#guilds

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I had a dream~

In my dream I was desperate to obtain high-quality and rare healing herbs and ingredients. It was in old time fantasy with knights and Guilds/adventurers. There were magical places called "Dungeons" you could go to that were almost always exclusively underground.

CRAFTS — 200/262 — Journeymen and apprentices

A journeyman was a craftsman’s assistant. If he went out into the world to ply his trade, he needed to have a vocational certificate and the tools of his trade. Rarely did journeymen stay in one workshop for an entire year. Typically they were there for just a few weeks, on one week’s notice, paid by the day (‘journée’). If a journeyman left without agreement (absconded), he was ‘proscribed’, outlawed from hire by other workshops, his identity written down and disseminated. An apprentice was a boy accepted into apprenticeship by a master craftsman in a special ceremony before other guild masters. Entry was made possible by paying a fee in cash and beeswax. Wealthier boys might complete their apprenticeship in as little as one year, while poorer ones had to work off their debt over several years.

TRIVIA

— Following the completion of apprenticeship, a journeyman in some parts of Europe was expected to undertake a period of travel known as the Wanderjahre (wandering years). Such travelling journeymen were called wandering journeymen. This practice, originating from the medieval period, required the craftsman to spend several years moving and working between towns and regions. A customary duration of three years and one day was most common, even today. The tradition was particularly widespread in the German-speaking lands, but was also known in France and parts of Scandinavia. It was observed across a variety of crafts, including carpentry, joinery, metalworking, millinery (hat making), instrument manufacture, and other trades. In the Middle Ages, the number of years spent travelling differed across crafts. Only after half of the required travelling years (Wanderjahre) would the journeyman register with a guild for the right to train up as a master. After completing the travelling years, he could settle in a workshop of the guild and after several more years, he would be allowed to produce a "masterpiece" and to present it to the guild. With their consent he would be promoted to guild master and as such be allowed to open his own guild workshop in town. A part of a journeyman's attire in the Middle Ages could have contained a golden earring or a golden bracelet; they could be sold during hard times or they served as payment for the gravedigger if they died on the road. Today, the night before setting off from home, a future journeyman traditionally hosts a farewell party. Over the course of the night, a hole is made in their earlobe with a nail, for an earring to wear throughout the journey. Tradition holds that anyone who breaks the rules will have the earring torn out, marking that person with a cleft lobe, or a "split-ear", a German term for a crook.

Clock Hands by Marieke Nijkamp and Sylvia Bi. Greenwillow, 2026. 9780063027138. 282 pp. including an author's note on guilds and strikes at the end. 

In the port city of Siannera, it's hard to get decent work if you're not a member of a guild. And it's hard to join a guild if you don't have the money to become an apprentice. Vale is guildless. His family needs more money than he can earn. But one day he's hired by a man and his daughter who are new to the city and are looking for a guide. The father doesn't play by the guild rules; he starts repairing an abandoned tower, turning it into the city's first astronomical clock, and eventually takes on Vale as an apprentice. The guilds are not happy. But Vale and the other guildless realize how much work they do (and how much power that gives them) and start to fight for change.

This graphic novel really swept me along. I liked how it showed both the good and the bad sides of organized labor, how it can be corrupt and also one's only hope. It suggests how to create a way within an unfair system using collective action, but it also shows that doing so isn't without costs.