Povijesni prilozi, Vol. 33 No. 46, 2014.
Original scientific paper
Craftsmen apprentices, craftsmen helpers and servants in Rijeka in the first half of the fifteenth century
Ozren Kosanović
Abstract
For the city of Rijeka in 15th century there is only one existing notary book written by Antonio de Renno from Modena and it encompasses period from 1437 to 1465. This article deals with topics such as: age of boys at the start of apprenticeship, its duration, wages of craftsman apprentices and helpers etc. For comparison it is taken into account extant research regarding this topic for communes in Dalmatia. When compared it seems that situation in Rijeka regarding all of aforementioned topics did not differ from Dalmatian communes. In general, apprentices could learn between 4 and
10 years, all of them had wages in money and some of them got tools for their craft. Wages of apprentices were around 2 ducat per year and of lower amount than those of helpers. The differences in wage were up to 6 or 10 ducats greater in the case of the helpers in some crafts. It seems that this difference was especially significant among the helpers of manufacturers of oars (remerius). This is not so surprising when one takes into account that researchers emphasized that Senj and Rijeka were major ship manufacturing centres in the North Adriatic in the Late Middle Ages. Man-servants (famuli) which served masters outside city, mainly in Apennine peninsula, had greater wages than those who served in Rijeka or in other cities on the East Adriatic. Maid-servants (ancillae) were poorly paid, when compared with male servants. Unfortunately investigation of their status is difficult to conduct because there are only nine existing contracts.
Keywords
craftsmen apprentices; craftsmen helpers; man-servants; maid-servants; Rijeka, 15th century
Hrčak ID:
126509
URI
Publication date:
30.7.2014.
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