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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Medieval craftsmen often ran what we would consider to be sweatshops, with many young (i.e. child) apprentices banging out work and not receiving much instruction in exchange. We're romanticizing and idealizing a past that was, in realty, often quite exploitative.

There are reasons why we started sending children to schools rather than businesses for basic education. There is also little need to reach back to medieval times when comparatively less exploitative (but still imperfect) apprenticeship systems are alive and well in the trades today.

One-on-one practical instruction related specifically to what you want to do is awesome, but there are a lot of difficulties in incentivizing people to supply such instruction.

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Even manufacturing without instructions gives you practice. Also you need only so much instructions per practice, getting instructions won't actually help you get better you also need to do it.

The master very much cares about your quality, because if it doesn't look like his quality nobody will buy it. If the quality goes down to much, there will be complaints to the guilt and he looses its ability to do business.

If you have problems with your master you can look for another one. The good always needed to reject prentices, the bad had nobody showing up. In-fact you were required to stay with multiple masters.

If you complain about them not having an 8-hour day, nobody had that in the middle ages. But tradesman were more of the richer people in a city, maybe behind tradesman.

In medieval setup, no you could not just look for another master. That is not how the society functioned. There was hierarchy and you had your place in it - bottom.

Also, apprentices duties involved also general housework and pretty much any random thing they told you to do. They would beat you if they thought you do not do what they want and you would be serving literally whole day and that was it. And no it was not whole day of learning. Based on book I read, that frequently involved things wife of the master ordered - they had nothing to do with the trade and that was normal.

With eating, you would wait behind the master while their lunch and tend eat whatever remained.

> general housework, wife of the master ordered

Yes you were part of the family for better and for worse. I don't see how that is problematic, you weren't working for a different household, you were just part of this household.

> They would beat you

Sure life sucked back than. There is a reason we are not in the middle ages anymore. I would say that was more a problem with the general attitude in society, not specific to masters.

> no you could not just look for another master

But you were required to look for a different master every few years? That claim doesn't make sense to me.

Of course not everything was all roses, it was just different. You didn't had a social net from the state, there wasn't an independent police you could report beatings from the master. On the other hand you had a social security net by the family/household currently living in (meaning your master's in this case) and if you have rows with everyone you can just walk for a day to the next city, where nobody knows you, and start afresh. The latter isn't possible now anymore.

> Yes you were part of the family for better and for worse. I don't see how that is problematic, you weren't working for a different household, you were just part of this household.

No you was not part of the family. And this was not part of the family thing either. It was more of the sweetshop with workers who have no choice thing.

> But you were required to look for a different master every few years? That claim doesn't make sense to me.

You was not given choice to shop around or change up however you wanted. That was not a thing. Occasionally you could be asked to move to different master at predetermined set points. But not always. I do not even see what is nonsensical or hard to understand about such setup.

> you had a social security net by the family/household currently living in (meaning your master's in this case)

Your master was not your security net. You would be kicked off and expected go back to your actual family.

> if you have rows with everyone you can just walk for a day to the next city, where nobody knows you, and start afresh

That was definitely not a thing either. They would vet you and your character with where you came from. There was a lot of suspicion about new people. You would have quite a difficult time to establish yourself or even find a living. Being banished was a punishment for a reason - and other village you go to will be very aware newcomer might be a troublemaker they did not wanted elsewhere.

> The latter isn't possible now anymore.

That is significantly easier now.

> No you was not part of the family. And this was not part of the family thing either. It was more of the sweetshop with workers who have no choice thing.

Name it part of the household then. In a modern sweetshop you get some money (or not) generally too less to pay for food and other things. Nobody cares if you die or just don't show up the next day.

As a prentice, you don't get money, but you also don't buy food and you don't pay for a roof. Your master can not afford for you to not show up or be invalid for work, because he can only afford to house and teach so many prentices. He also can't afford you producing low-quality goods, because the goods get sold in his name.

> You were not given choice to shop around or change up however you wanted.

I think this conflicts with that you were required to have served multiple masters as part of your education. When a prentice shows up to a new master, it means the new master gets an already trained workforce while not having to pay for the expenses of the education. Your old master will not be willing/able to afford that loss, so you need to mess up some money before you get kicked out.

> Your master was not your security net. You would be kicked off

When you become invalid indefinitely, yes. When you get sick for some days, your master will get you back to work as soon as possible.

> expected go back to your actual family.

When you show up broke after years, I bet you get kicked out there also. You have better choices moving to a new city or living off the streets.

> That was definitely not a thing either. They would vet you and your character with where you came from. There was a lot of suspicion about new people. You would have quite a difficult time to establish yourself or even find a living. Being banished was a punishment for a reason - and other village you go to will be very aware newcomer might be a troublemaker they did not wanted elsewhere.

Having an influx of new people from the landscape were how the cities operated. Having more people made the city richer and more powerful. It really depended on how skilled you were. If you can claim to be able to do X and you are able to show it, than you have a good chance to find work. If you don't, then good luck dying in the streets.

> That is significantly easier now.

Being a criminal and trying to flee? Good luck with that in the time of surveillance and world-wide police cooperation. Nowadays you can pretty much only double down on being criminal, be convicted or flee to a third-world country, where you will probably die soon/ have a way lower living standard. In the past you also had the opportunity to just switch jurisdiction and stop being a criminal, while not having a different living standard.

All the stuff you wrote is purely imaginary and has nothing to do with how people in medieval times actually behaved. You just made it all up, completely, based on what you want history to be.

In particular, if you was too sick or invalid or whatever, you got kicked off. That is it. No one expected the master to care for you or handle your healthcare. It is true you was not paid and worked for food.

If you produced low quality work, you would get simpler jobs (cleaning, wood chopping) for a but, would not learn and would eventually be kicked off too.

> When you show up broke after years, I bet you get kicked out there also. You have better choices moving to a new city or living off the streets.

Generally, they were unwilling to kick you off family, unless you was disobedient. That would be shameful for them. This was your safety net and related social obligations were actually strong.

You was not better off "living in the streets" of a town (which were significantly smaller).

Like, cities had very real limit of how many people they could accommodate before it became impossible. Newcomer with troublemaking potential was not making it richer nor was welcome.

> You just made it all up, completely, based on what you want history to be.

I'm sorry, I'm not yet 500 years old, I have only knowledge based on school and it being portrayed in public media. Do you have sources for your differing knowledge.

> No one expected the master to care for you or handle your healthcare.

Yes nobody is going to sue him. However when one of your prentices vanishes, there will be gossip, that's bad for business. Also I argued that this is bad for the master purely for economic reasons (sunken costs), because feeding someone is not cheap especially in the middle ages.

> It is true you was not paid and worked for food.

Yes and this is not something bad at all. It is just a different economy.

> Generally, they were unwilling to kick you off family, unless you was disobedient.

Yes and your father would claim you were disobedient to your master when you have not learned enough, as he has sent you there. That's why I would earlier that it's kind-of like you are now part of the master's family.

> it being portrayed in public media.

I'm not sure why the media would more accurately depict vampires than a blacksmith.

Is that sarcastic or what do you want to say? Do you claim the media represents vampires or do you claim it represents blacksmiths?

Public media are entertainment made by artists. They did not study history nor are attempting to paint it accurately. They are trying to create something for for their contemporaries, sorta kinda inspired by history.

Their blacksmiths are as accurate as their vampires as sibling puts it. Which is ok, the rest of us are supposed to realise the difference between a fiction , random tech guy or economist blog and actual history.

In a book having a story and then some pages about the historic context, I would expect the context to be somewhat accurate? I also mean stuff like that researchers are sometimes (I think often) unable to determine whether a picture, a music piece was created by the master or by the prentices. I don't expect public media to lie about that.

It's also about common sense economy and human behaviour. I don't think humans change all that much.

Wars and rivalities between cities and between the nobility-dominated land are part of history classes in school. Can you bring actual arguments why my reasoning is wrong, instead of simply claiming it just didn't happened this way?

> In a book having a story and then some pages about the historic context, I would expect the context to be somewhat accurate?

Why would you expect that if written by random writer?

> It's also about common sense economy and human behaviour. I don't think humans change all that much.

Your common sense is massively dependent on your values, your religion (or lack of it) and our technology. Humans with different values, different religion and massively different technology function differently.

> Wars and rivalities between cities and between the nobility-dominated land are part of history classes in school.

What you did NOT learned in high school history is how cities, towns and peasants operated in their day to day life. What you did NOT learned was anything about periods in between wars - and most cities were not in constant war with each other.

> Can you bring actual arguments why my reasoning is wrong, instead of simply claiming it just didn't happened this way?

Just about any actual specialized historical book about medieval time, frankly. And frankly, you are the one who made confident claims, you should be able to support them with evidence first.

> They would beat you if they thought you do not do what they want

Again, illegal in England.

> Based on book I read,

Well, if you've read a whole book, I guess that makes you an expert.

The romanticism around apprenticeships misses how tricky it is to scale personalized, practical instruction without either underpaying the instructor or pricing out the learner

Very true, but the benefit to one-on-one instruction is so enormous that we should find ways to apply it fractionally if we can’t apply it fully. One thinks eg of the one-room schoolhouses of the 1800s, with younger students learning from older students.

It's still that way. Germany has an apprenticeship system that is supposed to work just like the medieval system: You work in a company for 2-3 years at low pay, but you get trained in return. (Nowadays you spend some of that time in a trade school). The promise often is that if you do good, the company will hire you as a regular employee afterwards.

Unfortunately, experiences vary. The promise works out for some, but others have a shitty boss that does not teach them anything and makes them do menial jobs that do not require or teach any special skills (e.g. cleaning up the workshop or cooking coffee).

I've deeply studied the apprentice programs in medieval Europe; your claims don't align with guild law, nor the motivations of the guilds themselves (to create protective but longterm market-satisfying services and goods; i.e. to stay in business and prevent cheap knockoffs, at the cost of inhibiting innovation).

Apprenticeships certainly weren't more abusive than the typical alternatives: serf labor, or servant jobs. (One of the key differences between servants and apprentices in medieval England, for instance, was that you weren't allowed to beat your apprentices.)

Often exploitative? Sure. Most power structures are. But it absolutely was a system that guaranteed rights to the worker, which made it rise far above most employment situations of that time.

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