Week 13 – Apprenticeship, flexibility and rigidity: a long term perspective

This early draft was authored by Bert de Munck.

Most approaches to apprenticeship postulate a field of tension between, on one hand, the need to pass on techniques in a structured and more or less standardized way, and, on the other, the need for a certain flexibility when it comes to applying the techniques in variegated and ever changing circumstances. In a way, the medieval and early modern apprenticeship system is considered to provide the mechanisms for balancing these somewhat contradictory requirements. The principle of learning on the shop floor by imitating a master amounts to passing on a certain technical tradition from generation to generation while at the same time enabling to adapt the techniques to the ever changing economic and cultural contexts. However, the way in which rigidity and flexibility was balanced drastically transformed in the long run, due to economic as well as cultural and political transformations.

My chapter will trace these transformations through a focus on the way in which apprenticeship was organized and institutionalized. The current literature emphasizes that the medieval and early modern apprenticeship system allowed for a substantial amount of flexibility and adaptation to new contexts. Most evidence for that argument is circumstantial, but it includes the finding that books and recipes were hardly used on the shop floor, that imitating the master was not standardized, that test pieces were very broadly defined and simultaneously allowed for specialization, that the learning content was defined in an open ended way and/or customized in apprentice contracts etc. Rigidity increased in the long run, however. This has already been argued with a focus on the guild system, but other factors may have been more important, including the introduction of books, the growing importance of design and novelty in the appreciation of products, and, finally, the emergence of mass production in factories in the nineteenth century.

This long term evolution cannot be explained by looking at the economic context alone. While mass production and technological innovation is considered to be accompanied by deskilling and increasing division of labour, my chapter will show that cultural and epistemological factors may have been equally important. While increasing rigidity predates the rise of factory production, the antithetical opposition of craft and technological innovation is in all likelihood an nineteenth century fabrication. As I will show, our present-day views on medieval and early apprenticeship is very much informed by a nineteenth century ‘invention of tradition’, in which crafts were seen as the antithesis of mass production in factories.

Introduction

Our present-day views on craft and craftsmanship are very much informed by nineteenth and twentieth-century visions, in which craft was increasingly seen as the antithesis of technology driven mass production and standardized production processes. Karl Marx’ famous distinction between concrete labour and abstract labour was very much a distinction between artisanal labour and labour applied in the context of manufactories, with the former being likened to art. In 1857-8 Marx noted that

“This economic relation – the character which capitalist and worker have as the extremes of a single relation of production – therefore develops more purely and adequately in proportion as labour loses all the characteristics of art; as its particular skill becomes something more and more abstract and irrelevant, and as it becomes more and more a purely abstract activity, a purely mechanical activity, hence indifferent to its particular form”.[1]

In this regard, his views did not differ much from more conservative opinions, like those articulated in the context of the famous arts and crafts movement, in which a return to the medieval crafts was advocated. The most famous representative of this movement, William Morris, wrote that

“These arts, I have said, are part of a great system invented for the expression of a man’s delight in beauty: all peoples and times have used them; they have been the joy of free nations, and the solace of oppressed nations; religion has used and elevated them, has abused and degraded them; they are connected with all history, and are clear teachers of it; and, best of all, they are the sweeteners of human labour, both to the handicraftsman, whose life is spent in working in them, and to people in general who are influenced by the sight of them at every turn of the day’s work: they make our toil happy, our rest fruitful.”[2]

Notwithstanding all their ideological and scientific differences, both thinkers fell back on a dichotomous view, in which arts and crafts were seen as closely aligned and as both in opposition to alienated factory labour.

Such views inform our understandings up to the present day. In his best-seller The craftsman, the famous sociologist Richard Sennett too considered craftsmanship the antithesis of modern types of alienated labour, defining craftsmanship as “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”[3] In this definition, the autonomy and independency of the artisan takes center stage, although Sennett not unlike Marx and Morris also attributes a profoundly social dimension to craftmanship. While medieval workshops were considered to be characterized by a communal atmosphere, craftsmanship was“joined skill in community” for Sennett.[4] Medieval workshops would have provided a social structure for the development and transfer of skills, not with the help of codified instructions on paper, but through the daily incorporation of the legitimate standards. In the words of Sennett, “(t)he successful workshop will establish legitimate authority in the flesh, not in rights or duties set down on paper.”[5]

This clearly brings the question of rigidity versus flexibility to a head. While on the one hand pre-modern crafts are likened to art – which invokes an autonomous and creative artisan – craftsmanship is also seen as a the result of the incorporation of collective standards and procedures. As will be shown below, this ambivalence is actually the result of our modern, dichotomous view, which eclipses the complexity and hybridity of the artisan’s manifold histories. What is particularly unclear, is the range of technical knowledge he masters and the level of individuality and specialisation he is able to deploy. Related to that, to what extent is an artisan to be distinguished from an artist? And last but not least, how did this all transform in the long run? What happened in between the medieval period and nineteenth-century industrialisation?

This paper will present a long term view on artisanal knowledge in order to flesh out the bandwidth of artisanal skills, the distinction between different packets of skills and between artisanal skills and artistic skills, and the rigidity and flexibility of the context in which they worked. As I will show, all these elements transformed rather drastically during the early modern period.

Specialisation and division of labour in the late Middle ages

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century views not only disregard evolutions which have taken place during the early modern period (roughly the fifteenth to the eighteenth century), they are even doing injustice to the complexity of medieval craftsmanship itself. On the one hand, a great deal of medieval crafts did already experience thorough division of labour and specialization, especially in the textile industries, the largest sector by far before the Renaissance. The production of woollen cloth required up to a dozen different types of workers, from wool combers, carders, spinners and warpers, over weavers and fullers up to dyers and shearers. All these professions could moreover have their own specialisation, with dyers in bleu for instance to be distinguish from black dyers. Nor did specialization fail to increase from early on. As soon as textile industries expanded from roughly the eleventh-century on, competition forced entrepreneurs to specialize and focus on niche products, resulting in the use of different types of fabric (like light woollens versus heavy woollens, or a combination of wool and linen), different colours, and different patterns.[6] On the other hand, however, these types of specialization were not necessarily synonymous of deskilling – rather to the contrary. Innovation in terms of new types of product was mostly based on the development of new, additional technical knowledge. As Herman Van Der wee argued, “what was involved was more the deepening than the widening of human capital”; and what was stressed was “the input of labour, as against capital and raw materials”.[7]

In this vein, the textile industry was not too different from the art sector. Our views on art and artists too are very much informed by nineteenth-century opinions in which the artist is pictured as an independent genius the success of which is entirely due to his natural talent and skill. According to ideas such as those of Jacob Burkhardt, artists would have emancipated themselves during the Renaissance, first in Italy and then in the rest of Europe.[8] Yet recent views in the history of art shows that sculpting, painting and related arts should just as well be seen as an industry – a luxury industry targeting luxury markets.[9] The huge importance of skills and technical knowledge in these industries does not prevent that specialisation and targeting niche markets were at the order of the day. As art historians have shown, painters adapted their style and subject matter to the tastes and purchasing power of their target markets and customers.[10] Moreover, a thorough division of labour has been revealed in the workshops of artists just as well. Many hands were involved in the finishing of one painting, with different workers often having different specialisations – be it heads or human figures, or nature or specific types of decoration.[11] Famous artists and workshops are even shown to have collaborated on specific paintings, with each artist attributing a specific specialisation.[12]

In short, medieval and late medieval craftsmanship was not opposed to division of labour, art was not antithetical to specialisation and art and craftsmanship were not situated in different realms, both being luxury industries competing on high end markets.

Craft guilds and specialisation

The field of tension between specialisation and generality (and the transferability of skills) is detectable at the level of the juridical and institutional embedding of crafts. From the medieval period onwards, most craftsmen were organized in craft guilds. Each guild was supposed to gather a specific group of artisans: the shoemaker’s guild representing all shoemakers, the carpenter’s guild all carpenters, the baker’s guild all those involved in making bread, etcetera.[13] However, this was far from straightforward. The shoemaking industry also encompassed old shoemakers or shoe repairers, the bakery industry gradually included pastry shops and sugar bakeries, and the wood industry was divided in sawyers, carpenters and cabinet makers, with the latter in turn encompassing such groups as wood inlayers or being flanked by coffin makers and panel makers. Product and process innovations within these groups moreover challenged the identity and boundaries of these groups constantly. The sixteenth century wood industry in Antwerp was witness to a prolonged discussion between the carpenters and the cabinet makers about who was allowed to produce exactly which products. In principle, the cabinet makers were allowed to make loose furniture (with the use of glue) and the carpenters everything that was a fixed part of a house. But what to do with fixed banks once they are introduced? Among other things, the introduction of the so-called ‘panel work’ and the related shift from rough heavy boxes to light and attractive furniture assembled with mortise and tenon joints (in which panels could be fitted) jeopardised the existing boundaries between these two guilds.[14]

Within the guilds as well, specialisation was a cause for concern, especially when it came to training and the assessment of skills. In most guilds, membership as a master artisan was conditional upon the finishing of an apprenticeship term and a master piece. The length of the term was, up to a degree at least, related to the difficulty of the trade, but what if different specialisations are present within one and the same craft? That the guilds themselves struggled with this issue clearly emerges from an in-depth analysis of their master pieces. The earliest descriptions of test pieces in the guilds’ fifteenth and sixteenth century ordinances are mostly very vague, which suggests that a standardized range of skills needed to be demonstrated. In Antwerp, the tanners’ guild in 1583 enacted simply that prospective masters had to “skin, scrape, and sprinkle a hide” as a test. A journeymen who wanted to become a master shoemakers had to “cut and make a pair of thick leather shoes, a pair of boots, and a pair of slippers.” And the cloth dresser’s guild simply prescribed  (in 1696) that a new member first needed to shear nine ells of white cloth.[15]

Yet other guilds, clearly felt the need to specify exactly which product needed to be made as a trial piece or which types of skills needed to be demonstrated. The instruction of the Antwerp diamond guilds in their founding ordinance in 1582 mentions different types of stones as well as different operations, such as cutting, polishing, and finishing. The abovementioned guild of cabinet makers did not only enact at the end of the fifteenth century that two cabinets and a table had to be made, they also distinguished between two different types of cupboard (“een spenne en een tritsoer”) and specified that the table could be either round or square.[16] Moreover, guilds increasingly added that the deans of the guilds could decide ad hoc which piece was to be produced exactly. An ordinance of 24 November 1524 of the Antwerp gold and silversmiths not only enacted that the masterpiece comprised either a major work (e.g. a platter) or a gold ring set with a diamonds, it was also stipulated that prospective masters could simply make “what they were used to making”, i.e. what they had learned as an apprentice. Something similar was the case among the Paris goldsmiths.[17]

In the nineteenth and the largest part of the twentieth century, liberal and progressive thinkers – building on enlightenment ideas –, mostly considered craft guilds as conservative hindrances to technical innovation and the emergence of efficient markets, but recent research has shown that they clearly accommodated, if not stimulated, economic innovation.[18] In response to specialisation and the invention of niche products, they have at least tried to prevent that such entry barriers as apprenticeship terms and master pieces would turn into thresholds for those who had only learned part of the craft or acquired a specific set of skills.

Specialisation and vertical integration in the long run

The history of the guilds can also be used as a lens to look at long term transformations. From the sixteenth century on European guilds struggled to accommodate product innovation and vertical integration. Both dimensions can be illustrated by looking at discussions entailed by the introduction of such new products as leather belts with silver buckles or tin pots with earthenware lids. These products implied the input of manufacturers from different guilds, which was made possible by the activities of large merchants or entrepreneurs who simply bought the separate components of the article and employed artisans to assemble the final product. Guilds often protested this, as they considered it a violation of their rules, which prescribed that guild-based masters were to be independent and the sole warrantors of the final product’s quality and standards. The guilds’ attitude even hampered vertical integration in one single sector. In leather manufacturing, tanning and shoemaking were typically considered two different crafts, whether or not they were organized in two separate guilds, with each guild defining separate quality standards (for the leather and the shoes respectively) and entry requirements (apprenticeship terms and master trials). Juridical litigation could arise when tanners started to subcontract to shoemakers who then manufactured shoes on their premises – and vice versa.[19] The guilds involved mostly tried to confirm and monitor their rules, insisting that whoever manufactured shoes needed to have finished the shoemakers’ term and trial and whoever tanned hides the terms and trials of the tanners. In early modern Antwerp, such discussions emerged in a context in which the guilds of the tanners and the shoemakers were not sufficiently distinguished. Debate arose as shoemakers began to purchase hides themselves and hired tanners to tan for them. After decades of discussion, it was eventually decided to clearly separate the two guilds, which in practice meant that they each had their own apprenticeship term and master piece.[20]

Within a single guild as well, product innovation could cause trouble. The guilds’ products were mostly identifiable by hall marks which guaranteed certain quality standards. The tanners’ hall marks for instance guaranteed the proper origin of the hide used, distinguishing not only between different animals but also different parts of the animal. In the wood sector, the hall mark guaranteed the proper origin  of the wood used, for instance in order to distinguish genuine ebony wood from Spanish wood, which was used as a cheaper substitute. And in metal trades, a certain alloy was mostly guaranteed with a hall mark, with the tinsmiths’ marks for instance ensuring that the tin did not contain more than two percent lead. What happened in the long term was that additional hall marks were introduced, in order to accommodate new products and quality levels. This was for instance the case with the Antwerp guild of pewterers who were forced to create new marks in order to accommodate new alloys introduced by the masters.[21]

In addition to that, markets were increasingly flooded with products without quality marks or with shopkeepers’ marks, which were not made according to the guild’s standards. This was due to the increasing importance of wholesalers, which provided shops with imported products and product made by ‘false masters’ or outside the guild context. At the other end of the spectrum, the number of shops increased – called ‘faiseurs de rein vendeurs de toutes’ in some of the literature. While guild-based masters had often combined manufacturing and selling, this was increasingly separated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[22]

In all, text book craftsmanship as a collective of autonomous masters who all made the same or similar products independently and with the help of a few journeymen and one or two apprentices, was very much a fiction by the end of the eighteenth century – at least in a range of trades. Vertical integration, sub-contracting, wholesale and retail all undermined the ideal of the master-housefather working on his own premises and selling his products directly to his customers.[23] 

The separation of art and craftsmanship

Contrary to what has often been thought, the deterioration of the guilds and craftsmanship was not only due to nineteenth-century industrialisation and technological innovation. Craftmanship experienced major transformation before the mid-eighteenth century and in the absence of increasing scale and technology driven transformations – one of the most important being the increasing distinction between artisan and artist. Before the Renaissance period, both where hardly distinguished – if at all. What we consider artists today were often joined in the same guild as artisans, as was the case with the sculptors, which often shared a guild with other artisans working with stone, like masons. During the Renaissance period, however, sculptors and painters started to distinguish themselves from what they then referred to as ‘mere artisans’, or mere ‘mechanics’. The artists built upon the classical distinction between the mechanical arts and the liberal arts, and aligned themselves to intellectuals and those who had learned Latin and where familiar with texts and images form Greek and Roman Antiquity. In the process, artisans were increasingly denied what was then called ingenium (ingenuity). The Antwerp sculptors argued that talent was needed to become an artist but not to become a mason, claiming that while masons could support themselves from the very first day of their training, “apprentices in sculpture did not know for four or five years whether they would be able to continue in the profession.”[24]

This evolution was part of a broader and more thorough transformation in which artisanal skills were increasingly instrumentalized. By the mid-eighteenth century, the famous enlightened philosopher Adam Smith distinguished inventors and artisans with ingenuity from the rank-and-file artisans who only had to manufacture the products invented and designed by others:

“The arts, which are much superior to common trades, such as those of making clocks and watches, contain no such mystery as to require a long course of instruction. The first invention of such beautiful machines, indeed, and even that of some of the instruments employed in making them, must, no doubt, have been the work of deep thought and long time, and may justly be considered as among the happiest efforts of human ingenuity. But when both have been fairly invented and are well understood, to explain to any young man, in the compleatest manner, how to apply the instruments and how to construct the machines, cannot well require more than the lessons of a few weeks: perhaps those of a few days might be sufficient.”[25]

Paradoxically, artisans were actually valued highly in this period, but they were so only as sophisticated robots of sorts. In the famous Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, they were called ‘automatons’, while entrepreneurs referred to them as ‘sets of hands’.[26] Artisans were not considered able to invent or design new products or to monitor a complex production process. Building on a distinction between mind and hand, this capacity was denied to most of them.

Such a distinction between mind and hand was not made up to at least the early sixteenth century. Nor was embodied knowledge necessarily seen as inferior to intellectual knowledge before that time. As Michel Foucault has first noted, the Renaissance epistemological context was such that access to the truth – which was at the time synonymous with God’s wisdom – was possible through words as well as things. Just as finding the right words was considered getting closer to the truth in rhetoric, imitating God’s creation by crafting could be seen as a way of getting nearer to god’s wisdom. In order to understand this adequately, we have to free ourselves, again, from modern notions about invention and ingenuity. While imitation is seen as inferior to invention today, in the Renaissance context it could actually be better to manufacture imitations of, for instance, precious stones or diamonds, as you were then actually emulating god’s act of creation.[27] This is in any case how the mystic humanist Nicolas Cusanus defended craftsmanship against the pretence of artists. In the famous dialogue Idiota de mente, Cusanus features a wooden spoon maker, who actually argues that craftsmanship is superior to art because artisans do not use models, just as God did not have a model when he created the world:

“All finite art depends on infinite art (…) As an example let me take the making of spoons. The spoon has no model other than the idea in our mind. The sculptor or painter takes his models from the things which he wishes to represent, but I do not do this when I produce spoons, saucers and pitchers from wood (…) For this reason my art producers rather than reproduces natural forms and is, therefore, more like infinite art.”[28]

From this perspective collective standards and working procedures are not necessarily opposed to ingenuity and creativity. Ingenuity could just as well imply the presence of the collective. As will be further discussed below, craftsmanship was embedded in a religious atmosphere which made that work and skills were inseparable from devotion and piety. Even when considering that the nineteenth century was profoundly religious too, this was fundamentally different. Contrary to nineteenth and twentieth-century ideas, ingenuity and creativity in a way presupposed collective activities – which were of a fundamentally religious nature.

The socio-political dimension of learning

This perfectly illustrates that learning in the late middle ages was not reducible to the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills. It was rather embedded in a political and religious culture in which acquiring skills when hand in glove with being socialized in a corporative milieu. Apprentices did mostly not only work with their master but lived under his roof as well. A master was typically considered to act as a surrogate father of sorts. He was not only supposed to train the youth but to educate and discipline him as well. Masters were held responsible for the apprentice’s morals and were to guard that he fulfilled his religious duties.[29] Moreover, the terminology used in contemporary documents – including in apprenticeship contracts – often included references to ‘serving’. Apprenticeship was part of a life-cycle tradition, in which living and being socialized in another household was a standard feature of the life of a large part of lower and middling groups.[30] Boarding in another household mostly took place between the age of roughly 12 and 24, with 14 or 15 often being the medium age at which an apprenticeship started and the term to serve often ranging between two and eight years, with four to five years often being the mean or medium.[31] During this period, apprentices were to ‘serve’ their master to the best of their ability, not unlike living-in female servants. Masters, in turn, were to teach, educate and discipline the youth as a good housefather does.

The role of the guilds was not contrary to this. Becoming part of the guild too, was not only a matter of being able to demonstrate the mastering of a certain range of skills. It implied a range of rituals like having meals and attending mass together with the other masters. A guild was not only an economic institution but a religious brotherhood as well. Members were not only confronted with product standards but were supposed to take part in collective activities like masses, processions, feasts for the patron saint, and the funeral of fellow members. The ubiquity of terms referring to family like brother and brotherhood suggests that guilds can be seen as artificial families of sorts. Finishing an apprenticeship was in a way entering a new or a broader family, and becoming a master was assuming a socio-political role in which public and private aspects were profoundly entangled. A proper understanding thereof requires appreciating the deeply feudal and corporative context in which this all took place. The body politic was in this period literally imagined as a ‘body’, with a head and members. While the prince, or, in some cities, a conglomerate of nobles, was the head of the body, he did not represent a range of individuals on a territory as we would imagine today. Being part of the body as an individual rather implied being part of a member, which could be a noble family, the clergy, or indeed, a guild. And the guild itself was in turn conceived of as a body with a head (the board) and members (the masters), just as a household was (with the master as the head and the children, apprentices and servant, and the wife as members).[32]

To be sure, the corporative system and the collective ‘guild ethic’ did not fail to be challenged by an economic reality to which the guilds’ logic had difficulties to adapt. In the thirteenth and fourteenth century already, masters and apprentices concluded individual apprenticeship contracts which did not only differ from economic sector to economic sector, but which could also be customized to each individual case. In a sample of eleven weaver apprentices contracts, the terms agreed upon ranged from two to five years, in a sample of six contracts for silversmith apprentices this was three to six.[33] Unfortunately, the current state of the art does not permit to chart to what extent and in what sense this tension between a socio-political and an economic logic increased in the long run, but at least after the mid-seventeenth century, this tension would seem to have increased. In France the term alloué appears, which refers to an apprentice who agrees to learn without aspiring to become master himself. In the literature on England, reference is made to so-called ‘clubbing-out apprenticeships’, in which the apprentices no longer boarded with their masters, especially from the late eighteenth century on.[34] On the continent the decline of boarding has been observed even sooner, i.e. in some instances from the mid-seventeenth century on.[35]

All this suggests that guilds gradually lost their brotherhood-like characteristics and gradually transformed in modern political and economic institutions which guarded the ‘mysteries of the trade’ (as the technical knowledge was often called at the time) in a juridical way, with apprenticeship terms and master pieces serving as entry barriers – just like Adam Smith and later modern thinkers envisioned them to be.

The commodification of skills

Some historians have attributed the decline of ‘das ganze haus’ model to the emergence of pre- capitalistic labour relations, which would have turned the relationship between master and apprentices into one resembling the relationship between employer and employee. In an article on apprenticeship, Reinhold Reith and Andreas Grieβinger distinguished sectors in which concentration trends to place, such as textiles and the building industry, from ‘traditional’ sectors. In the former, concentration trends and increasing numbers of journeymen and apprentices per masters would have profoundly transformed the relationship between master and apprentice. However, recent research has shown that in so-called ‘traditional’ sectors like gold and silversmithing as well, the ratio of apprentices who boarded declined.[36] Moreover, in such sectors as well, the relationship between masters and apprentices seems to have grown more businesslike. A small sample of juridical litigations between masters and (the representatives of) apprentices shows that apprentices often refused to do household chores and that their parents or guardians stressed that they had paid for the acquisition of technical skills. They insisted that the apprentice would learn the tricks of the trade, rather than being used as a servant or a cheap workforce.[37] 

Even so, this is not to say that the more business-like relationship between master and apprentice was synonymous of deskilling. The point is rather that apprenticeship commodified, which could just as well mean that large amounts of money were paid for the acquisition of highly coveted skills. In the Antwerp gold and silversmiths’ sector genuine learning ateliers emerged, where apprentices – including immigrant apprentices – came to learn very specific and specialized types of skills, or what was referred to in the apprenticeship contracts as ‘advanced skills’. These apprentices were no longer life cycle servants, but were present in the master’s workshop only to acquire the skills paid for – and perhaps, to work for the master in return. Nor was this type of apprenticeship still related to a guild logic of finishing an apprenticeship term in order to become a master. The Antwerp guild of the gold and silversmith opposed the emergence of such learning ateliers, arguing that the masters in question hired more apprentices than was allowed. In a juridical dossier filed against him, the most important such master in the late seventeenth century, Guillaume De Rijck, simply responded that they were not apprentices, but journeymen who attended his atelier to work and acquire additional skills.[38]

The guild system itself profoundly transformed in the mean time. Until the fifteenth century, master status was largely inheritable, as master’s sons could become master without a great deal of formal obligations. In contrast to outsiders, they often did not have to finish an apprenticeship term or make a trial piece. So, up to the late middle ages, you were either born in the guild or you had to become socialized in your new family by living in with and serving a master for some years and then prove that you were able to do the job. This too changed in the long run, however. By the mid-eighteenth century master’s sons often had to meet requirements very much like those of outsiders, up to and including large entry fees. This suggest that the guild was no longer a corporation with the master’s households as ‘members’ but rather an organisation external to the private household of the master and more akin to either a modern civil society organisation or an economic institution enacting rules to protect the interests and privileges of its members.

Learning and acquiring skills was now completely separate from acquiring a corporative status. It continued to be connected to a working ethos and embedded in a paternalistic culture, but skills were nevertheless instrumentalized and, to put it in Weberian terms, ‘disenchanted’. This explains why a philosopher and economist like Adam Smith could conceive of skills as only a factor in a larger production process.

“(t)he improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit.”[39]

Craft in the nineteenth century

Learning and acquiring social and cultural prestige of course continued to be important in the nineteenth century. Under pressure of modern economic thinking based on the laissez faire principle, guilds and other professional organisations were abolished around 1800 (often under French rule or influence) or later in the nineteenth century. In France, the D’Allarde en Le Chaplier Laws of 1791 abolished the guilds and outlawed collective organisations in 1791 and in England the Combination Acts forbid trade unions and collective bargaining in 1799-1800. Yet this did not prevent guildlike mechanisms like training apprentices on the shop floor from persisting. Even in large manufactories, senior workers could train apprentices as if they were masters of sorts, in as system called gang labour, which allowed to integrated smaller social units in the larger whole. Nor did hands-on skills and craftsmanship disappear. In recent decades, several scholars have shown the continuing importance and persistence of artisanal skills as well as small scale manufacturing.[40]

Of course, this did not prevent mechanization and division of labour to become more important, resulting in both new types of hierarchies and new types of labour control. While more workers were reduced to their labour power, engineering and technical and technological knowhow became more highly valued. Also, new managerial techniques replaced face-to-face contact and enabled to discipline workers with formal rules, protocols, differential wages, tables with workings hours and targets, etcetera. At least in large manufactories, workers were increasingly reduced to little cogs in a large productive machine.[41] In this context, craft experienced a return. The famous arts and crafts movement was but the most famous expression of an atmosphere in which mechanized production and modernity in general were criticized in religious and conservative circles. In these circles, a revival of the middle ages was preached and practiced in myriad ways: the buying, selling and imitation of old art, the invention of neo-styles like neo-gothic and neo-Renaissance, the emergence of renovation and restoration as a discipline, etcetera.[42] In it, medieval craftmanship was very much idealized, with the medieval craftsman rendered as a pious beacon of harmony as well as a proud and disinterested artist targeting high quality for its own sake.

In this context, a dichotomous view emerged in which craftmanship was seen as the antithesis of innovation and technology-drive production. Yet as shown I this chapter, this is doing injustice to late medieval and early modern craftsman and the small-scale production they stood for. While small commodity production has often been able to sustain economic growth and productivity, craftsmen were often at the basis of innovation. Yet innovation and invention were, in this period, entirely different from our modern conceptions of it. The ideological and epistemological context were far more favourable to embodied and collective types up knowledge – up to the point that craftsmanship could be seen as conducive to scientific progress.[43] Art historians and historians of science have recently argued that the seventeenth-century scientific revolution – in which observation and experiment substituted for deductive philosophising about the nature of nature – were very much indebted to the practices and experiences of craftsman and other practitioners. While craftsmen observed how nature (raw materials) reacted to mechanical processing or such procedures as heating, the mathematical knowledge used for hydraulics and navigation was appropriated and built upon by scientists such as Renée Descartes. Unfortunately, this was also the period in which the artisans themselves became discredited. As art historian and historian of science Pamela Smith has observed ‘artisanal bodily experience was absorbed into the work of the natural philosopher at the same time that the artisan himself was excised from it’.[44]

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[1] K. Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 297.

[2] W. Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art. Five Lectures (London: Longmans Green, 1919 [1877]), p. *.

[3] Richard Sennett, The craftsman (London: Penguin, 2008).

[4] Sennett, The Craftsman, 51, 54.

[5] Sennett, The Craftsman, 54.

[6] *Munro*

[7] Herman Van Der Wee, ‘Structural changes and specialization in the industry of the Southern Netherlands’, The Economic History Review, 28, 1975, p. 213.

[8] Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: ein Versuch (Basel, 1860).

[9] Van Der Wee, ‘Structural changes’; Idem, ‘Industrial dynamics and the process of urbanization and de-urbanization in the Low Countries from the late middle ages to the eighteenth century’, in: Herman Van Der Wee (ed.), The rise and decline of urban industries in Italy and the Low Countries (late middle ages – early modern times) (Leuven, 1988), pp. 307-381; Alfons K.L. Thijs, ‘Antwerp’s luxury industries: the Pursuit of profit and artistic sensitivity’, in: J. Van Der Stock (ed.), Antwerp: story of a metropolis, 16th-17th century (Antwerp, 1993), p. 105-113; Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

[10] E.g., Michael North and David Ormrod (eds), Art markets in Europe 1400-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet (eds), Mapping markets for paintings in Europe 1450-1750 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); E.J. Sluijter, ‘On Brabant Rubbish, Economic Competition, Artistic Rivalry and the Growth of the Market for Paintings in the First Decades of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 1 (2009), no. 2 (http://jhna.org/index.php).

[11] Natasja Peeters (ed.), Invisible Hands? The Role and Status of the Painter’s Journeyman in the Low Countries c.1450 – c.1650 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007).

[12] Elizabeth A. Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

[13] A state of the art in James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[14] Bert De Munck, ‘Construction and Reproduction. The Training and Skills of Antwerp Cabinetmakers in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, In Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kaplan and Hugo Soly (eds), Learning on the Shop Floor. Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship (London/New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), pp. 85-110.

[15] Bert De Munck, Technologies of Learning: Apprenticeship in Antwerp Guilds from the 15th Century to the End of the Old Regime (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 68-74.

[16] Ibidem; De Munck, ‘Construction’.

[17] De Munck, Technologies, 72; Michèle Bimbenet-Privat, ‘Goldsmiths’ Apprenticeship During the First Half of the Seventeenth Century: the Situation in Paris’, In: David Mitchell (ed.), Goldsmiths, Silversmiths and Bankers. Innovation and the Transfer of skill, 1500–1800 (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing), pp. 23-31, p. 29.

[18] *Prak and Epstein*

[19] De Munck, Technologies, pp. 233-6. Also: Bert  De Munck, ‘La qualité du corporatisme. Stratégies économiques et symboliques des corporations anversoises du XV^e siècle à leur abolition’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 54 (2007), 1 : 116-144, 127-8.

[20] De Munck, Technologies, 235.

[21] Bert De Munck, ‘Skills, Trust and Changing Consumer Preferences: The Decline of Antwerp’s Craft Guilds from the Perspective of the Product Market, ca. 1500 – ca. 1800’, International Review of Social History, 53 (2008) 2: 197-233, 215-22; Idem, ‘One Counter and Your own Account. Redefining Illicit Labour in Early Modern Antwerp’, Urban History, 37 (2010) 1: 26-44, 38-9; also Idem, ‘The Agency of Branding and the Location of Value. Hallmarks and Monograms in Early Modern Tableware Industries’, Business History, 54 (2012) 7: 1–22.

[22] De Munck, ‘One Counter’, p. 39-43 and ‘Agency’, p. 10-3.

[23] *Lis and Soly*; De Munck, ‘One Counter’.

[24] Bert De Munck, ‘Corpses, Live Models, and Nature. Assessing Skills and Knowledge before the Industrial Revolution (case: Antwerp). Technology and Culture, 51 (2010) 2: 332-356, 346-7; see also Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing art in Antwerp, 1550-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 16.

[25] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, first ed. W. Strahan, London., 1776, Book I, ch 10, Part 2: 151-153; also quoted in Bert De Munck, ‘Disassembling the City: A Historical and an Epistemological View on the Agency of Cities’, Journal of Urban History, 43 (2017) 5: 811–829, 819.

[26] Cf. Cynthia J. Koepp, ‘The Alphabetical Order: Work in Diderot’s Encyclopédie’, In: Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (eds), Work in France. Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 229–257; Idem, ‘Advocating for Artisans: the Abbé Pluche’s Spectacle de la Nature (1732–51)’, In: Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis (eds), The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Modern Times (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 245–273; William H. Sewell Jr, ‘Visions of Labor: Illustrations of the Mechanical Arts before, in, and after Diderot’s Encyclopédie’, In: Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia L. Koepp (eds), Work in France. Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp 258–286; Simon Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, In: William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (eds), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 126–165; Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly (2012), Worthy efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 485–488, 422; Bert De Munck, ‘Artisans, Products and Gifts: Rethinking the History of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present, 224 (2014): 39–74, 55–61.

[27] E.g., Spike Bucklow, ‘The Virtues of Imitation: Gems, Cameos and Glass Imitations’, in Paul Binski and Ann Massing (eds.), The Westminster Retable: History, Technique, Conservation (London, 2009), pp. 143-9.

[28] Nicolaus Cusanus, Idiota de mente, cap II (Opera Omnia, 1937), p. 51.

[29] Maarten Prak, ‘Moral order in the world of work: social control and the guilds in Europe’, In Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (eds), Social Control in Europe. Vol. 1, 1500-1800 (Columbus, 2004), 176-199. Also Bert De Munck, ‘From Brotherhood Community to Civil Society? Apprentices Between Guild, Household and the Freedom of Contract in Early Modern Antwerp’, Social History, 35 (2010) 1: 1-20.

[30] Steven R. Smith, ‘The Ideal and the Reality: Apprentice–Master Relationships in Seventeenth-Century London’, History of Education Quarterly, XXI (1981), 449-60; Steven R. Smith, ‘The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-century Adolescents’, Past and Present, 61 (1973): 150-151; Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Failure to become freemen. Urban apprentices in early modern England’, Social History, 16 (1991): 155-172; Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 232–8.

[31] Cf. De Munck, Technologies, p. 177-85.

[32] Bert De Munck, Guilds, Labour and the Urban Body Politic: Fabricating Community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300-1800 (London/New York: Routledge, 2018) esp. chs 1 and 2.

[33] Guillaume Des Marez, ‘L´apprentissage à Ypres à la fin du XIIIe siècle. Contribution à l’élude des origines corporatives en Flandre.’ Revue du Nord, 2/1 (1911): 1-48 ; Léo Verriest, Les luttes sociales et le contrat d´apprentissage à Tournai jusqu´en 1424 (Brussels, 1911, Mémoire in-8° de l’Académie Royale de Belgique. Classe des Lettres, Deuxième série, Tome IX). Also: Bert De Munck, Raoul De Kerf and Annelies De Bie, ‘Apprenticeship in the Southern Netherlands, c. 1400-c. 1800’, In: Maarten Prak and Patrick Wallis (eds), Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 217-246, 223.

[34] K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 257-263.

[35] De Munck, ‘Brotherhood Community’, pp. 9-14.

[36] Andreas Grießinger and Reinhold Reith, ‘Lehrlinge im deutschen Handwerk des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts: Arbeitsorganisation, Sozialbeziehungen und alltägliche Konflikte.’ Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 13 (1986): 149–199; Reinhold Reith, ‘Apprentices in the German and Austrian Crafts in Early Modern Times‑Apprentices as Wage Earners?’ In: Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kaplan and Hugo Soly (eds), Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship (London and New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), pp. 179–202.

[37] Ibidem, 15-6. Also De Munck, Guilds, chs 4 and 5.

[38] Bert De Munck and Raoul De Kerf, ‘Wandering About the Learning Market: Early Modern Apprenticeship in Antwerp Gold- and Silversmiths Ateliers’, In: Pepijn Brandon, Sabine Go and Wybren Verstegen (eds), Navigating History: Economy, Society, Knowledge and Nature. Essays in Honour of Prof. Dr C.A. Davids (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 36-63,

[39] Smith, An Inquiry, pp. 151-153  

[40] Raphael Samuel, ‘Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop 3 (1977) 1: 6-72; Idem, ‘Mechanization and Hand Labour in Industrializing Britain. In: Lenard R. Berlanstein (ed), The Industrial Revolution and Work in the Nineteenth Century (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), pp 26-43; Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, ‘Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization’, Past and Present, 108 (1985): 33-176.

[41] ***

[42] ***

[43] ***

[44] Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experiment in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 186.