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Usually they worked in trades that required nimble hands and fingers such as spinning and working with gold thread and weaving and spinning of silk and fine yarns. Where women were admitted into a Zunft or permitted to form their own they enjoyed the same rights and privileges as their male counterparts. Widows too were rarely permitted to continue the trades of their Tiffany 1837 Toggle bracelethusbands: under the best of circumstances they could continue until one of their sons came of age. More often than not they were required to re-marry within a year, rarely within two years.Lehrling - Geselle - Meister: apprentice - journeyman - master. For more than eight hundred fifty years, these have been, and still are, the steps many Germans go through in their careers as Handwerker or skilled craftsmen.

The origins of this system are found in the medieval Zunft or Innung, also called Amt (primarily in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony), or Gilde in the case of merchants (the root of the Tiffany Cushion Two-row bracelet guild, where it is used both for craftsmen as well as merchants). It denotes an association or corporation of skilled craftsmen who join together for mutual support and protection. Ideally its members worked to enforce common standards of training, uniform quality of workmanship, and to ensure sufficient income for those Bead bracelet admitted as Meister to the Zunft who alone had the right to train apprentices and to work independently in a shop of their own. The institution of the Zunft was a European-wide phenomenon closely connected with the process of urbanization that began in southern and western Europe. From there it spread northward and eastward into the German-speaking areas of Central Europe where, some critics claim, it has survived until today.

Up until the early parts of the eleventh century, Europe boasted no more than a few hundred communities that would qualify as cities. As Europe's population grew, some historians maintain that it tripled during the next two Return to Tiffany Heart tag bracelet fifty years, a wave of urbanization with its concurrent increase in economic activity swept the continent. In trans-rhenanian Europe this meant either a (re-) birth out of earlier Roman origins, that is, cities such as Cologne or Regensburg, or strategically planned settlements founded by the Holy Roman Emperor, the nobility or the church, that is, cities such as Nuremberg (1050), Freiburg im Breisgau (1118), Leipzig (1150), or Lübeck (1158).