Labour Time, Guild Time? Working Hours in the Cloth Industry of Medieval Flanders and Artois (Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries)

Abstract

From their very early history, even before the craft guilds came of age, regulation of labour time was ubiquitous in most Flemish and Artesian cloth manufacturing cities. Nearly everywhere the working day was decided by the urban authorities and announced by bells; the working year was divided in working days and Sundays/religious festive days. Regulation, however, was refined and intensified in the course of the second half of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century when craft guilds pushed away the traditional relations between merchant-entrepreneurs and textile workers and replaced them with the late medieval small artisanal workshops. Labour time regulation was also clearly more developed in export-oriented cities: rules were stricter and the requirements of flexible workshops that could adapt to changing demand cycles necessitated more complex systems of regulation. Hence, labour time was not evenly organised across the different production stages. Cloth weavers have always been at the heart of regulation, while also cloth finishing and fulling were targeted. It is time-rate wages of journeymen weavers and subcontracting masters that set the standard for the intensification of labour time regulation once the guilds stepped in. Small-scale entrepreneurs needed to control more firmly the various production stages and adapt the scope of the enterprise to changing demand. Their mere economic survival depended, therefore, on the flexibility of labour markets. Once they gained access to political power, therefore, regulating labour time certainly became one of their main tools to control the organisation of labour.

“I Thought of it at Work, in Ostend”: Urban Artisan Labour and Guild Ideology in the Later Medieval Low Countries

“…Especially in the textile industry, labour time was closely regulated and supervised by the crafts in cooperation with the city government, and this organization of daily life as defined by organized labour gradually became even more decisive than the liturgical calendar. 91 Guild meetings also contributed to constructing group sentiment by inducting new members, electing leaders, and reporting on finances and important issues. Meetings and feast days were occasions for banquets, literary performances of mystery plays or dramas, and reciting worldly texts.…”

Savivaldžių miestų valdininkijos darbolaikis LDK XVI–XVIII a.: Merkinės atvejis

“…P Stabel, 2014.. 2 Dėl ribotos straipsnio apimties kaip pavyzdžiai pateiktos tik svarbiausios Merkinės tarybos bei vaito ir suolininkų teismo darbolaikio lentelės.…”