The métier: a trade written into a book of statutes, with a masterpiece to prove you had learned it.
À chacun son métier — to each their craft.
The household
The maison held master, wife, journeymen and apprentices at one table. The mistress of the house kept the accounts and sold at the front while the workshop ran behind.
The trade
Livre des métiers: each trade's rules — hours, materials, price, and the chef-d'œuvre (masterpiece) a journeyman made to become master.
1300s
Étienne Boileau's Livre des métiers had already fixed the shape: a trade was a sworn body with statutes, wardens who inspected the work, and a saint's day the whole craft kept together.
Women held their own crafts outright — silk-spinners and silk-weavers of Paris ran workshops, trained apprentices and swore the same oaths.
1400s
A journeyman walked from town to town, working under different masters — the tour de France of the crafts. Skill was gathered by travel, and each hall fed and lodged the traveller.
Le Ménagier de Paris, written by a husband for a young wife, is a whole household manual: markets, servants, preserving, accounts, and how a house keeps its honour.
1500s
The Lyon fairs made credit ordinary: bills of exchange let a family in one country fund a workshop in another. Partnership became the instrument of increase.
Print turned a trade secret into a book. A craft that wrote itself down multiplied; a craft that hid died with the master.
Free books
A 1390s household and business manual — full of usable practice.
The trade statutes of Paris.
Copy a chapter and shelve it in your Library — the Pearl quotes it from then on, with no tokens spent.
