A look at small businesses in a Medieval City, Circa 1200's

[Longmane]

An extract from "Life in a Medieval City" by Frances and Joseph Gies, a book in which they concentrate mostly on the City of Troyes in the 13th century.

Almost every craftsman in Troyes is simultaneously a merchant.  The typical master craftsman alternately manufactures a product and waits on trade in his small shop, which is also his house. Sometimes he belongs to a guild, although in Troyes only a fraction of the hundred and twenty guilds of Paris are represented.  Many crafts stand in no need of protective federation or have too few members to form a guild.

Each shop on the city street is essentially a stall, with a pair of horizontal shutters that open upward and downward, top and bottom.  The upper shutter, opening upward, is supported by two posts that convert it into an awning; the lower shutter drops to rest on two short legs and acts as a display counter.  At night the shutters are closed and bolted from within.  Inside the shop master and apprentice and a male relative or two, or the master's wife, work at the craft.

In a tailor's shop, the tailor sits inside, cutting and sewing in clear view of the public, an arrangement that simultaneously permits the customer to inspect the work and the tailor to display his skill.  When the buying public arrives—even if it is only a single housewife—tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers and the rest desert their benches and hurry outside, metamorphosing into salesmen who are so aggressive that they must be restrained by guild rules—for example, from addressing a customer who has stopped at a neighbor's stall.


Related crafts tend to congregate, often giving their name to a street.  Crafts also give their names to craftsmen—Thomas le Potier ("Potter"), Richarte le Barbier ("Barber"), Benoît le Peletier ("Skinner"), Henri Taillebois ("Woodman"), Jehan Taille-Fer ("Smith").  With the rise of the towns, surnames are becoming important; the tax collector must be able to draw up a list.   But neither in the case of the man nor the street is the name a reliable guide to the occupation.  Just as a grocer's son may be a chandler, so the Street of the Grocers may be populated by leather merchants and shoemakers.

Not far from the helmetmakers, armorers, and swordmakers one may be sure to find the smiths, who not only produce horseshoes and other finished hardware for retail sale, but supply the armorers with their wrought iron and steel. Ore is obtained almost entirely from alluvial deposits—"bog iron"—and only rarely by digging.  Though coal is mined in England, Scotland, the Saar, Liège, Aix-la-Chapelle, Anjou, and other districts, iron ore is smelted almost exclusively by charcoal.   A pit is dug on a windy hilltop, drains inserted to allow the molten iron to be drawn off, and charcoal and ore layered in the hole, which is sealed at the top with earth.  The advantage of this method is that the iron drawn off has some carbon in it; in other words, it is steel of a sort.  Medieval metallurgists do not really understand how this happens.  This "mild steel" is taken in lumps to the smithy.

The blacksmith's furnace is table-high, with a back and a hood, and like those of the smelters, burns charcoal.  The smith's apprentice plies a pair of leather bellows while the smith turns the glowing bloom with a long pair of tongs. When it is sufficiently heated, the two men drag it out of the furnace to the floor, where they break off a chunk and take it to the anvil, which is mounted on an oak stump.  They pound, then return the chunk to the fire, then back to the anvil for more pounding, then back to the fire.

Hour after hour the two swing their heavy hammers in rhythmic alternation, their energy slowly converting the intractable metal mass.  This metal may vary considerably in character, depending on the accident of carbon-mixing at the smelter.  If the smith is fabricating wire, the next step will be to draw a piece of the hot metal through a hole with pincers.  Several such drawings, each time through a smaller hole in a plate, accomplished with patience and much labor, produce a wire of the correct diameter, which is retempered and cut into short lengths. 

These are sold to the armorer up the street, who pounds them around a bar into links, the basis of chain mail.  The sages believe iron is a derivative of quicksilver (mercury) and brimstone (sulfur).  The smith and the armorer know only that the material they get from the smelter sometimes is too soft to make good weapons or good chain mail, in which case they consign it to peaceful uses—plowshares, nails, bolts, wheel rims, cooking utensils.

Other craftsmen who use the products of the forge include cutlers, nail makers, pin makers, tinkers, and needlemakers.  But the great use of iron, the one that ennobles the crafts of smith and armorer, is for war, either real or tournamentstyle. There are also metalworkers on a more refined plane: goldsmiths and silversmiths.

Since the twelfth century those of Troyes have enjoyed a wide reputation.  The beautifully worked decoration of the tomb of Henry the Generous and the silver statue of the same count are justly famous.  Goldsmiths are the aristocrats of handicraft, though not all are rich.  Some goldsmiths scrape along working alone, making and selling silver ornaments, with hardly a thread of gold to their name.  But most have an apprentice and a small store of gold, and fabricate an occasional gold paternoster or silver cup.  The most prosperous have well equipped shops with two workbenches, a small furnace, an array of little anvils of varying sizes, a supply of gold, and two or three apprentices. 

One holds the workpiece on the anvil while the master hammers it to the desired shape and thickness, wielding his small hammer with incredible speed.  Gold's value lies not merely in its rarity and its glitter but in its wonderful malleability.  It is said that a goldsmith can reduce gold leaf by hammering to a thickness of one ten-thousandth of an inch.  Thin gold leaf embellishes the pages of the illuminated manuscripts over which monks and copyists labor. Hours of labor, tens of thousands of blows, with the final passage of the hammer effacing the hammer marks themselves—these are the ingredients of goldsmithing, a craft of infinite patience and considerable artistry.

But the bulk of even a prosperous goldsmith's work is in silver, the second softest metal. Sometimes a smith makes a whole series of identical paternosters or ornaments.  To do this he first creates a mold or die of hardwood or copper and transfers the shape and design to successive pieces of silver by hammering.  For repair jobs he keeps on hand a quantity of gold and silver wire, made in the same way the blacksmith makes his iron wire.

As the armorer depends on the smith, the shoemaker depends on the tanner, though he prefers to have his shop at a distance from his supplier's operation.  The numerous tanners of Troyes occupy two streets southeast of the church of St.-Jean.  Hide-curing, either by tanning or the ancient alternative method of tawing, creates a pungent atmosphere.  Masters and apprentices may be seen outdoors, scraping away hair and epidermis from the skins over a "beam" (a horizontal section of treetrunk) with a blunt-edged concave tool.  The flesh adhering to the underside is scraped off with a sharp concave blade.  Next the hide is softened by rubbing it with cold poultry or pigeon dung, or warm dog dung, then soaked in mildly acid liquid produced by fermenting bran, to wash off the traces of lime left by the dung.

For extra soft leather—shoe uppers, coverings of coffers, scabbards, bagpipes, bellows—the leather is returned to the beam to be shaved down with a two handled currier's knife.  Then it goes to the pit, which is filled and drained with a succession of liquid baths.  The first is old and mellow, the last fresh and green, their flavor imparted by oak bark, oak galls, acacia pods, and other sources of tannin. In the final stages the hides lie flat in the pit of liquid for several weeks, with crushed bark between the layers. The whole process of tanning takes months usually, in fact, over a year. A new quicker process, employing hot water, will appear later in the century, taking as little as ten days. Tanning an oxhide is a laborious process, but it multiplies the skin's value. Whitened oxhide and horsehide are even more expensive.

Footwear is insubstantial—little better than slippers. Ladies of fashion wear goatskin leather, or cordwain (from "cordovan," a fine leather originally made by the Moors of Cordova), even less sturdy than ordinary cowhide.  The shoemaker is not only a skilled craftsman, but a merchant of some status, capable of acquiring modest wealth.  A shoemaker of Troyes named Pantaléon has given his son Jacques an education in the Church.  Jacques is today a canon at Lyons, soon will be bishop of Verdun, and will eventually become Pope Urban IV.

Besides shoemakers, hatmakers, candlestick makers, and other craftsmen, there are the practitioners of the service trades: food purveyors, oil merchants, pastrycooks, wine sellers, and beer sellers.  In addition there is the wine crier, who is also an inspector.  Each morning he goes into the first tavern he can find that has not yet hired a crier for the day; the tavern keeper must accept him.  He oversees the drawing of the wine, or draws it himself, and tastes. Then, furnished with a cup and a leather flagon stoppered with a bit of hemp, he goes out to cry the wine and offer samples of it to the public.  Before setting out he may ask those in the tavern how much the tavern keeper charged them, in order to check on the prices. Customers are served directly from the barrel; glass bottles are almost nonexistent.

There are some fifty vintages in thirteenth-century France.  Among the favorites are Marly, Beaune, Epernay, Montpellier, Narbonne, Sancerre, Carcassonne, Auxerre, Soissons, Orléans, and, most highly regarded, Pierrefitte.  Burgundy is already famous and northern Champagne produces excellent wine, though not the sparkling variety with which the province will centuries later become identified.  Cider is unknown except in Normandy, and outsiders who have tasted it consider it to be a curse God has visited on the Normans.  One observant chronicler reports that the French prefer white wine, the Burgundians red, the Germans "aromatic wines," and the English beer.

Another trade associated with the taverns is prostitution. The girls of the Champagne Fair cities are famous throughout Europe. When the fair is on, servant girls, laundresses, tradeswomen, and many others find a profitable sideline. Child labor being the rule, prostitution begins at an early age.

Taverns are the chief setting for another vice—gaming. The dicemakers' guild has strict laws against making fraudulent dice, which nevertheless find their way into the hands of professional sharpers.  The fine for making such dice is heavy, so the sharpers pay a high price for them. Poor light in the taverns facilitates trickery.

Others engaged in service trades include the coal sellers, hay merchants, barbers, furniture menders, dish menders, and clothes menders—these latter three being the leading itinerants, whose peculiar rhymed gibberish echoes daily through the streets.

An ancient trade of the countryside, recently urbanized, is that of the miller.  The numerous mills of Troyes are owned by the count, the bishop, the abbeys, the hospital, and various other proprietors. Most are situated on canals, with a few on the Seine below the city, mounted on floating hulls, the wheel over the side and the millstones seated on a cupola-shaped platform amidships.  Sacks of grain are brought by boat to the miller, who pours the grain into the funnel over an opening in the upper stone.  The current turns the wheel, which activates the stone, and the milled flour trickles into a sack beneath the platform.

Both millers and mills have other functions besides grinding grain.  In slack periods the millers fish or spear eels.  Mill wheels furnish power for a growing variety of businesses, notably tanning and fulling.  The old undershot wheel, pushed lazily around by the current flowing against the lower paddles, is being supplanted by the overshot wheel, which is turned by water flowing over the top.  Either type of wheel can be used when a weir or dam is constructed that creates a narrow, rapid current.  The power of this current can be multiplied by guiding it to the midpoint of a waterwheel, so that the wheel's turn starts underneath, or by guiding it to the top of the wheel, so that the wheel's turn starts at the top.  Although water mills are important, old-fashioned mills worked by horses and cattle still hold their own, because animals can work in all weather, whereas river and millrace currents may freeze in winter or dry up in summer.

From time to time the horse market is held in the Corterie-aux-Chevaux, near the Porte de la Madeleine.  Nervous colts, sedate palfreys, powerful chargers, mares with foals trotting at their heels, broad-shouldered oxen, pack-asses, pack-mules, pigs, hogs, cows, chickens, ducks, and geese noisily crowd the market place. Knights, ladies, burghers and peasants bargain, argue, examine animals, turn back horses' lips, feel coats and muscles, and now and then mount a palfrey or a charger.

Only nobles and rich burghers ride horses; everyone else rides donkeys or walks.  A pregnant lady or wounded knight may be carried in a litter (carriages are far in the future).  The knights who come to the horse mart sometimes take prospective mounts outside the city walls to try out. Often there are races, with the noisy assistance of the boys and young men.

Saddle makers display their work at the market, and it is worthy of display. Bows of saddles are wooden, often ornamented with plates of ivory, hammered metal, or elaborately painted leather, with semiprecious stones soldered into the surface of the pommel and cantle. The saddle-cloth is richly embroidered.  Sidesaddles are manufactured for ladies, but not all ladies use them.

Farm implements, fashioned by the city's blacksmiths, are on display too.  These include sickles for harvesting grain, long-handled scythes with lateral grips added for efficient haymaking, sharp-bladed felling axes.  Wooden spades have iron cutting edges.  There are also farm machines—many-toothed harrows and wheeled plows, with coulter, plowshare and mould board for turning the earth to left or right.

The development of heavier breeds of horses has greatly augmented their value.  They bring much higher prices than a mule or an ordinary draft horse.  If Julius Caesar could wander through the horse market of Troyes, he would be startled far less by the wheeled plow and the new, heavily padded, rigid horse collar than by the size of the horses.  Neither the Romans nor their foes ever rode anything like these.  The Parthians and Byzantine Greeks began the development of the big warhorse, now completed in this area of northern France and Flanders.  It is no accident that this is par excellence the region of feudal chivalry.


1 the hundred and twenty guilds of Paris:

In 1268, 120 crafts registered and wrote out their statutes at the invitation of Etienne Boileau, provost of Paris.  Preserved in the taille (tax list) of Paris for the year 1292 are the numbers of practitioners of the regulated crafts, by then totalling 130.

The principal ones:

366 shoemakers,  214 furriers, 199 maidservants, 197 tailors, 151 barbers, 131 jewellers, 130 restaurateurs, 121 old-clothes dealers, 106 pastrycooks, 104 masons,  95 carpenters,  86 weavers, 71 chandlers, 70 mercers, 70 coopers, 62 bakers, 58 water carriers, 58 scabbard makers, 56 wine sellers, 54 hat-makers, 51 saddler's, 51 chicken butchers, 45 purse makers, 43 laundresses, 43 oil merchants, 42 porters, 42 meat butchers, 41 fish merchants, 37 beer sellers, 36 buckle makers, 36 plasterers, 35 spice merchants, 34 blacksmiths, 33 painters, 29 doctors
28 roofers, 27 locksmiths, 26 bathers, 26 ropemakers, 24 innkeepers, 24 tanners, 24 copyists, 24 sculptors, 24 rugmakers, 24 harness makers, 23 bleachers, 22 hay merchants, 22 cutlers, 21 glovemakers, 21 wood sellers, 21 woodcarvers