Ulmer Maserholzpfeifen (Ulm Burl-Wood Pipes)

Ulmer Maserholzpfeifen is the collective name for pipes carved in and around Ulm in southern Germany from tree root and trunk burl, most finished with a chased silver cap. This production, which spread widely long before briar (funda kökü) reached European workbenches, was never brought under a guild's roof and so remained a rural sideline to the end; it nonetheless produced a pipe type that bears the region's name.

"Ulm" here refers not only to the present-day city but to the wide rural hinterland that fell under the city's authority: Geislingen, Söflingen, Pfuhl, Waldstetten, and Rechberg are the known links in that network.

A Craft Without a Guild

Records place the earliest document on the subject in 1695. Two craftsmen, reporting that they had been making wooden tobacco pipes for several years and covering their bodies in silver and tombac sheet, asked the city council for a charter and guild status; the request was refused that same summer, on the grounds that they had learned the trade neither through proper apprenticeship nor through the customary journeyman travel. Twenty years later, when the pipe makers of Geislingen said they numbered fifty and asked for their own guild, the outcome was no different; this second refusal in 1716 permanently filed pipe making under "free craft." That had two sides: there was no master's right, no apprenticeship requirement, and no cap on the number of workers, but pipe makers were in constant friction with the sales privileges of guild-organized tradesmen; in 1824 even the trade in pipe stems was closed off to them.

Being a sideline did not keep the workshops small. Records show that in 1790 two pipe-maker brothers, besides their bench in Ulm, employed dozens of people in their homes in settlements such as Langenau, Rechberg, and Söflingen. Even so, the number of those who counted the trade as their main livelihood did not exceed forty-five between the late 18th century and 1812. Local records put the number of masters engaged in the trade in Waldstetten around 1790–1800 at sixty.