Some great posts there, thanks.
Raimey is of course correct when he connects journeyman to journee, French for day .
Journeymen were “qualified” as they had finished their apprenticeship periods but, as a means of gaining more experience and venture cash before setting up their own workshops they, now free to travel, moved around to work for different master-craftsmen and were paid by the day.

Apprenticeships were taken very seriously; the apprentice was effectively an indentured servant and the Master was “in loco parentis.” If the conditions of the indenture were sufficiently onerous, the apprentice/servant could be akin to a slave, like many of the Irish shipped to your East Coast in the 1660s.

The indenture shown by Pete M is a standard form and could be used by any trade. They were very common in the UK and Ireland well into the mid 1900s and even in my time a solicitor’s apprentice was a common occupation and he (or his parents) paid his master for the privilege of working as an unpaid glorified law clerk until qualification. Typically a farm worker or kitchen maid’s indenture was almost identical, without the clause for instruction. The blank space at the end could be used for detailing special items such as “three days absence will be given for the Tipperary Races.”

The snobbery of looking down on “trade” is a 19th century occurrence and derives from impecunious British monarchs funding their lifestyles by selling honours to wealthy merchants. (That is why many of the present day British aristos have a poorer bloodline than most good horses.) The recently ennobled distanced themselves from their till-grubbing past and disdained those from where they themselves had come.

The following excerpts from the 1627 will of a very wealthy English landowner give an idea of how ordinary an apprenticeship was in that era:
Item And my will and desire is that my executor do dispose of my sonne Samuell ........ to some honest and recommendable trade in the Cittye of London with all convenient speade and that in the meane tyme he be not overchardgeable to my wyfe especially for his apparell and schoolinge
Item I geve and bequeath onto the foresaid Beniamyn ....... my sonne the full some of ffortye pounds of lawfull mony to be paid onto him within six monthes after his apprentishipp shal be expired.

In my student days there used to be (still is?) a good restaurant in Paris called “Aux Charpentiers.” Way back the carpenters guild used to meet in an upstairs room and the place was full of scale models that were guild entry pieces.

Rs
K.