seldom taught its “mysteries” or promoted to mastership. Mean-
while, guilds were becoming increasingly masculinized. In Linz, Austria
in 1750 an ordinance for the saddlers’ guild insisted that “all ...
masters shall take great pains to maintain proper male decorum among
themselves, and to instruct their apprentices and journeymen in such
male decorum. . .”2>
Even in places where corporate status was granted women in some
trades, as in eighteenth-century Nantes, the picture is still one of
inferiority and subordination. As everywhere, women in Nantes worked
mostly in textile, food, and female-clothing crafts, but within mixed-
> Quoted in Rappaport, p. 37.
34 Keith Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985),
p. 331.
35 Quoted in Merry Wiesner, “Guilds, male bonding, and women’s
work in early modern
Germany,” Gender and History 1 (1989), 128.
gender guilds female mistresses were not granted the same privileges as
their male counterparts. For instance, the tailors in 1728 amended their
statutes to allow female mistresses, but these women could not open a
shop and were restricted to only “bespoke” or commissioned work.
They could not employ journeymen. It seems that the tailors opened
their guild to women because the demand for female clothing (both
domestic and colonial, Nantes being a major export center) was out-
stripping the male tailors’ ability to meet it. Clandestine production,
much of it by women, was happening anyway, and by bringing the
women into the guild (but granting them little power there) the men
hoped to better regulate them. The female labor force in the garment
trades everywhere was large and growing in the eighteenth century, and
masters hoped to control this army of formerly illicit laborers through
guild ordinance and police. Admitting women to the guild held an
additional benefit, one especially important to a guild that apparently
was increasingly in debt: the payment of a mastership fee into the
strapped guild treasury.
In the face of the erosion of status, some women struggled to arrest
the degradation, and they did so by forming guilds. Here and there in
early modern European cities we find female guilds, but almost invari-
ably in textile-related trades, and of low status and relatively poor. In
Paris, the seamstresses fit this profile. The seamstresses (couturtéres)
established a guild in 1675 with statutes that entitled them to sew and
sell clothing for women and small children. Women serving a three-year
apprenticeship and a two-year subsequent probationary period as
workers could accede to mastership, provided they were at least twenty-
two years old. By 1745 there were 1,500—1,700 “mistress” seamstresses
in the capital, a number that swelled to 3,000 by 1789. Their poverty
should not blind us, however, to the benefits women believed that
incorporation provided. In response to the French Controller-General
Turgot’s abolition of the guilds in 1776, the women of the all-female
linendraper guild of Paris protested the policy in terms of status as much
as economics. In Réflexions des marchandes et maitresses lingéres de Paris
sur le projet de détruire les jurandes the linendrapers described their guild
as an institution that not only protected the quality of their work, but
assured “the decency and propriety [honnéteté] of their estate” or rank.?°
They saw their guild as a bastion against subordination and dependence,
an inevitable fate, they feared, if their guild were abolished.
36 Quoted in Cynthia Maria Truant, “Parisian guildswomen and the (sexual) politics of
privilege: defending their patrimonies in print,” in Dena Goodman and Elizabeth
Goldsmith, eds., Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (Ithaca,
1995), p. 56.
The meaning of skill
Until recently, histories of artisans described craftsmen as preindustrial

skilled workers destined to be crushed by the juggernaut of mechanized,
factory production. In the process they found their skills eroded. But
should skills be so objectively defined as a function of production?
Clearly female “skills” had been undergoing a process of devaluation for
centuries before industrialization, a process which had nothing to do
with technology, factories, or fixed capital. Instead, such “deskilling”
was a product of particular social and gender relations. It is not enough
to define skill as manual facility, as the co-ordination of perceptual and
motor activity, although this certainly is an important part of it. The
definition of skili also must include knowledge of the properties of
materials and how to assemble them into products. Such a definition, as
useful as it is, however, is overly production centered and, moreover,
ahistorical. Seamstresses, after all, fit this definition but were construed
by the men of their world to be “unskilled.” This definition tells us
nothing, in fact, of the meaning of skill, to those who claimed to have it,
and to those who wrote about it. To understand the meaning of skill, we
must situate it contextually, for it is a relational quality, measured
against those who supposedly possessed less of it, or none at all — the
semi-skilled and the unskilled.
Two historians — Stephen Marglin and Harry Braverman — have
suggested that what the industrial revolution was really about was not
the economic efficiency that came from the factory system, the morceli-
zation of the division of labor, or even scientific management, but rather
the social power that capitalists achieved from greater control of the
workforce and the workplace, effected through hierarchy and the dis-
cipline of labor.*’ This may have been true for the industrial revolution
when such control derived rather nakedly from extensive and integrated
market relations and capital formation, but it was a story with a long
history. Perhaps not mediated so thoroughly by the market but also by
the framing political and social structures of the guilds, control of the
workforce and the workplace had been a fundamental concern of
guildsmen since the fourteenth century. Hierarchy and the discipline of
labor were principles enshrined in guild ordinances, and these were to
be effected through control over skill — both its meaning and its posses-
sion. Skill became increasingly masculinized and associated with male
independence and female subordination. Apprenticeship as an institu-
Sf See Stephen Marglin, “What do bosses do? The origins and functions
of hierarchy in
capitalist production,” Review of Radical Political Economy
6 (1974), and Harry
Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974).
tion, as we have seen, clearly was designed to serve these ends as well, as
was legislation demanded by guildsmen against “illicit” clandestine
workers. These faux ouvriers, chambrellans, “chamberers,” Béhnhasen, or
Storer as they were variously called in France, England, and Germany,
were workers behaving as masters without guild sanction — taking orders
from customers, hiring workers, and so forth. Judging from the ava-
lanche of evidence of their widespread existence, these workers were the
bane of masters. The master goldsmiths of eighteenth-century Paris
complained to the authorities that “an infinity of false workers [dimin-
ished] ... the amount of available work .. . [and took] their clients
away with lower prices.”*® Significantly, these unqualified workers were
disparaged as “unskilled” and, as the French language of the time
tellingly put it, sans état, or literally “without rank.”
These matters are clearly about skill and division of labor, and they do
connect with the world of production, but their significance is about
much more than economics. Skill was also a symbol of status, the
division of labor placed one socially, and the guild (and corporatism
generally) theoretically secured these. These qualities helped define a
system that created a hierarchical slot for women, for apprentices, for
journeymen, and, of course, for masters. Hegel perceptively pointed out
that the evidence of a craftsman’s “skill” was not his technical wizardry,
but rather his membership in a guild. Such membership conferred a
collective status upon the guildsman via his apprenticeship, journeyman
status, or mastership, and granted the craftsman a sense of possessing a
“property in skill” which marked him off from others without it.
Through mastership, it was, in theory, legally secured. Until the late
eighteenth century this sense was more assumed and implicit than
stated, and during the early modern period it became imbedded in an
artisan’s identity which was rooted deep in the soil of rank and hierarchy.
How this formal, theoretical model of society squared with the messy
world of practice is the subject to which we now turn.
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2 The craft economy
An overview of the early modern European economy
The map of the late medieval and early modern European economy, as
the economic historian Jan De Vries observes, can best be thought of as
a collection of regions with cities and towns as their focal points. From
the high Middle Ages onwards a process of increasing economic integra-
tion occurred first within and later between these regions. The process
was uneven, but Europe’s cities gradually were stitched together in an
increasingly tight commercial system that more and more brought the
countryside into its orbit. Within their increasingly obsolete walls, cities
constituted the infrastructure of the economy, the site where a great deal
of craft production was organized, goods distributed, and capital
attracted and invested. Of course, such a process of network creation
and integration was far from linear, happening more rapidly in some
areas than in others.
The demographic collapse after the catastrophic visitation of the
Black Death after 1347 sent shock waves through the economy, but
ecological disaster also added to the devastation of wars that had
beset Europeans even before 1347. Royal armies, like those of
England and France beginning in 1337, counted many mercenaries in
their ranks (paid by escalating tax revenues), and during times of
peace these “free companies” ravaged the countryside. But it was
ecological disaster that most severely transformed the economy. The
plummeting of the European population (estimated to have been by
at least 25 percent) in the immediate wake of the Black Death was
followed by a spike in wages after each epidemic (plague visited in
1360 and again in 1371), and with labor short, prices rose steadily
across the board until the 1370s in northern Europe and the 1390s in
Italy. Then a relative glut of grain hit the markets, primarily due to
the
the importing of grain into Europe’s larger cities from across
from the Baltic regions by
Mediterranean by Italian merchants and
the Hanse, that league of merchants established in many northern
45
German cities. Prices then moved in different directions. Those for

manufactured goods continued to go up, while those for grain
dropped.
The European population stabilized during the first half of the
fifteenth century, and then began to grow again after about 1460. It
continued to expand into the first half of the seventeenth century.
Although reliable figures are hard to come by, it is safe to say that the
European population increased by about 20 percent between 1460 and
1650, from an estimated 82 million to about 100 million. More people
meant greater demand for goods, especially foodstuffs but also artisanal
manufactures. Demand from population growth, coupled with the
infusion into the money supply of silver from the mines of eastern
Europe and the recently colonized New World, sent prices spiraling
upward. The inflation lasted as long as population continued to grow
and silver to flow, and one important result was increased polarization
of wealth. On the one hand, immiseration and even pauperization
tragically captured ever more people (from 1530 perhaps one-third of
the population was poised on the brink of destitution, or lived and died
within its iron grasp). Yet on the other hand, the growth of the economy
during these years tended to concentrate capital increasingly in the
hands of a wealthy elite of merchants, lawyers, government officials, as
well as some artisans.
In the seventeenth century the flood of gold and especially silver that
had flowed into the economy slowed to a trickle, and the population of
Europe began to level off. Aggregate demand slackened, especially in
the agricultural sector. Indeed, De Vries observes that for a century after
1650 Europe sank into an agricultural depression, with far-reaching
ramifications. As food prices dropped and rents declined but real wages
went up, more of the household income was disposable for the purchase
of manufactured items. Even though the economy as a whole grew little
before the eighteenth century and a large sector of the population
continued to flounder in the despair of poverty, demand for manufac-
tured goods nonetheless increased.
This consumer demand was stimulated by several changes. As cottage
industry spread in the countryside, more and more rural but landless
wage-earning households were thrown upon the market for their goods.
Equally market dependent were urban dwellers, the number of
whom
continued to expand, especially in cities of over 10,000 inhabitants.
But
perhaps the greatest stimulus to consumer demand was the transfer
of
wealth to the government via ever-increasing taxation, capital which
was
then immediately redistributed to the state’s increasingly wealthy
depen-
dents (aristocratic courtiers, officials, bond-holding creditors).
Clearly,
The craft economy 47
by the seventeenth century capital was increasingly important, as were

those who controlled it.
Many historians have pointed out that market integration proceeded
at different paces in different parts of Europe, with the earliest strides
taken in northern Italy, southern Germany, and the Low Countries. It is
no accident that these regions were also precociously urban, with
populations increasingly dependent upon the market for their goods. In
the late medieval Low Countries, for example, a growing population
and a shift from arable to dairy farming came together to commercialize
agriculture as dairy products were marketed in northern Europe’s larger
cities, and grain was imported from northern Germany and lands at the
eastern end of the Baltic Sea. A surplus population (cattle raising was
not as labor intensive as arable farming) swelled the cities and stimulated
expansion in manufacturing, its products likewise directed through the
channels that markets were opening up. Such integration was not seen
everywhere, especially in manufactures; indeed, in England in 1500
most manufactured products never reached market at all, the bulk of
them being made and consumed in the household. This would change,
however, so that by 1600 the European economy was integrated to a
degree “unimaginable” in 1400.! Of course, population growth, espe-
cially in cities, and the development of rural industry and a growing
class of landless laborers contributed mightily to this integration during
what Fernand Braudel called “the long sixteenth century.” Even when
the population curve began to level off between 1600 and 1750,
however, the proportion of the population dependent on the market
continued to grow. During this period the trend was toward concentra-
tion of demand in Europe’s larger cities.
De Vries has recently called for renewed attention to the economic
history of the household unit, and contends that the “consumer revolu-
tion” that marked the second half of the seventeenth and the entire
eighteenth centuries was in fact driven by what he calls an “industrious
revolution,” whereby the productive resources of households expanded
by more intensive labor and were reallocated. He suggests that house-
holds made decisions that “increased both the supply of market com-
modities and labor and the demand for goods offered in the
marketplace.”” Economic historians like De Vries or Maxine Berg
1 Jordan Goodman and Katrina Honeyman, Gainful Pursuits: The Making of Industrial
Europe, 1600-1914 (London, 1988), p. 64.
Journal of
2 Jan DeVries, “The Industrial Revolution and the industrious revolution,”
power
Economic History 54:2 (1994), 255. See also Jan De Vries “Between purchasing
modern
and the world of goods: understanding the household economy of early
of Goods
Europe,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World
(London, 1993), pp. 85-132.
caution us, then, from thinking about the household economy as being
somehow divorced from markets, as historians used to assume, instead
suggesting that households were hooked up with other households ina
network of complex and reciprocal alliances, and that during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries households became increasingly
market oriented.
Thanks to the vast historiography on proto-industrialization of the
past twenty-five years, we know a great deal about households and
markets in the context of textile production, but these are primarily
rural. How do urban artisans fit into this picture? Clearly by the late
seventeenth century, various sectors of the urban artisanal economy had
become deeply immersed in expanding domestic and international
markets, and some of these sectors took on some of the characteristics of
what later came to be called “economies of scale.” As we will see,
however, some of the characteristics of scale were already emerging in
some artisanal sectors in the Middle Ages. Indeed, within small com-
modity production we can find a wide range of units of production
existing side by side and sometimes in interdependent combination,
from small-scale, relatively lowly capitalized but highly specialized
household-based workshops to complex, highly capitalized entrepre-
neurial networks involving partnerships and subcontracting.
Certainly the most prevalent unit of production was the workshop
where family members and a handful of employees toiled. This is the
traditional image of the preindustrial manufacturing economy, and
every city in Europe from the high Middle Ages to the twentieth century
had multitudes of such units. The German term Handwerken describes
them well. In contrast to Manufacturen, which were enterprises with
many workers concentrated in one place and a market with customers
that the producer never saw, Handwerken suggested small shops which
met the needs of local customers and which obeyed a set of norms
governing exchange between buyers and sellers who knew each other.
Scores of trades in medieval London were little different in their regard
for the rules of a community-based economy from their sixteenth-
century descendants, or, for that matter, from those in Reformation
Augsburg, seventeenth-century Dijon, or eighteenth-century Lleida,
Spain. These enterprises were shaped by the local market, supplying the
needs of the town and hinterland, catering to a local clientele either by
marketing “bespoke” goods (that is, those commissioned by the cus-
tomer), or products sold directly to the public from the shop window
or
from a stall in the marketplace near the church or in the central square.
Inventories were usually, though not always, small. Guild artisans like
bakers, butchers, tailors, blacksmiths, locksmiths, saddlemakers, engra-
vers, cabinet-makers and many others, usually fit this profile, as do, in
some respects, nonguild artisans — many of them women — producing
and selling inexpensive consumer goods like combs, wooden mugs,
thimbles, needles, and so on.
This familiar picture is an accurate rendering of much of the small
commodity production in preindustrial Europe, but recent research has
probed behind the uncomplicated image of the artisan in his shop to
discover that the craft economy could be quite complex, with many
sectors of it enmeshed in a diversified and far-flung market economy
long before historians have customarily assumed. By the sixteenth
century an urban network connected many European cities in systems
of commercial transaction which became frameworks for regional devel-
opment in manufacturing.
As markets expanded and consumer demand increased, the array of
manufactured products available diversified, as did the activities of the
artisans who made them, ranging from luxury products adorning the
bodies and decorating the homes and modes of transport of the increas-
ingly wealthy elite, to the cheaper imitations of them, the so-called
“populuxe” goods — silk hosiery, umbrellas, snuff boxes, pipes, ceramic
tableware — that also found an expanding market. The eighteenth-
century Englishman Tobias Smollett snobbishly moaned that “the
general tide of luxury. . . hath overspread the nation and swept [up]. . .
even the very dregs of the people. Every upstart of fortune [is] harnessed
in the trappings of the mode ... ”* Whether all of this constituted a
consumer “revolution” we can leave to the economic historians to
debate, but there can be no question that the number of Europeans
dependent on the market increased, in some places dramatically, across
the early modern centuries. Nor is it in doubt that the variety of goods
available and the kinds of artisans who made them increased apace.
Galloping diversity and specialization would be characteristics that
would mark the urban artisanry at least to the end of the nineteenth
century.
Demand and supply
The economic categories of supply and demand are, of course, recipro-

cally intertwined, and must be analyzed, if separately, nonetheless in
relation to one another. Economic historians have often privileged one
or the other in their quest for explanations of economic trends. For
example, until recently most approaches to industrialization have been
Road from Craft Fellowship
3 Quoted in R. A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries
to Trade Unionism (London, 1979), p. 80.
dominated by supply-side considerations (production, technology, and

so on). Increasingly of late, however, demand factors have garnered
attention, especially those of a cultural cast. Not only are markets — their
structures as well as access to them — being explored as formative in the
creation of “manufacturing communities,” as Maxine Berg puts it, but
expenditure patterns dictated by taste and fashion are being granted
primary consideration as well.4 This exploring of the varieties of
demand factors informs much of the recent historiography on the
“consumer revolution” of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The most noteworthy feature of production in early modern manufac-
turing is its decentralization. Artisans produced according to the logic of
“constant returns to scale,” an economic rationality whereby “growth of
output required proportional growth of the inputs of labor and raw
materials.”° In a system guided by such logic expansion was accom-
plished by increasing the quantities of labor and materials rather than by
expanding the physical plant because concentrated production was
cumbersome, increasingly expensive, and fraught with the problem of
labor indiscipline. As long as manufacturing operated according to the
logic of constant returns to scale, pressures to expand production
exerted by increased demand, then, would be accommodated by decen-
tralization, not concentration. Only gradually did manufacturers
abandon the logic of constant returns to scale and decentralized produc-
tion. They did so, as we will see, by experimenting with economies of
scale in some product lines where high-volume, standardized, and
concentrated production became the rule.
Still, the vast majority of artisanal businesses in the early modern
period worked within the framework of constant returns to scale, which
meant that expansion of production stimulated by increased demand
would take the shape of decentralized enterprises which could be highly
varied. Historians generally have categorically separated the “putting-
out system” from “small commodity production,” and though this may
be useful for analytical purposes, we must recognize that in the actual
functioning of the craft economy, these modes were often intercon-
nected by elaborate and complex networks of subcontracting. In
the
putting-out system, production was flexible because labor, in an age
(at
least since the mid-fifteenth century) of chronic underemployment, was
readily available. Labor could be added to or reduced by the employer
4 See Maxine Berg, “Markets, trade and European manufactu

re,” in Maxine Berg, ed.,
Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (London, 1991),
pp. 3—28; and De
Vries, “The Industrial Revolution,” passim.
> Jan De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600—1750 (Cambridge, 1976),
p.91.
without difficulty to expand or contract the volume of output in

response to demand. The putting-out system is usually associated with
rural, especially textile, production whereby a merchant orchestrates
and controls production by “putting out” raw materials to workers (raw
wool to spinners, spun thread to weavers, bolts of woven fabric to fullers
and dyers, and so on) who then fashion only parts of a finished product
(but it should be noted that this way of organizing production took hold
in other trades such as nailmaking and in cities as well). The well-
documented transformation of the textile industry into a Verlagssystem
or putting-out system in N6érdlingen between the late sixteenth and
early eighteenth centuries illustrates this well. Variations on the putting-
out system were also employed by mercers everywhere. These entrepre-
neurs usually were not artisans, but they would often transform goods
before selling them in their “general stores” by farming out the mod-
ification work to craftsmen.
In the pure form of this mode of production, artisans had little if any
control over the movement of the product to market (that function
being performed by the merchant). However, quite often we find
variations of the putting-out system where artisans employed subcon-
tracting arrangements, and thereby more greatly preserved their inde-
pendence by hammering out and closing business deals face to face,
without the mediation of merchants. In this mode, products were
fashioned in a similar way to putting out (component-part production),
but artisans were not as dependent upon merchants. Among most urban
craftsmen in most cities, the tradition of independence had deep roots,
and so small commodity workshops knitted together through subcon-
tracting arrangements were more common than the putting-out system,
which was found mostly in trades — above all, textiles — with export
markets about which merchants would be better informed than local
artisans. However, in both instances — putting out and subcontracted
small commodity — there was relatively modest capital investment in
physical plant, and production was expanded by a proliferation of very
small and increasingly specialized trades.
As demand increased trades proliferated, specialized, and diversified.
For five centuries after the Black Death Europeans witnessed the
introduction of a vast array of urban-made consumer products in
leatherware, metalware, woodworking, luxuries, textiles, and the like.
There is no clear timetable for this transformation, nor was it even over
time and smooth from place to place; but cities that experienced it first
and with the greatest intensity, establishing new trades and turning out
novel goods, were those that felt a quickening of commercial demand
for their products. Precocious in this regard were cities that, largely
because of their advantageous geographic location, engaged in inter-

national trade as early as the high Middle Ages. In thirteenth-century
Nuremberg, for instance, we can find within its walls goldsmiths,
cutlers, furriers, beltmakers, armorers, swordsmiths, scythesmiths, pew-
terers, and mirrormakers plying their trades and selling their products to
middlemen who carried them well beyond the city’s walls. The four-
teenth century saw the appearance of, among others, wiresmiths, bottle-
makers, brass smiths, and dicemakers. By 1400 the registers of the
Rugsamt, a municipal tribunal specializing in commercial and industrial
affairs, listed 141 separate trades, among them such highly specialized
ones as playing-card illuminators, brass-bowl makers, honeycake
makers, and scalemakers. The trend continued in the sixteenth century,
especially in precision metalware (for which this city became renowned),
from bells to candlesticks, hinges, doorknobs, and musical instruments;
from curtain rods, scissors, and precision scientific instruments, to
pistols and cannon.
With shifting consumer demand, trades came and went. Dijon is a
well-documented example of the dramatic reconfiguration the artisanry
might undergo. In 1464 the tax rolls list 81 different trade descriptions,
14 of which had disappeared from the rolls of 1556. The other 67 trades
from 1464, however, were joined by 20 entirely new crafts. By 1643 21
more trades had disappeared, while 11 new ones were listed, and then
by 1750 10 had been lost but 36 new ones had appeared. Thus from
1464 to 1750, as the total number of craft descriptions on the tax rolls
increased from 81 to 102, fully 67 new descriptions had appeared and
45 had vanished.
Consumer demand and market expansion went hand in glove with
artisanal specialization and, despite the mythical status that the autono-
mous artisan toiling in his workshop with a handful of workers com-
mands in traditional accounts, no craftsman stood alone. Indeed, the
more we learn about their business practices, the more we realize how
deeply enmeshed artisans were in interdependent networks. Michael
Sonenscher and Steven L. Kaplan have recently demonstrated the
complexity of these networks in eighteenth-century France. Consider
subcontracting. Sonenscher has convincingly shown that during the
eighteenth century an expanding and diversifying market was stocked
with products from increasingly specialized artisanal enterprises
engaged in widespread and intricate subcontracting networks. Most
master artisans still made limited runs of articles sold within a
range of
variable prices, and depended upon perhaps scores of constantly
chan-
ging and dispersed market outlets, relying upon personal relationship
s
for information about those markets as well as for all-important
credit,
possible subcontracted work, and labor availability. The eighteenth-

century economy was certainly more diverse, extensive, and segmented
than ever before, but the outlines of, and the trajectory toward, such an
economy are clearly discernible in preceding centuries.
Craftsmen in the construction trades, for example, had established
subcontracting arrangements almost as far back as we have records of
their activities. Already around 1300 in the Artois we know that master
masons and carpenters who had engaged in large projects would
simultaneously take on smaller jobs and then subcontract the work to
others, sometimes masters in their own guild, sometimes not, and some-
times to craftsmen of nonmaster status. Certain masons in medieval
Bruges became site managers and as such co-ordinated equally elabo-
rate systems of subcontracting with other masons, stonecutters, hodcar-
riers, carpenters, and all the other workers that thronged construction
sites. Little had changed by the fifteenth century, or even the eighteenth,
as construction in Florence or Lyons illustrates. In each instance, and
no doubt in many other early modern cities, projects were bid for and
then jobbed out by masters with more access to capital and credit than
their fellows, and so in effect the lesser masters who lacked the financial
means to take on large projects were hiring out their labor and expertise,
sometimes as foremen of work crews comprised of journeymen masons
and carpenters.
Everywhere we look at late medieval and early modern artisanal
business practices we see subcontracting. Mercers, as we have seen, are
one example, while luxury craftsmen present another. Master craftsmen
in some luxury trades in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Delft, for
instance, employed such techniques. Montias’s study of the craftsmen
producing luxury goods there crisply illustrates the kinds of business
practices we see elsewhere. Adjusting to a contraction of ecclesiastical
patronage in the wake of the triumph of Protestantism in the Dutch
Republic and a simultaneous rise of a domestic mentality among its
people, many Dutch master painters began to market “ready-made”
paintings destined for home decoration (by 1660 45,000 paintings hung
on the walls of Delft homes). To meet the demand of this market, they
subcontracted with other, specialized master or journeyman painters
(some to do expensive, high-quality work, others to turn out cheap
dozjin werck — the same painting rendered, literally, by the dozen). These
entrepreneurs then sold their standardized and “mass-produced” wares
from increasingly large inventories either directly to the public, or to art
dealers.
Subcontracting, evidently, was widely practiced. We know that six-
the
teenth-century butchers rented the stalls in the Paris boucheries from
municipality, then sublet them to so-called ézaliers, who also did the
actual butchering. The “butchers” provided the animals, paid the étaliers
for slaughtering them and marketing the meat, and cleared a profit in
the bargain. In sixteenth-century Augsburg some master furniture-
makers of means, rather than expanding their plant, inventory, and
labor costs, subcontracted with smaller masters of the same guild to
produce component parts of furniture which would then be assembled
in the workshop of the contracting master. Similarly, in many crafts in
the same city several shops often collaborated on single orders (espe-
cially large ones).
In such systems of subcontracting, finished products thus involved
several processes. Consider the complex collaboration between
craftsmen in production of a horse’s saddle in London around 1300. A
joiner made the saddle tree, a lorimer the harness, while painters added
decoration. The saddler oversaw and co-ordinated the process providing
the investment capital and then retailing the finished product. Similar
co-ordination and subcontracting took place in the production of works
of art. In late medieval Tournai painters were deeply interdependent in
networks of subcontracting, as were their Florentine counterparts. Take,
for example, the production of the major altarpiece commissioned for
the church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence in 1370. Art history books
attribute the piece to Jacopo di Cione, but its production actually
involved a host of designers, painters, carpenters, and gilders. The
manufacture of the gun further demonstrates interconnected systems of
production. Ostensibly made by the gunmaker, by the eighteenth
century it in fact involved nine different craft processes as the lock,
stock, and barrel passed through different, “independent” shops on
their way to final assembly in the gunmaker’s shop.
Textiles also witnessed innovation in product and diversity in the
trades turning it out, as well as systems of subcontracting. Wool, cotton,
flax, and silk fabrics were woven in countless varieties of weaves (often
of mixed fabric), designs, shapes, and colors, many of these co-
ordinated processes occurring in different urban artisan shops. The
sayetteurs of Lille worked on commission with merchants, sometimes
with groups of other masters who would collectively buy raw materials
from wholesalers and then commission work and distribute the materials
to other master sayetteurs.
The situation in the hardware trades of eighteenth-century Bir-
mingham or the edged-steel tools of contemporary Sheffield is no less
a part of a visible trajectory of diversification and specialization trace-
able to the high Middle Ages, the difference being one of degree rather
than kind. The streets of Birmingham buzzed with the activity of
The craft economy
55
metal-working craftsmen turning out of their shops a dizzying variety
of buckles, lamps, spurs, candlesticks, metal fittings, or kitchen items.
The city was a matrix of small, interconnected, and interdependent
workshops. The edged-steel tool industry of Sheffield, likewise, was
astonishingly specialized: in 1797 fully 134 artisan enterprises made
pocket Knives, while 81 others made table knives, 33 more made
razors, and yet 34 others made surgical instruments. As with many of
their craft ancestors, these eighteenth-century artisans were simulta-
neously independent (they worked on their own account in their own
shops, hiring wage-workers as needed) and dependent (credit was
usually necessary to purchase raw materials and to pay wages, while
the product from their shops was often a component part of another
product).
If decentralized small commodity production was the norm from the
Black Death to industrialization, we nonetheless can observe “hotspots”
scattered around Europe where enterprises were partially organized
according to the modern principles we have come to identify with
economies of scale. With an eye toward reducing what modern econo-
mists have come to call transaction costs, or consolidating access to a
market, some enterprises concentrated production in protofactories like
the glass works, dyeworks, and brickmaking operations in East London
during the seventeenth century, which were concentrated in plants or
yards, and artisans traveled from their homes to these protofactories
daily for work. Even some small commodity enterprises, however, can
be found that reflect a drift to scale. Some of these small enterprises
integrated vertically, while others combined horizontally. The modern
economic characteristics of volume manufacture of standardized pro-
ducts and uniform pricing can also be seen.
One path to economy of scale has been vertical integration, a way of
organizing production and distribution not unknown in the preindustrial
economy. Take the butchers of Bologna as an example. In the late
sixteenth century the butchers were accused by the tanners of en-
croaching on the monopoly the tanners supposedly held in tanning
hides. The butchers, as events of the seventeenth century clearly prove,
were individuals working in individual shops, but who nonetheless
collectively attempted to, and for a time succeeded in, vertically inte-
grating the raw leather trade by bringing together the purchase and
butchering of cattle and the tanning and marketing of the hides. Other
guildsmen elsewhere tried different tactics, but aiming toward vertical
integration nonetheless. In the eighteenth century, in order to free
themselves from dependence upon the founders, the painter-sculptors
of Paris conferred a mastership upon a journeyman without any training
their founding and

in their trade and then arranged with him to do all of
ae:
smelting work in return.
lines increas ing volume and standar dizatio n of
In some product
are evident. We have already seen the exampl e of
product and pricing
s being turned out of painters ’ shops in
“mass-produced” painting
seventeenth-century Delft, and we find such product ion process es in
other trades as well. Driven by widening demand in the seventeenth and
especially the eighteenth century, consumer goods like hats or pottery
were increasingly made in volume and in a standard range of styles.
Indeed, from 1500 to 1700 we can observe a drift away from bespoke
manufacture (that is, the making of customized items ordered by
specific clients) to “ready made.” This trend is especially visible in the
making of clothing and shoes. By the mid-seventeenth century, a ready-
made shoe industry had emerged in Northampton, England, as shoe-
makers toiling in their own shops made a standard range of footwear
primarily for the burgeoning London market. Merchants placing the
orders with the craftsmen, of course, reaped the greatest benefit from
savings on transaction costs, but the artisans nonetheless received a
steady flow of orders. A similar effect was exerted by demand from the
militaries of early modern states as the new and expanding standing
armies of the seventeenth century were armed, clothed, and shod. Vast
quantities of standardized muskets, uniforms, and boots were turned
out of countless artisan shops across Europe.
Capital, investment, and credit

Capital from commerce was the fuel that made the manufacturing
economy run. Investment patterns in many product lines across Europe
show merchants investing in manufacturing. Merchants could move
capital in and out of industrial investments without much difficulty since
the fixed investment was low; but this does not mean that capital was
exceedingly fluid because a great deal of capital was tied up in credit.
Credit could take a multitude of forms, from purchase of government
bonds to short-term bills of exchange to advances on orders placed. It
was not unusual to find merchants or even master artisans providing
short-term credit to masters, or becoming silent partners by investing
capital in a master’s enterprise, either for start-up costs or for continuing
manufacture. We find master artisans everywhere loaning and borrow-
ing, like everyone else, through personal rentes (as they were called in
France), or annuities. Kaplan has found that about one-third of the
bakers of Paris invested in such annuities, ranging from such modest
investments as 162 livres to a sizable 47,390 livres.
The craft economy
57
Elsewhere, as in sixteenth-century Seville and seventeenth-ce
ntury
Dijon, artisans took advantage of a building boom by buying
houses,
sometimes fixing them up, and then renting them. Luis de
Ribera, a
silversmith in the Spanish city, even owned all of the houses
on one
block of the Calle de Vigenes in 1600. Whether the capital returne
d
from such investments was channeled back into manufacturing we have
no way of knowing, nor can we say beyond speculation that capital from
profits from trade or from dowries did so. Wherever the capital went,
however, we know that many an artisan’s income derived from more
than craft production. Sevillian craftsmen, for instance, joined mer-
chants in investing in overseas trading ventures in the booming sixteenth
century. Rich artisans like silversmiths could be substantial investors,
even trafficking in the slave trade, while more ordinary craftsmen like
shoemakers, clothiers, or leather workers not uncommonly pooled their
resources and were involved in the occasional shipping of small quanti-
ties of merchandise like hides, soap, wax, or honey to the colonies of
New Spain.
Dowries were another infusion of capital into a craftsman’s purse.
The Sevillian sculptor Pedro Millan bought two houses and a workshop
with his wife’s dowry. Indeed, marriage contracts frequently stated that
the dowry was to be used for starting a business, and as such are very
good sources of information about start-up costs. In the current state of
research we do not know much about this, but what we do know tells us
that such costs could substantially tax the means of an ordinary artisan.
In Dijon from the mid-fifteenth century through at least the mid-
seventeenth, for instance, costs for entering a guild and setting up shop
continually escalated. All of the following required expenses went up:
fees to the craft confraternity, capital outlay for the materials necessary
for the nonmaster to make the masterpiece, providing the food and
drink for the celebratory banquet after admission to the guild, and of
course, the costs of outfitting a shop.
Indeed, it cost shoemaker Bénigne Rebourg 300 /ivres — no mean sum
to a seventeenth-century craftsman — to buy raw materials and tools to
start his business in 1632. Tools, especially in precision trades like
coppersmithery, could cost a great deal, even 100 livres, as they did in
Dijon in 1627. In late seventeenth-century London it would cost a dyer,
a mason, or a tailor anywhere from 100 to 600 pounds to set up shop,
while the sum would run up to 1,000 pounds for a tanner or pewterer,
and perhaps 3,000 pounds for a goldsmith. Jacques-Louis Ménétra, the
eighteenth-century Parisian glazier, tells us in his inimitable memoirs
that it cost him 300 francs (equivalent to livres) to buy a presumably
equipped shop from a fellow master glazier around 1770, a cost perhaps
below market since, as Ménétra informs us, “the deal was closed”
because “we had been friends.”® Such amounts required advantageous
marriages (Ménétra’s future wife advanced him the money to buy the
shop), or access to credit. An inexpensive, marginally equipped, and out
of the way bakery in Ménétra’s city in the 1760s and 1770s would run to
at least 300 livres, and a prosperous enterprise could sell on the market
for 6,000 Livres, this in addition to fees to join the guild that could reach
nearly 1,000 divres. For those artisans who could not afford to buy,
renting was an option, but again among the bakers of Paris, the range
could be vast, from 140 livres annually for a bakery in the faubourg Saint-
Lazare to 3,200 livres for a prime location in town on the rue Aumaire.
Often overlooked in discussions of small commodity enterprises is the
ubiquity of credit relations. These are nonetheless fundamental to our
understanding of this economy. Many workshops may have been small,
but whatever the size, all were immersed in surprisingly elaborate credit
and debit networks of mutual dependence that provided the means of
doing business. The Florentine Catasto of 1427, for instance, shows
long lists of artisans’ debtors and creditors, suggesting an extensive web
of credit relations. What Peter Earle has said about the late seventeenth-
century English economy can be said about the early modern economy
as a whole: there was a cash basis to the economy, but credit permeated
every aspect of economic life. No shop stood alone, and ironically, this
was the source of both the artisan’s precarious dependency and his
much-valued independence.
Everything hinged on respectability. As Gervase Rosser has noted,
the single most pressing earthly concern of every medieval artisan was the
establishment of a good personal reputation. This imperative was accentuated
by a relatively high degree of mobility among the working population . . . Until
good repute could be vindicated, it would be impossible to obtain credit — that
personal credit without which survival in the urban economy was not to be
expected.’
Receiving credit secured the independence of the master craftsmen
and provided a bulwark against sinking into the ranks of wage labor; but
indebtedness had to be managed effectively. The artisan who allowed
small debts to become large ones faced the threat of plunging to penury
and status ignominy. To avoid such shame, artisans had to pay attention
to cash flow. Inventories were relatively small because income, and thus
the ability to repay debt, was proportional to the velocity of the circula-
® Jacques-Louis Ménétra, A Journal of My Life, trans. Anton Goldhammer (New York,

1986), p. 169.
7 Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, guilds and the negotiation of work in the medieval town,”
Past
and Present 154 (1997), 9.
tion of capital; it may have been unavoidable for artisans to tie up capital
in debt and wages, so turnover in inventory was the critical variable in
the enterprise’s viability. The key to preindustrial profit for merchant
and artisan was increasing the speed of circulating capital.
In short, the cash flow problem was one that every artisanal enterprise
had to solve to remain viable, and effective management of credit was
the way to do it. In fourteenth-century Bruges bankers provided credit
overdrafts to producers of cloth, necessary for the drapers because theirs
was a business of frequent purchases of materials for small sums and
sporadic sales of cloth for larger sums. Similarly, cash flow was eased
through credit in fifteenth-century Florence, a place where the general
confidence in the recording system of debit and credit was extraordina-
rily high. Here artisans often were paid in drafts drawn on their current
employer’s banker. Alternatively, these same artisans might allow credits
with their employer to build up, and then pay off their own debts by
channeling them through their employer’s banker.
Debt management was no simple task, especially if one’s customers
were aristocrats. The eighteenth-century luxury economy was what
Daniel Roche has called a “deferred economy,” where the bills that
aristocrats owed artisans could go years in arrears. Craftsmen usually
got paid, but often after considerable cajoling, eventual threatening, and
even litigating. An artisan would start with a friendly, deferential
reminder to settle promptly, or to negotiate some sort of mutual
satisfaction. If the aristocrat balked, a threat of legal action was next,
and records show that artisans in the 1780s increasingly resorted to this,
and almost always found the courts sympathetic to their case. Payment,
often with interest, was usually forthcoming.
Every artisan encountered the problem of keeping his debts below his
credits, but even though we are sure that the web of credit relations was
extensive, indeed ubiquitous even in the late Middle Ages, we know
surprisingly little about how artisans managed cash flow. Few artisan
account books survive, but those that do point to rudimentary single-
entry book-keeping techniques. Household and business expenses and
income were thrown together and, even among artisans and tradesmen
in late seventeenth-century England, or even eighteenth-century Paris,
the periodic “taking stock” was simply meant to measure accumulation,
not compute annual profits, much less return on capital.
One bright light has been shone on this dark corner of daily, small-
scale credit practices by Steven Kaplan in his extraordinary study of
eighteenth-century Parisian bakers.* The abbé Galiani observed that
8 Steven L. Kaplan, Le Meilleur Pain du monde: Les Boulangers de Paris au XVIIIe siécle
(Paris, 1996), esp. chapter 5, “Le pain a crédit.”
“everyone buys bread on credit,” not just because of scarcity of liquid

capital but also because of the intense competition among bakers which
encouraged them to offer credit to customers to win their business. To
keep track of how much customers owed the baker, rather than keeping
elaborate account books of debits and credits (this was still an age of
widespread illiteracy, especially among the poorer of the bakers’ custo-
mers), bakers employed something called a taille. This was a long piece
of wood split lengthwise into two strips, one for the customer and one
for the baker. As the customer made a purchase on credit, the baker
notched both strips in the presence of the buyer. When the taille was
“declared full” by the baker, no more credit would be extended and it
was time to pay up.
To remain viable or to prosper, an artisan had to oversee debt
management with a keen eye, keeping his ear to the ground for informa-
tion that a debtor had come into some money, and to be promptly at his
door to collect. Obviously, not every artisan could be first in line. For
those who could not manage cash flow, and thus not keep credits
beyond debts, two options offered, both of them bleak. First, retrench-
ment, whereby the strapped craftsman reduced his borrowing. This,
however, ran against the need for status spending necessary for the
maintenance of the all-important social rank. As Daniel Defoe so
succinctly put it in the early eighteenth century: “he must live as others
do, or lose the credit of living and be run down as if he was broke. In a
word, he must spend more than he can afford to spend, and so be
undone, or not spend it, and so be undone.’? If Defoe is correct,
retrenchment was the slippery slope to loss of status and even bank-
ruptcy.
The rise of retail shops

Within Europe’s cities we can observe some transformations in the
artisanry. Certainly there was specialization in product and producer,
and also specialization in market. Fashionable aristocratic consumption
drove a greater proportion of artisans toward luxury production, as we
will see. The thirst for imitation by the lower orders, in turn, triggered
“populuxe” consumption and production which reached a vast scale in
the eighteenth century. Moreover, the increasingly standardized pro-
ducts of this expansion and transformation were marketed in new ways,
notably from “bespoke” to retail. It is between 1500 and 1700 that we
find the emergence, and, if not the generalization then at least the
° Quoted in Peter Earle, The Making of the English Working Class (Berkeley, 1989), p. 132.
spread of the retail shop, described by the Bristol merchant John Carey
in 1695 as “the wheel whereon the inland trade turns,.”!°
Artisans had for centuries marketed their goods through a combina-
tion of individual, open shop windows and market stalls erected on
market days in the central square, or at periodic fairs. In most cases
(food purveyors being the notable exception), they displayed a few
samples of their products and took orders. Such business practices
required little in the way of inventory. During the early modern
period, however, we find more shopkeeping artisans offering a greater
variety of increasingly standardized products, sometimes made else-
where, as regional specialization and market integration proceeded.
By 1550 this transformation was already well under way in London,
as it was in most urban centers during the second half of the
sixteenth century.
The growth of retail shopkeeping meant that artisan shopkeepers
needed a deeper inventory, which in turn required an increase in the
scale of operation. Most shops of this nature still could be classified as
small commodity, but the demand for capital nonetheless incremen-
tally increased (start-up costs continually rose, for instance, especially
during the eighteenth century). One result was further specialization in
manufacturing and marketing. For example, among the seventeenth-
century London pewterers, we find those with most capital and the
largest inventory supplying wholesale customers. Few of these men
actually produced what they sold, instead buying the product from
small masters who also turned out specialized items (and sold some
from their own shops) dictated by the wholesaler and, indirectly, by
the consumer market. There were also retailing pewterers with sizable
stock who did manufacture the product (or, more accurately, oversaw
and organized the production in their workshops) and who sold to
both retail and wholesale customers. We can find similar subcon-
tracting and marketing arrangements in many commodity trades, in
some instances leading to a complete separation of manufacturing
from retailing. The day when the manufacturing artisan no longer
retails his product is still long in the future — even in London only
about 14 percent of the employed population were shopkeepers in
1700 and even in 1850 — but the trend to purveying increasingly
standardized commodities from fixed premises rather than selling
bespoke goods in the open, central market was clearly underway in the
sixteenth century and was accelerating thereafter.
10 Quoted in H. Mui and L. H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England

(London, 1989), p. 6.
The luxury trades
A closer look at the specific experience of three important and dynamic

sectors of the early modern craft economy — the luxury, building, and
textile trades — will demonstrate some of the historical characteristics we
have been discussing: diversity, extension, and segmentation of market,
specialization of producer, and standardization of product. Recent
literature on the consumer revolution of the late seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries has pointed toward changes in taste and fashion which,
on the one hand, intensified consumption of expensive luxury products
by an elite that found capital increasingly concentrated in its hands, and
on the other, broadened consumption of “populuxe” goods by a
growing “middling sort” of well-off tradesmen, artisans, merchants, and
legal and medical professionals.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a growing aristocratic
presence in towns, as a self-conscious refinement, dissociation, distinc-
tion, and sense of cultural difference between social strata increasingly
marked urban society. Distinction was made visible by consumption,
and such consumption, coupled with growth in private building, is
considered to be a significant catalyst to economic expansion. Indeed,
historians now agree that in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries the luxury trades, especially in France but also nearly everywhere
else, comprised one of the most substantial sectors of the urban
economy. Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote that in the 1770s and 1780s
an “explosion of luxury, taste, and fashion” had rocked Paris, adding
that “600 mansions were built, that on the inside looked like a fairy-
land,” as furniture became an important object of luxury and expense.!!
Mid-eighteenth-century Madrid was gripped by similar consuming
habits, and over half of its artisans produced items — quality textiles and
leather goods, jewelry, objects of precious metal — to meet the demand.
If we know a good deal about such spending during the “consumer
revolution” of the 1700s, we are considerably less informed about
earlier centuries. Surprisingly, however, scattered evidence suggests that
similar cultural forces had been exerted for centuries, if not on the same
scale, and in the process had transformed luxury trades and building
industries into the complex enterprises we tend to associate only with a
later period.
For example, in the low countries of Flanders and Brabant in the
fifteenth century, as the textile industry contracted, industrial renewal
and the emergence of new guilds centered on luxury goods — painting,
11 Quoted in Michael Stiirmer, “An economy of delight: court artisans of the eighteenth
century,” Business History Review 53 (1979), 497.
embroidery, carpets, fashionable clothing — largely because of the

domestic demand stimulated by fashionable consumption at the court
of the dukes of Burgundy and by members of the urban elite bent on
emulation. This economy was, of course, organized corporatively, and
the cell of production and distribution was the artisanal workshop. To
domestic demand, however, was added an export market, as demand for
Flemish and Brabantine luxuries escalated to the point where, according
to Van der Wee, they began to flood Europe in the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
Whether or not this constituted a “commercial revolution,” as Van
der Wee suggests, with the expansion of the market came a transforma-
tion of business organization, especially in the direction of specialization
and segmentation which carried into the seventeenth century. Surviving
contracts commissioning tapestries and paintings, for instance, show
that some specialists would weave, embroider, or paint only faces,
others only hands, dresses, or landscapes, passing the tapestry or
painting from shop to shop as the process was completed. As labor
became increasingly specialized, so too did particular towns in the
production of particular luxury products. Malines, Brussels, Ghent, and
Bruges were renown as centers of the production and export of lace and
fine linen. Leiden was famous for cut diamonds, while Delft emerged as
the center for majolica.
In their response to demand for luxury items and their cheaper
imitations, the artisans of Delft illustrate many of the trends in the
artisanal economy we have discussed thus far. We have already encoun-
tered the “mass” production of paintings called, appropriately, dozjin
werck, which found their way onto the walls of tens of thousands of
Dutch homes. Earthenware production follows a similar pattern, be-
coming increasingly specialized as master faience-makers discontinued
making the clay tiles in house, opting instead to purchase them in bulk
from subcontracted artisans specializing in the task. Once under the
master faience-maker’s roof, the raw tiles were decorated, baked, and
sold in bulk (priced uniformly in 1,000-unit lots). To reduce costs, the
painted designs became less elaborate, more standardized, and increas-
ingly in the subsequently famous blue and white, which sold for at most
a quarter of the cost of the formerly popular polychrome tiles.
A similar development can be traced in Tuscany, over much the same
period. Although Florence had long been known for luxury goods by the
sixteenth century, the demand for luxury products grew in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries precisely as the woolen industry
leveled off then shriveled, bringing a whole new set of luxury crafts into
existence. It was during this time, as Brown and Goodman note, that
“large numbers of people concerned themselves with the pursuit of

fashion and of refined material culture.”!* These fashion-conscious,
status-proclaiming consumers (who included many artisan families)
exerted a noticeable demand for decorated furniture, glassware, glazed
ceramics, musical instruments, silks, and the like, and craftsmen were
drawn into these sectors of the economy to satisfy the demand.
Shops of all kinds proliferated. In Benedetto Dei’s description of
Florence in 1470, he counted eighty-four shops for woodcarving and
inlay, fifty-four for decorative marble and stone, and forty-four for gold-
and silversmithing. Between 1561 and 1642 the number of shops
dedicated to making and selling glassware exploded from ten to thirty-
two, ceramic shops from eight to thirteen, lute and harpsichord makers
from two to eleven, far outpacing the general population growth of
Florence which inched up by about 15 percent over roughly the same
period. Sixteenth-century Seville likewise became oriented toward
quality production, the result of the demand of an elite which was
thriving from the transatlantic trade. The city’s most numerous
craftsmen, not accidentally, were the embroiderers, painters, silver-
smiths, engravers, and sculptors.
The growth of a European conspicuously consuming aristocracy
during the early modern centuries has been amply documented. Best
known are the excesses of the courtly aristocrats. The wealthy inhabi-
tants of large, aristocratic houses were prodigious consumers of luxury
goods and services. In Paris in 1760s and 1770s, for instance, five
aristocratic houses employed in one way or another 1,800 artisans from
200 different trades. The hotel Kinsky, to take but one of these, under-
went constant alterations from the end of the 1770s to the early 1790s,
the Princess Kinsky employing in the process over a hundred craftsmen
whose ranks included seventeen painters, fourteen sculptors, seven
upholsterers, six carpenters, and three cabinet-makers. The Duchess
Fitz-James of Paris was a big spender, too. Between 1786 and 1788 she
spent 400,000 lures in debt settlements to over 200 artisans and
merchants, with 20,000 livres alone going to one joiner, 17,000 Livres to
a jeweller, 10,000 divres to an ironsmith, 9,000 livres to a carpenter,
7,000 livres to a wheelwright, and 6,000 livres to an upholsterer.
Stupendous as this kind of aristocratic consumption was, we should
not ignore the importance of the burgeoning numbers of the elite in
general in this robust luxury economy — office-holders, financiers,
merchants, lawyers, and rentiers. These men (and their spouses) were no
12 Judith C. Brown and Jordan Goodman, “Women and industry in Florence,”

Journal of
Economic History 40:1 (1980), 75; Richard Goldthwaite, The Building
of Renaissance
Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), p. 350.
less intent on proclaiming status by display, and as a great deal of the

capital flowing into royal coffers was so often redirected towards these
men’s pockets, they had ample and growing resources to finance luxury
consumption. The artisanal sector of local economies was often trans-
formed in the process. We shall return to this topic when we analyze the
workforce in the following chapter, but so dramatic was the impact of
this kind of consumption on the organization of work, that it is worth
commenting on it here.
In Dijon, which seems a typical example of its kind, from 1464 to
1750 the office-holding class grew from about 3 percent of the total
population of heads of households to over 12 percent (the total number
of laymen and women in town with tax exemption by reason of office
and/or nobility expanded from 57 to 567). Over the same period, the
percentage of artisans working in the luxury trades increased from 3.8
percent to 9 percent. Some trades closely tied to fashion witnessed
meteoric growth. Whereas goldsmiths, pewterers, and painters com-
prised 26 of the 31 artisans engaged in luxury production in the fifteenth
century, by the mid-eighteenth century these three trades counted for
only 29 of 133 artisans in this sector. By 1750 14 sculptors were working
in Dijon, as were 32 wigmakers, 15 faience-makers, 14 glassmakers, and
14 carriage-makers. In 1464 there were only two glassmakers in town
and only one sculptor, while there were no wigmakers (no one wore wigs
then), faience-makers, or carriage-makers at all. Indeed, the one-in-
eleven proportion in 1750 probably underrepresents the number of
artisans catering to the luxurious demands of members of the elite.
Certainly many locksmiths (whose numbers nearly doubled from 13 to
24 between 1643 and 1750) fashioned wrought iron products for elite
dwellings, while many tailors (whose numbers swelled from 80 to 144
over the century before 1750) were called upon to make the sumptuous
clothes so desired by these members of the elite. During the great period
of grandiose townhouse construction commissioned by these magis-
trates — the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the percentage of all
artisans laboring in the construction trades increased from just over 10
percent in 1464 to nearly 16 percent in 1643 and 1750. The number of
stonecutters — those essential craftsmen in townhouse construction and
decoration — mushroomed from zero in 1556 to forty-six in 1750.
Members of the elite with a taste for luxury transformed the artisanry
in other towns as well, and well before the eighteenth century. Rome in
the early sixteenth century housed a relatively large elite population —
the aristocracy and the clergy and courtiers attached to the papal court.
Of course, members of the Roman elite spent on luxury items of all
sorts; already in 1526 more than one in nine artisan household heads (of
1,760) was producing luxury items, a proportion that no doubt under-

represents the actual number catering to the elite since certainly many
tailors and leatherworkers (classified in different categories) made luxur-
ious items for these conspicuous-spending men and women (see illustra-
tions 1 and 2). Rome also experienced a construction boom that
spanned the sixteenth century and was capped by the Catholic Reforma-
tion-inspired building program of Sixtus V after 1585. This free-
spending pontiff (and some of his successors) were bent on glorifying
the Church of Rome, thus providing work for many carpenters, masons,
and tilers (16.4 percent of the 1,760 artisan household heads already in
1526-7), not to mention the thousands of unskilled day laborers
thronging the construction sites.
Saint Charles Borromeo had said that in Rome in his day, the late
sixteenth century, two things were needed to succeed: to love God and
to have a carriage. Many of the elite agreed. By 1594 883 carriages
owned by 675 people could be counted on the streets of Rome. In Paris
in 1720 there were 15,000 carriages. To meet the demand for this novel
and increasingly popular form of luxury, artisans began making them, or
rather, making their component parts. In Florence in 1561 there were
no coachmakers at all, yet by 1642 there were thirteen. The occupa-
tional description “coachmaker,” however, obscures the number of
artisans who were in fact involved in the manufacture of carriages.
Coachmaking ushered in a riot of specialization, and although the final
product was assembled in a “coachmaker’s” shop, in fact the carriage’s
constituent parts were produced in a wide array of individual shops. The
following eighteenth-century example shows how far specialization had
gone, for the London parish of St. Martin’s in the Fields was a veritable
coach factory without walls. Here fully seventeen trades were found to
participate in “coachmaking,” with “coachbuilders” assembling the
carriage whose parts were made by, among others, coach-frame makers,
coach-harness platers, coach-harness makers, coach joiners, coach pain-
ters, coach-spring makers, coach trimmers, and coach wheelwrights.
In
contemporary Paris we find the same, with blacksmiths and ironsmiths
forging the axles, springs, and hinges, harnessmakers dressing
the
leather, and joiners building the body, with saddlers decorating
the
inside and painters, gilders, and mirrorcutters the outside.
Rapid growth, specialization, and component-part product
ion and
assembly mark clock- and watchmaking no less than
coachmaking.
Weight-driven clocks were developed around 1300, and for
200 years
these large timekeeping devices were made by teams of ambulan
t clock-
makers, many who also were locksmiths and blacksmiths (illustra
tion 3).
Late medieval clockmakers belonged to no particul
ar professional
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France, Paris
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Illustration 2 Seventeenth-century shoemaker. Photo Bibliothéque nationale

de France, Paris
Illustration 3 Fifteenth-century clockmaker’s shop. Biblioteca Estense,

Modena (Ms. lat. 209=alfa.X.2.14: De Sphaera). Reproduced by kind per-
mission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali
category, and the technical competence for building clocks existed in

various crafts (weaponsmiths, goldsmiths, and above all locksmiths).
Clockmakers were a mobile lot, often working regions of a diameter of
two to four days’ journey. Heinrich Halder, for instance, worked in
Lucerne, Basle, and Strasbourg between 1373 and 1419.
With the invention of the much smaller spring-powered clocks around
1500 a new market was opened up and increasingly professionalized,
corporatively organized, and sedentary clockmakers came into being.
Though most towns of any size likely had a few of these resident
craftsmen, an export market emerged in the sixteenth century with
a
artisans in a handful of towns in central Europe — which had had
tradition of accomplished metalworking — making and selling timepieces
across Europe. Strasbourg, Ulm, Nuremberg, and above all Augsburg
emerged quickly as the clock- and watchmaking capitals of Europe.

Indeed, between 1550 and 1650 Augsburg licensed 182 master clock-
makers, and in any given year this town could count fifty to seventy
shops, each shop turning out fifteen to twenty-five timepieces annually.
Like coachmakers, clock- and watchmakers everywhere actually as-
sembled component parts which had been manufactured in other shops,
often through a subcontracted arrangement (thus the importance of
skilled metalworkers, especially those accomplished in making gears and
transmission devices). These German cities retained pride of place in
the timepiece market until the invention and manufacture by the
English and the Dutch of the pendulum clock in 1657 and the spring
balance pocket watch around 1700. The latter especially had the
potential to become a mass-produced consumer durable, as indeed it
did by the late eighteenth century. Between 1775 and 1800 300,000 to
400,000 such timepieces entered the market from watchmaker shops in
Europe each year.
Building trades
The building industry illustrates the characteristics of diversity, exten-

sion, and segmentation that marked preindustrial craft production more
than has commonly been realized. The construction market tended in
the late medieval and early modern period to be local in nature, in
respect both to demand and to supply, where employers tended to hire
local craftsmen who in turn relied upon, given the difficulty of transport,
a local or regional supply of building materials. Still, the industry saw
much specialization and expansion over these centuries. |
In late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, specialization was
already the rule (although there was, as elsewhere since the Middle
Ages, a remarkably free mobility of individual craftsmen between trades,
no doubt following market opportunities). Master wallers headed small
crews which specialized in masonry, or tiling, or laying foundations.
Like these independent workmen, stonecutters likewise often specialized
in specific tasks (illusration 4). Some quarried stone and chiseled it into
rough blocks ordered by a builder, while others worked in shops and
carved the blocks into decorative pieces to order. Some entrepreneurial
wallers and stonecutters had an eye toward expansion. Some wallers
performed a range of tasks, while some stonecutters integrated the
provisioning of decorated stone vertically by organizing the entire
production of quarrying, cutting, and carving. All of this was contracted
with a builder, likely the “purveyor” (provveditore) hired by the employer
to arrange for supplies, check on deliveries, pay for wages and materials,
Mit angn/Winckelmagf oi Richefcheit/

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Mit Reller/gewelb/Bad ond Briinn/
Mit Gibelmauwrn von Qhuaderfteitt/
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Seb ich auf feften ffarcken grunde/
Cadmus erfilich die Runt erfurnd.
2 Ser
Illustration 4 Sixteenth-century stonemason. Reproduced with permission
from Jost Amman and Hans Sachs, The Book of Trades, New York: Dover
Publications, 1973
(2 Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914
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Illustration 5 Early fifteenth-century builders at work. From

Livre des profits
champétres by Pierre de Crescent. Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal,
Paris. Photo
Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris
and to oversee the foreman who was entrus

ted with handling the
technical aspects of the construction project.
Such an organization of production was probab
ly typical of most
construction sites throughout early modern Europe
(illustration oe
Often this segmentation was driven, as was the
case in eighteenth-
century Lyons, by impoverishment of some master
s within the trade.
The craft economy 1B
These unfortunates lacked the financial means to purchase materials for

large projects, and so hired themselves out to the large builders, some-
times as foremen of work crews of journeymen masons or carpenters.
Most construction in most cities probably dealt with repairs to roofs,
doors, and windows, and so most businesses were small and shop-based
(illustration 6). Still, like all aspects of the craft economy, the building
industry was heterogeneous, with some builder artisans expanding their
operations into contracting when possible. With the housing boom for
middling and upper-class families, especially in Europe’s capitals and
port cities that commenced in some places like Seville in the late
sixteenth century and continued in other places through the eighteenth,
the opportunities to expand for artisans with access to credit were close
to hand. In some places there emerged contractors who organized, often
speculatively, vast home-building projects. Antwerp, Paris, and London
all had such businessmen, many of whom had begun their careers as
artisan builders. Large-scale, multicraft building projects linked in a web
of subcontracting were not, however, confined to the capitals — witness
Dijon — nor, as Elizabeth Musgrave has shown for eighteenth-century
Brittany, were all of the contractors men.
A close cousin to construction of buildings was the making of boats
and ships. Both trades had a highly fluid workforce that moved from site
to site or yard to yard, and in and out of trades. Both were concentrated
outside the workshop, though some shipwrights and caulkers, like
carpenters, masons, or glaziers, did maintain shops (often run by wives
and daughters, as the glazier Ménétra explicitly points out) to house
their supplies and tools, and from which to organize business operations
(taking orders, keeping the books). Similarly, like building construction,
shipbuilding was heterogeneous in organization and scale. In the Low
Countries, for example, independent craftsmen with small crews and
with access to sheltered waters and a stretch of flat shoreline built small
vessels of under 50 tons. Before the mid-sixteenth century this was the
overwhelming norm throughout Europe, as ships were relatively small.
After that, however, dramatic changes occurred in shipping and ship-
building, and although small workcrews continued to produce boats and
small ships, larger ships were increasingly turned out of yards whose
scale dwarfed the traditional operations. Like the large contractors in
the general building industry, the scale of operations could be vast.
It is well known that the Dutch were the preeminent shipbuilders of
seventeenth-century Europe. During a typical year of that booming
century fully 250 shipyards churned out between 300 and 400 ships of
200 tons or more. The seventeenth century had seen a dramatic
expansion in this industry, in terms of total tonnage, even as the number
Illustration 6 Carpenter’s workshop. From Les Quatre Etats de la vie

de Phomme
by Jean Bourdichon. Photo Bibliotheque nationale de
France, Paris ?
The craft economy as
of construction wharves contracted. For hundreds of years before that

shipbuilding had been much like other crafts. It required little capital
investment, it was urban, and the builder was an independent producer
who lived and worked on the property and was assisted by a small
workcrew consisting of an apprentice, a handful of hired wage-workers,
and a subcontracted master craftsman or two with specialties in making
specific objects for fitting out the vessel. Throughout the early modern
period, some artisans engaged in shipbuilding were masters of guilds, a
status which permitted them to bid for and get a contract for con-
structing parts of a ship, fitting it out, or undertaking repairs to it.
Before 1600 many small, independent producers could do this, but so
dramatic were the changes in the Dutch industry in the seventeenth
century that guild masters came to be only those few who owned
wharves, rich men with access to capital. There are several reasons for
this contraction in the ranks of masters and small-scale independent
shipbuilders. First, costs of raw materials, especially wood, rose steadily
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Second, Dutch innovation
in ship design (notably the flyboat which reduced cargo transport and
crew costs) made Dutch ships the prized vessels of not just the expansive
Dutch ocean-going fleets, but of many other European states as well.
The combination of cost-efficiency and the expansion of overseas
commerce spelled demand for Dutch ships. Whereas in 1532 about 400
Dutch ships sailed the seas, by 1636 there were at least 2,500 and
perhaps as many as 4,300 of them, and these latter ships were also at
least twice the size of the former, topping out at 300 to 500 tons, against
the typical 70- to 100-ton vessel of the sixteenth century. Obviously,
construction of these vessels consumed more material, more labor, and
more capital.
To meet the demand and to keep production costs low and competi-
tive, the industry was reorganized. Orders for larger ships mounted
while those for smaller vessels, the construction of which smaller
shipbuilders might have afforded, diminished. The industry was increas-
ingly centralized in the hands of a relatively small number of wharf-
owners who had the capital and access to credit that would make
production of many large ships possible. Capital costs continued to
spiral upward into the eighteenth century, driving out of business the
smaller, independent producers without adequate capital to own or
lease slipways, purchase materials and equipment, or hire a large work-
force.
English shipbuilding shared many of the characteristics of its Dutch
counterpart, but departed from the Dutch experience in significant ways
n
as well. Unlike Dutch shipbuilding, small-scale English productio
(vessels of under 50 tons) was not destroyed by firms building larger

ships, and few shipbuilders saw the consolidation of manufacture and
the concentration of capital that Dutch shipbuilding did. Even ship-
builders constructing the larger vessels in the seventeenth century did
not have operations on the Dutch scale. Few builders turned out even a
ship a year; even the largest, like the Graves brothers of Limehouse or
the Foord brothers of Ipswich, only turned out about fifteen 200—300-
ton ships each between 1626 and 1637. Like all English-built ships,
these were built to order (in contrast to the Dutch where speculative as
well as commissioned shipbuilding increased after 1600) and payments
were made to the shipbuilder in installments, thus reducing the shipbuil-
der’s need for large reserves of capital. The shipbuilder (often the master
shipwright) subcontracted with various master craftsmen from carpen-
ters to caulkers, and hired wage-workers as needed. Only the largest
operations would employ as many as 100 men. Unlike the Dutch master
wharf-owners, few English shipbuilders made a fortune in the business.
Certainly, since the 1570s and up to the 1640s, the English yards
turned out larger ships. Many of these were substantial, heavily masted
and well-armed warships built for the navy, while others were the great
“East Indiamen,” enormous vessels of 600 to 700 tons trading in the
Levant and the East Indies. These craft, most of which were built along
the Thames in London, were well suited to their purpose, but with the
expansion and diversification of English shipping in the second half of
the seventeenth century, a merchant fleet consisting of Dutch-style
vessels came to be increasingly desired. Flyboats seized by the English
from the Dutch in the three Dutch wars between 1652 and 1674
satisfied the demand for a time (and also depressed the home industry,
irreparably destroying the Ipswich yards). As these ships began to wear
out in the final decades of the century, however, the English ship-
building industry, notably on the northeast coast, responded
by produ-
cing ships modeled on Dutch design and suited to competing
effectively
with them.
Daniel Defoe observed in the early eighteenth century that
“The
whole [Thames] river .. . from London Bridge to Black
Wall is one
great arsenal,” estimating that no fewer than thirty-t
hree shipyards
operated there.'? Clearly, London was still a shipbuilding
center of
importance, primarily continuing to build ships for the
navy and the
East and West India Companies; but during the eighteen
th century the
center of gravity of the English shipbuilding industry
decisively shifted
to the northeast coast from Newcastle to Scarborough.
Whereas in 1790
13 Quoted in Earle, p. 24.

The craft economy gia
and 1791 the yards of this region produced 249 ships (88 over 200 tons)
of nearly 41,000 total tons, London was a distant second with 119 ships
(25 over 200 tons) of just over 16,000 tons.
Another great seafaring state of the early modern period, the Venetian
republic, also was home to a major shipbuilding industry. Its private
sector was organized much like the English, and its public sector, the
Arsenal, had similarities with the Dutch. Like the English, most master
Venetian shipwrights, called squerarioli, were independent owners of
shipyards, usually quite modest in size, at which mostly small craft of
well under 100 tons were constructed. The smallest of these enterprises
and by far the most numerous shipbuilding operations in Venice were
simple boatshops, where the squerarioli and a few helpers made small
barges, canal boats, and gondolas. Larger operations, building ships of
100 to 250 tons, would find squerarioli directing construction, co-
ordinating acquisition of materials, subcontracting sawyers, caulkers,
and carpenters, and hiring of wage-workers. There had always been
these small operators in Venice, and boatmakers and shipbuilders of
modest size continued to exist throughout the history of the Venetian
republic.
Larger ships, those of from 250 to 600 tons — first the merchant
galleys of the Middle Ages and then the great galleys and roundships of
the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — were constructed under
different conditions. Larger shipyards, more and more expensive mate-
rials (larger timbers were needed, often having to be shipped to the
lagoons from a distance at great expense), and access to more and more
specialized craftsmen (with innovations in rigging, for example, came
specialized pulleymakers and mastmakers) meant that few if any master
shipwrights could finance the operation. Thus, with these vessels mer-
chant customers commissioned shipwrights to direct and co-ordinate
the project, and financed the construction.
Private shipbuilding of great galleys and roundships fared well enough
until the second half of the sixteenth century when competition from the
Dutch was felt. It was easy enough for a Venetian merchant to transfer
funds to the Netherlands and then finance the construction of a Dutch
flyboat. To preserve the private Venetian shipbuilding industry, and
their own livelihood, entrepreneurial shipwrights like Bernardin Sebas-
tiano Rosso proposed to the republic that credit be extended, not to
shipwrights, but to merchant customers who might commission pro-
jects. It was hoped that such an inducement would encourage these
merchants to keep their capital in Venice, and it would save the ship-
wright from shouldering a heavy debt. Such creative financing did
it did
induce some merchants to build in Venice, but in the long run
little to arrest the slide in the construction in Venice of private ships of

more than 100 tons.
Public shipbuilding in the Arsenal, in contrast to the Venetian private
sector and to the English example, became in the sixteenth century
increasingly centralized as production grew in scale and the product -
the light galley for the war fleet — became increasingly standardized. The
Arsenal had begun as a state-owned storehouse for naval supplies which
were consigned to private shipbuilders making vessels for the Venetian
fleet. In the 1320s the Arsenal expanded operations to include ship-
building, but only a dozen master craftsmen were continually employed
there. This changed in the 1450s, which saw a new wave of expansion of
the war fleet, and then another in the middle third of the sixteenth
century (with the Turkish threat), and then again in the seventeenth
century. With each wave of expansion shipbuilding was in some way
reorganized, but most notable was the shift to an economy of scale, in
some ways mirroring the Dutch development. Production of ships, as
Frederick Lane and Robert Davis have described so well, followed a line
system based on standardization of design and serial assembly of inter-
changeable parts crafted by specialists and assembled by work gangs. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Arsenal turned out an
average of seven to ten galleys a year (the sixteenth-century private
sector, in contrast, might produce in a good year four or five round-
ships), with some notable years far in excess of that average — in 1651
the number was thirty. Of course, in the Arsenal it was the state that
owned the operation rather than a wealthy cadre of wharf-owners, but in
both the Venetian and Dutch cases capital was concentrated, production
was expanded and increasingly standardized (with shipwrights,
foremen, and gang bosses delegating the increasingly standardized
and
specified tasks to legions of artisans), and the range of products
was
increasingly narrowed (the Arsenal produced only a few types
of galleys,
galleasses, and cutters, while the Dutch focused on the flyboat).
Royal manufactures and the textile trades

Clearly, then, as luxury trades and especially shipbui
lding so starkly
illustrate, the heterogeneity of artisanal production in
general ranged
from small workshops to emergent economies of scale.
Indeed, it was
often the case with the latter that the state was
involved, either as
outright owner (as with the Arsenal, the Gobelin
s in France, the
Lagerhaus in Prussia which manufactured uniforms
for the military, or
the Royal Porcelain Works in Vienna and Berlin)
, or, as was more
common, as financiers or investors providing
subsidies, loans, and
privileges. Everywhere in Europe, especially in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, central governments, in the face of accelerating
economic growth and foreign competition, intervened to create and
protect useful industries whose viability it deemed important to the
interest of the state or the public welfare. Generally, this meant protec-
tion from competition for a new industry, and so state intervention
usually took the form of granting of privileges, the most important being
a monopoly on the production and sale of a particular product. The
best-known illustration of this development occurred in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century France, when kings from Henri IV to Louis XVI
granted hundreds of privileges establishing protected industries called
“royal manufactures.” Most of these were privately owned, often by
individual entrepreneur artisans (sometimes called “court artisans”),
but those that survived were almost always relatively large concerns with
a high degree of integration, a network of affiliated workshops and
warehouses run by managers and technical directors and co-ordinated
by an entrepreneur artisan. These firms reveal labor and product
specialization, making long runs of standardized, often luxury goods like
porcelain or clothing, sold at relatively uniform prices and marketed
through established, durable, and relatively secure channels to a concen-
trated body of consumers. Often the market was the court and the
aristocracy surrounding it, or the state itself.
The sector that benefited most from royal privilege was unquestion-
ably textiles. In France between 1661 and 1683 of the 113 titles of royal
manufacturer Colbert granted, 55 went to companies making textiles,
several of which specialized in the manufacture of uniforms for the
expanding ranks of the French army. Such concentration in textiles
continued into the eighteenth century. Between 1683 and 1753 of the
243 royal manufacturers created, 149 were in textiles, and again the
state was an important customer as the demand for uniforms continued
to grow with the size of armies. Clearly, a viable textile sector was
deemed essential to a state’s economic health, and small wonder, since
this sector was the largest of the early modern, and before that, of the
medieval economy.
The well-known history of textiles in Europe from the Middle Ages to
industrialization has emphasized the shift of an urban-based industry to
the countryside, and a transformation of industrial organization from
independent artisanal workshops to a putting-out cottage industry to
mechanized factories. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this
general picture (which has received considerable attention in the proto-
rural
industrialization literature), and ostensibly, then, because of the
scope of this study of
nature of the textile industry, it lay outside the
urban artisans. It is true that in some areas in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, like some towns in the Low Countries (Ghent,
Bruges, and Ypres, for example), competition from villages like Hond-
schoote and from countries like England destroyed the textile sector of
the economies of the towns that had geared their productive capacities
to heavy woolen broadcloth. The competition was destructive because
not only was cloth being manufactured more cheaply (rural industry
everywhere was organized on a putting-out, piecework basis under
which rural workers labored more cheaply than their urban counter-
parts), but a different kind of cloth was being made.
The “new draperies,” as they were called, were not as durable as the
traditional broadcloth, but they were lighter and cheaper to make and to
sell. The wool comprising the new cloth, which was called worsted, was
combed before spinning, but unlike the heavy woolens which were
shrunken, beaten, and pressed after weaving, worsted cloth underwent
no further postweaving treatment. The production of the new draperies
were therefore less labor and capital intensive. They came to dominate
the textile sectors of the economies of the Low Countries and England,
as they destroyed those of places like Venice and Barcelona. These latter
cities had specialized in high-quality woolen manufacture, and saw their
prosperity in this sector peak in the sixteenth century. In Venice between
1500 and 1565 wool production increased tenfold, while silk output
tripled. In 1570 at least 7,000 people were employed in Venetian textile
manufactories, working as many as twenty-five looms in a single shop.
Glassworks at Murano and the building industry boomed as well.
By
1600, however, the textile markets, notably in the Mediterranean,
had
been invaded by northern Europeans selling the lighter and cheaper
cloths, and as demand for the traditional cloths slackened,
the looms of
Venice and Barcelona fell increasingly silent.
If the story of the urban textile industry in early modern
Europe was
simply one of dismal decline and eclipse, then a book like
this on urban
artisans would have nothing more to say about it. Howeve
r, once again
industrial organization was more heterogeneous than
we once thought.
Recent research has shown that in many towns and
cities the textile
industry did not wither and die; in some places, it hardly
changed at all,
while in others it was dramatically transformed, both
in manufacturing
processes and in product. We find in many German
cities, for example,
cloth production continued to be controlled by
small-scale master
craftsmen with most tasks carried out in small worksho
ps, while in
others, like N6rdlingen or Lille, we find the putting-out
system increas-
ingly entrenched — with all of the economic polarization,
dependency,
and even proletarianization that this entailed. Indeed,
urban putting-out
The craft economy 8]
systems in textiles can be found even in metropolises like London, and

as late as 1759. In that year weavers, working under piecework condi-
tions, represented the most numerous craft practiced in the capital, and
fully 14,000 families depended in one way or another on textile manu-
facture.
Some cities were not ignorant of the advantages of making the “new
draperies.” Leiden, for instance, became one of the largest industrial
cities in Europe in the seventeenth century, and its dominant economic
sector was textiles. Flemish artisans skilled at making the new cloth fled
Hondschoote for Holland during the Dutch War of Independence
(1568-1648) from Spain, which created religious, political, and above
all economic turmoil in Flanders. Many of these migrants settled in
Leiden. Here they turned out all types of cloth, but especially inexpen-
sive worsteds and fustians (a combination of linen and wool). The
abundant labor supply provided by massive immigration (see the
following chapter) and escalating product specialization (in the 1660s
over 125 separate textile trades existed there) kept production costs low
enough to keep international and domestic markets stocked.
Florence also responded to changing market conditions, and also
thereby avoided the collapse of its textile sector. The urban woolen cloth
industry, the industrial backbone of the late medieval Florentine
economy, suffered in the sixteenth century, like everywhere else, from
the dual forces of northern European competition and the relocation of
industry to the Tuscan countryside. However, as the urban wool
industry contracted, urban silk production expanded. Whereas the ratio
of wool to silk output in Florence between 1430 and 1439 was 11:1, by
1600-9 it was roughly 13:10. It reached parity during 1620-9, and for
the next century silk output exceeded that of wool, between 1660 and
1669 reaching a 10:3 ratio. Indeed, as woolen manufacture contracted
or relocated to the countryside, in many cities in Europe — Venice,
Lyons, Tours, Geneva, Zurich, Granada, Valencia, London, Am-
sterdam, Antwerp — silk production expanded, as did the variety of silk
cloth — damask, taffeta, satin, velvet.
Regulation and economic activity

era has
Much of the historical writing on guilds in the early modern
nature of
been bedeviled by a lack of distinction between the theoretical
many
the guild system and actual economic practice. Until recently
that the guild
historians had assumed that the tight regulatory regime
or royal govern-
system pronounced in its statutes and that municipal
endorsed in law restricted economic growth, and thus strait-
ments
jacketed the development of free market capitalism in places where the

guild system was most firmly entrenched. This proposition has now
been challenged, with some historians deeply familiar with archival
sources about economic activity asserting that the regulatory reach of
the guild system was short and incomplete, and that much, in some
places most, economic activity hummed along without being influenced
significantly by the guilds and governments one way or another.
Until very recently, most historical studies on work from the Middle
Ages to the eighteenth century have viewed it through the optic of the
official guild organizations of master craftsmen — the mysteries, the
Ziinfte, the métiers, the arti, the gremios. This in turn has focused
attention on the records left by these organizations. However, as some
historians now recognize, the statutes promulgated by formally consti-
tuted crafts were normative or idealistic, and much historical research
now focuses increasingly on the gap between such norms and actual
practice, and the relationship between the two. This research agenda has
also challenged, by extension, the traditional assumption that the guild
system was an impediment to the emergence of capitalism.
What role did regulation play in economic practice? How much did it
impinge upon work? There is no question that guilds were empowered
and indeed enjoined, by municipal, ducal, ecclesiastical, or royal govern-
ments to regulate the economy, and were provided with a sanctione
d
apparatus of enforcement — workshop inspections and access to courts
being the most apparent. Indeed, it is hardly unusual to find instances
in
the archives of the workshops of artisans being searched for
illegal
materials and contraband or shoddy products, nor is it rare to
encounter
litigation between guilds over violation of monopoly privileges,
or even
journeymen suing masters over what would come to be
called “unfair
labor practices.” Guilds were granted monopolies over
the production
and sale of given products, and artisans from other guilds
and outsiders
to the guild system altogether (nonmasters, foreigners
) were liable to
search, seizure, and prosecution if they encroached
upon this privilege.
Such a visitation could result in the destruction or
confiscation of the
offending material or product, “false and deceitful
wares,” as the
London authorities put it in the seventeenth century.
A fine upon the
offending artisan usually followed, and the result
of such regulatory
actions could be ruinous to the individual.
Indeed, searches were in
force everywhere we find guilds, and even in London’s
livery companies
searchers were raiding shops into the eighteenth
century. Weavers, for
instance, held yearly searches into the 1720s,
finally abandoning them
altogether only in 1736. The clockmakers had
done the same only a year
before, and the clothworkers were to follow suit
only in the mid-1750s.
Searching generally came to a halt after a committee of the House of

Commons ruled in 1753 that searches were “injurious and vexatious to
manufactures, discouraging to industry and trade, and contrary to the
liberty of the subject.”!4
There is no question that a regulatory apparatus was firmly in place
wherever guilds were established, and governments were empowered to
intervene directly in the economy by means of their own agencies and
officials. Take sixteenth-century Nuremberg as an example. Here a five-
man municipal tribunal called the Rugsamt specialized in industrial and
commercial affairs and had jurisdiction over everything pertaining to the
making and distributing of products. One of its members, the Pfdnder,
oversaw all market activity, and administered an army of inspectors and
market supervisors. There were twenty wood inspectors, and thirty-six
officials assigned to the wine trade alone! Properly weighed and mea-
sured goods meeting standards of quality were all inspected and tagged
if approved.
The Statute of Artificers promulgated in England in 1563 aimed to
regulate the economic life of an entire sector of society, the artisanry,
but it clearly had supra-economic intentions as well. Artisans were
deemed especially turbulent because of their mobility, and so Queen
Betty’s Law, as the statute was called, struck a blow for social order by
attempting to control entry into most trades by the following regula-
tions. Apprenticeship terms were set at seven years regardless of the
trade and skill differential; journeymen had to be twenty-four years of
age before becoming masters; justices of the peace were empowered to
control wages; and any journeyman who changed jobs was required to
have a certificate from his previous master releasing the worker from his
employ and attesting to his character. The statute also had an anti-
combination clause, outlawing “confederacies and conspiracies” among
artisans organized to pressure employers on wages or piecerates.
These regulatory regimes foreshadowed the supposed dirigisme of
mercantilism, best expressed by Colbertism in late seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century France and imitated by nearly every state in eight-
eenth-century Europe. Between 1673 and: 1714 in France, a flood of
royal regulation washed across the guilds. There were no fewer than 450
réglements on manufacture, and another 500 on the policing of the trades
and on jurisdictions between them. Of course, officials had to be created
to administer all of this, so legions of offices like inspector of manufac-
tures, clerk of apprenticeships, and controller of weights and measures
of workmanship in
14 Michael Berlin, “‘Broken all in pieces’: artisans and the regulation
Town,
early modern London,” in Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The Artisan and the European
1500-1900 (Aldershot, 1997), p. 87.
were created and sold. Ideally, all of this would be part of a structured
society, as the eighteenth-century Lieutenant-General of Police in Paris
Lenoir put it in his Mémoires. Lenoir imagined that society would be
held together by a domestic chain whereby jurés would be subject to
these officials, masters would be subordinate to jurés, journeymen to
masters, and apprentices to journeymen. “The influence of the police,”
Lenoir optimistically dreamed, “can act upon a mass of 200,000 men,
among whom each must be guided by another, and everyone, from the
first to the last individual, will be weil classified, well registered, and
held in check by the regulations and demands of discipline and sub-
ordination.” !>
Of course, long before Colbert or Lenoir, governments had been
attempting to regulate certain aspects of the economy. The most
extensive and probably most effective government regulation concerned
the food trades, especially baking and butchering. Government regula-
tion of production and sale of food items can be traced back to
Carolingian times, notably in the assize of bread. For a thousand years
hence governments tied the price of bread to grain in an inverse relation-
ship, factoring in production and labor costs and allowing the baker a
“reasonable” profit. Early modern Dijon, in France is typical in how the
assize worked. Magistrates periodically purchased several measures of
variable quality wheat and then oversaw bakers turning it into bread. A
fixed margin between the cost of wheat and the allowable price of bread
was allotted, and from this margin the baker had to meet expenses for
wood, wages, and rent. Whatever was left was the baker’s profit. Clearly,
this system could squeeze the baker in times of general inflation unless
assizes were frequent and the fixed margin adjusted. Judging from
the
litany of bakers’ complaints, such assizes and adjustments
were not
frequent enough.
As with bakers, so butchers in Dijon and elsewhere were regulate
d in
a similar fashion: the magistrates bought several animals on
the hoof,
appointed a butcher to slaughter them, and determined
from the yield
what price per pound was requisite to cover the costs
of wholesale
production and still allow a “fair” margin of profit to
the butcher (from
which overhead had to be paid). And like the bakers,
the butchers
complained about the inflexible relationship between
floating wholesale
and fixed retail prices, clamoring for adjustable
margins and more
frequent assizes.
:
The regulatory regime could be quite elaborate.
The eighteenth-
century Parisian police had spies and informants
to help the Inspecteurs
15 Quoted in Arlette Farge, La Vie fragile. Violence,
pouvotrs et solidarités a Paris au XVII]e
stécle (Paris, 1986), p. 154 (my translation).
des manufactures nab culprits. For sixteen years a police inspector,

Poussot, kept a register of those arrested in his jurisdiction, the quartier
of the Halles. Of the 2,692 persons arrested by this inspector between
1738 and 1754, about half were picked up based on information
reported by his mouches, or spies. Most of the miscreants were young
immigrants, mostly journeymen and apprentices from every trade.
There is no question, then, that an elaborate regulatory system
emerged in the late medieval and early modern period, and that the
regulatory arm reached artisans. But does this mean that such govern-
mental action was often enough or punitive enough to impede economic
activity and stifle economic growth in general? Indeed, should the logic
of regulation just be measured against the standard of economic
efficiency? Granted, guilds and municipalities had an institutional appa-
ratus to enforce regulatory statutes; everywhere the archives are full of
instances of violation of these regulations, often rampantly so, even in
such ostensibly tightly regulated locales like sixteenth-century Nurem-
berg. However, the very magnitude of violation has prompted some
historians to consider the possibility, even the likelihood, that normal
economic practice was a freewheeling affair where licit and illicit activity
constantly revealed how inadequate the regulatory apparatus was to
actual production, distribution, and consumption. What we see in the
archives, so this argument goes, is in fact a juridical and administrative
distortion, a misleading reflection of economic activity that cannot
measure how effective such regulation was, at least in terms of what
impact it may have had upon the economy at large.
Indeed, government regulatory action often reflected, paradoxically,
an economy that it could not control. For instance, in 1581 King Henri
III of France issued an edict which sought to incorporate all economic
activity in the kingdom. An inclusive guild system, however, was immedi-
ately recognized to be inadequate to actual production and distribution,
and so some subsequent royal legislation is a story about legitimating
what appears to be a de facto unregulated market. Thus, guild production
throughout the seventeenth century and beyond was legally supple-
mented by ad hoc royal patents and privileges exempting some artisans
from guild regulation and surveillance. Patents were granted to particular
entrepreneurs or manufacturers, concessions were awarded to foreign
merchants to market their goods at fairs, mercers were permitted to sell
everything from fine art to clothing to pins (there were several thousand
mercers in Paris alone in 1789), and privileged areas like the suburbs
(called sauvetats) St. Seurin and St. André in Bordeaux or the faubourg
St. de aan outside Paris were recognized as effectively “free enterprise
zones.” Even these concessions could not encompass the dynamic
economy, as illegal activities like operating multiple shops, smuggling,

unlicensed peddling, and clandestine workers working on their own
account outside of guilds proliferated everywhere. In 1748 the tailors of
Amsterdam, for instance, were troubled by clandestine, nonguild
workers — both male and female — who, it seemed to the masters, were
making more clothes than the masters themselves.
Part of the trouble for the regulatory minded was the proliferation of
mastership letters sold, in fact, by the crown (fiscal demands, as so often
happened, contributed to a subversion of the crown’s own regulatory
intentions). This had been going on for centuries, but by the eighteenth
century it had become a speculative market, as individuals bought the
letters and then leased them to other craftsmen, usually nonmasters.
This was expressly forbidden by guild statutes everywhere, of course,
but nonetheless widely practiced. Take the “wigmaker” M. Lacouture
from Bordeaux. He bought seven mastership licenses for wigmaking,
keeping one (and presumably practicing the craft) and letting out the
other six. This practice was encouraged by the fact that increasingly
trades abandoned the making of a “masterpiece” as part of the require-
ments for admission to the guild. With no demonstrated mastery of the
craft’s skill required, only the money to buy the license was needed.
It was commonplace among tailors of eighteenth-century Bordeaux to
run several shops, despite the illegality of this practice. Others formed
equally illegal mergers. Likewise the Parisian goldsmiths. They were
constrained by their statutes to allow but 300 shops in the city, but in
fact there were 800 of them, many of these being enterprises
run by
“false workers” who, moreover, received subcontracted
work from
masters within the guild. The bakers were no different, either
in Paris or
in Amsterdam. The Dutch guild ordered that members
could only
operate one shop “in one’s own name and on one’s own account,”
but in
practice many bakers ignored the law. In Paris the
bakers’ by-laws
specifically prohibited masters from “lending their names”
or “renting
their masterships directly or indirectly” to nonmasters.
Master bakers
nonetheless did just that, often by notarized lease contracts.
To take but
two examples of many, the master bakers Guillaume
Grand and Jean
Theveneau rented their bakeries to, in the one
case, a couple not of the
guild, and in the other, several journeymen bakers,
even giving the
master’s protection and couverture — or cover —
allowing these non-
masters to operate their enterprises under the name
of the master. !©
Nor was this just an eighteenth-century developmen
t, although owing
to the expansion of the consumer-based econo
my it was probably more
16 Kaplan, pp. 317, 131.

commonplace then. In late medieval London an apprentice tailor

might
run a shop in his master’s name or, a couple of journeymen
might pool
their capital to open a shop, allowing one of them to buy admissi
on to
mastership while the other shared in the venture as a silent partner. And
this did not occurr just among tailors, for apprentices and journey
men
cutlers in late fifteenth-century London were also accused of opening up
shops illicitly.
By the eighteenth century, with the “consumer revolution” at full
throttle, whole sectors of the European urban economies operated on a
day-to-day basis according to rules more akin to the spot market than
the tightly regulated guild world prescribed in statute and legislation.
The business practices recounted by the Parisian glazier Jacques-Louis
Meénétra in his journal amply demonstrate this.!7 Masters employing
masters, journeymen working on their own account for private indi-
viduals, masters forming partnerships with other masters and even
merchants, journeymen employing apprentices; all of these business
practices may have been carried out in autonomous shops rather than
factories, but they came together nonetheless in a complex network of
subcontracting which, in some product lines as we have seen, rendered
the street an early version of the assembly line.
Given the incomplete reach of regulation into economic practice in
the early modern era, perhaps we should think of the regulatory regime
in political and moral terms as well as economic. Robert Du Plessis and
Martha Howell are surely right to suggest that the backbone of the
economic system of urban early modern Europe was the independent
master artisan working in the small shop assisted by family members
and a handful of workers.!® They are also correct to point out that the
chief characteristics of this system were an openness to the expansion of
commodity markets and product innovation as well as accelerating
specialization and division of labor. However, the goals of this economic
system of “small commodity production,” as they call it, were not
unbridled growth or maximization of profit, but rather full employment,
producer autonomy (symbolized hierarchically by the independent
master distinct from and superior to the piece- or wage-worker), and a
reasonable standard of living. Authorities, moreover, attempted to
regulate the system to achieve these goals, which thus were moral and
political as much as nakedly economic. They were moral, because
harmonious human relations, the highly valued Christian peace, were
secured by stability — social, political, economic; they were political
17 Ménétra, A Journal of My Life. ;

18 Robert Du Plessis and Martha Howell, “Reconsidering the early modern urban
economy: the cases of Leiden and Lille,” Past and Present 94 (1982), 49-84.
because stability was the surest way to perpetuate existing power

relations which positioned magistrates in dominance. To be sure, this
ideology had an economic face; in 1575 the ruling oligarchy of Lille
asserted that small shops were “best attuned to market conditions, for
not only was work closely supervised, thus maintaining the desired level
of quality, but a close balance was promoted between output and
demand, thus avoiding harmful gluts.”!° Still, regulatory intervention
was more about fine-tuning, seeking a balance between, than imposing
some economic logic on, recalcitrant or obtuse craftsmen.
What was happening in Lille and Leiden was certainly not unique. In
sixteenth-century Augsburg we find magistrates interested in shoring up
the deteriorating condition of the town’s weavers, and they saw the
putting-out system, which seemed to lead to concentration and depen-
dency, as the root of the problem. They responded with strict regulation
of the number of looms permitted per workshop. Moreover, sometimes
the municipality itself purchased cloth from workshops, sold it, and then
used the profits to advance loans to artisans in need of operating capital.
Clearly seeking to secure the independence of the individual artisan,
their objectives were guided by the ideal of the patriarchal household, a
unit of production and reproduction that was assumed to be the
microcosm of the well-ordered polity. The master artisan, according to
this economic, political, and moral vision, had a self-contained business,
financial independence, public honor, a spouse, and political adulthood.
Such a vision did not consider the success of a business as unimpor-
tant. In fact, all artisans considered business success vitally important,
and the guild was far from considered an impediment to a successful
business. In fact, it was seen as the appropriate framework for such
business success. In the late medieval Low Countries no less than in
eighteenth-century Austria, Italy, or even France, in fact, recent research
has demonstrated that one of the key variables in the development of
new industries was the creation of new guilds or the novel uses of
existing ones. Historians like Jean-Pierre Sosson, Marc Boone, Gail
Bossenga, Jean-Pierre Hirsch, and Simona Cerutti have shown how
guilds responded flexibly to new market conditions and surging
demand, and a clear correlation can be seen between the emergence of
new guilds and the emergence and acceleration of the demand for their
particular products.?°
19 Tbid., 72.
20 See Jean-Pierre Sosson, “Les Métiers. Norme et réalité — exemple des anciens Pays-
Bas merdionaux aux XIVe et XVe siécles,” in Le Travail au Moyen Age (Louvain-la-
Neuve, 1990), pp. 339-48; Marc Boone, “Les Métiers dans les villes lamandes au bas
Moyen Age (XIVe-XVle siécles): Images normatives, réalité socio-politiques et
economiques,” in Pascale Lambrechts and Jean-Pierre Sosson, eds., Les Meétiers au
Philippe Minard has recently cautioned us that efficiency is not

the
best measure of the role of the guild or the state in the economy
.
Regulation there certainly was, but if we remove the reductive blinders
of economism, we can see other uses to which the system of regulation
was put. One very fruitful avenue of recent research has explored the
relation between the regulatory regime and social status. Minard himself
has found that many successful artisans in fact welcomed the regulatory
regime because it served as an external verification that their product
was free of defect, and that the artisan who made it was of good credit
and sound reputation — a man of honor. Such qualities were hardly
simply economic, and demonstrate once again how multifaceted the
meaning of status was in the world of the artisan.?!
It seems that guildsmen in seventeenth-century Spanish towns found
the regulatory system of quality control useful for announcing and
preserving their good name and social status as well. Here master
craftsmen believed that fraudulent production by one guildsman sullied
the reputation of them all, and explicitly described the logic of inspec-
tion in terms of collective prestige. Even a regulatory practice as
seemingly explicitly about economic matters — the search — could have
been about status and reputation no less. One might imagine that if the
logic were solely economic, then the purpose would be to catch malefac-
tors, and this would be done most efficiently by surprise. And yet
London livery company ordinances, for example, stipulated when
searches were to take place, and though the intervals varied from guild
to guild from quarterly to monthly, they were nonetheless known in
advance to all. Importantly, these searches were ceremonial, indeed,
public occasions, where guild officials were accompanied by legal
representatives of the municipality. The inspecting craftsmen, clad in
costumes and proudly carrying the guild’s insignia on its banner,
marched in a procession from the guild hall through the city, stopping at
and inspecting shops along the way, finally ending the demonstration of
guild integrity at the fairground at Smithfield. Perhaps to ensure the
largest audience, often the procession/inspection was held on market
days or coincided with the opening of fairs. Willful malefactors might
take the risk of escaping detection, but they could hardly have been
surprised by an inspection if it occurred. Guilds like that of the coopers
Moyen Age (Louvain-La-Neuve, 1994), pp. 1-21; Gail Bossenga, The Politics of
Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge, 1991); Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les
Deux Réves du commerce. Enterprise et institution dans la région Ulloise, 1780—1860 (Paris,
1991); and Simona Cerutti, La Ville et les métiers (Paris, 1990).
2= Philippe Minard, “Normes et certification des qualités. Les Regles du jeu manufac-
turier au XVIlle siécle,” in Bretagnes. Art, négoce et société de l’Antiquité a nos jours
(Brittany 1996).
where
did vary their routes on each occasion, and they searched shops
they had heard abuses might be discovered, but on each occasion they
still only searched about thirty shops, and even then the inspecti on
could hardly have been thorough. In all trades, if faulty products were
found, they were publicly and ritually destroyed, “burned and con-
sumed,” as the basket-makers put it when they found faulty products.
These inspections, of course, had an economic side, but they were just
as much, perhaps more, about the honor and status of the guild and its
members. The inspections were a form of public tribunal, and, as the
spectacle-makers and basket-makers put it, were even referred to as
“trials” with a “jury” and “witnesses.” The turners specifically invoked
the language of honor in their ordinances when they announced that the
production of “faulty commodities sold [to the public were a] great
slander of the Misterie [the guild]” (my emphasis).?2
So what can we conclude about regulation and the economy? Cer-
tainly it is time to abandon the assumption that guilds suffocated the
economy where they were most deeply entrenched. But we should be
equally cautious from running to the opposite extreme by assuming that
the regulatory regime was ineffective or irrelevant. Perhaps we must
recognize that the regime was extremely flexible, responding to the
varieties of needs of artisans and governments. We must appreciate that
there were different kinds of markets, and regulation fit differently in
them. There was the sprawling, freewheeling, and effectively unregu-
lated clandestine and illegal craft economy. Alongside this economy
there was the licensed one, but even here within the official organization
of the guild we find ample room for flexibility and economic growth.
Indeed, within this official structure we find masters of the same guild
competing with one another, availing themselves when possible of the
regulatory apparatus to compete more effectively. And finally, there is
the prestige economy, where regulation was immersed in the world of
status, and was strategically appropriated by artisans for purposes that
were much more than simply economic.
Historians of artisans have long assumed that guild regulations so clearly

articulated in corporate statutes were an accurate reflection of economic
activity. A corollary to this assumption is the assertion that such regula-
tions stunted the early modern economy. Recent research has prompted
us to question these positions. No doubt guild or governmental regula-
tion affected many artisans in their worklife, but the evidence for
artisanal economic vitality is too overwhelming to draw the conclusion
22 Berlin, p. 81.
The craft economy
91
that regulation smothered the economy. The traditional picture of
the
craftsman toiling alongside a couple of workers in a shop turning
out
finished products that conformed to guild regulations, therefore, is
not
so much inaccurate as it is incomplete. The craft economy, we now
realize, was surprisingly heterogeneous and dynamic. Artisan enterprises
from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century (and beyond) ranged
from lowly capitalized but highly specialized household-based work-
shops deeply enmeshed in elaborate webs of credit relations to complex,
highly capitalized enterprises involving sophisticated combinations of
partnerships, private and state-financing, and extensive subcontracting
arrangements. As consumer markets grew and became increasingly
integrated from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, the variety
and number of artisanal enterprises increased. Already, however, in
some cities in the Middle Ages and in many more in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the drift toward specialization and diversity of
producer and, in some artisanal sectors, standardization of product is
evident. Equally apparent are changes in the organization of production.
Artisans were guided by a traditional, premodern rationale of constant
returns to scale, but their experiments with vertical integration, hor-
izontal combination, and above all economies of scale in some sectors
reveal that many craftsmen were surprisingly modern, and more flexible
in their approach to business that was once thought.
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6 The workplace
Cityfolk
The artisans who are the focus of this book lived in Europe’s cities and
towns. Their way of life was fundamentally affected by the nature,
process, and results of urbanization. Just how many people comprised a
“town” or a “city” is open to debate, but most historians accept that
settlements with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants do not qualify, and some
would suggest that the description “urban” requires at least 2,000 or
even 5,000 souls. We need not settle that issue here, but we should bear
in mind that in 1350, just after the Black Death had catastrophically
carried away between a quarter and a third of the European population,
no more than 10 million (and perhaps as few as 7 million, depending on
which estimate of total European population one accepts) men, women,
and children lived in settlements of at least 1,000, a figure that reached
between 8 and 12 million by 1500. In that year only four cities — Milan,
Venice, Naples, and Paris — held over 100,000 souls each, while eighteen
cities counted at least 40,000 (ten of which were in Italy). Perhaps
seventy held at least 20,000. France had over thirty cities of at least
10,000 inhabitants.
The sixteenth century would witness growth among cities of all types,
sizes, and locations, so that by 1600 there were upwards of 600
European cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants, comprising about 12
percent of Europe’s total population. The seventeenth century would
see a net deurbanization of cities under 40,000, a contraction partially
offset by substantial growth in port cities and capitals. In some of these
cases, the growth was enormous, as Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, Am-
sterdam, and especially London, illustrate. The urban population of
England grew from 12 percent of the total population in 1500 to 23
percent by 1700, some of the growth the result of the extraordinary
surge of London which ballooned from about 60,000 in 1520 to
200,000 in 1600 to 575,000 in 1700. Amsterdam swelled from 30,000
in 1550 to 175,000 a century later, engulfing a vast acreage in the
95
process (the area of the city expanded from 450 to 1,800 acres).
Amsterdam was a great metropolis, to be sure, but the United Provinces
as a whole were highly urbanized, as their cities and towns held 464,000
inhabitants in the mid-seventeenth century, and 58 percent of their total
population lived in towns of 10,000 or more. |
The growth rate of the total population of Europe was relatively flat
between 1620 and 1750, after which it rose vertiginously, an increase
that was accompanied by widespread urban growth, which now in-
cluded smaller cities and new cities, in addition to the megalopolises like
London (which continued to burgeon, reaching 900,000 by 1801).
Obviously, many of the inhabitants of these cities and towns
throughout the period were artisans, men and women whose way of life,
moreover, was fundamentally related to the nature, process, and results
of urbanization. But just how many of the denizens of these towns and
cities were artisans? How many were masters, and how many were
journeymen, apprentices, and women? How wealthy were they? What
were the conditions of their work life? How and how much were they
paid? These are some of the questions we will address in this chapter.
The division of labor
Surprisingly, forty years after the advent of social history and historical
demography, it is still beyond our grasp to determine with precision
what percentage of the European urban population were artisans. Few
sources exist which permit accurate counting (virtually none before
1500), and what records do exist (such as tax rolls, hearth counts, guild
memberships, excise papers, mortality bills, and so forth) disproportion-
ately represent the sedentary and proprietary population. Moreover,
what modern studies we do have tend not to be directly comparable,
because of the different records used as well as the variety of the
historians’ own assumptions and methods of determining what an
“artisan” was. These variables of evidence and method determine which
“artisans” have been counted. The imprecision can be seen immediately
in the difficulty in distinguishing between “artisans” and “shopkeepers,”
a difficulty compounded by the expansion of pure retailing in the early
modern period. Moreover, any attempt to determine what percentage of
an urban population were artisans requires laborious social histories of
cities where historians have counted and classified all the inhabitants.
This kind of history has been associated with annaliste-inspired
methodology, and to date has generated some impressive (if often
francocentric) studies for the early modern period. Unfortunately such
an approach is inappropriate for the large cities of Europe because of
The workplace 97
Table 3.1. Artisans as percentage of population, selected cities
City Date % (N=) (Method)
Rome 1526-7 55.4 (1,760) (male household heads)

Montpelier 1549 213 (350) (taxed male household heads)
1640 25.1 (588)
Dijon 1464 39.7 (851) (taxed male household heads)
1750 255 (1,183)
Cuenca 1561 58.0 (2,007) (all household heads)
7 Te 35.1 (598)
Frankfurt 1587 56.1 (1,247) (taxed male household heads)
Nordlingen 1579 83.3 (1,054) (taxed male citizens)
1724 78.9 (878)
Madrid 1757 39.4 (16,731) (property-tax payers)
Mainz 1785 30.5 (582) (master home owners)
their unmanageable size, and so we have little demographic knowledge

of many cities that were undergoing dramatic change.
Still, if we cannot precisely compare the demographic make-up of
Europe’s cities, what studies we do have do illustrate, grosso modo, the
range of urban artisanal activity. What emerges is a picture of diversity,
variety, and, in some places, sweeping change! Late medieval London,
for instance, had an estimated 180 different trades and crafts, and by the
early seventeenth century St. Botolph Aldgate, an extramural parish,
had 130 of its own. Between 1654 and 1693 St. Giles Cripplegate,
London, could count 215 different manufacturing occupations, led by
weavers (864), shoemakers (567), tailors (547), and glovers (333).
Examples like these could be multiplied.
The percentage of artisanal representation within European cities is a
portrait in diversity. In some places artisans represented just 20 percent
of the total recorded population, while in others they were upwards of
80 percent. Table 3.1 isolates some examples which illustrate this
extraordinary diversity (and the variety of ways historians have counted)
in the early modern period.
It seems that diversity is the only generalization that can be concluded
from this table. The range of artisanal representation (usually male
household heads) in the population at large is wide: one of four or five in
Dijon and Montpellier, one of three in Mainz, two of five in Madrid,
one of two in Rome, Frankfurt, and, for a time, Cuenca, four of five in
Nérdlingen. If such differences between cities are surprising, more
predictable, given the remarkable specialization that characterized the
craft economy that we saw in the previous chapter, is the variety of
artisanal activities within the towns themselves.
Generalization about artisanal division of labor is made difficult by

the fact that, depending on the city or town, the size of some craft
sectors grew while others contracted, and many wholly new trades
appeared while others vanished. We have already seen this in the
previous chapter in the case of Dijon. Moreover, any attempt to
represent numerically the division of labor by craft suffers from the same
difficulties as representing the percentage of artisans in towns or cities as
a whole. We must also bear in mind the caveat that occupational
nomenclature or guild membership does not necessarily describe manu-
facturing or commercial activity, nor does it completely convey the
extent of the division of labor in a town or city. In sixteenth-century
Dijon, for instance, we find a man like Hugues Sambin listed on the tax
rolls as a cabinet-maker, but we know from other records that he was a
distinguished architect, military engineer, and wood sculptor; he was
listed as a cabinet-maker in official records because that was the guild to
which he belonged, not because he made furniture. Similarly, Adriaen
Willeborts van Weena was Delft’s principal builder and architect but
was listed on the tax rolls of the 1620s as a stonemason. In eighteenth-
century Paris, even though the statutes of the bakers’ guild formally
prohibited its members from practicing more than one profession, we
find master baker Pierre Félix trafficking openly in grain, as did master
baker Louis Chevalier, the latter in cereals that were rarely used in
breadmaking. Many other bakers doubled as voituriers, or wagoneers,
while “baker” André Le Roux made his living trading in stone for
building construction. In some places, like Noérdlingen, artisans could
be listed in official records with two occupations, which reflected guild
membership in one but practice of the other. Moreover, in many cities
multitudes of artisans belonged to no guild at all. Wage-earning artisans
in the fifteenth century, especially the marginals whom we encounter in
criminal records, frequently practiced two or more trades. A man picked
up for petty crime, for instance, called himself a tanner, but he also
worked as a shoemaker and as a mason. A “tailor” had also worked
emptying cesspits, a “baker” had hired himself out as a porter, a “shoe-
maker” had been employed as a pastrycook at times and as a porter at
others. And how are we to classify the builders of Renaissance Florence
or those of several towns in early modern northern England who
practiced several crafts — masonry, carpentry, stonecutting — depending
upon demand, and becoming “jacks of all trades,” as they were called in
England, in the process?
To make matters worse for the historian bent on counting
and
classifying, many guilds in many towns and cities were amalgamations
of
crafts and trades. The cabinet-makers’ guild in Rome in 1624,
for
The workplace 99
Construction Clothing aay
Craft group
Figure 1 N6rdlingen, 1579-1724: percent of all taxed, male artisans, selected

craft groups
instance, encompassed twenty-two different trades. And finally, generic

labels in the records left to us often veil an extensive subdivision of
labor. The label “painter” on craftsmen’s bills submitted to aristocratic
customers in eighteenth-century Paris, for example, could have referred
to one of the following craftsmen: decor-painter, architect, painter
carver, gilder, pattern-painter, varnisher, and even stucco-worker.
With such imprecision, need we bother trying to classify and count
artisans according to a division of labor at all? Some might suggest that
any picture is bound to be excessively nominalistic and ultimately
inaccurate, but, since these records are all we have, unless we completely
discount any possibility that they might reflect, however murkily, arti-
sanal activity, then perhaps it is worth presenting some examples of the
division of labor in some European towns that in recent years have been
the subject of scholarly scrutiny.
Nérdlingen, as we have seen, held a citizen population that was
classified as 80 percent artisan. Moreover, as figure 1 shows, the
plurality of artisans was engaged in textiles (most of them woolweavers),
and when added to the leather (mostly tanners and shoemakers) and
food trades (mostly butchers and bakers), we find that from 1579 to
1500-1510
1550-1560
Clothing e i
pee Textiles
Construction
Leather
Craft group
Figure 2. York, 1500-1600: artisans in percent of all admissions to freedom,

selected craft groups
1724 the artisans of these three sectors made up no fewer than two-
thirds of all taxpaying craftsmen in the town.
The other sectors shown here — clothing, construction, and luxury —
also contrast sharply with the division of labor in other European towns,
as we will see. For example, the number of tailors plying their trade in
Nordlingen (only twenty-four, eighteen, and thirty-six in the respective
years) was disproportionately low compared to most other towns, as
were the numbers of building craftsmen (only twenty-two, six, and eight
masons paid taxes in Nérdlingen, and only eight, nine, and thirteen
carpenters did) and luxury craftsmen (only ten, four, and eight gold-
smiths and gilders were listed as taxpayers, and only five, one, and one
painters were, although by 1724 the town could boast two clockmaker
s
and two organbuilders).
Tudor York (figure 2) provides us with a very different picture.
True,
as in Nordlingen the dominant class in this city was the “freeman,”
or
citizen, a group that was comprised mostly of master craftsme
n, traders,
and shopkeepers. In the 1530s and 1540s, however, they
numbered
about half of the adult males in this city with a total population
in 1525
of close to 6,000 souls. Throughout the late medieval and
early modern
The workplace 101
period York was among the five largest and wealthiest cities in the
kingdom, despite its dramatic contraction between 1377 and 1525. Still,
in 1579 this classic regional production center and market town had
sixty-four craft guilds within it, and, in partial contrast to Nordlingen,
the largest craft sectors were the clothing, food, and by 1600, the
building trades that served the city and its hinterland.
Within these groups, the largest craft guilds were tailors and shoe-
makers in the clothing trades, butchers and bakers in the food trades,
carpenters and tilers in the building trades, weavers in textiles, and
tanners in the leather trades. York’s craft profile conforms to the
traditional picture that historians at one time thought was general to the
urban artisan population of Europe. To be sure, the division of labor in
this example was not unique, for many other towns exhibited very
similar patterns; but, on the basis of the mounting evidence in recent
studies, we must be wary of assuming that this was the norm, or that
there even was a norm.
Looking at Frankfurt am Main in the late sixteenth century (figure
3) we see a city that thrived from transit commercial traffic on the
Main river as well as from the fairs held there twice a year. But an
examination of the craft sector comprised of 1,247 male, artisan house-
holders finds production geared toward the local market, not for
export. Ostensibly, we might expect, then, a profile similar to York’s, if
not Noérdlingen’s.
Direct comparison between York, Frankfurt, and Noérdlingen is im-
possible, given the variations in the way the respective historians have
chosen to form their craft groups, but certain resemblances are apparent
nonetheless. Victualing trades are well represented in each city, and not
surprisingly butchers and bakers dominated this sector in all three cities,
as they must have in every early modern city. In 1616 in Frankfurt
approximately sixty butchers belonged to their guild; unless there was
extraordinary growth in their ranks between 1587 and 1616, butchers
must have comprised nearly one-half of the food and drink sector there.
Similarly, tailors were numerous nearly everywhere. In 1587 there were
ninety-four men in Frankfurt’s tailors’ guild, so tailors undoubtedly
comprised nearly the entire “clothing” craft sector there. But note that
this craft sector only represents 8 percent of male artisan householders,
still twice the representation of this sector in Nérdlingen but contrasted
sharply with York’s 25 percent at roughly the same time. D. M. Palliser
counted shoemakers within the clothing sector in York, and Christopher
Friedrichs clearly did not for either Nérdlingen or Frankfurt; but even if
we add the entire leather sector in Frankfurt to the clothing sector there,
the percentage still remains well below the combined clothing and
30
25
20
_— On
Percent
Nn
0 ; !
Textiles Luxury Construction Leather Clothing Metals Others
Woodworking Victualing
Craft group
Figure 3. Frankfurt am Main, 1587: percent of artisan householders by craft

group
leather trades of York. Ostensibly similar towns, York and Frankfurt

turn out to be quite different in the division of artisanal labor.
Like York and Frankfurt, Dijon also was a city that produced for the
surrounding hinterland and served as a regional market center (increas-
ingly for wine); but it was also a growing administrative center and a
provincial capital during the late medieval and early modern centuries.
How different was its artisanal sector from our previous examples?
Certain similarities with York, Frankfurt, and even Nordlingen are
evident where we would expect them, but more instructive are the
differences. In Dijon, with the population of office-holders, merchants,
lawyers, and rentiers exploding between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-
eighteenth century, crafts that catered to their consumption needs grew.
Recall that this elite comprised only 5 percent of the heads of house-
holds in 1464 (artisans comprised about one-third), but by 1750 these
same elite groups equaled about a quarter of the population, as did the
artisans. Given that this elite was also increasingly wealthy and fully
immersed in a culture of conspicuous luxury consumption from at least
the mid-seventeenth century, we should not be surprised to find that the
division of artisanal labor would shift to sectors satisfying these
demands.
The workplace 103
25
20
13.
Percent
10 fe
Textiles Leather Clothing Victualing Metals Woodworking Luxury

Construction Wine-related
Craft group
Figure 4 Dijon, 1464-1750: percent of artisan heads of households (male and

female)
Clearly, as figure 4 shows, the textile industry in Dijon collapsed in

the sixteenth century (victim to rural industry and competition from
other textile towns), but other sectors grew. This was notable in the
building trades. Dijon’s streets in the seventeenth century rang with the
clang of masons’ chisels and pounded to the thud of carpenters’
hammers and adzes as sumptuous townhouses sprang up all over town.
The woodworking sector grew, too, as many joiners and furniture-
makers fitted out the interiors of these townhouses. Above all, however,
the growth is clearest in the luxury sector.
Rome in the early sixteenth century had some similarities to the Dijon
of later centuries, but departs from the profiles of some of the other
examples described thus far (figure 5). Both Rome and Dijon housed
relatively large elite populations (unlike Nérdlingen) — in Rome’s case,
the Roman aristocracy and the clergy and courtiers attached to the
papal court — both experienced construction booms, and both sup-
ported a relatively large sector of artisans producing luxury goods.
As nearly everywhere, there were more tailors than any other
craftsmen in Rome, but the building boom that Rome experienced
throughout the sixteenth century provided work for many carpenters,
3D
30
25
20
Percent
Clothing Construction Victualing Leather Luxury
Craft group
Figure 5 Rome, 1526-7: percent of artisan household heads
masons, and tilers, not to mention the thousands of unskilled day

laborers thronging the construction sites. Many of these craftsmen
found work as a result of the Catholic Reformation-inspired building
program by Sixtus V and his successors who, after 1585, were bent on
glorifying the Church of Rome. No doubt as in Dijon, many Roman
tailors made clothes for the Roman elite and so the percentage recorded
on the chart on Rome (and Dijon) probably underrepresents the
proportion of artisans producing luxury goods. Even underrepresented,
however, these ranks were large relative to what we know of other towns
of sixteenth-century Europe, no doubt a testimony to the precocious
luxury consumption of the denizens of the aristocratic and papal courts.
Like in Dijon and Rome, luxury consumption in Madrid restructured
the artisanry as well (table 3.2). In the eighteenth century it was so
pronounced in Spain’s capital that well over half the artisans there were
engaged in making products for this market. In contrast to Madrid but
typical of most Castillian cities, Cuenca witnessed a radical contractio
n
of its total population from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (from
nearly 15,000 in 1561 to barely 6,000 in 1707, then creeping slightly
upward to just over 7,500 by 1771) and with it the collapse of
the
export-oriented textile and metallurgical industries (figure 6). Local
service industries (leather, clothing, and construction) remained fairly
The workplace 105
Table 3.2. Madrid, 1757: distribution of occupations by product, in percent
%
Quality textiles, leather, and final products 44.7
Precious metals, jewelry Toor
Mechanical and metallurgical 19.8
Rough textiles, leather, semi-finished goods Lak
Other crafts 6.6
Source: David Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1983), p. 69.
60
50
40
30
Percent
20
10
Textiles Leather Nasal PEN Construction er eee cate
Craft group
Figure 6 Cuenca, 1561-1771: percent of artisans by craft group
constant in absolute numbers, suggesting that by the eighteenth century

Cuenca’s artisans were providing for the town and its immediate hinter-
land only.
A final example, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, again
challenges our desire to generalize, and the historian who arrived at the
following numbers used yet another kind of source to do so: mortality
bills (figure 7).
Masters, journeymen, apprentices
The sources social historians have at their disposal for numerical repre-
sentation are usually biased toward the sedentary and proprietary
1540-1600
Percent
Clothing
Leather
Metals
Construction
Craft group
Figure 7 Greater London, 1540-1700: percent of artisans, selected craft
groups
artisan, that is, the male master. From these, we can gain some know-
ledge of the numbers and proportions of masters in Europe’s urban
populations. In contrast, seldom do we capture journeymen, apprentices,
or women methodically enough in our records to count them and to
determine their representation in the population. The example of the
apprentices of seventeenth-century London is interesting, but unfortu-
nately nearly singular. London in 1600 had about 15,000 apprentice
s
and 12,000 journeymen in its artisan shops, the apprentices swelling
to
20,000 by 1650. Untold thousands more, however, fled beyond
the
northern, eastern, and southern edges of the city (areas which
grew
dramatically in population) to evade guild regulation. It has
been esti-
mated that in 1600 apprentices comprised about 15 percent
of the
population of London, but by 1700 they were only 4 or 5 percent.
If we cannot offer much more than this in the way of apprent
ice and
journeyman representation in the towns and cities of Europe,
-we can
present ratios of master to apprentice and master to journey
man. Here
again, however, diversity is the rule. In some places, like
early modern
Dijon or eighteenth-century Bordeaux, apprentices were
very few, while
The workplace 107
in Rome in 1622 they outnumbered the masters 17,584 to 6,609. At the

Venetian Arsenal in 1630 within the three major guilds of shipwrights,
caulkers, and oarmakers the proportions of masters to apprentices were,
respectively, 217:165, 277:121, and 56:20.
Heterogeneity describes master to journeyman ratios, too, since in
some places the masters outnumbered the journeymen, while elsewhere
it was the inverse. In Coventry in the 1520s there were 63 master
capmakers and 47 journeymen, but 37 master weavers and 45 jour-
neymen. In Augsburg in 1615 the master shoemakers outnumbered the
journeymen 111 to 62, while in the same year in the same town the
master joiners outnumbered their journeymen 119 to 80, a proportion
that shifted four years later to 104 to 85. In the towns of Bavaria in 1792
there were three to four master artisans for every journeyman.
Elsewhere, journeymen outnumbered the masters. In the faience
workshops in Delft in 1640 there were about 15 knechts (apprentices and
journeymen) in each of the ten registered potteries. In Bologna in 1697
236 journeymen were spread (unevenly) among the 49 master shoe-
makers’ shops. In Rouen in 1752 journeymen hatters outnumbered the
masters 100 to 18, while in Paris in 1739 the proportion was 546 to 63,
an imbalance that was even more exaggerated in 1790-1 when there
were 1,602 journeymen hatters and only 67 masters.
Women
If we know little about the numbers of journeymen and apprentices, we

know even less about female artisans. Two central problems in the
history of women’s work have been, first, to explain the changes in the
gender division of labor in the European workforce from the late Middle
Ages to the era of industrialization, and second, to determine whether
these changes entailed a devaluation of women’s work and a margin-
alization of their activities from the market economy. Although, given
the nature of the sources, we can never know the full extent of female
involvement in the early modern economy, recent local studies are
confirming the impression that we should not think of the family
economy and the market economy as somehow separate, nor should we
think of women as confined to the former and cut off from the latter.
Indeed, a consensus is emerging among historians that women’s eco-
nomic activity changed in the early modern centuries and a gendered
division of labor appears to have rigidified. Female participation in the
economy, however, was certainly not confined to the household. Or
rather, we should say that the household economy was closely and
dynamically connected to the market economy and so that a female role
108 Artisans in Europe; 1300-1914
in the “family economy” often meant a pronounced contribution to the

market economy itself.
A recent study of women in the construction trades in eighteenth-
century Brittany by Elizabeth Musgrave neatly illustrates the ambiguity
of the female role in the artisanal economy and the blurred distinction
between the household and market economy. She points out that on-site
construction was performed by mobile and transient artisans who
formed craft associations that were “free” and thus not officially guilds.
She ‘contrasts this organization of work with the sedentary off-site
construction trades which were workshop based and formally incorpo-
rated. The nonguild, on-site work was monopolized by men, while,
surprisingly, female builders were fairly common in the off-site sector.
These female builders were not members of guilds, but as wives of
master guildsmen they could act legally in the marketplace if they did so
with the permission of their husbands. Widows had even more freedom.
In any case, Musgrave finds women working independently, supplying
on-site enterprises with raw materials, sometimes even engaging in
general contracting, bidding for and undertaking large-scale, multicraft
building projects. The only evident participation of the husband in these
enterprises is his requisite signature.
One can see in the example of the construction trades of Brittany the
outlines of the traditional picture of the wife of the master craftsman as
his helpmate in the family workshop, but closer scrutiny reveals a more
complex picture where women were more independent than previously
thought. Of course, not all wives became independent contractors or
wholesalers of supplies. Indeed, in the countless small household work-
shops that dotted most medieval and early modern streets husbands and
wives were partners, the women often having an adjunctive role in
production. Bakers’ wives would set out loaves baked by their husbands,
while butchers’ wives would boil the tripe and bones of the beasts
slaughtered by their spouses. Similarly, weavers’ wives were often
spinners, providing the thread needed by their husbands in the making
of cloth (illustration 7). Wives of artisans everywhere can be found
as
the keepers of the accounts of the family enterprise, often
making
purchases of raw materials and paying workers.
As we saw in chapter 1, guild history shows a trend toward exclusio
n
of women from guilds from the late Middle Ages, but
many early
modern cities still had mixed membership guilds. The
weavers of
Augsburg in 1600 are one example, where 15 percent
of the:masters
were women (although they employed only 5 percent of
the journeymen
and apprentices). The guilds of spinners, ribbon-makers,
and _lace-
makers in eighteenth-century Rouen counted many women
in the ranks
The workplace 109
Dev Weber,
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AV
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Yeh bin ein Weber sur Leiner Wat/

Kan wircken Barchentvnd Gponat/
Fifchibicher/Hand;webl/Factlet/
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ty
from
Illustration 7 Sixteenth-century weaver. Reproduced with permission
Sachs, The Book of Trades, New York: Dover
Jost Amman and Hans
Publications, 1973
of masters, too. Indeed, in this city of 85,000 inhabitants there were 600
female masters in various trades, or about 7 percent of all of the city’s
guild masters.
The evidence of women artisans in mixed guilds is just the tip of the
iceberg of their actual artisanal activities, however, for recent studies
have shown that, despite legal exclusion from most guilds, many women
practiced artisanal trades nearly everywhere. In fourteenth-century
Flanders, for instance, women may have been increasingly excluded
from guilds, but precept was not always practice. The dyer guilds there
specifically excluded women, but we know nonetheless that many
women worked as dyers in Flemish cities, some even owning dyeing
enterprises. Similarly the famous London silkwomen, though they had
no guild status, dominated silk manufacture and trade in the late
medieval and early modern period. In Oxford between 1500 and 1650
no women were admitted to the freedom and thus none could legally
practice a trade independently, but there is evidence for widespread
female involvement (even their taking of apprentices) in glovemaking,
shoemaking, and tailoring. In York between 1560 and 1700 we find
women silkweavers, pinmakers, joiners, curriers, pewterers, and tailors.
In Lyons in 1781 many women practiced aspects of the hatting trade, as
eplucheuses, cardeuses, and coupeuses, and even had formed “combina-
tions,” perhaps with the intention of one day receiving guild status.
Clearly, women practiced a wide range of artisanal crafts, but along-
side this diversity is a trend toward an increasingly gendered division
of
labor as women were concentrated more and more in particular artisanal
sectors. Peter Earle presents us with a cross-section of female
artisanal
activity in London between 1695 and 1725, and it neatly
sums up a
picture that should be noted for the diversity of female
artisanal
activities as well as the concentration of women in cloth
and clothing
production and sale. He bases his profile on 613 depositio
ns of female
witnesses (unmarried women, wives, and widows) before
the London
church courts.’ Not all of these women claimed to practice
artisanal
activities (many of which were casual, intermittent,
or seasonal, and
none of which was organized in livery companies or
guilds), but 12 of
the women were involved in some form of manufact
ure other than
textiles, while 28 were involved in textile manufacture (mostly as
silkwinders) and another 124 made or mended
clothes. A further 47
were retail shopkeepers (many of them were milliners
, who employed
apprentices and journeywomen to do needlework
to stock their. shops).
! Peter Earle, “The female labour market in

London in the late 17th and early 18th
centuries,” Economic History Review 2nd ser., 42
(1989), 328-53.
The workplace 111
In sum, about one-third of Earle’s sample was involved in artisanal and

shopkeeping activities, most in cloth and clothing production and sale.
This female concentration in textiles can be traced to the late Middle
Ages, but so can diverse female participation in other artisanal activities.
In late medieval England, for instance, there is scattered evidence of
women working as smiths, and female bakers (probably as managers)
are not unusual in late medieval London. Sixteenth-century German
cities had many independent women working in the “free arts,” or crafts
not organized into guilds, doing, for example, light metalwork (making
needles, thimbles, or rings).
In mid-fourteenth-century Florence, women could be found in a wide
variety of artisanal occupations, too, but by the early fifteenth century a
significant change had set in, a change that was not unique to Florence.
Women became increasingly concentrated in particular artisanal sectors
and excluded from others. From the early fifteenth century until the late
sixteenth there is scant mention of working women in the Florentine
records, but just before 1600 rather suddenly account books of woolen
manufacturers show a rising percentage of female workers. By 1604 62
percent of weavers and 40 percent of woolworkers were women, the
majority of whom were married. This surge of women back into the
workforce resulted from the “bidding away” of men from the textile
trades into the booming luxury trades. By 1663 women were confined to
woolweaving and warping; of 550 woolweavers, 447 were women, as
were 26 of the 27 warpers. Conversely, all beaters, cleansers, scourers,
tenterers, dyers, shearers, and menders were men.
The Florentine silk industry shows a similar gendered division of
labor. All master dyers were men, as were their apprentices, but 65
percent of the 100 master throwsters were women (as were 78 percent of
the 480 apprentices), 78 percent of the nearly 2,000 master silkweavers
were women and 59 percent of the 775 apprentices were, and every one
of the nearly 5,000 master silkwinders was a woman, and nearly all the
3,300 children who worked in the trade were female. The vacuum drew
women in, and in the process constructed a gendered division of labor,
not between the household and the market economy, but within the
market economy itself.
A similar trend toward concentration of women in certain textile
trades occurred in German cities. In fourteenth-century Frankfurt
twenty-four different “free arts” were the preserve of women, mostly in
cloth and clothing production. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
witnessed a gradual crowding of women into fewer and fewer free arts as
incorporation took over formerly free crafts and masculinized them.
Even in the sixteenth century there were still women tailors in at least
thirty German cities, but by the end of the century everywhere they had
been reduced to seamstresses working for male tailors. The same trend
of exclusion, concentration, and increasing gendered division of labor
can be seen in stocking-knitting as men took over the trade and excluded
women from it. Ultimately, quite often women artisans were left only
with spinning. Indeed, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
most common female artisanal occupation in German towns, and
probably nearly everywhere else, was spinning.
Clearly the early modern trend was toward concentration of female
artisanal tasks in certain sectors, but within these sectors women did, in
some cities, expand their activities. Maxine Berg asserts that in eight-
eenth-century England women dominated all aspects of textile manu-
facture. Across the channel in France women were independently
participating in the expanding clothing trades. Certainly this is the case
with seamstresses and linendrapers (lingéres). The seamstresses of Paris
established an all-female guild in 1675, carving out of the male tailoring
world the privilege to sew and sell clothing for women, and for children
under the age of eight. As we have seen, their numbers expanded
throughout the eighteenth century reaching 3,000 by 1789. The linen-
drapers, the oldest women’s guild in Paris (they traced their statutes to
the fifteenth century), rode the increasing demand for underclothing in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to expansion and, in some
cases, prosperity, for some women organized themselves into a well-
heeled group with large networks of suppliers and workers. By the 1780s
there were 800 mistress linendrapers in Paris employing another 1,200
lingeres.
As the cases of the seamstresses and linendrapers of Paris illustrate,
all-female guilds existed in the early modern period. However, the
history of guilds reveals the trend across these same centuries toward
a
gendered division of labor and the concentration of women artisans
in
fewer craft sectors. Already in the fourteenth century we can see a trend
toward excluding women from guilds in which hitherto they had
been
members. In the towns of fourteenth century Flanders guilds
were
steadily excluding women from their ranks, while in late
medieval
Cologne guilds likewise imposed restrictions on female membersh
ip.
Cologne also reveals the trend toward a more rigid gendered
division of
labor, for in Cologne several all-female guilds were in fact created.
The
yarntwisters were organized as a guild between 1370 and 1397,
receiving
statutes in 1397, while spinners of gold thread were chartered
_also in
1397 and silkmakers in 1437. From the time of incorpora
tion until
1504, 116 mistress silkmakers with independent shops employin
g 765
apprentices made and marketed silk, and joined a
thriving export
The workplace 113
industry. This was not just a medieval or German phenomenon, since in

eighteenth-century Rouen several of the seventy guilds were exclusively
female as well: the hand-knitters, the fashionable plume-makers, the
embroiderers of religious vestments, and the linendrapers.
Nearly everywhere widows of masters of guilds were permitted to
continue their husbands’ businesses, although usually, as we have seen,
there were statutory restrictions on their activities. It is probable that in
most places most of the women in the mixed guilds that had master
status gained it through widowhood. In Nantes between 1620 and 1650
at least 10 percent of the bakeries and butchers’ shops were run by
mistress widows, while in York between 1581 and 1660, according to
guild account books, 49 of the 257 bakers were widows. Similarly, in
Frankfurt am Main in 1696 30 of 180 master tailors were widows.
Despite the evidence of widows running independent artisanal busi-
nesses, we should not draw the conclusion that most widows of master
artisans did so. The evidence from London between 1695 and 1725
suggests that few did there, a situation that held for sixteenth-century
Augsburg as well. No doubt some widows ran businesses in areas related
to their husband’s occupation, as was the case in early modern construc-
tion in northern England where it was not unusual for widows to run
building supply businesses. Still, a life of penury confronted many a
widow.
Wealth and poverty

In 1741 Pierre Anquetin, one of the poorest of Paris’s master bakers,
died. The modest dowry of 1,500 /divres that his wife had brought to the
marriage in 1719 and an equal sum he had contributed had long since
been depleted, so that he left his six children and his widow with no
assets and saddled with a debt of over 4,200 livres. In the same trade at
about the same time we find Pierre Lepage, one of the richest bakers in
all of Paris but who was not even a master but a faubourien, a denizen of
one of Paris’s guild-free suburbs. He boasted a net worth of 82,818
livres, which included uncollected debts of customers of more than
25,000 livres, rentes worth over 24,000 livres, and a house, complete
with a library of 200 books, worth 13,000 livres. Such a range of wealth
and poverty within the same trade was, in fact, typical of most trades in
most cities, and once again impresses upon us the rule of diversity and
heterogeneity in the early modern European artisanry.
Because of the scarcity of the kinds of sources needed to ascertain
wealth (above all tax rolls and notarial records) and the painstaking and
time-consuming research needed to compile and interpret them, we can
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~Q [S) 3 o q ra 1S) °
7 | Ay ° oO w a
iE
°
ee= 2oe 3
5 Se Sork4 deskeoas
Occupation
Figure 8 Florence and Pisa, 1427: average per capita wealth in florins, selected
occupations
say little about artisanal wealth during the Middle Ages. Of course, we
can surmise that opening and stocking a shop and staffing it with
workers required a level of wealth that was significantly greater than that
commanded by the propertyless migrant laborer or vagrant, but we have
no way to compare quantitatively the relative wealth of various artisanal
occupations, or artisans with other occupations in medieval cities before
the fifteenth century. With the early modern centuries, however, this
changes.
When we examine quantitatively the distribution of wealth in various
early modern European cities, we find, as we might expect, that artisans
nearly everywhere rank well below the elite of their city (patricians, royal
officials, merchants, lawyers), but also appear as owners of enough
property to place them clearly above the propertyless underclass of
society. In this “average” sense they were a “middling sort,” but closer
examination shows a wide disparity in the wealth of different artisans in
given towns, even within the same occupation. :
Fifteenth-century Florence and Pisa conform to these generalizations
(figure 8). There was an enormous chasm in terms of wealth between
The workplace 115
Lie pe en
Illustration 8 Nailmaker, 1529. Reproduced with permission from Jost

Amman and Hans Sachs, The Book of Trades, New York: Dover Publications,
1973
120
Under 100
100 F [__] 100-400
BB 401-1000
80 GB Over 1000
~
3
8 60
AY
40
20
0 CS
Patricians Coopers Butchers Tailors Lacemakers All males
Merchants Shoemakers Day labourers
Occupation
Figure 9 Frankfurt am Main, 1587: distribution of wealth by assessed worth

in gulden, selected occupations
the Florentine and Pisan elite (bankers, merchants, and lawyers) and the
artisans, and when we note that the sottoposti (or unincorporated and
essentially propertyless occupations) of Florence in 1427 overwhel-
mingly clustered at the bottom of the wealth scale where fully 65 percent
of them had an assessed individual net worth of one florin or less, we get
a picture of a vertical distribution of wealth, with an artisanry clustering
in a lower middle rank. Many of these artisans, however, were closer to
the sottoposti than at first appears because of indebtedness. If we
deducted their debts from their net worth we would find over 40 percent
of them in the “1 florin or less” category. In other words, these artisans
owned property, but for many it was entirely mortgaged. The difference
between a tailor with an assessed worth of, say, 100 florins, and a
propertyless sottoposto was narrower than one might initially assume. No
wonder artisans were so keen on proclaiming the status differences
between themselves and their “inferiors.” They were closer to them
economically than they wished to admit.
In its heterogeneity, Frankfurt in 1587 is similar to Pisa and Florence
of 150 years earlier (figure 9). Once again, the artisans are distinctly
placed between the patricians and the day laborers, but the Frankfurt
The workplace 117
Illustration 9 Shoemaker, 1520. Reproduced with permission from Jost

1973
100
0—40th
90
[__] 41-80th
80
a Above 80th
70
60
50
Percent
40
30
20
10
Merchants Lawyers Artisans Winegrowers
Occupational group
Figure 10 Dijon, 1556: distribution of wealth, by percentile, in percent of

selected taxable occupational groups
records show that distribution of wealth among and within trades was
wide. Here the coopers, butchers, tailors, shoemakers, and lacemakers,
to name some prominent trades, cluster together relative to the rest of
society, but, as we will discuss below, also saw their wealth spread widely
across the guild.
Much the same can be said about Dijon in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (figures 10 and 11). The artisans are placed
between the winegrowers below them and the mercantile and legal elite
above. As a group relative to the rest of society, artisans appear a
middling sort, but within the artisanry the range of wealth is once again
wide, with one of every five artisans in the top 20 percent, and about
one of three in the bottom third. Between 1556 and 1643 there is little
change in the artisans’ relative position, but by the mid-seventeenth
century more merchants and lawyers have clustered in the top end of the
wealth scale.
A final example, Madrid in the mid-eighteenth century, at first glance
seems to suggest that artisans were the poorest occupation in town,
oddly, having a greater proportion in the lowest annual income category
of 0—1,000 reales (according to the Catastro of 1757) than even unskilled
The workplace 119
80
70
41—80th
60 ory Above 80th
50
40
Percent
30
Merchants Lawyers Artisans Winegrowers

Occupational group
Figure 11 Dijon, 1643: distribution of wealth, by percentile, in percent of

taxable selected occupational groups
laborers (figure 12). However, artisan wealth in this table is skewed by

the disproportionate representation of poor construction workers who
were especially numerous in Madrid (and 80 percent of whom were not
masters). These artisans account for fully two-thirds of the 0—1,000
reales category, and when they are subtracted from the remaining
artisans in the overall sample, a profile similar to that found in most
other early modern cities emerges, with a clumping of artisans on
average toward the lower third of the scale but with representation
across the wealth spectrum.
Within the European artisanry we also find a range of wealth between
trades. The butchers of Dijon, for instance, from 1464 to 1750 were
consistently more wealthy as a group than the tailors, shoemakers, or
furniture-makers, although the bakers had surpassed all artisans by
1750 (table 3.3).
Many towns are like Dijon in the wide range of wealth possessed by
different master artisans. N6rdlingen in 1579 (table 3.4), Delft in the
1620s (table 3.5), Reutlingen in 1745 (table 3.6), Madrid in 1757 (table
3.7), or Lyons from 1728 to 1789 (table 3.8) are characteristic. The
difference between tanners or butchers and woolweavers in Noérdlingen,
ey
Pywrepvmnst H
Illustration 10 Reliquary maker, 1458. Reproduced with permission from Jost

1973 2
The workplace 121
Illustration 11 Turner, 1485. Reproduced with permission from Jost Amman

and Hans Sachs, The Book of Trades, New York: Dover Publications, 1973
80 |
| | Propertied and
Titled Persons
70 [
a Professions
60 (ea Merchants
Pe Artisans
50 | Labourers and
servants
40
Percent
,__ es
Under 1000 1001-2000 2001-5000 5001-15000 Over 15000
Reales
Figure 12 Madrid, 1757: distribution of wealth (assessed worth) by percent of

occupational category
Table 3.3. Dijon, 1464-1750: median tax assessment (the taille, a tax on
personal wealth), selected trades (minimum ten instances)
1464 1556 1643 1750

(in gros) (in sous) (in sous) (in livres)
Butchers Pape 17 110 12

Goldsmiths 12 10 55 -
Bakers 6 9 60 20
Tailors 6 4 30 7
Shoemakers 5 4 50 a
Furniture-makers 4 4 30 7
Source: James R. Farr, “Consumers, commerce and the craftsmen of Dijon,” in Philip
Benedict, ed., Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (London, 1989),
pp. 134-73.
or between silversmiths or painters and carpenters or pinmakers in

Delft, or between coopers or bakers and carpenters or masons in
Reutlingen, or luxury craftsmen and construction tradesmen in Madrid,
or shoemakers and bakers in Lyons, for example, is visibly dramatic.
If wealth was widely distributed among the trades, so too can that be
said within individual trades. The shoemakers, butchers, bakers, and
woolweavers of Nordlingen in 1579 show this clearly (figure 13). Even
the relatively wealthy butchers had one in four of their brethren assessed
The workplace
123
Table 3.4. Nérdlingen, 1579: average wealth of male citizens, selected
occupations, in florins
= SS ee ee ee eee
Tanners 652
Butchers 622
Bakers 512
Finecloth weavers 398
Shoemakers 310
Woolweavers 184
All males 438
Source: Christopher Friedrichs, Urban Society in an Age of War: Nérdlingen, 1580-1720

(Princeton, 1979).
Table 3.5. Delft, 1620-31: average real estate taxes paid, selected
occupations (number of taxpayers in parentheses)
Occupation (N) Average taxes paid (in stuivers)
Silversmiths (10) 179.6

Painters (39) 177.8
Faienciers (14) 142.8
Carpenters (39) 103.2
Pinmakers (5) 44.0
Source: John Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft (Princeton, 1982).
Table 3.6. Reutlingen, 1745: average value of homes owned, selected

occupations, in florins (number of home-owners in parentheses)
Bakers 963 (60)

Coopers 669 (17)
Shoemakers 440 (41)
Furnituremakers 390 (4)
Tailors 343 (16)
Carpenters 313 (8)
Masons 275 ©)
Source: Douglas Dekker Hall, “Craftsmen in Reutlingen, 1740 to 1840,” Ph.D. thesis,
University of California at Berkeley, 1977.
Table 3.7. Madrid, 1757: percent of occupational group with income above
(in reales)
1,000 5,000
Luxury crafts 84.7 24.7

Construction 31.1 6.6
Source: David Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy, 1560—1850 (Berkeley, 1983).
Table 3.8. Lyons 1728-89: average apports (livres) brought by males to

marriage, bakers and shoemakers (number of marriages in parentheses)
e
ee
Bakers 1,923.5 (183)

Shoemakers 514.5 (552)
Source: Maurice Garden, Lyons et les lyonnais au XVIIIe siécle (Paris, 1975).
4 All Males
= Shoemakers --------
4 Butchers
© Woolweavers
Percent
0 —
Under 25 26-100 101-400 401-800 801-3200 Over 3200

Florins
Figure 13 Nordlingen, 1579: distribution of wealth, in florins, in percent of
taxpayers in selected crafts
in the lowly 0—25 florin category, while nearly an equal number were
assessed on a worth of over 800 florins, and 1 in 25 of over 3,200 florins.
At the other end of the artisanal wealth scale we find the woolweavers
where predictably nearly two of five were assessed on 25 florins or less;
but even in this poor trade more than one in eight were assessed on over
400 florins.
The same disparities of wealth can be seen within the crafts of
Frankfurt in 1587 (figure 9). As we have seen, there was a considerable
gap between the coopers in general and the lacemakers, but even among
the relatively wealthy coopers and the relatively poor lacemakers, note
that wealth within the guild was scattered from the top to the bottom of
the scale. The same could be said about most trades in most European
towns from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Entirely typical in
this regard are the shoemakers and tailors of Dijon in 1556 and 1643
The workplace
Illustration 12 Butcher, 1436. Reproduced with permission from Jost Amman

and Hans Sachs, The Book of Trades, New York: Dover Publications, 1973
Table 3.9. Dijon, 1556, 1643: distribution of wealth by percentile, in

percentage of taxpaying shoemakers and tailors (number of taxpayers in
parentheses)
eee
eee
Percentile
0—40th 41—80th over 80th
Re ee ee Mo en ee ee ee eS SS
Shoemakers
1556 (4) BS 44.1 20.6
1643 (45) 24.4 64.4 15.6
Tailors
1556 (70) 31.4 54.3 14.3
1643 (71) 38.6 49.3 ia
————
Dee
Source: James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550—1650
(Ithaca, 1988).
Table 3.10. Frankfurt, 1701: wealth assessment of master tailors, in florins

——————————eeee—eee EET
eee
Assessment Number of masters Percent of all masters

“So eS 2 ee eS ee ee a eee
Under 300 2 2
300 60 44
301-—2,000 59 44
Over 2,000 14 10
Source: Gerald Soliday, A Community in Conflict: Frankfurt Society in the Seventeenth and
Early Eighteenth Centuries (Hanover, NH, 1974).
Table 3.11. Paris, 1773: distribution of wealth, goldsmiths, in percent of

goldsmiths paying capitation asssessment
Assessment in livres
1-5 6-25 26-50 51-100 Over 100
21% 49.8% 16.9% 7% 2.8%
Source: Steven L. Kaplan, “The luxury guilds in Paris in the eighteenth century,” Francia
(1981).
(table 3.9), the tailors of Frankfurt in 1701 (table 3.10), or even the
goldsmiths of Paris in 1773 (table 3.11). If one of the functions of guilds
in preindustrial Europe was to ensure an equitable distribution of wealth
among its members as guild statutes suggest and historians have
asserted, they were doing a demonstrably poor job of it.
The sources that historians have used to describe the distribution of
wealth — usually tax rolls, notarial contracts, or property registers —
inevitably privilege the sedentary resident and head of household. In
The workplace
V2
Table 3.12. Dyon 1464-1750: distribution
of wealth among female artisans,
by percentile of total taxpaying population
Se
Widowed Single
N= Percentile N= Percentile
1464 18 36th 0 ~
1556 36 50th 4 26th
1643 25 43rd 8 15th
1750 174 42nd 105 36th
SS ———— Ss.
Source: Farr, “Consumers, commerce and the craftsmen
of Dijon,” in Philip Benedict, ed.,
Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (London, 1989),
pp. 134-73.
most cases when the resident is an artisan, this means that

males and
masters are disproportionately represented. How can we determi
ne the
wealth of journeymen, many of whom were migratory and
did not
establish households of their own? And what about women? Theoret
i-
cally, the wealth of independent women should be easier to ascertai
n
than that of journeymen since they were heads of households, but
the
male preponderance as household heads in the extant records
has
guided historians in search of norms away from quantitative analysis of
female artisanal wealth. True, the number of female household heads
before the seventeenth century who were not widows was rather small,
but no studies that I am aware of besides my own on Dijon have even
correlated widows with occupation and taxable wealth. Most studies
generally refer to artisan widows as invariably poor, and no doubt many
were, but the evidence from Dijon cautions us from making sweeping
generalizations. It shows that widows tended to be better off on average
than single female artisans, and though generally below their male
counterparts, many of these women were definitely above the threshold
of poverty.
If we can say little about the wealth of artisan women, we can say
more about that of journeymen. Tax rolls are not much help here
because rarely do these sources indicate whether the taxpaying artisan
was a journeyman. Other sources, like marriage contracts or property
registers, are more helpful, however, and though the evidence is sparse,
in each of the following cases, predictably, we see a picture of significant
differences between the wealth of masters and that of journeymen. For
instance, in Dijon from 1550 to 1650, the average apports that daughters
of master artisans brought to their marriage was 278.6 livres while that
of daughters of journeymen was 95.5 livres. A ratio of about 6:1 is
evident in the values of dwellings owned by masters and journeymen in
Delft between 1620 and 1644. Here master painters’ homes averaged
1,800 gulden in value, while the homes of journeymen painters averaged

275 gulden. The gap between master faience-makers and their jour-
neymen in this European capital of majolica production was not as wide,
but it was substantial nonetheless, for the average master’s home was
worth 1,650 gulden while that of a journeyman was 672 gulden. Looking
at Lyons over a century later a similar relative disparity is evident. From
1749 to 1751 the daughters of master artisans in general brought apports
of 1,870 livres to marriage, while those of journeymen averaged 600
livres. In each of these cases — Dijon, Delft, Lyons — the ratio of master
to journeyman wealth was usually about 3:1. Of course, this evidence
disproportionately reflects the sedentary artisan of whatever status (one
would have to assume that the gap between the sedentary master and
the migratory journeyman must have been greater still), but as with tax
rolls, these averages also obscure the fact that there were many masters
who could scrape up no more assets for their daughters than jour-
neymen could, and must have crowded into dwellings little different
from those inhabited by their “inferiors.”
At this end of the spectrum of wealth we come up against artisans
perilously close to sliding out of the world of the artisanry altogether (as
we have come to understand it) and into the world of proletarianized
waged labor. These workers are not the subject of this book, of course,
but their existence (which has been amply documented by many
historians, particularly in the textile industry) calls our attention to the
volatility and precariousness of the world of the artisan, for penury and
economic dependency were never far away from many a craftsman.
Working conditions
Our best evidence telling us what the workplace was like is visual. Rich
as images can be (illustrations 13-17), unfortunately they still leave to
our imagination the sounds and even the smells that round out what life
in the artisanal shop was like. Or perhaps we should say shops, for the
working conditions varied widely from trade to trade. The construction
industry was noisy with the sawing, stonecutting, chiseling, and ham-
mering that took place at crowded sites full of bustle, while tanneries
were renowned for noxious odors, shoemakers’ shops for being cramped
and ill lighted, butchers’ shops, obviously, not only for the raw meat
carved off the carcass of an animal dispatched with little concern for the
suffering the beast might feel, but also for the rivers of blood and globs
of fat that accompanied the process. Indeed, although butchers were
everywhere enjoined to do their work only in slaughterhouses, they often
out of convenience simply slaughtered the brutes in the alleys behind
The workplace 129
Illustration 13 Cabinet-maker, 1484. Reproduced with permission from Jost

1973
Illustration 14 Sixteenth-century wood turner by Jan Joris van der Vliet. ©

Kupferstichkabinett. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin — Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
Photo Jorg P. Anders
The workplace 131
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Darnach henck ichs auffan die Sta non/
Wiifch darnach ab mit cin Harwiifch/
Bud habs feyl auffoem Leder Tifch.
ae
Illustration 15 Sixteenth-century tanner. Reproduced with permission from
Jost Amman and Hans Sachs, The Book of Trades, New York: Dover
Publications, 1973
£32 Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914
bate foro
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Illustration 16 Seventeenth-century edge-tool maker. Photo Bibliotheque

nationale de France, Paris
The workplace 133
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Illustration 17 Seventeenth-century carpenter. Photo Bibliotheque nationale

de France, Paris
their shops, turning these byways into impassable morasses of fly-
infested, coagulated blood.
The working conditions in artisanal workshops, large or small, were,
in Arlette Farge’s words, “violent and deadly.”” Overcrowding, poor or
2 Arlette Farge, “Les Artisans malades de leur travail,’ Annales. Economies, soctétés,
civilisations 32:5 (1997), 994.
non-existent ventilation, the use of chemicals emitting noxious, even

incapacitating, and sometimes deadly fumes, all afflicted the early
modern workplace. Risks on the job were high, prompting historian
John Rule to observe “The labouring poor you always had with you, but
not, in many occupations, for very long.”? Building trades had the ever-
present risk of a fall, as Gaspare Nadi well attested. This fifteenth-
century waller from Bologna records in his diary several falls he suffered,
the most serious being a plunge down a chimney.
An English pamphleteer lamented in 1782 that manufacturing pro-
duced a “mournful scene of the blind and lame and of enfeebled,
decrepit, asthmatic, consumptive wretches crawling half alive upon the
surface of the earth.”4 Allowing for hyperbole, there is, nonetheless,
little doubt that working for piecerates, as many craftsmen did, encour-
aged long hours at work and resulted in fatigue, and thus accidents on
the job. Negligent or tired printing shop workers passing too close to a
press in operation could find their ribs, arms, or legs broken or their
skulls fractured by whirling levers. Clothcutters lost fingers while wool-
combers often punctured theirs.
Different occupations had specific risks, depending upon the nature
of their work, but all work took its toll upon the artisan. Hernial ruptures
plagued craftsmen doing heavy lifting, while prolonged and repeated
muscular action or working in the same posture for hours at a time, day
in and day out in trades like shoemaking, saddlemaking, or tailoring
contributed to cramps sometimes known as “craft palsies.” Cruelly, to
modern sensibilities, a part of the Black Country in England was known
colloquially as “humpshire” because of the deformed posture of the
locksmiths that concentrated there. Equally insensitive by modern
measures, in 1700 the Italian physician Ramazzini wrote a treatise of
occupational medicine in which he observed that
It is a laughable sight to see those guilds of cobblers and tailors in their own
special feast days when they march in procession two by two. . . Yes, it makes
one laugh to see that troop of stooping, round-shouldered, limping men swaying
from side to side; they look as though they had all been carefully selected for an
exhibition of these infirmities.?
Disabling chemicals — especially lead and mercury — also afflicted
artisans who came into contact with them. Ramazzini described the
effects of lead poisoning contracted by pottery workers who used lead in
their glazes: “First their hands become palsied, then they become
3 John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century English Industry (New York,
1981), p.76.
4 Tbid., p. 74.
> Quoted in ibid., pp. 82-3.
The workplace 135
paralytic, splenetic, lethargic, cachetic and toothless, so that one rarely

sees a potter whose face is not cadaverous and the colour of lead.”
Ramazzini surmised that gilders, who also used lead in their work,
would pray for death if they did not die young, for ‘an uncontrollable
trembling of fingers, hands, legs, and head would begin to afflict
craftsmen after just months on the job. Mercury brought on nervous
and mental disorder, too. Used in the making of felt hats, “hatters’
shakes” and the mental symptoms of depression, loss of memory, and
paranoia resulted from mercury poisoning, and contributed to the
proverbial image of the “mad hatter.”
Amid such perils, nonetheless, work did get done. Artisanal tech-
niques everywhere were protected by craftsmen themselves as the
“mysteries” of the trade, so we know surprisingly little about the actual
work done by artisans. They operated by “rules of thumb,” learned by
apprentices through experience from a master or a journeyman, and by
a journeyman from his fellows or from a master. Techniques were
therefore highly varied, secretive, and far removed from the systematic,
scientific basis that mechanical production would gradually acquire
during the era of industrialization. Perhaps the best way to describe
artisanal technique would be in a manner familiar to the craftsmen of
the age themselves, by example, by exploring the techniques, sights,
sounds, smells, and conditions of a few, specific trades.
Let us begin with ubiquitous baking, its eighteenth-century Parisian
ambience recently so magisterially examined by Steven Kaplan.’ Most
of the production of loaves of bread took place in the bakehouse
(fournil), a dark and ill-ventilated place behind the boutique or some-
times underground. Usually the baker’s brick or refined-clay oven was in
the bakehouse, and so bakers and their workers toiled in exceedingly hot
and often cramped conditions (sometimes so hot that the dough did not
rise properly, having partially cooked from the heat, and sometimes so
cramped that bakers could wield the long-handled baker’s shovel only
with difficulty). Bakers, stripped to their waists (see illustrations 18 and
19), grunted, groaned, and sweated over hardwood, non-porous
kneading troughs (usually one or two per establishment) which were,
after the oven, the most important piece of equipment in the bakery.
Here the dough was confected. Flanking the trough were cauldrons of
water, along with salt, yeast, and flour, these being the four formal
ingredients (although by the eighteenth century some doctors were
complaining about the unhygenic additive of sweat that liberally dripped
© Quoted in ibid., p. 79. 4
7 Kaplan, Le Meilleur pain du monde, Les Boulangers de Paris au XVIIIe siécle (Paris, 1996),
esp. ch. 2, “Panification.”
Illustration 18 An eighteenth-century bakery: kneading bread. Division of

Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY
Illustration 19 An eighteenth-century bakery: weighing, shaping, baking

bread. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
The workplace 137
off the bodies of the four or five workers). Mixing of these ingredients
required an enormous intensity of physical effort. Time was of the
essence, for taking too long to mix the dough could upset the fermenta-
tion process and the dough would then not rise properly. The rule of
thumb of one Parisian bakery was forty-five minutes for a doughball
suitable for 200 loaves. During the last half of the eighteenth century
kneading machines made their appearance, but only gradually came to
dominate the trade in the following centuries.
Experience in the trade, not scientific manuals or mechanical clocks,
tutored noses, and eyes informed bakers when the dough had risen
properly and was ready for weighing and cutting, and later when it was
well baked. A certain odor to the dough signaled the first stage, just asa
certain golden appearance signaled the latter. No mistakes could be
tolerated, for bread that had not risen properly baked densely, and
loaves removed from the oven prematurely could not be reinserted
without damaging the product. Then as now, a baker’s livelihood rested
squarely on the quality of his product.
Baking was laborious and physically taxing — something we can say
about nearly every trade during the old regime. Hatmaking certainly
was, to cite another populous trade, the processes of production of
which we are well informed about thanks to the work of Michael
Sonenscher.® Making a hat in eighteenth-century France involved three
dozen processes, all performed by workers in the same place (see
illustrations 20—24). The stripping of fur from the beaver or rabbit pelt
(the most common raw materials for hats in that age) was done mostly
by women, despite the labor-intensive nature of this task. The fur was
then sorted and sent along to felters who “bowed” it, stirring it with a
bow-shaped implement. These men had to work in closed, airless rooms
to prevent the fur from blowing away. Fullers washed the felt, which was
then placed on a mold the shape of which shifted according to fashion,
and left to dry. Once dry, hats were singed by fire, rubbed to raise the
nap, trimmed, and then sent to be dyed and further stiffened. The
process concluded with another group of female artisans trimming and
tidying up the hat before it was sent for final decoration, with ribbons,
feathers, or gilt.
Close scrutiny of many artisanal workshops and of the production
processes within them reveals a picture of an extensive division of labor
and a high degree of integration. Moreover, production was often
spatially quite concentrated, the literature on proto-industrialization
which has emphasized dispersion not withstanding. Baking and
8 Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1987),
pp. 20-5.
Illustration 20 Hatmaking: tearing and shaving fur from pelts. Reproduced

with permission from Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century
France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987
Illustration 21 Hatmaking: bowing the fur. Reproduced with permissio

n from
Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century
France, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987
The workplace 139
TS.
ES
EE
Gus
SBOE
RR
a Ses
Ri
ES
BS
Se
~ ‘
“Pikes:
Illustration 22 Hatmaking: building a hat. Reproduced with permission from

Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France, Berkeley:
Illustration 23 Hatmaking: felting a hat. Reproduced with permission from

Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France, Berkeley:
Illustration 24 MHatmaking: dyeing and finishing hats. Reproduced with

permission from Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987
hatmaking make this point, and so does papermaking. As Leonard

Rosenband observes, “during the eighteenth century [papermaking] still
consisted of centuries-old artisanal procedures performed in a mill.”?
Here we find, amid dangerous and unhealthy conditions, artisans hard
at work in tasks that had changed little for centuries. Craftsmen and
women toiled at various tasks, from converting old linen into pulp, to
creating sheets, to preparing the paper for ink and for shipment. As with
the women who stripped the fur from pelts in hat manufacture, so
others were put to relatively “unskilled” tasks in papermaking, first
called upon to pull the knots out of old linen after they had removed the
caked dirt and other foreign matter from the raw material. The linen
was then rotted in a fermentation process, and beatermen then mon-
itored the rythmic stamping mallets as they hammered the rotted linen
into filaments and pulp. Vatmen then took over as the pulp was
transformed into paper. Dipping a rectangular, wire-mesh mold into
a
° Leonard Rosenband, “Hiring and firing at the Montgolfier paper mill,”
in Thomas M.
Safley and Leonard N. Rosenband, eds., The Workplace Before
the Factory (Ithaca,
1993), p. 226.
The workplace 141
vat of watery pulp, the vatman then “lifted the mold and shook it
according to custom so that the fibers of the infant sheet ‘shut.’”!° From
the vatman to the coucher went the nascent sheets of paper where they
were “flipped” six or seven times a minute, each onto a “hairy felt.”
Together the felt and the paper were then pressed. The layman then
took over, separating the sheet from the felt. This was a delicate
operation, according to a contemporary authority who wrote a book on
the art of papermaking, “suitable only for people who have practiced it
from an early age and not for ... inexperienced country-folk.”!!
Women then resumed a role, hanging the paper on cords of horsehair
for drying. Later, the sizerman collected them and plunged them into an
emulsion which filled the pores of the paper and thereby prevented
inkblots. Women then sorted the sheets by size, weight, and quality and
helped the loftsman wrap them up in reams for shipping.
In each of these examples — baking, hatmaking, and papermaking —
we catch a glimpse of the workshop that, perhaps surprisingly, is more
readily seen in illustrations than read about in written sources. Of
course, each trade has its unique characteristics, but these three well
depict qualities of old regime artisanal production which have been
underemphasized in the traditional literature — its extensive division of
labor and its high degree of integration. These trades were far from
unusual in this regard.
Cores and peripheries in the workforce
For all but the wealthiest master craftsmen, economic insecurity was a
constant fact of life for artisans from the late Middle Ages into the age of
industrialization. For most masters and journeymen of most trades,
employment was uncertain and irregular. Weather and seasonal cycles
of demand affected a variety of trades, and chronic warfare added a
further disruption. In the preindustrial economy demand for manufac-
tures was inconstant, compounded by the technological and distribution
bottlenecks that beset the putting-out system (variants of which, as we
have seen, were employed in more trades than simply textiles). Of
course, the conjuncture of historical conditions determined the level of
employment, underemployment, or unemployment. The immediate
aftermath of the Black Death, for example, found labor in demand
beyond available supply, and so employment was high. A contrasting
example would be London in the 1570s as a wave of unemployment
swept most trades as the international demand for English products —
10 [bid., p. 227. 11 Quoted in ibid., p. 227.

especially cloth — slackened. There are countless examples of these

cycles.
In general, however, an analysis of early modern employment reveals
a picture of precarious insecurity. This was especially the case for the
artisans we have called “peripheral.” Proportions and ratios between
masters and journeymen are informative about the division of labor, but
it is also helpful to see the early modern workforce in terms of cores and
peripheries. It appears that from the Middle Ages right into the eight-
eenth century master artisans in many towns, fully in keeping with the
economic logic of “constant returns to scale,” had kept a core of well-
trained workers (sometimes fellow masters jobbing themselves out) in
permanent employment, and added only modestly or incompletely
trained workers from the mass of migrants when business was good, and
laid them off when business slowed. As Michael Sonenscher has shown,
Parisian masters taught only a select few workers the “knowledge” of the
trade, and in so doing maintained discipline in the workforce by keeping
it “dis-integrated.”
In many towns master artisans retained in their employ a central core
of highly trained workers, some who were small masters in the guild,
others who often had been picked as apprentices (and frequently were
sons of other master artisans) and were destined for eventual mastership.
Surrounding these workers who knew or were taught the “mysteries” of
the trade were “peripheral” workers, men who were briefly trained in
only certain tasks and were summarily hired and fired as employers,
operating according the logic of “constant returns to scale,” sought to
keep production in balance with demand. When faced ‘with increased
demand, preindustrial employers did not expand the physical plant;
they simply hired more workers. Conversely, when demand slackened,
they laid them off. Given the fits and starts of short-term supply and
demand cycles and the scarcity of investment capital available to most
master craftsmen, this was a business practice that was entirely rational,
if harsh for the laid-off worker.
Of course, what this strategy created were islands of skilled and
relatively continuously employed small masters and journeymen sur-
rounded by a vast sea of semi-skilled craftsmen, many with no distinct
occupation, who were underemployed and could and did switch jobs
and trades readily. Censuses and tax rolls, useful as they are, are just a
snapshot of a shifting, dynamic, and unstable world of employment.
Such a core and periphery situation is already evident in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Dijon, and no doubt existed elsewhere. Here we
find a clearly segmented labor force of journeymen, a core destined for
mastership who remained in the employ of their master for several years.
The workplace 143
This privileged sector of the workforce was surrounded by a much more

transient body of workers with little hope of entry into the masters’
ranks.
A dynamic correlation existed between available investment capital,
demand, and workforce concentration. The tapestry works in Aude-
narde in 1541 (a town with a population of about 8,000) were run by 41
masters who employed 29 apprentices, 209 journeymen, and 905
unskilled workers, an average of 29 workers per enterprise. This average
hides a polarized situation, however, for, as the chronicler Joos Vanden-
broucke observed, some masters with available capital employed more
than 300 men in one enterprise, while others less economically advan-
taged ran small shops with only a handful of journeymen or workers.
In 1630 in the textile industries in Holland we find similar structures
of workforce segmentation and concentration, where a master/entrepre-
neur called a reder owned relatively large workshops employing as many
as forty workers under one roof. The Venetian glassmaking and fur and
wool industries likewise had seen labor segmentation and concentration,
in their case since the late Middle Ages.
Of course, the traditional picture of the artisan’s workshop — a master
toiling alongside a journeyman or two and an apprentice — is not an
entirely inaccurate one, but it must be complemented by one of shops
that, depending upon the vagaries of demand, could reach considerable
size. Even a bakery, like one in seventeenth-century London, might
bustle with thirteen people at work, including maidservants, a wife, and
children, in addition to five or six apprentices and journeymen. Con-
temporary guild statutes from German cities occasionally specified how
many workbenches a shop might contain (typically three) and every-
where statutes restricted the number of journeymen a master may
employ in his shop (often only two, sometimes a few more); but we
know from other sources that these restrictions were often ignored, no
doubt by the more successful enterprises. By the eighteenth century it
was not at all uncommon to find workshops with twenty workers within.
This was certainly true in the emerging “ready-made” clothing and
shoemaking industries, but it was also the case in both English and
French hatmaking. In Paris in 1739 ten of the sixty-three master hatter
shops employed one-half of the journeymen, an average of between
twenty-five and thirty journeymen per shop. By 1791 the fifteen largest
hatmaking shops were huge by preindustrial standards, employing an
average of over sixty journeymen each. Such a scale calls the termi-
nology of “workshop” into question, suggesting protofactories instead,
more akin to the textile enterprises which in some places housed under
one roof several artisanal operations. The Linz woolen manufactory in
Austria in 1786 illustrates this well, for 102 dyers and cloth finishers
toiled inside its walls.
Thus, when we speak of cores and peripheries, we should bear in
mind their double meaning. On the one hand the terms reflect a
segmented labor force of select journeymen with relatively permanent
employment surrounded by a sea of transient, short-term, unskilled
workers. They also describe a concentration of workers unevenly
distributed across the enterprises of particular trades in a particular
town. In Nantes in 1738, for instance, 2.6 percent of the master
locksmiths employed more than four journeymen in their shops, while
81.5 percent employed one or none at all. The locksmiths of Marseilles
in 1782 show a_ similar profile: 80 percent of the masters there
employed one-half of the journeymen in shops with three or fewer
journeymen, while about 4 percent of the masters employed almost 20
percent of the journeymen in shops with nine or more. Or take the
joiners of Amiens in 1765-6, where the pattern of concentration and
peripheralization is even more pronounced. There 90 percent of the
masters employed half of the available journeymen and put them to
work in shops where they worked alongside 3 or fewer of their fellows,
while three percent of the masters hired nearly a quarter of the available
journeymen, putting them to work in shops where they were joined by
more than ten of their fellows.
Peripheralization and incompletely trained workers were the products
of, but also contributed to, segmentation of labor. In some sectors of
manufacture, like textiles, shipbuilding, or ceramics, we find the division
of labor deeply segmented, resulting in a loss of independence for many
craftsmen. A great deal has been written about this development in the
eighteenth century, the best-known example being the Wedgwood
potteries. Extensive specialization where workers were trained to a
particular task contributed to standardization of production, but it also
fragmented the artisanal work process and eliminated any claim to
independence an artisan may have had. Josiah Wedgwood, the man
behind the system, sought “to make machines of the men as cannot err”
and referred to his workers, tellingly, as “sett[s] [sic] of hands.”!2 His
system rested upon ironclad discipline. In exchange for job security (a
powerful incentive, given the chronic insecurity of employment: most
artisans faced), master potters lost all authority, conforming to a
discipline secured by written rules and regulations that demanded
punctuality, cleanliness, sobriety, and fixed hours of work.
No doubt the eighteenth century witnessed an expansion of disci-
2 Quoted in Neil McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline,” Historical
Fournal 4:1 (1961), 34, 46.
The workplace 145
plined systems of production and advancing specialization and fragmen-

tation of the labor force — but these trends did not originate then.
Already in early Renaissance Florence we find a convergence of political,
economic, and technological changes that altered production and the
division of labor in the textile industry fundamentally. The diffusion of
the loom and the spinning wheel in the late thirteenth century and the
expansion of the wool industry created more steps of production, and
labor was increasingly fragmented into menial tasks. Many formerly
skilled and independent artisans were subsequently pressed into a mass
of wage-earners.
Some historians have called this process “proletarianization,” but
whatever its label, we can find this development in several sectors of the
early modern economy. The Venetian Arsenal provides a vivid example,
mirrored in some respects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Dutch shipbuilding. From the mid-fifteenth century and culminating in
the seventeenth the Arsenal workforce was increasingly disciplined to
the demands of an integrated production schedule. An elaborate state-
administered bureaucracy regulated production at the expense of guild
self-government. Standardization of design and production of inter-
changeable parts crafted by specialists and put together in “assembly-
line” fashion by workgangs converted the task of the artisan into a one-
dimensional and repetitive one (this was true in Holland’s shipyards,
too, where workers did not have to be versatile or knowledgeable).
Anticipating Wedgwood’s system in many ways by more than a century,
in exchange for job security (the Venetian state guaranteed life-long
employment), craftsmen lost to the Venetian government any claim to
control over apprenticeship, working conditions, wages, or quality
standards. Indeed, by 1650 the arsenalotti were no longer even called
“masters” (maestri) any more, just “workers” (operaz).
Specialization of task, labor segmentation or fragmentation of skill,
and employers’ disciplinary production systems are but one side of the
coin of employment practices, for on the other we find a countervailing
but related trend toward a growth in the peripheral labor force, an
increase in the scale of artisanal mobility and, as we will see in the next
chapter, mounting “insubordination” among journeymen.
Mobility and migration
As far back as records take us, we can see that many artisans in Europe
were highly mobile. Indeed, it was not just artisans that thronged the
roads of late medieval and early modern Europe, prompting one
historian to refer to a “culture of mobility.” As David Reher notes,
people’s propensity to move about has emerged as perhaps the single most
noteworthy trait of urban populations. Migration levels were extremely intense
for people of all ages, sexes, and social categories . . . [a] pattern [that] . . . quite
possibly [was] typical of most pre-industrial urban areas in Europe, regardless of
their size. 1?
No doubt immigration into cities was needed to fill the ranks of
populations that, owing to the high mortality rates there, could not
reproduce themselves.
Migration of laborers was a significant part of this ambulant popula-
tion, and be it skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled, it was a constant
feature of the manufacturing economy of Europe’s cities. Migratory
patterns were sometimes seasonal, but throughout the year one could
find multitudes of workers tramping from town to town seeking work,
with a chosen few gaining access to mastership or citizenship, and thus
permanent residence. In the two years of 1779 and 1780, 2,836
journeymen tailors registered in Rouen, while the registrations of jour-
neymen wigmakers in Nantes between 1783 and 1785, for example,
show peaks of over a hundred in the months of May, September, and
January, and troughs of under twenty in June and December. Some of
these artisans, like their brothers everywhere had done for centuries,
settled in to semi-permanent employ with one master (thus forming a
relatively stable “core” of trained journeymen), but by far the most
found only short-term jobs and drifted into town and out again after a
brief stay. Whatever the city in Europe — large megalopolises like
London or Paris, or smaller towns like Nérdlingen or Dijon — the
demographic situation regarding migration was always the same: vast
waves of migrants in search of work flowed into town; some stayed, but
most, like an ebbing tide, floated out of the town gates and drifted along
the road toward the next nearest town.
The construction industry was notoriously mobile. The stonemasons
of central France trekked annually to Paris during the construction
season (by 1694 6,000 made the trip from the Haute-Marche), and
returned home at the end of it. Mobility may have been marked in
construction, but it pervaded all the trades. The workforce of the
printing craftsmen at the Société Typographique in Neuchatel, Switzer-
land, turned over every six months in the eighteenth century. Similarly,
80 percent of the journeymen hatters working in Marseilles in’ 1782
were not born there, while 85 percent of all journeymen in Frankfurt am
Main in 1785 were outsiders, many from France, Hungary, Denmark,
and even England.
13 David S. Reher, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain, Cuenca, 1550-1870

(Cambridge, 1990), p. 302.
The workplace 147
Since the late Middle Ages, and probably before, London had been a
city of immigrants, but when the city government opened up the
freedom in 1531 (responding to a demand for labor), the magnitude of
immigration increased dramatically, fueling a massive population
growth that would continue for centuries. It has been estimated that by
the seventeenth century 70 percent of Londoners had been born else-
where. So powerful was London’s magnet for people that by 1700
immigration to metropolitan London absorbed 50 percent of the natural
increase of the entire population of England. Countless numbers of
these immigrants were artisans. Indeed, in London in 1650 fully 85
percent of the 20,000 apprentices there were immigrants.
As sixteenth-century Venetian industries boomed (glassmaking,
building, shipbuilding, and above all textiles), the queen of the Adriatic
became a magnet for itinerant and immigrant labor; but it was not the
only destination. The silkweaver Francesco Cazuolo in the 1550s and
1560s wandered from Milan to Mantua, Bologna, Florence, Naples,
and Messina on the island of Sicily, before finally reaching Venice.
Fellow silkworker Francesco Fontana likewise made a stop in Milan, but
his itinerary included Turin, Lyons in France, Geneva in Switzerland,
Brescia, and then Venice. Venice also became home to foreigners in
other trades. Most of the bakers and many of the cobblers and tailors
came from Germany, many butchers from the Grisons in Switzerland,
and many journeymen printers from France.
The common aspiration of most skilled workers was to become a
master and establish residence, but, even though emigration is nearly
impossible to document quantitatively, we can be sure that only a
minority of artisans formed a sedentary core of workers, and that many
migratory workers must have remained so throughout their lives. Eur-
ope’s workshops were largely peopled by a floating population of casual
labor. Wherever records of turnover in the workplace exist, we see short-
term employment as the norm, with longer stays reserved for far fewer.
Construction workers in the towns of northern England, for instance,
were commonly hired by the week or the month, and many remained on
the job for less than a year. One-half of the journeymen joiners in
Chester between 1600 and 1640 stayed for less than a year, and another
30 percent for less than three. But one in five remained for longer than
three years. Renaissance Florence was little different. For example, of
the eighty-nine stonecutters employed in the first 600 days of the
construction of the Strozzi palace, one-fourth worked fewer than 50
days, one-half fewer than 100, but two were still on the job after 450
days. A clear example of a resident core of workers trained for eventual
mastership comes from Dijon. There is no question that workshops, like
their counterparts in Paris and no doubt everywhere else, were sites of

constant coming and going of workers, but the sixty-nine journeymen
who acceded to mastership amid all this flux in Dijon between 1590 and
1642 had spent an average of three years in the service of their last
employer. The eighteenth century shows the same profile. Almost one-
third of the tailors hired in Rouen between 1778 and 1781 stayed on the
job for a week or less, while another 40 percent were gone before
month’s end. Of the 500 to 750 journeyman wigmakers who annually
registered in Rouen between 1783 and 1790, almost three in ten stayed
on the job for less than a month, almost 60 percent for three months or
less. Fully 90 percent were gone within the year.
Marriage contracts also point toward a minority core of immigrant
craftsmen entering the charmed circle of residency and mastership,
surrounded by a majority of peripheral transients. Between 1551 and
1650, of the 168 immigrant journeymen who married in Dijon, 51 or
about 30 percent found brides who were daughters of masters resident
in Dijon, a clear inside track to mastership for the groom, while 58
married immigrant women. Of those who married masters’ daughters,
the price was mounting; indeed, the average amount of apports these
men brought to the marriage between 1601 and 1650 was 363.3 livres, a
far greater sum than the 68.3 livres that their counterparts of the second
half of the sixteenth century had to muster.
No6rdlingen provides further evidence of this core/periphery phenom-
enon in the working community, and once again wealth mattered.
Between 1580 and 1700 one in six of the 4,700 men admitted to
citizenship were immigrants; but we know that the city’s standards of
admission were high and getting higher. Before 1585 the city council
had required prospective citizens to have a minimum of 50 florins in
cash, but this figure was doubled in that year, and then in 1607 doubled
again. This meant that many craftsmen remained itinerant, with mobi-
lity accelerated by the upheavals of the Thirty Years’ War. Records show
that few migrant journeymen gained mastership and citizenship in
Nordlingen, the overwhelming majority staying in town no more than a
year, and often for far briefer stays.
The towns of Holland provide another illustration of mobility, cores,
and peripheries. Massive immigration fueled dramatic population
growth in these cities (from 247,000 in 1600 to 464,000 in 1650 to
489,000 in 1700, despite a negative intramuros natural rate of increase),
the first wave in the late sixteenth century triggered by the war with
Spain and a huge exodus from the southern provinces of Flanders and
Brabant. Many of these migrants were skilled craftsmen with capital,
and the towns of Zeeland and Holland swelled with artisanal enterprises
The workplace 149
which in turn created a demand for labor. The towns of Holland and
Zeeland became vast labor markets, by the seventeenth century ex-
panding so that workers were pulled from a wide geographic area. On
average from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century one in
four men living in the Dutch republic had not been born there.
Amsterdam, the fastest growing city of the republic, illustrates this
well. Many hatters and silkworkers destined for “the warehouse of the
world” came from France, while many construction tradesmen migrated
from the coastal provinces of Germany as well as those of the Nether-
lands itself. Inland Germany sent many bakers, smiths, tailors, and
shoemakers to Amsterdam. Of course, once again, some of these
immigrants became burgher masters, but many more were, and re-
mained, journeymen. For example, of the 4,139 craftsmen married in
Amsterdam between 1641 and 1650, five out of eight were immigrant
journeymen (one in eight of the masters marrying in this decade were
born elsewhere as well), whereas only one in twenty-five was a master
Amsterdammer.
Eighteenth-century Vienna presents a similar picture. In 1742 only 13
percent of the guild masters had been born in that town of well over
160,000 souls. Indeed, in most central European cities of that century
we find that three-quarters of the journeymen were immigrants. Vienna
was a magnet that pulled many sons of rural artisans to it for at least
temporary stays, most of the newcomers hailing from the German lands
to the west in the upper Rhine region, followed closely by lower and
alpine Austria. Few, however, came from nearby Hungary, but wherever
their point of origin, most would tramp from city to city and eventually
either join ranks of lifetime wage-workers or return to their roots in the
countryside and become village craftsmen.
The urban labor market was flexible and open, and everywhere gave
rise to a core and periphery phenomenon, with permanent privileged
jobs of high wages for relatively extensively trained workers surrounded
by relatively unskilled workers in short-term employment. As specializa-
tion increased, the labor market everywhere became more segmented,
and as the market grew (urban manufacturing was attracting labor away
from agriculture for centuries before the industrial age), it became
increasingly anonymous. This spelled difficulty for authorities and
employers alike, who were keen on maintaining discipline in the ranks of
hired artisans. Of course, employers had long been concerned about
this; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century labor market was different
in degree more than in kind. As early as 1354 in Paris master artisans
and royal authorities had tried to regulate the labor market spatially by
demanding that all wage-workers in clothmaking, tanning, carpentry,
masonry and “generally all manner of work” present themselves “at the
hiring square” (sur la place d’embauche) that was customary in their
trade. In Milan and Antwerp workers were required to report to special
hiring locales, and by the sixteenth century the Dutch shipbuilders were
demanding that all unemployed journeymen report to a specified place
daily for a “shake-up,” as the hiring practice was called. Throughout the
early modern period construction workers in Chartres were expected to
gather by the porch of the town’s magnificent cathedral, while their
counterparts in Dijon were required by municipal statute to report to St.
Michel Square at daybreak. Laggards or workers trying to arrange
employment elsewhere were to be expelled from the city if apprehended.
This was still the practice in the eighteenth century, for the place de
Gréve was the traditional gathering place for construction workers
seeking employment (ironically, the expression faire la gréve meant
looking for work, not going on strike), while the rue de la Poterie was
the place for pastrycooks, and the rue des Ecouffes for joiners. Other
trades required that their workers seeking employment gather in front of
the guild hall (if one existed), or in front of the home of one of the
officials of the particular guild. Verbal contracts were then often con-
cluded between master and worker on the spot.
Not all trades had a geographic “hiring place,” but, with an eye
toward worker discipline, by the seventeenth century many had guild
officers whose job it was to place workers in shops in need, and many
guild statutes were amended to require journeymen to report immedi-
ately to the placement officer upon their arrival in town. Several Parisian
guilds already had employment clerks in the sixteenth century, and in
the seventeenth we find them in Dijon (the master cabinet-makers
created the office in 1624, the shoemakers in 1633), Toulouse, Mont-
pellier, and Nevers (in the latter two towns the clerk was appointed by
the municipality and the crown respectively). A police ordinance in
Paris in 1639 ordered all journeymen of whatever craft to present
themselves upon arrival to the employment office of their trade. This
was not just a French phenomenon, for the shoemakers of seventeenth-
century Augsburg, to take but one example among many, had a
Zuschickmeister, a master whose job it was to register incoming jour-
neymen and to place them in the employ of masters needing labor.
Masters and journeymen lived in perpetual tension between need and
(in)discipline. By the eighteenth century, masters had come to believe
that insubordination had reached crisis proportions. Placement clerks
and mandatory reporting to hiring places were now deemed inadequate
to stem the rising tide of worker sedition. To keep track of the churning,
shifting world of work and workers, authorities and masters generalized
The workplace
151
and expanded upon a system of obligatory worker
registration. Vestiges
of this system can be traced back to the fourteenth
century. The Statute
of Labourers in England in 1349 and 1351 laid down
that artificers who
changed employer must have a certificate from their previo
us master. In
the sixteenth century the brewers of London required worker
s to carry a
“passport” signed by masters verifying that the worker
had left his
employ in good standing, while the goldsmiths requir
ed workers to
produce letters from their former employers attesting
not to their
training or skills, but rather certifying their good conduc
t and behavior.
There is evidence in France of the use of such documents,
called billets
de congé, in the late sixteenth century as well, but it was
during the
eighteenth century that the system was increasingly standardized
and
generalized across the guilds. These billets were records of previo
us
employment, and no journeyman was permitted to seek work unless
the
previous master had signed the certificate releasing him from
his
employ. To force mobile journeymen to seek work promptly and there-
fore come quickly within the disciplinary arms of the masters, these
certificates expired after fifteen days, whereupon a journeyman who had
not found work was plunged into the dreaded, floating population of
gens sans aveu. Journeymen were later told to keep the certificates
together in a small booklet, called a Livret which, as in the case of the
bakers of Paris, could only be acquired from the placement office of the
guild. When signed, these billets verified that the journeyman had
completed his work and legitimately departed his previous employment.
Journeymen were required to carry these documents with them, and
present them to guild employment officers upon arrival.
In 1739 the French crown prohibited master papermakers from hiring
any worker without a billet de congé, and then royal patent letters
extended this requirement to all guilds in 1749. The preamble to this
regulation explains its fundamental purpose, which was to combat
worker insubordination:
We are informed that a number of workers in the trades and in manufacturing
are leaving the manufacturers . . . employing them without first having obtained
in writing notice to quit, or without completing the work in hand and, in many
cases, without reimbursing advances [on wages] made to them on the basis of
earnings from their output. We are also informed that some of these people
having formed a kind of body are holding meetings and laying down the law to
their masters, doing as they choose, depriving them of workers and preventing
them from [hiring] . . . whom they want.}4
14 Arlette Farge, La Vie fragile. Violence, pouvotrs et solidarités a Paris au XVUe siécle (Paris,
1986), p. 126 (my translation).
was designed to
It should need no emphasizing that this system
of 1781 requir ing /ivrets put it, “to
oversee and, as the French legislation
fying, classif ying, and, it was
contain” the working population by identi
ed a bureau cratic survei llance
hoped, immobilizing it. The livret signifi
the worker s,” to render them all
system that intended to “classify all
authori ties. Given the swirlin g,
visible to the disciplinary eye of the
s of eighteenth-
dynamic complexity of the world of work and worker
be a dream, if perhaps a
century Paris, such a system could only
reassuring one, in the minds of the authorities.
the migra-
A similar situation was developing in Germany. To control
ndence and indisci pline, in
tions of journeymen and so limit their indepe
d journe ymen to keep a
1724 the Saxon ducal government require
then in 1731 the empero r
Wanderbuch (identical to the hvret), and
a docume nt all journe ymen
issued an edict that created the Kundschaft,
place of
were required to carry on which was recorded their name, age,
nce, and the particu lars of
birth, a brief description of physical appeara
employment history, complete with signatu res of previou s masters
guild
releasing them from employ. This booklet had to be presented to
placement officers upon a journeyman’s arrival in a new town. The
Kundschaft was issued by the guilds, and had to be signed by a guild
officer when the journeyman wished to depart. Without a signed, and
therefore validated Kundschaft, a journeyman could not legally work
elsewhere in the empire.
Wages
The urge and need that masters felt to discipline workers did not, of
course, begin in the eighteenth century. Indeed, already in the four-
teenth century we see deep tensions between masters and workers over
the duration of the working day. Workers were usually paid a daily wage
(usually distributed weekly, on Saturday), or sometimes “by the piece,”
but in either case the hour was not the unit of measurement for
payment. Masters, therefore, were keen on controlling how much and
when their workers worked, and workers’ resistance movements in the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as we will see in chapter 5,
focused on the duration of the working day as often as the wage‘itself.
This is not to say that wage levels were unimportant, but several
factors affecting an analysis of wages in the preindustrial European
economy must always be borne in mind. First, we should not equate
wages as the monetary equivalent of the necessities and conveniences of
life, for wages were often only a fraction of a worker’s income (and an
unknowable one at that), since nonmonetized payment for work (the
The workplace
153
provision of lodging and/or food and
drink) was far from unusual.
Obviously, then, we must avoid applying
liberal Ricardian “iron law”
assumptions about wages to the preindustrial
economy.
Second, the increasing economic specializati
on and the segmentation
of the Jabor market coupled with an economy
that was only sporadically
becoming integrated meant that wage differential
s from place to place,
season to season, craft to craft, and even within
the same craft in the
same place, could be significant. Most master
s did not even work for
wages, but those who did were generally paid
higher wages than
journeymen in their trade. We know that during the
eighteenth century
rates varied among journeymen, not just in the same
trade, but even in
the same shop, with higher wages going to the semi-
permanent core of
workers. But even the transient journeyman earne
d more than the
“semi-skilled” or unskilled migrant wage-worker. Such
differentials had
been around for nearly as long as we have record
s of wages. At a
construction site at Caernarvon in Wales in 1304, for examp
le, fifty-
three masons received seventeen different rates of pay. Nowhe
re, in fact,
do we find standardized systems of wage payments, not
even in the
eighteenth century, nor can we trace a linear trend from payme
nt in
kind or by piecerate to payment in cash, since this fluctuated
as the
schedules of production were affected by shifting deman
d and the
conditions in the labor market itself. All of these variables
make
comparisons between wage levels highly speculative and only infor
ma-
tive in very general ways.
Third, real wages are not an accurate measurement of standard
of
living because, not knowing the nature of workdays (specifically how
many there were in a year), we cannot extend with any confidence daily
wages to annual income, nor do we know what percentage wages may
have been of household earnings (we know that women contributed to
household budgets, and that often the men had by-employments, even
agricultural ones, that brought added income to the family).
So of what use to us are wage indicators? Certainly data exist,
especially in the building trades, to show that from the fourteenth to the
nineteenth centuries generally across Europe nominal wages were extra-
ordinarily “sticky,” sometimes remaining stagnant for a century, and
that though they lagged behind food price increases, they almost never
fell. We can also demonstrate that real wages moved in accord with
population movements. Thus from the Black Death to the late fifteenth
century real wages were relatively high everywhere, but this “golden
age” was followed by a disastrous “long sixteenth century” where, by
the early 1600s, price inflation had cut real wages to half what they had
been in the late 1400s. Gradually falling prices to 1750 and periodic
but then inflation resumed and only

wage increases boosted real wages,
wages begin rising again.
in the early nineteenth century did real
ibe the movement of wages
These trends more or less accurately descr
the exception of the Nether-
during the early modern centuries (with
ially in the early seventeenth
lands where the demand for labor, espec
elsewhere, giving the Dutch
century, drove real wages up faster than
words, “a privileged position”
wage-earner, in Jan De Vries’s vivid
tell us two things of great
trapped in “an iron cage”).!> The data
above or below subsistence.
importance. First, whether a wage paid was
in question needed nonmonet-
Knowing this tells us whether the artisan
mployment to make ends meet.
ized payment, a working wife, or by-e of
wages to those
Second, we know that the ratio of a craftsman’s
ries at roughly 3:2. Within
“unskilled” laborers remained fixed for centu
find, predictably, that the
the ranks of the craftsmen, moreover, we
superior to those paid to
wages paid to masters were and remained
ia” reflect not simply the
journeymen. This tells us that “skill prem
even the relative supply or
monetary worth of dexterity and training or
much a powerful concern
demand in the labor force, but reveal just as
we know about nonmonet-
for status and relative position. Given what
ude that wages paid were
ized payments in the workplace, we can concl
e place in a hierarchy
as much symbolic cultural indicators of appropriat
e and convenience needs.
as they were economic indicators of subsistenc
s were a “middling
Historians have traditionally assumed that artisan
and occupying a
sort,” numbering about a third of a town’s inhabitants
they possessed —
position in society that was determined by the wealth
y more than the
considerably less than the elite above them, not greatl
some truth in this
propertyless underclass beneath them. There is
of employment
profile, and one can safely say that, given the incertitude
produc tion and distri bution , econo mic security was
and bottlenecks in
last thirty years,
precarious for most artisans. Research over the
community
however, forces us to recognize nonetheless that the artisan
geneou s. Artisa ns did compri se about one-th ird of
was extremely hetero
ranged from 20
the population of some towns, but their numbers
it may be true
percent in some places to 80 percent in others. Likewise,
rank in the
that many artisans in many towns occupied the lower middle
we also know that many of their brethr en spread
wealth hierarchy, but
from the very wealth y to the very poor, so that
across the wealth scale,
goods: understanding the

15 De Vries, “Between purchasing power and the world of
economy of early modern Europe.” In John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.),
household
Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), pp. 85-132.
The workplace
155
we must jettison any preconception that guilds
effectively distributed
wealth among their members.
Diversity describes the history of apprentices,
journeymen, and
women artisans, too, for the number of apprentices
and journeymen
(and their ratio to masters) varied widely from town
to town and from
trade to trade. Until recently we knew almost nothin
g about female
artisans, but research in that area has revealed that
women practiced
more trades than was once supposed, and we now realize
that dichot-
omizing the household economy (the supposed female sphere)
and the
market economy (the purported male sphere) is misleading,
for women
participated in both and their economic activities blurred distinc
tions
between the two.
Amid all of this variety, are there any general trends that can
be
identified and supported by a body of research? One identifiable trend
across the early modern centuries concerns the experience of women.
Although we can find as late as the eighteenth century women working
in a wide variety of trades, we can also perceive in many cities a
concentration of women in a narrower sector of craftwork, that of
textiles and clothing manufacture.
Second, even though mobility marked the lives of most artisans at
least since the Middle Ages, it does appear that the numbers of artisans
on the move steadily increased at least from the sixteenth century, so
that by the early eighteenth century masters and political authorities
became especially concerned about the disorder and indiscipline that,
from their perspective, accompanied such mobility. Of course, com-
plaints about insubordination among workers can be found throughout
our period, but the masters’ voices became more shrill and the legisla-
tion of central authorities more coercive as the numbers of migrant
workers apparently increased, and institutional changes (placement
bureaus, livrets, and Wanderbuchen) were created to attempt to bring
order and stability to this world of flux and turmoil.
A third, related, trend that emerges from all of this diversity is an
increasing segmentation in the labor force, with a core of trained
workers remaining in the employ of masters for relatively lengthy
periods (and perhaps even gaining mastership eventually) surrounded
by a swelling population of incompletely trained and transient workers
who stayed on the job for a considerably shorter time. Of course, the
logic of ‘constant returns to scale’ contributed to this core—periphery
situation in the workforce as masters laid off and hired workers in
response to demand (the first to go were the incompletely trained
transients); but the result of such marginalization was expansion in the
ranks of mobile and “indisciplined” workers. The problem of discipline,
institutions of
as we will see in chapter 5, informed the construction of
n.
authority from the Black Death to the era of industrializatio
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4 Authority and resistance (I): artisans in
the polity
The internal governance of guilds
From as far back as we have records of internal guild governance, we

find evidence for guild officials, called variously jurés, gardes, syndics, or
prudhommes in France, consuls or gastaldi in Italy, promens in Spain,
wardens in England, Vorgehern in Germany, and juiz de povo in Portugal.
Whatever their title, these men were empowered to inspect the work-
shop of fellow guildsmen (and sometimes those of a closely competitive
guild — the shoemakers of Dijon, for instance, had the right of inspection
of cobblers’ shops). During such inspections the officials, the numbers
of whom ranged from two to six or more, depending upon the guild, the
time, and the place, in principle sought to uphold the dictates of the
guild’s statutes. This meant above all scrutiny of products for quality
and investigating whether the master in question was abiding by the
rules which usually restricted the numbers of apprentices and jour-
neymen to be employed. If violations were detected, these officers were
empowered to impose fines, in some places one-half of the fine going to
the officials themselves. The typical term of office was one year, some-
times, as in Paris, two, but equally typical was the same man serving in
the post year in and year out.
These were powerful men. In many guilds they administered guild
property, collected dues, kept the account ‘books, and in some places
served as judges in the guild court hearing and decided cases of disputes
between guild members. Often they also judged the quality of master-
pieces presented by journeymen for admission to mastership, and, thus
empowered to approve or turn away candidates, they were gatekeepers
to the guild. With such powers, one might reasonably ask how these
privileged men attained such an office. Not long ago, historians of guilds
generally believed that during the Middle Ages guilds were democratic
bodies that elected their officials in annual assemblies, but that in the
more “absolutist” early modern period they lost these freedoms. There
is some truth to this generalization. We know that in fourteenth-century
159
Arras and Montpellier, for instance, jurés were elected by and from
among the masters and even the journeymen. The best example of guild
democracy, however, is Florence. In the wake of the communal revolu-
tion, thirteenth-century guilds embodied what John Najemy has called
“popular republicanism” because the legislative, judicial, and regulatory
powers exercised over their members were conceived to be collectively
possessed by the guildsmen.! Moreover, the guild’s officials, called
consuls, were elected by the members and were strictly constrained by
the statutes of the guilds.
The essential principles of the Florentine guilds — equality among
members and collective rule by them — were not, however, embodied
everywhere. We know, for example, that in Paris in the thirteenth
century jurés were not elected by the membership but rather named by
the prévot with the king’s approval, while in the medieval city of London
guild wardens were approved by the mayor and his aldermen. Indeed,
the trend of the future would be more along the Parisian or English
experience than the Florentine (even in Florence). One can safely say
that guild officials nearly everywhere after 1350 were vested with their
authority, and increasingly appointed outright by the civic or royal
authority.
Particularly well-documented examples of internal guild governance
in the late medieval period and the emergence of oligarchy, stratification,
and hierarchy within it can be found among English cities. Smaller
guilds in medieval England were more democratic than the larger ones,
with journeymen and masters more or less equal. In 1370, for example,
the Chester bowyers stated explicitly in their statutes that in the election
of the guild’s officials a journeyman had equal voice to a master. Among
the larger guilds, however, democratic principles, if they ever existed,
were clearly eroding by the late fourteenth century as increasingly sharp
distinctions between masters and journeymen emerged. This develop-
ment was accompanied by the growing involvement of governments in
the trades, a situation encouraged by masters who feared the growing
“indiscipline” of their employees. In exchange for relinquishing to town
councils or even kings any claim to autonomous. self-governance,
masters gained the use of municipal courts, and above all government
sanction in the discipline of labor. Even in guilds where’ officials
continued to be selected by the guildsmen, they had to be approved by
the city council. Furthermore, these guild officials were usually drawn
from among the more substantial masters, a harbinger of the crystal-
lization of ranks within the guild that would set in during the fourteenth
1 John Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400
(Chapel Hill, 1982), p.9.
Artisans in the polity 161
century whereby first the journeymen and later the small masters would
be set off from and deemed inferior to the substantial masters.
Already in 1396 journeymen saddlers had been so distinguished, and
had formed their own organization. The master saddlers of London
complained to the mayor that the guild’s “serving men called yomen”
were not only holding meetings, but were wearing a common livery and
appointing an officer (a “bedel”) of their own.” By 1415 the “yomen”
tailors also had such an organization, and during the rest of the century
they were joined by yeomen founders, curriers, bakers, and clothwork-
ers, each of these groups fighting running battles with the masters of
their guilds over elections, control of funds for the poor, and the use (or
abuse) of workshop inspections. During this century the yeomen and
masters worked out a compromise, but one which nonetheless embod-
ied a drift toward oligarchy, hierarchy, and stratification. Yeomen
received some guild privileges (access to burial funds and poor relief),
but only masters, and only some of them at that, reserved the right to
wear the status-laden guild livery. These masters, increasingly called “of
the livery,” or “liverymen,” monopolized the election of guild officials,
and so controlled the governing body of the guilds, the Court of
Assistants, while the yeomanry comprised of all the journeymen and
increasingly the small masters were denied any voice in guild govern-
ance. Emblematic of this development, in 1487 the carpenters went
from election “by common consent” to “such as the livery think
convenient.”
By the sixteenth century the yeomanry had become a rank for
journeymen of the guild awaiting promotion to mastership, and for
small masters to the livery, a wait in vain for many since it required
capital and family connections. The livery came to be more and more
dominated by merchants. Such control of governance by the livery did
not, however, go uncontested. As late as the 1620s the yeomanry of the
weavers and the founders, for example, were demanding political parti-
cipation. Guild statutes, reflecting a more democratic past, often stated
that guild officials were to be chosen by the “commonalty,” but by the
seventeenth century liverymen of these guilds disputed what “common-
alty” meant. As opposed to the definition of “freeman” (that is, an
individual admitted to the “freedom” of the city) that journeymen and
small masters ascribed to it, liverymen of the weavers, clothiers, and
founders defined it as only including a “certain select number of rank
and degree.” For the clothiers, this meant specifically only the “Master
2 R. A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade
Unionism (London, 1979), p. 43.
and Wardens.” The founder yeomanry might counter that their

liverymen were “reading the charter at their pleasure.”* Maybe so, but
they were doing it, so the weaver liverymen said, to restrict the electorate
and thus the governing stratum of the guild in order to avoid “popular
disorder.” Indeed, the fear of indiscipline in the lower orders — and not
just in England — insistently lurks behind every justification for hierarchy
and oligarchy in the guilds.
The drift to an oligarchic ruling elite within guilds is everywhere
apparent. In Venice the gastaldo was sometimes elected by the masters of
the guild, sometimes (as with the bellfounders) appointed by the city
magistracy, but never were his assistants of judges, deacons, and
stewards elected by the guild membership, being selected instead by the
outgoing officials. Selection for office in early modern Rome was even
more circumscribed. There, through a process called imbossolazione
which was generalized among the guilds in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries and was still in place in the eighteenth, every three years the
“notables” of the guild drew up a list of candidates whom they believed
were worthy of guild office. The candidates’ names were then inscribed
on wax tablets and placed in an urn. Each year the current officers drew
tablets from the urn, thereby electing the officers of the guild for the
year to come.
Hierarchical stratification occurred in the guilds of Bologna, too, at
about the same time. Until 1500 most masters were full members of the
guilds and participated in guild governance, but over the next two and a
half centuries the ranks of full membership contracted sharply, leaving a
situation where most craftsmen became obbedienti, a status akin to
yeomanry in England and with a meaning immediately redolent of
hierarchy. These men paid an annual fee (the obbedienza) to the guild
council which was controlled by an oligarchy that ran guild affairs.
In France there is some evidence that assemblies of guildsmen were
active in internal guild politics in the Middle Ages. According to the
Parisian Livre des métiers of the thirteenth century, the master goldsmiths
and pinmakers gathered annually to elect their gardes et jurés (although
in other trades of the time jurés were already named outright by the
prévot, or selected by a committee appointed by the prévét), and most
trades required their jurés to convene a general assembly if a modifica-
tion of the guild’s statutes were to be proposed. Evidence of such
democratic procedures, however, disappears in France in the sixteenth
century and is replaced by clear evidence of oligarchization. Many jurés
of Paris were drawn from among the “notables” of their guilds through a

process of co-optation whereby previously selected masters and former

jurés replenished their ranks by “electing” hand-picked newcomers. This
restricted electorate then elected the jurés. The democratic past when
all guild members participated was supplanted in the sixteenth century
by oligarchy. Among the goldsmiths, for instance, the leadership of the
guild decided that, as Steven Kaplan notes, “only experienced and
respected masters — ‘prudhommes’ — would have the right [henceforth]
to deliberate upon corporate affairs.’ Such a coup did not go without
objection by the rank and file masters, who denounced their exclusion
as “arbitrary” and continued to attend assemblies until they were
definitively ousted in 1648.°
There is only a trace of guild democracy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Dijon, too. The extensive records of those appointed as jurés by
the town council there (only the goldsmiths and pastrycooks were
permitted election, and even then it was for only one of the two jurés)
point toward a domination of guild politics by a handful of individuals
and families. Indeed, the town magistrates repeatedly drew their ap-
pointments from the same narrow circle of master artisans, a form of
political patronage from which both artisan and magistrate benefited,
the former through wealth and status, the latter through a hoped for
quiescence in the all too turbulent world of work. Indeed, everywhere in
early modern cities, guild officials were integrated into political
patronage systems, empowered to deliver peace and stability in the
ranks in exchange for their privileged perch atop their corporation.
The escalation of the fear of worker insubordination to crisis propor-
tions in the eighteenth century only served to further ensconce a
corporate elite. Some guilds brought more masters into the charmed
circle than others, but always the decision of whom to include in
electoral or business assemblies was made by current and/or ex-officers
of the guild. The Parisian painter-sculptor officers no doubt spoke for all
the guild elite when they said that the reason the entire guild member-
ship was not convoked in assembly was “in order to prevent plots and
cabals that could influence the . . . elections.””®
Less fortunate masters, as those among the Parisian goldsmiths,
denounced the oligarchs for their monopolization of power. In many
guilds in eighteenth-century Paris, as Kaplan has discovered, “one can
detect a sort of structural political insurgency latent in many guilds,”
the primary cause of contention being “questions of accountability and
participation.” Such complaints seem an echo of former, more
5 Steven L. Kaplan, “The luxury guilds in Paris in the 18th century,” Francia 9 (1981),
270.
© Quoted in Kaplan, “Luxury guilds,” 258.
democratic practices, and it may be that lesser guildsmen were leading

“a democratic movement ... in response to a sort of aristocratic
resurgence . . . within the guilds — echoing broader social and political
trends.”” The self-appointed elite was at times accused of malfeasance
of office, at other times rebuked for taking “the posture of Absolute
Masters of the community” and for “regard[ing] the other masters as
being far beneath them . . totally dependent on their will, and [for]
thus reply[ing to them] with haughtiness and contempt.”® Often bound
by blood or marriage, this corporate elite was refilled by co-optation,
with new, younger men named to the ranks of the “council of elders,”
there to await “election” by former officials to some administrative
post.
Artisans in the polity

As oligarchy and hierarchical stratification increasingly took hold within
guilds and characterized internal guild governance from the late Middle
Ages to the end of the old regime, so, too, was artisanal participation in
the larger municipal political arena increasingly circumscribed. Both
developments had much to do with a demand for order that increasingly
marked the late medieval and early modern era, cresting during the
seventeenth century. Cities and their inhabitants more and more came
to be viewed by rulers of increasingly integrated states as parts of a
coherent social order, and a preoccupation with social discipline in-
formed this vision. The urban elite came to believe that, as Christopher
Friedrichs observes, “[its] own interests were better served not by
struggling to defend urban liberties but by functioning willingly as
agents of the prince’s will.”°
It is true that urban governments were increasingly subordinated to
state control, but one would be wise not to exaggerate the extent. We
will return to this shortly, but here we should note that the relationship
between the urban elite and outside, higher political authorities affected
the political role of artisans within the municipality because outside
powers became increasingly concerned about social disorder (often
associated with the turbulent world of the craftsmen), and believed that
oligarchy and bureaucratic municipal governance would facilitate good
“police.” As power on the urban level was increasingly concentrated in
7 Steven L. Kaplan, “The character and implications of strife among the masters inside
the guilds of eighteenth-century Paris,” Fournal of Social History 19 (1986), 635, 642.
8 Kaplan, “Luxury guilds,” 271.
° Christopher Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450-1750 (London, 1995), p.57.
the hands of the elite, artisans found themselves, in the name of social
discipline, progressively excluded from the constitutionally politically
active community.
The constitutional structure of European cities, despite countless
variations that were products of unique traditions and historical circum-
stances, were similar in that they were all rooted in a conciliar system.
This meant that authority was collective, and though there were mayors,
consuls, and burgomasters, these individuals, if not always named to
their office by a council, invariably worked in close conjunction with it.
Given the collective nature of authority, the pressing constitutional
issues were which groups (including guilds) were permitted political
participation (to elect or select its leaders), and who was permitted to
belong to such groups. The composition of the political community
varied from one town to the next, with more guildsmen included in
some places than in others, but over time the trend everywhere was
toward an oligarchy of an elite and the exclusion of guildsmen. This
does not mean that artisans lost all political power, but it does mean that
such power had to be exercised for the most part either through
petitioning and litigating in courts of law, or outside of constitutional
channels altogether through the threat or action of rebellion.
The trend toward excluding artisans from the constitutional political
community began early in Italy. However, even in places where, as we
will see in the next section of this chapter, a wave of rebellions by
craftsmen in the fourteenth century altered the constitutional balance in
favor of guildsmen against patricians in some towns in Germany and the
Low Countries, the gains in most places were rolled back in the early
modern period. Indeed, nearly everywhere during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, from Ghent to Vienna, from London to
No6rdlingen, Frankfurt, or Augsburg, from York to Barcelona, from
Strasbourg to Florence or Venice, from Leiden or Lille to La Rochelle,
artisans were increasingly excluded from the world of political participa-
tion. Only, it seems, in the “home towns” of Germany did guilds
continue to play a significant constitutional role in local government.
For the rank and file masters, the late medieval and early modern age
was a time of denial of political privileges once possessed, within both
the guild and the city.
The exclusion of craftsmen from political participation happened first
in Italy. Whatever constitutional position guilds had acquired in the
aftermath of the “communal revolutions” of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, in most places it was lost by 1400, in other places even earlier.
In Venice the Giustizia vecchia was created in 1173 to supervise the
guilds, and by the 1270s upon promotion to mastership a craftsman
swore an oath of allegiance not to the guild, but to the state, promising
not to form any “organization, company, armed band or conspiracy by
oath, bond, or any other sworn commitment against the honor of the
Doge and his council, the commune of the Venetians, or any other
person.”!° With the Serrata of 1297 by which a circumscribed patriciate
secured control of the governance of the city, guilds were definitively
denied constitutional access to political power.
Such exclusion took longer in Florence — the fourteenth century was
seared by a bitter struggle over the constitution of the commune
between craftsmen and a mercantile elite — but the outcome — oligarchy
and the exclusion of craftsmen from political power — was the same. One
legacy of the communal revolution in Florence was government of the
city by the direct participation of its citizens. The raging point of
controversy henceforth became which inhabitants had the right to
participate. The focal point, as John Najemy has explained in such lucid
detail, was elections. Most craftsmen in the guilds held to a collectivist
and egalitarian position and thus advocated a broad electorate and
envisioned the “Florentine republic as a federation of equal and auton-
omous corporations.”!! The great merchants, bankers, and landholders,
in contrast, rejected the decentralized popular republicanism of the
guilds and advocated instead a communal society and a polity based not
upon the corporation but upon the family, an “organism [that] naturally
produced a beneficent elite of trained and experienced leaders who were
identified with the patricians of the oldest and most prominent
families.”!? These spokesmen and leaders of the “civic family” would be
obligated to rule in the interest of all. We will return to this conflict later
in this chapter when we discuss the revolt of the ciompi, but we should
note here that the conflict between these two very different constitu-
tional visions raged from 1293, when the guild forces were ascendant
after the promulgation of the Ordinances of Justices, to 1382 when, in
the aftermath of the failed corporatist ciompi revolt, the oligarchic elite
won control of the commune. Never again would artisans participate
significantly in Florentine politics. In 1434 the Medici gained control of
the city, and then in 1532 the Medici grand duke of Tuscany abolished
all distinctions between citizens based on guild membership. Two years
later he consolidated the guilds further, and used them as bureaucratic
agencies of ducal power, a situation that would exist into the late
eighteenth century.
The constitutional exclusion of artisans from political power occurred
10 Quoted in Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice
and Europe, 1250-1650 (Totowa, 1987), p. 25.
11 Najemy, p. 10. 12 Thid., p. 13.
later in other cities of Europe, but the outcome was the same. In
NOrdlingen, for instance, craftsmen found themselves increasingly
restricted from the city council — the fifteen-member Innerer Rat —
between 1580 and 1700. In the former year craftsmen comprised one-
third of this powerful council, a representation that lasted until the
beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. After that a sharp reduction in their
numbers set in, so that by 1652 only one artisan was appointed to it
(since 1552 appointment had been made by a committee of seven sitting
council members). By 1700 not a single artisan, or even the son of one,
sat on the council which was now dominated by lawyers and professional
bureaucrats.
In Augsburg, too, oligarchy triumphed. A free imperial city since
1276, Augsburg experienced a Zunftrevolution in 1368, a bloodless coup
against the patricians led by merchants and artisans who then intro-
duced a new constitution to the city. The new order granted certain
guilds direct representation in municipal government, and alongside
merchants, weavers, bakers, and other craftsmen and shopkeepers now
held a majority in the Great Council and the Inner Council. This
fortunate constitutional situation for artisans lasted until 1549 when, in
punishment for resisting the victorious Emperor Charles V in the
Schmalkaldic war that the Catholic Charles waged against the
Lutherans, guild representation on the councils was ended. A similar
fate befell Memmingen in 1551 and, indeed, twenty-five other imperial
free cities between 1548 and 1552, leaving municipal government in the
hands of an oligarchy of merchants and patricians. This constitutional
structure lasted in most of these cities into the nineteenth century.
The formal political power of Viennese artisans was extremely limited
as well. A municipal law of 1526 had excluded artisans from the city
government, and, indeed, most artisans were not even citizens. In 1736
only a third of the craft masters were burghers and freemen of the city,
and almost an equal number were Stérer, those craftsmen operating on
their own account illicitly outside of guilds.
The seventeenth century also saw the eclipse of artisanal political
participation in Barcelona. Municipal government there comprised a
Council of 100 (actually 144 representatives or jurats) and various
municipal officers led by a committee of five councilors. One half of the
jurats were artisans, but the formal political power of craftsmen was less
than might appear at first glance. Only one of the five councilors was an
artisan, and few craftsmen were permitted to hold important municipal
offices (and only these officers could bring proposals for discussion to
the Council of 100). Between 1600 and 1630, as Barcelona plunged
into a recession which hit the crafts especially hard, the patricians and
merchants on the city council came to hold the view “that some artisans
were unworthy of holding high city offices by reason of their ‘vile’
trades.”!3 Countering such oligarchic and exclusionist sentiments, the
artisans pressed for the creation of a sixth councilor who also would be
an artisan. In 1641, as part of the Catalan revolt that Barcelona’s
craftsmen supported, they won their sixth councilor — from Louis XIII
of France, although the new constitutional arrangement was subse-
quently confirmed by Philip IV of Spain. The presence of this new
councilor, however, did nothing to halt the oligarchic control of muni-
cipal government, and in 1716, when Catalan privileges were revoked
by Philip V and the province — and Barcelona — were henceforth
governed by the laws of Castile, artisans were left entirely out of city
government whose officers now were royal appointees.
The same story of the triumph of patrician oligarchies dominated by
merchants, legal professionals, or in some places royal officials, can be
told about the cities of England and France. In England since the
Middle Ages, towns had received their privileges by charters granted by
the crown. These charters defined the relationships between the rulers
and the ruled both within the city and between the city and the crown.
The most prized privilege was incorporation, which granted the town’s
rulers the status of representing the interests of the entire citizenry.
Though many charters had been granted before 1500, 160 more cities
received theirs between 1500 and 1700.
One historian has called charters of incorporation “tools of an
irresistible tendency towards exclusiveness,” and indeed they did encou-
rage the growth of oligarchy as power was vested in the hands of a small
civic elite that perpetuated its grip on municipal governance by
co-optation rather than by general election by the citizenry, often
retaining their seats for life. Fear of the disorder that was assumed to
ensue should the ‘commons’ be allowed to participate is voiced clearly
enough by the magistrates of Nottingham in 1512: “If you shall suffer
the commons to rule and follow their appetite and desire, farewell all
good order.” This fear was reiterated in Gloucester in 1584: “Experi-
ence hath taught us what a difficult thing it hath always been to deal in
any matter where the multitude of burgesses have voice.” !4
In the fifteenth century many English towns heard freemen, many of
them artisans, clamoring for a greater voice in municipal governance;
but the best artisans could hope for from such demands was the creation
13 Luis R. Corteguera, “Artisans and politics in Barcelona, 1550-1650,” Ph.D. thesis,

Princeton University, 1992, p. 153.
14 Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500-1700 (Oxford, 1976).
169
of a large, supposedly consultative council comprised of a broader group
of citizens. In practice, however, this body was usually ignored by the
inner council controlled by the oligarchic elite. Councils of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries met in secret and made decisions without any
pretense of consulting the citizenry. More and more they tuned their
municipal decisions to the chord being struck at court, as powerful
political patrons rewarded municipal elites for their loyalty.
Charters in France, too, were granted by the crown, and brought with
them a degree of self-government vested institutionally in councils
called variously échevinages, consulats, jurades, or capitoulats. As in
England, theoretically the charter sanctioned the council as representa-
tive of the community or, as it was sometimes called, the respublica.
Often there were small, inner councils headed by a mayor, and larger
councils, those, too, usually socially circumscribed to include only
“notables.” These small councils were called to meetings to deliberate
on pressing issues, but everywhere the trend was the same as in
seemingly every other city in Europe: toward oligarchy, which meant
that if any artisan participated, he was among the most affluent.
Perhaps half of French towns in the Middle Ages had been established
as “communes,” but historians have come to recognize that even in
these supposed havens of independence from seigneurial lords,
autonomy was less complete than once imagined and institutions of self-
government were extended to only a part of the town. In any case, by
the early modern period, most towns had received whatever indepen-
dence they had by concession from the king, usually in exchange for
money or, in the case of militarily strategically located towns like Angers
or Langres near the outer reaches of the kingdom, for loyalty. None-
theless, municipal self-government was unequivocally a royal conces-
sion, and, moreover, whatever autonomy it had was circumscribed by
competing royal administrative bodies within the walls — above all
bailliages or sénéchausées, and, in some cities, parlements.
Within this constitutional framework, local power was vested in the
hands of an elite who were perpetuated in office by various systems of
election and co-optation. Sometimes, as in the towns of the southeast,
seats were allotted to certain social or occupational groups, even at
times including artisans (although always drawn from the wealthiest
ranks of them). In Romans, for instance, one seat each in the council
went to the Jaboureurs, the artisans, the merchants, and either the
nobility, medical or legal professions, or men called rentiers who lived off
their investments. More common, however, were cities whose councils
were controlled by merchants or men of the law, as was the case in
Lyons, Poitiers, Dijon, and Paris.
Resistance
—
Urban elites had always known that their city - wherever in Europe
was part of a larger political system and owed its privilege s to some
higher authority, be it a king, a duke, a bishop, or a lord, but they also
knew that their relationship with that power was one of give and take.
This was as true of the Middle Ages as it was of the early modern
period.
Artisans, too, were aware that power was negotiated, perhaps between
unequals, but negotiated nonetheless. They may have been formally
excluded from politics, but this does not mean that they were politically
powerless. Municipal authorities had few means of physical coercion
(indeed, the backbone of the urban militia were usually the town’s
artisans), and artisans had a very high level of group cohesiveness and
self-consciousness of their traditional rights. When collective demands
were voiced they could carry considerable leverage. Artisans usually
entered the political process by petitioning authorities for changes in
laws or statutes, and if the demands went unheeded, then craftsmen
were known to appeal up the political hierarchy, even to the king or
prince himself.
One area of disagreement between guilds and municipal governments
concerned access to mastership. Indeed, in 1619 in Dijon many guilds
joined to file a collective grievance with the king against the town
council, protesting the city fathers’ attempt to expand the ranks of
masters within the guilds by easing the requirements for admission.
Fearing disorder among journeymen denied opportunities for master-
ship, the civil authorities had pressed for openness, while for decades the
masters had been moving in the opposite direction, with considerable
success. This single issue had been and would continue to be the most
contentious one between the city magistrates and the master guildsmen.
Guilds and government squared off over the same issue in Reval
(present day Tallinn, Estonia) in 1659, the guilds appealing to the king
of Sweden to forbid the municipal authorities from trying to force them
to lower their requirements and costs for mastership. Only when they
received no satisfaction did they turn to violence. In 1662 a group of
artisans attacked the twenty-odd soldiers the town council had sent to
break up a demonstration by these same artisans.
Artisans in rebellion
From the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, towns all
across Europe from time to time were rocked by rebellion. Some of
these disturbances were riots, the result of poverty and the desperation
that so often attends that dismal condition. Many other disturbances,
however, were uprisings by substantial citizens. Craftsmen played their
part in both kinds of disturbances, sometimes leading and usually filling
the rank and file of the rebels. What was the nature of these rebellions?
And why were artisans so prominently represented in them? Were these
expressions of mass discontent in times of crisis, even of economic
depression, perhaps as some historians have asserted, challenging an
unjust economic system and a repressive social structure? Or were they,
as other scholars have contended, the attempts of a lesser bourgeoisie to
democratize town government? In fact, both explanations have some
elements of truth in them. Some insurrections did clearly have economic
and social discontent behind them, but in others we find no propertyless
wage-workers in the ranks of the rebels at all. In these latter uprisings,
however, even though citizen artisans often were responsible for them
and their explicit demands usually focused on opening government
more to their participation, we must be cautious about labeling them
“democratic.” The craftsmen who led or participated in these insurrec-
tions were drawn from the more substantial ranks of the artisanry, and
the regimes that were installed, even ephemerally, were still oligarchic.
Given the current state of research, then, we can observe, quite
generally, that the urban insurrections that were so numerous from 1300
to 1700 and that concern us here because of the prominent role artisans
played in them, were of two sorts, not always distinct. First, there were
anti-tax revolts which escalated into insurrections, resulting in ephem-
eral attacks upon the homes, and less often, the persons of the wealthy.
The second type of insurrection was the result of a convergence of
factors, the most salient being opposition to new taxes, fiscal maladmin-
istration by the existing and almost invariably patrician city government,
and the demand for wider political participation in the urban polity. In
fact, these issues were often related, for rebels demanded constitutional
changes as a way to guarantee greater attention by the ruling elite to the
interests of the citizenry, and the interests that were most prominent in
these demands were fiscal. Revolt after revolt in town after town
centered on these explosive issues. Such protests were often a direct
result of expensive wars and thus the town’s foreign policy, and they
ranged from presentation of petitions asking for redress to the burning
of palaces and the execution of patrician councilmen.
The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries have generally been
viewed by historians as a period of crisis, one marked in part by many
urban uprisings. Around 1400 the Liegeois Jean d’Outre-Meuse
observed that “all the common people every where in France as
elsewhere have risen up. . .”!° In France alone during the second half
of the fourteenth century urban disturbances rocked Provins, Chalons-
sur-Marne, Amiens, Rheims, Orleans, Lyons, Toulouse, and elsewhere,
and artisans were the principal actors in them. Many of these uprisings
were clearly about taxes, and artisans were clearly responsible for most
of the urban uprisings, especially during “the years of revolution” of
1378-83 when a large part of Europe was shaken by conflicts perceived
as unprecedented in the seriousness of their threat to the social order.
In 1378 in Le Puy in eastern Languedoc, for instance, the first salvo
of the Tuchin revolt, which would rage throughout the province until it
was definitively crushed by the duke of Berry in 1384, erupted over
taxation matters. Subsidies granted by the Le Puy town council to the
king of France for the seemingly interminable war with England were to
be collected as indirect taxes on consumption, a flat tax that would hit
artisans especially hard. It led to a rising of, as one letter of remission
after the revolt was suppressed said, “a great number of workmen . .”
Another letter recorded that after the tax was announced “Many people
cried aloud: ‘O blessed Virgin Mary help us! How shall we live, how
shall we be able to feed our children, since we cannot support the heavy
taxes established to our prejudice through the influence of the rich and
to reduce their own taxes?’”!° In September of 1381 the revolt reached
Béziers, the rising there triggered by unfair “estimates” used for assess-
ments of direct taxation. A crowd led by artisans stormed the town hall,
set fire to the tower so that some councilors were burned alive while
others plunged from the heights to their deaths. Suppression came
quickly from the duke of Berry who ordered the execution of forty-five
rebels (among whom were sixteen weavers and a host of other “workers
and artisans”), four by beheading on a winepress in the town square,
and the rest hanged.
In the north of France at about the same time artisan-led anti-tax
rebellions also erupted. A royal decree for the collection of new aides in
1382 in Rouen provoked a riot from 200 gens méchaniques, mostly from
the textile crafts. These “men of low estate [homines vilis status] ...
coppersmiths, cloth-workers ... hands engaged in work shops,” as a
local chronicler put it,!” attacked the king’s tax-collecting officers first,
but soon the anti-fiscal riot took a social turn as the rebels targeted
wealthy bourgeois, former mayors, the cathedral chapter, the monks of
St. Ouen monastery, and the Jews. The rising, called the Harelle, lasted
15 Quoted in Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle
Ages, trans. A. L. Lytton-Sells (London, 1973), p. 99.
three days, and though it resulted in only two deaths, chroniclers,

moralists, and judges who commented upon the insurrection and its
suppression seem to have feared the worst from it — total subversion of
the social order.
Perhaps the best known of the medieval rebellions is the English
Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. As the name suggests, this was largely a rural
rebellion, but we should note that it also involved many artisans from
towns, and eventually spread to London. In the repression that followed
masons, tailors, dyers, and tilers were interrogated for their participa-
tion. Just as the One Hundred Years’ War had triggered revolts in parts
of France, so, too, did it play a part in this one. By the mid-1370s the
war had turned defensive for the English as they tried to retain their
territories on the continent; consequently the costs fell upon those at
home, the fruits of pillage abroad having dried up. In 1377 and again in
1379 Parliament levied a poll tax to finance the war, a flat rate of 3
groats on all but the destitute. This assessment was higher than any
previous tax, equal to a laborer’s wages for three days, and rumblings of
discontent burst in to the open in June of 1381. When it came to light
that many taxable people were not on the tax rolls and thus escaped
assessment, an insurrection erupted, one soon led by Wat Tyler that
then quickly engulfed all of Kent and Essex as rebels sacked and burned
manor houses and castles. Within days the rebels marched on London,
and there found citizens, many of them artisans, sympathetic to their
cause. When pressure from within the walls forced the aldermen to open
the gates to the rebels, many of the rebels were given food and drink by
the city’s craftsmen and shopkeepers. As is well known, Tyler’s demands
to the young King Richard II were rooted in egalitarianism, but more
germane to our concerns was his demand dear to artisans: the revoca-
tion of the Statute of Labourers of 1351 which had restricted wages.
Once again, an incipient tax revolt had overflowed its banks and taken a
turn toward social warfare. The rebellion was eventually suppressed, but
in partial response to it and a reflection that artisans were a part of it, in
1388 the crown ordered all guilds to report to their sheriffs the details of
their “brotherhoods,” including the “origins, governance, oaths, meet-
ings, liberties, ordinances, usages and any charters or letters patent as
well as how much money they had.”!® This was a clear attempt to bring
the guilds under public authority.
Popular protest, whatever its form, was a central feature of the power
relations between superiors and inferiors in medieval and early modern
towns. This was of political importance because, first, it gave voice to
18 Quoted in Leeson, p. 40.

ordinary people who otherwise could not be heard, and second, because
it revealed in the reactions of the authorities the deep fears they
harbored about the stability or fragility of the political or social order. As
with many medieval insurrections, their early modern counterparts
often focused on fiscal issues. In many cases they remained anti-tax
revolts with no apparent or extensive political program or aims other
than redress of immediate fiscal grievances (usually a new, and perceived
unjust, tax), although they commonly were laced with social antagonism
so that the riots often escalated quickly into a spasm of social conflict
between the rich and the less fortunate (though not necessarily the
impoverished or propertyless). Between 1616 and 1647 in France alone
203 urban revolts and riots have been counted, many of which conform
to this type. The rebellion in Montpellier in 1645 is a classic example of
this sort of insurrection.
This important royal and provincial administrative town of 20,000
inhabitants had been suffering from the combined financial burdens
caused by France’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War and depressed
agricultural conditions. Then, in June of 1645, a new tax was
announced. Local accounts say that the first to protest were artisans’
wives. A crowd of them led by Monteille, the wife of a tilemaker, chased
the tax-collector out of town under a shower of rocks. The protesters,
whose ranks began to swell now with male artisans (who clearly
predominated in the crowd of rebels), descended upon houses of
taxfarmers and pillaged them. A locksmith and a miller were arrested by
the provincial lieutenant-general, and were sentenced to death the next
day by the royal presidial court. Before they could be executed,
however, they escaped from jail, freed by a crowd of women and helped
by a locksmith. Violence escalated further when a crowd of protesters
was fired upon from a window of one of the tax-collector’s houses. A
plasterer and a master mason fell dead in the street, and the enraged
rebels, provided now with martyrs, exploded in violence. They sacked
two more houses of tax officials, and this time two people were killed,
the widow of a councilor at the royal financial court in Montpellier who
reportedly had insulted the rebels, and the son of one of the tax-
collectors. A bonfire stoked by the furnishings of these sumptuous
houses blazed into the night. This was the end of the insurrection,
for the next day the lieutenant-general suspended the new tax, and
when the magistrates simply told the people to go home, they apparently
did.
Artisans, as we have seen, were prominent in the ranks of rebels with
fiscal grievances, and certainly can be found erupting in violence
directed against their social superiors. But this is only one type of urban
insurrection, and though it is difficult to determine the social or

economic status of the artisans involved in these kinds of disorders, it is
likely that they were drawn from the lower ranks. These kinds of
insurrection were, of course, deeply troubling to the authorities, but
even more grave to the wielders of public power were those occasions
when substantial artisanal householders raised the standard of rebellion,
because this kind of insurrection could challenge the very legitimacy of
the ruling elite and bring in, if successful, significant changes to the
urban polity in terms of the families that governed it. Often, then,
revolts involving artisans had a political side, and were usually coupled
with fiscal grievances and social antagonism.
Years ago the distinguished Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote of
the Révolution des métiers of the fourteenth century. He observed that in
cities in the Low Countries, northern and southern France, the Rhine-
land of Germany, Italy, and the Mediterranean shores of Spain, insur-
rections led by guildsmen carved places for craftsmen in municipal
governments. Since Pirenne wrote, historians have come to question
just how “revolutionary” these rebellions were, and how successful; but
there remains little doubt that artisans were especially restive in that
tumultuous century and that the insurrectionary aims of guildsmen
often had a clear and bold political cast.
The commercial development that the cities of thirteenth-century
Europe experienced increasingly concentrated wealth as it generated it,
creating powerful dynasties of merchants, bankers (moneychangers),
and financiers. At the dawn of the fourteenth century, these men
controlled municipal governments nearly everywhere, and retained their
grip on local power through co-optation. This self-perpetuating patri-
ciate was in fact comprised of dynastic family groups — tellingly in
Germany called simply the Geschlechter, or “the families” — interlocked
by marriage and clientage. The constitutional arrangements in which
patricians dominated town councils was only challenged if the ruling
elite was perceived not to be ruling in the collective interests of the
citizenry. Dissatisfaction with these regimes invariably focused on fiscal
issues, usually triggered by an increase in urban expenditure and
taxation, but often quickly broadened into accusations of malfeasance of
office or maladministration of civic finances. In these revolts of house-
holders, substantial craftsmen often led the discontented, usually a grab
bag of other social groups, including merchants, but rarely including the
very poor and the destitute. On the political plane, all of these rebellious
factions complained of being excluded from town management, and
their demands for reform always redrew the map of political participa-
tion by broadening its social base.
Early in the fourteenth century precisely these issues were joined in

the rebellion that shook the major towns of Flanders. In 1300 French
armies under the banner of King Philip IV invaded Flanders. His quick
success was crowned by what the king imagined to be a magnanimous
gesture, the abolition of unpopular taxes on foodstuffs in Ghent. He did
not reward Bruges in this way, however, and as soon as the French king
was out of Flanders, the Brugeois raised the standard of rebellion. Led
by the weaver Pieter de Coninck and the butcher Jan Breidel, early in
1302 the rebels gained control of the city and set up a magistracy
stocked with supporters of the count of Flanders, who was held captive
at the time by his lord, Philip. Meanwhile in Ghent, a pro-French
municipal government attempted to reimpose the food taxes in April. In
response, artisans declared a work stoppage there, an act of resistance
which then escalated into riot, ending in the killing of two aldermen.
Then in Bruges on May 18, pro-count forces ambushed and massacred
pro-French forces; uprisings exploded everywhere except in Ghent, as
men sympathetic to the French were driven from power. That summer
the French invaded, but were defeated in the famous battle at Courtrai
in July. Pro-French patrician regimes in Ghent and Ypres were deposed
within a few days. The new regimes that were installed recognized the
important role the craftsmen had played in the rebellion and so had
broader social representation, though the councils remained, as before
the rebellions, the preserve of families with property. Guilds won the
most extensive rights in Bruges, which had led the rebellion, their
members gaining the right to serve on the town council. Nine of thirteen
new aldermen there were probably guildsmen, and a fuller even became
the new burgomaster.
On the surface this looks like a triumph of, if not democracy, at least
of the representative principle in governance, but before we hasten to
acclaim this rebellion a “revolution of the trades,” we should examine
more closely just what kind of regimes emerged from this rebellion. The
landowning patriciate was hardly banished from the town councils, and
the constitutional arrangement was still structured to favor oligarchy. In
both Bruges (where magistrates came to be appointed directly by the
count’s commissioners) and Ghent oligarchies re-emerged, the same
men and families remaining in the magistracy for years despite the
requirement that the offices rotate. Unlike before the rebellions, consti-
tutionally the magistracy could and did include guildsmen, but we find
that guild aristocracies came to dominate. For example, in Ghent the
carpenter Arnoud van der Varent occupied a seat on the council for
seventeen consecutive years after 1360. The firm hold of the propertied
classes (guild or otherwise) on the Flemish oligarchies continued in the
Artisans in the polity WE
Burundian period of 1384-1477, when ducal appointment and co-

optation combined to keep the leading families entrenched in local
government.
The German version of the révolution des métiers were the so-called
Zunfterevolutionen, but once again we must ask how revolutionary, and
how advantageous to artisans, these insurrections really were. Between
1300 and 1550 historians have counted 210 uprisings in 105 different
German towns, and true to classic form, most were triggered by anti-tax
sentiments. They also incorporated political frustrations stemming from
exclusion from municipal government. The object of these rebellions
was fiscal reform and governments made responsible to the citizenry by
popular participation, not revolution.
Generally, the results of the wave of rebellions that shook German
towns in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries can be classified as
follows. First, in some cities artisans failed to gain a constitutional
foothold in government, as town councils remained solidly patrician.
This was especially true of the Hanseatic towns in the north. In some
towns in the southwest, like Strasbourg and Basel, guildsmen were more
successful, winning representation on town councils, while in other
places like Ravensburg in 1346 and Speyer in 1349 or Cologne in 1396
no patricians at all remained on the councils after the rebellions as all of
the seats were captured by guilds. Indeed, in Cologne guild membership
became the sole route to a council seat, and council members were
elected by the guilds.
This seeming triumph of the artisans requires closer scrutiny before
we can declare a halcyon day of the artisan. Let us look at both ends of
the spectrum, first at two Hanseatic cities, Brunswick and Liibeck, and
then Cologne. In Brunswick in 1374 craftsmen (led by tanners) rose
against the patrician town council, protesting an increase in taxation to
finance what the rebels took to be misguided and expensive territorial
acquisition and defense policies. The ruling elite of this Hanseatic city
was committed to maintaining and supplying a series of castles well
beyond the walls, and this imperial posture involved the city in continual
feuds with the local nobility and, in 1374, an unsuccessful war against
the archbishop of Magdeburg. In the wake of the war the town found
itself swamped in a debt of 10,000 marks, thus prompting the new tax,
and the charges leveled against the patricians by the artisan-led citizenry
of unnecessary imperial commitments and mismanagement of the town
finances.
A special meeting of the citizens was called by a group of tanners and
cobblers, and heated discussion and recriminations ignited a crowd to
action, bursting from the meeting and storming the town hall and the
homes of some councilmen. Eight councilmen were executed, while fifty

patricians, fearing for their lives, fled town. A new council was named by
the rebels. The rebellious town was promptly expelled from the Hansa,
and as patrician families that had fled and even many of the former
patrician councilors gradually came home, the situation was altered and
internal pressures to return to the status quo ante were exerted. By 1380
only one rebel from the newly installed council of 1374 still sat in
government. In 1386 a new constitution granted fixed guild representa-
tion on the council, the composition of which included a wider range of
families, albeit from society’s upper ranks.
Just as the situation in Brunswick was simmering down, the
“butchers’ rising” flared in the fellow Hanseatic town of Liibeck. As the
name suggests, this insurrection that raged from 1380 to 1384 was
instigated by the town’s butchers who opposed an annual tax paid on
the stalls they rented from the city and from which they were forced to
market their meat. In 1380 the butchers presented a petition to rescind
the tax, but in the same petition they also requested an alteration of the
town’s constitution, demanding their representation on the town
council. When their demands were not met, a reported sixty to sixty-five
men conspired to lead a rebellion to topple the current government and
install a new regime with broader social representation. The ranks of the
rebels were dominated by artisans. Not surprisingly, many were
butchers (at least twenty-seven), two of whom also joined two furriers
and two bakers among the leaders of the revolt, although it was Heinrich
Paternostermaker, a merchant, who was the chief of the conspirators.
The would be rebels planned to storm the town council while it was in
session and arrest the councilmen and kill those who resisted, but the
plot was uncovered before it was hatched, and of the forty-seven men
subsequently arrested, nineteen were executed. Testimony to the
butchers’ leading role in the abortive coup, their guild was dissolved in
its aftermath.
For a time Ltbeck returned to the status quo ante, but with a new tax
levied in 1403 the citizenry grew restive again, and true to form, fired
complaints about mismanagement of civic finances at the town council.
Like the citizens of Brunswick thirty years before, citizens of Ltibeck
accused the patrician council of foolishly and expensively maintaining
distant possessions, and couched their complaints in political demands.
Like the artisans of the “butchers’ rising,” this group of citizens com-
prised mostly of lesser merchants and artisans renewed the demand that
they be formally represented on the council. Claiming not innovation
but tradition, these men asserted that the patrician families that cur-
rently dominated the municipal government in fact contravened
Liibeck’s charter granted by the Emperor Henry the Lion in 1340,

which supposedly granted all citizens the right to stand for and to elect
the town council. Regardless of the appeal to tradition, fearing armed
rebellion some councilors fled. An entirely new council was set up with
merchants and craftsmen in its seats, but enough former councilors
remained in town and, by refusing to step down, left a situation where
two councils were struggling for power and vying for legitimacy. The
other Hansa towns sided predictably with the patrician council, as did
the Emperor Sigismund, and when the situation was resolved in 1416
with a new council in which some rebels were accepted, not one of these
new elites was an artisan.
If the political fates of artisans in Hanseatic cities like Brunswick and
Libeck force us to reconsider how appropriate the epithet “revolutions
of the trades” is when describing the uprisings in those towns, perhaps
the situation in Cologne would be more suitable. For here, it seems,
guilds fully triumphed in 1396. From the mid-thirteenth century until
1396 Cologne’s municipal government was controlled by an entrenched
patriciate that monopolized the fifteen seats on the inner council (the
enger Rat) and perpetuated their grip by co-optation. A larger council
(the weiter Rat) with eighty-two seats was selected from the town’s
parishes. In both bodies artisans had little voice. In 1396, however,
artisans were joined by a group of new merchants who likewise had been
effectively excluded from government. Beginning with complaints
voiced by artisans and lesser merchants about taxation and extending to
allegations of fiscal mismanagement by the patrician oligarchy, protest
escalated. Several guilds, led by those of the weavers and the goldsmiths,
toppled the sitting government and installed themselves in power. They
drafted a new constitution called the Verbundbrief which established
guild government and ostensibly announced victory for artisans. A new
council was henceforth to be elected by twenty-two Gaffeln which were
political guilds comprised of craft and merchant guilds. The new weaver
Gaffel had four seats, the merchants two, with the remaining seats being
distributed among other craft guilds.
Such a new political order, which lasted until 1513, appears to
confirm the estimation that this was indeed a Zunfterevolution. However,
despite the constitutional arrangement of guild representation, the
families that came to dominate government were drawn from the
upper ranks of their guilds. Indeed, recent research demonstrates that
the political movements of the fourteenth century capped by the
successful coup in 1396 were the work of the entrepreneurial, even
capitalist elite within the ranks of the merchant and craft guilds. These
guilds were hierarchical organizations, and once legitimated by the new
constitution, they became the organs through which the government

was run and the crafts themselves were regulated and, thus, through
which labor was disciplined.
None of the German revolts was about equality, and everywhere
oligarchy endured, even if the personnel changed and in some cases
widened. These revolts, like most other uprisings by householders
across Europe, were about responsible government and, if the current
regime was perceived to be failing in providing that, constitutional
remedies to include the formerly excluded from politics were usually
advanced. This, in fact, was the norm of all rebellions from 1300 into
the early eighteenth century. It certainly describes the central issues of
perhaps the best-known insurrection of the fourteenth century, the
ciompi revolt in Florence. Historians still disagree whether this revolt
was essentially economic or political, but there are more than hints that
dissatisfaction over taxation and restriction of political participation in
government by significant taxpayers were involved in this revolt.
By the mid-1370s a combination of factionalism in the ruling elite, an
economic downturn, and a costly war against the papacy had destabi-
lized the patrician regime dominated by the seven major guilds (the
leaders of which were not artisans) then in power. In the summer of
1378 the regime collapsed. The ciompi revolt of that summer actually
consisted of two distinct phases, but both centered on electoral and
thus constitutional reforms. In June and early July the fourteen minor
guilds demanded greater political representation (the current regime
restricted them to only one-fourth of the civic offices), by being given a
voice in the selection of candidates standing for election to civic office.
These guildsmen, the leaders of whom were artisans, were equally keen
to keep the unincorporated sottoposti from forming guilds and thereby
legitimately being able to claim the right to participate in governance as
well. However, once the first demand was forced upon the current
regime in July, the feared demands of the sottoposti quickly followed.
Under the threat of violent insurrection, on July 22 the petition
submitted by the sottoposti was accepted, and three new popolo minuto
guilds were created. A dramatically expanded political class resulted
and a constitutional regime comprised of three groups of guilds —
major, minor, and popolo minuto — which theoretically were autonomous
and equal came temporarily into being. The new regime was immedi-
ately undermined by faction within the ranks of the guilds of the popolo
minuto as one of them, that of the ciompi, or woolworkers, felt that they
were being unfairly excluded from the electoral process. Violent insur-
rection again reared its head, but this time it was crushed by a coalition
of the other guilds. The ciompi guild was dissolved, a fate that also
awaited the remaining two popolo minuto guilds a month later as the
substantial artisanal community represented in the fourteen minor
guilds and the seven major guilds rolled back the gains the sottoposti had
made in July. Though exclusionary in its own right, this guild regime
which controlled Florence until 1382 had a broader base which
included many artisans than did the preceding regime. This regime,
however, in turn met its demise when disgruntled guildsmen of the
seven major guilds sided with the ousted patricians and ushered in a
new regime. Artisans were convinced henceforth to abandon their
corporatist loyalties and to accept the new regime because of its system
of open nominations which slated thousands of citizens for election to
civic office. The ruling elite was narrow, no less oligarchic, and no less
powerful than that of the pre-ciompi days, but it was a governing elite
that was drawn constitutionally from a group three to four times larger,
and so rested upon the legitimizing fiction of a broad-based system of
political opportunity. In practice, the days of any significant artisan
participation in government were gone forever.
Though the insurrections of the summer of 1378 depart from the
norm of most rebellions of the fourteenth century in that they were not
clearly triggered by a new tax, like rebellious artisans everywhere these
Florentines wanted something from their municipal government that
they were not getting. Political participation had its rewards — attention
to the interests of those represented — and though these interests and
rewards certainly were economic in many instances, in the Florentine
experience we can see the rebels trading in another coin as well —
honorable status. The victorious minor guildsmen of late June and early
July demanded political inclusion so they could maintain exclusion of the
sottoposti. They were fearful of the latter’s incorporation because it
blurred social distinction, and honorable status was rooted in such
distinction. They may have been forced to accept the sottoposzi (after all,
the principles undergirding the sottopost’s demand for incorporation
were the same that legitimated the demands of these minor guildsmen),
but judging from their subsequent actions they immediately began
preparing the ground for the eventual exclusion of sottoposti, which
happened within two months. The threat from below must have been
felt more greatly than from above by 1382, and thus the minor
guildsmen cast their lot with a statist regime that could guarantee the
hierarchical order that the propertied guildsmen so desired.
Artisans expected their municipal governments to safeguard their
interests, and protested, sometimes violently, if the ruling elite failed
them. Often, as we have seen, these interests were explicitly fiscal, but
the fact that anti-tax sentiments leaped to constitutional levels so
quickly suggests that artisans were also deeply concerned about issues
that went beyond their pocketbooks and reached the level of the
structure and maintenance of the community. How well the government
secured the kind of order that artisans needed to maintain the security
of their place in the community was an issue worth fighting, and even
dying, for. Medieval rebellions, then, were very much about mainte-
nance of community of a particular kind (stratified). Early modern
artisanal insurrections were little different in this regard.
We search in vain in English cities for artisanal rebellions with anti-tax
sentiments or political goals, but nearly everywhere else we find insur-
rections strikingly similar to those of the fourteenth century. The
communero revolt of 1520 launched by Castilian cities was the biggest
urban rebellion of early modern Europe, and found artisans deeply
engaged in it. Spain’s recently crowned king, Charles I (who even more
recently had become Holy Roman Emperor Charles V), promptly
quarreled with the cities represented in the Cortes over a proposed levy
of new taxes. The cities rejected his demands, and instead countered
with demands of their own, including not only a reduction of taxes but
also a reform of the entire taxation system, the latter calling for prior
approval by the Cortes of taxes sought by the crown. Many Castilian
cities united behind these demands, and formed a junta that co-
ordinated their resistance. Of course, as everywhere the cities (and thus
the junta) were dominated politically by oligarchs (regidores), but the
ruling elite was followed into revolt by many artisanal householders.
Indeed, the communero cities were the artisanal manufacturing centers of
the interior of Castile (the commercial cities of the periphery tended to
oppose the revolt). But if the oligarchs were intent on redrawing the
map of power between crown and Cortes, the artisan rebels rallied to
the cry of communidad. In other words, they seized the opportunity of
this revolt to press for political, even constitutional, changes on the local
level which would better secure their interests by better securing their
conception of the community. Politically, this meant broadening the
base of political participation among the community of citizens, and
constitutionally, by instituting changes that would force the ruling elite
to govern in the interests of all the citizenry. In typical fashion, this
meant approval of all town council policies and decisions by popular
municipal assemblies.
In Avila, to take but one communero city, initially this coalition of
oligarchs and artisans held, but as artisans began expanding their
denunciation of fiscal injustice from the royal taxation policies to the
fiscal privileges of the local elite, and then demanded expanded political
participation to rectify such abuses, cracks in the coalition opened.
183
Then, when crowds rioted and sacked the homes of some city councilor
s,
the coalition collapsed. Avila then withdrew from the communero move-
ment shortly before the rebel forces were destroyed in the battle of
Villalar by the armies of Charles in April 1521. The newly discovered
loyalty of Avila’s oligarchs to their king spared them; Avila’s artisans
who led the local insurgency were not so fortunate. Eleven of them were
executed in the autumn of 1521. Needless to say, none of the cities of
Castile found any room for artisanal participation in governance hence.
One hundred and twenty years later elsewhere in the kingdom of
Spain, another rebellion erupted similar to the communero revolt and
those of the fourteenth century in the centrality of taxes and political
demands for broadening the base of participation. Everywhere in the
sprawling Spanish dominions the 1640s were a time of crushing fiscal
burdens brought on by a governmental fiscal policy seeking revenues to
reverse the staggering military misfortunes of the Habsburg forces in the
waning years of the Thirty Years’ War. These burdens were felt every-
where in the Spanish kingdom, including Naples, then a city of 300,000,
the largest in Europe.
In 1647 thousands of Neapolitans exploded in rebellion, triggered by
a new tax on fruit. A classic anti-fiscal revolt at the outset, it became
much more as time wore on. Initially led by a fishmonger named
Masaniello, the rebels plundered the palaces of tax officials and then
issued demands for the elimination of taxes on consumption items like
grain, wine, oil, and cheese. The cry for tax reform, however, quickly
gave way to political demands that any new taxes must first be approved
by a popular assembly. From there the rebels expanded their demands
to a popular election of magistrates, challenging both the local oligarchy
and the crown whose viceroy approved the town councilors who had
been chosen by co-optation by the existing council. The viceroy also
appointed the royal officers called corregidores to oversee the municipal
government. The local viceroy had no troops to quell the insurrection,
and so was forced to accede to the rebels’ demands. Not even the
assassination of Masaniello could stem the tide of the insurrection. As
Spanish troops disembarked in October and laid siege to the city, the
mantle as rebel chief was picked up by a blacksmith named Gennaro
Annese who then proclaimed the city and kingdom of Naples a republic,
but under the protection of the king of France. French protection never
materialized, and the republic collapsed from internal dissension as
much as from outside pressure. In April 1648, following a promise of
amnesty to the rebels, the removal of taxes on food, and the appoint-
ment of a new viceroy, the rebels capitulated and the gates were opened
to the Spanish troops. What became of Annese we do not know, but,
once again, no room was allocated to artisans in the constitutional

regime after the revolt.
in
The seventeenth century has long been identified as a century
ns that swept
crisis, and a salient illustration of that crisis was the rebellio
tions have
across most of Europe at that time. The most-studied insurrec
and
been the rural ones, especially in France, but towns of France
especially Germany did not escape upheavals, most of which, once
again, found artisans filling the ranks of the rebels. Typical as well were
the
the anti-tax sentiments of the rebels and the quick escalation of
uprisings to constitutional levels. We could illustrate this in any number
of towns. Friedrichs estimates that two-thirds of Germany’s imperial
cities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries experienced
these kinds of conflict, but for the sake of clarity and brevity, we shall
confine our attention to especially well-studied rebellions in two impor-
tant cities: La Rochelle from 1612 to 1628, and Frankfurt in 1612-16
and again in 1703-32.
As the seventeenth century dawned on La Rochelle, patricians domi-
nated the town council, called the corps de ville. A thriving port city with
a growing population of merchants prospering from commerce, the
stage was set for a restive group of merchants and many substantial
artisans to begin demanding greater influence in town government. As
in most patrician-dominated cities, La Rochelle’s councilmen were
named by co-optation. What these merchants and artisans cared dearly
about was fiscal administration that protected their interests; their
complaints about city government, then, often focused upon import
taxes, duties, and tolls that might restrict the flow of goods into port.
The late sixteenth century was punctuated with just these kinds of
disputes, and to preclude any insurrection the corps de ville attempted to
alter the command structure of the militia which heretofore had been
controlled by the merchant and artisan opposition. Nothing could be
done about the rank and file of the militia (overwhelmingly artisan
householders), but in 1598 councilmen were commissioned as the
militia’s commanders and lieutenants.
In 1608 another episode further embittered the increasingly alienated
merchants and craftsmen. In that year the town council spent 20,000
livres to purchase from the crown the privilege to collect taxes on goods
entering the port. The unenfranchised merchants and artisans saw this
as an attempt by the corps de ville to arbitrarily manipulate import duties
once again to their detriment, and launched allegations of patrician
malfeasance. The breaking point came in 1614 when several of the
town’s wealthiest but disenfranchised merchants, led by Jean Tharay,
raised the banner of insurrection. Justifying their resistance in terms
185
that would have sounded familiar to rebels in nearly every city that had
witnessed insurrections since 1300, they claimed that the corps de ville
had ruled the city, not as it should in the interest of the community of
citizens, but rather in its own interests. Wishing not “to govern
ourselves insolently, but to be governed equitably,” they thus demanded
a reform of the town council by broadening the social base of political
participation. !?
The rank and file of the militia companies were artisans, and this
force became the backbone of the rebellion that erupted on March 22.
Militiamen barricaded the town hall with councilors inside, and six days
later the council capitulated and accepted twenty-eight articles re-
forming town government which brought the formerly disenfranchised
into the halls of government. In August, the patricians attempted a
counter-coup, and fighting in the streets quickly followed. Tharay was
seen in battle helmet and “covered in cutlasses” spearheading an assault
on the patrician forces who were holed up in the town hall. The
patricians were routed, and sixty of them were apprehended and
imprisoned.
The new regime was headed by Tharay who rewarded his followers
with formal inclusion in the government, which completely excluded the
patricians. Tharay commanded a deep and broad network of clients that
included many artisan householders (this was how he could secure the
loyalty of the militia), and in the new regime about 10 percent of the
Council of Forty-Eight (a large council that paralleled a new, smaller
inner council and which possessed significant checks upon the smaller
council) were craftsmen. This was not a révolution des métiers, but
certainly a constitutional arrangement more advantageous to artisans
than most urban regimes afforded them. The regime lasted until royal
victory in the siege of 1628, after which the inner council, the Council of
Forty-Eight, and, significantly for the artisans, the militia companies,
were all abolished. The new regime that supplanted the old installed,
predictably, a new patriciate drawn from a narrow social base.
Bernd Moeller, the distinguished historian of the imperial cities of
Germany and the Reformation, contended that the Protestant Reforma-
tion in the imperial cities was rooted in a desire of ordinary citizens to
preserve a traditional conception of community life. He argued that
these citizens still embraced the concept of “commune” so dear to their
medieval forebears and, therefore, the Reformation had strong political
links to the medieval past.*? Other historians have added that the
Reformation era saw the eclipse of the communal spirit and henceforth
19 Kevin Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530-1650 (Leiden, 1997).
20 Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation (Philadelphia, 1972).
citizens increasingly became subjects of authoritarian regimes in which

power descended from king or duke to city magistrate.
As we have seen, citizens, householding artisans represented among
them in great number, fought violently at times to assert or defend the
interests of the community, and not just in Germany or in the Middle
Ages. Indeed, although it is true that political unrest of this type was
especially pronounced in the imperial cities (forces for the Gemeinde or
community of citizens squaring off against those of the Obrgkeit, or
rulers). This is the leitmotif that runs through nearly every rebellion in
European cities from 1300 into the eighteenth century.
In German cities this defense of the privileges of the Gemeinde was
given institutional voice in different ways. In many cities there were
constitutional arrangements for Biirgerschaft to oversee the governance
of patricians. In Erfurt, for example, four Vierherren were so invested. In
Cologne twenty-two guild masters served as Bannerherren who were
expected to meet periodically to determine if the interests of burgher-
citizens were being served, while in Brunswick in 1513 a committee of
Zehnmdnner to be selected by guild masters was instituted to oversee
collection and expenditure of civic revenues. Above all, there was the
Ausschuss, an ad hoc committee that could be convened by citizens when
it deemed that the council was not ruling in the interests of the
community. Typically an Ausschuss would claim the right to review
decisions handed down by the council and to participate in council
deliberations. These committees were usually convened when financial
maladministration was suspected, but they quickly raised fundamental
constitutional questions about the council’s responsibility to the citizens,
and the citizens’ right to participate in their own governance. The
convening of such a committee could be, and often was, the first step
toward challenging the existing regime, and it often launched demands
that by now should sound quite familiar: fiscal reform and broadened
representation on the council.
Conflicts that pitted citizens against magistrates over these issues did
not end with the Reformation. Indeed, citizens excluded from govern-
ance and dissatisfied with their magistrates rose between 1550 and 1700
in Aachen, Brunswick, Bremen, Cologne, Frankfurt, Liibeck, Straslund,
and a host of other towns. The experience of Frankfurt well illustrates
the salient issues.
From the fourteenth century patrician families had dominated the
city government of Frankfurt, challenges to their rule from the artisan-
led citizenry in the 1350s and 1360s, and again in 1525 having been
repelled. Another challenge was mounted in 1612, and this time, at least
for a while, it was successful. Disgruntled burghers, many of whom were
established artisans, formed an Ausschuss to vent grievance and to press

for reforms. Typically, the dissatisfaction focused on fiscal mismanage-
ment, and from the outset was laced with anti-Semitism since the rebels
assumed that the city’s Jews and its patricians worked together against
the interests of the lesser burghers. An imperial commission arrived to
negotiate a settlement, a compromise between the burghers and the
patricians being reached the day before Christmas, 1612. Of the
seventy-one articles in the so-called Citizens’ Agreement, the most
important to the burghers were those that limited the number of
patrician seats on the town council and added burgher seats, and that
created two burgher committees that were charged with, among other
things, overseeing the city’s finances. These changes would benefit the
well-to-do burghers who then secured their place in the new constitu-
tional arrangement by a system of co-optation.
For lesser artisans who were still excluded from politics, these reforms
were unsatisfactory, and so, led by the pastrycook Vincenz Fettmilch,
the challenge to authority took a radical turn. Fettmilch, who had
sought and been denied a municipal office in the new regime, led a
group of men left out of the new constitutional arrangement. In May
1614 Fettmilch and his followers stormed the town hall and, after
capturing the councilors, held them captive until they resigned.
Fettmilch then declared himself Gubernator of Frankfurt. Not surpris-
ingly, neither the title nor the regime was recognized by the emperor. In
fact, after a group of artisans and their journeymen plundered the
Jewish ghetto and Fettmilch expelled the Jews from Frankfurt (recall
that the Jews were suspected of profiting from the fiscal malfeasance of
the previous regime and so became the scapegoats of the fiscal troubles
experienced by the town), the emperor placed a ban upon the regime
and threatened military intervention. Goaded by the specter of imperial
troops invading the city, a group of burghers turned on Fettmilch and
arrested him.
An imperial commission restored the patrician council, which has-
tened to abolish the burgher committees which had been established in
1613. The Jews were permitted to return to the ghetto under imperial
protection, and the leaders of the uprising were hanged. Then the
emperor, seeking to expurgate the trouble at its source, decreed the
Transfix of 1616 which abolished the guilds. They were replaced by
Handwerke, organizations that had to answer to the town council for
everything. Creatures of the government, all officers of the trades
henceforth were to be appointed by the council. Even business meetings
required prior approval.
Between 1705 and 1732 Frankfurt was shaken by yet another
challenge to patrician government. This time, however, the changes

were lasting. What did not change, however, was the exclusion of the
rank and file artisan from politics. A new constitution established
consultative bodies of citizens and requirements that the council consult
it on substantive issues, especially tax increases. The key differences
between this challenge to patrician power and Fettmilch’s uprising were
two: first, the eighteenth-century rebels did not seek to displace the
patricians from power, but rather to force them to share power with
them. Second, the composition of the rebels was different. Technically
both were burgher uprisings, but under Fettmilch the “burghers” in
question were mostly artisans, while in the eighteenth century they were
merchants and entrepreneurial artisans who had become deeply
engaged in commercial activities, often practicing more than one
“trade.” Not surprisingly, the constitutional settlement of 1732
balanced conciliar power between the patricians and the wealthy men of
commerce. Artisans, like their colleagues in most other European towns
and cities, were effectively excluded from political decision-making.
After 1680, though disputes between citizens and magistrates in fact
increased, recourse to violence declined. A different arena for disputes
became increasingly dominant, the courts of law, and artisan demands,
at least before the French Revolution, ceased to have high constitutional
stakes. The basic structure of guild internal governance — oligarchy —
remained the same everywhere, but also widespread was another trend,
the intrusion of civic, ducal, or royal government in internal guild
affairs.
One trend plainly visible in the political history of medieval and early
modern artisans is toward oligarchy, both within the guilds themselves
and within the urban polity. Increasingly guilds were dominated by the
wealthier craftsmen, the same families tending to run a guild’s affairs for
generations. Within the urban polity, however, we find artisans increas-
ingly excluded from the constitutional political community. Artisans
may not have welcomed these developments, but they saved outright
political resistance — rebellion — for matters of even deeper importance.
As we have seen, the hundreds of artisanal rebellions that dot the
calendar throughout Europe from the late Middle Ages to about 1700
centered on two interrelated concerns — a perceived overtaxation of
artisans, and fiscal maladministration by the municipal elite. It may
seem that the history of artisanal rebellion is one of dreary failure — after
all, the so-called “revolution of the trades” turn out not to have been so
revolutionary, and early modern rebellions seem to end monotonously
in returns to the status quo ante, after a perfunctory execution of some of
the rebels. Artisan success, however, perhaps should not be measured

simply in revolutionary terms. Artisans expected their municipal govern-
ments to safeguard their interests, and protested if the ruling elite failed
them. Sometimes artisans tried to carve places for themselves in the
constitutional arrangement, and sometimes they found short-term
success, but usually rebellious artisans were sending a message that
violence against the ruling elite was always an option and that too great a
disregard for artisanal interests and concerns would ignite it.
Often, as we have seen, the spark that ignited a rebellion by artisans
was fiscal, but the fact that anti-tax sentiments or concerns about fiscal
maladminitration leaped to constitutional levels so quickly suggests that
artisans were also deeply concerned about issues that went beyond their
pocketbooks and reached the level of the structure and maintenance of
the community. True, they may have wished to insert themselves
officially in the constitution of their polity, but failing this (and they
almost always failed), they still hoped to protect and preserve something
else, their social status. How well the government secured the kind of
order that artisans needed to maintain the security of their place in the
community — their status, in a word — was an issue worth fighting, and
even dying, for. Medieval and early modern rebellions, then, were very
much about the maintenance of a stratified community and of the
artisan’s place within it.
Bibliography
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5 Authority and resistance (II): masters and
journeymen
The idea that work in medieval cities was characterized by a developing

polarization between ... masters and journeymen has for over a
century provided the prevalent framework of historical debate ...
However, “masters” and “journeymen” continued throughout the
medieval period, up to and beyond the sixteenth century, to be
heterogeneous groups with shifting and partially overlapping interests.
The widespread received view which identifies the former as entrepre-
neurial owners of capital and the latter as a nascent working class is
undercut by so many local varieties of experience that this bipolar
model remains an insufficiently explanatory historical tool.!
So contends Gervase Rosser in a recent article, and he has a point.

Masters and journeymen were not always at each others’ throats, small
masters often having as much in common with their two or three
journeymen as with the large masters of their guild. As Ménétra’s
journal testifies for the eighteenth century, some masters stood ready to
share a drink with their journeymen, to make loans to them, to protect
them, to help them escape after a brawl, even to bring them food in
prison. For Ménétra, a good master who earns his men’s respect is one
who treats them fairly, eats with them, and works alongside them.
Certainly, in the competitive labor markets which characterized Eur-
opean Cities at least from the late Middle Ages, masters, especially the
smaller masters who were at a competitive disadvantage to the larger
employers, found it in their interest to cultivate the goodwill of jour-
neymen. We know as early as the fifteenth century in Basel that some
small masters and journeymen in the smith trade regularly worked out
employment agreements in open breach of the rules of the guild and in
defiance of the large masters.
Small masters falling in league with some of their journeymen was
encouraged by the drift to oligarchy within the guilds, and by the
simultaneous formation of cores of large masters and peripheries of
1 Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, guilds and the negotiation of work in the medieval town,” Past
and Present 154 (1997), 4.
191
smaller ones. Certainly the story of strife between masters within guilds
is one that needs to be told (we already know a great deal about conflict
between guilds), even if in the present state of research we cannot say
much about it. Kaplan has shown that in the eighteenth-century Parisian
bakers’ guild a tension existed between the chefs and the rank and file of
masters, the primary point of dispute being governance of the guild. He
finds that the rank and file were demanding more “democracy,” challen-
ging an aristocratic oligarchy’s domination of guild politics. He points
out that
in a manner that recalls the revolt of the Parlement against royal absolutism,
the reforming masters intended to clean the corporation of its corruption,
oblige the directors to render their accounts public, and to force them to
conform to the fundamental laws of the corporation and to renew the moral
foundations of the community by restoring a climate of collective participation
and of responsibility.”
To be sure, then, when we discuss “labor relations” in the preindus-
trial world of the artisan we must consider the varieties of forms of
association and solidarity between masters and journeymen as well as
conflict between and among masters. To suggest that the only form of
conflict worth studying was that between master and journeyman does
indeed, as Rosser has warned, blind us to the varieties of labor relations.
But, perhaps Rosser’s criticism is overdrawn, for what is the historian to
make of the countless instances in the historical record of conflict
between masters and journeymen and, indeed, evidence that masters
and journeymen saw themselves as quite fundamentally distinct status
groups, and seem to have constructed identities that were very much
rooted in a sense of status that was generally shared by fellow masters
and fellow journeymen? Violence and conflict often functioned as a
means to make inclusion and exclusion in these groups clear, and even
the most cursory glance at the workshop shows it to be a site of frequent
conflict, a place, as we will see, where antinomies existed side by side
with solidarities. To recount the history of conflict between masters and
journeymen is not to fall into the teleological trap of tendentiously
isolating the origins of the conflict between capital and labor, but rather
to give the weight of historical evidence its full due.
Time and labor
In the mid-eighteenth century Josiah Wedgwood transformed pottery

manufacture in England, a change that in two important respects
2 Steven L. Kaplan, Le Meilleur Pain du monde. Les Boulangers de Paris au XVIIIe siécle
(Paris, 1996), p. 207.
Masters and journeymen 193
reflects a trend in worker discipline that had been sporadically unfolding

for centuries. In his desire to “make machines of the men as cannot err,”
Wedgwood instituted a clocking-in system to track and regulate his
workers’ use of time, and he sought to instill a sense of punctuality by
enforcing an uninterrupted attendance on the job for a fixed duration of
the workday. In the name of discipline and efficiency, he countered the
trained worker’s (or journeyman’s) traditional sense of the relationship
between time and labor, and he robbed the journeyman of his most
powerful weapon and most cherished “right” against the employer in
the workplace and, indeed, the basis of his sense of honor as a counter-
point to discipline and subordination, the freedom of movement. In
exchange for the higher wages Wedgwood paid, his workers were trained
to a particular task, and had to stick to it for the entire workshift. Such a
system, by no means common in the workshops of Europe at this time,
or even a hundred years later, was profoundly at odds with traditional
work practices. Wedgwood may have been successful in his venture, but
for centuries before his experiment masters and journeymen, employers
and workers, had been at loggerheads over precisely these two funda-
mental issues. Who would control movement of labor (and thus the
labor market)? And how would the relationship between time and work
be defined?
In yet another pathbreaking article that so gracefully flowed from the
pen of E. P. Thompson, this unparalleled English historian of work
asked how a clock-based “time sense” that so clearly emerged during
the early modern age affected work in general and labor discipline in
particular. “And how far,” he continued, “did it influence the inward
apprehension of time of working people? If the transition to mature
industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits — new
disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these
incentives could bite effectively — how far is this related to changes in the
inward notion of time?’”? It is true that workers complained about wage
rates as far back as we have records of disputes in the workplace, but
rates were daily, not hourly, and were paid weekly or even biweekly. This
meant that wage disputes were often about the length of the work day,
or the density of work within that day. These disputes suggest that
employers and workers did not always share the same perceptions about
the relationship of time and work activity.
was
Thompson contended that the transition to industrial society
in the notation of time from “task-
characterized in part by a shift
s, laborers
orientation” to “timed labor.” In task oriented work regimen
l capitalism,” Past and Present 38
3 BE. P. Thompson, “Time, work discipline, and industria
(1967), 57.
“attend upon what is an observed necessity,’ and make no clear

demarcation between work activity and other social pursuits. The
working day “lengthens or contracts according to the task.” Thus,
typically in such work regimens, we find unstructured movement in and
out of the workplace, irregular working weeks, and bursts of activity
followed by lulls. In the “timed labor” work regimen, in contrast, such
work habits are deemed wasteful and inefficient. A Newtonian concep-
tion of time notation as abstract, absolute, and mathematical, “flowing
without relation to anything external,” was far from this cultural world
which embraced a plurality of time-reckoning modes, each rooted in
varying routines of experience. Ménétra once again poignantly demon-
strates this observation. In his journal he almost never mentions precise
clock-time, although he certainly was familiar with watches. For him, it
seems, owning a watch was a sign of prestige rather than of timekeeping
practicality. Judging from his journal, he cared not at all about mea-
suring time, other than in a rough sense of time on the job and time in
recreation. But even here he saw no sharp boundary and no set cycle,
time at work expanding and contracting as needed.
Thompson, then, poses the key historical question: how effectively
and universally was the sanctioned discourse on time imposed or
appropriated? His answer perhaps gives too much weight to the em-
ployers’ ability to impose the timed-labor regimen, and it inappropri-
ately assumes a too linear progression in the transformation of the
workplace from task-based time to clock-time (after all, not all em-
ployers were Josiah Wedgwoods, for task-oriented work routines per-
sisted in the widespread handicraft industry of the nineteenth century).
Still, despite the overly tidy picture that Thompson presents, one cannot
gainsay the accuracy of his observations that such a transformation over
the centuries was occurring, that it did have something to do with
employers disciplining workers, and that workers resisted such disci-
plinary measures.
Historians have long been aware that the crisis of the fourteenth
century had a profound impact on the world of work, not least in
creating conditions which led to confrontations between employers and
workers, between masters and journeymen. In the late medieval period
we find a rising tide of regulations that deal with time and work, and at
the same time we find workers resisting such laws. Jacques Le Goff has
pointed out that an important point of contention focused on the
measurement and use of the working day.? This was especially acute in
4 Tbid., p. 60.
> Jacques Le Goff, “Labor time in the ‘Crisis’ of the 14th century: from medieval time to
the textile trades where employers sought greater discipline over how
much and when their workers worked.
That the timed-labor regimen appeared first and most strikingly in
the textile sector probably has something to do with the regularization of
expanding demand and the pressure that demand exerted upon produc-
tion schedules. Whatever the reason, in Germany the Werkglocke or
“workclock” was introduced first in the textile workplace, and at regular
intervals it rang bells which demarcated periods of work and rest. Work
bells became common at construction sites, too. We hear of such a bell
in 1354 sounded at the Tower of London “to ring the hours for the
workmen,” and for similar purposes in 1365 at the cathedral in
Florence, in 1390 at the cathedral of Milan, and in 1396 at the Certosa
monastery in Pavia.°®
This new method that hourly marked the work day suggests a new
mentality where the work day was conceived as the sum of equal hours,
and as such it represented the imposition of an alien, timed-work
regimen that was associated with the discipline of labor. Not surpris-
ingly, the workclocks were often the targets of worker resistance. In the
late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries worker uprisings were
characterized by the destruction and silencing of the workclocks, an
indication that the struggle between master and journeyman was not so
much about wage levels as the control of labor time. Nor was the contest
over time and work activity just a German phenomenon. In France
masters and journeymen squared off over this matter as well. In Troyes
in 1358 masters in the textile trades complained that their workers had
decided collectively not to begin the work day until after morning mass,
while weavers in Rheims formed an entente against their employers over
the same thing, as did the fullers of Saint Denis in 1321.
The struggle between masters and workers (increasingly the trained
workers who came to be called journeymen) over control of the relation-
ship between time and labor extended beyond the Middle Ages into the
early modern centuries, and seems to have been experienced most
notably, once again, in the manufacturing sectors where regular, sub-
stantial, and increasing demand was exerted upon production practices
and schedules. Worker protests in the Low Countries, for instance,
the
erupted in shipbuilding and textiles, and focused on the length of
per se. The journeymen shipwrights of
work day rather than wages
a work stoppage to force a reduction of the
Amsterdam in 1625 called
in the Middle Ages (Chicago,
modern time,” in Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture
1980).
and Modern Temporal Orders,
6 Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks
trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago, 1996), p. 299.
work day from fourteen hours to twelve, and enforced their demand by
boycotting any masters’ shops that resisted it. Labor unrest was frequent
among Dutch journeymen clothshearers, too, as the strikes in Hoorn in
1639 and Leiden in 1643 attest. Though the municipal authorities
always supported the masters and saw the protests as “revolts plain and
simple,” closer scrutiny once again reveals that the disputes were quite
often about control of time in the workplace.’
Instances of worker resistance to authority, called cabales in France,
proliferated in the eighteenth century. They may never have led to
general uprisings, but their almost daily frequency upset the world of
work nonetheless. Their sporadic and ephemeral nature — often
spreading no further than to a couple of shops, the street, or the
neighborhood — provided no solace to the authorities who feared that a
general breakdown of order was imminent. Indeed, words about worker
indiscipline run like a red thread through the Dictionnaires de police,
judicial treatises, chronicles, memoirs, and of course, police ordinances
of the eighteenth century.
Whether the workers’ “strikes” against their employers were about
hiring practices, a daily wage (in French, /e prix de la journée), piecerates,
hours in the working day, or the freedom to come and go as they
pleased, workers’ resistance was in one way or another about working as
they understood it, and this meant working according to the rhythms of
life that structured their existence and framed its meaning. This under-
standing entailed an assumption about freedom of movement in and out
of shops, and worker discretion about the pace of work. When em-
ployers tried to restrict that movement (for example, by requiring “pass-
ports,” certificats de congé, or Kundschaften, or by demanding that their
workers stay in the shop and at work continuously during the work day),
the most normal form of resistance was simply to ignore the regulations
and dare the masters to do anything about it. In the face of widespread
behavior of this sort, masters, even with the support of the police, could
do little. In the face of such problems, masters might, alternatively,
attempt to alter the mode of payment, either by reducing the daily wage,
by attempting to pay workers in kind (in “truck”), or by altering the
payment of piecework by retaining the rates but enlarging the quantum,
thereby leaving in place the “customary” rate.
Directly or indirectly, these work practices were about a certain
relationship between labor and time. Workers understood the relation-
ship one way, masters quite often another. An extended working day
coupled with workers on the job more continuously than had tradition-
7 A. T. Van Deursen, Plain Lives in the Golden Age, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge,
1991), p. 10.
ally been the case, was an imperative more and more masters embraced
as demand exerted its pressures on production schedules in more and
more trades. For more and more masters, a morality of industriousness
began to attend this imperative about time, and the competing impera-
tive embraced by workers was disparaged as laziness and idleness. As
some masters in some sectors of manufacturing increasingly demanded
a closer correlation between work performed and units of time, workers
resisted by stopping work, their demands usually focusing on mainte-
nance of current wage rates or a reduction in the hours of the work day.
Examples of such resistance can be found throughout the early modern
period, but become almost constant and ubiquitous in the eighteenth
century.
In the sixteenth century in the printing industry, to maintain or
increase profits in an expanding and increasingly competitive market,
master printers tried to reduce wages and increase working hours. A
reduction in wages could be accomplished by changing the method of
payment to monetary wages entirely, rather than a mix of wage and
board at the master’s table. In an age of rising prices (especially for
foodstuffs) and “sticky” wages, masters obviously benefited from such
methods of payment. Compounding the disadvantageous position of the
workers, sometimes masters added extra unpaid apprentices, thereby
reducing the demand for trained workers. In most cities where printing
was an important industry — Lyons, Venice, Geneva, Paris — masters
employed these kinds of practices, and everywhere the laborers’ re-
sponse was the same: work stoppage.
An especially well-documented strike in the printing industry oc-
curred in Lyons in 1539 when the work stoppage was orchestrated by a
“company” of journeymen pressmen, typesetters, correctors, and proof-
readers called the Griffarins. In response to masters’ attempts to
eliminate the traditional payment arrangement of monetary wage plus
meals at the master’s table, the Griffarins co-ordinated an industry-wide
the
strike that lasted almost four months, and in the end they forced
masters and publishers to return to the traditional food and wage
arrangement for another thirty years. Some work stoppages were shop
based, but reveal no less than the industry-wide strikes the collective
appren-
organization of the Griffarins. If, for example, a master put an
complaints by the jour-
tice to work pulling a press against express
signal of “tric, tric” all the
neymen pressmen of the shop, at the
out. Until the master agreed to
journeymen of the shop would walk
the shop would be boycotted,
adhere to the demands of the Griffarins,
to work there would be
and any journeymen or apprentices who tried
beaten by the Griffarins if apprehended.
The Griffarins of Lyons were not the only journeymen who co-
ordinated strikes in the sixteenth century. At the end of the century the
journeymen bakers of Colmar struck, and strengthened their hand by
forging a prior alliance with their fellows in Strasbourg and Basel who
agreed not to come to Colmar seeking work. Journeymen bakers walked
off the job in Paris in 1579, while the journeymen tailors did the same
ten years later. In the next century we find journeymen blacksmiths and
hatters in Paris boycotting the masters who had lowered their wages.
Boisguillebert, the Lieutenant of Police in Rouen disapprovingly ob-
served that “One sees in commercial towns 700 to 800 workers of one
trade stop work simultaneously because [their employers] wish to lower
the daily wage by a sou.”8
Labor unrest tore at the textile industry as well. For three centuries
beginning in the 1300s we find widespread evidence of clashes between
workers and employers in this industry, especially in the Low Countries.
Fullers were the most active of the protesters, and if their demands were
not met, they would call an witgang where all the workers would simply
leave town. The twin objectives, of course, were to deprive masters of
workers and to escape the jurisdiction of the local government. In 1478,
for example, the fullers of Leiden collectively left town and went to the
city of Gouda when their thirty-four demands went unsatisfied. This
was certainly not the first witgang, for they referred to similar walkouts
“staged by our forefathers.” Nor was it to be the last, for we know that
the weavers of Amsterdam staged one in 1523.
Whatever the strike activity — issuing demands, stopping work, leaving
the city — solidarity was required. Sometimes this was forced upon
colleagues, and strikebreakers risked their health, reputation, and future
prospects of employment, for they were often roughed up, and then
blacklisted.
Fullers lost their prominence as strikers in the sixteenth century, but
the shearmen picked up where the fullers left off. In Venice in 1556 the
shearmen organized a strike, while in 1643 the shearers of Leiden staged
an uitgang. It seems, however, that mass exoduses of workers from
towns were losing their effectiveness in the seventeenth century. When
the shearers of Leiden left town, for example, the authorities immedi-
ately wrote to other nearby cities notifying them that their shearers
might be en route, and asking them to deny them entry. The Leiden
magistrates had good reason to expect compliance, for not only did they
promise other towns that they would do the same if the situation were
reversed, but growing specialization had meant that the cities were not
8 Quoted in Abet Poitrineau, Is travaillaient la France, Meétiers et mentalités du
XVIe au
XIXe siécle (Paris, 1992), p. 172.
as competitive with one another as they had been before. Uitgangs also
lost their effectiveness because after 1637 manufacturers of woolens in
different cities in Holland began to collaborate on an unprecedented
scale. The resulting employers’ organizations had a primary goal of
enforcing labor discipline and obedience.
Still, worker resistance did not disappear, for witgangs gave way to
strikes, and a wave of the latter in the mid-seventeenth century show
that the co-ordination of the workers’ activities no less than that of the
employers spanned cities. From 1636 to 1639, for example, strikes led
by shearers were staged in Haarlem, Hoorn, Gouda, and Rotterdam, the
strikers holding clandestine meetings to co-ordinate their actions and to
determine the means of enforcement. They determined that those who
disregarded the decisions of the group were declared “foul” and so were
deprived of their honor and expelled from the community of workers.
Not only were strikebreakers blacklisted, but no one would even drink
with a “foul” shearer. We find the same kind of coercion and, indeed,
the same dishonoring language invoked by workers in English, French,
and German towns and cities.
Leiden was the scene of frequent strikes during the turbulent seven-
teenth century. Work stoppages occurred there in 1619, 1637, 1644,
1648, 1700, and 1701. Leiden was Europe’s largest clothmaking center,
and it was a terrifying prospect indeed if many of its textile workers
stopped work, for they numbered 45,000 strong in 1670 when the total
population of Leiden was 70,000. Not surprisingly, like municipal
authorities everywhere, the regents of Leiden supported the master
manufacturers in their conflicts with labor which, again, turned on
issues of wages and the length and density of the working day. In 1700,
after a half-century of underemployment and real wage decreases, over
1,000 weavers assembled outside the city walls to discuss their wages
and then issue demands for higher ones. When their demands were not
met, strike funds were collected. The strike was called the next year; it
was eventually suppressed, and four strikers were hanged while another
six were flogged.
In the eighteenth century worker resistance to the masters’ impera-
tives of time and labor were more frequent yet. Strikes were called for a
variety of reasons — wages, length of working day, numbers of appren-
tices allowed, even technological innovations. The shearers of Leiden
protested between 1716 and 1718 against a new method of shearing
| which was easier than the traditional method. The shearers held that
this was a violation of “their ancient freedom,” and feared that the new
method diminished their skill by lowering the qualifications to do their
job, which in turn spelled a loss of status.
Even state-supported enterprises were not immune from work stop-

in
page. The French royal cloth manufactory established in 1665
Abbeville was a large, capital- intensiv e enterpri se that almost immedi-
ately experienced cash-flow problems. Servicing an enormous debt
lures
(more than a million livres) and paying 120,000 to 200,000
annually to its diverse workforc e (the manufac ture of the fine cloth
passed through fifty-two different processes) strapped the enterprise.
The employer’s usual recourse was to lay off workers who, predictably,
protested. The first such protest occurred in 1686, followed by a full-
scale strike in 1716 which was only suppressed when royal troops were
called in. The judicial officer who tried the rebels in court clearly
sympathized with the employers, castigating the workers as a “licen-
tious” lot “who do-not seem to realize that the manufactory is not there
for them, but that they are there for the manufactory.” The strike
militarily crushed, workers were expected to — and apparently did — fall
in line and adhere to the work regimen dictated by the employers, a
regimen which was described by a traveler who observed the manufac-
tory in 1728. The witness reported that he had never seen a manufac-
tory “better-ordered or more cleanly kept,’ and he was especially
impressed that the 3,500 men and 400 girls executed their tasks “to the
sound of the drum.”?
If the Abbeville textile workers succumbed to a discipline in the
workplace that resembled that of the Wedgwood potteries, elsewhere
their colleagues continued to resist. In Sedan in the 1730s and 1740s
the shearmen struck repeatedly against their masters over the masters’
attempt to intensify their work without additional pay. Specifically,
shearmen were ordered to carry pieces of cloth from the workshop to
the drying racks in addition to the normal work required of them. The
shearmen protested that they had never before had to do this — this had
never been part of their customary practices “since time immemorial” —
and they drove their point home by walking off the job on more than
one occasion. In 1759 in Verviers the shearmen struck, too, and part of
the dispute there concerned the calculus of time and labor that had
divided masters and workers in so many other places. Statutes had
nominally fixed wages for shearmen at 20 sous for a 12-hour and 40-
minute work day, but masters had undercut the wage by buying inflated
German coins at a discount and then forcing the shearmen to accept
them at face value.
Most of our examples thus far have been drawn from industries that
were more integrated than most, and so were more sensitive to the
° Quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York,
1986), p. 338.
pressure of demand schedules. During the eighteenth century and from

the stimulus of the “consumer revolution,” however, this pressure
spread to many more trades than ever before. Not surprisingly, the
number of strikes increased proportionally, and can be found in nearly
every trade. At times the number of striking workers was enormous, as
the 20,000 silk workers who shut down production in Lyons in 1779
attested. In France alone between the 1720s and 1780s we can count
work stoppages and boycotts in over sixty towns, and in Paris we know
of over fifty different incidents. Citing only a few of the most notable
and large Parisian strikes, we find scores, sometimes hundreds of
workers throwing down their tools and walking out of their shops, often
insulting the master and his wife as they left: stockingcap-makers in
1724, blacksmiths in 1731, locksmiths in 1746, cutlers in 1748, hatters
in 1764, bookbinders in 1776, and masons and stonecutters in 1785.
Similar circumstances occurred in England. On the docks of Deptford
yard between 1733 and 1737 the most common offense of the workers
there was “basseying,” that is, “escaping over the wall after first
answering the morning call.” The second most common offense was
“idling at the tap-house.”!° Taking all the trades together, however, the
most remarked upon practice of worker resistance to their employers
was what subsequent labor historians have called “industrial disputes,”
conflicts that mostly meant work stoppages. These erupted all over
Great Britain in most trades. One historian counts 373 disputes
between 1717 and 1800 (120 in London alone), the lead taken by
woolen workers (64 instances), followed by ship’s carpenters (37) and
tailors (22).!! Weavers were especially well represented in protests
against wage reductions. Weaver riots swept Somerset and Wiltshire in
1726 and 1727. Strikers from Wiltshire calling themselves “regulators”
descended upon some employers’ houses in the woolweaving town of
Frome in Somerset, and presented a list of demands about wages. If an
employer rejected the demands, “the windows paid for it,” as a local
commentator put it.!7
Workers struck over many issues — A of the relationship
between the length of the work day and the daily wage, depressed or
stagnant wages in the face of rising prices, denser working days, and
especially payment in truck whereby masters overvalued the goods and
so effectively depressed wages. The tailors of London complained about
10 John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century English Industry (New York,
1981), p. 135.
11 Tbid., pp. 148-9.
M.
12 Robert W. Malcolmson, “Workers’ combinations in 18th-century England,” in
Jacob and J. Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London, 1984)
p. 152.
the impact of the statute of 1721 which fixed their hours of work and
divided the working day into two, unequal parts. The afternoon session
was an hour longer than that of the morning, and since the masters
could pay equal wages for each shift, it was obviously in their interest to
let their journeymen “play in the morning” and call them to work in the
afternoon, thereby picking up a free hour’s work and avoiding the
required penny and a half breakfast allowance in the bargain.
Complaints about payment in truck had been heard for centuries. In
the 1500s journeymen furniture-makers of Strasbourg protested collec-
tively against their masters who tried to convert payment from cash to
truck, a complaint indistinguishable from the one lodged in 1726 by the
weavers of Somerset who were grieved by “their masters . . . paying
their wages in goods, and setting extravagant prices on such goods.” The
Devonshire weavers in 1743 were “up in arms . . . on account of their
masters forcing them to take corn, bread, bacon, cheese, butter and
other necessaries of life, in truck, as it is called, for their labour.”!? And
cutlers in Sheffield rioted in 1756 against masters trying to force them to
take half their wages in truck.
Job placement
Obviously, collective work stoppage, even if unsuccessful, requires
organization and co-ordination, and incidents of strike activity that
pepper the historical record since the high Middle Ages tell us that
workers had been organizing against employers — mostly in industries
like textiles where expanding and increasingly integrated demand was
affecting production schedules — long before the age of industrialization.
Timed-work regimens, wages, piecerates, length or density of the
working day, forms of payment (in truck, debased coinage, etc.) — any of
these issues could be and were cause for worker grievance against what
we today called unfair labor practices, and on countless occasions ended
in work stoppage. However ephemeral and unsuccessful most of these
“strikes” were, they do tell us that workers were not infrequently at odds
with their employers.
Journeymen artisans joined in these collective actions, but jour-
neymen flexed their muscles in the contest with masters in another
arena besides work stoppage; they were also interested in controlling job
placement. Journeymen and masters realized that control over condi-
tions, hours, or wages derived from access to and control of the labor
market, and in northern, western, and central Europe they openly
13 Quoted in Rule, p. 138.

struggled with one another over control of this all-important market.

Journeymen recognized that mobility was their greatest weapon in this
contest, and consequently everywhere they struggled to defend their
freedom of movement. They well knew, as did their masters, that
unimpeded mobility between shops and from town to town allowed
them to dictate in some measure the conditions of labor demand.
Masters, for their part, saw such demands as rank disobedience, typi-
cally conflating economic issues with the social and political, and
masters invariably responded to journeymen demands with counter-
demands for discipline and an unquestioned respect for hierarchy.
Given the importance of mobility to the labor market objectives of
journeymen, it is no surprise that journeymen associations cropped up
first in cities in the late Middle Ages where urban production required a
flexible supply of trained workers. Thus weavers and fullers were among
the first trades to organize, but we also find evidence of associations of
journeymen coopers, for instance, in 1321 in Rostock, Liibeck,
Hamburg, Wismar, and Straslund. As well-trained workers became
more mobile after the demographic crisis of the mid-fourteenth century,
brotherhoods of journeymen, called Gesellenvereine, mushroomed, so
that by 1400 shoemakers, tailors, furriers, bakers, and smiths each had
their own organizations in the towns along the upper Rhine.
Journeymen brotherhoods seemed to have emerged as religious con-
fraternities that were isolated cells, not connected to confraternities in
other cities. With the mobility of journeymen in the late Middle Ages,
however, some of these pockets were increasingly being stitched together
between towns, the confraternities thus probably serving historically as
the core of what came to be called in France compagnonnages, or
journeymen brotherhoods directly interested in labor market issues.
Journeymen confraternities and compagnonnages overlap, and are diffi-
cult to distinguish historically, for their interests and rituals were almost
indistinguishable from the fifteenth century on. Ostensibly, journeymen
confraternities were organizations for devotion and charity, and they do
seem to have performed these functions; but they also were the institu-
tional cells of what the French authorities called cabales, and thus the
seat of sedition and the site of a perceived libertinage and insubordina-
tion. These organizations, whatever their origins and historical conver-
gences, were forged in the crucible of corporatism, and it is not
accidental that the emergence of urban corporatism was accompanied
by the rise of journeymen brotherhoods, nor that they almost always
emerged in trades with corporate statutes.
Despite their confraternal function which, ostensibly, merely declared
these brotherhoods to be pious, mutual aid societies, in the eyes of the
masters and civil (and ecclesiastical) authorities they were deeply trou-
bling for the disobedience they implied, which, in baldly economic
terms, was evidenced in the covert challenge to labor market control
that they portended. Whenever we find evidence of journeymen associ-
ations acting to influence job placement, we find masters responding
vociferously. Already in 1352 we find master bakers from eight towns
along the middle of the Rhine trying to join forces to combat the
journeymen over precisely this issue. These masters ultimately could not
agree among themselves (divisive competition among masters being a
problem that would dog them everywhere for centuries), but they clearly
mtended to co-ordinate their hiring practices in an effort to deny their
workers the power to dictate to them what these would be. In the 1380s
master tailors from twenty-eight towns along the upper Rhine tried to
do the same thing that the downstream bakers had tried a generation
earlier, and they agreed in principle not to hire any journeyman who had
left his previous employer without permission. These masters even
formed a Handwerkerbunde, but it was largely ineffective for the same
reason that it had been for the mid-Rhine bakers — because of discord
among the masters themselves. When trained labor was in demand,
masters competed among themselves for the best workers, and masters
with larger enterprises and more access to capital often were in a
position to bid away journeymen from the smaller masters by offering
higher wages or better or more plentiful board. The masters’ collective
front against worker control of the labor market was undermined by the
masters who might accept journeymen controlling placement in ex-
change for concentrated or expanded production.
Journeymen brotherhoods were not just a German phenomenon in
the late Middle Ages, for we find these organizations popping up in the
fourteenth century and proliferating in the fifteenth in the Low Coun-
tries, England, and France. In 1350 we find London shearmen walking
off the job and none agreeing to return until the grievance in question
with a master was settled, clearly evidence of an association among these
workers that was solidary and had some teeth. In 1362 some London
weavers did the same thing. We do not know the specifics of their
grievances, but this is clearly evidence of collective worker action, and
sounds like the tactics of nascent journeymen brotherhoods elsewhere.
In 1396 the master saddlers of London complained to the mayor that
since 1383 their “serving men called yomen” not only had been holding
meetings, but had taken to donning a common livery and had even
named an officer (a “bedel”) to call their meetings and to organize their
activities. By 1415 yeomen tailors apparently had such an organization,
too. And at about the same time in York shoemaker “serving men” had
set up, as the municipal authorities said, “a contentious conventicle. .

[which] publically, proudly and boastfully den [ied] the authority of their
masters . . . [and were] gretly disposed to riot and idelness.”"4
It is difficult to say given the scarce evidence whether journeymen (or
yeomen, “young men” as they were called in England) were squaring off
against masters over control of the labor market in the fourteenth
century, but the compromise many masters and journeymen worked out
in the fifteenth suggests that this was an important issue by then. In
many English cities journeymen agreed to affiliate their organizations
with the guilds, the yeomanry taking an inferior position to the
liverymen in the guild. Acceptance of hierarchy, however, was ex-
the
changed for certain privileges, the extent of which depended upon
strength of the yeomen’s organization. For instance, in 1434 the black-
smith journeymen of London and in 1458 their colleagues in tailoring
were granted control over labor placement, empowered by their guilds
was
to “search for forrens,” that is, to determine that no outsider
also
working in a shop without their approval.'” The master blacksmiths
to masters in
allowed a journeyman to meet and then escort new arrivals
Hull, and
need of laborers, a privilege that their colleagues in York,
Exeter also extracted from their masters.
nce in the
In France we find parallel developments, with the appeara
activity against
fourteenth-century workplace of concerted worker
hoods in the fif-
masters, and a proliferation of journeymen brother
edness between
teenth. Depending on the trade, the degree of connect
t towns varied
the organizations (usually called confrairies) in differen
centurie s there is no
widely, but as we move through the early modern
ly organiz ed in-
question that tighter networks of more bureaucratical
, were common
stitutions developed. Worker migrations, often seasonal
and mobile workers
in the fourteenth century in France as elsewhere,
s in the workplace
increasingly organized to advance their interest
we see control over the
against those of the employers. Fundamentally,
ymen and master alike.
labor market as the prime objective for journe
journe ymen had orga-
For instance, by the mid-fifteenth century fuller
towns, includi ng Paris,
nized into a “league” that embraced forty-two
was to regulate labor
and the primary objective of the journeymen
The journe ymen dyers of
supply and control employment placement.
of an interna tional league
Bruges in 1453 similarly had led the creation
A journeyman traveled from
that boasted members in forty-two towns.
Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval

14 Quoted in Heather Swanson,
England (Oxford, 1989), p. 56.
Centuries Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade
15 R. A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six
one town to the next supported by these networks and, depending upon
the demand for labor in any particular locale, was either placed in a
master’s shop by the resident journeymen or sent on to another town in
the network. In this way demand was manipulated to exceed supply, but
such a system was dependent upon the free mobility of the journeymen.
This network of fullers resembles what will come to be called the tour de
France, a route that itinerant journeymen traveled to learn their trades,
but also, through mobility, to ensure access to, and control over the
labor market by regulating its supply.
These organizations of worker solidarity, in France called confrairies
and eventually compagnonnages, were not, as we will see in the next
chapter, exclusively economic institutions, but they did serve throughout
the early modern period nearly everywhere in Europe except Spain and
Italy to help workers control the labor market and, indirectly, the condi-
tions of work and the wages paid. One possible reason for the absence of
journeymen tramping in Spain, and thus of compagnonnages, is the severe
economic disunity of the peninsula in the late Middle Ages and the early
modern period. Iberia consisted of a multitude of small commercial
regions with small towns with little contact with each other. Moreover,
traveling from town to town, particularly on foot as a journeyman would,
was extremely difficult. Distances between towns were great, the terrain
was often rugged and dry, and in few places could a journeyman go more
than 50 miles without having to climb a mountain.
If we find no compagnonnages in Spain or apparently Italy, we do find
them in England, Germany, and especially France. Worker solidarity
across trades would have to wait for the eighteenth century, and we
cannot speak yet of a confrontation between “labor” and “capital,” nor
of conflict between “classes” of master and journeyman. The relations
between masters and journeymen, permeated as they were with patern-
alism, were too ambivalent for that. Antagonism over job placement
could be muted and the solidarity in the ranks of the journeymen
divided, for example, by traditions of fidelité personelle, particularly
if a
journeyman felt his prospects for admission to mastership were reason-
ably bright. Similarly, competition between masters for labor
often
drove a wedge through the ranks of the masters. On the other
hand,
negligible or declining prospects for admission to mastership
(a situa-
tion, as we have seen, that attended the demographic changes
in Europe
after 1450) prompted other journeymen to struggle for control
of the
labor market, a control that could at least improve their
conditions as
lifelong workers. Unmistakably, however, amid all of this variety,
in an
increasing number of trades more and more journeymen
were squaring
off against their masters.
There is ample evidence in England, Germany, the Low Countries,

and France that these independent journeymen associations existed and
became more formally organized in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, complete with treasuries and officers, and with pretentions to
control the labor market. The Reichspolizeiordnung of 1530 prohibited
journeymen in the Holy Roman empire from administering justice to
their fellow workers and from collectively abandoning their masters’
workshops, while an English law of 1549 and the French edict of Villers-
Cotterets of 1539 sounded the same note. The English law declared
illegal all “confederacies and conspiracies of working people to deter-
mine wages or amount of work to be done,” a law that would stay on the
books until its repeal, along with the famous Combination Acts of 1799
and 1800, in 1826.!° Villers-Cotterets, similarly, specifically prohibited
“any alliance or intélligence between journeymen, any assembly on their
part for whatever cause, in short, any coalition directed against the
masters,” stipulations that were repeated in subsequent royal legislation
in 1560, 1566, and 1579.!”
The basic characteristics of the brotherhoods (compagnonnages in
France, Gesellenverbaénden in Germany) were much the same throughout
Europe. Their roots, as we have seen, were in the migrations of artisans
that accelerated after the Black Death, and in many cities and towns it
was becoming difficult for journeymen to become masters. The impor-
tant factor of the conditions for journeyman mobility was, of course,
demand for trained labor, and by the sixteenth century it had become
customary that they would seek favorable situations, moving on if work
was unavailable and being drawn to areas where trained workers were in
short supply. It was within this force field of supply and demand that
journeymen organized to manipulate the conditions.
In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the institutional trappings
of brotherhoods became more clearly defined. The Parisian journeymen
tailors, for example, elected a “king” of their company in 1505, while in
Burgundy at about the same time we find journeymen cutlers, saddlers,
and shoemakers organized and levying dues on newcomers (called a
bienvenue) in exchange for placing them in jobs. The cutlers were doing
this in Dijon as early as 1464. In 1540 we find a newcomer arriving in
town and being met by a resident fellow journeyman and escorted to the
house of the mére, an inn or tavern. Here he was temporarily lodged
while it was determined whether employment were available for him.
This journeyman was placed with a master, but on other occasions
16 Quoted in ibid., p. 27. ae

17 Quoted in James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550-1650
(Ithaca, 1988), p. 68.
where work was not available, journeymen were instructed to passer

outre, that is, to go on to another town where employment prospects
might be brighter. Eventually there emerged a network of these mére
lodges and labor clearinghouses throughout the realm.
By 1579 such a network was probably established among the cabinet-
makers, and among the locksmiths, tailors, and shoemakers before
1600. The evidence comes from Dijon and Troyes, but given the nature
and function of the these organizations they must havé extended beyond
these towns in a network that extended well beyond Burgundy. In 1469
we find reference already to a tour de France among some journeymen,
and Dijon was an important stop on this journey of no prescribed route.
By the early seventeenth century a shoemaker reported that he had
journeyed south from Dijon to Chalon, Tournus, Macon, Lyons, and
Vienne, while a glover said that he had worked in Paris, Lyons, Avignon,
Marseilles, and other towns including Dijon. One remarkably itinerant
cabinet-maker had stopped in Lyons, Provins, Grenoble, and had even
wandered down into Italy before eventually arriving at Dijon.
In 1579 Dijon’s syndic (the chief police officer) reported to the city’s
magistrates that the journeymen cabinet-makers had drawn up “laws
and statutes” for themselves and had elected a captain, a lieutenant, a
receiver, and a sergeant as their officers. The magistrates were so
alarmed that they called a special meeting of the town council to
proceed against these rebellious workers. They summarily banished the
captain, Jean Champignon of Rennes, as well as “Little John,” the
brother in charge of the treasury, and they confiscated a rollbook as well
as the contents of the brotherhood’s treasury held in a strongbox (which
contained 105 sous). No doubt suspecting journeymen of other trades of
similar clandestine organizing, the council then prohibited all jour-
neymen of whatever trade from assembling, electing officers, collecting
dues, or making among themselves “any deliberations or resolutions” to
establish prices for their products, to set wages, “or to prevent jour-
neymen of their trade from seeking and finding masters [to work for]
that seemed good to them.”!8
Prohibitions like these, be they municipal or royal, were futile, for
journeymen brotherhoods not only survived, but thrived. In 1585 again
in Dijon the authorities arrested ten journeymen cabinet-makers who
had gathered to watch a newcomer display his competence in the craft, a
ritual typical of compagnonnage. In 1605 the town council again prohib-
ited assemblies of more than three journeymen and forbade journeymen
to draw up articles of governance of their organizations and rolles of their
18 Quoted in Farr, pp. 68-9.

members. They were not to prevent newcomers from seeking work in

whatever shop they wished, nor were they to take newcomers to taverns
or inns upon their arrival. In 1619 these prohibitions were repeated in
response to continual violations.
Shoemaker journeymen had a compagnonnage nearly as early as the
cabinet-makers, as did, apparently, the locksmiths. In 1581 Dijon’s
municipal authorities prohibited all journeymen shoemakers, lock-
smiths, and cabinet-makers from assembling in groups greater than
three, and the following year, in response to a complaint by the master
shoemakers and cobblers, they prohibited the journeymen of those
trades from naming provosts, captains, or chiefs of their “companies” or
collecting dues from their fellows. Sometime in the next forty years the
shoemaker and cabinet-maker brotherhoods became worker placement
services, for in 1621 the masters of both crafts appended to their guild
statutes a clause making it illegal for journeymen to practice embauchage
(labor placement), to convene assemblies, and to collect dues from
newcomers (the locksmith journeymen were prohibited from doing
precisely this as well in 1635). According to these masters, the jour-
neymen and their organization were the principal causes of the “dis-
order” that reigned in their trade.
Among the journeymen tailors there was apparently a national
network by 1588. In that year, Jean Philippe, innkeeper of the Fatted
Capon in Dijon, was arrested after an alderman had raided the place
and discovered eight journeymen tailors in a room upstairs, some
playing cards, some making stockings, others just lying about. Interroga-
tion of Philippe and the journeymen revealed that the journeymen
tailors throughout the realm knew that the Fatted Capon was their
house of call in Dijon, and Philippe their mére. They reported that they
knew that they could stay there temporarily until they were placed with
a master. Failing that, they would move on. Philippe was ordered to
provide this service no more, but to no avail, for in 1599 the master
tailors complained to the magistrates that Philippe was still at it, and
was “accustomed to receive and retain in his house the journeymen
[tailors] . . . Indeed, at present he has six there . . . which is the reason
that they [the masters] are badly served.”!9 The authorities again
ordered Philippe to evict his guests and henceforth to lodge journeymen
for no more than one night. We hear no more of Philippe, but in 1603
the master tailors amended their statutes to require newly arrived
and
journeymen to present themselves directly to the masters for work,
them first. A fruitless law,
specifically forbade innkeepers from receiving

it seems, for in 1612 these same masters lodged a grievance with the
town council that precisely this clause in their statutes was being
egregiously violated by their journeymen.
As the compagnonnages developed their distinctively institutional trap-
pings, especially concerning control of the labor market for trained
workers, masters were slow to react. Eventually, after royal and muni-
cipal measures had clearly proved insufficient in crushing the worker
organizations or even stemming the tide of their growth, masters began
to institute labor placement programs of their own. In 1624 the cabinet-
makers of Dijon created the office of hiring clerk (clerc embaucheur), and
the master shoemakers followed suit in 1633. This guild officer’s job was
to receive incoming journeymen and to place them in shops in need of
trained labor. In 1626 the master cabinet-makers complained to the
authorities that the journeymen still controlled the placement of in-
coming workers, and were united among themselves which allowed
them to stage collective walkouts from the shops. Indeed, they alleged
that the unity was coerced, that membership in the brotherhood was
mandatory, the journeymen in question “constrain[ing] all who were
inscribed on their rooles [sic] to follow them.”2° These workers, the
masters alleged, enforced their control of master and worker alike by
forming “troops” of twenty to thirty journeymen who roamed the city
and threatened a beating for any master or worker who dared challenge
their control. Workers not inscribed on their rolls but trying to work in
town anyway risked being “expelled from the town by cudgel blows,” as
one journeyman rather boldly admitted to the authorities in 1626.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all across France
labor exchanges and placement offices often engendered conflict
between guild officials and ordinary masters, and disputes over corrup-
tion and favoritism in the placing of journeymen in shops were frequent.
But without a doubt, most of the conflict engendered by this struggle for
control of the labor market saw journeymen squaring off against
masters, and journeymen coming to blows with one another as they
tried to maintain “closed shops.”
The issue of placement was perhaps the most divisive fact that a guild
could face. As Kaplan has shown, among the bakers of eighteenth-
century Paris, it “shook the community” more than any other.?!
Journeymen usually despised and resented the masters’ placement clerk,
sometimes to the point of murderous rage. In 1742, for instance, the
master bakers’ placement clerk Estienne Berton was spied in a tavern by
2° Quoted in Cynthia Maria Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods

of Compagnonnage in
Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, 1994), p. 64.
21 Kaplan, p. 225.
Masters and journeymen ¢ 211
a group of journeymen who, their propensity to violence perhaps

lubricated by drink, set upon him and beat him senseless with their
canes. Berton died the next day of a fractured skull.
For journeymen labor placement exchanges to work in the worker’s
favor, defection from the ranks had to be either prevented or punished.
The same went for workers respecting prevailing wage rates. Violence
among journeymen over renegades working “under price” can readily
be located in the historical record. A local commentator reported in
1733, for example, that the journeymen weavers in Bristol
being irritated against one of their fraternity for working under price . . . rose in
a great body, and seiz’d the delinquent, who underwent the marks of their
revenge in the usual manner of ducking in the river, and a hearty drubbing, by
which usage he had the misfortune to have one of his eyes beat out.?”
In 1679 in a smithery in Bedfordshire the blacksmith Nicholas Browne
testified in court that a certain journeyman named Thomas Crawley was
accused by fellow journeyman John Winch thus: “Hee’s the rogue that
workes for eight pence a day when others have 12d. a day.” When
Crawley countered that Winch was lying, Winch, who at that moment
was “lighting a pipe of tabacco [sic] with an iron rod being red hott, did
run the same into the eye of the said Thomas Crawley, and told him that
[that] . . . would teach him.. .”??
Effective control of the labor market from the perspective of jour-
neymen demanded such “closed shop” techniques and methods of
enforcement, supported by institutional trappings like rolls and treasu-
ries, fixed meeting places for assemblies, and strong leadership (refer-
ence to premiers, chiefs, captains, and the like are common). Equally
clearly, the masters’ complaints about the indiscipline, rebelliousness,
and violence of their journeymen, and the institutional changes the
masters made were attempts to counter this function of the journeymen
brotherhoods and to wrest control of the labor market from them.
Infighting and competition for good workers often divided the ranks of
the masters and blunted the effectiveness of this master counter-
offensive, and in some trades the two institutions co-existed, if uneasily,
whereby a journeyman would arrive in town and proceed to the house of
call and then either be sent on his way or sent to the hiring clerk for
placement. In any case, the compagnonnage was a fixture.
Master reaction to journeymen organization appears to have been
more effective in Germany than in France. Despite the similar institu-
tional trappings of journeymen organizations to those of their counter-
parts in France, they do not seem to have exerted the same degree of
22 Quoted in Malcolmson, p. 125.
22. Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914
power over the labor market, at least not before the eighteenth century.
The tramping system, or Wanderjahr, was made obligatory in some
trades as early as the sixteenth century, legislated sometimes by guild
statute, sometimes by state regulations. Clearinghouses and waystations
called Herbergen or Trinkstuben popped up everywhere in Germany in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but here these inns were some-
times owned by the guild and were operated by one of its masters. This
officer was variously called the Herbergsvater, revealing the paternalistic
assumptions of these institutions, or, as in Augsburg among the joiners
and shoemakers around 1600, the Zuschickmeister. Whatever the name,
when an itinerant- journeyman arrived in town he proceeded to the
Herberge where he was temporarily lodged, sometimes at the expense of
the guild. Journeymen Trinkstuben that remained independent of
masters employed the Auszug, the German equivalent of the French
passer outre, to attempt to regulate the labor supply. In that event the
journeyman was sent on his way, perhaps with a bit of money drawn
from the journeymen’s treasury. Journeymen who remained in town did
so when their labor was in demand. Masters who needed trained
laborers came to the Herberge or Trinkstube to interview prospective
workers. In places where the masters owned the house of call or the
placement officer was a guildsman, both master and journeyman had
the right of refusal of the terms of any contract, but if the journeyman
refused to accept the conditions of the work offered, he had to wait a
week to be reassigned, and in any case he could only refuse three times,
then being assigned anyway.
In the eighteenth century in Germany as elsewhere, the pace of
change in the conditions of labor accelerated, and the journeymen
adjusted their tactics. Tramping and geographic mobility continued to
serve as a pressure tactic, as did strikes and boycotts aimed at particular
workshops. But the population was growing, and accelerating product
demand and increasing capital concentration led to larger workshops.
Organized journeymen, sometimes joined by small masters, began to
target specific, large employers for work stoppages or labor shortages,
figuring that alteration of working conditions here would have a ripple
effect through the industry. Linked together in networks of brother-
hoods organized along craft lines, now called Bruderschaften, jour-
neymen flexed the muscles that came with increased organization and
collective action, calling strikes and labor boycotts against masters they
deemed to be unfair. In Leipzig in 1763, for example, 200 journeymen
tailors packed up and left town, while their colleagues in Danzig
boycotted the city from 1751 to 1798. The Danzig interdiction was
unusual for its duration — most boycotts were much shorter — but such
boycotts were no more unusual than strikes within towns. In Nuremberg

alone between 1786 and 1806 ninety-seven different strikes were called
by journeymen.
The authorities continued to rail against such “insubordination” as
they had done since the sixteenth century. As we have seen, the imperial
edict of 1731 prohibited assemblies of journeymen while it also at-
tempted to control their mobility — recognized to be their most potent
weapon in the battle over the labor market — by the Kundschaft.
Employers also were called upon to report whether the journeyman had
“conducted himself in a diligent, quiet, peaceful and honest manner as
befitting a journeyman in the crafts and trades ... ”*4 Journeymen
countered the Kundschaft with a document of their own, the Gesel-
lenschein, that verified the journeyman’s adherence to the solidarity of
the brotherhood. This document spread across the Holy Roman empire
in the eighteenth century.
In England, journeymen brotherhoods developed many of the same
institutions found elsewhere, and these appear in full flower in the
eighteenth century. Hatters had a national network of “turn houses,” a
“turn” being the English equivalent of the French tour, while felt-
makers, weavers, brushmakers, curriers, millrights, and, for centuries,
masons, to mention only a few of many trades, likewise had stitched
together similar networks of inns where tramping and “rambling”
brothers would stay. An age and nation of a supposed J/aissez-faire
economy, the eighteenth century in England was actually a time when
many laws were enacted to control labor, especially journeymen, and
this legislation sometimes directly attacked these “lawless clubs.” The
royal proclamation against journeymen’s clubs in 1718, the Act of
Parliament of 1721 against journeymen tailors, and the Act of 1726
proscribing workingmen’s “unlawful clubs and societies” are but three
examples of no fewer than forty laws directed specifically at the regula-
tion of workers that were on the books by the end of the century.”
From the perspective of the masters and the authorities, the most
alarming institution was the house of call, a labor exchange controlled
by journeymen that can be found in many trades in eighteenth-century
England. The Hole in the Wall on Fleet Street in London, the house of
call of the printer compositors, is a colorful example of a common and
widespread institution.
The Parliamentary Act against the journeymen tailors in 1721 capped
artisans in
24 Quoted in Josef Ehmer, “Worlds of mobility: migration patterns of Viennese
the European Town,
the eighteenth century,” in Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The Artisan and
1500—1900 (Aldershot, 1997), p. 193.
25 Leeson, p. 86.
a dispute between London’s masters and journeymen that had flared

since the turn of the century. Journeymen tailors had long had their own
houses of call which, as in France and Germany, served as clearing-
houses for workers. Masters had accommodated themselves to the
institutions, but around 1700 the five houses of call of the journeymen
tailors of London confederated themselves and aggressively restricted
the labor supply. In 1720 they also demanded a reduction of hours and a
pay hike, and when the masters responded by organizing their own
houses of call and demanded that the journeymen use them, the
journeymen called a general strike. The parliamentary Act sought to
quash the journeyman confederation, but it persisted, largely because of
a lack of a united front among the employers (several of whom were
eager to use the labor unrest as a weapon to destroy their competitors).
By 1760 the journeymen tailors had gone from five to forty-two affiliated
clubs in London, and during the general strike of 1764 they had the
clout to send 6,000 journeymen tailors out of town, thereby choking the
labor supply. Sir John Fielding cogently if tendentiously wrote just four
years previous that
the master taylors . . . have repeatedly endeavored to break and suppress the
combinations of their journeymen to raise their wages and lessen their hours of
work, but have ever been defeated . . . and this has been in some measure due to
the infidelity of the masters themselves to each other; some of whom, taking
advantage of the confusion, have collected together some of the journeymen,
whose exorbitant demands they have complied with, while many other masters
have had a total stop put to their business.2°
The truth was that successful masters had to accommodate these
“unions,” and many did. In 1811 the radical draper Francis Place
observed that “in large concerns, it is very common for the master to
send to a house [of call] for a ‘squad’ of 10 men and a captain, and to
another for 6 men and a captain, and so on. . . ”27
Outside of London, though the evidence is more spotty, similar
conditions prevailed among the tailors as well as many other trades. In
1777 the master tailors of Birmingham tried to replace day rates by
piecework, and were met with a strike by their journeymen, and the
house of call was the focus of the conflict. The masters’ opening salvo
had been a general call to all journeymen that they would only be hired
if they came directly to the masters’ shops for work, bypassing the house
of call: “none will be employed but such as call at the masters’ houses,
7° Quoted in Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, “‘An irresistible phalanx’: journeymen
associations in Western Europe, 1300-1800,” in Catharina Lis, Jan Lucassen, and
Hugo Soly, eds., Before the Unions: Wage Earners and Collective Action
in Europe,
1300-1850, International Review of Social Fiistory 39 (1994, Supplement 2),
45.
27 Quoted in Lis and Soly, 46.
Masters and journeymen
215
and are free from all combinations.”28 The journeymen responded that
the house of call was an ancient and customary institution that existed in
all the major towns of the realm, and they called a general strike to
protect it, and its role in job placement. There is evidence that among
these tailors, as well as among tinplaters and woolcombers in other labor
disputes that, to control the labor supply in their turn, journeymen were
sent on their way.
Owing to the work of Cynthia Truant, Steven L. Kaplan, Michael
Sonenscher, and of course the inimitable, memoir-keeping journeyman
Jacques-Louis Ménétra, we know more about journeymen brotherhoods
in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France than at any other
time and in any other country. Though injunctions against these
“fraternities” date back centuries, during the eighteenth century we find
more of them than ever before, populating dozens of trades. Not
surprisingly, we also find the authorities more explicitly concerned
about the behavior of their members, both in their disruption of the
economy — specifically the labor market — as well as a more cosmic fear
of insubordination and thereby the dissolution of the social order. Their
fears, though shrill, were not far fetched nor wildly exaggerated, for not
only were compagnonnages growing in membership, but they had also
split into sects that spanned corporate boundaries, with the gaveaux
(sometimes spelled gavots) and the devoir (or devoirants) being the
largest and best known.
Geographic mobility — tramping — stiffened by the starch of brother-
hood organization continued to be the journeymen’s most potent
weapon, but they were all the more effective with a noticeable increase
in the degree of the almost bureaucratic organization that these brother-
hoods adopted to control their own ranks and to co-ordinate collective
action against the masters. Ménétra writes often about the job-securing
function of these brotherhoods, and refers to networks through which
correspondence flowed and job offers were transmitted, creating the
itineraries of the tour de France. Organized and thus prepared to parry
the innumerable prohibitions pronounced by masters and secular
authorities alike against their brotherhoods, journeymen, as Kaplan
points out, “resisted and contested on countless occasions.” He adds
that Le Cler du Brillet, a theorist who opined about the policing of
society, wrote aphoristically that where there were workers, there was an
“esprit de cabale.”?? Indeed, the fear of worker conspiracies became an
obsession of many masters and of the police, and with good reason, for
28 Quoted in Rule, p. 156.

29 Steven L. Kaplan, “The luxury guilds in Paris in the eighteenth century,” Francia 9
(1981), 293.
the evidence suggests that cabales proliferated during the eighteenth

century, “seriously upsetting public order and troubling the world of
work almost every day.”2° Cabale is the general term employed for
workers disobeying their masters and resisting discipline, and it took the
form of strikes and walkouts, but cabales of journeymen took different
shapes. There was the cabale-bravade, of which the objective was defense
of respect and status (we will return to this in the next chapter). Then
there was the cabale pour l’emploi, whereby journeymen defended their
employment by opposing dismissals of their fellows. There was also the
cabale pour les salaires which was about wages and piecerates. But above
all there was the cabale-placement, which focused on control of the labor
market.
Legislation restricting journeymen mobility — by imposing the congé
and livret system discussed in chapter 3 — theoretically placed control of
job placement in the hands of guilds and their officers. Given the
number of journeyman strikes or just simple refusal to abide by the
restrictions that pepper the eighteenth century, such legislation could
only have been partly successful. In 1699 the officers of the hatmaker
guild in Paris complained of a plot by their journeymen who had
conspired to force the masters to accept certain workers. If any master
refused to accept these men, then the rest of the journeymen would
“damn,” or boycott, the violating master. In the middle of the eighteenth
century Ménétra’s companions, the journeymen glaziers, boycotted
Nantes, a collective action that brought the masters of the town to their
knees, and to the negotiating table. In a drawn out conflict over hiring
practices in Bordeaux in the late 1750s, journeymen of many trades
engaged in collective action, the co-ordination of which Ménétra boast-
fully claims to have accomplished himself. Other examples of worker
resistance abound. In 1739 a journeyman guilder newly arrived in Paris
had refused to report for work at the shop to which the masters’
placement office had assigned him, his crime compounded by his
inciting of several of his fellows to follow his lead. In 1756 the officers of
the bakers’ guild in Paris complained to the authorities that their
journeymen were harassing the jurés and some masters over unfair hiring
practices, while other journeymen were operating a job exchange “to
place their comrades.” Attacks on masters and even guild placement
officers had been occurring for decades. These acts of disobedience
were bad enough, but the job exchange was more than the masters
could bear because it revealed collective, planned action on the part of
the journeymen. In 1786 500 or so journeymen épiciers simply refused to
30 Kaplan, Le Meilleur Pain, p. 226.

Masters and journeymen
2
abide by the obligatory registration and labor placement system
that the
guild officers tried to implement. Clandestine meetings, threaten
ed
reprisals against journeymen who refused to honor a boycott, and
renegade masters employing unregistered journeymen undercut
the
effectiveness of the legislation.
Black-market hiring by masters was far from infrequent, and evidence
for it can be found in many trades, the bakers being one example among
many. Some master bakers hired black-market labor for various reasons
— it was quicker and simpler, and it permitted the master to recruit a
specific man who may have had skills the master particularly needed, or
because he mistrusted the guild officer who might favor his competitors.
Ménétra recounts an incident after he had become a master about how a
guild officer unjustly fined him for employing an unregistered jour-
neyman (Menétra alleged that the placement officer had just sent the
man to him), but the real reason for the fine, according to Ménétra, was
the enmity that the officer held for Ménétra because Jacques-Louis had
“done a job that [the officer] could not do.” Ménétra alludes to some
support he had from some other masters in this affair, suggesting the
rifts that could split the ranks of masters. Indeed, the role of renegade
masters in these examples of labor disputes should caution us from too
quickly assuming that the battle lines were drawn clearly and categori-
cally between journeyman and master. Indeed, the evidence often points
toward conflicts that arose from specific “unfair” practices of specific
masters. Guild policy reflects the interests of certain masters who
dominated the politics of the guild, and other masters within the guild,
the evidence confirms, not infrequently objected to policies that they
estimated were detrimental to their business concerns.
Clearly, confrontation between journeymen and masters over the
early modern centuries was expressed in actions in the workplace — work
stoppages, boycotts, and the like — and such occurrences were far from
infrequent. Disputes between journeymen and masters, however, found
another venue as well, and could be wrangled about without any
evidence of work stoppage or any reference to conspiracies and cabales.
This venue, as Michael Sonenscher has explored in some detail for
France in the late eighteenth century, was courts of law. In the current
state of research Sonenscher’s contention that the “typical form of
protest in the eighteenth century trades was neither the food riot nor the
strike, but . . . the lawsuit” is perhaps a bit overdrawn, but certainly it
was one important forum of dispute about the workplace.?!
Scattered evidence from the late Middle Ages and during the early
31 Michael Sonenscher, “Journeymen, the courts, and the French trades, 1781-1791,”
Past and Present 114 (1987), 77-109.
modern period shows in England and on the Continent that some

confrontations between masters and journeymen were indeed fought
and settled in court. Journeymen sued employers over violations of guild
statutes (for example, when masters retained more that the permitted
number of apprentices, clearly an unfair labor practice that depreciated
the value of trained labor by lowering the demand for journeymen),
sometimes showing a canny familiarity with the legal system by pitching
rival jurisdictions against one another. Natalie Davis has found that the
journeymen printers who formed the company of the Griffarins in
sixteenth-century Lyons used the courts against their masters in salary
disputes, sometimes appealing to Parlement, sometimes playing rival
jurisdictions off against one another, all the while hiring lawyers to
present their cases in court. Indeed, the Griffarins were far from
singular, since we have found many instances where journeymen re-
tained solicitors and displayed a shrewd sense of playing rival jurisdic-
tions against one another, efficiently using legal arguments in the
process. In the cities of the Austrian Netherlands in the eighteenth
century we find journeymen as plaintiffs on the dockets of even the
higher courts.
Sonenscher points out that in Paris in the 1780s journeymen were
“regularly challeng[ing] corporate decisions and appeal[ing] to one or
other of the parlements.” We can safely conclude that many labor
disputes, which Sonenscher defines from the perspective of the jour-
neyman as “a concerted action to affect conditions. in a trade as a
whole,” often took the form of legal proceedings whereby journeymen
used the law to affect a variety of working conditions and wages.?* Such
legal actions could be enormously collective, as demonstrated by the
case in 1785 where 2,000 journeymen painters, decorators, and sculp-
tors appealed to the Parlement of Paris contesting a lower court decision
that required these journeymen to pay 8 sous for a livret (that booklet
that recorded a journeyman’s employment history and contained
written permission from employers to change jobs) and a further 3 sous
every time they changed jobs. In the same year the journeymen hatters
of Paris appealed to the Parlement against a ruling by the Liewtenant-
général de police that reduced their piecerates. In neither case, nor in any
legal disputes, is there evidence of work stoppage, and never is the term
cabale invoked to describe the journeymen’s actions; but the actions are
no less a part of the history of confrontation between masters and
journeymen than the better known work stoppages, boycotts, and
cabales.
32 Ibid., p. 85.
Whatever the venue or the means, masters and journeymen were often
at odds. Leaving aside whether this is part of the history of the conflict
between labor and capital, or part of the story of the formation of the
working class, we can nonetheless see that collectively masters and
journeymen had squared off against one another. It is the collective
nature of this conflict that is significant, and this raises the issue of
bonds of solidarity in artisan life. In the varieties of dispute between
masters and journeymen, we often find the question of honor bulking
large, its importance signifying status. It is no accident that disgruntled
journeymen often smeared the reputation of former masters. Insults
were usually loaded with status signifiers, like misérable (low-life), or
gueux (beggars). They might spread rumors in the street, as the eight-
eenth-century Parisian journeyman baker Le Roux did against his
former master Augustin Legrand, bruiting it about that Legrand was
married to “a slut and a whore.” Or they might threaten their former
masters with vengeance. After being fired by his master, Francois
Breton, an eighteenth-century French journeyman buttonmaker, went
from street to street swearing to any who would listen that to get back at
his master he “was going to join the French Guards so that he would
have the right to carry a sword and to run it through [his master’s]
body.” His intent was not simply to kill his master, but also to do it with
a status symbol, the sword. The murder of a master with the preeminent
symbol of independence would annul his servile status.*?
Animosity toward masters was not confined to journeymen, for
apprentices might also feel the degradation of inferior status and appal-
ling working or living conditions. One episode made famous by Robert
Darnton demonstrates the complex interrelationships between worker
protest, honor, and community.** Apprentice and journeymen printers
in Paris by the early eighteenth century were working in fewer and larger
shops, among larger workforces, and with less opportunity to advance to
mastership than ever before. The frustrations of these workers erupted
one night in a paroxysm of ritualized violence directed against the cats in
the neighborhood, with the primary target being La Grise, the pet of the
wife of a certain master. Behind this grisly episode, we find journeymen
increasingly aware of their particular status in society, and keen on
defending it. As their situation was deteriorating, journeymen became
33 Quoted in Farge, La Vie fragile. Violence, pouvoirs et solidarités a Paris au XVIIIe siécle
(Paris, 1986), p. 144. An English translation exists: Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and
Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (London, 1993).
34 Robert Darnton, “Workers revolt: the great cat massacre of the rue Saint-Séverin,” in
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
(New York, 1984), pp. 75—106.
more and more set on distinguishing themselves from the alloués, or the
simple wage-workers who increasingly thronged the printshops. The
narrator of the cat massacre, Nicolas Contat, repeatedly contrasts the
world of the apprentice and journeyman with that of the alloué and, of
course, with that of the masters. As we will see in the next two chapters,
ritual, ceremony, community, and status were at the heart of artisan
experience.
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6 Communities
Around 1740 Flegel the tinsmith, a citizen of the German “home town”
of Hildesheim, wanted to marry.! As for any master craftsman, the
proper pursuit of his trade required a household supporting and sur-
rounding his workshop. Such a domestic establishment of hearth and
shop signaled to a master craftsman’s customers, neighbors, and fellow
guildsmen that he was industrious, trustworthy, and morally sound. He
thereby could expect to be considered a worthy member of the over-
lapping communities that gave the artisan his status and his life its
meaning and security — family, neighborhood, town, and above all, guild.
But when Flegel went to his guild officers to register his intention to
marry his chosen bride, the daughter of a fellow citizen named Helmsen,
he was barred from doing so on the grounds of indecency. Flegel’s future
father-in-law, the officers discovered, had been born illegitimately, and
Flegel’s guild demanded that all masters and their wives prove their
descent from four sexually irreproachable grandparents. Flegel’s bride,
despite the fact that her father had been legitimized after his birth by
territorial law, could not do this, and so she was too impure to belong, by
way of her future husband, to the tinsmith community.
Not to be deterred, Flegel married her anyway, and promptly found
himself barred from his guild’s meetings and ceremonial functions.
Flegel demanded from the local authorities that they force the guild to
recognize his marriage and allow him to take his rightful place in the
guild as one of its masters. The town council turned a deaf ear to
Flegel’s entreaties for three years, but when Flegel appealed to the
territorial lord of Hildesheim, the bishop, who ruled in his favor, the
town council caved in and ordered the guild to convene a meeting of
masters to readmit Flegel and recognize his marriage. On the appointed
day, however, not one master showed up, and in the teeth of another
order from the council to convene and to admit Flegel, all the officers of
the guild resigned.
1 Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871
(Ithaca, 1971), pp. 73-6.
222
Communities 223
Flegel had been cast from his guild community because, as Mack
Walker points out, “he had defied the procedures upon which commun
-
ity peace was founded.” Nor were the tinsmiths the first of Hildesheim’s
guildsmen to bar unseemly masters from their communities. The master
shoemakers had cast from their ranks a fellow master whose matriage
plans concerned a socially inferior piper’s daughter. The master tailors
did likewise to a fellow craftsman whose mother’s reputation was
suspect, and the smiths did the same to a master who tried to register a
miller’s daughter as his wife. Marriage was a matter of honor for these
guildsmen, and this community took as one of its sacrosanct rules of
membership the possession of Ehrbarkeit, or honorable status, which
was rooted in a common understanding of, again in Walker’s words,
“domestic, civic, and economic orderliness.” These morally upright
master craftsmen also assumed that these irreplaceable qualities were
irreparably damaged by “the promiscuity and irresponsibility implied by
illegitimate birth.” This sense of honorable status, then, was linked to a
sense of purity, and marital purity was a “caste mark” that guildsmen
embraced to distinguish themselves from their social inferiors. This
fervid preoccupation with morality and its link to status and social
exclusiveness apparently was accentuated in the “home towns” more
than ever in the second half of the seventeenth century and into the
eighteenth. In the degree of their moral intensity and overriding pre-
occupation with the purity of the guild community, German “home
townsmen” were probably an extreme example among the master
craftsmen of Europe, but the general concern to define communities
and to invest a great deal in the need to belong to them was, as we will
see, typical of artisans, master and journeyman, all across Europe.
The artisan experience, even among sedentary masters, was a shifting
world marked by ephemeral alliances alongside more lasting and perma-
nent bonds, as well as overlap and competition between loyalties and
solidarities. As Steven Kaplan has written, guildsmen had a “split
personality.” On the one hand, all the masters were bound by an oath to
the guild which made them brothers of one another and spiritual sons of
the guild’s patron saint, and as such they were “supposed to feel a sense
of unity and solidarity.” On the other hand, however, such brotherliness
was seriously undermined by strife between masters within the guild,
often, as we have seen, flaring up in disputes over guild governance, with
the lesser masters bristling “under the yoke of leaders who treated them
as inferiors and/or dependents.”? Paradoxically, then, the dynamism of
the social interaction of artisans destabilized communities which were
2 Steven L. Kaplan, “The character and implication of strife among the masters inside the
guilds of eighteenth-century Paris,” Journal of Social History 19 (1986), 641.
nonetheless necessary. This tension between the fissures that continually

threatened to rend the bonds of community and the desire of craftsmen
to construct, usually with great attention to ritual and ceremony, bonds
of loyalty and solidarity underlies the various nodes of community in
artisan lives that we will explore in this chapter — guilds, craft fellow-
ships, the organs of spiritual brotherhood, neighborhood, and family.
Lines of solidarities and counter-solidarities crisscrossed through the
artisan world of master and journeyman, a craftsman’s daily existence
being full of moments of alliance and rupture. Sociabilities were
dynamic, moving, unstable and often short lived, stitched together in
networks that were constantly being constructed, renewed, and
dissolved.
Community rests on mutual awareness of its members of belonging or
not, of inclusion and exclusion, of insider and outsider, and such
membership is secured by a conformity to agreed upon, unwritten, and
often tacit rules. Members simply were expected to know the unspoken
rules, and to abide by the norms and constraints they imposed. To
violate was to exclude, as the unfortunate Flegel discovered. Commun-
ity, of course, is embodied in institutions and takes shape through often
highly ritualized practices that are further structured by being situated
in particular places and occurring at specified times.
Guilds and craft fellowships
Given the emphasis on guilds in most scholarship on artisans, it should

not be surprising that historians have for years suggested that artisan
identity and sense of belonging to a community were defined by guild
membership. No doubt this is true, in part, but we must bear in mind
two things: first, that the guild was not the only node of community for
artisans, as has so often been assumed, and second, that we ought not
be overly hasty in assuming that guild identity was another way of saying
that artisan identity was work based. In fact, guild membership signaled
social, and sometimes political, status and thus a sense of place and
belonging in society, and not just a means of earning a living.
Guilds or corporations everywhere were described juridically as a
social rank united by oath in order to become, as it was said in France,
“a body, a confraternity, and a community.” To be a “body” implied a
deep, indissoluble bond among members; to be a “confraternity”
brought members together in spiritual brotherhood; and to be “a
community” conveyed a sense of belonging to a distinct group in society
and a loyalty to that group measured against other categories of the
population. It was through membership in a corporation that an artisan
Communities 225
acquired social rank, or, as the French called it, état, which in turn fixed
the person’s place in the hierarchical social order and defined his
privileges, duties, and, above all, his dignity. Charles Loyseau, that great
theorist of social order and ordering of the early seventeenth century,
spoke for all Europeans when he defined one’s état as “‘the dignity and
the quality’ that was ‘the most stable and the most inseparable from a
man.’”’ This sense of status was enshrined in the corporate idiom
which encouraged solidarity within a corps, but also created sharp
boundaries between corps, and between corps and the undifferentiated
mass of the noncorporate population. The idiom also arranged all of this
hierarchically.
Of course, the corporate idiom expressed an ideal of amicable social
interaction and unquestioned loyalty and solidarity within the body.
Lived experience did not, could not, measure up to this ideal, and so it
is hardly surprising to find guilds and corporations shot through with
tensions and riven by fissures that continually threatened to give the lie
to the corporate idiom. All of the sites where guildsmen gathered — the
workshop, the tavern, guild assemblies, to mention a few — were fields of
power relations and thus sites where alliances were constantly being
fractured, but also reinforced. The corporate idiom was a static con-
struct and was valued because of its power of hierarchical positioning;
but it was continually destabilized by the shifting vagaries of everyday
social life. The result was an unsettling, even paradoxical tension at the
heart of artisan identity. It is this tension which gave rise, as we will see,
to the pronounced, almost exaggerated, rituals and ceremonies which
visibly defined the communities which were such important anchors of
stability to people immersed in a dynamic world of ephemeral and often
contentious interaction.
The seventeenth-century Lillois weaver Pierre-Ignace Chavatte re-
flects this paradoxical tension. In his remarkable journal he reveals a
deep sense of dignity for being a member of his guild and possessed a
sense of esprit de corps that bound him to his fellows. Clearly the ideal of
the corporate idiom beat deeply in this man’s breast, and permeated his
sense of social rank and sense of honor. Equally clearly, his sense of
belonging to the community of sayetteurs was defined in large measure
by rigorous distinction from others in the social firmament, above all the
dependent wage-workers (the salariés) and the corps of bourgeteurs, those
weavers who were perilously similar to the sayetteurs in the kind of
weaving they did. In Chavatte’s mind, wage-workers and bourgeteurs
were “beneath” him, the inferiority of the former stemming from their
3 Quoted in William Sewell Jr., Work and Revoli:tion in France: The Language of Labor from
the Old Regime to 1848 (Princeton, 1980), p. 35.
dependent, unincorporated status. The inferior status of both groups

derived from their inferior stil, a word Chavatte uses repeatedly to
describe not just his skill as an artisan, but more profoundly and
sweepingly, a way of life. Chavatte acted out on the public stage a
behavior that said who he was, a public identity which he expressed
through the communities to which he belonged.
Chavatte shows us very clearly that the corporate idiom, with its
function of social placement and emphasis on dignity, was not just a
juridical ideal confined to the world of the jurists and political author-
ities. But Chavatte also shows us in his journal that such neat distinc-
tions were undermined and confounded by powerful forces at work in
artisan lives. Chavatte prided himself on his independent status; juridi-
cally, as a master craftsman, he may have been independent, but
economically he was not. He had no workshop of his own, employed no
workers, and in fact, worked “under,” dare we say despondently, other
masters of his trade. Indeed, Chavatte’s journal reveals the divisiveness
among craftsmen even of the same guild that tore at the idealized fabric
of solidarity of the community, and shows us how one craftsman, but so
typical of countless others all across Europe, struggled to secure moor-
ings of community in a world that constantly threatened to cut them.
The corporate idiom, aside from its importance in defining rank in a
hierarchical society, had other practical uses. The emphasis on solidarity
and mutuality served to safeguard perceived collective interests, and
especially to keep peace between brothers who all too often were
necessarily immersed in competitive relationships. Guild ordinances in
towns in the north of England, for example, required peaceable relations
between members. The bricklayers of Chester were forbidden “to call
any of the brothers worse than his proper name in wrath or anger,” while
their colleagues in Newcastle fined any member 6 shillings 8 pence
“who shall at any time scandalise, demean, vilify or otherwise abuse any
other of the said company in the meeting house.’”* Similarly, in the
1330s the London carpenters agreed to “work his brother before any
other.”? Such co-operation, however, required discipline and, for those
brothers who resisted it, sanction. The ultimate sanction was exclusion
from the community — again, Flegel’s tale shows this disciplinary tactic
employed by masters in full color — but the ways of community
discipline had countless variations among masters and journeymen
(who, though their collective organizations were often illegal nonetheless
4 Quoted in Donald Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the
Towns of Northern England, 1450-1750 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 78.
> Quoted in R. A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries Road from Craft Fellowship
to Trade Unionism (London, 1979), p. 25.
Communities 227
appropriated for their own uses and to their own end the form and spirit
of corporatism) throughout the early modern period in every city in
Europe.
Let us take a few illustrative examples of discipline and sanction
among journeymen, a subject we will return to shortly when we explore
the ceremonies and rituals of journeymen brotherhoods. Solidarity and
tensions in the workshop were reflected in treatment of newcomers. In
late medieval London coppersmiths examined and admitted a stranger
to the trade only after he had promised to abide by the rules of the trade,
to pay a set fee into the common fund for the poor or the unemployed of
the trade, and finally, to demonstrate his competence in the craft. If he
fulfilled these requirements he and the rest of the members of the craft
swore a “covenant” which, among other things, guaranteed the new-
comer employment.
Joseph Moxon wrote in 1683 in his Mechanick Exercizes that “every
printing-house is by the custom of time out of mind, called a chappel
. all the workmen that belong to it are members of the chappel.”°®
Certainly this was true at the Plantin printing-house in Antwerp where,
since the sixteenth century the “chapel” functioned to preserve a
“closed-door social harmony,” and where workshop rules required
journeymen seeking work there to join the local chapel which involved,
as with the London coppersmiths centuries before, payment of a
schedule of fees, demonstration of competence, and the swearing of an
oath to the community.
Once installed in the workshop, rules continued to govern the workers
with an eye toward solidarity. Seventeenth-century London journeymen
printers, for instance, were also required to join the “chapel,” and once
a member one had to agree to obey the senior compositor, called the
“father of the chapel,” whose job it was to maintain “good mutual work
habits” in the shop. Illustrative of the emphasis on mutuality and
communal solidarity, all compositors were organized into a “compan-
ionship” of three to six men which was paid collectively. Journeymen
resisting these customary rules could be expelled from the chapel, and
the workplace. Indeed, most conflict in the Plantin-Moretus printing-
house was not between master and journeyman, but among jour-
neymen. Negligent workers found themselves sanctioned by their
fellows in a variety of ways, but primarily by fines which were collected
© Quoted in Jan Materné, “Chapel members in the workplace: tension and teamwork in
the printing trades in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” in Catharina Lis, Jan
Lucassen, and Hugo Soly, eds., Before the Unions: Wage Earners and Collective Action in
Europe, 1300-1850, International Review of Social History 39 (1994, supplement 2),
Bee
and spent collectively. The goal of punishment, however, was solidarity,

for offenders were often shown mercy, the aim of discipline not being to
impoverish a colleague, but to bring him back into the communal fold.
Spiritual brotherhood
Membership in guilds was obligatory in most places to practice a craft
legally, and perhaps the lack of choice (as well as the competition for
markets and labor that so many masters had to engage in with their
fellows) threw men together in a collectivity not ideally suited to the
demands of solidarity. And most likely this is why another institution of
association and brotherhood emerged and developed almost indistin-
guishably from the guild, the craft confraternity. Confraternities in
general were religious sodalities comprised, as Richard Mackenny
writes, of “voluntary groups of laymen who met together at regular
intervals to do pious and charitable works in honour of a patron saint.”’
Historically they appeared on the scene before the craft guilds and
flowered everywhere thereafter. For example, craft sodality among shoe-
makers existed in Barcelona already in 1218, while the shoemaker guild
only made its appearance late in that century. Even very small towns
were honeycombed with confraternities. In the fourteenth century, for
instance, the small English town of Bodmin already had forty. In Venice,
though virtually all trade guilds (arti) had confraternities (scuole) offi-
cially attached to them by the fourteenth century, there were other
sodalities (scuole piccole) that were not affiliated with guilds but counted
guildsmen from different trades among their members. These scuole cut
across parish and class lines, although their membership decidedly did
not include the disreputable wage-laborers or beggars. The four scuole
piccole of S. Anna, Celestina, S. Cris. and Apostoli between 1337 and
1520 drew their membership from over seventy parishes, and among the
1,269 brothers of the scuola piccola of Celestina over the same period
132 nobles rubbed shoulders with 123 textile craftsmen, 41 merchants,
and 81 artisans in assorted luxury crafts.
All across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
number of guilds and confraternities — craft and otherwise — expanded.
Likewise everywhere guilds and craft confraternities became officially
affiliated. No doubt this flowering had something to do with the expan-
sion and diversification of the artisanry, and the accelerated mobility of
many craftsmen. This, in turn, meant that, as Gervase Rosser points
out, “the single most pressing earthly concern of every medieval artisan
7 Richard Mackenny, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of Guilds in Venice and Europe,
1250-1650 (Totewa, 1987) p. 44.
Communities 229
was the establishment of a good personal reputation,” an imperative

born of the intensified struggle to gain a foothold in the medieval urban
environment that mobility brought in its train. Establishing trust, and
thereby personal credit, was vital for successful entry into the cherished
world of respectability and the social status that went with it, and
membership in confraternities was one way to establish the social
connections that would provide these.
It is no accident that the vocabulary employed by confraternities (and
by guilds) emphasized the qualities of family, brotherhood, friendship,
peace, charity, and above all trust, reputation, honor, honesty, and
fairness. Indeed, craft confraternities and guilds as early as the thirteenth
century in Italy and everywhere thereafter will be described in this
vocabulary. Confraternities stood at the intersection of economic and
religious life. Moreover, guildsmen assumed that honor had a religious
side, and worshipping in the guild’s chapel in the church, as Kaplan
reminds us about eighteenth-century Parisian artisans, “was no less a
guarantee of masterly character than success in business.”’? By serving as
an association of individuals through which trust, reputation, and salva-
tion could be simultaneously pursued, the confraternity was the con-
science of the guild, shoring up the solidarity that countervailing
tensions within the guild continually challenged.
Guilds and craft confraternities effectively merged in the high Middle
Ages and would remain joined to the end of the eighteenth century.
Everywhere, in the late Middle Ages craft confraternities and guilds
increased in number and overlapped, with the statutes of each sup-
porting the other, with the same masters dominating both. Guild
statutes everywhere from then on usually make stipulations about
affiliated confraternities, including the dues owed by current masters,
and fees paid by new ones. Often the officers of the guild administered
the confraternity, frequently not even separating the account books. For
example, the statutes of the confraternity of the hosiers of Marseilles
required that masters could only give work to journeymen who had
sworn to obey its rules and embraced the devotional expectations of the
brotherhood, while the guild statutes stipulated the payment of dues to
the confraternity. The statutes of the cobblers’ confraternity of Aix-en-
Provence in the fifteenth century required that any master or jour-
neyman who was a thief or a fraudeur be “expelled and chased from this
craft,” recalling the importance of honor and reputation as a part of the
8 Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, guilds and the regulation of work in the medieval town,” Past
and Present 154 (1997), 9.
° Steven Kaplan, “The luxury guilds in Paris in the eighteenth century,” Francia 9 (1981).
ethic of solidarity that these bodies pronounced. Similarly, in Barcelona

between 1500 and 1650 about a hundred trades formed confraternities,
and, again there was an indistinguishable administrative overlap
between guild and confraternity. Four guild officers (called promens)
presided over both, and confraternal dues were spent not just on
devotion and charity, but also on legal expenses incurred by the guild in
its litigation over trade privileges. Even during the Enlightenment, the
new statutes of the Parisian bakers’ guild in 1719 required new masters
to pay 12 livres to the confraternity during their reception ceremony, as
well as provide a 3-pound candle in honor of their patron Saint Lazare.
Current members had to pay 45 sous in annual dues to the confraternity.
Craft confraternities, like all religious sodalities, were about salvation
as well as solidarity, or, rather, melded the two values inextricably into
one. Stipulations of mutual aid for living members and their families
and prayers and masses for the souls of dead colleagues appear in
documents establishing craft confraternities or in contracts with the
clergy for performance of such functions. In 1560 the artisans of the
confraternity of Saint Honoré in Dijon, for instance, paid the Jacobins
for services “for the ... salvation of the souls of the said master
pastrycooks and bakers as well as for all the brothers and sisters of the
confraternity of the said Saint Honoré, living and dead.” The same
sense of devotion and solidarity is evident in a contract drawn up by
Dijon’s locksmiths in 1651 for masses to be said “in order to pray to
God for the whole corps of the said trade, and for the salvation of the
souls of their deceased predecessors as well as for those and their wives
who will die hereafter.”!°
Dispensing charity brought devotion and solidarity together, too, for it
fulfilled the supreme theological virtue of the late Middle Ages, charity,
as well as providing mutual aid to brethren, and when directed toward
needy guildsmen and their families, it also proclaimed solidarity among
brothers. By excluding nonguildsmen and above all wage-workers, even
those who worked in the craft, mutual aid also defined boundaries of a
community and announced a claim to a certain place in the social
hierarchy. Many craft confraternities had hospitals and thus institution-
ally dispensed charity to brothers and their dependents or survivors.
Venetian tailors, silk throwsters, painters, and bakers all maintained such
establishments in the fifteenth century. In 1500 the tailors’ hospital
sheltered seventeen members and their families. Similarly, craft confra-
ternities in sixteenth-century Seville had their own hospitals to help
their poor and infirm, including widows and orphans. Such institutions,
10 James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dyon, 1550-1650 (Ithaca,
1988), p. 243.
Communities P 231
like their counterparts in Strasbourg, Lille, or Augsburg, often explicitly

excluded wage laborers. The expenditures of eighteenth-century
Parisian craft confraternities show that time had not dulled the chari-
table fervor, as large sums on subsistence for the poor and needy
continued to be doled out. The cabinet-makers, for instance, came up
with 7,200 livres from its members to be spent toward the construction
of four civic hospitals in 1787 — a significant sum, given that in 1778 the
guild’s total income was 13,253 livres.1!
Many confraternities spent half, perhaps more, of their revenues on
charity for fellow members. In 1616 the master masons, carpenters,
roofers, and plasterers of Dijon who had established a new confraternity
pledged to set aside half their dues “to the profit of the poor of their. . .
trades.” In 1482 the York carpenters “ordained that if any of the [guild]
fraternity fall to poverty, so that they may not work, or happen to be
blind, or to lose their goods by unhap of the world, then the foresaid
brotherhood [shall] give them 4 pence every week, as long as they live,
by way of alms. . .” In 1619 the joiners of Chester voted to give alms to
a destitute brother, and in 1637 the smiths of the same town gave 8
shillings “to the widows of our company.”!”
What percentage of the brotherhood’s treasury such charitable expen-
ditures represent, unfortunately, we have no way of knowing, but such
expenses were not the only drain on fraternity treasuries. Upkeep and
decoration of the brotherhood’s chapel could draw down guild or
confraternal reserves, too. In sixteenth-century Venice part of guild dues
were dedicated to devotional expenditures like paying for candles
burning before the shrine of the guild’s patron saint, or, as the guild of
the caulkers did in 1454, payment to the monastery of San Stefano for
an altar and a tomb in the church. A year later the same guildsmen were
assessed a special fee to pay for the construction of the altar and
decorating its chapel. By 1578 this chapel counted among its sacred
objects a variety of images fashioned in gilded silver and studded with
precious stones. Ceremonial pomp accompanied decorative splendor,
all geared toward honoring God, the guild, and its members. After 1461
among the duties of the chief guild official (the gastaldo) was to summon
all the guildsmen to mass in their resplendent chapel, and to hire (again,
paid from guild fees) trumpeters and pipers to glorify in music the
celebration of that mass. Clearly a great deal of money collected by the
guild from its members was spent on religious services and decorative
and devotional objects.
11 Kaplan, 265, 268.

12 P)onald Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of
Northern England, 1450-1750 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 82.
As in Venice hundreds of years before, confraternities, like that of the

Parisian goldsmiths in 1771, continued to spend considerable sums on
religious services and sacred objects. These guildsmen spent 1,261 livres
on salaries for clergy, choirmaster, and choirboys, and kept in the guild
office, as Kaplan discovered, “two reliquaries of their patron Saint Eloy,
two large silver images of the saint, and chandeliers decorated with his
image.”}3
Before the late sixteenth century the church had played almost no
official role in confraternities of any kind, but after the Council of Trent
this changes in the Catholic parts of Europe. As part of the attempt of
the institutional Church to bring behavior into obedience to Rome in
Catholic lands, confraternities were to be more closely tied to parishes
and thereby brought under episcopal surveillance and control. After
1604, in fact, confraternities had to have episcopal approval for their
existence, without which the Church declared they had no salvatory
effect and hence no spiritual function.
Venice saw its scuole piccole more closely tied to parishes in the post-
Trent second half of the sixteenth century, and after 1591 they were
subject to episcopal visitation. The Counter-Reformation church also
tried to force parochialism on craft guilds, and if guilds resisted, which
they did at times, they found themselves investigated by the Inquisition.
We find the same offensive in sixteenth-century Florence. Here, too,
craft confraternities were increasingly tied to parishes, but, as in Venice
and elsewhere, other institutions of collective devotion were encouraged
and thereby competed for the spiritual allegiances of artisans. A cult of
the Eucharist was encouraged by the Church (emphasizing collective
membership in yet another corps, the spiritual body of Christ), the
success of this venture evidenced by the growth of eucharistic brother-
hoods, above all the confraternities of the Holy Sacrament. In Florence
after 1530 twenty-four new sacramental confraternities were quickly
founded, counting many artisans in their ranks. In Venice the confrater-
nities of the Holy Sacrament (scuole del Santissimo Sacramento), which
were comprised almost exclusively of artisans and were parish based,
multiplied rapidly as well. By 1581 one-third of Venice’s nearly sixty
parishes had such an institution. These confraternities were dedicated to
intensifying devotion to the sacraments, and woe to the artisan who did
not show reverence to a procession of this confraternity which carried
the body of Christ through the streets. It was precisely such irreverence
that landed a certain Venetian jeweler named Girolamo before the
Inquisition in 1548 for heresy, for he and his workers threw their hats on
13 Kaplan, 267-8.
Communities 233
the floor and turned their backs on the procession as Christ’s body
passed the shop.
In Spain the same trends toward confraternal growth and diversifica-
tion are visible, as medieval brotherhoods were joined by new ones
whose foundations were encouraged by the reforming Catholic Church.
Valladolid, for example, a town of 30,000 souls, had about a hundred
confraternities, while Toledo had 143 for 60,000. In Barcelona in 1519
we find thirty craft and professional confraternities, a number which
grew to fifty-one by 1588 and, when added to the number of new
devotional brotherhoods, brought the total to around eighty. In Zamora
in 1400 there were about ten confraternities, but vigorous growth in the
late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth pushed the number
to 150 by 1600, when the population of the town still hovered below
10,000. There confraternal membership cut across occupational lines.
In 1400 the confraternity of Santa Catalina included among its brothers
a blanket-maker, a blacksmith, a sculptor, a tanner, a woolcomber, a
carpenter, and a weaver. That of Nuestra Senora de Yermo counted
among its seventy-eight members admitted in 1595 three coppersmiths,
five weavers, five woolcarders, two fullers, a carpenter, a shoemaker, and
a locksmith. All confraternities were occupationally heterogeneous, and
even socially, as these brotherhoods also embraced surgeons, servants,
silkmercers, teachers, and even a washerwoman.
In France, too, the seventeenth-century Catholic Church encouraged
the formation of confraternities and sought to control them through
parishes, and as in all other parts of Catholic Europe, their ranks
swelled, including many artisans, although increasingly the craftsmen in
these sodalities were just masters. In Dijon the Confrérie des Trespasses
in the parish church Saint Jean had 49 active members in 1590, but had
bulged to 251 by 1629, while the Confrérie des Rois in the parish
church of Saint Michel mushroomed from 99 brothers and sisters in
1583 to 492 by 1650. Many of the new members were master artisans.
Despite the competition of alternative religious sodalities, craft
confraternities continued to thrive, especially in the seventeenth
century when, in fact, some, like that of the locksmiths of Dijon, were
reestablished. The corporate nature of craft confraternities had long
been apparent, and no doubt shored up guild solidarity, but many
craft confraternities, like the new ones sponsored by the Counter-
Reformation Church, had long provided spiritual and social bonds that
transcended guild boundaries. This was true in large cities as well as
small towns. In the fifteenth century 65 percent of the members of the
London tailors’ fraternity of St. John the Baptist were not tailors, while
the weavers of Coventry admitted artisans of other crafts as “love
brethren” to their confraternity of Saint Osburga. In 1596 in Piera in

Catalonia a confraternity dedicated to Saints Jacinto and Lucia was
founded for tailors, clothiers, shoemakers “and many other individuals,”
while the year before in Sabadell one dedicated to Saints Joseph,
Eulalia, Eloi, and Crespi had been established for shoemakers, carpen-
ters, and smiths. In Dijon, the drapers, fullers, and dyers all belonged to
the confraternity of Saint Trinité, the sword-polishers and cutlers shared
that of Saint-Jean Baptiste, while, as we have seen, the master masons,
carpenters, roofers, and plasterers, contending that their crafts de-
pended upon “une mesme société,” sought to establish a confraternity
in 1616 to “solemnize the holy days of Saint Joseph and of the Four
Crowns,” patrons of their crafts “since time immemorial.”!4
Although in late medieval France masters and journeymen both
belonged to the same craft confraternities (for example, the tailors,
doublet-makers, cobblers, and windowpane-makers of Paris), increas-
ingly from the fourteenth century journeymen began forming their own
(as among the Parisian forge-operators, roofers, and shoemakers),
complete with ceremonies that betray a sense among them that they
belonged to an état distinct from the masters above them and the wage-
workers below. Journeyman confraternities existed in the netherworld of
clandestinity and quasi-legality. As long as their functions were strictly
spiritual they were accepted, grudgingly, by the authorities, but gather-
ings of journeymen for whatever purpose always met with suspicion. As
early as the 1320s the Florentine commune banned journeymen from
making “constitutions or statutes . . . within the guise of a fraternity or
otherwise, and under the pretext or cover of religion, or of providing for
funerals or religious offerings . . . except by special license of the consuls
of that [officially organized] craft under whose authority they stand.”!>
In 1365 in Freiburg the master clothworkers complained to the author-
ities that journeymen weavers and woolbeaters were gathering in sedi-
tious meetings under the cloak of religious confraternity. When Charles
V suspected in 1525 that journeymen confraternities were actually cells
of sedition, he prohibited them in the Holy Roman empire. In 1539 his
royal rival Francis I of France followed suit for his kingdom. Both were
ineffective, and journeymen confraternities in Spain, Catholic Germany,
France, and probably elsewhere increased in number in the later
sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth.
The associational brotherhood of confraternities, no less than any
other institution of solidarity in the craft world, was additionally secured
through festive celebration. Most confraternities held an annual festival
14 Farr, p. 244. 15 Quoted in Rosser, 25.

Communities 235
on their patron saint’s day, beginning with a mass that all members were
expected to attend, and then continuing with the secular communion of
feasting and drinking. Not surprisingly from the late sixteenth century
on, increasingly in the eyes of reforming authorities intent on tightening
the screws of moral discipline and public order, such celebrations easily
and apparently often became bouts of extensive and excessive consump-
tion. Such bacchanalian celebrations were typical of confraternal festi-
vals since the Middle Ages, but what changed in the sixteenth century
was the attitude of the authorities toward them. Increasingly the propo-
nents of the new morality, both clerical and lay, saw in these events
opportunities to indulge in pleasures of the flesh and violence, offensive
behavior in and of itself, but all the more heinous when it occurred on
holy days. A proclamation by the town council of Dijon in 1600 is
typical in its content and sweep:
The confraternities . . . of the arts et métiers . . . [were] introduced to honor God
and the patron saints . . . with the intention of good works . . . [However], for
some years, instead of the honor and glory of God and the said saints only
things to the contrary have been produced . . . .Derisions and insolent behavior
like games of dice, blanques, quilles, cards, and banquets .. . [lead to] such
blasphemy. . . and excessive expenses that God is greatly offended . . .1°
Dijon’s chief police official went on to rail against the artisans who, on
their festival days, dressed up in fools’ costumes, with bells on their toes
and tambourines in hand, and made all sorts of racket at the doors of
the churches and even came into the churches with their bells and
baubles “disturbing and interrupting the service of God.” In the eyes of
the authorities, such “willful disorder of the people” could only provoke
the wrath of God and lead to disorder in the streets.
The Reformation
Martin Luther wrote in the sixteenth century that confraternities should

be “snuffed out and brought to an end.” In kingdoms and cities where
Protestantism took hold and devotion was generally centered in the
home and the parish church, confraternities were indeed disbanded.
With them went the festive celebration of saints’ days and the attendant
processions, and if the cycle of religious festivals was not entirely
eliminated, it was certainly reduced. What this meant was that commun-
ity spirit was shifted on to other ground.
In Protestant lands guilds either absorbed the functions of the pre-
Reformation confraternities (charity may no longer have been inspired
16 Farr, p. 247.
by the doctrine of good works, but aid to disadvantaged brothers and

their dependents continued to be embraced by guilds), or secularized
clubs emerged with similar social welfare functions. Such clubs in-
creased in popularity in the Dutch Republic and in Restoration
England, especially after 1700. Benefit or “box” clubs were quite
common among craftsmen in these Protestant countries. The wool-
combers of Coggeshall, for example, established one in the 1680s “for
the help of such as may be sickness, lameness, or the want of work,”
while their brethren in Wellington and Tiverton had set one up by the
mid-eighteenth century for “the support [of] decayed brethern of the
trade.”!” Entrance fees and dues to these “voluntary” societies were
kept high enough to restrict membership and by excluding the poorer
sort. Monthly meetings were often convened in the nearby alehouse,
which also often had special clubrooms.
Such clubs were not just for the care of the sick, as the Norwich poem
called “The Weaver,” which was popular around 1720, testifies: “Twas
then I could to jovial clubs repair,/ and pass my evenings pleasurably
there/with boon companions talk of mutual trade/and spend the wagers
we before had laid.”!® In eighteenth-century Birmingham hundreds of
artisan clubs existed, and nor were they all just for care of the sick.
Many were also lottery clubs where dues were paid into a common
purse, and when the accumulated capital reached a certain amount, a
drawing was held and a sum was paid out to a winner to build a house,
or to use in his business.
Where Catholic theology taught that through certain ceremonies
(notably the mass) one became a part of the mystical body of Christ, in
practice the sense of earthly belonging was most visibly expressed in
membership and practices of various religious sodalities and proces-
sions. For Protestants, the options were different, but many nonetheless
answered the call and flocked to the various standards of the Reformed
religions forming a select community of “saints.” As many historians
have demonstrated, the ranks of the new faithful were especially
crowded with artisans. In French cities like Montpellier, Toulouse,
Rouen, Dijon, Lyons, and Lille, as well as in the cities of Germany,
historians have documented that artisans were attracted to Protes-
tantism in numbers disproportionate to their representation in the
population as a whole.
There is less agreement about the reasons for the attraction. Historians
of northern French towns like Amiens or Lille make a convincing case
that a correlation exists between proletarianization and impoverishment
17 Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London, 1983), p. 234.
1S Tbid.;py23De
Communities 237
and the willingness to embrace the new faith as a form of protest.

Between the 1540s and the 1560s not all types of artisans in these towns
were drawn to the Protestant faith. The craftsmen most attracted to it
were weavers of light cloth and woolcombers, trades that counted many
wage-workers in their ranks who were suffering a deterioration of their
economic status.
The proletarianization thesis does not apply everywhere, however. In
fact, elsewhere there is a strong correlation between Protestantism and
relatively high levels of wealth, status, “art,” and education (or at least
literacy). The Evangelical, Lutheran, and Calvinist teachings of an
unmediated relationship with God could and did appeal to many an
artisan’s cherished sense of independence. The sixteenth century saw a
shift in the hierarchical structure of the city, and with the increasing
vilification of manual labor and the dissociating of the nobility and
elite urban dwellers from the artisanry, artisans were probably more
receptive to a faith that granted them a sense of dignity and indepen-
dence. It is certainly no accident that in most places the artisan trades
most attracted to Protestantism — goldsmithing, printing, cabinet-
making, to name the most notable — were also the ones artisans held to
be the most “artful” and the least associated with the manual aspects
of production.
The journeymen printers of Lyons studied by Natalie Davis illustrate
these points exceptionally well. In a justly famous article she showed
that these journeymen were attracted to the new faith, and grafted
membership in its community on to a secular brotherhood that had
previously been formed as an institution of opposition to the masters of
their craft. Already formed in a solidary community, the company of
Griffarins, these journeymen found appealing a faith that provided
congregational participation. Moreover, a liturgy in the vernacular was
especially accessible to this quite literate group. Thus a highly self-
confident group of young men proud of their skills and arrayed in
militant disobedience against the immediate authority of their world, the
masters, found a faith that squared with their desires.
At least during the 1550s. In the 1560s, however, the informal
religious movement that they had embraced became the formal
Reformed Church of Lyons, and the increasing institutionalization and
discipline that this entailed rubbed these journeymen the wrong way.
Now they were denied an administrative role in the church, and found
the Consistory disciplining them for the ceremonies and ritual practices
which defined their sense of belonging in the company. Whereas during
the 1550s the solidarity of the company and the experience of the new
faith pulled in the same direction and reinforced one another, in the
1560s they came apart and worked against one another. Festive and
excessive eating and drinking together secured the bonds of community,
but they were also morally repugnant to the leaders of the Reformed
Church. Initiation ceremonies “in which godfathers poured water and
wine on the journeyman’s head and gave him a new and usually coarse
name, and the profane song in which the name of the Lord began and
the name of the Holy Ghost ended each verse,”!? were no less about
bonding a community, but from the perspective of the godly they were
sacrilegious and blasphemous. To make matters even worse, the Con-
sistory inveighed against journeymen strikes, and held out the threat of
excommunication and thus the denial of salvation to journeymen who
dared square off against their masters in such a way. So, when forced to
choose between communities, that of the Griffarins and that of the
saints, what did the journeymen do? They opted for the Griffarins, and
returned to the other religious community (which had said nothing of a
connection between strikes and denial of salvation), the Catholic
Church.
Historians have long focused their attention on France and Germany
when discussing the appeal of Protestantism in the sixteenth century,
but we find the patterns revealed there in more surprising locales. In the
1540s, for example, evangelical ideas were penetrating the artisan
community of Venice, and as elsewhere, the largest numbers of those
accused of heresy and brought before the Inquisition in the sixteenth
century were craftsmen (292 of 676). Moreover, proportional to the
general population, evangelical ideas found their most fertile ground
among artisans in its elite trades, above all, as John Martin has demon-
strated, among the silkweavers, the “traditional aristocrats” of the
Venetian manufacturing world. These adherents to a new faith were also
adhering to a new community, and were perceived by their neighbors
according to these communal attributes. When a dozen or so evangelical
artisans gathered for religious discussions now in one of their work-
shops, now in another, neighbors, who were fully aware of these not so
secret meetings, tellingly referred to them as a sort of confraternity, a
scuole di lutherani. ¢
As in every city of Europe, the highly mobile world of the street and
the workplace provided the conditions for spreading evangelical ideas,
and this was certainly evident in Venice. Of the 327 persons whose
origins we know that were accused of heresy by the Inquisition in the
sixteenth century there, 78 percent came from beyond the lagoons.
Perhaps surprisingly, heretical artisans were quite often tolerated, if not
19 Natalie Z. Davis, “Strikes and salvation in Lyon,” in Society and Culture in Early
Modern
France (Stanford, 1975), 14.
Communities 239
entirely liked by their Catholic fellows, at least until the late 1560s.
This tolerance permitted the construction of cells of evangelical com-
munities in Venice, shop and family based, which assembled for read-
ings of the Gospels and prayers, and performed “counter-rituals” to
the Catholic ones, even singing Protestant litanies behind closed doors
in their shops while Catholic religious processions were staged just
outside. To be sure, Venetian evangelists were sometimes ignored,
sometimes reproved by fellow workers or neighbors, but they were
seldom reported to the authorities. For example, in 1561 Nicold da
Cherso, a master ropemaker at the Arsenal, and his fellow workers
were fed up with fellow worker Isepo Zanco preaching his heretical
ideas to them, but they did not report him to the Inquisition. Instead,
as Cherso said, “we kept him out of our docks, and even if he did
come by once in a while, we wouldn’t put up with him talking about
[his religious] ideas.”?°
War, disease, and the counter-offensive of the post-Tridentine
Catholic Reformation in the late 1560s and 1570s made Venice a
much more dangerous place for evangelicals, and the official intoler-
ance seems to have been matched by an increasingly less tolerant
populace. Still, historians are just beginning to understand the com-
plexity of religious belief and relative tolerance or intolerance, how
faith in some situations can lead to murderous rage against others who
believe differently, yet in other contexts men and women of rival faiths
can peaceably co-exist, even intermarry. Recently historians have
closely examined biconfessional communities and attempted to un-
tangle lines of solidarity that run across and often against religious
faith. For example, Peter Wallace has studied the Alsatian town of
Colmar across a history that saw it move from being a Catholic
imperial free city (but with many Protestants tolerated within its
walls), and then in 1575 become officially Protestant (with many
Catholics tolerated). After 1648 an official biconfessionalism con-
firmed by the Peace of Westphalia was in place, and remained there
with Lutherans in the ascendancy until the French takeover in 1679.
For most of this period, Protestants comprised a two-thirds majority of
the populace, but regardless of which faith was politically ascendant,
always all guilds and all neighborhoods were confessionally mixed,
with membership in a particular religious community only one site of
solidarity among many.”!
20 John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley,
1993), p. 65.
21 Peter Wallace, Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar, 1575-1730 (Atlantic
Highlands, 1994).
Neighborhood
Another site of community was neighborhood, and like guild, frater-
nity, or faith, brought together a consciousness of familiarity and a
sense of belonging. Neighbors packed onto medieval and early modern
streets. The neighborhood was defined by sight and sound, and
extended as far as one could see or hear from the shop or house,
including the street in front and the courtyard in back. Most streets
were short and crooked, so the extent of the visible and audible was
scarcely more than 50 yards in any direction. But within these confines
dozens of peering eyes filled the windows and doorways, and multi-
tudes of ears strained at walls to monitor the space. Artisans held a
deep concern for the opinions of their neighbors, for neighborhoods
no less than any other form of community was built upon inclusion
and exclusion and awareness of informal and unspoken rules dictating
acceptable behavior. Reputations were continually made and de-
stroyed, and respectability had to be reestablished every day. An
artisan’s identity, both his self-image and the inseparable image others
had of him, was closely tied to his neighborhood. Craftsmen estab-
lished strong relationships with neighbors, both friendly and competi-
tive. In this intensely public arena where interdependence and
vulnerability were facts of life, individuals were extremely sensitive to
neighborly judgment of their actions. The bonds between neighbors
could be as tight as that of kin, faith, or craft, but there was also great
potential for enmity in proximity.
Because neighbors were highly interdependent, they were continually
vulnerable to one another. Disputes over any number of things could
erupt, from conflict over common resources, to business partnerships
(neighbors were often of the same craft and at times partners in
business), to provision of credit and collection of debt. Indeed, it
seems that much conflict between neighbors came from a violation of
expected bonds of sociability. Recognizing the potential for and extent
of conflict between neighbors is therefore important, but we must also
appreciate how crucial the neighborhood was as an instrument for
social control. Mutual obligations knit neighbors together and often
prompted them to act collectively in defense of common interests. The
loyalty, solidarity, and cohesiveness of artisan neighbors took very
visible shapes, most notably in peacekeeping and providing aid in time
of crisis.
Good neighborliness was valued everywhere. In Ghent as early as the
thirteenth century we even find neighborhood associations called
gebuurten (which were entirely independent of guilds or confrater-
Communities 41
nities).** Members of these institutions usually came from just one

street, or perhaps only a part of one and maybe some adjoining alleys.
Whatever their size, their numbers grew, accelerating especially from
the fifteenth century. By 1777 there were 211 of them in Ghent, each
one averaging forty-five to fifty households, many of them artisanal.
Through these organizations neighbors were called upon to fight fires,
organize the night watch, and put on festivals and funerals. All adults
were automatically members, paying dues to a common treasury, and
meeting regularly in assemblies convened by a democratically elected
dean. Neighbors here as everywhere, in good Christian fashion, were
expected to live “in peace, love and friendship.”
Peace between neighbors was a valued, and indeed Christian, ideal
that artisans seem to have taken to heart. In France, when artisans
sought admission to mastership the authorities inquired into the
prospective master’s vie et meeurs (way of life and values) often calling
upon neighbors to give testimony. Depositions are full of accolades from
neighbors about so and so being a “peaceable man.” Of course, not
all neighbors were peaceful, but when fights did occur in a neighbor-
hood, neighbors were expected to “make peace” as soon as possible,
and they responded in bunches when fights broke out. In 1643 in Dijon,
for example, the son of a master plasterer named Léonard Guillaumot
knocked down another master plasterer with a stone but was prevented
from braining him “by all the neighbors running there.” Indeed, neigh-
bors often seem to be ready on the spot to prevent violence. In 1642
again in Dijon a journeyman tailor reported that a coppersmith’s
daughter was spared harm from a group of boys attacking her because
“at the same instance her neighbors ran there” to intervene. A year later
tailor Claude Lorrain, holding an ax in his hand, charged pastrycook
Francois Jonas, but before he could land a blow, the weapon was ripped
from his hand by another artisan neighbor.
Neighbors could unite for other reasons, too. In eighteenth-century
Paris neighborhoods of artisans and others could come together against
the authorities. In 1772, for example, the jurés lutemakers came into the
Enclos Saint-Martin-des-Champs to seize some violins in the shop of a
tailor who obviously had made them illicitly. Once the jurés were inside
the courtyard, the neighbors closed the gate behind them, and having
trapped them began to threaten them. The tumult that resulted led to
the calling of the Parisian guard, three sections of which were needed to
restore order.
Neighborhoods, clearly, could unite in defense of space or interest. It
22 Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Disordered Lives: Eighteenth-Century Families and Their
Unruly Relatives (Cambridge, 1996).
is therefore surprising to find that such a unit could so effectively and

readily mobilize when, if a couple of recent studies are indicative, most
of its inhabitants had not lived there for very long. Even “permanent”
residents did not stay put for long, reflecting the pronounced mobility of
medieval and early modern urban populations. Take sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Dijon as an example. Half of the artisans living on
the bustling rue du Bourg and on the Place du Morimont in 1556 were
gone four years later, and by 1579 only 14 percent of the artisans of the
rue du Bourg were still there, and only 3 percent of those of the Place du
Morimont. Between 1630 and 1636 on the artisan hotbed of the rue des
Forges, only 38 percent of the original inhabitants were still there in
1636, and by 1650 only 6 percent. In each of these cases artisan mobility
was slightly more pronounced than that of the population as a whole.
A sample from eighteenth-century Paris confirms this pattern. Among
284 masons between 1750 and 1765, only 64 or 23 percent remained at
the same address. Of course it would be hazardous and foolhardy to
generalize from these examples, but they do seem to suggest a picture of
substantial geographic turnover in artisan populations. Still, despite this
mobility, neighborhoods remained cohesive units. Those who moved
into a neighborhood and stayed a while shouldered the customary
responsibilities and duties of neighbors. The data from Dijon suggest a
core of residents who were more stable than a periphery of transients,
but even so most neighbors could not have known their fellows on the
street for very long. Perhaps it is for this reason that in an emergency
those in trouble did not shout any particular name, but simply
“neighbor!”
Of course, not all neighbors were artisans, and so bonds of neighbor-
hood were forged between and among craftsmen and men and women
of other walks of life. Still, the incidence of the overlap between artisan
(often of the same trade), and neighbor was great. First, in most towns
artisans constituted a sizable proportion of the population, usually from
a quarter to a half, and habitation patterns reflect at once diffusion
(artisans were spread all over town) and concentration (some trades
concentrated in particular quarters). Strong correlation between space
and occupation was especially marked in the medieval period, and
though diffusion becomes more a characteristic of cities thereafter, we
still find pockets of concentration even in the eighteenth century.
In late medieval Venice there is evidence of a correlation between
workplace and residence in some trades, although certainly not all.
Glassmakers, for instance, clustered on the island of Murano, and this
probably encouraged trade solidarity. The same can be said of the
tanners of the Giudecca. Both of these examples of concentration were
Communities 243
probably dictated by health and safety concerns. Access to water also

determined the location of some trades like fulling, dyeing, and again,
tanning, as did noxious production odors or byproducts, like butch-
ering, sKinning, and again tanning. In 1248 King Ferdinand III of
Castile decreed “that men of the same craft should be settled in specific
areas and the streets where they resided should bear their names.” In
Seville, although the designated districts and streets generally continued
to go by their assigned names, already in the 1300s craftsmen were
setting up shop in areas not set aside for them by statute. By the
sixteenth century only the skinners were still concentrated in their
designated area, although members of the same trade still tended to
cluster.??
Similar clustering patterns are evident in sixteenth-century Rome
where over half of its master artisans concentrated in four of the city’s
fourteen guartiers — Ponte, Parione, Regola, and Campo Marzo. In
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dijon the building craftsmen con-
centrated in Saint Nicolas and above all Saint Michel parish. The light
clothweavers of seventeenth-century Lille were no different. They clus-
tered in the parish of Saint Sauveur, where in 1686 about 40 percent of
the men who lived there were sayetteurs. On some Lillois streets the
density was even more pronounced. Of the eighty-nine men living on
the rue du Croquet, fifty-four were sayetteurs. Textile craftsmen domi-
nated certain sectors of the Spanish town of Lleida at about the same
time, while in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate just outside of London
in the second half of the seventeenth century, we also find weavers
concentrated. Here they were joined by a clustering of shoemakers,
tailors, and glovers. These four trades far outnumbered the 211 other
manufacturing occupations of the parish, counting 996, 583, 566, and
371 inhabitants respectively.
Even in such a cosmopolitan and diverse city as eighteenth-century
Paris, we still find certain trades concentrated geographically (although
not exclusively in these locales, of course): goldsmiths in the rue and
quai de Gesvres and on the Ile de la Cité, the Place Dauphine, and the
quai des Orfévres; joiners to the north of Saint Eustache; cabinet-
makers at the city end of the faubourg Saint Antoine; and butchers
around the Vieille Place aux Veaux and in the Grande Boucherie at the
end of the rue Saint Denis.
Probably the most marked geographical concentration of certain
trades in early modern Europe were the shipbuilding trades of the
Venetian Arsenal. This clustering emerged with dramatic suddenness
23 Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca,
1972), pp. 135-6.
with the expansion of the state shipbuilding yards in the late fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. There had been 6,000 shipbuilders in medieval
Venice, but they did not live together in an occupational enclave, but
rather scattered about the city. With the emergence of the Arsenal such
an enclave appeared, the core of which was the secco marina. Here quite
a few shipbuilders even owned their own homes, property in fact
donated to them by the state as yet another means to secure a stable and
disciplined workforce. The gang bosses or foremen as well as the
managers clumped around the Campo dell’Arsenale, which was the
ceremonial and religious center for the arsenolotti community. It was in
the Beata Madonna dell’Arsenale church where arsenal foremen were
invested with their offices, giving sacred legitimacy to a new hierarchical
status. The rank and file arsenalotti clustered in four parishes, and were
the dominant occupational group in each of them, ranging from about
one in nine of the popolani households in San Ternita, to almost one in
four in San Basio and San Martino, and nearly two of five in San Pietro.
Family and kin
In a world of high mobility like that of preindustrial urban populations,

so typical throughout Europe, kin and immediate family played an
important role. Most urban dwellers had recent rural roots, and they
became beacons for relatives migrating from countryside to town. As a
result, Kin groups tended to cluster in particular neighborhoods, which
meant, in turn, that the solidarity of family and neighborhood reinforced
one another. Kin and neighbors were helpful to recent arrivals in a
variety of ways — finding work, credit, raw materials, or customers,
informing newcomers of voluntary associations they might join, making
friends and contacts, perhaps even finding a marriage partner.
Indeed, marriage was the fundamental social institution for artisans,
as it was for everyone, since it was at the heart of the value system
centered on honor, respectability, and status no less than of the material
system of production and reproduction. Indeed, marriage, honor, and
business success went together. The symbolism of a civil ordinance in
Augsburg in 1571 is pointed in this regard. It declared that craftsmen
who went bankrupt had to suffer the indignity of sitting among the
women at weddings, the ceremony that declared male economic inde-
pendence as well as guild membership. We find the same kind of nexus
between respectability and business success in eighteenth-century Paris,
with business failure often coming on the heels of a lost reputation. This
is precisely what befell the Parisian baker André Devaux who was driven
out of business and shamed into leaving the faubourg Saint Marcel
Communities 245
because the neighborhood had judged him and his wife to be disrepu-
table. All bakers, indeed, all artisans feared this fate which usually was a
result of accumulated charges repeatedly hurled as verbal insults in
public, slanders which almost invariably centered on the man’s dishon-
esty in business and his wife’s sexual promiscuity.
Marriage and mastership coincided in most places. Guild regulations
often required it, as did the practical imperatives of running an
enterprise, for dowries often brought the essential capital for setting up
shop or for buying tools, and wives often played indispensable commer-
cial roles. Marriage was inseparably a working and sexual relationship,
and as such it secured the most lasting and the least soluble social bonds
that artisans forged. Marriage was at the center of economic, moral, and
social ordering. Marriage and the wedding that celebrated it marked a
rite of passage from one status to another. Marriage generally marked
the difference between master guildsmen (who in many towns had to
have a wife) and journeymen (who in many places were prohibited or at
least discouraged from marrying), and thus the difference between
authority and subordination. For any craftsman to sever the connection
between mastership and marriage, for example, violated a cherished
moral principle, and met with condemnation by fellow artisans. Thus,
when the unmarried Georg Roll of Augsburg tried to set himself up as a
master watchmaker in 1562, his fellow guildsmen reacted with violence,
raining blows upon him for his violation of the moral norms of the
community.
Marriage was not only the linchpin of the moral system at the heart of
the well-ordered polity, but it also was the fundamental institution of
reproduction, which in turn was central to the maintenance and devolu-
tion of property. Artisans no less than any other propertyholders in early
modern cities were deeply concerned about their patrimonies, and as for
everyone, marital formation was the most important decision in this
regard that artisans (and their children) could make. Many historians
have examined the marriage patterns of varieties of occupational groups,
and if the research on artisans is not as extensive as one might hope,
nonetheless one can venture a perhaps surprising generalization: the
children of the great majority of guildsmen did not marry spouses who
were, or whose fathers were, in the same guild as themselves or their
fathers. That is, guild endogamy was far from the norm. For example, in
Venice between 1309 and 1419 guild endogamy was very low (only 5.5
percent). The same could be said of many trades in sixteenth-century
Aix-en-Provence. There the great majority of leather-workers, shoe-
makers, carders, and especially tailors married outside the guild.
Indeed, of the twenty-seven tailors that Claire Dolan found in her
sampling of marriage contracts there, not one married the daughter of

another tailor.?4
In sixteenth-century Lyons only one in four of the daughters of
master artisans married men in the same occupation as their fathers,
while in seventeenth-century No6rdlingen guild endogamy among
masters ran below one-third. In Dijon from 1551 to 1650, it was only
about one-fifth. The artisans of Lleida between 1680 and 1808 show a
rate of guild endogamy of one-third, although the figure inched up
toward 40 percent over the last forty years of that period. Eighteenth-
century Parisian bakers were more endogamous within their guild than
most other early modern artisans, but even among them the rate is still
less than half (46 percent), and if we count just masters and their
children the rate drops to 42 percent.
Of course, part of the explanation for a minority of guild endogamous
marriages is the relative availability of eligible brides (in many towns at
different times demographics must have conspired to provide little to
choose from), but more voluntarist explanations also must be consid-
ered. Unfortunately, most historians who have measured guild endo-
gamy have not followed up the results with this question: if artisans were
not marrying fellow guildsmen or their daughters, who were they
marrying? No doubt some married up the social ladder (catching a
merchant or a lawyer or his daughter), but in most places upward social
mobility slowed dramatically in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. So who were they marrying? The unfortunate answer is, we
do not know, at least not enough to make any generalizations. Were
fourteenth-century Venice or sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dijon
typical? There we find guild endogamy low, but artisanal endogamy high.
That is, artisans were avoiding marriage with other families of their guild
while seeking matches with artisan families outside their guild. In
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dijon we find that endogamous
marriages were relatively infrequent, but when we note that the rate of
marriages within the artisanry but outside the guild ran at 75 to 80
percent, we get a picture where craftsmen were deliberately marrying
across guilds and within the artisanry. Of course, in other towns there
were exceptions to this generalization (a majority of plasterers and
weavers in sixteenth-century Aix married within their guilds), but the
Dijon-Venice picture is repeated in eighteenth-century Turin and Brit-
tany. Here masters deliberately wed their sons outside the guild. It was
the broader social world beyond the guild but within the artisanry that
24 Clare Dolan, “The artisans of Aix-en-Provence in the sixteenth century: a micro-

analysis of social relationships,” in Philip Benedict, ed., Cities and Social Change in Early
Modern France (London, 1989), pp. 174-94.
Communities 247
mattered most. Artisans needed, as Simona Cerutti has noted,

to knit
family ties that spanned different crafts and economic interests
, such a
network providing business connections, sources of credit, and
destina-
tions for children as apprentices or spouses.
Among the eighteenth-century Breton building trades we also find
a
correlation between guild exogamy and artisanal endogamy, where
craftsmen married to cross-match skills and business contacts. In 1723,
for instance, Louis Bossard, a master glazier of Rennes, married Janne
Jubin, the daughter of a roofer who also was a general contractor. In
addition to bringing a dowry to the union, Janne brought management
expertise she had learned from her father about building contracting
and, just as importantly, business contacts through him as well.
The current state of research on artisanal occupational considerations
in marriage is tantalizingly incomplete, sadly a conclusion we must also
draw about the intersection of geographic and occupational endogamy.
Only flashes of light illuminating the Venetian arsenalotti, eighteenth-
century Parisian bakers, and the Dijonnais craftsmen of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries can be glimpsed in an otherwise dark land-
scape. Sixty-five percent of the arsenalotti of San Pietro married within
the arsenal shipbuilding community of that parish, while 46 percent of
those living in San Martino parish did. And among those marriages of
San Martino, one-third brought together men and women of the same
street or campo. In eighteenth-century Paris 40 percent of the Parisian
bakers married a girl from the same quartier, and one in six of them
married one from their own street (these latter marriages were also the
ones that produced the greatest fortunes). In Dijon 45 percent of the
daughters of artisans living in Dijon married native artisans, while one-
third of the daughters of masters married native masters.
Marriage was one important way to preserve the patrimony; passing
down masterships from father to son appears at first glance to be
another. In the eighteenth century critics of the guilds like the abbé
Coyer, Bigot de Sainte-Croix and above all Clicquot de Blervache
excoriated guilds as closed reproduction systems. Rétif de la Bretonne
echoed these conclusions when referring to printers when he wrote that
“a worker never becomes a master; the masters reproduce among
themselves (engendrent des maitres), and journeymen more journeymen
from generation to generation.”?
Were the routes to mastership as narrow as these observations
suggest? Did masters actively aspire or even conspire to restrict access to
mastership? The answer to the first question seems to be a qualified no,
25 Quoted in Materné, p. 54.

but, paradoxically, to the second, yes. That is, from the sporadic
evidence that we are able to assemble it seems that trades were more
open than many a master might have wished and that many a historian
has imagined. Demographic pressures and the fiscal attractions (higher
fees were charged of non-kin) certainly could, and did, counter any
aspirations masters may have had to restrict membership in guilds.
Let us look at some figures. In York from 1397 to 1534 sons followed
in their father’s craft 51 percent of the time, but this general figure hides
enormous differences between trades. The pewterers, locksmiths, and
goldsmiths were effectively closed to nonfamily members, with 83
percent of the.sons of the first two becoming masters in their fathers’
guilds and 78 percent of the sons of master goldsmiths doing so. At the
other extreme were the masons (16 percent) and the carpenters (26
percent), with the leather trades (43 percent), clothing trades (42
percent), bakers (53 percent) and butchers (65 percent) ranged every-
where in between.
York provides a microcosm of the European experience from the late
Middle Ages to the eighteenth century in that we can find examples of
extreme openness as well as relative closure. Sometimes over time we can
even find within the same guild a sharp trend from one state to the other,
as was the case with the barrelmakers of Bruges. Here we discover over
roughly the same period as the York sample (1375-1500) the percentage
of sons of barrelmakers following in their fathers’ guild plummeting from
50 percent to almost 0, or a state of complete openness.
Examples of relatively closed systems would be the guilds of Augsburg
in the second half of the sixteenth century, where increasingly master-
ship became a family affair. Among the smiths there in the 1560s, for
example, 87 percent of new masters had a father or father-in-law in the
guild. The butchers of seventeenth-century Delft were also relatively
closed (true of butchers almost everywhere), possibly because the
number of masterships had been limited to thirty-two “since time
immemorial.” In seventeenth-century Noérdlingen 60 percent of the
sons of masters followed in their fathers’ occupation, while the tailors of
Reval (Tallinn in present-day Estonia) required that the only way to
enter the guild was by birth as the son of a master or by marriage to the
daughter or widow of one.
On the other side of the ledger are data that show openness, and on
balance, especially as we move into the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, this seems to be the rule more than the exception. The
examples of the corsetmakers and joiners of Vienna or the painters of
Delft appear to be typical. In Vienna during the Thirty Years’ War
among the corsetmakers and joiners 10 percent of the masters were sons
Communities
249
of masters, while among the painters of Delft from
the late sixteenth
century to 1659 only 21 of 177 (12 percent) sons of master
painters
followed in their father’s trade. In the eighteenth century
the trend
toward openness continued. In Bordeaux immigrants were needed
to fill
the ranks of mastership, and although masters’ sons had priority
, only a
small minority of masters were the sons of one. Among the 250
tailors
who became masters between 1757 and 1783, for example
, only 16
were sons of masters and 44 their sons-in-law. The proportion among
wigmakers was even lower, under 20 percent. In contemporary Vienna
small, rich guilds like the sword-cutlers and goldsmiths seem to have
been able to privilege sons of masters better than large, poor, and
rapidly expanding crafts like tailors, shoemakers, and cabinet-makers, at
least judging from the percentage of immigrants (and therefore not
indigenous masters’ sons) who became masters. Where 30 percent and
52 percent of the master cutlers and goldsmiths were not born in
Vienna, 85—90 percent of the tailors, shoemakers, and cabinet-makers
were not.
A trend to openness might appear surprising if we were to conclude
from one body of evidence that shows that guildsmen in many cities at
just this time were lowering or eliminating altogether the admission fees
for sons and sons-in-law of masters and raising those for others. This
was occurring in such diverse locales as seventeenth-century Barcelona,
the German “home towns” between 1650 and 1800, and eighteenth-
century Lyons, Dijon, and Paris. Yet despite these favorable conditions
for sons of masters to become masters themselves in the same guild,
openness to outsiders became the norm. The shoemakers of Barcelona,
for example, even exempted a candidate from fees if the new master
were the son of one and married the daughter of another master in
the guild, but only one-fifth of the 232 shoemakers there received
into mastership between 1599 and 1630 were sons of masters from
Barcelona.
Similar figures can easily be gathered for other guilds in other cities.
On the one hand, in Parisian guilds mastership fees for apprentices who
were not sons or sons-in-law of masters ranged from twice to almost
twenty times what sons or sons-in-law paid. The bakers stipulated in
their revised statutes of 1719 that the droits de maitrise for foreigners was
400 livres, but for sons of masters in the guild only 100 livres. The sons
of master painters paid 160 livres while apprentices without the connec-
tion paid 300, while among the peigniers-tabletiers the rates were 22 livres
and 400 livres respectively. Most trades ranged somewhere in between,
like the tapestry-weavers (87 livres and 440 livres), the hatters (140 and
600 livres), and the goldsmiths (546 livres and 1,066 livres). On the other
find that
hand, these kinds of disincentives notwithstanding, we still
the
among goldsmiths between 1720 and 1775 only about a third of
Cy ee
masters were sons or sons-in-law of masters (195 of 616, or
percent), the same rate we find among Parisian locksmiths between
1742 and 1776 (116 of 346, or 34 percent), and eighteenth-century
shoemakers and bakers in Lyons. Dijon’s rates between 1693 and 1790
were even lower, for under 20 percent of 7,861 mastership letters issued
went to sons of masters in the same trade, and the rate was declining
across the century from 30 percent at the beginning to 12 percent at the
end.
So, were guilds ossifying into rigid, self-perpetuating oligarchies that
became a drag on economic growth as their free-trade critics alleged and
so many historians have assumed? Judging from the master artisans’
aspirations to grease the wheels of their sons and sons-in-law advance-
ment into their ranks and simultaneously raise the bar for other aspir-
ants, one might think that the critics of guilds had a case. The statistics
seem to say otherwise, however, pointing to increasing openness of the
paths to mastership. Yet behind these figures there dwells another story,
at least in York, Dijon, Paris, and the German “home towns,” for here
the guilds were not as open as they seem. It is true that sons of masters
were not categorically staying in their father’s trade, but many, and in
some places most, new masters were sons of masters of other guilds
within the same locality. That is, openness favored the sons of guildsmen
in town, not the immigrant (Vienna seems an exception here) who
tended to return to his native town or village to join the ranks of
mastership there.
This colonizing across guilds, a pattern clearly visible in artisan
marriages in towns like Dijon and Paris, could preserve the patrimony as
effectively as succession within the same guild, and it held out the added
advantage of forging lateral links in business. Where lateral links have
been studied (and much more research needs to be done), it has been
shown that artisans were keen on constructing these connections
throughout their social relationships — through marriage and godparent-
hood, for example. A Parisian metal-polisher, for instance, in 1768
could count a brother and an uncle who were master shoemakers, and,
on his wife’s side, an uncle who was a master painter. Or take the
framework knitter in 1771 whose close kin included a master goldsmith,
an engraver, and a bookseller. Establishing spiritual kinship by god-
parenthood was another way to secure bonds across guilds. Between
1578 and 1646 in Dijon, for example, when a craftsman selected a
godfather from the artisan ranks, over half chose a master from another
guild. Journeymen show the same pattern. This is hardly surprising,
Communities
251
since the key to weathering the vagaries of a precarious

and fragile
existence was to belong to multiple communities and shape them
as best
one could to be mutually reinforcing.
Journeymen brotherhoods
If life was precarious and uncertain for the relatively sedentary master
craftsman, how much more so it was for the transient journeyman. For
him, knowing and being known was of paramount importance because
it was the only path to acquiring and preserving material security,
respectability, and the social status all artisans of whatever rank craved.
Journeymen brotherhoods have been studied mostly in Germany,
England, and France, but wherever we find them we find the jour-
neymen behaving in remarkably similar fashion for very similar pur-
poses. As Michael Sonenscher crisply points out, “anonymity was the
most dangerous condition that a journeyman could experience, because
it was the surest route to exile from the trades and entry into the world
of the hospitals and the poor.’’?°
For journeymen, the community that provided the means of avoiding
the dreaded anonymity was the brotherhood. Confraternities and their
later incarnations provided the sense of belonging and the means for
distinction in a world of fleeting encounters and ephemeral personal
contacts. It is surely no accident that these brotherhoods were most
prevalent among workers of stone, wood, leather, metal, and cloth, that
is in trades where the pool of labor was large, the turnover high, and
thus the demands for distinction most pressing. These were trades, as
Sonenscher notes, where “a relatively small number of widely accessible
materials were used to make a wide variety of different products,” and
journeymen placed a premium upon the ability to set oneself apart.
Rituals were employed to accomplish this need for distinction. These
brotherhoods were renowned, and are still remembered, for the distinct
rituals of inclusion and exclusion they fashioned. These rituals made it
possible to transform similarity into difference.
Many of the rituals employed by journeymen to construct and
: reinforce their brotherly communities were drawn from religious cere-
|
mony (which, of course, served the same purpose of defining member-
ship in a community), with the aim not to mock the established religion
|
| (regardless of what the clergy thought), but to empower themselves and
draw clear lines around their community. They sought to appropriate
|
the force of Catholic ritual and to turn it to their own purposes. The
26 Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century
French Trades (Cambridge, 1989), p. 205.
|
parallels with Catholic ritual are indeed striking. For instance, ritual
practices sanctioned the stages of a journeyman’s life as the sacraments
did those of the Christian. Initiation ceremonies of the brotherhoods
were in fact baptisms, bringing the newcomer into the body of the
community, and as part of this ceremony of incorporation, the newly
baptized was rechristened with a new name. Journeymen appropriated
rites of communion, too, for during these initiations the bonds of the
community members were renewed by sharing bread and wine, and just
as Christians did, performing a “secular communion” afterward by
enjoying a feast in the brotherhood’s favorite and regular tavern. These
brotherhoods had their secret and sacred books, their sanctioned priest-
like officials who presided over the ceremonies and through their special
status in the brotherhood endowed the rituals with efficacy (the saddlers
in France even dressed one of their members as a priest in real
sacerdotal attire). They had a recognized hierarchy of officers — pre-
miers, captains, lieutenants, treasurers, and so forth — who maintained
discipline in the ranks. As in the Church, all of these trappings con-
tinually re-formed and reinforced the community securing its bound-
aries, defining its members.
In the eyes of the Church, naturally, all of these actions were sacrile-
gious, an illicit and unauthorized appropriation of the sacred as well as
the authority of the priest. In 1655 the theology faculty of the Sorbonne
in Paris condemned the ritual practices of the recently uncovered
journeyman shoemaker brotherhood as “impious and sacrilegious,” but
authorities everywhere, as we have seen, also suspected the brotherhoods
had more worldly, if no less illicit objectives. Already in 1383 the
London master saddlers accused their “serving men” of organizing
collectively “under false colour of sanctity” to press for wage increases.
Journeymen employed other rituals to stake out boundaries of com-
munity and to announce membership. For example, everywhere we find
these brotherhoods we see emphasis on ritualized “welcomes” and
“farewells.” In early modern Germany ceremonies like strictly observed
greeting formulas and gift-giving crisply distinguished insiders from
outsiders, and regulated the passage of the latter into the former. By
knowing the standard greeting (called the Gruss) and, after a two-week
trial period, receiving before the assembled membership of the local
chapter of the brotherhood the Handwerksgeschenk or gift, the newly
arrived journeyman proved his right to belong. If the journeyman was
not placed in a shop, he still received the gift, and continued on his way.
After the assembly, which usually took place on Saint Monday, the
journeymen collectively held a banquet in the tavern or inn favored by
their craft.
Communities 253
Eighteenth-century Viennese journeymen had a similar system.

The
tramping stocking-knitter, for example, upon arriving in town
went to
the house of call or Herberge of the craft, there receiving “a half measure
of wine and kreuzer-worth of bread.” He was then joined by the two
senior journeymen in town (the Altgesellen), exchanging “greetings and
welcome” with the newcomer and then drinking a toast of another half-
measure of wine with him. The newcomer was then escorted to the
masters’ shops in a strictly established order from oldest to youngest
master, seeking openings for work. They then returned to the inn, drank
another round, and if he found work, he would be escorted once again
to his new shop. The following Sunday all of the journeymen stocking-
knitters would convene in their inn to drink again, toasting the Schenk,
or welcoming drink or round, to their new colleague. If no work were
found, he would be sent on his way with some cash from the local
treasury, which was stocked regularly by weekly dues of 1 kreuzer
assessed each journeyman in town (a typical weekly wage was 16 kreuzer
in cash and 7 kreuzer worth of “beer money”). This system of Geschenk
and Herberge enabled migrant journeymen to survive, as they put it, in
an “honorable way” by protecting them from having to find work
outside their calling and below their rank. “For the journeymen of the
early modern period,” Josef Ehmer concludes, “and especially in the
eighteenth century, ritual demonstrations of unity and solidarity were
essential components of the process of accumulation and reproduction
of the ‘symbolic capital of honor.’ ”?7
The printer journeymen had similar rituals marking membership.
Like most of the brotherhoods, they generally obligated newcomers to
become members of the local “chapel,” as the chapters were called.
Entrance to the sixteenth-century workplace of the Plantin press in
Antwerp brought with it a payment called the willecoem, and over the
next few centuries more elaborate initiation ceremonies evolved, com-
plete with baptisms, oaths, communions, and so on. If one wished to
work in the trade, one had to respect the demands of the community, or
punishment would be meted out, as Benjamin Franklin discovered in an
eighteenth-century London printing establishment. The abstemious
Franklin never kept “Saint Monday,” opting to work instead on that
unofficial weekly holiday. He not only violated the proverbial dictate of
“Sunday to God, Monday to friendship,” but he also preached to his
fellow workers against beer drinking. And when he refused to celebrate a
“welcome” by not buying a round of drinks for his fellows, he was
27 Josef Ehmer, “Words of mobility: migration patterns of Viennese artisans in the
eighteenth century,” in Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The Artisan and the European Town,
1500-1900 (London, 1997), p. 191.
visited by “the chapel ghost” who punished deviants, this time by

mixing Franklin’s letters and transposing his lines.
It may seem an odd sort of brotherhood to have obligatory member-
ship, but such requirements made it possible to clearly delimit the
community, and by singling out deviants to define more sharply the
rules of belonging. In 1643 the blacksmiths of France functioned in
such a way, for in this year in Dijon the journeyman Nicolas Maillefert
arrived and was greeted by a fellow journeyman blacksmith called Le
Gascon. Calling Maillefert “comrade,” Le Gascon told him that work
could be found for him, but first he was taken to a shop where, as was
customary for new arrivals, he was expected to demonstrate his cap-
ability in the craft. After that test, Maillefert was escorted by Le Gascon
and three other journeymen to the inn of their mére, and there Maillefert
shared food and drink with his new brothers. After the meal, Maillefert
was taken to a room and there, again according to the “customs” of the
brotherhood, he was expected to give up his doublet to the journeyman
in town with the greatest seniority. He was also expected to pay the escot,
or entry fee, to the brotherhood’s local treasury. When Maillefert
refused to surrender his doublet and his cash, he openly violated the
customs of the community and paid for his actions by being roughed up
so badly by the others that he fled to the police.
Violence was clearly a part of the ritualized actions of journeymen,
and this no doubt had much to do with the importance of masculinity as
a marker of community belonging. We have already seen that jour-
neymen in Germany deemed it dishonorable to work in shops alongside
women, and boycotts of shops where women were employed were
common. In 1649 journeymen hatters in Frankfurt barred from their
shops journeymen who had trained in the town of Fulda because the
master hatters of Fulda were known to employ women in their shops as
embroiderers. There was even a wave of riots and strikes that rolled
across Germany in the 1720s when imperial authorities attempted to
force journeymen to work in mixed gender shops. Some masters, like
the saddlers of Linz, Austria, shared the journeymen’s concerns about
manhood, and made the same point about masculinity and community.
These masters demanded that “all . . . masters shall take great pains to
maintain proper male decorum among themselves, and to instruct their
apprentices and journeymen in such male decorum.””8
By the eighteenth century, the religious trappings of the brother-
hoods’ rituals and ceremonies received less emphasis, although oaths
and baptisms are still central. Whether religious or secular, however,
28 Quoted in Wiesner, “Guilds, male bonding, and women’s work in early modern
Germany,” Gender and History 1 (1989), 128.
Communities 255
the ceremonies still mark rites of passage and entry into a

new status
and corps, état, or estate, to invoke the terms they specifically used
to
describe themselves. And by the eighteenth century the brotherhoods
were there to stay, as the authorities simply had to recognize. One
finds a strong sense of pride and self-confidence among journeymen
brothers during this century. One journeyman in eighteenth-century
Paris, when under interrogation by the police and asked his name,
boasted that “he did not know his baptismal [i.e. Christian] name,”
and then defiantly added that “he had no need of registering [with the
police as was required by law] or fear of police ordinances.”29 With the
boast he proclaimed membership in a specific community, and an-
nounced a sense of autonomy and independence that, from the
perspective of the authorities, was insolent and rank insubordination.
The “registration” that so rankled this journeyman was no doubt the
hvret, which, as Kaplan has pointed out, evoked Ja hvrée, or the livery
worn by the lackey. To the journeymen this was a repugnant symbol of
servitude that branded one a member of an inferior social category
from which the journeymen were ever vigilantly intent upon distin-
guishing themselves.
How else to explain the journeymen hatters’ response to a police
ordinance in 1764 prohibiting them from wearing swords? Scores of
these journeymen saw this as an insult to their status, an intolerable
denial of their independence, and an affront to their manhood. So what
did they do? They boldly and openly convened assemblies, which were
illegal, and attended them resplendently attired in braided coats and
lace-sleeved shirts, and sporting swords strapped prominently about
their hips. They seem to have known that some of them would be
arrested for such insubordination because they made a collection
beforehand for a relief fund for any brothers who might land in jail. Six
did.
Communities were held together by systems of interior discipline.
Threats or the actual meting out of violence were a time-tested means to
enforce the rules that defined the group and continued to be a part of
journeymen behavior throughout the history of the brotherhoods. In the
eighteenth century, however, we begin to see some emphasis upon
regulating violent behavior. In this sense the brotherhoods were in step
with a “civilizing process” that was sweeping through society at large.
Sometimes we find brotherhoods regulating themselves against excessive
drinking, fighting, or even cursing, although one wonders what the
bacchanalian Ménétra would have thought about this. The journeymen
*9 Quoted in Kaplan, 294.

turners of Toulouse had a schedule of fines for spitting, for improper

dress, and even for “breaking wind” during assemblies. For behavior
which was deemed to weaken the bonds of brotherhood, fines could also
be levied. Between June 1760 and January 1761 the locksmiths of
Bordeaux fined each of the following the substantial sum of 2 lures:
Claude Le Bourguignon (twice) and Frangois l’Angevin for fighting
with brothers, Jean-Baptiste Le Flammand for cursing, and Francois
Le Languedoc, Jacques le Guépin, and Thomas Le Flammand for
consorting or eating with “renegades,” presumably journeymen who, for
whatever reason, were no longer members of the brotherhood.
Ménétra, so much of whose remarkable Journal of My Life recounts
his life on the road as a compagnon, illustrates in so many ways the
varieties of the ritualized actions of the journeymen and the solidarity
they were intended to secure. Perhaps Ménétra was able to recall in such
vivid detail so many of his experiences (the memoirs were written near
the end of his life) because those experiences were so steeped in ritual
and ceremony, for rituals provide permanence to memories, especially
pressing among a highly mobile population where personal, individual
alliances were fleeting.
Ménétra’s memoirs are full of celebrations of community, and the
sense of belonging to a special group — the compagnons du devoir — fills
much of the text. We read of violence (brawls with other groups,
including the rival compagnons de gavots) and the man’s sexual escapades
(a demonstration of manhood, implied as a marker of belonging to the
brotherhood), but above all we read of the actions of a man keen on
celebrating brotherhood. In one fertile episode Méneétra tells us how, as
first compagnon (or the one with a combination of seniority and recogni-
tion among the confréres of possessing leadership skills) in Lyons, he
organized a huge celebration of Saint Luke’s day. The bash was financed
by contributions from journeymen (and even some employers) to a
common fund, which was to be spent lavishly on food and drink, to be
consumed in common. The festival was to last almost a week, and, as
Ménétra was proud to emphasize, it was designed to bring all the
compagnons du devoir together in one, big celebration of fraternal
solidarity. Workers of all ages and whatever trade spent the week
celebrating the values that journeymen, and Ménétra, prized so highly:
generosity, the sharing of wealth. Celebrants were expected to buy
drinks for one another, to feast together, even to share sexual partners.
Such mutual sharing reveals the ethic of “gift-exchange” so evident in
other journeymen rituals. Everywhere in this festival, and everywhere in
brotherhood rituals, we can see the symbolism of solidarity, of giving
and receiving, of belonging.
Communities 257
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Leicester, 1990, pp. 103-20.
Seaver, Paul S. Wailington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century
London. Stanford, 1985.
Wallace, Peter. Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar, 1575-1730.
Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1994.
7 Ceremonies, festivals, taverns, and games
Ceremonial and ritualized behavior was a common means of creating

and reinforcing social bonds throughout society, but of course the forms
varied from one social stratum to another, and even within them. This
was certainly true within the artisanry. Francesco Sansovina, a late
sixteenth-century Venetian guildsman, left a chronicle which tells us a
great deal about guild festivity and ceremonial. He emphasizes diversity,
saying that they took place “at different times, for different purposes and
different occasions,” and offers a typology of “‘habits and customs,
‘welcomes for foreign princes,’ and ‘ducal processions.’”! Amid this
diversity, however, we can isolate some common forms, among the
more important being the procession and consumption (drinking and
eating).
Processions
Artisans participated in many processions, each with its own specific

purposes but with the general function of defining community (and
often rank within it). Participants in processions became part of a larger
body. The traditional idea of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood was
deeply ingrained in public processions, and not surprisingly, confrater-
nities employed the parade as a very important way to demonstrate
membership and solidarity. Each guild had its own patron saint’s day
during which invariably the members of the guild marched about,
sporting upon their persons, or even on floats, symbols of their craft.
The lacemakers of seventeenth-century Lille, for example, paraded
around town on their saint’s day with a float bedecked with lace ribbons
and upon which they had erected an enormous spindle. Indeed, proces-
sions were opportunities to demonstrate craftsmanship while they
affirmed a claim to a particular social status. In Venice as early as 1268
the guilds marched in a huge procession for the new doge, and among
1 Richard Mackenny, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe,
1250-1650 (Totowa, 1987), p. 136.
258
Ceremonies, festivals, taverns, and games 259
the craftsmen advertising themselves by their appearance were the

furriers, who turned out appropriately clad in outfits trimmed with
ermine, fox, and the skins of wild animals, while the weavers came
attired in the fustians they had made. Doublet-makers marched in white
jackets stitched with fleurs-de-lis and pearls, goldsmiths ostentatiously
wore jewels, while glassmakers carried elaborate flagons.
In 1549 in Lyons artisans were no less taking the opportunity of
procession to proclaim their skill and show their wares, the occasion this
time being a royal visit. Hundreds of sumptuously dressed artisans
participated in an enormous procession that paraded through town. In
1521 Albrecht Diirer recorded his impressions of a procession for the
Feast of the Assumption in Antwerp, and specifically noted the sartorial
splendor of the various guildsmen — goldsmiths, painters, weavers,
masons, joiners, carpenters, butchers, bakers, and so on — as well as the
emblem of each trade. In London the annual lord mayor’s show provided
a stage for guild display. In the sixteenth century the twelve great
companies were joined by sixty smaller livery companies to put on the
show, a festive occasion with a great deal of parading about that became
increasingly opulent in the early seventeenth century. Artillery salutes,
decorated barges, feasts, and of course elaborate costumes sorely taxed
the treasuries of the participating guilds. Spain was no different. In
sixteenth-century Seville artisans rendered visible their sense of com-
munity and advertised themselves by marching in processions, with
guild officers dressed in brilliant uniforms and flying banners of the
guild’s insignia. In 1579 during a procession accompanying the transfer
of the remains of King Ferdinand III of Castile from their place in the
cathedral to a new chapel built for the purpose, two hundred tailors,
hosiers, and doublet-makers marched as brothers of the confraternity of
San Mateo, each wearing breeches trimmed in gold with matching hats.
Fifteenth-century London guildsmen similarly decked their masters in
liveries specific to the craft at all sorts of public events from feasts, to lord
mayor’s days, to processions honoring reigning monarchs.
Clearly processions were about community (and advertising); they
were also about hierarchy. At Blois in 1666 an ordinance from the royal
court of the bailliage ruled that during a general procession in which
artisans were to participate, the “ranks of the trades” be clearly dis-
played by their marching order with the highest ranking (“les plus
qualifiés,” here, but certainly not everywhere, this meant goldsmiths,
clockmakers, and drapers) closing the parade with the rest arranged
from start to finish ascending the social hierarchy.” Fifteenth-century
2 Abel Poitrineau, Ils travaillent la France. Métiers et mentalites du XVIe au XIXe siecle
(Paris, 1992), p. 207.
Coventry showed the same concern for status in its regular communal
processions which made visible a particular hierarchical ordering. The
weavers’ ordinance there stipulated that “In every procession and all
other congregacions for worschip of the citte and . . . of the seyd crafte
. . every man shall goo and sytt in order as he hath byn put in Rule of
the seyd crafte.”?
Drinking and eating
One of the processions best known to historians is the parade of Mardi

Gras, and equally well-known is the close association between this
procession and the celebrations of food and drink. Indeed, it is during
carnival when we can often see how different forms of festive behavior
can reinforce the bonds of community. In Paris in 1739, for instance,
the butchers celebrated their guild festival during carnival, and staged a
beuf gras procession in their neighborhood. Groups of people con-
suming food and drink collectively has long been recognized by anthro-
pologists as a way to define and reinforce group solidarity. These
ritualized practices are arranged on a spectrum of relative formality,
ranging from the formal annual guild feasts that regularly dotted the
calendar to casual gatherings of artisans in one another’s houses, or in
nearby taverns. The rules of hospitality, visiting, and commensality were
yet another part of the mosaic of rules and norms governing artisan
communities, articulating inclusion and exclusion. _
Eating and drinking together implied trust, and groups that ritually
shared food and drink were making a collective statement about them-
selves as a harmonious body. Festive eating and drinking was a hallmark
of guild behavior everywhere. The craft fellowships of fifteenth-century
Coventry met three times annually, and, among other ceremonial
practices, gathered for a banquet. For the Lillois weaver Chavatte, like
all craftsmen everywhere in Europe, craft banquets and beuveries or
drinking bouts were of capital importance because of what they said and
did about community. Admission of a new master to the ranks of a guild
always involved a banquet (usually paid for by the new master), where
the brotherhood was enlarged and renewed. Collective dining could also
be an act of social reconciliation between guilds, as it was in late
medieval Coventry where conflict between two fellowships was explicitly
to be sealed by a meal consumed together.
Journeymen no less than masters availed themselves of food and drink
to bond ceremoniously. With the increasing mobility of journeymen in
> Quoted in Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the
Urban Crisis of
the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), p. 112.
the late Middle Ages, taverns and inns become increasingly important,
not just as “houses of call” or clearinghouses for employment, but more
viscerally as surrogate hearths and homes for men without families.
Coincident with this increased mobility is an explosion in the number of
taverns and inns in European cities. On the left bank of Paris alone in
the fourteenth century sixty could be found, joining at least 200 and
probably many more that went unrecorded in the city as a whole. There
were 87 taverns in Rouen in 1556, a number that swelled to 478 by
1742. In Lille in 1665 83 can be counted in the city, but many more
dotted the suburbs and thereby escaped the city tax. In 1693 in the
Sarladais there were 220, and about 100 years later there were 1,500 in
France’s second largest city, Lyons, and fully 4,300 in Paris.
Alehouses in England were the counterparts to Trinkstuben in
Germany or cabarets and guinguettes in France, and were frequented by
“the mechanick part of mankind,” artisans. A London pamphleteer
remarked in the 1620s that most of the beer consumed in “tippling”
houses was drunk by “handicraftsmen, workmen of all sorts . . .,” while
William Hornby composed a poem in 1619 with the same sociological
observation, but here marked by a hierarchical message: “Tis great
impeachment to a generous mind/A base and paltry alehouse to fre-
quent/It best befits a tinker in his kind/Than any man of virtues
eminent.””*
Given this testimony, it is hardly surprising that in the early seven-
teenth century gentlemen tended to gather at inns, a picture confirmed
by a study of customers at an alehouse in Kent by Peter Clark. Between
1590 and 1610 this particular establishment counted among its clientele
scarcely three in a hundred, while one in three were artisans. The rest
were tramping laborers and domestic servants.
Tudor authorities saw the alehouse as a place of political subversion
and moral debauchery, and a rival to the church as a center for
communal and neighborhood activities. Sometimes clandestine mar-
riages were celebrated there. Alehouses also became locales of many
quasi-religious celebrations like mumming at New Year, and fiddling
and dancing at Candlemas, activities that had once been performed in
the church but with the onslaught of Puritanism had been driven out.
Indeed, alehouses served a variety of needs in the artisan community.
They were places where one might find short-term credit for food,
drink, and a room “on tick.” They also doubled as places where a
craftsman might market his wares, or fence stolen or smuggled products.
And they were a prime site for working out and sealing business deals,
4 Clark, Alehouse, pp. 123-4.

ratified with a drink. In 1672 a foreign visitor to an English alehouse

noted that “no kind of business is transacted in England without the
intervention of pints of beer.”°
Because of its unsavory reputation as a haunt of the disorderly and
dangerous classes, authorities in the early seventeenth century intensi-
fied a regulatory assault upon the alehouse, primarily through a licensing
program. By 1700 the alehouse had been largely tamed, a development
reflected in its changing clientele. The Hanoverian alehouse now
catered to the more “established society,” “persons of good fashion and
credit.” The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were a time
of a relative buoyancy in the economic fortunes (as wages went up and
prices dropped);-and many artisans thus had more disposable income to
spend on the increasingly diversified alcoholic beverages served in the
alehouse. Still relatively class specific, the alehouse nonetheless now no
longer was the haunt of lesser craftsmen or the working and tramping
poor who henceforth went elsewhere for drink and sociability. Dram
and ginshops operated in cellars, backrooms, or sheds in alleys, ex-
ploded in number after 1700. In 1736 in the metropolitan districts of
Middlesex 3,835 dramshops were counted, while William Maitland
estimated that there were 8,659 brandy-shops in London in 1737, or
one for every eleven houses. In Whitechapel and Southwark these kinds
of shops were even more densely packed, with about one in eight
buildings proffering cheap drink. Spirits became the poor man’s drink,
costing less than beer and ale in alehouses.
As we have seen, journeymen everywhere had their. “own” taverns or
alehouses and inns where they might even have their own “club room,”
as it was called in England. Ménétra again is the classic example of the
journeyman, everywhere in his memoirs hailing fellows with drink and
continuing the tradition of conviviality while securing community and
brotherhood. This glazier and his fellows had their haunts on the tour de
France, no less than the early seventeenth-century tailors did (the Fatted
Capon being their place in Dijon) or the late eighteenth-century lock-
smiths (Le Gros Raison and La Ville de Rome in Paris.) Here they not
only socialized, but found short-term credit (often in pawn, usually
from the owner), lodging, advice, information about masters, and jobs.
They often slept two or three to a bed, and idled away the hours playing
cards, rolling dice, and drinking. They drank for a variety of reasons.
Certainly drink was an analgesic for a painfully harsh existence; but
beyond that it provided an alternative sociability that was not available
to them elsewhere, for they were rootless and mobile, far from family
5 Ibid., p. 232.
Ceremonies, festivals, taverns, and games
263
and home. The tavern supplied a hearth, complete with brothers and
mother (the mére). Moreover, as the authorities and the
master
craftsmen well knew, in the tavern journeymen felt release from the
demands of subordination. No doubt this is why taverns everywhere
were roundly condemned by the police as dens of debauchery, thievery,
and violence.
It was not just journeymen who frequented taverns; Chavatte, like so
many master craftsmen everywhere, constantly haunted the neighbor-
hood taverns as well as the more distant guinguettes where the wine was
cheaper because duty free. Indeed, in his memoirs he mentions taverns
and the fellowship he found there many more times than he does his
home and family, about which he says almost nothing. Given the
sources and the state of current research, it is difficult to say what the
social clientele was in these drinking establishments, but we can be sure
that artisans were among the best customers. By the eighteenth century
when the kinds of sources that permit closer and more exact scrutiny
exist, it also seems that a kind of social segregation was occurring
(mirroring, no doubt, the “dissociation” occurring in society at large)
where certain drinking establishments were no longer frequented by
urban elites. In Paris, for example, police lieutenant Lenoir reported
that wineshops were haunted by “soldiers, workers, coachmen, [and]
lackeys.” The only women he mentions are prostitutes, and so the
tavern was clearly masculine space. Probably a third to a half of the
clientele of wineshops were artisans, and the general pattern seems to be
that artisans clustered together, often with their neighbors.
In eighteenth-century Parisian taverns Thomas Brennan has found
infrequent associating between social or professional levels. Between
1691 and 1771 nearly seven of every ten master craftsmen who
frequented a tavern shared table and drink only with other masters.
Journeymen were even more homogeneous (73 percent and 75 percent,
respectively). When artisans of different rank did mix in taverns, in
about one in ten cases we find masters sharing a table with journeymen,
fewer than one in twenty doing so with social superiors, and never with
day-laborers. Journeymen, too, were self-conscious of their rank and
with whom they would raise a drink or share a meal, for fewer than 7
percent of them lifted drinks with day-laborers, and never with anyone
further up the social scale than their masters.
Journeyman and masters may have seldom shared a table, but they
certainly nonetheless did rub shoulders in taverns. Imbibing can
promote an easy familiarity and even a sense of equality, but the
sociability of the tavern could be fragile. The authorities’ concern that
taverns were violent places was based in fact, for many a criminal dossier
is full of assaults, batteries, and even murders that occurred in bars.

More mundane, but no less indicative of the “disorder” that seemed so
prevalent in taverns, is the insubordination of a journeyman wheelwright
in a Dijon bar in 1642. The journeyman, Claude Boulangier, came to a
wineshop that master barrel-cooper Claude Rebourg ran out of his
cellar. Somehow Boulangier’s flagon was knocked to the floor, where it
shattered. Boulangier blamed the servingmaid, and she him. Rebourg,
who had not seen the incident, demanded that Boulangier pay for the
broken flagon. The journeyman indignantly refused, and rained dishon-
oring insults upon Rebourg, calling him, among other things, a cuckold
using the tu form of address. Perhaps aware that he had crossed the
boundary of acceptable behavior and therefore expecting retaliation
from Rebourg, Boulangier then bolted for the door. While clambering
up the stairs he suddenly hesitated, and then loudly farted, captioning
his timely gesture with the words “That’s for you [toy] and yours!”
Boulangier had indeed crossed the boundary, for now Rebourg, deeply
offended by the insults and now this egregious, scatological gesture of
disrespect and insubordination, dashed after him, collared him, and
dragged him to the police.
Games and violence
Loyalties overlapped and criss-crossed throughout artisan culture,

shoring up some communities while simultaneously weakening others.
As we have seen, communities were constituted by inclusion and exclu-
sion, and defining boundaries and thereby members was an inevitable
part of building and reinforcing social solidarity. Of course, the act of
exclusion, of defining brothers against others, carried the threat of
violence along with it. Ménétra, for example, toasted drinks with his
fellows by degrading the integrity of their rivals and thereby effectively
challenging them to a fight. Indeed, we need not look far in artisan
culture to find violence, and its use is often related to the reinforcement
of community. Of course, in the eyes of the authorities, violence is
usually illicit, and so violence and criminality are frequently joined.
Brawling, of which Ménétra was so fond, was certainly a.form of
violent behavior, but it was also a kind of spectacle akin to physical
games. Despite what the authorities and moralists thought, it was not
lawless savagery, but part of a code of behavior that defined commun-
ity and even identity. It provided the opportunity to demonstrate the
masculine attributes of prowess, agility, and courage. Perhaps most
important of all, the field of play could double as a field of honor. All
of these characteristics were part of the extraordinary “wars of the
Ceremonies, festivals, taverns, and games
265
fists” studied by Robert Davis in late medieval and early modern

Venice.
From the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, several
times a year, crowds dominated by artisans would fight for the posses-
sion of a bridge. Called battagliole sui ponti, these ritualized combats
occurred on bridges on the city’s outskirts, and constituted a kind of
popular counter-ritual to the state ceremonies staged in the city’s center.
Where the latter visualized the values of wealth, decorum, social status,
patrician power, and the peace and unity that was at the heart of the
myth of Venice as the “Most Serene Republic,” the artisanal fistfights
inverted this elite ceremonial, using violence to proclaim another com-
munity and a different value system. The battagliole were opportunities
for artisans to stake a claim to honor and to assert public status of their
own. As one of the combatants put it in the mid-seventeenth century:
“The aim of our contests . . . is not to kill or tear each other apart but to
win . . . glory and reputation in the presence of the city.”°®
In these ritualized combats, dominated by artisans, ordinary bridges
became tournament fields while canals, balconies, and rooftops become
grandstands where hundreds, even thousands of spectators gathered
and formed a public opinion that bestowed or withheld honor to the
combatants. Sometimes these “wars” were fought between individuals,
champions of certain groups, other times they were fights between
scores of young men (sticks giving way to fists in the early 1600s).
Combatants marched two abreast to the fighting bridge, declaring their
masculinity to all through their dress and warlike chanting. This was yet
another kind of procession, and women and children came to doors and
windows to cheer them on, and, as Davis writes, “to bear witness to this
collective assertion of male distinctiveness.”’ Indeed, these staged
events were a crucial part of boys becoming men, a rite of passage as
they left the feminine space of the hearth for the masculine terrain of
shop, tavern, and fighting bridge. Fights among the Venetian artisans,
just as with Ménétra and his fellows, either in taverns or on the bridges,
were almost always about honor, and honor was about claiming a place
in society.
Although the single-minded pursuit of status and reputation by the
combatants could be lethal (fifty combatants died in a battle in 1606),
killing was not the purpose of these events; the garnering of reputation
was. The chronicler who left us so much information about these
battles intoned, “Oh, how much power has the [desire for] reputa-
© Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late
Renaissance Venice (New York, 1994), p. 91.
7 Tbid., p. 109.
tion!”® Losers were deeply shamed by their loss, and given the
importance of honor and reputation in the artisan world, the stakes of
these battles were incredibly high. Victors and their supporters might
celebrate for days, in their feasting, drinking, and dancing, renewing
community bonds.
Venetians were fierce partisans of two large groups that sponsored
these battles, the Nicolotti and the Castellani. Membership in these
groups was determined by where one lived, and so loyalty to one’s group
often split trades and even workshops, sometimes with deadly results. In
1670, for example, reportedly
Twelve or sixteen cobblers . . . part masters and part journeymen . . decided
to go see the festival that the Muranesi usually hold in August when they rebuild
their glass furnaces, and, being together at an inn, since they were not in
agreement over their support of the factions [the Nicolotti and the Castellani],
they got into the hottest dispute, to the extent that one of the most ardent
among them (maybe also incited by the anger of Bacchus) punched a
companion in the face. Another, seeing his friend offended, knocked [the
attacker] off his bench onto the ground ... [A]nother pulled out one of the
wide knives [that] they carry, cutting in a blow two fingers off [that one’s] left
hand ... until [finally] everyone had pulled out daggers, knives, cleavers,
swords, boathooks, harpoons, and [even] skewers from the kitchen . . . thinking
nothing of being knocked down, disemboweled, or killed.”°
Three ultimately died in this brawl, and eleven were seriously injured.
The “wars of the fists” slowly disappeared in the late seventeenth
century. Local patricians were the first to desert the audience. With their
withdrawal went much of the financing needed to stage these events and
to celebrate victory afterward and, equally important, the protection
these local patrons provided against the state authorities who now began
passing edicts outlawing the fights. Long wars against the Turks in the
seventeenth century also played a part in sapping the fights of their
interest as they drained the Castellani faction of many of their fighters.
The arsenalotti constituted the core of this faction, and they were called
upon as part of their service to the state to man the galleys that shipped
out to fight the infidel. As a result, the Nicolotti overmatched the
Castellani on the bridges, and the crowds lost interest. The last big pugni
occurred in 1705, the “wars of the fists” no longer considered by
spectators and thus by participants as a source of honor and public
respect. They gave way to more “refined” means of demonstrating
reputation. Growing hostility towards the “brutality” of popular recrea-
tion in Venice, as everywhere in Europe, is evident in the eighteenth
century. In part related to the underlying concern for labor discipline,
° Quoted in ibid., pp. 37-8.
events like the “wars of the fists” were increasingly seen as wasteful of
time, energy and money, and gradually evolved into the more rule-
bound modern sport activities.
One should not overdraw the “lawlessness” or “brutality” of artisanal
recreational activities, however. This behavior may have appeared dis-
orderly or indisciplined to the authorities, but to the artisans it func-
tioned according to very clear norms, even rules. This is especially clear
when we look at another kind of recreation that artisans seem especially
fond of, game-playing.
To be sure, game-playing was often associated by the authorities with
criminal activity and violence. In the fifteenth century an insider turned
police informant betrayed a gang to which he had belonged, and the
subsequent police investigation tells us a remarkable story about the
Coquillards, a Burgundian band of artisan criminals. These men used a
secret vocabulary that only initiates of the group could understand, and
they supplemented the group’s income from thievery by running a
clandestine gambling ring, apparently rigging the operations by using
loaded dice.
Gambling among Coquillards was criminal, and often violent, but
most men in the late medieval and early modern period were extraordi-
narily fond of gambling. Indeed, game-playing in general seems ubiqui-
tous among all social groups, and male artisans were no exception.
References to craftsmen (though rarely women) playing nine-pins,
quilles, bowls, tennis, or boules dot the historical record frequently and
regularly. These games of skill were usually considered by the religious
and political authorities to be at worst harmless diversions, and even
legitimate and healthful. Not so games of chance, their widespread
popularity notwithstanding. All social ranks since the Middle Ages (and
no doubt before) seem attracted, even addicted to games of chance
(including women of the upper classes, at least from the seventeenth
century on), and the avalanche of municipal and royal legislation every-
where condemning such activity attests to its popularity as well as the
inability of the authorities to curb it.
Dice-throwing was an ancient game of chance, and certainly was
being played in the Middle Ages. Card-playing, on the other hand,
appears only in the late fourteenth century, becoming increasingly
popular from the mid-fifteenth. In the current state of research it
would be impossible to prove conclusively that any particular social
rank was more or less given to games of chance in any particular
century, although contemporaries of the seventeenth and especially the
eighteenth century were convinced that they were witnessing an un-
precedented gambling mania among all walks of life, from courtly
society to the world of the artisan to that of the indigent beggar and
criminal.
What historical record we do have leaves no doubt that craftsmen
were given to games of chance; but what meaning and significance they
attached to games, specifically the gaines of chance of dice-throwing and
card-playing, has received very little attention. Certainly play no less
than work played its part in defining artisan culture. Play occurred in
spaces specifically for it, space that was relatively autonomous, and as
such, much like the workshop or the street, it served as another site in
which community and identity could be fashioned. Of course, games of
chance were conflictual in certain contexts, and competition was an
inherent characteristic of them wherever they were played. They could
be, although not necessarily, destructive to community. Gambling could
and did at times emphasize impersonal social exchange. In card-playing
if not dice-throwing, the role individual skill played in success or failure
tended to social atomization, to turn, in John Dewald’s words, “social
connectedness into hostile individualism.”!° Furthermore, some gam-
bling dens were open to all classes, and the free-wheeling gains and
losses, according to Dewald, had an egalitarian effect.
How many artisans were rubbing shoulders with aristocrats around
gaming tables or the pits of cockfights is impossible to know. Samuel
Pepys was struck in 1663 by the social mix at a cockfight: “But Lord!
To see the strange variety of people, from Parliament men ... to the
poorest ’prentices, bakers, brewers, butchers, draymen, and what not;
and all these fellows one with another cursing and betting.”!! The
picture Rétif de la Bretonne sketched of a cardroom he happened
upon a century later was more socially homogeneous. That this one
was only populated by “workers of every trade, and a few small
merchants”’* is perhaps not so surprising, given the growing stratifi-
cation and cultural segregation we know was occurring in early
modern society.
As we ponder the importance of play in artisan culture, consider that
play activity is distinct from “ordinary” life by its locality and duration,
that it constitutes, as Johan Huizinga put it, “a stepping out of ‘real’ life
into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own.?!3 Also
note that the site of play activity, the “play-ground,” is kin to sacred
space. It is sharply delineated, “hedged round,” in his words, within
10 Johnathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Ongins of Modern Culture, France,
1570-1715 (Berkeley, 1993), p. 165.
11 Quoted in Peter Earle, Middle Class, p. 57.
12 Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris (New York, 1964),
p. 150.
13 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
(Boston, 1955;
orig. edn. 1938), p. 8.
which specific and inviolable rules obtain.'+ Third, he observed that

participants in play activity constitute, again in his words, a “play-
community . .. mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and
rejecting the usual norms.”!? Such activity from this perspective can be
interpreted as a form of resistance.
Many historians have explored the relationship between work and
leisure, often in the context of the development of the disciplining of the
workforce. As the work day became increasingly defined temporally, so
too did the time available for nonwork activity, or leisure. The watershed
in the transformation of the relationship between work and leisure, so
this argument goes, has been thought to be industrialization, after which
work became regulated by the clock rather than by the requirements of
the task. There is some truth in this script, as we have seen, but we
would be mistaken if we concluded that the concern for disciplining the
worker was especially an industrial, or even narrowly an economic
matter. Nor should we assume that time devoted to leisure, or more
appropriately, play activity, was any less structured before industrializa-
tion. Philippe Ariés suggested that leisure only exists as a “function” of
work, and that the game is suspect because it risks being more than a
stoppage of work, but a competitive activity. In a sense, he is correct, but
only partially. Play did compete with work, but play should not be
thought of as its negative complement. Playing games, especially games
of chance, were more than activities competing with work, but manifes-
tations of an alternative aspect of social production. This alternative
contested the normative production of the religious and political author-
ities, and, when engaged in by journeymen, at times contested that of
the masters as well. As Eileen and Stephen Yeo have pointed out, leisure
was “at the center of [social] . . . struggles. Far from being a neutral,
free zone it was contested territory, with no party to the conflicts being
in any danger of under-politicizing it ...” Furthermore, they add,
leisure activities were “manifestly about the production of meanings,
ways of living and seeing. . .”!°
If gaming activity can be usefully understood, then, in one sense, as
resistance, what was being resisted? And where? And how? And why?
Rather than posit work as the basis from which an analysis of play can be
drawn, think of work and play as independent activities rendered mean-
ingful by the place they occupy in the system of cultural production as a
1a Tbid.; p10: 15) Thid., p. 12.

class and
16 Bileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, “Ways of seeing: control and leisure versus
Class Conflict,
struggle,” in Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, eds., Popular Culture and
1981),
1590-1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Atlantic Highlands,
p. 150.
whole. In the early modern period, this system was, as we have seen,
rigorously hierarchical, and its authoritative structure voiced everywhere
in terms of discipline. Discipline in the workplace was a fundamental
concern, and so was discipline outside of it. It was a transcendent value,
an organizing principle of society that theoretically ordered the work-
place, the street, the home, the state, the tavern, and the gambling den.
Of course, its application was imperfect and incomplete in all of these
spheres, variously embraced or resisted by the different ranks of society.
Judging from the extraordinary volume of legislation proscribing games
of chance, the places where they occurred, and the people involved, play
activity of this type was construed by the authorities as especially
indisciplined.
France appears typical of the rest of Europe in this regard, and is
certainly the country best studied by historians. In the early eighteenth
century Nicolas Delamare devoted an entire section to “Games” in his
magisterial Traité de la police. He asserted that “Religion and the State”
have a fundamental interest in “disciplining games,” especially games of
chance. These jeux de hasard he closely associated with the disorderly
personal characteristics of “agitation, impetuosity, anger, violent
passion, [and] fury, [traits] that are .. . appendages of these sorts of
games.” He continued, “from all the points of morality that are the
object of police, there are few that have given occasion to so great a
number of laws than games of chance.”!” Judging from the evidence
from, to name just a few cities, Amiens, Strasbourg, Dijon, Paris,
Toulouse, Lille (one could cite countless other cities from all across
Europe) between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, one would find
it difficult to disagree with Delamare’s assertion. Among many laws
Delamare himself cites, consider the following: in 1397 an ordinance
from the provost of Paris reported that
many gens de métiers and other petit peuple leave their work and their families
during workable days to go and play tennis, boules, dice, cards, and 9-pins and
other games in . . . taverns and other public places; many among them, after
having lost everything, are given to rob and to kill and to lead a Verysevilulitcman.
To prevent . . . [such] disorders, [the provost] prohibited persons of this rank to
play during workable days under pain of prison and fine. . . 18
In this ordinance, games of chance and games of skill are lumped
together and collectively proscribed. The multitude of examples that
Delamare offers from subsequent centuries increasingly focuses on
games of chance, supporting the perception held by Henri III in 1583
that the incidence of such games was increasing at an alarming rate.
17 Nicolas Delamare, Traité de la police (Paris, 1729), book 3, section 4, pp. 481, 485.
18 Thid., p. 488.
Ariés is probably right that games of chance represent a fundamental

counter-current to the moralizing of the seventeenth century.
In 1611 Louis XIII was concerned enough about the power of games
of chance to divert good subjects “from the path of virtue” toward
“dissipation,” “license,” and even bankruptcy, that he prohibited
anyone from “assembling to play cards or dice.” In 1643 the Queen-
Regent wanted to support with her authority a discipline so important
to the state that she prohibited académies de jeu (gambling dens), a
position Louis XIV reiterated in 1666, associating these places with
disorder.'? The parlementaires of Toulouse were of the same opinion,
condemning these gambling dens, the games of chance played in them,
and the men “engaged in this disorder.”*° The cascade of legislation
prohibiting games of chance does not end there, but pours over into the
eighteenth century, recurring thirteen times between 1710 and 1781.
Of course, we cannot be sure that increased legislation signaled an
increase in activity, but there seems little doubt that games of dice and
cards were being increasingly organized and situated in specialized
space, even at court — legislation notwithstanding — with king and
minister at the table. Artisans were often singled out in the surviving
evidence as especially eager to engage in these activities. They were
frequent players of dice and card games in taverns at least since the
fifteenth century, and in the berlans (dice dens), académies de jeu, and
taverns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The drive for discipline, of course, also had a religious face, and
gaming was often proscribed for its supposed sacrilegious character.
From another perspective, then, participation in games of chance also
represents a resistance to the moral discipline that the religious and
political authorities were attempting to impose during the early modern
centuries, the attempt to bring “the cloister to the street.”?! Resistance
to such discipline in the form of play, specifically of games of chance,
was taken quite seriously by the authorities precisely because such play
was so independent of it.
Like all play activity, playing games of chance can be interpreted as a
“stepping out” into a temporary sphere with its own rules. Furthermore,
as many anthropologists have suggested, play is very close to religion
conceptually, and as a rival transcendental experience, can pose a
challenge to religion. There are good reasons why religions often
19 Tbid., pp. 490, 491, 495.

20 Arrest de la cour de Parlement de Toulouse, Toulouse, 1681. Bibliotheque Nationale,
Cabinet des Estampes.
21 See James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 1550-1730 (New
York, 1995), chapter 2.
proscribe play activity, especially that which involves chance, fate, or

divination. Both play and religion carve out a stable if fragile order
from a universe without law, and legitimize it by forms of sacralization.
In both chance (or fate) and God reside the terrible unknowable, both
of which can bless or damn, inscrutably bestow bliss or misfortune.
The sacred is ultimately inscrutable, ultimately uncontrollable, but
that does not stop people from feeling a need to hedge it about, to
contain it — in a church, in a tavern, in a tabernacle, on the tapis vert of
the gaming table.
In some ways, games are also like festivals, and many historians have
observed that festivals were ambiguous events. They were regulated by
prescribed ceremonies but simultaneously preserved a flexibility that
permitted invention and even retained the possibility that the tolerated
license could escape the boundaries of the rules and lead to real
disorder. Playing games of chance might be thought of as microcosms of
festivals, or, perhaps more appropriately, as fétes quotidiennes, for much
the same reasons. Both occur in prescribed sites, both dictate their own
flow of time, both allow invention and flexibility within prescribed rules,
both can overflow into disorder. Both, above all, are expressions of, to
recall Huizinga, “stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of
activity with a disposition all its own . . . distinct from ‘ordinary’ life by
its locality and duration.” As autonomous and rival constructions of
order, both festivals and games of chance can, moreover, represent
challenges to the normative order.
Legislation makes it amply clear that municipal no less than royal
authorities often singled out for discipline the “play space” of games of
chance. The repeated card- and dice-playing in these locales equally
demonstrates that the space was contested, that such discipline was
resisted. Historians have often noted that taverns and churches were the
opposite poles of social activity in early modern villages and urban
parishes, with taverns, in a sense, being “‘anti-churches,” and it certainly
is no accident that the legislation prohibiting games of chance and the
places where and the time when they were played are often cast in
religious idiom. Moreover, at times the authors of these texts explicitly
interpret this form of play as an affront to the sacred (as défined, of
course, by the political and religious authorities). In 1745, for example,
a royal ordinance condemned those individuals who “profaned” reli-
gious celebrations by playing games of chance in taverns or académies de
jeu during them, “particularly cards and dice [which] are an assault
against the sacred.”2? In 1583 Henri III had railed against the same
22 Jean-Louis Calvet, Les feux de la société (Paris, 1978), p. 188.

Ceremonies, festivals, taverns, and games 2S
behavior for the same reason. He lamented that the players of games of
chance were playing “especially on [religious] festivals and Sundays
instead of attending to the service of God.”23 His choice of “instead of”
suggests that he viewed such activity as directly competitive with
religious observation.
Municipal authorities spoke in the same voice. In 1600 the town
council of Dijon, for example, proclaimed that
the confraternities of the arts et métiers [were] introduced to honor God and the
patron saints . . . [However,] for some years, instead of the honor and glory of
God and the said saints only things to the contrary have been produced .. .
Derisions and insolences like games of dice and ... cards .. . [lead to] such
blasphemy. . . that God is greatly offended. . .
The Dijon magistrates reiterated the proclamation in 1604, 1607, twice
in 1615, and again in 1635, 1645, and 1646 each time specifically
singling out artisans for rolling dice or dealing cards during divine
service and specifying that such activity took place in taverns and
berlans.** In Lille in 1684, as Chavatte recounts, the town council
similarly was concerned about artisans playing games of chance during
saints’ days, fearing that such a violation of sacred time would provoke
the wrath of God against the entire city.
Religious legislation echoed political legislation, first directed at
clerics in the Middle Ages, and then from the late fifteenth century on,
against the laity. Synodal statutes condemned games of chance on the
grounds that they were an affront to God and created conditions which
led men to blasphemy, debauchery, and ultimately perdition, a stance
endorsed by Saints Charles Borromeo and Francois de Sales. The
Swiss theologian Lambert Daneau conceived of players of games of
chance as “moquers et contempteurs de Dieu.””? Condemnations of
playing games of chance invariably are associated with blasphemy, as
countless decrees, both royal and municipal, illustrate. In 1661 Louis
XIV denounced “the cursing and blaspheming” that accompanied
card-playing and dice-throwing, while Delamare catalogues similar
decrees citing the “execrable blasphemies” uttered in gambling dens.*°
Popular preachers from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries never
tired of asserting that the devil was behind games of chance, Daneau
echoing this position in the late sixteenth century by asserting that
23 Declaration du Roy, 22 May 1583, Bibliothéque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.

24 James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550-1650 (Ithaca,
1988), pp. 247, 251.
25 Lambert Daneau, Nouveaux Traités trés-utiles. . . Le Premier touchant les sorciers. .. Le
Second contient une breve remonstrance sur les jeux de cartes et dez (Paris, 1579), p. 133.
26 Declarations, Arrests, et édits royaux, September, 1661. Delamare, p. 492 (ordonnance de
Police, 6 April 1655); p. 492 (ordonnance de Police, 15 July 1667).
cards were invented by Satan. This Calvinist divine, by the way,

bundled into one book his treatise on games of chance with his tome
on witchcraft, the common thread linking the two being, of course,
diabolism.
Of course, games of chance were not denounced solely on the
grounds of religious morality — they also were seen as leading to the
financial ruin of good families — but the religious idiom is hard to
overlook. If we consider that the profane is only “profane” according to
a specific, if dominant or normative, definition of the sacred, then
understanding play activity as having “counter-sacred” characteristics,
and thus being a form of resistance to the “moralizing effort,” in Robert
Sauzet’s words, makes sense.
Play, especially games of chance, were a form of resistance to the
normative, disciplining morality. It served other purposes in artisan
culture, too, however. Play activity carves out autonomous space, orders
it with rules, and becomes a peculiar and concentrated arena for social
relations. Games, however, especially games of chance, can be both
“disjunctive” and “conjunctive,” to use the anthropologist Lévi-
Strauss’s terms. Police and moralists only saw their disjunctive effects,
with gambling perceived as a threat to the social and moral fabric of
society and the tavern or gambling den as the privileged site of this
disorder. To be sure, artisans as well as men from many other social
ranks were ruined at the game table, and “execrable blasphemies” flew
from the mouths of the losers as freely as the money from their purses.
But artisans also played games of chance for “conjunctive” reasons, as
activity constitutive of cohesive social relations, as useful in the con-
struction and maintenance of community and identity. As the sociologist
Jeremy Boissevain has suggested, play can promote both a sense of
togetherness and identity.?”
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, young artisans gathered in
taverns to roll dice, often divided into teams, with the stakes not cash, or
one’s tools, but rather the next round of drinks. Loser buys. Cheaters
were thought of as thieves, as mauvais compagnons, and refusal to play
often met with violence. To play was to enter a circle of initiates, to join
a community, and to refuse was to renounce the group.
In the eighteenth century games of chance played the same role
among artisans. Ménétra haunted hundreds of taverns during his youth,
and referred to the cohesiveness of card-playing when he casually
observed at one point in his journal when he had been away from his
friends on the tour de France that “the companions” missed him and
27 Jeremy Boissevain, “Play and identity: ritual change in a Maltese village,” in Jeremy
Boissevain, ed., Revitalizing European Rituals (London, 1992), p. 151.
“wanted me to cut cards with them again.”?® The gambling by artisans

in the taverns of Paris, like those of the gin palaces or inns of the cities of
the Austrian Netherlands, was seldom ruinous = drinks or food for all
the players, or perhaps a third or maybe a half of a day’s wage. Similarly,
the English craftsman John Smith rolled dice with a potter for tankards
of beer at an alehouse in Wantage, ultimately setting himself back 10
shillings. Most losses probably were much smaller. Gambling like this,
then, may be thought of as a form of reciprocity among the players, even
a kind of investment in the cohesiveness of the group. Thus cheating, or
keeping one’s winnings, was a violation of sociability and an affront to
the community. In eighteenth-century Paris a group of master artisans
complained of a player who had joined their game and kept his
winnings. The game had been played with the understanding that each
would leave his winnings to cover the bill. The man who kept his was
told to leave the group, and was further informed that he was not
worthy of being in the company of respectable people. He had incurred
a debt of honor, and had not canceled it with, in Brennan’s words, “the
appropriately symbolic exchange of shared consumption.””°
Bibliography
the subject.
Ariés, Philippe, and Jean-Claude Margolin, eds. Les jeux a la Renaissance. Paris,
1982.
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London, 1978.
Davis, Robert C. The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late
Renaissance Venice. New York, 1994.
*Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston,
1955; orig. edn 1938.
Martin, John. “A journeymen’s feast of fools.” Fournal of Medieval and Renais-
sance Studies 17:2 (1987), 149-74.
Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, 1997.
*Thomas, Keith. “Work and leisure.” Past and Present 29 (1964), 50-66.
Yeo, Eileen, and Stephen Yeo, “Ways of seeing: control and leisure versus class
and struggle,” in Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, eds., Popular Culture and
Class Conflict, 1590-1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure.
Atlantic Highlands, 1981.
28 Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York,

1986), p. 66.
29 Thomas Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in 18th-Century Paris (Princeton,
1988), pp. 253-4.
8 Epilogue: artisans in the era of industrial
capitalism
Something happened during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centu-

ries that fundamentally transformed the artisanry of Europe’s cities. Of
course, it is beyond the scope of this book to present this transformation
in detail, but the long history of artisans and artisan culture would be
incomplete without at least an overview, however cursory it inevitably
will seem to specialists of the period, of some of the more significant
developments that led to the eclipse of the traditional artisan. In fact, as
is well known, multiple forces — legal, political, intellectual, demo-
graphic, and economic — converged during the era of industrialization,
and one result was the destruction of the culture of the artisan and the
transformation of his and her identity. Of course, it did not happen over-
night (it took 150 years), but there can be little question that, grosso
modo, Europe’s cities in 1750 held hundreds of thousands of men and
women who more or less conformed to the cultural profile that I have
presented in this book, and that by 1900 very few did. These vestiges of
the past were concentrated in certain places — Germany and southern
Europe. Everywhere, regardless of the remnants of an earlier age,
artisans gradually became something else — shopkeepers, mechanics, or
waged workers — and thought of themselves as such.
In the world of ideas and discourse, over these two centuries, the
eighteenth and the nineteenth, liberalism slowly displaced corporatism
as the dominant idiom which informed social, political, legal, and
economic organization and thought. Proponents of liberalism envi-
sioned a natural economy that performed at peak efficiency only when
governmental regulation was excluded, and a polity that in principle and
in the name of freedom denied the place and influence of special
privilege. The successful march of liberalism toward ideological dom-
inance occurred at the same time that the the population soared and
with it the number of new, urban, department-store-shopping consu-
mers. And, of course, within the ascendant logic of industrial capitalism
which liberalism helped to define, the economy was transformed
according to principles of scale and conformed increasingly to a singular
276
In the era of industrial capitalism PAIGE
notion of a@ market economy. This defined out of existence (and

obscured for future historians) the various kinds of markets (and market
logics) that had existed during the old regime.
From corporatism to liberalism

We might think of liberalism, as we have with corporatism in chapter 1,
as a cosmology, or as a rhetorical system for ordering the world and
making sense of it. Though the historical varieties of corporatism and
liberalism were great, in general it remains true that each articulated
organizing principles which informed social, legal, political, and eco-
nomic life. Where corporatism embraced the principles of paternalism,
hierarchy, and discipline in the social and political realm, and the
economic principle of containing competition and channeling produc-
tion and distribution toward what was perceived as the public good,
liberalism championed the principles of an unregulated or “free”
economy based in what was thought to be “natural” market exchange
(often called “liberty of commerce”), individual self-determination, and
absolute private property.
As Steven Kaplan has recently pointed out, the organizing principles
of both corporatism and liberalism — as all sweeping cosmological
systems are — were imbedded historically in social taxonomies, which in
turn were closely linked to the exercise of power. He cogently asserts
that “the tools of distinction used to forge the classification system are
tools of social and political control . . . This taxonomy must overcome
and in some sense permanently disqualify rival systems . . .”! Kaplan
thus encourages us, rightly, I think, to consider how social, political, and
economic relations intermix to produce the social classification and the
conditions for the appropriation by social actors of certain principles
that inform these relations.
The rhetoric prescribing the corporate regime, as we have seen, was
embodied in most polities of medieval and early modern Europe. As
creations and creatures of political authority, guilds — the classic corpo-
rate institution — were simultaneously empowered and rendered vulner-
able to political authority. As choses du roi, as they were called in France,
their privileges may have been sanctioned by royal authority, but what
would happen to those privileges, indeed, to the corporate system in
general, if political authorities embraced a “rival classificatory system,”
to reinvoke Kaplan’s phrase? In the eighteenth century the official
1 Steven L. Kaplan, “Social classification and representation in the corporate world of

18th-century France: Turgot’s carnival,” in Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp, eds.,
Work in France (Ithaca, 1986), p. 177.
system of classification, corporatism, was increasingly challenged by just

such a “rival system,” that came to be called liberalism; but the displace-
ment of corporatism was hardly rapid or unconflicted. There was
considerable ambivalence within the ranks of political authority, with
cameralists, “Colbertists,” and “liberals” of different stripes all vying for
influence. Even within the ranks of “liberals” themselves there was little
agreement. French “liberals” in the eighteenth century well reveal the
ambiguity: while embracing the principle of “liberty,” some were none-
theless reticent to dissolve corporate bonds for fear of unleashing the
anarchy of social equality. As Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly have shown
for the Austrian Low Countries, other “liberals” and entrepreneurial
capitalists welcomed state intervention in the economy in certain situa-
tions where it protected new industries or seemed to encourage eco-
nomic growth, while still others (who counted guildsmen in their ranks),
as Gail Bossenga and Jean-Pierre Hirsch for Lille in northern France,
Simona Cerutti for Turin in Northern Italy, Jaume Torras for Igualada
in Catalonia, as well as Lis and Soly for the cities of Brabant and
Flanders all show, wanted to preserve corporations because they were
viewed as good bases from which to pursue individual interest and
economic gain.”
French state policy, to cite the best-studied and most notorious case,
reflects well this state of confusion. Despite the inroads the principles of
liberalism had made among “enlightened” economists and philoso-
phers, in a five-year span in the 1760s the crown again tried to
universalize the corporate regime throughout the kingdom (recall the
edicts of 1581 and 1673) yet permitted rural textile producers complete
freedom from corporate regulation. Even more indicative of the confu-
sion and contradictions within state policy and the varying hues of
“liberalism” is the episode of Controller-General Turgot’s attempt to
abolish guilds in February 1776 and his abrupt dismissal in May.
Turgot, a serious philosopher as well as a doctrinaire reformist govern-
ment minister (he penned an entry in the Encyclopédie on epistemology
and was an intimate of Gournay and the physiocrats), saw guilds as
millstones around the neck of the French economy and so asserted that
sweeping them away would liberate commercial and industrial ‘activity.
Turgot, however, was not thinking in simply narrow economic terms,
nor were his opponents in the Parlement of Paris, those staunch
? Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge,
1991); Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les Deux Réves de Commerce (Paris, 1991); Catharina
Lis and
Hugo Soly, “Entrepreneurs, corporations et autorités publiques au Brabant
et en
Flandre a la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” Revue du Nord 76 (1994), 725-44;
Jaume Torras,
“Corporations et liberté de fabrication en Espagne au XVIIle siécle,” Revue
du Nord 76
(1994), 745-51.
In the era of industrial capitalism
279
defenders of corporatism. Both the minist
er and the judges were
fundamentally concerned with preserving hierar
chy and discipline, but
equally fundamentally disagreed on how that
best could be accom-
plished. Turgot sought to replace what he thought
was the artificial and
ineffective hierarchy of corporatism with a natural one,
and so he shared
no sympathy with his opponents who clamored that
his edict would
dissolve the bonds of subordination and was, theref
ore, a blueprint for
anarchy. Turgot, however, did not equate liberty with
equality, instead
asserting that “entrepreneurs or masters” and “simple worker
s” con-
verged naturally in the marketplace, the latter working for
the former
and thereby entering a relation which created a “distinction . . . which
is
based on the nature of things and does not depend at all on
the
institution of incorporated guilds.”? The Parlement of Paris though
t
Turgot’s natural hierarchy a dangerous illusion, and denounced
the
Controller-General’s edict in the name of corporatism and the social
order it supposedly guaranteed. These jurists proclaimed that the
“principle of incorporation” embraced all of France in a “chain” whose
links led directly to the “authority of the throne.”4 To sever one link was
to destroy the chain, and ultimately the monarchy itself.
Turgot lost the battle, but liberalism eventually won the war. Con-
flicted as its history was, over the long run liberalism did prove corrosive
to corporatism in general and to guilds in particular, as the cascade of
liberal-inspired legislation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries abolishing them all across Europe attests. The assault on corpora-
tions may have been largely economically inspired, but corporations
were more than simply means to organizing work; rather, they were a
fundamental unit of the entire system of social representation and social
control. Their dissolution could only have widely felt cultural ramifica-
tions, most notably, for our purposes, in the world of the artisan.
During the eighteenth century, especiallyin England, we find the
language of the law shifting from a defense of traditional collective rights
to one of utility based on individual rights. Artisans had “since time
immemorial” based their sense of status upon widely held notions of
customary legitimacy. As the law shifted ground, however, the artisan’s
claim of traditional, collective rights lost its bite. As a result, craftsmen
were confronted with a new legal world, and had to adapt to it. In
France during the Revolution, the law changed more abruptly, and
artisans promptly responded to it. A declaration by the National
Assembly on August 11, 1789 simply called for the “reformation of the
trades,” but guilds were only officially abolished by the Allarde law
3 Emile Coornaert, Les Corporations en France avant 1789 (Paris, 1968).
4 Kaplan, pp. 197-8.
enacted on March 17, 1791. This law legislated free contract to be the
foundation of the new social order and abolished all bodies (notably
corporations) and any regulation that hindered such relations. The
Allarde law at first glance seems most detrimental to master artisans and
seems to empower journeymen, for now no institutions, like guilds,
legally existed to mediate labor relations as they had done in the past.
Indeed, since 1789 journeymen and even apprentices had been claiming
freedom from the constraints of guilds on the basis of individual rights,
citing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the text of which
was approved by the National Assembly on August 26. This is precisely
what the apprentice wigmakers of Bordeaux claimed in late August
1789, the ink hardly yet dry on the Declaration. They asserted a right to
be self-employed because, they inferred, guild regulations “were abol-
ished by the Declaration.”
Given the history of relations between masters and journeymen and
apprentices that was steeped in a deep concern among masters about
labor indiscipline that during the eighteenth century virtually reached
the point of terror, we might expect the masters to have steadfastly
opposed the Allarde law. In fact, after the law was passed masters seem
most concerned about their property investment in mastership licenses
which, after the Allarde law, were technically worthless. The licenses
were replaced by a new tax, the patente, which was assessed on all
artisans running their own shops. In the wake of the Allarde law masters
spent their energy suing in court for refunds on their Old Regime
investment, but we do not hear the expected outcry against the law in
terms of a breakdown of order prompted by labor insubordination. No
doubt this was because another law more in their interest followed on
the heels of the Allarde law. Three months after the Allarde law was
passed, the Le Chapelier law was enacted, and here all forms of trade
organizations or combinations were declared illegal. This meant jour-
neymen brotherhoods, and so at a stroke the Le Chapelier law banned
the basic institution upon which journeyman power had rested for
centuries. With journeymen brotherhoods now outlawed, the masters’
concern for labor indiscipline was considerably assuaged.
The gradual displacement of corporatism by liberalism affected more
than labor relations, for by sweeping the guild from the historical stage, it
deeply affected an artisan’s sense of status and identity. Guilds, I have
argued, served a fundamental purpose of placing members and non-
members in the social and political firmament, offering a device for social
distinction, differentiation, and rank. As we have seen, Old Regime
> Josette Pontet, “Craftsmen and revolution in Bordeaux,” in Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The
Artisan and the European Town, 1500-1900 (Aldershot, 1997), p. 123.
281
society everywhere in Europe was, to recall
what Harold Perkin said of
England, “a finely graded hierarchy of great subtle
ty and discrimination,
in which men [and women] were acutely aware
of their exact relation to
those immediately above and below them.” To be
sure, life was in part a
Struggle for access to material resources, but it was
also, and perhaps
more profoundly, a struggle over classification, a scramb
le to accede to or
to preserve one’s état, degree, or Stand. Definitions of
property folded
smoothly into this classificatory system. According to the
legal definitions
of property in the corporately organized old regime, alongs
ide absolute
private property which an owner could dispose of as he saw
fit, there was
property in public functions — venal offices, or, for master
artisans,
masterships. This last form of property was critically important
because
it carried legal privilege with it, and so conferred upon the holder his
rank
and public standing. It legally defined his place in society. Most of
the
varieties of property did not survive the French Revolution, the case
nearly everywhere in Europe (parts of Germany seem the notable excep-
tion, where masterships still carried legal sanction and formed the basis
of a cursus honorum within the trades well into the second half of the
nineteenth century),° when liberal political and legal regimes were
established. The drastic narrowing of the legal definition of property
meant that privilege and property were now severed, and so no longer
was property a possession which legally conferred rank and distinction.
For a guild member of the early modern period, his rank had been
represented by his mastership and guild membership, conferring a
distinction which helped secure a living, but also which conferred a social
identity.
Such a hierarchical system had been equally a power structure, and so
distinction and difference were animated by a deeply felt concern for
subordination and discipline of inferiors. Breach of discipline by jour-
neymen or wage-workers reflected more than instability in the labor
market, but also and more dramatically, a perceived threat to hierarchy
and the principle of distinction. Masters were viscerally sensitive to
insubordination by journeymen and wage-workers, and journeymen
were Keen, in turn, not only on contesting masters but also on main-
taining the inferiority of wage-workers beneath them. Both masters and
journeymen invoked hierarchy and distinction to fashion social identity.
When this system of social and political classification was undermined
in the eighteenth century and eventually displaced in the nineteenth, the
guilds disappeared in most places and legally enshrined masterships
© See Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “La Survivance des corporations au XIXe siécle. Une
esquisse comparative,” Revue du Nord 76 (1994), 806.
with them. This left masters and journeymen to their own devices to
attempt to fashion a sense of place and a sense of self in a differently
configured world.
The tidal wave of liberal legislation (especially its legal and economic
aspects) inundated most of Europe in the nineteenth century. The
Prussian Stadtordenung of 1808 followed France’s lead in narrowing the
definition of property by severing its links with privilege and thus formal
rank. Henceforth possession of absolute private property (this did not
include mastership in a guild) was the sole criterion for citizenship.
Elsewhere as well the meaning of property was narrowed, and incorpo-
rated guilds were juridically attacked. During the Napoleonic occupa-
tion of Westphalia and the Rhineland guilds were abolished, but even in
areas where they survived, corporate rights were increasingly limited,
especially concerning regulation over admission to the guild. Indeed, all
across Europe corporate regimes were redefined, disempowered, or
dismantled, and guilds abolished. In Spain guilds met their demise in
1812, in Sweden in 1847, in Austria in 1859. Where guilds were closely
tied to municipal governance, as in southern Germany, or where
indemnities were to be paid master artisans for the proprietary loss of
their masterships, as was the case in Prussia, they lasted longer, but over
the course of the first seventy years of the century, despite intermittent
periods where “reformism” lost influence in government (as in Prussia
in the 1820s), a powerful incursion of liberalism is evident. Prussia
legally embraced freedom of commerce in 1810 (striking a blow at the
corporate privileges of monopoly), and in 1870-1 the unified Rezch
applied it everywhere. In England, even though the livery companies
had lost any practical purchase on guild regulation or even economic
importance in the eighteenth century but remained important as the
avenue to municipal office, the companies lost their legal right to control
the apprenticeship system with the repeal in 1814 of the Statute of
Artificers of 1563.
Status, independence, and skill
By 1870 everywhere in Europe corporatism had been largely dis-

mantled, displaced by liberalism. Certainly such a sweeping displace-
ment could only have a thunderous impact on the lives of artisans,
something of which historians have long been aware. Part of the artisan’s
response, as we will see, was a de facto continuation of collectivist
expressions, even though they were deprived of any basis in law. In the
face of these changes, what was to become of the much-valued sense of
status and the sense of independence that was at the core of artisanal
283
identity? In 1826 John Gast, an English shipwright and leading activist
of the labor movement, wrote:
Let all the useful and valuable members of every trade who wish to appear
respectable, unite with each other and be in friendship with all other trades,
and
you will render yourselves worthy members of society, at once respectable and
respected.’ [my emphasis]
In this call for worker unity Gast was addressing fellow artisans —
masters and journeymen — and he strikes the chords of respect, respect-
ability, worth, and value that he assumes will resonate in his audience’s
ears. These interlocking values spoke directly to an artisan’s identity and
his sense of status. German “home townsmen,” perhaps the quintes-
sence of the corporate-minded artisan, would have understood Gast’s
speech as an appeal to Eigentum, the guildsman’s identity, which was
couched in Ehrbarkeit, or honorable status, in Mack Walker’s words,
“something sensed and displayed and received within a community.”8
The sense of worth, respect, and respectability under the corporate
regime only implicitly assumed a master’s independence; rather, it was
represented by the estate of mastership, a legal and social status
dependent upon hierarchical distinction where masters in the nature of
things were superior to journeymen who were superior to nonguild
wage-workers.
As mastership lost its official place in the late eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, master artisans were forced to devise a new criterion of
distinction, and they seized upon independence. In a sense, there is
continuity to the corporate world, but independence emerged as a more
clearly defined and increasingly urgent value in the nineteenth century.
Masters, no longer distinguishable from their inferiors by corporate
status, now separated themselves from the lower elements, the “ill-bred
workmen,” by a “respectability” overtly resting upon independence. But
how independent were masters in the increasingly new scheme of
things? The redefinition of status from mastership defined through
corporatism to independence, in any case, hardly shifted artisans onto
firmer ground.
Without a legally sanctioned mastership, how was independence to be
represented? Freedom from penury (and from charity) or proletarianiza-
tion was part of it, but once again we must guard against reducing the
meaning of identity directly to economic factors. After all, for centuries
7 John Breuilly, “Artisan economy, artisan politics, artisan ideology: the artisan contribu-
tion to the nineteenth-century European labour movement,” in Clive Emsley and James
Walvin, eds., Artisans, Peasants, and Proletarians, 1760-1860 (London, 1985), p. 189.
8 Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1645-1871
(Ithaca, 1971), p. 101.
an artisan’s sense of status was supported by a sense of custom and

but
legitimacy. Earnings were vitally important — they always had been —
they were important precisely because they had to be sufficient to
support a lifestyle proper to one’s status. Money was traded, in effect,
for forms of cultural capital through which one’s status could be
demonstrated, read, and socially secured. Independence from public
charity was essential, and so money was needed for membership in
“friendly” or mutual aid societies, clubs, and eventually trade unions.
Money (and credit) was also the oil that greased the wheels of informal
yet hardly trivial sociability, needed to buy a round of drinks for one’s
fellows at the local wineshop, alehouse, or pub (the modern form which
clearly emerged in the 1830s).
Among the many meanings mastership carried in the old regime, one
was competency in the craft to create products useful to the public.
Competency, in turn, carried with it a tacit possession of what has come
to be called, somewhat anachronistically, “skill.” As we have seen in
chapter 1, skill meant much more than manual facility, as the co-
ordination of perceptual and motor activity. Rather it was a quality, and
a possession. Apprentices and journeymen destined for mastership were
invested with this quality through educational training, while the wage-
worker, who may have been able to perform certain tasks adequately
and even as well as some journeymen, was not in possession of the full
know-how, the “mysteries” of the trade. Masters shared knowledge with
a chosen few, thus keeping the labor force, to recall Sonenscher’s term,
“dis-integrated” and therefore, hoped the masters, more easily disci-
plined. Masters knew well that knowledge and authority were con-
nected. The quality and property of skill, therefore, for all of its
importance in the fashioning of marketable products, was a critical
indicator of status and was used to discipline the workforce. It was
possessed by the master and the journeyman destined for mastership,
and so created a core of “skilled” workers surrounded by a periphery of
“unskilled,” a division that articulated rank hierarchy and the distribu-
tion of power within the workplace according to its possession.
John Rule confirms this picture for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century English artisans by demonstrating that skill was a property and
thus a “distinguishing mark separating the artisan from the common
labourer.” A technical aptitude in the fashioning of products, true, but
skill gained its meaning as symbolic capital, the possession of which
“entitled its holder to dignity and respect.” It was conferred by a
community and was protected as a “right” by tradition and custom.’
9 John Rule, “The property of skill in the period of manufacture,” in Patrick Joyce, ed.,
The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987), p. 108.
In the era of industrial capitalism 285
Sonenscher similarly emphasizes that skill was invested with meaning in
France by its place in a system of difference and distinction. Focusing
on the world of journeymen, he points out that prowess to fashion an
item well was certainly valued among these men, but such skill was
valued for social reasons as much as economic ones. In a world where a
vast pool of laborers worked in trades with a “relatively limited range of
materials” and that saw few “rigid technical and occupational divisions,”
there was a wide dissemination of similar abilities. So when journeymen
brotherhoods ritually demonstrated the feats of prowess of their
members in competitions, they were securing their community and
articulating its boundaries by transforming “similarity into difference in
a world in which too many people could do the same thing.”!°
Recent research on women’s work has deepened yet further our
understanding of the meaning of skill. The “skill”? of female artisans had
been undergoing a process of devaluation for centuries before industrial-
ization, a process which had nothing to do with technology, factories, or
fixed capital. Instead, since the devaluation of female skills was inversely
related to the definition of skill by men, such “deskilling” was a product
of particular social and gender relations. Among the lessons we learn
from this gloomy process is that it is not enough to define skill as manual
facility, nor is it sufficient to define skill as knowledge of the properties
of materials and how to assemble them into products, however necessary
that is. As we have seen, seamstresses, after all, according to this
definition, were skilled, yet they were construed by the men of their
world to be “unskilled.”
Equally “unskilled” in the eyes of male master artisans and jour-
neymen were the “chamberers” or “roomworkers,” those clandestine
workers we met in chapter 3. Judging just from their technical aptitude,
many of these workers would seem “skilled” to us, but judging from the
avalanche of complaints by master guildsmen of the widespread exis-
tence of these clandestine workers and the legislation designed to
regulate them, they were disparaged as “unskilled” and, as the French
language of the time tellingly put it, sans état, or literally “without rank.”
Skill, then, was as much a cultural construct delimiting boundaries of
a community defined by status and a sense of difference as an indicator
of the technical capacity of a worker. For masters skill, or the lack
thereof, helped articulate a system that created a hierarchical slot (as
well as a division of labor) for women, for apprentices, for journeymen,
10 Michael Sonenscher, “Mythical work: workshop production and the compagnonnages

of eighteenth-century France,” in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work
(Cambridge, 1987), p. 56.
for “roomworkers,” and, of course, for themselves. Hegel perceptively

pointed out that the evidence of a master craftsman’s “skill” was not his
technical wizardry, but rather his membership in his guild community.
Such membership conferred a collective status upon the guildsman via
his mastership, and granted him a sense of possessing a “property in
skill” which marked him off, in his mind, from others supposedly
without it. Through mastership the property in skill was, in theory,
legally secured. Skill so construed was imbedded in a male master
artisan’s identity which was rooted in the soil of rank and hierarchy.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we find the defense of skill
and its association with status and dignity even more emphasized by
artisans than it had been previously. This is because the status associated
with a possession of skill and the knowledge and power it carried was
being increasingly contested, threatening the degradation of the master
artisan and the “skilled” journeyman alike. The property of skill was a
frontier to be held against the unskilled (including many women), the
numbers of whom were rising with the burgeoning population of the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was the real threat of tech-
nical innovation, mechanization, and factory production. These new-
comers to the economic scene did not throw many people out of work,
but they did rob them of their property in skill and so undermined their
status. Artisan technique had been based on rule of thumb estimations,
a way of knowing that was under attack in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries by scientists and engineers whose knowledge was
based on a rational and analytical evaluation of procedures and mate-
rials. The largely organic artisanal language of thickness, weight, and
height was challenged by the mechanistic language of physics, which,
moreover, was embraced by the administrative elite in government who
yoked such a way of knowing and thinking about production with the
idea of progress. They tried, as Daniel Roche writes, “to place technical
invention under the tutelage of scientific experts.”!! Thus in France
during the 1780s under the administration of finance minister Jacques
Necker, 1300 inventors were registered by a government bureau. Re-
flecting the artisan’s ability to adapt to new conditions, note that two out
of three of the inventors were urban artisans, two-thirds of them hailing
from provincial cities, not the capital.
The invasion of a different way of knowing about physical work was
joined by inexorable changes in the organization of production. Mass
production and standardization further fragmented artisanal knowledge
and recast relations of authority. Loss of independence and “deskilling”
11 Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales (Paris, 1997), p. 65.

did not simply erode the skilled artisan’s economic security, although it
did that. More broadly, it further contributed to the replacement of the
traditional template against which status was understood, and through
which artisans knew who and what they were. This is one reason why
English masters defended the apprenticeship system long after livery
companies and guilds had any economic significance. It is also why
masters struggled for the better part of the nineteenth century to
resurrect corporatism, even if it had to be sans /a lettre.
Collectivism
William Sewell, Bernard Moss, and Cynthia Truant have eloquently

and persuasively written about nineteenth-century French journeymen
drawing upon a collectivist tradition in their effort to staunch the
erosion of their status which was ebbing as their property in skill was
threatened. We now know that there existed clear connections between
corporate craft traditions and early forms of socialism, and that there
were remarkable continuities between the “rites of labor” that defined
the journeymen brotherhoods of the old regime and those of the era of
industrialization. Sewell has found that even in 1848 skilled workers
were still thinking in terms of distinction determined by membership in
états, evidence of a reconfiguration of corporatism, and that “unskilled”
workers were so designated not because of a glaring lack of technical
aptitude, but because they had no corporate traditions. This picture
which portrays connections between worker collectivism and Old
Regime corporate attitudes has been confirmed by scholars working on
Italy, Spain, Britain, Germany, and elsewhere. Each of these accounts
has been framed within the historiographical tradition of locating the
origins of trade unions in particular and of the working-class movement
in general.
Space does not permit recounting here the histories of trade unionism
or of the working class movements in Europe during the era of indus-
trialization, but it is worth briefly considering in two significant ex-
amples — Britain and Germany — the varieties of trajectories from an Old
Regime artisanry that such formation could follow. In Britain, the
“tramping system” preserved strong continuities with the old regime
until the 1840s. A journeyman on the road could expect a friendly
reception at his trade’s house of call and a night’s hospitality there. He
could also expect that his brothers, as they had for centuries, would
either find employment for him, or point him toward a town where
work might be available. These networks could be extensive, and the
numbers of tramping journeymen huge. For example, in 1800 20,000
journeymen tailors were organized in a network that spanned forty

houses of call, and despite the masters’ demand for action by the
magistrates against the houses to “destroy communication” among the
workers, in 1818 the network was still in place. So pervasive in so many
trades were these tramping networks that R. A. Leeson has concluded
that “the tramp helped build the [trade] union ... Thanks to the
tramping system, the unions were able to grow, defying both the
employers and the law. As both a passive and active factor, ‘tramping’
brought the nineteenth-century trade unions into being.” !?
Tramping certainly played its part in the British worker movement,
but we also must consider the role played by the “friendly societies.”
The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 outlawed worker combina-
tions whose objective was to seek wage increases or to oppose cuts, to
alter the length of the work day, and of course, to call a strike, but these
laws left untouched the friendly societies. Almost immediately suspi-
cions among lawmakers and employers arose about these organizations
being “frequently made the cloak . . . [offering] commodious opportu-
nities to foment sedition and form illegal combinations.” And it was not
long before a government official could pronounce that the Combina-
tion Acts had been “in general a dead letter upon those artisans upon
whom it was intended to have effect.”!? To make matters worse for the
authorities, these clandestine but widespread artisanal “societies” began
to transcend trade boundaries as journeymen began to share the recog-
nition that the problems facing individual trades were in fact universal.
Between 1820 and 1826, for instance, steam-engine makers, smiths,
papermakers, shipwrights, pottery-makers, and others organized into
one trade society pitched toward mutual support in the form of financial
solidarity during strikes.
The growth of labor unions and the economic slumps of the 1840s
combined to signal the approaching end of the traditional British
tramping system. The waves of industry-wide mass unemployment and
the means of more rapid travel and better communication undermined
the need and the effectiveness of finding employment by hitting the
road. Workers in the industrializing sectors of the economy came to
adjust themselves to the boom and bust cycles of early industrial
capitalism, and increasing numbers of them opted to stay home during
periods of unemployment and ride out the storm until the production
cycle resumed. The workplace in these sectors was undergoing a steady
12 Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade
process of structural change, and some artisans were redefining their

role within it. As Clive Behagg observes, many a journeyman/worker
increasingly abandoned the language of customary rights to justify his
relations with his master/employer while he increasingly adopted the
language of the market. In 1869 a member of the Operative Gunmakers
Society gave an address to the Birmingham Society of Artisans on the
topic “Trades’ unions: are they consistent with the laws of political
economy?” a question he answered decidedly in the affirmative.
The trajectories toward working-class formation from craft traditions
are varied in Germany, too. As in France and Britain, some historians
have pointed to apparent connections between the traditional craft
system and the rise of the labor movement, and likewise they have
focused on the 1830s and 1840s as a pivotal time when collective worker
organizations like friendly societies and workers’ education clubs re-
cruited their membership largely from journeymen tailors, shoemakers,
carpenters, masons, and so on. The German labor movement was anti-
corporate in its rhetoric, a clear difference from the French experience,
but in many other ways they were similar. Other historians, however,
have noted the continued legal existence of guilds throughout the first
half of the nineteenth century (in contrast to Britain and France), and
have concluded that the craft tradition (where the master was still very
much the dominant figure in the system of labor discipline due to the
survival of corporate rules) remained relatively independent of the
worker movement which grew parallel to, and not out of, the craft
tradition. In fact, these historiographical approaches are not as far
apart as they may seem, although most historians today would tilt
toward the first interpretation rather than the second. As Jurgen Kocka
reminds us, clear evidence exists that in some places, like Hamburg,
“local ... unions grew directly out of previously existing journeymen
organizations.”!4 Moreover, Kocka insists, by the 1860s the free labor
contract had been legally established everywhere and corporate laws had
been rescinded. The tramping system of journeymen (Gesellen) had
already buckled and begun to break apart as a result of the economic
slumps and unemployment of the 1830s and 1840s, and the industriali-
zation boom of the 1860s and 1870s largely finished them off. In this
crucible of structural change, German journeymen/workers, like their
British counterparts, adapted to the new circumstances, not only or
even primarily reacting defensively against innovation and change, but
proactively, fashioning the worker movement into a movement of
ntury
14 Jiirgen Kocka, “Craft traditions and the labour movement in nineteenth-ce
Power of the
Germany,” in Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick, and Roderick Floud, eds., The
Past (Cambridge, 1984), p. 103.
emancipation and demanding a fair share of the rewards of the eco-

nomic progress that liberals were forever crowing about.
Most of the historiography about the fate of artisans in the nineteenth
century has, as we have now seen, been framed by questions about the
origins of the workers’ movement. What such a perspective invariably
leaves out is the trajectory of the master craftsman. We can hardly find
it unexpected that the master artisans of Germany (many of them
“home townsmen”) fought, vainly as it turned out, to roll back the
liberal dismantling of corporatism at the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848
(although journeymen lobbied here for easier entry into guilds), a
demand they resurrected in the 1860s. Less well known, however, is the
resurgence of corporate ideology among master artisans in Napoleonic
France. Demands for the institutional restoration of corporate struc-
tures in commerce and industry rested on the familiar argument that
such structures would maintain social and economic stability, assure
high quality products, and discipline labor. In 1806 a butcher’s words
would have made an eighteenth-century parlementaire proud: “master-
ships and guilds suit a monarchical state; they are one of the mainstays
of this kind of government; they help it to police the secondary and
lower classes of society.”!> Corporatism was not resurrected to become
the law of the land once again, but technically illicit employer associ-
ations of master artisans nonetheless were formed in the first two
decades of the nineteenth century. Membership per force was voluntary,
and these groups never counted a majority of masters in their ranks, but
it is telling that a syndicate of master shoemakers established in 1818
was dominated by the small masters, and their primary goal was to
bring discipline to the labor market by controlling the employment
agency of the trade. The resurgence of extra-legal corporatism found
expression not only in working-class trade unionism, or even socialism,
but also in the employer associations of tradesmen and shopkeepers
that dotted the business landscape of the nineteenth century, and not
just in France.
The collective spirit among masters as well as journeymen also found
expression in the burgeoning of “friendly societies.” In 1793 in London
such mutual aid organizations (close descendants of Old Regime con-
fraternities) enrolled at least 650,000 members, by 1803 704,000, and
by 1815 925,000. These figures are undoubtedly underestimates
because they are based on only those societies that registered with the
authorities, and in 1800 probably only about half of them did. In that
year 654 societies registered in Middlesex, 254 in the City of London
15 Michael Sibalis, “Corporations after the corporations: the debate on restoring
the
guilds under Napoleon I and the Restoration,” French Historical Studies 15 (1988),
721.
alone. These societies grew while the Combination Acts of 1799 and
1800 were on the books, no doubt because they were not covered by
those Acts. We find similar developments in France. In Paris in 1820
there were 120 artisan mutual aid societies, while just two years later
there were 143 involving sixty crafts and counting 13,000 members.
Some of these societies were craft specific, many others were not, but
whatever their occupational specificities, they continued to expand, so
that by 1846 there were 262 in the capital alone.
Industrialization
For most of the twentieth century historians have debated, often

heatedly, the processes of industrialization from the mid-eighteenth
century well into the twentieth. Of course, the consensus for most of
this time was that an Industrial Revolution occurred. In the past twenty
years, however, many historians have opted for an evolutionary view
instead. Whatever the pace of change, however, few disagree on its
eventual magnitude. We have long known that industrialization had an
impact on artisans and handicraft production, but only recently have
they been the subject of close and systematic scrutiny. Among some of
the focuses of these more recent studies have been the following, each of
which was important to the status, identity, and experience of master
and journeyman artisans: the reformulation of the role of the state in
economic activities; the uneven pace and impact of capital accumulation
and distribution through credit; the emerging integrated, capital-
intensive economies of scale alongside continued undercapitalized han-
dicraft and provisioning trades that remained dis-integrated or ancillary
to the larger integrated enterprises; and changes in the organization of
labor influenced as much by cultural factors as purely economic ones.
Technological innovation, mechanization, and factory production,
though not ignored by historians, no longer hold pride of place. Several
fact, that
historians of both England and France have demonstrated, in
production was structurally transformed in various sectors of the
and nineteenth centuries but
economy by capitalism in the eighteenth
without either mechanization or factories.
ization or
The appearance of industrial capitalism without mechan
rethink ing about working -class
factories has prompted considerable
of the cultural factors involve d in
formation, as has an appreciation
opher Johnso n has observe d that “a
such formation. Moreover, Christ
ans of the industri al transit ion has
good deal of our work as histori
in which that vast, amorphous, and ill-defined
concerned the ways
of handworkers called ‘artisans’ experienced the profound
category
legal and economic changes of the age.”!° Most of the literature on

artisans has focused either on their radical politics or their proletariani-
zation. There is truth in these scripts — some artisans were radical and
some were proletarianized — but again it leaves out of account many
sectors of the artisanry. Indeed, sucha narrative omits many of those
artisans that have been the focus of this book, notably the provisioning
trades and the small commodity producers, most of whom were master
artisans, and a vast number of whom all across Europe preserved their
artisanal workshops until the 1860s, even the 1880s in some parts (like
southern Europe). Moreover, scholars have discovered that the indus-
trial transition did not immediately destroy small-scale production, but
rather for a time (late into the nineteenth century) produced a whole
new set of possibilities for small commodity producers. Only in the last
quarter of the century, even later in some parts of Europe, did mechan-
ized, factory production, in a quantum sense, overwhelm the master’s
shop. Still, prior to that masters everywhere were nonetheless affected
by the gradual transition to industrial capitalism. Proletarianization was
not the only means by which capital subordinated labor, and becoming
a factory worker was only one of the trajectories an artisan might follow
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Although many masters retained their own shops, working the inter-
stices of large-scale industry or mass marketing or directing their
energies toward neighborhood provisioning, they nonetheless found
their independence and security increasingly undermined by limited
access to credit, raw materials, labor, and markets. In England, this
process was well under way by the mid- to late eighteenth century.
Coupled with the dismantling of corporatism, the assault of industrial
capitalism prompted the ideal of independence to be thrown into relief,
an independence that was increasingly illusory. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries the ambiguous world whereby the ideal of indepen-
dence rested awkwardly against the dependency that resulted from
liberalism, the extension of capitalism, and galloping population growth,
and thus more consumers, can be seen in a variety of trades in England,
France, Germany, Austria, and no doubt elsewhere. In mid-nineteenth-
century England, capitalistic industries like sawmilling, ironmaking, and
steelmaking generated an increase in work for the small workshop.
Likewise steam-driven sawmills turned out wood that still had to be
fashioned in the carpenters’ and furniture-makers’ shops, while the
enormous furnaces of the Black Country provided large quantities of
16 Christopher Johnson, “Artisans vs. fabricants: urban protoindustrialization and

the
evolution of work culture in Lodéve and Bedarieux, 1740-1830,” Mélanges de l’école
francaise de Rome 99:2 (1987), 1047.
material to thousands of local smiths toiling in their own shops. The

cutlers of Sheffield similarly worked the metal rolling out of the local
steelmills. These shops were organized in the traditional manner, with
masters taking on or laying off workers and journeymen (labor was
abundant due to population growth) as industrial output and the pace
of demand dictated.
Yet beneath the similarities with the old regime there lurked a
difference, for the seeming independence was built increasingly on a
foundation of dependency. No longer did masters, or shopkeepers, for
that matter, have much control over the access to their materials, now
provided by merchant industrialists, factors, and wholesalers. Moreover,
masters came to rely on a steady flow of orders, often from only a few
middlemen or owners of factories. The same can be said of access to
credit and to markets which was increasingly controlled by merchant
operations. Of course, even in the old regime masters were not entirely
independent either, especially in emerging economies of scale and those
like textiles organized on the putting-out system. But the urban master
tailor, shoemaker, cabinet-maker, cutler, butcher, or baker was not as
encumbered by these dependencies as his descendants experiencing the
transition to industrialism would be.
Population growth across Europe in the late eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries triggered overcrowding and underemployment in most
trades, and the market for consumer goods which moved more regularly
by developments in the transport system, expanded dramatically and
became increasingly well integrated. Joined by the deregulation of
prices, craft entry, production levels, and the labor force which the
credo of “liberty of commerce” so dear to liberal regimes would bring in
its train, these forces structurally altered most trades in the towns of
Europe well before mechanization and factory production became the
norm. This is especially true for the garment trades, where the trajec-
tories toward proletarianization or dependency are quite evident. In
Paris between 1800 and 1850, for example, tailors had to contend with
an influx of migrants from the provinces at the same time that confection
(the production of ready-made clothing) was taking hold. Confection
marketing
was based on cheap materials, volume production, mass
and sweated, cheap labor
increasingly through department stores,
the master’s shop), performed
(outwork rather than work done in
as sweated
increasingly by women. By 1850 real wages had plummeted
of the workforce. This is
labor represented a shocking 83 percent
but what happened to the
proletarianization by most any measure,
higher quality clothing to consu-
master tailors? Some, of course, sold
others were driven
mers dissatisfied with off-the-rack apparel, but many
to confection. Overcrowding in the trade and the competition of out-

working increasingly brought master tailors into a dependency upon the
merchants who provided the raw materials, the credit, and the outlet to
markets.
The nineteenth-century Parisian tailors epitomize the processes of
proletarianization and dependency without the factory, and it is a tale
that can be told of other consumer-oriented trades, and not just in
France. Indeed France, which experienced population growth but
relatively slower than that felt in Germany and England, seems to have
suffered relatively less from proletarianization. In Germany, laws per-
mitting free migration and unrestricted entry into crafts led to over-
crowding and underemployment, and in trades like the garment crafts
this drove many journeymen and poorer masters toward proletarianiza-
tion (87 percent of craftsmen in these trades in 1890 were solitary
outworkers working for piecerates or wages).
But proletarianization was not the universal fate of the provisioning
tradesman or the small commodity producer in general. Small produ-
cers able to maintain their shops and the appearance of independence
remained numerous. In 1803 England and Wales counted 25,000 shop-
owning artisan families and another 74,500 shopkeeping households.
The description of Britain as the “workshop of the world” was apt. In
London in 1841 a census listed 840 separate craft occupations, re-
flecting the traditional response to increased demand which was the
continual subdivision of the steps of production within “crafts” and the
reduction of production to a series of separate component tasks. In
London a decade later a census reveals that three-quarters of London’s
firms still employed fewer than five men, and 86 percent fewer than ten.
And this probably underestimates the actual number of firms, especially
the small ones, for we find listed in the 1853 Watkins’ London Directory
2,555 shoemakers and 3,207 master tailors where the census of 1851
listed only 1,841 and 1,782 respectively. Still, just going by the census,
one is struck by the numerical preponderance of small-scale enterprises:
97 percent of the bakers employed four or fewer workers, while the same
can be said of 79 percent of the carpenters, 72 percent of the cabinet-
makers, 71 percent of the shoemakers, and 70 percent of the tailors. We
can find only eighty enterprises employing more than a hundred
workers, and just twelve over 300. Such a profile looks remarkably like
the bipolar, core—periphéry structure of the old regime, especially when
we observe that many of the smallest firms in fact were outworkers
employed off site by the larger ones that, increasingly engaged in
production of scale and having the means for high and sustained capital
investment, clearly had a competitive edge over the smaller ones.
In Germany in 1875 40 percent of all persons active in the industries

of factories, craft, mining, and building were self-employed, running
enterprises with fewer than five employees. Likewise nineteenth-century
Paris has been called “the city of the small workshop” par excellence,
responding to mounting demand as the craft economy always had, by an
increased division of labor. Indeed, even with technical innovations we
associate with industrialization and factories — the steam engine, the gas
and electric motor — we find right to the end of the century many of these
small shops using the new machinery on a small scale. In 1906 we still
find that half of the French workforce was employed in firms hiring five
or fewer workers. This has led many historians to conclude that indus-
trial production (in France especially) seems not to have grown by
following the path of factories or capital-intensive technology, but rather
through the proliferation of wide varieties of dispersed production.
But, of course, large industrial production did come to dominate the
economy — no historian disputes that — but more gradually and certainly
later than has often been suggested. Much current research points
toward the last quarter of the nineteenth century in some parts of Europe
(Britain, Germany, the Low Countries, to a lesser extent, France), the
early twentieth century in other parts (southern Europe) when we see a
quantum transformation in production, processing, and retailing. This
transformation was enabled by regularization of demand smoothed by
the dramatic changes in transport and communication, price elasticity,
capital- intensive, and increasingly standardized production culminating
in the assembly line, and, ultimately, the scientific management princi-
ples of “Taylorism” and “Fordism.” Amid such changes, artisans did not
suddenly disappear, but they did become something altogether different,
gradually but ineluctably more integrated into production and distribu-
tion networks that were controlled by large capital. Intensive subdivision
of tasks and subcontracting continued apace, and as independence
became increasingly a chimera, artisans gradually evolved into me-
chanics, shopkeeprs, or waged workers. In Germany, where industrializa-
on capital
tion after 1870 was rooted in large-scale finance and centered
workshop production declined
goods production, small commodity
noticeably. In 1882 60 percent of German industrial-manufa cturing
employees, but by 1907 only 31 percent
enterprises still had five or fewer
of the workforce was employed in large
did. In France in 1906 10 percent
factories of more than 500 employees.
ues to affirm,
What these figures suggest, and current research contin
ntury of a dual econom ic structu re which
is the existence from mid-ce
ial face, but one that saw the balances
had an artisanal and an industr
artisan al favor. The situati on in Gronin gen
tilting decidedly away from
illustrates this well. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century
artisans accounted for about three-quarters of the labor force there, a
total labor force which had grown between 1889 and 1910 by one-half.
These were no halcyon days for artisans, however, for upon closer
inspection we can see that Groningen’s manufacturing economy was
bifurcated, made up of large and small mechanized firms on the one
hand, and large and small craft enterprises on the other. Thus we find a
dualism in the industrial economy at large and in the labor market in
particular, with nonmechanized artisanal enterprises increasingly incap-
able of competing with the firms that used the new gas and electric
motors in their enterprises geared toward mass production. Those
artisans that were not eventually absorbed into the industrial workforce
and workplace sank into a position of inferior status and relative penury.
From artisans to workers, mechanics, and shopkeepers
There was no legal restoration of corporatism in the nineteenth century,

of course, and its gradual if relentless displacement by liberalism,
capitalistic market culture, and, in many places, an intrusive state
apparatus, ultimately recast the mold within which artisans fashioned
their identity. Perhaps the fate of the German “home towns,” those
polities that in many ways expressed in rarefied form the essence of the
European artisanry, can best illustrate this transformation. The artisan
of “home town” society thrived in an environment that kept the imperial
government out of local political and economic affairs, and in this
“incubator,” as Mack Walker called it, the artisan was keenly aware that
“his personal identity was found in the web and walls of familiar
community.”!’ Dramatic political, administrative, and economic
changes in the nineteenth century broke the incubator, especially after
mid-century. State administrators, notably in Prussia but also in many
other duchies and principalities, sat on communal councils as part of a
general expansion of central government bureaucracy, with the result
that the “state had replaced community as guardian of internal stabi-
lity.”!8 Converging with political changes were economic ones, as the
growth of banking, credit, investment, integrated transport networks,
and increasingly concentrated heavy industrial production showed that
the economy was moving in regional and national directions and rested
more and more on interdependence. These forces destroyed the basis of
“home town” community, and the artisans within had to seek a different
grounding for their identity.
17 Walker, p. 406. 18 Tbid., p. 408.

Corporate attitudes among craftsmen did not disappear at the same

pace everywhere; they were largely gone from England by 1850, from
France probably by 1890, while they lingered longer in Germany. In any
case, by the turn of the twentieth century one would be hard pressed to
find an artisan who self-consciously defined himself in terms that his
forebears of a century or two earlier had. Instead, he was now a skilled
worker, a mechanic, a shopkeeper, and he thought of himself as such.
Women, as we have seen, never had much claim to artisanal identity in
the old regime, and the age of industrialization brought no change on
that score. If anything, the incursions of the middle class ideal of
domesticity and the assumption that the woman’s place was in the home
more and more took hold in the world of the mechanic and shopkeeper,
if not yet the waged worker.
The nineteenth century also brought a crystallization of the processes
that separated the artisanry into productive and retail segments that
historians have traced to the eighteenth century in some trades but to
the nineteenth in many more, and this no doubt is central to the story of
the transformation of the artisan. The important point is that, however
segmented the artisanry had been in the Old Regime, most artisans
entered the nineteenth century with a corporate sense of themselves and
exited it without one. In the interim, they had passed through a filter
that dismantled the political, legal, and intellectual framework of corpor-
atism, and, while suffering the unrestrained violence of the capitalistic
market, left them to their own devices to fashion a new meaning to their
existence, and a new sense of who they were. The traditional conceptual
tools for making sense of the world gradually ceased to be adequate to
reduce it to meaning and to place oneself satisfyingly within it. The
template against which status was measured and identity was constituted
was irrevocably transformed, rendering the question for historians —
“what was an artisan?” — necessarily in the past tense.
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Index
Abbeville, 200 Barcelona, 35, 80, 167-8, 228, 230, 233,

Aix-en-Provence, 229, 246 249
alehouses, see taverns and alehouses barrelmakers, see coopers
Allarde law, 279-80 Barry, Edward, 14
Althusius, Johannes, 24 Becher, Johann Joachim, 10-20
Amiens, 144, 270 Behagg, Clive, 289
Amsterdam, 95-6, 149, 195, 198 Berg, Maxine, 47-8, 50, 112
apprentices, population of, 106 billet de congé, 151, 196
apprenticeship, 33—7 Birmingham, 54, 214, 236
Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 11 Black Death, 45
Ariés, Philippe, 269 blacksmiths, 198, 205, 211, 253-4
Arsenal, 78, 107, 145, 243-4 Blois, 259
arsenalotti, see shipbuilders and bohnhasen, see workers, clandestine
shipbuilding Boileau, Etienne, 26, 34, 37; see also Livre
artisan, definition of, 3—4 des métiers
associations, journeyman, 203, 250-6 Bologna, 55, 107, 162
characteristics, 207—8 Bonaventure, Saint, 11
and confraternities, 234—5 Bordeaux, 85, 85, 216, 248, 256
and discipline, 255-6 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 12
in England, 204—5, 211, 213-15 Bourdaloue, Louis, 12
in France, 205-6, 208-11, 215 Brabant, 62
in Germany, 203-4, 211-13 Braverman, Harry, 42
and honor, 253 Brennan, Thomas, 263, 275
and masculinity, 254-5, 256 Bristol, 211
rituals of, 251-5 Brittany, 108, 246
and status, 251-2, 254-5 Bruges, 59, 176, 205, 248
and trade unionism, 287 Brunswick, 177-8
and violence, 254, 256 building trades, 53, 70-8, 99, 100, 102,
and women, 254 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 123, 134,
and working class formation, 287-8 146, 147, 153, 243, 246-7; see also
Audenarde, 143 carpenters and masons
Augsburg, 35, 48, 54, 70, 107, 108, 150, butchers, 53, 55, 84, 119, 123, 124, 128,
167, 231, 244, 245, 248 178, 243, 248; see also victualing
Augustine, Saint, 11 trades
Ausschuss, 186-7 by-laws, see guilds, statutes
Avila, 182-3
cabinet-makers, 208, 209, 210, 231, 237,
bakers and baking, 56, 58, 59-60, 84, 243, 249, 294
123, 124, 135-7, 143, 151, 198, 203, Calvin, John, 12
204, 210-11, 216, 217, 230, 244, Carey, John, 15
246, 247, 248, 249; see also victualing carpenters, 53, 123, 226, 231, 248, 294; see
trades also building trades
300
Index 301
carriage-makers and carriage-making, 66 Council of Trent, 232

cash flow, 58-60 Coventry, 107, 260
Castile, 182-3 credit, 52, 56, 58-60
Cerutti, Simona, 246 Cuenca, 97, 104—5
Chamberlen, Peter, 14 cutlers, 207, 249, 293
chambrellans, see workers, clandestine
charity, 231; see also friendly societies Darnton, Robert, 219-20
Chavatte, Pierre-Ignace, 225—6, 260, 263, Davis, Natalie Zemon, 218, 237
273 Davis, Robert, 78, 264
Chester, 160, 226, 231 death and dying, 230
Chevalier, Bernard, 25, 29 Defoe, Daniel, 15-16, 17-18, 60, 76
Ciompi revolt, 180-1 Delamare, Nicolas, 270, 273
Clark, Peter, 261 Delft; 53; 56,63, 107,119, 123, 1275
clock- and watchmaking, 66—70 248
clothing trades, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, demand
105, 106, 111, 112, 248; see also tailors consumer, 47
and tailoring and the household, 47
cobblers and shoe repairing, 229 Devries, Jan, 45, 47, 154
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 15, 83-4 Dewald, Jonathan, 268
collectivism, 287-91 Diderot, Denis, 19
and socialism, 287 Dijon, 48, 52, 57, 65, 73, 84, 97, 102-3,
and trade unions, 287 118, 119, 122, 126, 127, 142, 147,
see also friendly societies 150, 163, 169, 170, 207, 208, 209,
Colmar, 239 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 241-2,
Cologne, 38, 112, 177, 179-80 243, 246, 247, 249, 253-4, 264,
Combination Acts, 207, 288, 291 2703273
communero revolt, 182 discipline
compagnonnages, see associations, and corporatism, 20, 26, 29
journeymen and the ideology of work, 11-12
confraternities, 203, 228-35 and labor, 13-14, 17, 26
and the Council of Trent, 232 and statutes, guild, 25
and guild statutes, 229 and workshop organization, 19
of the Holy Sacrament, 232 division of labor, see labor, division of
and journeymen, 234-5 Dolan, Claire, 245
and mutual aid, 230-1 drink and drinking, see food and drink and
officers of, 229, 230 taverns and alehouses
and reputation, 229, 230 dyers and cloth-dyeing, 205; see also
construction; see building trades textiles
consumer revolution, 49, 50, 62, 87
coopers, 123, 203, 248 Earle, Peter, 110
Copenhagen, 40 Ehmer, Josef, 253
coppersmiths, 227 employment
corporatism certificates of, 151
decline of, 277—82 hiring practices, 150
and discipline of labor, 20, 26, 29 patterns of, 141—2
in England, 29-30 and unemployment, 141-2
in France, 29 Encyclopédie, 19
and friendly societies, 290-1
in Germany, 31 family
and hierarchy, 20, 22, 26, 28 and marriage, 244
and honor, 24 and mastership, 247-50
in Italy, 28 family economy, 107-8
in the Low Countries (Flanders, United faux ouvriers; see workers, clandestine
Provinces), 31 Fettmilch, Vincenz, 187-8
in Prussia, 31 Firmin, Thomas, 13
rise of, 23-32 Flanders, 62, 110, 176
302 Index
Florence, 53, 54, 58, 59, 63-4, 70-2, 81, hatters and hatmaking, 135, 137-40, 143,
111, 114-16, 145, 147, 160, 166, 198, 213, 216, 218, 254, 255
180-1, 232, 234 hierarchy, 5, 13, 33
food and drink and corporatism, 20, 22, 26, 28
among journeymen, 260-3 within guilds, 160—4
among masters, 263-4 and ideology of work, 11, 13-14
rituals of, 260-1 and processions, 259-60
see also taverns and alehouses historiography of artisans, 1—2
Foucault, Michel, 12, 15 “home towns” (German), 31, 35, 222,
Frankfurt am Main, 38, 39, 97, 101, 111, 249, 296-7
113, 116-18, 124, 126, 186-8, 254 Hondschoote, 80, 81
Franklin, Benjamin, 253 honor, 6, 24, 32, 219, 223, 225, 244, 283
Freiburg, 234 hosiers, 229
Friedrichs, Christopher, 164 household economy; see family economy
friendly societies, 288, 290-1 houses of call, see associations,
Fulda, 254 journeymen, characteristics
fullers, 198, 203, 206; see also textiles Huizinga, Johan, 268-9, 272
gambling, see games and game-playing identity, 4

games and game-playing, 267-75 idleness, 13-15
of chance (dice-throwing and industrialization, 291-6
card-playing), 267, 270-5 and capitalism, 291
function, 274-5 and dependency, 293-4
and immorality and irreligiosity, 272—5 and population growth, 293—4
and resistance to authority, 274-5 and proletarianization, 292—4
and violence, 270-71 and status, 296-7
Gast, John, 283 and the workplace, 292, 294-6
Ghent, 28, 176, 240 insubordination, 151-2; see also discipline
glaziers, 216 insults, 219
glovers, 208, 243 investment, 51, 56-8
goldsmiths, 25-6, 43, 86, 126, 162-3,
163-4, 232, 237, 243, 248, 249 Johnson, Christopher, 291
governance joiners, 231, 243, 248
within guilds, 159-64 journeymanship, 36, 37
and journeymen, 160-1 journeymen
within polities, 164—9 and guild governance, 160-1
artisan participation, 165-9 mobility of, 147
Griffarins, 197-8, 218, 238 population of, 106
Groningen, 296 see also associations, journeyman
guilds journeyman associations, see associations,
and confraternities, 229 journeyman
and journeymen, 37
officers, 30, 159-64 Kaplan, Steven L., 22, 25, 33-4, 52, 56,
hiring clerks, 150 59, 135, 163-4, 192, 210, 215-16,
and Roman law, 23 223, 229, 232, 255, 277
and solidarity, 224—6 Kocka, Jurgen, 289
and status, 225 Kundschaft, 152
statutes, 24, 25, 26, 27, 42
and apprenticeship, 33 La Bretonne, Rétif de, 268
and journeymanship, 37 La Rochelle, 184—5
and women, 37-41 labor
discipline of, 13-14, 17, 26
habitation, patterns of division of
by trade, 242-4 among artisanry, 97-105
Hamburg, 289 among masters, journeymen, and
Hanway, Jonas, 13 apprentices, 105-7, 143-5
Index 303
and women, 107-13, 140-1 market and markets

in the workplace, 137-41 diversification of, 49
segmentation and concentration, and economic productivity, 17
141-5 expansion of, 49, 63
market, 149-50 historical definition of, 16
certificates of employment, 151-2 and households, 47-8
control of, 202-20 integration of, 47-8
hiring practices, 151 and natural law, 16
regulation of, 150 retail, 60-1
morality of, 12-15 rising demand in, 51-3
and natural law, 18 and utility, 17
productivity of, 15-16, 17 and women, 107-8
and utility, 18 marriage, 222
lacemakers, 258 and family solidarity, 244
law, Roman, 23 and honor, 223
leather trades, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, and mastership, 244—5
106, 248 patterns of,
Le Chaplier law, 280 geographic endogamy, 247-8
Leeson, R. A., 288 occupational endogamy, 245-7
LeGoff, Jacques, 194-5 Marseilles, 144, 229
Leiden, 38, 39, 81, 88, 196, 199-200 Martin, John, 238-9
leisure and work, 269-70 Marx, Karl, 3
liberalism, 276, 277-82 masons, 53, 123, 213, 231, 241, 248; see
definition of, 277 also building trades
and the French Revolution, 279-80 Massillon, Jean-Baptiste, 12
and labor relations, 280 mastership ‘
and legislation, 278-82 access to, 170
and property, 281-2 by immigrants, 249
varieties of, 278 by sons of masters, 247—9
Lille, 88, 243, 258 admission to, 35
linendrapers (dingéres), 111, 112 requirements, 249
Linz, 40, 143-4, 254 and marriage, 244-5
Lis, Catarina, 278 mechanical arts, 18
Livre des métiers, 162; see also Boileau, Memmingen, 167
Etienne Ménétra, Jacques-Louis, 6, 57—8, 87, 191,
livret, 151-2 215, 216, 217, 256, 262, 264, 274
Lleida (Spain), 48, 243, 246 mercantilism, 16, 83
locksmiths, 144, 208, 209, 230, 233, 248, metal trades, 52, 54-5, 102, 103, 105, 106
249, 255-6 Minard, Philippe, 89
London, 30, 40, 48, 54, 61, 73, 76, 82, 87, Misselden, Edward, 16-17
89-90, 95, 96, 97, 105-6, 110, 113, Mobility and migration, 145-52
143, 160, 204, 205, 214, 226, 227, 23, of journeymen, 203-20
243, 252, 259, 261, 262, 290, 294 see also associations, journeyman
Loyseau, Charles, 225 Moeller, Bernd, 185
Lubeck, 177, 178-9 monopoly, 21
Luther, Martin, 235 Montchrestien, Antoine de, 16
luxury trades, 53, 59, 62-70, 99, 100, 102, Montpellier, 174
103, 104, 105, 123; see also goldsmiths Moser, Justus, 24-5
Lyons, 53, 110, 119, 124, 128, 169, 197-8, Moss, Bernard, 287
201, 218, 237-8, 245, 249, 256, 258, Mun, Thomas, 16
261 mutual aid; see confraternities and friendly
societies
Mackenny, Richard, 228
Najemy, John, 160, 166
Madrid, 62, 95, 97, 104, 118, 119, 122,
123 Nantes, 40-1, 113, 144, 146, 216
Marglin, Stephen, 42 Naples, 183-4
304 Index
Neapolitan revolt, 183-4 vertical integration, 55

neighborhood, 239-44 scale of, 48
associations, 240-1 units of, 48—9
conflict within, 240 proletarianization, 292-4
definition of, 240 property, definitions of, 281—2
habitation patterns within, 241—2 Protestantism
interdependence within, 240 attraction of artisans to, 236—9
Newcastle, 226 and journeymen, 237-8
Nordlingen, 97, 99, 119, 122, 123, 148, and mutual aid clubs, 236
167, 246, 248 proto-industrialization, 48
Nuremberg, 32, 52, 83, 213 putting-out system, 49, 51
oligarchy rebellion and revolt

within guilds, 160-4 in England, 173
within polities, 166-9 in Flanders, 176—7
Oxford, 110 in France, 172, 184-5
in Germany, 177-80, 185-8
painters and painting, 123, 127, 218, 230, in Italy, 180-1
248, 249 in Naples, 183-4
papermakers and papermaking, 140-1 reasons for, 171—4
Paris, 41, 64, 73, 84-5, 95, 107, 112, 113, in Spain, 182-3
126, 135-7, 143, 149-50, 160, 162-3, regulation, governmental, 81-91
163-4, 169, 201, 207, 210-11, 216, and capitalism, 81—3, 90-1
218, 230, 231, 242, 243, 244, 246, and guilds, 82
247, 249, 254, 261, 263, 270, 275, and workshop inspections, 89
291, 294, 295 Reher, David, 145-6
paternalism, 33 retail and retailers, 294, 296-7
patriarchy, 33 Reutlingen, 119, 122, 123
Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 173 Reval (Tallinn), 248
Pepys, Samuel, 268 “Revolution of the Trades” (Révolution des
Petty, William, 13 métiers), 175-81
pewterers, 248 Roche, Daniel, 286
Pirenne, Henri, 175 Romans, 169
Pisa, 114-16 Rome, 65, 103-4, 243
Place, Francis, 214 Rosenband, Leonard, 140
population, growth and contraction, 23, Rosser, Gervase, 2, 4, 58, 191, 192, 228-9
45-6, 95-7 Rouen, 107, 108-9, 146, 148, 172, 198,
“populuxe” goods, 49; see also consumer 261
revolution Rule, John, 134, 284
potters and pottery-making (ceramics),
144 saddlers and saddlemaking, 161, 204, 207,
prices, 45-6 252, 254
printers and printing, 146, 197-8, 219-20, Sahlins, Marshall, 4
227, 237-8, 253 Sahlins, Peter, 4
processions, 258-60 Saint-Victor, Hugh of, 11
functions, 258 Salisbury, John of, 11
and hierarchy, 259-60 Sansovina, Francesco, 258
production seamstresses, 41, 112
economies of scale in, 55—6 searches (workshop inspections), 159
logic of, 50 Sedan, 200
organization of, 286-7, 293-6 Seville, 57, 73, 230, 242, 259
decentralization, 50-5 Sewell, William, 18, 21, 287
diversification, 49 Sheffield, 55, 202, 293
specialization, 49, 51 shipbuilders and shipbuilding, 73-8, 145,
standardization, 55-6 243, 247
subcontracting, 48, 50-5 the Dutch, 73-5
Index 305
the English, 75-7 Turgot, 278-9
the Venetians, 77-8 Turin, 246
shoemakers and shoemaking, 56, 123, 124, turners, 255
126, 203, 204—5, 207, 208, 209, 223,
228, 243, 245, 249, 294 uitgang, 198-9; see also strikes
shopkeepers and shopkeeping, see retail urbanization, 95-6
and retailers
silkmakers and silkmaking, 110, 111, 112 Venice, 77-8, 80, 95, 162, 165-6, 199,
silversmiths, 123 228, 230, 231, 232, 238-9, 242, 243,
Smith, Adam, 16, 18 245, 247, 258, 264-7
Soly, Hugo, 278 Verviers, 200
Sonenscher, Michael, 52, 142, 215, 217, victualing trades, 99, 100, 102, 103,
218, 251, 285 104
status, 4, 5, 224-5 Vienna, 95, 149, 167, 248, 249, 252-3
and corporatism, 22 Villers-Cotterets, Edict of, 207
and dependency, 293, 296-7 violence
and independence, 283 and games and game-playing, 270
and industrialization, 296-7 and honor, 264-7
Statute of Artificers, 35, 83 and masculinity, 264
Statute of Labourers, 151, 173 and ritual, 265
statutes, guild, see guilds, statutes see also Wars of the Fists
Strasbourg, 202, 231 Voltaire, 13
Strauss, Gerald, 32
strikes, 195-202, 214, 215, 254 wages, 152-4, 197, 198
subcontracting, see production Walker, Mack, 31, 223, 283, 296-7
Wallace, Peter, 239
tailors and tailoring, 111, 123, 126, 161, Wanderbuch, 152
198, 203, 205, 208, 209-10, 212, Wanderjahr, 212
213-14, 223, 230, 233, 243, 245, 248, wars of the fists, 264—7
249, 293, 294 wealth
Talbert, Abbé, 14 distribution of
tanners and tanning, 123, 242 by occupation, 113-22
taverns and alehouses, 261-4 between trades, 119-22
and disorder, 261—2, 263-4 within trades, 122-27
and journeymen, 262-3 of journeymen, 127-8
see also food and drink of women, 126-7
textiles and clothmaking, 54, 78-81, 99, weavers and weaving, 111, 123, 124,
100, 102, 103, 105, 110-13, 198-201, 143-4, 203, 211, 213, 233, 237, 243,
243 246
and women, 38, 40-1, 110-13 Wedgwood, Josiah, 144-5, 192-3
theology and work widows, 39-40, 113
early modern, 12 wigmakers, 249
medieval, 10-12 Winstanley, Gerard, 17
and status, 22 women, 6
Thompson, E. P., 193-4 and division of labor, 107—13, 140-1
time and work, 193-202 and guilds, 37-41
and clocks, 195 and status, 40-1
tinsmiths, 222-3 and textiles and clothmaking, 110-13
tour de France, 206, 208, 215; see also woodworking trades, 102, 103, 105, 123
associations, journeymen workers, clandestine, 43, 285
trade unions and trade unionism, 287—9 workhouses
and friendly societies, 288 in France, 14
Troyes, 208 in Germany, 15
Truant, Cynthia, 215, 287 in Great Britain, 15
Tuchin revolt, 172 in Ireland, 15
Tucker, Josiah, 13 in The Netherlands, 15
306 Index
working conditions, see workplace, structure of, 288—9

conditions of
working-class formation, 287—90, 291 yeomanry, 161
workplace York, 100-1, 110, 113, 204—5, 231,
conditions of, 128-41 247-8
discipline of labor in, 19
division of labor in, 137-41 Zamora, 233
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ITHORAWN
Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914
This book is a survey of the history of work in general and of European

urban artisans in particular, from the late middle ages to the era of
industrialization. Unlike traditional histories of work and craftsmen, this
book offers a multi-faceted understanding of artisan experience situated
in the artisans’ culture. It treats economic and institutional topics, but
also devotes considerable attention to the changing ideologies of work,
the role of government regulation in the world of work, the social
history of craftspeople, the artisan in rebellion against the various
authorities in his world, and the ceremonial and leisure life of artisans.
Women, masters, journeymen, apprentices, and non-guild workers all
receive substantial treatment. The book concludes with a chapter on the
nineteenth century, examining the transformation of artisan culture,
exploring how and why the early modern craftsman became the
industrial wage-worker, mechanic or shopkeeper of the modern age.
JAMES R. FARR is Professor of History at Purdue University, West

Lafayette, Indiana. He is a specialist in French history and the history of
work, and has published Hands of Honor: Artisans and their World in
Dijon, 1550-1650 (1988) and Authority and Sexuality in Burgundy,
1550-1730 (1995).
UNIVERSITY PRESS —
ISBN 0-521-42934-X
Cover illustration: Alessandro Fei, 1 6th-century |

goldsmiths’ workshop. Florence, Palazzo Vecchio
Studiolo. Photo © Scala, Italy. toe 80521"429344"

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Artisans in Europe,

This book is a survey of the history of work in general and of European

JAMES R. FARR is Professor of History at Purdue University, West

New Approaches to European History is an important textbook series,

To aid the student reader scholarly apparatus and annotation is light,

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Cambridge University Press 2000

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2000

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in Plantin 10/12pt [cE]

ISBN 0 521 41888 7 hardback

List offigures page vi

Nordlingen, 1579-1724: percent of all taxed, male page

Seventeenth-century tailor page 67

31 Artisans as percentage of population, selected cities page 97

Although this book carries my name as the sole author, no work of

West Lafayette, Indiana, 1998 JAMES R. FARR

Sa ey i ee eee, eaporime ae See

viewed positively as guarantors of societal harmony. Rather they have

concludes that “the categories of 19th century discourse have blinkered

sense of socialplace in the face of powerful, often inimical forces in their

identity in early modern Europe were overwhelmingly masculine, and it

Entries marked with a * designate recommended readings for new students of

short, a spiritual discipline. Medieval theologians, therefore, did not

2 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York, 1968), p.55.

government administrator, idleness became “the mother of all vices”

6 Quoted in Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England

As the number of beggars increased across Europe in the seventeenth

Morality and productivity

12 Quoted in Foucault, pp. 60, 61.

mies, usually producing textiles: that such institutions, by their cheap

14 Quoted in Anthony, p. 49.

central preoccupation of a tradesman’s life, arguing that even the duties

“tinker with [the instructions] or add anything to [them], but should

Guilds and the organization of work

principle of containing competition to preserve the livelihood of artisans

(smiths of all kinds). Guild by-laws also regulated economic relations

24 Bernard Chevalier, “Corporations, conflits politiques et paix sociale en France aux

enumerate administrative units (the trades or métiers) and then authorize

even nineteenth centuries. Chevalier has persuasively contended that in

“mysteries” or, as they were called in London, livery companies

which stipulated, as elsewhere, the nature of apprentice training, regula-

31 Gerald Strauss, Nuremburg in the Sixteenth

Apprentices, journeymen, and women

of the corporatist conception of work and of hierarchy.”*? It was a moral

well as from nonapprenticed workers within. Upon completion of one’s

From the 1570s this became commonplace among craftsmen, aS

receiving their certificate, were not so fortunate. There were journeymen

This gender division of labor was firmly supported by patriarchal theory

In England customary law did not officially deny married women or

The meaning of skill

Until recently, histories of artisans described craftsmen as preindustrial

38 Quoted in Kaplan, “The luxury guilds,” 261.

An overview of the early modern European economy

German cities. Prices then moved in different directions. Those for

by the seventeenth century capital was increasingly important, as were

Demand and supply

The economic categories of supply and demand are, of course, recipro-

dominated by supply-side considerations (production, technology, and