Clientele (journeyman's certificate)
Clientele is the historical name for a certificate that was issued to the journeyman, whose training included a hiking period prescribed by the guild , after the end of his activity in a place as proof of his conduct and confirmation of proper termination by the guild in question.
Until around 1730, the customers were mostly handwritten, later they often took the form of large-format, printed forms with handwritten entries. The wording was laid down in the Imperial Crafts Code of 1731. For example, the example shown on the right says:
"We jurors and other masters of the praiseworthy craft of their carpenters in the Hanseatic City of Bremen, hereby certify that the current journeyman named Johann Heinrich Lande von Bremen was born around 20 years old, and of medium stature , and also has blond hair here 2 Year, --- weeks in work and have been loyal, hardworking, quiet, peaceful and honest for such a time, as befits any journeyman craftsman, which we thus attest, and therefore all our co-masters this according to craft use everywhere want to request appropriately to promote ... "
Since the 1770s at the latest, customers in the larger cities of the empire have been given large cityscapes engraved in copper . This should make it difficult to forge the coveted documents, but also reflects the custom of wealthy travelers to bring graphic sheets with vedute from the cities they visit .
Customers did not have the function of an apprenticeship or journeyman's certificate, they were not proof of training and qualifications, but only of activity, guild membership and good behavior. With the other papers of the journeyman, his previous customers were deposited in the guild drawer at the start of work and thus prevented him from secretly leaving the place of work. Without a clientele, he could hardly find relevant work in the next place on his hike.
In many places around 1810/1820 (i.e. during and after the Napoleonic Wars and the Vienna Congress of the victorious powers) the expensive and unwieldy documents were replaced by small-format hiking books in which the stations of the hiking trip were noted by the police authorities.
literature
- Klaus Stopp : The craft customers with local views . Descriptive catalog of the work certificates of traveling journeyman craftsmen (1731–1830). Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1982.
- Klaus Stopp: The craft customers of Switzerland , Weissenheim 1979.
