How Did You Learn a Trade? Seven Years Under Contract in Someone's House

An apprenticeship was a formal contract, frequently registered with a guild or a town authority, under which a young person entered a master craftsman's household for a fixed term, commonly around seven years though varying by trade and place. The master undertook to teach the craft, to feed, house and clothe the apprentice and to supervise their conduct, while the apprentice undertook to serve, to obey, to keep the master's secrets and not to marry or trade on their own account during the term. A payment usually flowed from the apprentice's family to the master at the start, since the early years cost the master more in supervision than they produced in work. The relationship was legal and enforceable, with runaway apprentices pursued and both sides able to bring complaints before the guild or the courts.

The path through a trade had recognised steps, though reaching the end was not guaranteed:

• •Apprentice, bound by contract, unpaid, living in the household and learning
• •Journeyman, free and paid by the day, qualified to work but not to employ or keep a shop
• •Travelling years in some trades and regions, where a journeyman worked in several towns to broaden experience
• •The masterpiece, a demonstration work assessed by the guild before admission
• •Master, entitled to a workshop, to employ journeymen and to take apprentices
• •In practice many journeymen never became masters, since numbers were restricted

The guild controlled entry to the trade and that control had two faces that historians continue to weigh against each other. On one account the system solved a real problem, since a young person cannot judge whether a master is teaching them properly and a master has no incentive to invest in training somebody who can leave immediately, so a binding term with enforcement on both sides made the arrangement possible at all, and the quality standards, inspections and restrictions on shoddy work protected customers who could not assess craftsmanship themselves. On the other account the guilds were restrictive bodies limiting numbers to keep prices up, favouring the sons and relatives of existing masters, excluding women and outsiders and resisting new methods that threatened established practice. Both are supported by evidence from different trades and places, and the balance is genuinely disputed.

Access to the system was restricted in ways that shaped who could work at what for centuries. Guild membership frequently required legitimate birth, local citizenship and a fee, each of which excluded a portion of the population before any question of ability arose. Women were formally excluded from most guilds while working extensively in the trades in practice, as the wives, widows and daughters of masters, with widows in many places permitted to continue a workshop and in others required to remarry within the trade or give it up. Religious and ethnic minorities were barred from particular trades in many cities, which pushed them into occupations the guilds did not control and shaped occupational patterns that persisted long afterwards. Rural workers outside the towns were beyond guild jurisdiction, which is one reason manufacturing moved into the countryside where guilds could not reach it.

The system weakened through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under several pressures. Production moved into factories where work was divided into simple operations requiring little training, which removed the need for a long apprenticeship in many trades. Guilds were abolished outright in several countries during and after the revolutionary period, on the grounds that they were restraints on trade and on the freedom to work. Legal enforcement of indentures fell away. Technical schools and later formal vocational qualifications took over the teaching function, separating instruction from employment. Something of the arrangement survives in modern apprenticeship schemes, in the structure of professional training with its long supervised periods and formal admission, and in academic doctoral supervision, which retains the shape of a long individual attachment ending in an assessed original work.

A binding contract placed a young person in a master's household for around seven years, with teaching, board and supervision exchanged for unpaid labour and obedience. Apprentice, journeyman and master were the recognised stages, and most journeymen never reached the last. Whether guilds protected quality or restricted entry to keep prices up is genuinely disputed and both are evidenced.