[chalst]

This is the origin of the term "journeyman" for instance... apprentices who would follow master craftsmen around until they became masters in their own right.

No, that's not right. When an apprentice finished their apprenticeship, they would usually have to leave their master's service. The openings for masters would be fixed per town by the guild, so journeymen would work itinerantly until they found an opening to become a master. Journeymen would work for a series of masters, and their relationship to these masters was entirely different to the relationship of apprentices.

The status of journeyman became institutionalised, so that the criterion for taking up a mastership was that one had travelled widely enough as a journeyman for some length of time and had crafted a masterpiece.

I've never heard of the idea of guilds organising flights: I should think that master guildsmen had more to lose than agricultural laborers from relocation. Perhaps if several guilds coordinated, it could be less than massively destructive. Where did you get this idea?

[stan_rogers]

It may help to know that while journeyman and journey come from the same French word, journée (meaning, essentially, day), that journeyman simply means someone who is entitled to charge a day rate for his work. (Masters were the "contractors" of their day; they were paid for the project, and apprentices got to eat -- they usually paid for the privilege.)

Yes, the guild system and town laws often made the journeyman itinerant, but it wasn't travel that put the "journey" in "journeyman".

[vgr]

Interesting, thanks for clarifying. I assumed too quickly that journey in journeyman meant what it means to us today.

[vgr]

Don't quite recall, but I think it was from a book about cathedral builders or something. But I'll admit my knowledge of medieval guilds is largely superficial and drawn from books where it was a side issue rather than the main topic. Your description sounds like you know what you're talking about. Got any good references (books, not articles) worth reading to get a clearer idea of how guild economies worked?

[chalst]

I'm not an expert: I spent a bit of time about ten years ago researching the topic, back when there was a lot of talk about guild structures being appropriate to software development.

Epstein has an article on craft guilds in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History: http://www.oup.com/us/pdf/economic.history/craft.pdf