ABSTRACT
Labom agitation among Eumpe:n arti",", go" back at le.,t to the thirteenth century. Not only workers in the wholesale textile trades, but also the journeymen of cordwainers and saddlers, of skinners and tanners, even of cobblers and bakers, plotted together for higher wages and better conditions. 2 Yet details about these clandestine coalitions - their organization, their ritual, and their tactics - have been hard to come by. We know of them mostly from the masters' complaints and from governmental edicts forbidding them. Royal and city officials thought of journeymen's organizations as 'monopolies', as unjust in their efforts to force up wages as merchants who forced up the price of grain by hoarding it. To be sure, there are examples - especially in England - of open journeymen's guilds; and there are examples - especially in France - of open journeymen's confraternities. But their statutes are not very informative, for they include the legal religious and charitable activities, and disingenuously omit oaths and special agreements about wages or strikes. 3
Until now, documents from the seventeenth century have been the earliest to reveal the dark secrets of the journeymen's organizations. Especially useful has been the testimony of a repentant ex-journeyman before the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris in I 655. 4 Recently, however, I was lucky enough to come upon some documents giving a similarly detailed picture for the sixteenth century. Described there was the Company, as its members called it, of the printers' journeymen of Lyons. The source was a group of I8 journeymen from Lyons, testifying, not always so repentantly, before the Consistory and lieutenants of Protestant Geneva.5
