Page 22 - Constructing Craft

Many twentieth century craftspeople were aware that the objects they created had

only a tenuous link with the past, and were often used as decoration rather than
employed for the purpose for which they had been designed. But they were

encouraged by customer expectation, public perception and the need to prosper in
a capitalist economy to promote the image of the (possibly rustic) artisan producing

time-honoured objects to be used in the home. The craft industry could manipulate
the market as successfully as any other capitalist enterprise.

The Pervasive Craftsman Myth

Craftspeople often called on perceptions of earlier working environments to provide
examples of how they might follow their interest. In Britain, in the second half of the

nineteenth century, the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement ‒ a group of

upper-middle class designers and intellectuals ‒ revered medieval craft and made
assumptions about how the artefacts that survived were produced and consumed. A

set of contrasting images developed between ‘the craftsman and the industrial
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worker’: one a happy artisan and the other an unhappy machine-minder. In fact,
craftspeople, ‘far from being typical workers of the past era, accounted for less than
ten per cent of the medieval labour force,’ – peasant labourers formed the vast

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majority of the workers in those earlier societies. The myth that most working
people in medieval Britain practised some form of craft persisted through to the
twentieth century. Two British craft commentators observed in 1982 that, ‘although

craft pottery is today the most popular of handicrafts, it played a negligible part in
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the urban economy of Merrie England.’ They added:
Only in the countryside, where neither the work nor the
products were subject to Guild inspection, did potters spend a
significant proportion of their time serving the domestic needs of
the local community by making vessels for the kitchen or the
peasant’s hut. From the sixteenth century onwards, this kind of
production was mainly based in small workshops and rural
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households.

The image of the average pre-industrial worker, urban or rural, as a skilled
craftsperson could be misleading. The supposed contrast between a pre-industrial

society, where high quality functional objects were lovingly made by hand and a
satanic, post-industrial working environment became even more evident in the

Constructing Craft