Daily Life During The Reformation (6 page)

Shoemakers who produced fine leather or velvet shoes were
more highly considered than those in the same guild who lacked these skills.
Some members made new shoes but did not repair them. The cobblers who repaired
them were not allowed to make them.

The shoemaker’s shop was usually also his home, although some
might maintain a stall at the local market to sell their products. Wealthy
customers had their shoes made to order. The same kind of hierarchy would apply
to hatters and other fine crafts.

Unskilled workers were not organized into guilds.
Fishmongers, itinerant dealers, carters, or messenger boys had no such
organizations to rely on in the event of illness or unemployment.

In Germany, jobs were posted by the master in a designated
building sometimes owned by the guild or at an inn. Here, journeymen could find
work. If a new man came to town looking for a job, he was obliged to report to
this kind of employment office and could only take a job listed there. Masters
were required to do all their hiring there.

For a young middle class boy, the road from apprenticeship
to master craftsman would have been long and arduous. The time and strictness
varied among guilds but in general, a boy or sometimes a girl in certain trades
was placed with a master from about age seven to ten. An agreement was made
whereby the child had to serve and obey the master and promise to remain in
return for the instruction. In turn, the master agreed not to use the boy as a
servant or be abusive toward him. The length of time for the apprenticeship
varied from two to seven years. Disputes often arose over the amount of time
given to serving the master and to learning the trade. Boys and girls were
often apprenticed to a relative, where the situation might be more agreeable.

Once the agreement was finished, if the boy had learned the
craft or trade well, he would receive a letter of introduction informing other
masters of the craft that the young man was now a journeyman and eligible to be
hired by a master and receive pay for his work. He sometimes traveled going
from one master to another in order to learn different techniques and at the
same time make business contacts.

No contract was involved in employment, but the job might
last for many years. The ambitious journeyman dreamed of becoming a master and
owning his own business. The contacts he made were of importance for
prospective work. He also decided on his future home and found a wife to manage
it. Few guilds accepted unmarried masters.

It was made relatively easy for sons of guildsmen and of
masters to become members of the guilds themselves but more difficult for
others by the raising of entry fees or by setting quotas then filling them with
relatives. The piece of original work that was required to become a master
could always be rejected as unworthy.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, journeymen were
increasingly barred from mastership and were becoming simply permanent
employees with no prospects of owning their own shops. Towns began to discover
that guilds hindered economic progress and set about freeing crafts from guild
control.

Wholesale merchants did not make things, and there were no
journeymen. The family business was almost always passed on to members of the
family who, once they had learned the business, were placed in an appropriate
position.

Rural Industries

Village or cottage industries that did not involve
agriculture revolved around the blacksmith, the barber, the miller, the baker,
cobblers, carpenters, and weavers. Villages often differed in their activities.
In coastal areas, they might be devoted to fisheries, elsewhere to raising
dairy cattle, to vineyards or orchards, still others to grain. Many peasants
milled their own grain at home while others used the services of a mill,
usually owned by the lord of the manor and for which they paid a fee.

In large towns the iron works might have several furnaces
and forges and a number of workers, but in a village there was often just one
man operating a bellows and a single forge. He might also farm to supplement
his small earnings as a blacksmith. In addition, he could also be the one to
see if a wound required cauterizing or a broken bone set. An alternative would
be the barber who generally had experience in tending wounds.

Woodcutters, generally the poorest of workers, obtained a
permit from the lord who owned the forest. Working as independent contractors,
they cut down the trees and then sold them to lumbermen who carted them away to
sawmills. The lord of the manor to whom the trees belonged took the lion’s
share of the profit. The work was hard and when the woodcutter aged and his
strength failed, he had little or nothing to fall back on.

For poor peasants, in the countryside where rigid guild
restrictions did not apply, weaving presented a chance to earn a little extra
money. A sheep farmer sheared his animals and sold the wool to a merchant who
then distributed it to peasants where it was spun into cloth in the home. The
merchant collected the woven cloth and sold it to processors who finished and
dyed it. From there, it was sold to various industries or persons such as
tailors who turned it into clothes. This system of manufacture used credit at
nearly every level. Textile manufacturers in the cities who farmed out this
work to the villages paid less for the work than in the city. This was one way
for entrepreneurs to bypass the guild system. Pay discrepancies between cottage
and urban craftsmen were due to the fact that the country workers were
semi-skilled, never having served as apprentices. The cottagers also maintained
agricultural plots for food not available to town craftsmen, and working at
home reduced overhead costs. Often, the textile production was geared to the
winter months when all farm hands were not required for planting and
harvesting. Cottage industries also gave country women a chance to increase the
family finances by working at the looms. Along with food production, textiles
made up the largest industries, employing the most people and generating the
most wealth.

Mining

Besides the mineral wealth flowing to Europe from the New
World, central and eastern European mines underwent rapid development during
the time of the Reformation. New ones were opened, and established mines were
going deeper underground.

The state owned the natural resources, and if ore was
discovered on a family’s property, the state claimed it. Usually the right to
mine was purchased from the king or the prince of the realm, often in the form
of an annual fee, by a wealthy entrepreneur who exploited the mine and sold the
ore. The use of copper became more prevalent during the period for coins and
for use in making cannons and cooking utensils. In the sixteenth century,
copper was generally replaced by cheaper iron.

Lead used in roofing, armaments and piping, was mined on or
near the surface of the ground and smelted close by to avoid expensive
transportation costs. Smelters were situated in or nearby forests, where wood
was readily available to turn into charcoal required to heat the furnaces to
sufficient temperatures to extract the metal. The unhealthy work took its toll
in lung diseases from the poisonous gases emitted in the process.

From the foothills of the Bohemian mountains, copper and
tin deposits supplied the metal for the bells, statues, and doors of the great
gothic cathedrals. Silver talers (coins) were minted here in 1519. The word
“dollar,” first applied by the United States to silver coins, derives from
taler.

One of the great German families controlling enormous
capital, the Fuggers, financed copper smelters and used their resulting fortune
to help support the Habsburg dynasty.

In England, the most important mines were in Cornwall where
vast quantities of tin and copper ore were found. When the miners of Cornwall
went to the New World, they took with them their knowledge of deep, hard rock
mining and helped develop some of the great mining areas of the United States.

Entire families worked the mines in England and Wales:
women above ground, small children serving as messengers and doing odd jobs. At
12 years of age, boys could join their fathers underground.

To house their workers, mining companies constructed rows
of cheaply built cottages and rented them to the miners. If a man had an
accident, or otherwise was incapable of work, he lost his dwelling as well as
his job.

Miners were born and died in these squalid company houses.
Parents, children, and grandparents often crowded together. There was no
overall mining guild, and isolated communities had few facilities for
recreation.

Light in the mines came from candles placed on ledges along
the wall of the shaft or attached to the miners’ hats. They had to pay for
their own candles and tools, the price taken out of their pay.

Dangerous rock falls, collapsing tunnels, gas explosions,
and ladders of rotten wood often caused death and injury. Medical services were
mostly nonexistent. An injured miner out of work had to rely on charity. Mining
communities had their cripples sitting in the street begging, attesting to the
price paid to extract metals for a pittance.

Coal was also widely mined and burned in England and Wales
where air pollution became a fact of life. Despite the health problems
associated with it, coal and its irritant consequences were considered a
necessity.

There were usually three eight-hour shifts and a worker
beginning at six in the morning arose about four if he had to walk several
miles to the mine, negotiate hundreds of feet of vertical ladders, and then
walk underground to the worksite. Eight hours of moil in cramped and frequently
wet conditions left him exhausted. He returned home to wash off the coal dust,
eat dinner, and get some sleep before the shift began anew.

HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

By the end of the medieval period, much of Europe was under
the jurisdiction of powerful monarchies such as Portugal, Spain, France,
England, and Scandinavia.

The union of territories in central Europe ruled over by an
emperor consisted of hundreds of smaller units under the immediate mandate of
princes, dukes, barons, counts, margraves, knights (which might rule over only
a village), and free cities. This large territory was linguistically and
ethnically diverse and nearly impossible to administer effectively. It was
feared by neighboring countries, such as France, for its territorial ambitions
and was itself fearful of the westward expansion of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

Seven noble electors selected each Holy Roman Emperor from
the Austrian House of Habsburg whose lands were large and wealthy enough to
enable the dynasty to impose its candidate on the other German states.

The Holy Roman Empire, c. 1560.

The emperor, residing generally in Vienna, was often in
conflict with the Church and subordinate rulers of the empire. Much of the land
in the hands of the Church was beyond his grasp, and the political
semi-independence of the nobility gave rise to disputes over taxation and
territory.

Castles dotted the countryside and every few miles there
was a different lord, a new jurisdiction where tolls had to be paid for goods
crossing their lands. Many nobles were eager to expand their possessions and
influence.

Free Cities

There were 80 free cities in the Holy Roman Empire that
were not subject to the will of a landowner. These cities owed allegiance only
to the emperor and not to an intermediate prince or lord. The free city was
obliged to render hospitality to the emperor when he visited and to meet
certain imperial taxes and military manpower.

Such an arrangement, for practical purposes, left the city
politically autonomous and managed by the city magistrates. They had relatively
large populations such as Augsburg, an important city of southern Germany, with
a population of about 30,000.

At the apex of the municipal society stood the
burgermeister and the so-called honorability that made up the city council
composed of the rich, patrician families that monopolized the city government
and administered its various sources of income at their pleasure. With their
wealth and their aristocratic privileges, the patricians lorded it alike over
townspeople and neighboring peasantry who were subject to the municipality. The
town council assumed the chief rights over municipal lands, imposed duties, and
sold guild privileges and rights of citizenship as a source of profit.