7 Years, No Pay, No Marriage: Medieval Apprenticeship

Richard Whittington was a real man who really did become mayor of London, but he was not a barefoot orphan and there is no evidence he ever owned a famous cat. What he actually did was learn a trade, the way thousands of medieval young people did, and that story is stranger than the pantomime. This video follows an apprentice from the contract to the workshop door. It starts with the indenture itself: one agreement written twice on a single sheet of parchment, then cut apart along a jagged line so that only the true pair would match. The document named the craft and the years, in London usually at least seven, and its clauses tell you exactly what both sides feared. The master promised food, clothing, a bed and to hide none of his skills. The apprentice promised obedience, no dice, no taverns, and no marriage until the term ended, because he lived inside his master's house rather than going home at night. From there we look at the rules. Around 1268 the Paris provost Étienne Boileau had about a hundred crafts write their statutes into one book, which set training terms as long as ten years for goldsmiths, limited how many apprentices a master could take and banned working by candlelight. Then the craft itself, through the painter Cennino Cennini, who prescribed a year of drawing on a panel coated with ground chicken bone, six years grinding colors and laying gold leaf, and only then six years of painting. We also cover the parts usually left out: silkwomen in London and Cologne who took girls as apprentices, widows who kept workshops running, complaints brought before city officials by beaten or untaught apprentices, the many who never finished, journeymen paid by the day and wandering between towns, and the test piece that gave us the word masterpiece. Chapters: 0:00 The Cat That Never Existed 1:30 Cut Along a Wavy Line 3:10 What Each Side Promised 4:53 Paris and the Book of Trades 6:33 Cennini's Thirteen-Year Plan 8:17 Craft Secrets and Murano Glass 9:52 Girls, Silkwomen and Widows 11:34 When the Contract Broke 13:02 Journeymen on the Road 14:45 What a Masterpiece Really Was 16:18 The Guild as a Brotherhood 17:02 Whittington, For Real #MedievalHistory #Guilds #MiddleAges #History