Mason Corporations in France 149service in the royal domicile. Thus the masons were under the master
builder of masonry and the carpenters under the king's master carpenter.^4
The Corporative Organization in Paris
According to the Livre des MetiersThe drafting of the Establissements des mestiers de Paris, known as the
Livre des Metiers, in 1268 under the direction of Etienne Boileau,
provost of the king, sheds full light on the corporative organization.^5
With the creation of this book in mind, Etienne Boileau asked the
representatives of the brotherhoods to give him the rules of their trades.
This book is therefore a codification of earlier existing statutes. The sys-
tem of the Livre des Metiers placed labor under the control of Church
and state. But it is important to remember that this regulation was valid
only within the royal provostship. It did not apply in the jurisdictions of
other sovereign authorities that essentially derived from the Church and
the Ecclesiastical Orders, among which the Templar quarter figures
prominently, especially with regard to jurisdictions where trades were
exercised in franchise. These francs metiers, escaping royal or sovereign
tutelage, did have their own rules and rites however, and we know they
even served as models for the sworn trades. The internal organization is
thus equally valid for both kinds of trade associations.
According to Boileau's book, trade taken in its entirety is based on
a fundamental division made up of three classes: apprentices, valets (the
term journeymen later replaced this), and masters. The length of
apprenticeship varies from two to twelve years, depending on the trade.
Once his time of apprenticeship had ended, a young artisan could
immediately become a master. It was only in the fifteenth century, or at
the end of the fourteenth at the very earliest, that the disposition was
introduced into the rules that made journeyman a separate stage of
apprenticeship that the artisan was expected to undertake before
obtaining the brevet of mastery.
According to the Livre des Metiers, the master could and should
require the worker (valet) he hired to produce certain justifications of his
skills, first giving notice that he had completely finished his apprentice-
ship, and then establishing that he was free of any earlier commitment.