Indentures for medieval village apprenticeships: medieval urban apprenticeships cut short

[syntinen_laulu]

A vaguely European, vaguely 14th-15th-century AU setting

Two questions:

1.       How did rural craftsmen such as millers, village blacksmiths, potters etc. take on apprentices in the late Middle Ages? An apprenticeship was a major legal commitment on both sides, I can’t see late-medieval people being satisfied just with a verbal agreement. (And even

Comments

[bopeepsheep]

Agreed that a verbal contract in a village is pretty much as good as it gets. Villages are small and tight and if you break a verbal contract, oops, there goes your arrangement with the local miller, or your share of the next pig slaughtering, or your daughter's marriage prospects suddenly dive ... social justice was swift and fairly harsh

[syntinen_laulu]

But in the several generations after the Black Death, social and geographical mobility was huge. Hundreds of villages simply disappeared and in fact never revived; thousands of people had fled the place they and all their ancestors had grown up in and where they were known; thousands more who had stayed put found that almost everyone they had known was dead; patterns of landholding were revolutionised. Before the Death, just calling on the village elders to verify that they remembered two people clapping hands on an an agreement was a viable system; after it, just not.

[bopeepsheep]

OP's timeframe is big enough for that to be potentially irrelevant, plus AU. ;-) I know about the disappearing villages, having lived very near one for 15 years, but in my part of the world the survivors just moved into the nearest bigger villages. They didn't scatter. It's not a universal pattern, because the plague wasn't evenly distributed.

[naath]

People, especially Crafts/Trades people moved around a lot more than anyone gives credit for. They just did it *really slowly*.

A *journey*man would literally *journey*. Having finished his apprenticeship if he wasn't set up to inherit a particular business (from, say, his father) he would go around, working for different Masters, seeing who he could impress, saving up to start his own business (if he ever can).

Oh, and randomly - the Silk Women in London were IIRC the only guild to be exclusively female, and the only guild to take female apprentices (there were women trading as master craftsmen, having inherited a husband's or father's business, but they didn't serve a formal apprenticeship). They were concerned with making silk narrow-wares - ribbons and laces and such.

[bopeepsheep]

Depends on the size of your settlement and the area you're in. I know from our village history that people pretty much stayed around after apprenticeships to become the next tradesman in due course. Movement inward tended to be family crisis-related, movement outward similarly. Geography plays a large part in how these things play out.
Journeymen/compagnons aren't really necessary in an area where being apprenticed to Joe the Stonemason from the age of 12 is all you really need to have a job for life, and you aren't aiming for a guild qualification. Joe wouldn't be a Master - or possibly even know they existed - so why would his apprentice care about moving on? Towns yes, villages no.

[marycatelli]

Well, actually, a stonemason would move about a lot. 'cause the demand moved.

The reason for the actual medieval Freemasons was because of that mobility, and because a mason's handiwork could be lethal if done wrong -- and lethal long after he had left town. They needed some way to verify that Jack Stonemason was telling the truth when he showed up. The solution was a secret rite taught only to those that the teachers were willing to certify as competent.

Other trades, less so.

[bopeepsheep]

Yes, bad choice of example there - but too late to edit it. :) Joe the Miller would be a much better example. No need to go anywhere, nor for his apprentice to, barring calamity.

[bopeepsheep]

You'd think that, but there's a well-known German 'folk song' (actually based on a romance poem from the early 19th century) with the title "Das Wandern ist des Mueller's Lust" ("Wandering is the Miller's Joy"), which is about the enforced wandering years for all journeymen, including millers. The song is at first glance about how constantly being in motion is natural and how temporary masters (and, explicitly, female masters) shouldn't hold try to hold the journeyman back from moving on, but in context with the other poems of the same author it's really about the hardship of the custom and about how the young people yearned to settle and be at peace. (Under German "walz" rules, you weren't allowed to return close your hometown for 3 years, and you didn't carry more than a few coins and weren't supposed to save up more. The golden earring and sometimes a pair of bracelets that the journeyman carried were emergency funds to pay for the gravedigger if the person died during their wandering years

[naath]

From my reading about rural Suffolk even casual farm labourers would be drifting from village to village to find work. Also if everyone stays put in a village of 500 people you shortly find there isn't anyone to marry (and the church wasn't terribly keen on first-cousin marriages).

[marycatelli]

Actually casual farm laborers would be among the most mobile. Nothing to tie them down, since they had no land of their own. Would probably shift according to what was being planted or harvested or other labor-intensive jobs. So it might not be a good indicator.