When I was at the London College of Furniture in 1973, Chris Challen came to teach and start a lute-making course. I am uncertain of his experience up to that time, but I had the impression that he was still working out the details of lute construction. At that time, there was no culture of the craft outside of the German coterie, and that was based mainly on the violin- and guitar-making traditions. For those of us trying to reconstruct a more historical form of instrument, we had to figure out many techniques by trial and error.
When it came to gluing the bridge onto the front in those early days, I would first assemble the instrument altogether. My concern was that the strings aligned with the neck properly, so there was a balanced distance between the first string and the fingerboard edge with a corresponding spacing for the last fundamental string. The only way I could imagine being confident of that alignment was to complete the construction sans bridge and then glue that in place the last thing when I could be satisfied with its relationship to the fingerboard. For pressure, I used weights set on a board riding over the bridge top. I regret that this system resulted in an occasional bridge coming unglued with dramatic consequences.
Since those days, I have refined my bridge-placement methods. I now glue the bridge onto the front before that gets put on the bowl. The clamps provide more pressure than I could ever achieve with weights, and I am glad to say that bridges no longer come off unexpectedly.