Training and the Organisation of Work

Apprenticeships, for instance, were very different. The hatmakers designated (art. 3) a minimum of two years of training for ‘learners’, a period significantly shorter than London apprenticeships, which were both by custom and in practice at least seven years and sometimes as long as twelve.1 Stephanie R. Hovland, ‘Apprenticeship in Later Medieval London (c.1300–c.1530)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 2006), pp. 87–92; Rhiannon Sandy, ‘Apprenticeship Indentures and Apprentices in Medieval England, 1250–1500’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Swansea, 2021), pp. 81–92. A two-year training was, however, entirely consistent with practice in the Low Countries. Unlike the English system, where young adolescents entered apprenticeships in their early to mid teens, the training in the Low Countries was begun when the candidate was more mature (from late teens to as late as thirties) and had already had some general schooling and perhaps even years of work experience. The extent to which apprenticeships were regulated varied by craft, by city, and over time but, in general, in the later fifteenth century it was much less formalised than in London.2 Bert De Munck, Technologies of Learning: Apprenticeship in Antwerp Guilds from the 15th Century to the End of the Ancien Régime (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 59–65; Karel Davids, ‘Apprenticeship and Guild Control in the Netherlands, c.1450–1800’, in Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship, ed. Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kaplan, and Hugo Soly, (New York: Berghahn, 2007), pp. 65–84; Bert De Munck and Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ‘Education and Knowledge: Theory and Practice in an Urban Context’, in City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600, ed. Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone, and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 229–30. It is perhaps because the training practice among the Dutch hatmakers was quite different from English customs that the English-language ordinances and the 1511 agreement avoided the use of the word ‘apprentice’, instead using ‘lerner’, presumably as an English equivalent of the Dutch leerknecht or leerling. As far as we can determine, this is a unique use of this word in English in the context of craft training rather than book learning.3 ‘Lērner’, Middle English Compendium <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english- dictionary/dictionary/MED25192/track?counter=1&search_id=7946638>, and OED, s.v. lerner, and see pp. 112–13, 125 below. It is notable that the 1511 merger agreement with the Haberdashers also made no provision for the hatmakers taking apprentices in the English manner: reference is made to ‘servants allowes’ (hired servants), covenant servants, servingmen, journeymen, and learners. Though the hatmakers in London seem to have trained successors, these documents do not envisage the adoption of the long English apprenticeship. Too little is known about how hatmakers worked in the first half of the sixteenth century in London to clarify the terms on which training was accomplished. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Haberdashers, aided by a 1563 Statute of Artificers and a 1566 act regulating the making of caps and hats, made largely successful efforts to regularise hatmakers’ training along the same lines as English customs with minimum seven-year apprenticeships, supervised by the Haberdashers’ guild.4 Duckworth, Early History, pp. 24–27; see also below ch. 3.

These differences in apprenticeship practice reflect the fundamentally different cultures of artisanal labour in the Low Countries and London. In London the apprenticeship system was an important means of controlling entry into craft occupations: by 1500 almost all those who became full members of London guilds were admitted after completing an apprenticeship they had begun in early adolescence. This served an important gatekeeping function, excluding any without parents or guardians who could or would arrange for and fund an apprenticeship contract for the adolescent boy in question.5 S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status, and Gender (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 158–59; Hovland, ‘Apprenticeship’, pp. 151–62; Sandy, ‘Apprenticeship’, pp. 95–101. By his mid teens, whether a boy would have the opportunity to become a master craftsman in London working within the guild environment was determined; only men with wealth and connections could bypass the apprenticeship system to enter a craft by redemption (paying a fee), while beginning an apprenticeship in one’s twenties was rare.6 Sandy, ‘Apprenticeship’, pp. 78–81, 86. The ordinances of the hatmakers, on the other hand, reflected the more open environment of craft work in the Low Countries. An apprenticeship, often of one or two years’ duration,7 This is the duration specified, for instance, in Guillame Des Marez, Le Compagnonnage des chapelliers Bruxellois (Brussels: Lamertin, 1909), p. 9. was usually necessary to work as a ‘free journeyman’ and then a master in a craft. One might work as an ‘unfree’ journeyman, however, without an apprenticeship; undertaking formal training was only necessary if one wanted to be a master. An artisan could pursue such an ambition post-adolescence: it was not uncommon for a man to enter into an apprenticeship contract after having worked as an unfree journeyman for some years, having accumulated some capital and wishing to achieve the credentials to set up a shop of his own. In many cities in the Low Countries immigrants were tolerated or even welcomed, and if they had been trained elsewhere many craft guilds had measures that allowed them to demonstrate their skill for entry to the membership in place of an apprenticeship. Similarly, movement between allied crafts was fairly common.8 De Munck, Technologies of Learning, pp. 59–65; Bert De Munck, ‘One Counter and Your Own Account: Redefining Illicit Labour in Early Modern Antwerp’, Urban History 37 (2010), 26–44; Reinhold Reith, ‘Circulation of Skilled Labour in Late Medieval and Early Modern Central Europe’, in Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. Stephan R. Epstein and Maarten Roy Prak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 114–42; Peter Stabel, ‘Social Mobility and Apprenticeship in Late Medieval Flanders’, in Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship, ed. Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kaplan, and Hugo Soly (New York: Berghahn, 2007), pp. 158–78.

The hatmakers’ ordinances reflect this more informal and less structured world of artisanal affiliation than pertained in London. Article 4, for instance, allowed fullers, weavers, tailors, and others to be accepted as brethren of the hatmakers’ fraternity after they had been ‘lafulli chosin’ by demonstrating that they were ‘instructe and lernid before in the seid craft of hatmakynge’. In the London guild system, it was possible for a member of one guild to transfer to another should he prefer to practise another craft, but it was sometimes difficult or inconvenient. This meant in some cases that a citizen’s nominal guild affiliation and his actual occupation were at odds. A trained skinner who entered the freedom through the Skinners’ Company, for instance, could become a waxchandler by trade but might remain a member of the Skinners through his life.9 See for instance William Colte, a skinner by guild affiliation and waxchandler by trade; John Knyll, who became his apprentice through the Skinners’ guild in 1509, learned the craft of waxchandler from him rather than skinner. Both worked as waxchandlers and yet remained members of the Skinners; his actual work did not prevent Colte from serving as warden of the Skinners’ guild in 1523–24. GL, MS 30719/1, fol. 41r; 30727/2, 60r, 211v; LMA, COL/CA/01/01/003, Repertory 3, fol. 174v. Though transferring from one craft to another had been more common earlier in the fifteenth century, and even around 1500 it was still possible to change affiliations, by that later date it could be difficult. The Waxchandlers refused to take Colte and Knyll as members, for instance (as above, Repertory 3, fol. 174v), and the Upholders fined members £20 if they sought to leave and join another guild (LMA, COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, 6v). As article 4 of the hatmakers’ ordinances suggests, however, alien and foren artisans in the London area could be more adaptable and fungible in their craft identities and affiliations, and the many who came from the Low Countries would have seen this as normal. Work life was likely more flexible for the immigrants, who were both excluded from the London guilds but also freed from them.

Though Londoners likely would have bristled at the suggestion, this less- or at least differently-structured training and craft organisation neither caused nor resulted in poor training. It did mean, however, that workers’ credentials sometimes needed establishing in ways other than completion of a guild-enrolled apprenticeship. Article 24 mandated letters of attestation from former masters for servants coming from overseas. This is one of the earliest signs of such testimonial letters for migrant craft workers in England, but it was a well-established practice in the Empire, France, and elsewhere on the continent, where a higher degree of labour mobility was both an assumption and a reality. Such letters were associated with the practice of the Wanderjahr for skilled trades such as goldsmithing: artisans migrated to different centres and presented testimonial letters stating their training and skills, often issued by civic or guild authorities in their previous place of residence.10 For examples of testimonial letters on the continent as far back as the late fourteenth century, see Knut Schulz, ‘Handwerkerwanderungen und Neuburger im Spätmittelalter’, in Neuburger im Späten Mittelalter: Migration und Austausch in der Städtelandschaft des Alten Reiches (1250–1550), ed. Rainer Christoph Schwinges (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), pp. 445–78 (448–54). On labour mobility more generally, see Stephan R. Epstein, ‘Labour Mobility, Journeymen Organisations and Markets in Skilled Labour in Europe, 14th–18th Centuries’, in Le Technicien dans la cité en Europe occidentale, 1250–1650, ed. Mathieu Arnoux and Piere Monnet, Collection de l’Ećole française de Rome, 325 (Rome: Ećole française de Rome, 2004), pp. 251–69; Reith, ‘Circulation of Skilled Labour’, pp. 114–42. The Goldmiths and the Weavers, both trades for whom alien skills were indispensable, similarly asked for such testimonial letters from immigrants trained overseas,11 Lisa Jefferson, ed., Wardens’ Accounts and Court Minute Books of the Goldsmiths’ Mistery of London, 1334–1446 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 242–43; Consitt, London Weavers’ Company, p. 213; Berry, ‘Guilds’, pp. 545–49. but most other London guilds would have had no need for letters of attestation from overseas as, generally, aliens were simply not admitted. Indeed, in most cases craftsmen trained elsewhere in England were also excluded. The London guild system was predicated on a stationary work life from entry into apprenticeships in early adolescence until the end of one’s career; though reality was certainly less simple (and exceptions could be made for those with connections and cash), almost all London guild members followed this path. Alien craftsmen in London, on the other hand, often – indeed probably usually – had migrated at an older age than early adolescence (though some had come as children with their families). For those from the Low Countries and likely elsewhere in Europe, too, this movement in one’s twenties or later was normal and the organisation of craft work in cities accommodated migrants at different career stages.12 Bruno Blondé, Frederik Buylaert, Jan Dumolyn, and Peter Stabel, ‘Living Together in the City: Social Relationships Between Norm and Practice’, in City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600, ed. Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone, and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 81–82; Marc Boone and Peter Stabel, ‘New Burghers in the Late Medieval Towns of Flanders and Brabant: Conditions of Entry, Rules and Reality’, in Neubürger im späten Mittelalter: Migration und Austausch in der Städtelandschaft des Alten Reiches (1250–1550), ed. Rainer Christoph Schwinges and Roland Gerber (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), pp. 317–32; Stabel, ‘Social Mobility’, p. 159. Although the London guild system was much less adaptable, migrants were forced to work outside those structures anyway.

A potential disadvantage of this more flexible labour practice was instability for employers: servants with hatmaking skills were evidently in demand in London and thus it was a challenge to retain them for the length of their contract or covenant judging by the number of articles in the ordinances of the Fraternity of St James dedicated to that issue. In article 1, only those who had fulfilled their previous covenants with masters both in London and overseas were to be admitted; articles 6, 7, 11, 20, and 25 address the problem of servants departing from their masters without permission and the related problem of servants’ being lured away by other employers. This was a concern also for London’s citizen guilds,13 Indeed, luring away (‘withdrawing’) another man’s servant was an actionable trespass under English law. Morris S. Arnold, ed., Select Cases of Trespass from the King’s Courts, 1307–1399, 2 vols, Selden Society 100 (London: Quaritch, 1985), I, xliv. but the hatmakers’ ordinances place far more emphasis on illicit servant mobility than was usual in England. Such emphasis was common, however, in Dutch guild ordinances.14 De Munck and De Ridder-Symoens, ‘Education’, p. 230. The repeated return to this issue from different angles in these ordinances suggests that hatmakers found it difficult to keep servants and to force them to fulfil the contracts or covenants that bound servant to employer. This reflected the more fluid structures of work among the hatmakers in particular and the artisans who worked outside the guilds in general; as foren and alien artisan shopholders worked outside the guilds and of civic authority, they also had fewer mechanisms to enforce covenants and contracts. This likely also speaks to the attractiveness of hatmaker servants: they had options. Indeed, provisions for servants who had broken their covenants to be welcomed back to a master’s employ suggests they were in such demand that they had to be forgiven their trespasses.

Like the ordinances of London citizen guilds, the hatmakers’ ordinances assumed a workshop model of craft production, with a master, several journeymen servants, and perhaps a trainee working in the master’s shop on the ground floor of his own house. Article 23, however, hints towards a different form of labour organisation, dependent on networks of pieceworkers, that had become evident in garment manufacture in London by the end of the fifteenth century, as described in chapter 1. The hatmakers were resistant to such changes, as indeed were other guilds, both in London and in the Low Countries. Article 23 mandated that craft work be confined to the shops of the brethren in the guild, that they must ‘put no hattes forto be flosshede, nor cause no hattes to be flosshede, nor put no feltes to be made withoute his house’. What ‘put’ here means is presumably the practice that a century later became routinely designated by the verb phrase ‘put out’, namely ‘to arrange for (work) to be done off the premises or “out of house” (by contractors, freelancers, etc.)’.15 See OED, s.v. put, 10(c). As with many other sectors of the garment industry, this was unsuccessful: by the early 1530s, as we shall see in the next chapter, the London hatmakers were operating large-scale piecework operations employing as many as one hundred workers.