The livery company: learn seven years, work as a journeyman, then open your own bench.
Learn it, prove it, then teach it.
The household
The household was the firm. Apprentices lived in it, ate in it, and were answerable to the mistress as much as the master.
The trade
Mercers, Goldsmiths, Drapers, Bakers — companies that held the standard (the hallmark), the apprenticeship, the almshouse and the school.
1300s
A craft petitioned the city for ordinances: who may sell, how work is made, what happens to bad work. The warden's job was to walk into a shop and inspect. Quality was public, not private.
The guild was also the burial club and the pension: it buried its dead, dowered orphans and fed a member fallen sick. Trade and mercy were the same institution.
1400s
Finish an apprenticeship and you took the freedom of the city — the legal right to trade in your own name. That single step is the pattern we call launch.
Widows kept the shop. A freeman's widow could trade and take apprentices, which is why so many workshops carry a woman's name in the rolls.
1500s
From 1538 every parish had to write down baptisms, marriages and burials. That order is the reason an English line can be traced at all.
The Statute of Artificers (1563) made the seven-year apprenticeship national law: no man practised a trade he had not served for.
Free books
Original guild ordinances in English — excellent Library material.
Daily city records, 1276–1419.
Copy a chapter and shelve it in your Library — the Pearl quotes it from then on, with no tokens spent.
