CHAPTER VI

THE CRAFTSMAN

The men who engaged in these trades -- barbers and shoemakers, joiners and millers -- have left little trace of themselves. There are no diaries or other personal papers, no testaments or wills to shed light on their personal lives, and these particular crafts have left almost no physical artifacts.<s1>s Moreover, few historians have taken the trouble to study craftsmen. Those most likely to undertake such a study are the social historians, but because of their preference for rural subjects, we actually know more about the peasant in his village than we do of the artisan in the great cities. There is, however, one type of source that does shed light on this shadowy region of social history; namely, the surveys of the citizenry conducted by the city government for military and fiscal purposes. These documents provide a wealth of data on such fundamental areas as age, wealth, size of membership, number of employees, place of residence, and even religion. Because the Tax Books and Muster Lists give each citizen by name, they are one of our few sources on the individual craftsman. The data also provide another and consistent way to compare the four guilds. The data are presented here in tabular form, arranged according to subject: size of guild, age, wealth, place of residence, number of sons and journeymen, distance and direction travelled by the journeymen, size of household, and religious affiliation. Statistical analysis of guilds is not new, but previous attempts have been very limited. Either only one craft is examined or, more commonly, only the Tax Books are utilized.<s2>s By using the Tax Books in conjunction with the Muster Lists, and by analyzing four guilds instead of one, I have been able to go beyond simple description and have been able to establish a relationship between the craftsman and his craft. The analysis shows that differences in craft and guild were reiterated in the craftsmen themselves, and that many of those differences can be traced to differences in the economic or technical conditions in the individual crafts.

The first and simplest level of comparison between the four guilds is that of size, which is to say the number of masters and journeymen who belonged to each guild. The Muster Lists for 1610, 1615, 1619 and 1645 all gave the number of masters for each guild, and those for 1615 and 1619 gave the number of journeymen and sons as well. The membership information is summarized in Tables 1 through 3.<s3>s The joiners and the shoemakers had the largest guilds of the four, with over one hundred masters each. The Barbers Guild was somewhat smaller, with around seventy masters, and the Millers Guild was by far the smallest, with about thirty-five masters.<s4>s The number of masters corresponded roughly to the number of shops in the city, for no master was allowed to work for another and no master was allowed to have two shops. Although there were undoubtedly a few exceptions, the usual rule was one master to one shop, so that some approximation of the market size for each shop can be calculated on the basis of the number of masters. Assuming that everyone in the city was a potential buyer, and assuming a population of around 30,000 people, each master shoemaker had an average of 261 customers, each joiner had 288 customers, each barber had 484 customers, and each master miller served 1,154 customers. These figures admittedly could be off by 100% or even more for individual masters, but they do serve to point out the relation between size of guild and size of market. Joiners and shoemakers were large guilds (eighth and ninth largest in the city at this time) because they served the general public and had to meet a high level of demand.<s5>s The barbers had a somewhat smaller guild, less because their market was smaller than because the demand for medical services was not as frequent as the demand for shoes. Finally, the Millers Guild had few masters basically because one mill was capable of a much higher level of production than was one shoemaker's or barber's shop. The high cost of starting a new shop also served to keep the number of master millers small. No one would make the large capital investment of building and equipping a new mill unless there was an obvious need, which occurred only rarely. On the other hand, the costs of establishing a new joiner's shop, for example, were within the ability of an artisan to meet. The new master could set up shop regardless of whether or not there was demand for his product.

TABLE 1: SIZE OF GUILD - 1610

TABLE 2: SIZE OF GUILD - 1615

Shoemakers I Joiners I Barbers I Millers

Masters I 111 119 75 44

Journeymen I 62 80 18 67

Sons I 7 10 3 1

TOTAL 180 209 96 112

TABLE 3: SIZE OF GUILD - 1619

Shoemakers I Joiners I Barbers I Millers

Masters I 115 104 62 26

Journeymen I 65 85 17 67

Sons I 6 11 2 5

TOTAL 186 200 81 98

In all three censuses taken during the 1610's, the master was asked his age. The data are presented in Tables 4 through 11; Tables 10 and 1 1 represent the average over the three censuses, and not actual figures. It should be noted that because there was no age recorded for some individuals (for example, no age was recorded for female respondents), the number of masters in each guild does not always equal the number of masters given in Tables 1, 2 and 3. I have omitted giving totals in every table in the interest of space, and will give totals only where they differ significantly from the figures in the first three tables.

As can be seen in Table 10, the median age for the four guilds was over forty years, with the millers being the youngest at thirty-nine and the joiners the oldest at forty-four. The data show that most masters were between the ages of 35 and 45, with as high as sixty three percent of a guild in this age group. With an average age in the forties, a master would normally be the oldest male in the shop, a fact that helps explain the position of dominance he held over his employees. His legal position as master was reinforced by the social authority of his age. Troubles between journeymen and masters may well have had generational conflict as one aspect of the tension.

One-third of the millers were under thirty-five years of age, and two-thirds were under forty-five (see Table 10), a comparatively young age structure. This may have resulted from health hazards connected with milling, specifically from lung diseases contracted from breathing dust from the flour produced during the milling process. More likely, however, is the possibility that masters left the Millers Guild in higher proportions than in the other guilds. Masters may have quit in order to practice a different craft, to pursue a mercantile trade, or may have simply been forced out because there was no mill available to operate. None of these theories receive any support from the sources, and the reasons for the lower median age in this guild must remain speculative.

The barbers show a fairly even age distribution, which might seem puzzling in view of their involvement in medicine. Barbers dealt mainly with injuries rather than with contagious diseases, so there was less chance of infection than one would at first suppose. Even so, the barbers consistently had a smaller proportion of guildsmen in the over-55 age group than did the other three guilds (See Tables 5, 7 and 9).

The relationship between age structure and occupation can be examined more closely by comparing barbers with bathers. The mean age of the bathers was consistently greater than that of the barbers, and it was the latter who were more likely to come into contact with contagious diseases, since those who were afflicted with such diseases were forbidden by law to frequent the public baths.<s6>s Furthermore, the surgeons (Wund$rzten) were significantly older than either barbers or bathers: 47.6 years in 1610, 45.5 in 1615 and 50.2 in 1619. Surgeons, of course, had little contact with contagious diseases, and so lived longer than their colleagues. Even though the absolute figures are small, the results are consistent, and point to an inverse relationship between exposure to contagious disease in the course of one's occupation and a lengthened life span.

The Joiners Guild was the oldest, with a median age of forty-four, and is the one guild that shows unusual characteristics in its age structure. Two points are striking about the age structure of the joiners: an exceptionally low percentage of masters in the age group under twenty-five, and a high percentage of masters over fifty-five. The comparatively small number of young masters could have resulted from a variety of related factors. Since native sons had a much shorter training period, the statistic may indicate that few sons of masters were entering their father's trade. It may indicate a later age of apprenticeship than in other guilds, or it may indicate a longer period of training. The heavy concentration of masters in the upper age brackets is also open to speculation. Nearly half the guild was over forty-five, and over one-fourth was over fifty-five (see Table 11). While it is true that the joiner's craft posed no special physical dangers to the craftsman, the same was the case for shoemakers, and they did not have a similarly high proportion of their members in the older age groups. One possible explanation is that, because the Joiners Guild was exceptionally stable in membership, fewer masters would have quit the guild. Thus there would be a higher proportion of older masters in this guild.

The shoemakers had the most even age distribution of the four guilds, though the structure was somewhat skewed toward the older end (nearly ten percent were over the age of sixty-five). The median age was forty-three (Table 11). With no discernible extenuating circumstances in the craft, the shoemakers most closely approximated a''normal'' age structure.

The data on age yields useful information on the timing of an artisan's career, an area that until now was illumined only by the guild regulations. The data show, however, that regulation and reality did not always coincide. Only in the Barbers and Bathers Guild was a minimum age set for entering an apprenticeship -- 12 years -- but we can safely assume that apprentices rarely began at a much younger age, nor began much later

than age 15. Ten years was the length of training in this guild, as well as in the Joiners Guild, with the apprenticeship lasting three years. If we assume a typical beginning age of fourteen and a training period of ten years, then mastership should have begun around age twenty-four. How this compares

with the actual figures is shown by Table 12.<s7>s The data leave no doubt that the usual age for accession to mastership was somewhere in the range of twenty-eight through thirty-two years old.

Table 12 reveals that age thirty was the typical age at which a journeyman became a master. Specifically, over half (fifty-one to fifty-six percent) of the shoemakers, barbers and millers who were under age thirty-five were between the ages of thirty and thirty-two. Although a handful of men became masters in their early twenties, the sharp rise in the number of masters at age twenty-eight or, in the case of the barbers and millers, at age thirty, shows that these were the usual years during which one could expect to become a master. Since a journeyman was still considered something less than a mature adult, this statistic would indicate that the late twenties and early thirties were the age of maturity in early modern Augsburg, at least among guildsmen. This conforms closely to the typical age of marriage, not least because marriage and mastership were linked by guild ordinance. In other words, adolescence lasted well into the twenties in this society.

One possible explanation for the late age of mastership is that the theoretical length of training, as inferred from the regulations, is correct, and the estimate of the age of apprenticeship (fourteen years old) was incorrect. The apprentice would have to have been eighteen or twenty years old. The regulation would not have set the minimum age at twelve if most apprentices were adults. Moreover, there is a petition from a man who found himself in

the position of having to be an apprentice, although he was a mature adult.<s8>s He complained bitterly about the absurdity and injustice of his situation, as surely would any adult. An apprentice was, almost by definition, a youth.<s9>s The second explanation is that the length of training was longer than required by law. This makes sense, for while some would take longer than the ten year minimum, no one was allowed to take less time. With a proportion of the journeymen spending fifteen or twenty years before becoming masters, the average age of the masters as a whole would rise. As observed above, this line was around age twenty-eight to thirty-two, meaning the average length of training, from apprentice through journeyman to new master, was fourteen to eighteen years.

The Muster Lists gave no information at all on the wealth of the guildsmen, but such data were readily available in the tax books (Tables 13 and 14).<s10>s The measurement of wealth is difficult even in modern societies, and it is even more difficult in pre-modern societies. It is not that the tax books are difficult to read; most entries are routine, and Claus Peter Clasen

has written an excellent guide to their interpretation.<s11>s The difficulty lies in deciding what we mean by''rich'' or''poor''. Since capital goods and property were the principal objects of the tax, the best modern term that would apply is ''gross worth'', or the total value of a person's assets without deducting outstanding debts. The worth of a person can be all in cash and other liquid assets, or wholly in fixed assets such as property and equipment that might be difficult or impossible to sell. It would have been entirely possible for an artisan to owe a fairly high tax, yet have very little cash and be saddled with heavy debts, while another artisan, paying the same tax, would have a high income and few debts. The first we would call poor, the second rich. There is no way to distinguish between the two for individual cases using the tax books alone.

Even among the''wealthy'', the tax paid is not a reliable indicator of their economic strength. A rich man could hide many assets and, likewise, many debts. Moreover, a man could easily have paid a high tax yet have been on the verge of bankruptcy because of high debts. These considerations tend

to vitiate the utility of tax books for use in a reliable analysis of class, and make all the more attractive the alternative approach based on status or estate.

The limitations of the tax books do not mean that this source is rendered useless. They do mean that differences in wealth as represented by the tax paid cannot be taken at face value and, similarly, the fact that two peopie paid the same tax does not necessarily mean that they were equally wealthy. This is an important point to understand, for most of the guildsmen studied here were at or near the level of habnits -- those who had so little

that they paid only the base tax of thirty-six pfennig.<s12>s Conclusions about the poverty of a guild therefore require more than the tax books alone to substantiate them. Among the upper classes there was ample opportunity to shuffle one's wealth about from one form to another, from inside to outside the city, and back again. Among the artisans, however, there was little chance for this because there was so little wealth. The tax figure represented the craftsman's home and shop, with furniture and tools. The figure is most reliable between guilds in the aggregate, for it would measure the general or average capital investment needed to do business in that craft. It is least reliable between two individuals from the same guild, for here the variables of debt and cash flow were the most significant.

The lowest tax category was habnits -- literally,''have nots'' -- those who had no taxable wealth. Most guildsmen managed to remain above this level: seventy-seven percent of the joiners had some taxable wealth, seventy percent of the shoemakers, sixty-seven percent of the millers, and fifty-nine percent of the barbers (see Table 14). The percentages take on more meaning when compared to statistics for the whole city. In 1618, the date of the next tax book index, forty-three percent of the citizens were habnits.<s13>s Only the barbers approached this level of poverty, with forty-one percent habnits in 1611. The joiners had only twenty-three percent habnits. This is still a significant proportion, but the fact remains that these guilds were better off than the bulk of the population.

If the guildsmen were, for the most part, not destitute, neither were they rich. Anton Mayr, in his book on the rich of Augsburg, defined anyone under twenty florins as Besitzer kleiner Verm[gen --''possessing

little wealth'', which he distinguished from the habnits.<s14>s All of the guildsmen fell into these two categories; all were either habnits or were Besitzer kleiner Verm[gen. The divisions used by Friedrich Blendinger in his essay on the middle classes of Augsburg permit finer distinctions. Even here, however, most guildsmen fell in the lowest two categories of habnits or ''lower class'' (Unterschicht); that is, paying no tax or paying less than one florin in taxes (see Table 13). In the''lower middle class'', which Blendinger put at one to three florins, no guild had more than fourteen percent of its members: seven percent for the shoemakers, thirteen percent for the joiners, twelve percent for the barbers and six percent for the millers. In the''middle class'' category (Mittelschicht, three to ten florins), there was five percent of the shoemakers, four percent of the joiners, six percent of the barbers, and twenty-two percent of the millers. Finally, one shoemaker and one miller each qualified to be placed in the ''upper middle class'' obere Mittelschicht, ten to twenty florins. The figures place the craftsmen sqaurely in the ranks of the lower classes and, even at that, places them at the lower end of the lower classes, merging with the habnits. Economically as well as socially these guilds fell in the lower layers of respectable society.

Barbers were impoverished. Forty-one percent of the barbers were habnits, nearly eight percent more than the millers, and over eighteen percent more than the joiners. This poverty was quite possibly due to low profit margins. Prices were not fixed by the city in this guild, and there were virtually no costs for materials or other capital investments. It is possible, therefore, that there was widespread price competition, with each shop

offering its services at very low prices in order to attract business. It is also possible that, as with modern doctors, the barbers had to write off a significant portion of their accounts receivable as uncollectable in cases where they treated the poor. Neither was there any practicable way to get rich in this craft, inasmuch as barbering was a service. Only by opening up a chain of shops could an individual barber hope to get wealthy, and then he would be a manager and owner rather than a master craftsman. This type of business was impossible under the guild system. Another approach would be to treat only the wealthy and to charge high fees, but his avenue, too, was closed, for there was a more prestigious -- and presumably more profitable -- craft of Doktor whose clientele were of the better sort. Barbers dealt primarily with the commoners, people like themselves, who had little to spend on baths, haircuts and medical emergencies. It is possible that the disappearance of the Badegeld -- a weekly allowance for bathing provided by guilds to journeymen -- helped to impoverish the bathers.

The joiners were significantly better off than the other three guilds studied, though it would be misleading to say the the joiners were wealthy. It would be more accurate to say that the joiners were the least impoverished of the four. Twenty-two percent of the joiners were habnits. the lowest percentage in this category, but that is merely to say that nearly one quarter of the guild was too poor to pay property taxes. The reason for this smaller percentage of habnits masters is probably due to the higher investment in their shop and equipment than was required of a shoemaker. As pointed out above, the high percentage of habnits among millers and barbers is due to the presence of Knechten, who owned little, and there were no Knechten in the Joiners Guild.

The striking point about the joiners is that fully sixty percent of the guild was in the zero to one florin category. Moreover, in the other guilds the bulk of this category was concentrated closer to zero than to one florin, whereas the joiners show a significant percentage at the upper end (see Table 14). Thus, even though the shoemakers, too, had a high percentage in the zero to one florin bracket, the median was much lower than for the joiners. A joiner was neither rich nor poor; the great bulk of them could count on a minimal standard of living.

Although their median wealth was not the lowest, in a certain sense the Shoemakers Guild was the poorest of the four. Eighty four percent of the guild paid less than 31 kreuzer in taxes. The median level was drawn upward by the presence of a few shoemakers at relatively high levels (one fellow paid twelve florins in taxes). This distribution in wealth implies capitalist influences in the craft, wherein a few masters garnered the lion's share of the market, becoming rich at the expense of their brethren, who faced a life of near poverty or worse. The poverty of this guild was, as was the case with the barbers, a result of open competition for customers and the low income levels of most customers. All shoemakers offered their products in the same marketplace, and had to compete openly as customers passed by. Prices wouid therefore have been kept relatively low, not through regulation by guild or city, but by the unpitying force of competition. Even if prices were more or less customary, and peer pressure was brought to bear to keep price-cutters in line, the customary prices themselves were determined largely on the basis of what the traffic would bear, and this will have been as low as possible.

There was an unusually high proportion of master millers in the upper tax brackets, and that proportion becomes even larger when the Knechten -- most of whom were at the bottom tax levels -- are removed from the statistics. The principal question in regard to the wealth in the Millers Guild is whether or not the mill itself was taxed. It is possible to answer this question using the tax data. The tax rate was one-fourth to one-half of one percent, which converts the tax bracket ten to fifteen florins, for example, into a minimum of 1,601 florins at 1/4% rates, a figure certainly high enough to allow for the possession of a mill.<s15>s At the lower end, in the under one-half florin bracket for example, where half the guild was, the highest actual wealth was no higher than 163 florins. This was probably not enough to represent ownership of a mill, for the millstone alone normally cost that much.<s16>s In other words, there seems to be proof here of our earlier hypothesis that some masters owned their mills outright, while others merely leased them.

The city was divided into extremeiy small tracts specifically for the muster census that had anywhere from four to more than sixty households in each tract. The mean number of households per tract was around thirty. Each major section of the city was represented by a letter -- A through F -- that corresponded to the principal historical quarters: the merchant's quarter (A), the cathedral quarter (B), St. Jacob's Quarter (C), Holy Cross Quarter (D), St. George's Quarter (E), and St. Stephan's Quarter (F). The first three of these were so populous that they were divided into sections; viz., AA, AB, BA, BB, CA, CB, CC, and CD. The other three were represented as DA, EA and FA. Finally, each of these sections were again divided into as many as thirty-four neighborhoods, or census tracts, numbered sequentially. Each tract was thus referenced as BB 9 or FA 27. Many of the tracts had at their head a one or two line description or name. It is the presence of names that leads me to believe that these were more than arbitrarily-drawn census lines and that they were in fact based on actual neighborhoods.

The small size of these neighborhoods, plus the fact that most masters had their home and shop in the same building, allows us to make some fairly reliable statements about occupational location in seventeenth century Augsburg. Unfortunately, due to the shifting in boundary lines that occurred with each census, it is not possible to compare data from different years, as we can with other categories like wealth and age. I used the data from 1610 for my sample year because of its completeness. The data are summarized in Tables 15 through 17.

Table 17, the Index of Concentration, is the only one that allows comparison of data between guilds. The fact that thirty-four master joiners were in one quarter, or three percent of the millers were in another is not indicative of their relative presence in these districts. Instead, both types of data reflect the relative sizes of the quarters themselves, and mask the actual concentration of a craft in a given quarter. An index is needed that will factor out the varying sizes of the quarters and allow us to see if there were few or many masters compared to the total number of people. Table 16 provides such a figure. The index is nothing more than a compilation of ratios, namely: percentage of masters in a give quarter divided by the percentage of total citizens in that quarter. Thus, for example, where twenty-eight percent of the citizenry lived in the Oberviertel, only twenty percent of the shoemakers lived there, yielding an index of 0.7; while thirty-six percent of the millers lived in the same quarter, which gives an index of 1.3. If the same proportion of a craft was located in a quarter as the population at large, then the index would equal one.

The index allows comparisons between guilds at the level of each quarter. The most unusual distribution of masters was in the Shoemakers Guild, where thirty-six percent of the guild was located in Unser Liebe Frauen Viertel. This was a very high concentration index of 2.2, meaning that there were proportionately more than twice the number of shoemakers here than one would expect given a random distribution. By contrast, with the exception of the Holy Cross Quarter, the joiners were very evenly distributed about the city. The distribution of the Barbers Guild was more even still, with a slightly high concentration in St. George's Quarter and a low concentration in the Merchant's Quarter. Finally, the millers exhibited still another pattern, with no millers in St. George's and only one in Holy Cross, while fully two-thirds were in the Oberviertel and Jacoberviertel. The reason for this is obviously connected with the location of running water in the city: there was none in the former two quarters, while the latter two contained all four of the city's main canals (see Map Two).

The totals in Table 16 permit comparisons to be made at the city level. They show that the proportion of shoemakers to citizens was almost exactly equal, while it was nearly so for the barbers. The joiners, on the other hand, had a noticeably high level of concentration in the city, while for the millers it was very low. The figure for the joiners may well be indicative of a surplus caused by a spurt in public construction, which was enjoying its glory days during this decade under the aegis of architects like Elias Holl, who built the new City Hall in 1615. The apparant deficit of millers was probably a permanent condition, and reflects the high level of productivity found in a mill when compared to a joiner's or a barber's shop.

Reinhold Rau observed that the usual image of all or most of the members of a guild living on a common street or otherwise in close proximity with one another was not true in T^bingen.<s17>s Neither was it true in Augsburg. The masters in these four guilds were located throughout the

city, and though the dispersion level again varied from guild to guild, it was higher than one might have expected from reading other descriptions of guilds. Yet this dispersion should not be surprising, for very few industries benefit from intensive concentration, particuiarly those engaged in retailing. Data on occupational location is one of the more interesting types of information supplied by the Muster Lists.

The barbers were exceptionally dispersed. Only two neighborhoods had any more than two barbers in them (they both had three). Both barbers and bathhouse keepers were equally dispersed. Interestingly, although there were masters in sixty different neighborhoods in Augsburg, in only two of them were there both a barber and a bather. The joiners were also highly dispersed, though there were four neighborhoods with three master joiners,

two with four, and one with five. It is of course possible that a''street'' of joiners ran across the administrative boundaries of the muster rolls. The boundaries were not arbitrary, but the possibility does exist. To allow for this, I searched for contiguous neighborhoods. Even here, a ''street'' of masters might have run athwart the contiguous neighborhoods, but this approach should have caught at least a few. Even using contiguous neighborhoods, however, I could uncover no significant concentrations among the joiners. Three districts in the Jacober Vorstadt yielded seven masters, but that was the highest concentration I could find.

The story is virtually the same for the shoemakers. Despite the high concentration of shoemakers in the cathedral district, the masters were fairly evenly distributed within it. In fact, the Jacober Vorstadt produced the only noticeable concentrations -- seven in one three-neighborhood tract, and eight in a two-neighborhood tract.

The millers produced the only significant local concentrations. Two different neighborhoods produced concentrations of eight masters. Here there actually seems to have been some very specific groupings. In one neighborhood of the Jacober Vorstadt were located eight S$gm^llern, while only one other neighborhood in that part of the Vorstadt held any millers, and that was in the adjacent neighborhood and he was likewise a S$gm^ller. Similarly, the M^hlknechten were virtually all located in

two districts of St. George's Quarter, and only one M^ller lived there. The millers themselves were located in one section of the Jacober Vorstadt and one section of the cathedral district, all close together though not bunched into the same or adjacent districts. The actual listing of the M^hlknechten and the S$gm^llern seem to imply that they each shared common quarters with their fellows, thus accounting for the high level of concentration. The millers, on the other hand, were pretty much one master to a neighborhood, but were bunched along very restricted parts of town. This most likely reflects the fact that the mills were strung along the waterways, and is supporting evidence that the millers resided in or near their mills.

Mills required water to operate, and the only water in the city came from diverted streams of the Lech River. These streams came into the city on the southeast side, ran through the east side of the downtown area and the west side of the Jacober Vorstadt, and left the city on the northeast side, near St. Stefan's. The mills of the city were concentrated in these districts. The millers, too, lived in these areas; only one miller lived on the west side of town (see Table 15). It seems likely that most of the millers had their residences in or adjacent to their mills. The Ordnung of the millers warned against conducting business by night, implying that the miller would normally be on or near the premises after business hours.<s18>s The sources do not indicate if the miller received his residence from the city along with his mill. If he did, one wonders what happened to his widow upon his death. Was she forced to relocate? Were his Knechten transferred to the new master? The answers to these questions do not appear in the sources, but they would surely have been matters of policy determined by the city.

The Muster Lists for 1615 and 1619 contain valuable information on journeymen in the form of two columns entitled Gesellen and Heimatort (,'journeymen'' and ''home town''). There was also a column entitled Sohn (''son''). The entries in the latter column are difficult to interpret. The figures in Tables 18 through 21 show the results of the tabulations for the number of sons in each guild, and the numbers seem exceedingly small. Was it possible that less than one in ten masters had their sons working with them in their shops? It was indeed possible, for the son would have been apprenticed to another master as was customary, and so would not have been recorded. As a journeyman, the son travelled and so again was not in his father's household. One wonders what consequences this had, when the male child effectively left the home in his early teens. In any case, the census probably military age -- perhaps age eighteen or so. By this age, most males in a household were journeymen or other adults, not apprentices. Consequently, the Gesellen column holds the significant information.

The number of Gesellen was recorded as a numeral, one entry per master, with a dot to signify zero. On rare occasions there was no entry only

a blank; these I counted as''null data'', on the assumption that the official did not know how to record an entry for that master. In the rightmost column of the Musterregister was the wide column for home town. Here was recorded the name of the home town for each journeyman. Each town name was

clearly written and legible, though peculiarities of spelling did cause some problems in identification. For example, the town of Stra]berg appeared seven times. At first I thought that this was Strasbourg, on the Rhine River, but I managed to find a Stra]berg about fifty kilometers from Augsburg. I used several atlases and other sources to guide me in my search, and there are undoubtedly some errors. There is also an element of uncertainty when a town was recorded twice, for there is no way to be sure that both journeymen came from the same town, or from two different towns with the same spelling. Similarly, some town names appeared in several places all over Germany. If there were two towns named, for example, Leipzig, I chose to believe that it was the noted Saxony city that was meant, and not some obscure village with the same name. I did take distance into account as well, so that if there were two towns and one was in Swabia, I generally chose the Swabian one. If the element of doubt grew too large, however, I counted the entry as if I had found nothing at all. Fully half the null data for this statistic are in fact town names with multiple locations and no clear way to choose among them.

Allowing for this margin of error, Tables 24 through 27 present the data for 1615 and 1619, while Tables 22 and 23 represent a combination of the data from both years. By locating the towns, I was able to add distance and direction as measures of movement in the labor pool of these crafts. The data show that there were distinct differences among the guilds in the average distance travelled by the journeymen and the dominant direction from which they came. The data also reveal differences among the guilds in the type of town that produced the most journeymen. We will look at each of these in turn.

Most masters worked alone. Most did not employ their own sons, and most had no journeymen. This is a very surprising statistic, but the finding is consistent across all four guilds for both 1615 and 1619. It is possible that only native journeymen were counted and that there were many more foreign journeymen in the shops. On the face of it, this seems to be an attractive and plausible explanation. A foreign journeyman could not be

liable for duty in the city militia, so why should he be counted in a census for the military? The evidence, however, does not support this theory. Journeymen journeyed, by definition; so native sons would most likely be found anywhere except Augsburg. Moreover, the Musterbuch lists the home town of every journeyman surveyed. Some came from Augsburg, but most came from somewhere else. It is remotely possible that these represent journeymen who had purchased citizenship and intended to remain in

Augsburg, but other evidence all but disproves this unlikely theory. In short, the data on journeymen represent exactly what they seem to: the actual count of journeymen in each shop.

If the data on journeymen represent the real count of journeymen, then we are still left with the unexpected result of finding most shops devoid of journeymen. Another explanation for the apparant shortage is that work was seasonal and some masters probably hired a journeyman on a temporary basis. The census, however, was conducted in June, whereas most seasonal work was low in winter and would have been strong in the summer. The most probable explanation for the paucity of journeymen is that most masters simply could not afford one. It may be protested that a journeyman earned his own keep by his labor, but this was the case only if the master was doing a sufficiently lively business to require the extra labor. A journeyman drew his wage regardless of whether or not the master was making a profit. Given the general poverty of these guildsmen, the best explanation is that they could barely support themselves and that there was no room or opportunity for a journeyman.

The impression that every master had both apprentice and journeyman has been created by guild historians who relied heavily on guild regulations for their information on such matters. The regulations naturally discuss journeymen and apprentices, but not every article applied equally to every guildsman. A second source for our misconceptions about the master's work force stems from contemporary illustrations. These, however, were intended to convey as much information as possible, and quite naturally depicted a full and active shop, replete with journeymen and apprentices. Guild petitions from self-described poor masters leave no doubt that the master worked alone, though he may very well have been assisted by family members.

As mentioned earlier, the millers employed far more journeymen per master than did other guilds. They also had the smallest percentage of masters with no journeymen. One reason why a mill was a more productive shop than that of a shoemaker or other artisan is because the miller could employ more workers than could other masters. There was no limit on hiring in this guild, and masters employed as many as nine Knechten. In terms of manpower, this was the equivalent of three to five shops in other crafts. This makes sense, for the millers processed all the grain for both bread and beer for the entire city, and would need many workers to meet this need.

The barbers, on the other hand, generally worked alone. The barbers had the highest percentage in the category of no journeymen and the figure is even higher with the bathers -- who employed Knechten -- removed. With nine out of ten barbers employing no journeymen, one must wonder how and where a master received his training. Perhaps it was with itinerant barbers, for this guild had no regulations barring a rural education. Having a journeyman would only make sense if the barber had sufficient clientele to keep his journeyman busy, and if the barber did have such a large number of customers then it is likely that his tax level was high. In the case of the barbers, in other words, the tax level was probably indicative of the basic level of business done by each master, and this guild had the lowest median wealth of all the guilds studied.

The statistics show clearly the effect of guild regulations. In both the Joiners Guild and the Shoemakers Guild, there was a limit of two journeymen per master. The number of masters in both guilds employing two masters is higher than one would expect, indicating that some masters, at least, were hemmed in by this limitation and probably would have taken on more journeymen had they been allowed to do so. On the other hand, the great majority of masters had one or no journeymen, and were not affected by the regulation. Here again is an example of how a reading of the guild regulations alone can lead to incorrect conclusions. One would, in judging from the regulations alone, be inclined to speculate about the harmful effects of such an arbitrary limitation of the labor pool and completely overestimate the actual impact of the ceiling.

It is worth noting that there was little correlation between a. master's level of wealth and the size of his shop. One would expect the two to be closely related, but the correlation coefficient for all four guilds grouped together is only 0.427.<s20>s This shows some correlation, but nothing striking. The statistic does mask some interesting data concerning the individual guilds. The correlation coefficient for the barbers was very high -- .803 -- while for the shoemakers and joiners it was very low --.275 and.161 respectively. The millers' coefficient was.498. The low coefficient for the joiners and shoemakers is easily explained by the fact that in both guilds scarcely any masters had more than three journeymen. Particularly in the case of the joiners, it would seem that having a journeyman was necessary to certain types of projects. It is entirely possible that master Joiners hired journeymen out of the Herberg for specific contracts, for limited terms. When a master joiner got a contract for work, he would hire a journeyman, more or less regardless of the master's level of wealth.

The data collected on the origins of journeymen have important implications for our picture of the relationship between city and countryside. The journeymen of these guilds came from surprisingly distant places. The image of journeymen originating from the villages of the surrounding regions has no basis in fact for these guilds. The mean distance travelled was well over one hundred kilometers, and those more distant places tended to be towns or cities, not villages. These guilds drew upon a labor network that was essentially urban in character, and one which remained relatively isolated from the countryside surrounding Augsburg itself. This pattern of labor immigration would have only tended to reinforce and perpetuate the dichotomy between city and countryside. In those guilds that did draw significant numbers from the surrounding countryside, there may have been a different social or cultural orientation as well.

The importance of Augsburg as a high-level central place is reflected by the distances travelled by foreign journeymen. Table 23 gives the median distance from Augsburg of the journeymen's home towns (the

median includes the Augsburg entries, which were counted as zero kilometers). The median distance differs significantly from guild to guild, ranging from

115 kilometers for the shoemakers to 26 for the barbers. Even more striking is the fact that only one journeyman miller travelled over 300 kilometers and not one journeyman barber travelled over 200 kilometers while, on the other hand, there were more than thirty journeymen in the Joiners and Shoemakers Guilds who travelled that far. There was, in fact, a shoemaker from Wales and a joiner from Riga (now in Russia, formerly Estonia). The individual guilds each had their own distinctive structure, but again, shoemakers and joiners more closely resembled each other than did any other two guilds. Both the joiners and shoemakers pulled more journeymen from the 100 to 200 kilometer range than from any other. Both had one third to one half their journeymen coming from distances in excess of 200 kilometers (thirty-seven percent of the shoemakers, forty-seven percent of the joiners). Although the medlan distance of the joiners was considerably less than that of the shoemakers, most joiners actually travelled further. The high number of joiners from Augsburg lowered the median below that of the shoemakers.

The distance travelled by a journeyman barber was very small. Less than twenty percent journeyed more than 100 kilometers, none more than 200 kilometers, while one-third came from Augsburg itself. The question of why this should have been so immediately presents itself. The median distance is to a certain degree a measure of the demand for labor in a given craft. Where demand was high, men would have been willing to take the risks of long-distance travel. Where demand was low, Augsburg would not have been mentioned in other towns as a place of opportunity. This supposition finds reinforcement in a comparison of the ratios of masters to journeymen in these three guilds. There were 1.5 master joiners for every journeyman joiner, 1.7 master shoemakers for every journeyman, and 4.2 master barbers per journeyman (figures are from 1615 -- see Table 2). These ratios make it evident that demand in the Shoemakers and Joiners Guilds was three times as high as in the Barbers Guild. Interestingly, the distance ratio is comparable

-- journeyman joiners came from a median distance roughly three times that of journeyman barbers, and for shoemakers the median distance was about

four times as great. This correspondence may be purely coincidental, but it is intriguing.

The effect of Augsburg's influence as a central place can be seen in another aspect of the tables on home towns. In the Shoemakers, Joiners and Barbers Guilds, there was a very low percentage of journeymen who were born within''commuting'' distance of the city; that is to say, within ten kilometers, a distance close enough to allow the worker to walk to and from work on weekends. This is a remarkable finding, for it would seem at first that the surrounding communities would have provided the most ready pool of labor for a craft. Moreover, the Millers Guild does display such an expected statistical pattern (see Table 24), though it does seem strange that almost forty percent of the journeymen millers came from towns between 50 and 100 kilometers distant.

The explanation for these patterns lies in the nature of the crafts themselves and in the nature of central places.<s19>s Because Augsburg was a high-level central place, no town of any size developed within ten kilometers of the city. Because joinery and barbering and even shoemaking were specifically urban crafts, few journeymen came from within the ten kilometer radius. It must be remembered that although peasants made shoes and cabinets, they made them in rural styles, and did not know how to work in the city fashions. Furthermore, the Shoemakers and Joiners Guilds had regulations forbidding rural journeymen from becoming masters. Consequently, journeymen in these guilds came overwhelmingly either from inside Augsburg or from beyond the ten kilometer radius that comprised Augsburg's primary market area.

Why, then, did fifteen percent of the M^hlknechten come from within this primary market area, compared to four percent for the barbers and shoemakers and only two percent for the joiners? Because milling was rural as well and urban in nature, so the conditions discussed above would not have applied in this guild. It is interesting to note that both the barbers and the millers pulled over half their labor pool from within the sixty kilometer radius that Rolf Kiessling found was Augsburg's effective reach as a central place.<s20>s Both of these guilds thus can be viewed as domestic, not only in terms of sales and raw materials, but also in terms of their labor supply. The other two guilds, by contrast, drew from well beyond the sixty kilometer range. Half the journeyman joiners were from towns 86 or more kilometers distant (one-third were from over 300 kilometers), and half the journeyman shoemakers were from towns 115 or more kilometers distant (one-third were from over 200 kilometers). Put another way, over half the journeymen in these guilds were true foreigners, coming not only from outside Augsburg but from outside Augsburg's primary area of influence and from outside the cultural and linguistic region of Swabia.

The millers were by far the most labor-intensive of the four crafts. There were roughly two journeymen for every master, and several masters employed more than three (see Tables 1 - 3). In 1619, over half the masters were employing two or more journeymen. The word used in the muster rolls is Gesellen, which translates best as''journeymen'', but in the petitions and the guild regulations the word that more often appears is Knechten, which is a word loaded with servile connotations. Here it is best rendered as''man,, or ''employee'', for the Knecht fulfilled many of the same functions as a journeyman but did not have the journeyman's potential to become independent. He was more or less permanently in the employ of another, waiting for an opening to occur in the mastership of one of the mills. With two Knechten for every Meister, he would have a long wait. The high number of employees was due to the conditions of production. Milling grain was a quasi-industrial operation in that it consisted of a number of steps and large machines requiring a work force rather than a single master. The employees of a miller were full-time workers. Their employment would not have been for a specific term, for the work was on-going and permanent. For this reason, there was no need for a Herberg and a Zuschickmeister to handle the assignment of jobs.

The Knechten came predominately from the south and southwest.

No other guild exhibited such a strong orientation toward a specific direction. They also came from relatively small distances. The mean distance from Augsburg for millers was 79 kilometers, and for those coming from southerly directions it was only 63 kilometers in 1615, 48 kilometers in 1619 (see Table 30). The explanation for this pattern lies in the geography of the region. A city or large town tended to draw workers from the surrounding countryside rather than from other cities. There was no such cities to the south of Augsburg until one crossed the Alps, whereas to the north there were a number of medium to large cities. The natural hinterland for M^hlknechten was therefore truncated on the north.

There were few journeymen in the Barbers Guild. In fact, in 1615, 83% of the barbers had no journeymen at all. Of those who did have journeymen, most were bathhouse keepers, who employed Knechten rather

than Gesellen, much in the same manner as the millers. Unlike the millers, though, the journeyman barber could always take his mastership and set up shop somewhere in the city. The difficulty would be in making a living, but there was no limit on the number of shops that could be operating. This was also in contrast to the bathers, for there were only a limited number of bathhouses in the city. As has been supposed previously, the fact that an unlimited number of journeyman barbers could set up shop probably contributed to the general poverty of this guild.

The few journeyman barbers that did exist tended to come from cities. A very high proportion came from Augsburg itself. Those who came from elsewhere came from the north and northwest, from cities of significant size. Barbering was an urban occupation; one would not expect to find a barber in a village (whereas the presence of a miller wouid be expected).

One corollary of this fact is that this guild never faced the problms of rural competition.

Master joiners were the largest employers of their own sons: seven percent in 1615 (Table 19), ten percent in 1619 (Table 21). They also employed the largest numbers of journeymen, though the millers employed more per master. Nevertheless, the journeyman joiners were not faced with the impasse that faced the M^hlknechten. Not that every journeyman could expect to become a master. The petitions are full of complaints from journeymen about the obstacles to mastership placed in their way by the regulations, by individuals or by circumstances. As with the barbers and shoemakers, most joiners worked without resident journeymen, perhaps hiring them only for contract work. Many journeyman joiners operated out of the Herberg under the direction of the Zuschickmeister. These journeymen were

not recorded in the muster rolls, for they were not citizens (or, it is at least probable that they were not). In general, it should be observed that there were more practitioners of a given craft than was recorded in a muster roll, for in most crafts some resident foreigners operated within the city but outside the guild.

The regulations of the Joiners Guild imposed a limit of two journeymen per master, whether or not they resided with him. Sixteen percent of the master joiners in 1615 had two journeymen; twenty-two percent in 1619. This percentage is much higher than in the other guilds, implying that some masters would have had more journeymen had they been allowed. It is curious to note that, in the light of the above-mentioned regulation, two masters were on record in 1615 as having more than two journeymen, and in 1619 there were three. Perhaps they had some special permission to hold more journeymen. Such permission was indeed granted, provided only that it was for the length of some specific job and no longer. If this was the case, then these figures may represent the percentage of masters requiring extra help at any given time.

Master shoemakers employed sixty-three journeymen in 1615, sixty-seven in 1619. This number was neither exceptionally high nor exceptionally low, yielding a ratio of roughly two journeymen per master. No master employed more than two journeymen. Journeymen came from all over Europe. Indeed, this was the only guild to show any significant number of journeymen coming from the east as well as from other directions. The distance travelled was considerable, if not as high as that travelled by journeyman joiners: 213 kilometers in 1615, 157 in 1619. No one direction predominated.

The census for the 1645 Muster List took a very different form

from those of the 1610's. We possess only the index to this muster list, but it contains a good deal of information. The index lists only three districts for the city: St. Jacob, St. Ulrich, and St. Stephan. These divisions probably corresponded roughly to the Jakober Viertei, the Overviertel plus Unser Liebe Frauen Viertel, and St. Stephan's plus St. George's. The Heilige Kreuzer Viertel would have been placed either in St. Ulrich's or St. Stephan's. The distribution of the crafts in these new divisions is given by Table 31. The table confirms that the crafts tended to stay in one area of the town, with only the millers appearing in any significant proportion outside the business district of St. Ulrich.

The most striking thing about the 1645 figures is the shockingly small number of masters. The Thirty Years' War had been over for Augsburg for several years by the time of this census, yet where there had been 115 shoemakers there was now only twenty six. Where there was once forty four millers, only twelve remained. The joiners dropped from a high of 118 to a mere twenty three, while the barbers went from seventy four in 1615 to only twelve in 1645. These numbers translate into percentage losses of seventy-three percent for the shoemakers and millers, eighty-one percent for the joiners, and eighty-four percent for the barbers, all within a thirty year span -- a single generation. These losses were much more severe than among the general population, which declined about fifty percent, probably because economic disruption led to emigration of workers. With their markets so drastically reduced, artisans went elsewhere to seek their livelihood. Significantly, the two crafts where demand was most constant also lost the fewest members -- shoemaking and milling. It seems likely that journeymen who would otherwise have become masters in Augsburg chose not to pursue their career there during the war years. Also, young masters would have been more likely to emigrate than older masters. In both cases, the man's household would have been smaller than average, because he was young, while those who stayed in Augsburg would have had more household members. This helps account for why the losses in the crafts were so much higher than among the general citizenry. Furthermore, recovery in a craft would have been slower than in the general population because of the guild requirements governing admission. It would be interesting to examine the petitions for the post-war years to see if admission standards were enforced or relaxed.

It is not surprising, but it is significant, that religion was guild-specific (see Table 33). The millers were heavily Catholic, while the barbers were purely Protestant. There is no connection with social status here, for both millers and barbers stood low on the social scale, as we have seen. There may have been some connection with income, for the millers were the wealthiest and most Catholic, while the barbers were the poorest

and most Protestant. The evidence here is too slim for a solid conclusion, but it is interesting.

The response to the religion question pertained to every member of the household, not merely to the master, giving us a rare glimpse into the artisans' homes. Of seventy-four households, in only one was there a split in religious uniformity: a master miller had one Protestant in a household with three Catholics. In the other seventy-three cases, the entire household was either wholly Catholic or wholly Protestant. Although the city government was evenly split between the two churches, and the citizenry was also deeply (though lopsidedly) divided, there were very few such divisions within the households of these artisans.

Religious solidarity extended outward from the household to embrace the guild. Only the Millers Guild showed any signifcant presence of the minority religion (Catholicism), and here it was actually dominant -- seventy-three percent of the millers were Catholic. In the other three guilds, Catholics were in a distinct minority of nineteen percent, nine, and zero percent in the Shoemakers, Joiners and Barbers Guilds respectively. Nothing

in the guild regulations provided for this relgious uniformity, but, as we shall see in the next chapter, there were informal practices in place that proved equally effective.

One invaluable statistic provided by the 1645 Muster List concerns household size. Unlike the previous lists, which gave only the master's name, the 1645 list gave the master's name and a further column entitled Personen, with a numerical entry. The term Personen could have meant either ''household'' or ''family''. Table 30 summarizes the data, and the mean household size figures provide the evidence needed to resolve the question. A mean family size of five is higher than means found by many researchers in Germany and elsewhere, who all agree that the typical mean is a little over four. The higher means in this table would nicely account for the presence of apprentices and journeymen in some households. In addition, the logic of the muster list would imply that journeymen would be included, since they had been recorded in earlier censuses. Finally, the modern distinction between household and family was not so marked in early modern societies; all residents of a household were in some sense regarded as family.

The statistics reveal distinct differences among the guilds. The shoemakers and joiners were both large guilds that resembled one another in age structure, wealth, location and other areas, save that the joiners tended to be a little older and wealthier. Both guilds drew journeymen from very distant towns. The barbers, on the other hand, were poor and had very few journeymen, whom they drew primarily from Augsburg itself. They were also purely Protestant, at least by 1645. Finally, the millers proved to be the most unusual group of all. They showed the only significant geographic concentration within the city. They were the only guild in which Catholics formed the majority. They were financially better off than the other guildsmen and yet were younger. This guild used journeymen far more intensively than did the other guilds and pulled them from relatively close by the city, especially from areas to the south of Augsburg. This was also the most heavily regulated of all the guilds, a factor that almost certainly directly affected the statistical characteristics just mentioned.

Most differences and similarities between the guilds stemmed from the technical and economic peculiarities of their associated crafts, or from special conditions created by the administration of the city government. Thus, for example, the comparative wealth of the Millers Guild was seen to have been the result of including the value of the mill itself in the tax assessment. We have seen also that a pattern is beginning to emerge with regard to these guilds: the shoemakers and the joiners were similar in many respects, while the barbers and the millers were each distinct. This pattern existed in the craft, in the guild, and in the members themselves. We shall explore this theme further in the chapters that follow.

NOTES

1. Heinrich Bechtel, Wirtschaftsgeschichte Deutschlands (Munich, 1951 - 1956), p. 239.

2. Friderich Blendinger and Claus Peter Clasen are the two principal researchers in this area for Augsburg. Clasen's book on the weavers, in which he uses both tax data and muster list data to paint a portrait of the weaving industry, has already been cited. Blendinger uses the muster lists to obtain membership lists for each guild, then tracks them into the tax books, but he does not use the data contained in the muster lists themselves. See Friedrich Blendinger, ''Versuch einer Bestimmung der Mittelschicht in der Reichsstadt Augsburg vom Ende des 14. bis zum Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts'', in Erich Maschke and J^rgen von Sydow, eds., Stadtische Mittelschichten (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 32 - 78.

3. Among the conventions used in the tables are the following. Each table has a title and a year, which refers to the year of the source document. Most tables have a second version in which the raw numbers are given as vertical percentages. I have used dashes (-) to mean zero (0) to improve the legibility of the tables, while n/a means that data were not available for that year.

4. The term ''master'' here includes a variety of guildsmen whose actual status is uncertain, but who were listed in the Musterbuch.

5. Clasen, Weber, p. 22.

6. The average ages in years were as follows: 1610: barbers 41.2, bathers 47.6; 1615: barbers 39.4, bathers 41.4; 1619: barbers 40.3, bathers 40.6.

7. One of the first things this table shows is the effect of the respondents giving their age in round numbers -- a disproportionately high number of them reported their age as 30, while very few said they were 29 or 31.

8. H-A, GSLM# 548,059, Supplication, Georg Seltman, 29 October 1613.

9. The German words make the relationship plain. An apprentice was a Lehrjung or a Bub.

10. The figures on the left represent the tax levied on the master in florins. kreuzer and pfennig. Although 36 pfennig was theoretically the lowest tax one could pay (the capitation tax plus the Wachgeld), there were a few who paid less, for reasons that are not clear. These I groups along with the many who paid the 36 pfennig but no more. Since nearly everyone paid the 36 pfennig, each tax level ends at that figure in the pennies column.

11. Clasen, Die Augsburg Steuerb^cher, (Augsburg, 1976).

12. One florin (silver) was equal to 60 kreuzer. One kreuzer was equal to 60 pennies.

13. Anton Mayr, Die Grossen Augsburger Verm[gen in der Zeit von 1618 bis 1717, (Augsburg, 1931), p. 16, Table 5.

14. Mayr, Verm[gen, p. 10.

15. Clasen, Steuerb^cher, p. 10 discusses the rates and points out that during the early seventeenth century, the 1/4% rate was used exclusively.

16. Stork and Teague, Flour, p. 102.

17. Reinhold Rau, ''Fr^he Handwerkerordnungen im W^rttemburgischen Raum'', in Maschke and von Sydow, Stadtische Mittelschichten, pp. 94-95.

18. Instruction zur die M^hl-Visitatores, Article 17 (1722), GSLM# 466,116.

19. The seminal figure in central-place theory is Walter Christaller, who set forth his ideas in his book, Central Places in southern Germany, Carlisle W. Baskin, trans., (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966).

20. Rolf Kiessling, B^rgerliche Gesellschaft und Kirche in Augsburg im Sp$tmittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Strukturanalyse der oberdeutsche Reichsstadt, (Augsburg, 1971), p. 132.