Wednesday 11 April 2012

A-Z Challenge: J is for Journeyman

No, a journeyman is not a man on a journey.  The 'journey' here comes from the French 'jour' or 'journee' (pronounced joornay), which means 'day'.  A journeyman was a day labourer who had served his apprenticeship.

The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down the journeyman's hours of work as being, in summer, from, at or before 5 a.m. until between 7 and 8 p.m., with not more than 2 1/2 hours off for breakfast, dinner and drinking; and in winter from dawn till dusk. [Terrick Fitzhugh, Dictionary of Genealogy, p160]

No comments:

Post a Comment

Copyright

You may NOT use the contents of this site for commercial purposes without explicit written permission from the author and blog owner. Commercial purposes includes blogs with ads and income generating features, and/or blogs or sites using feed content as a replacement for original content. Full content usage is not permitted.

You Might Also Be Interested In

Total Pageviews

Blog Archive