Mobility of Pre-modern Skilled Workers

For a long time historians systematically underestimated the mobility of workers in pre-industrial Europe, on the assumption that individuals before nineteenth-century industrialisation and urbanisation were essentially place-bound. Social historians inspired by modernisation theory described the transition to modern society in terms of a radical increase in mobility – an argument that required establishing a counterpoint in terms of a spatially ‘stable’ and ‘immobile’ pre-modern society. As a survey from the 1970s put it, ‘there is widespread agreement that industrialisation, at least in Europe, caused an extraordinary spatial and occupational mobilisation, thereby marking a decisive break with static preindustrial society’. As Steve Hochstadt noted a few years later, ‘general works on economic history, family life, and social structure still describe preindustrial society as rooted…. Premodern Germans are still described as immobile in most general demographic studies. Even city populations are considered exceptionally stable…. Only with industrialization did German society become mobile’.

Although this view still finds some support, it was already becoming clear that migration was a ‘normal and structural element of human societies throughout history’. This revisionism soon extended to pre-modern Europe to include journeymen, as researchers discovered that a market for specialised labour had already begun to develop in the later Middle Ages, particularly in connection with the rise of organised tramping (Gesellenwanderung).