I will concede and eat a few bites of my hat in that Germany Journeyman's pieces submitted to the guild of Masters, were sold. See GGCA( http://www.germanguns.com for purchase) publication No. 36, Spring 2008 at page 25 where there is an article where a percussion double owner inquires to Dr. Fritze, great grandson of Emil Karl Alexander Fritze and contact at the Museum in Suhl, ( http://www.waffenmuseumsuhl.de/ - I don’t know where the English button might be - http://www.gunmaker.org/www/wts/html/webinfo.nsf/DokuUNID/041129-60189-OM-8610666056?OpenDocument with more German ref. info) regarding info on the piece and it turned out to be E.K.A. Fritze’s journeyman piece. But the “trade gun” is much, much more than the plain-janes which are sometimes labeled “guild guns”. Actually it is closer to a masterpiece. Now E.K.A. Fritze didn’t do all the elaborate work but he did do the work representing what he had learned and within his discipline/capability/specialty. The rest of his work was outsourced just like what one would see in the making of a longarm for a firearms merchant during the period. The guild had an internal control mechanism, which was the Masters which allowed some Journeymen to continue while keeping their thumb on the rest of the group in order to protect their own interest. With the advances of the industrial revolution more and more hand tasks were performed by machine resulting in more output when more output was needed. Conflicts/Wars, etc. for the most part drove the production and peacetime found idle hands. So I think this is why you see a lot of the German influence in America where German Journeyman were attempting to break free from the hold of the Masters. Larger facilities were the recipients of the large contracts and in turn they had their own in-house journeyman programs. So the military and sporting began to diverge. For the most part, the basis of the info is from the article but with some yarn of my own.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Last edited by ellenbr; 05/03/09 10:51 AM.