The Master Craftsman
The American trade system is a bizarre patchwork of inconsistencies. One particularly irritating area is the total lack of qualifications for carpenters. Masons, plasterers, tilers, and other trades also share in this, but as carpenters are the primary driving force of all construction projects, it is particularly harmful, not only to the system itself, but to consumers, contractors, and the collective pride of the industry. While plumbers, electricians, and even more recent trades like HVAC technicians have an apprentice-master system built into their state qualifications, carpenters, the oldest trade on the planet, and likely the one that spurred the origin of the guild system, have nothing. This leads to rampant cowboy-ism, whereby anyone with a Skilsaw and a truck is a carpenter, and there is no way to know who is skilled or not. In a strange twist, at least in Massachusetts, all it takes is a letter from an old boss or three years of pay stubs and suddenly the cowboy is eligible for a contractor’s license (CSL), which makes them the de facto boss on the jobsite. How does that make sense?
It seems clear that even if the state and local governments do not see fit to apply some sort of qualification system onto carpenters, masons, etc. that at a bare minimum we come to an understanding amongst ourselves of who is qualified and who is not.
To start, we are in need of a definition of what it means to be a master craftsman Notice I don’t say a redefinition, because we are not changing the definition. We are merely reestablishing the centuries-old system of growth from apprentice through master. The master obviously is at the top of the pyramid, so let’s establish first definitions for the understories.
First the apprentice; this one is easy; it’s in the word. Apprentice comes to us from the French apprendre, meaning to learn — the chief focus of the apprentice. The apprentice enters into a period, five years give or take, in which they establish and acquire their knowledge of mind and skill of hand. In the ancient European system the apprentice was not paid. They were boarded by the master, fed, and perhaps provided some tavern money.
After a successful apprenticeship, the budding craftsman would rise to the level of journeyman. There are two interesting etymologies here. One is the English language word journey: to wander or to travel. This is connected to the notion that medieval journeymen traveled the country, working for different masters in order to grow their knowledge and experience, all the while being eligible for a day’s pay. In modern day Germany, young carpenters still do this. The second etymology comes from the French word journee, simply meaning “the period of a day.” This relates back to the journeyman’s eligibility to be paid (remember the apprentice was not), but eligible because of the skill of their hands not the completeness of their knowledge. They traveled the country to complete that knowledge to a degree sufficient to run a successful practice.
Finally, we come to the master degree. This one has been severely bastardized in late years, being applied only to those who have “mastered their craft.” Oddly enough this usage of the word “master” derives from the term “master craftsman” therefore this usage is a bit circular. What we really mean when we say a master, is the one in charge, not necessarily the best of the best. This is how the word came down from Latin’s magistrare. This is why we say shipmaster, master of the house, harbormaster, headmaster etc. Though those titles imply skill and knowledge, their true definition comes from their control and authority of their given realm. It wasn’t until the middle 1700’s that the term master as a verb came to mean what it does today, i.e. to dominate a given skillset. Before then it was a synonym for “company owner.”
In the medieval sense, a master craftsman gained the eligibility to found a company and train apprentices through the assent of their peers. In European practice and the guild system — which was never really brought to the Americas — the journeyman would produce their master work and submit it to the approval of the other masters of the guild, and thereby earn their stripes, and the ability to run their shop. What was tested was not necessarily the craftsman’s raw skill, but their ability to run a shop, and their broad knowledge across all areas of building. This was also before indoor plumbing and electricity, so the master carpenter’s knowledge did not need to extend to cover energy efficient boilers, buried services, or air sealing as it does today. The divergence between carpenter and builder occurs as these conveniences start to enter our buildings; before that the builder of a given project was either a master carpenter or a master mason. The divergence between Architect and Master Builder will be discussed in a future article.
In the Americas where guilds never took root, the nation’s inborn independence of spirit meant that any upstart could found their business whenever they felt they had enough knowledge, but it was still the public performance of their skill that determined whether the sum total opinions of their neighbors ranked them as a master or a hack. The master was a journeyman who had acquired enough knowledge and capital to start their own company, so that they might take on apprentices to teach, and bring on journeymen to employ. Too many in our field shirk their role as a teacher and lament the quality of their learners.
Earlier I mentioned a “completeness” of knowledge. I do not mean by this the totality of available knowledge within a trade. That would not be possible to acquire. The master does not have a complete knowledge of all things, but their accrued knowledge allows them to run their company and provide a service.
So let’s revisit these definitions:
The apprentice: the learner; one engaged in acquiring knowledge and acquiring skill. The journeyman: one with an acquired skill of hands but incomplete knowledge, who must engage in the continued acquisition of knowledge. Master: one who has acquired a complete trove of knowledge sufficient enough to be the master of other workmen, apprentices to teach, and journeyman to improve. The apprentice is defined by their master, the journeyman by themselves, and the master by their peers or by public. One cannot declare themselves a master; the community decides.
With these definitions in place, what now? There is much work to do in revitalizing the carpentry trade from an organizational perspective. Craftsmanship is alive, no doubt, but without recognition of qualifications on a formal level, that craftsmanship suffers. The unions still maintain these degrees, and on some level are keeping the torch lit, but amongst the residential construction community we must do something to carry forward those markers of our ancient tradition that established rigorous standards for who was able, and who was not.
