. The most important industrial commodities in medieval regional and international trade were textiles, whose leading producers during most of this era were found in France, especially the northern provinces. During the high Middle Ages, the majority of French textiles, manufactured in a wide variety, were cheap to medium-priced: fairly coarse, generally light worsted, woolens, linens, and mixed fabrics, particularly worsted-woolen says and linen-cotton or linen-woolen fustians and tiretaines, sold chiefly in Mediterranean markets. The upper price ranges comprised more finely textured, heavier, pure linens and woolens; and the most luxurious woolens were densely woven from the finest English wools. The most expensive French textile was the woolen escarlate (écarlat, scarlet; first documented ca. 1030–50), whose distinctive red color was produced by kermes (or grain), a dyestuff composed of rare Mediterranean oak-infesting insects (Coccus ilicis). Rivaling the finer Italian silks, a late-medieval French escarlate (about 80 by 5 ft.) could cost as much as three years’ pay for a master mason or carpenter in Paris or Rouen.
Of all these textiles, the most important were woolbased. From the first evidence for commercial production in the later Carolingian era until perhaps the 12th century, worsted-type fabrics seem to have predominated. They were distinguishable by their lozenge or diamond-twill weaves, composed of strong, long-fibered wool yarns, woven on the vertical warp-weighted loom of great antiquity. A fashion and industrial revolution took place with the emergence and subsequent victory of the long, heavy, felted woolen broadcloth, composed of short-stapled, finer wools whose yarns were woven on the new horizontal foot-operated treadle loom. First so described by Rashi of Troyes (ca. 1040–1105), it was subsequently much enlarged and improved by the 13th century as the famous broadloom. If that loom was the most crucial innovation for the new long broadcloths, their cohesion and durability also depended upon extensive fulling (unlike worsteds), with water, chemicals, pressure, and heat: to force the fine, curly, but weak wool fibers to interlock and be felted into a highly compressed and thus heavy fabric, whose fiber-ends were then repeatedly raised or “napped” with teasels (a thistle plant) and shorn with razor-sharp, foot-long shears, until all visible trace of weave was obliterated and the texture had become as smooth as silk.
Three other labor-saving innovations of the late 12th and 13th centuries were also particularly well suited to producing woolens: carding the wool fibers with two wired brushes, which also facilitated subsequent felting; spinning carded wools or cotton with a hand- or foot-operated wheel that rotated the spindle; and mechanical fulling, with water-powered wooden hammers to pound, scour, and felt the woven cloth. While the rival and younger Italian and English cloth-making establishments, called “draperies,” soon adopted these innovations, the more prominent Franco-Flemish draperies long resisted them, for fear of impairing the quality of their woolens. Many required the traditional techniques of hand-combing the wool fibers and then spinning them with the drop-spindle and distaff to produce both the warps (the strong yarns stretched on the loom) and the wefts (the weaker yarns passed
Women carding, spinning, and weaving wool, from a 14th-century manuscript. B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 71. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale,Paris.
through the warps), although some grudgingly permitted carding and wheel-spinning for the wefts alone. Above all, they insisted upon the laborious, traditional method of foot-fulling, which took three or four days for each cloth.
Some of these changes involved in the evolution of the medieval felted woolen broadcloth also involved changes in the sexual division of labor, which, however, were more related to the commercialization and urbanization of the French woolens industry. A growing dependence on competitive export markets required greater specialization of labor to provide both lower-cost efficiency and better quality. Insofar as early-medieval and Carolingian cloth production was much more oriented to local consumption, it had been a largely rural domestic or household craft with little formal division of labor, except in the large workshops of manorial estates and religious orders, called gynaecia. As that term indicates, the cloth-manufacturing processes of this era were performed there and almost everywhere by women. Even in the fully developed export-oriented woolen draperies of the high and later Middle Ages, female workers still outnumbered males; but throughout western Europe, men had succeeded in decisively dominating this industry.
In the commercially oriented Franco-Flemish draperies, production became organized by a “putting-out” system under the supervision of entrepreneurs known as drapiers, almost always men, the exception typically being their widows. Some drapiers might also be wool merchants; but most purchased wools from such merchants, who often delivered them already sorted by staple length, beaten, cleansed, greased, and sometimes partially dyed in the wool, usually woad-blue as the foundation for other colors. Under the drapier’s supervision, these wools were “put out” to combers and carders, almost exclusively female, who prepared them for spinning in their own homes—often rural cottages, for piecework wages. Thus prepared, such wools were then similarly “put out” to spinners, again females, whether using the distaff or the wheel, also working in their own homes or cottages. The warp and weft yarns so spun were then delivered to the weavers, who were almost exclusively male by the high or late Middle Ages—all the more so since the master weaver was frequently also the drapier.
The broadloom required two weavers, one on each side, to operate the treadles for separating the warps and to pass the weft-bearing shuttle back and forth through the warps; their assistants, who wound and fitted the warps and wefts, were usually females. The woven cloth was then delivered to the fullers, who were again almost exclusively male, as were the other artisans in the finishing processes. After the cloth had been thoroughly scoured, degreased, felted, and subjected to a preliminary napping (teaseling) and “wet-shearing,” it was hung by tenterers on large frames, to be dried and stretched so that no wrinkles remained, and then returned to the drapier. He might choose to sell this broadcloth, whose manufacture had taken over two weeks, to cloth finishers or merchants, who might then commission shearers and dyers to finish the cloth; or the drapier himself might send the cloth to the shearers and dyers; or the woolens might be exported to Italian towns, Florence especially, for such finishing.
In the leading Franco-Flemish draperies, formal guild organization by the later Middle Ages was confined largely to the four major urban-based and male-dominated crafts: the master weavers, who as drapiers depended on profits for their incomes, while their journeymen weavers received wages; the master fullers, dependent piecework employees of the drapiers; and the master shearers and dyers, most of whom were independent fee-earning craftsmen.
The ultimate, late-medieval commercial preeminence of the luxury-quality woolens was due not just to changes in fashion or technology but more particularly to adverse economic changes that sharply raised transportation and marketing costs in international trade to a prohibitive level for the cheaper textiles. Most of these rising costs resulted from the widespread, prolonged warfare—and associated fiscal, monetary, and commercial policies pursued by the combatants—that afflicted so much of western Europe and the entire Mediterranean basin, Christian and Muslim, from the later 13th to the mid-15th centuries. Europe was also seriously afflicted, during the last hundred years of this era, by plagues and famines; but in France the industrial and commercial transformations were readily apparent well before these later calamities.
The most graphic evidence can be found in the rapid decline of the Champagne fairs during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Most of the textile industries scattered across central and northern France, the Low Countries, and the adjacent Rhineland had been vitally dependent upon these fairs, which had long served as the hub of western European and especially Mediterranean-oriented commerce. During the mid-13th-century apogee of these fairs, and in the famous Hanse of the Seventeen Towns, producers of the cheaper, lighter textiles well outnumbered those of luxury woolens. The great majority of the draperies were then francophone; and even in Flanders, a French county, francophone draperies then predominated over the draperies flamigantes. But by the mid-14th century, the big urban draperies flamigantes of Ypres, Ghent, and Bruges had gained a decisive ascendancy by specializing more and more in those luxury woolens whose commerce could better withstand rising marketing costs; in stark contrast, dozens of the smaller, cheaper-line French draperies in French Flanders (annexed to the royal domain), Tournai, Artois, Ponthieu, Vermandois, Champagne, and the Île-de-France had either disappeared or were relegated to a much more modest existence in supplying purely local or regional markets. Of the linen industries in this region, only the luxury producers, chiefly at Reims, survived and prospered. The supremacy of those urban Flemish draperies was short-lived, however, as they encountered increasingly severe competition in luxury woolens from quasirural nouvelles draperies within Flanders itself and from draperies in neighboring imperial Brabant, Holland, Florence and other north Italian towns, and England. Within France, by the late 14th and early 15th centuries, several new Norman draperies also provided some competition in the luxury field, while in the south new draperies in Languedoc and Catalonia sold cheap to medium-priced woolens in Mediterranean markets that the northern draperies could no longer effectively service. Finally, in 1470, with the dawning of the early-modern era, France gained a new textile industry, when Louis XI successfully established an Italian-style silk-making craft at Tours.
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