Rait master
Raitmeister literally means arithmetic master . The term has been used in various ways.
Raitmeister as an accounting officer
A Raitmeister was an official of a Rait authority (Raitkollegium or Raitrat) or court chamber .
A raitherr , however, was appointed by the estates .
Raitmeister as an iron dealer
Raitmeister was the name for a dealer of iron and iron products in the Siegerland , later they also operated ironworks (smelters).
As traders, the Raitmasters bought the iron ore from the mine owners and in turn sold it to the “mass blowers” who smelted the iron stone and poured it into large “massas” (large, unformed lumps), which were then processed as pig iron in the forges. This resale from the mass blowers to the blacksmiths was also the responsibility of the Raitmeisters, who were often hammer or hut owners themselves. Alternatively, they could have the pig iron processed by so-called contract smiths in the publishing system . In addition, the vast majority of the Raitmasters were on the road as dealers and ultimately offered the finished products at appropriate markets and trade fairs.
At the beginning of the 15th century, the Siegerland Raitmasters, together with the mass winds and the blacksmiths, organized themselves like a guild.
The counterpart to the Raitmeister in other regions of Germany were the Reidemeister (Reidmeister, Reidtmeister) in the Märkischen Sauerland and in the Eifel as well as the Radmeister in Styria , as the owners of the local wheelworks were called. A wheelwork was a piece furnace into which the air was blown through bellows operated by water wheels.
swell
- Princely-Salzburg court calendar, or schematic to the leap year ... 1780, Salzburg, link
- Document from 1592, a Raitmeister as administrator of the court clerk's office on monasterium.com
literature
- Jahn van den Dycke, Raitmeister at the Chamber of Accounts on uni-heidelberg.de
- KJ Ley: On the meaning of the words raitmeister, hauberg and jahn in Siegerlande , in the magazine of the association for Rhenish and Westphalian folklore. 3rd year. 1906. 2nd issue link
- Werner Sombart, Modern Capitalism , Volume 3, pp. 711f on Radmeister and Raitmeister