Life in a Medieval City (12 page)

An apprentice has five obligations to fulfill. First, he must supply a certificate to the officers of the guild, stating that he is “prudent and loyal.” Second, he must demonstrate that he knows the craft. In some guilds the emerging apprentice must produce a “masterpiece.” An apprentice hatmaker fashions a hat, a cake baker bakes cakes. Third, the apprentice must show that he has enough capital to go into business. Sometimes his capital is his tools, sometimes he needs cash. Fourth, he must swear on the saints’ relics to uphold the guild’s law and customs, which the officers read aloud to him, explaining and clarifying as they go. Finally, he pays a fee, which goes not to the guild but to the prince—in Troyes the count of Champagne—for guilds “belong” to the sovereign. In 1160 Louis VII sold five of his Paris guilds (the leatherworkers, pursemakers, baldric makers, shoe repairmen and dockworkers) to the widow of a wealthy burgher, who thereafter collected the dues formerly owed the king.

On paying his fee, the apprentice becomes a member of the corporation, the inner body of the guild, that consists of the masters alone, or the masters and journeymen. His rise in status calls for a celebration—a round of drinks at the tavern, or possibly a dinner. Or he may merely pay five or ten sous to the corporation treasury.

An apprentice’s ambition may even soar beyond acquiring the status of a master. He may dream of some day being an officer of the corporation. Officers are elected by the masters, or by the masters and journeymen, and the election is ratified by the count’s provost.

Married apprentices are not unknown, and occasionally a master may even provide his apprentice with an allowance for taking his meals outside the master’s house. But such cases are the exception.

A craft may make a man modestly rich. Of course it may also make him stoop-shouldered, but this is a hazard of any trade. A man repeats the same motion with hammer, with maul, with saw, with shears, with needle, with loom, ten, twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch, day in and day out, transmitting the energy of his hand, arm and shoulder into chalice, statue, vestment or article of furniture. Forty years of such effort can leave him bent and crooked. His servile forefathers, however, ended their days not only crippled and deformed by their labors but with nothing to show for it.

In the old
cité
near the Abbey of St.-Loup is one of the crowded town’s most crowded districts. This is the Broce-aux-Juifs, the old ghetto of Troyes. Its streets are hardly distinguishable from the rest of the old quarter, except for the Mezuzah (a small parchment scroll inscribed with Old Testament writings) on every doorpost. The men, women and children on the streets do not look very different from their Christian neighbors, except that on the breast of each is sewn a yellow circle, or wheel. They speak perfectly good French, though they use Hebrew characters in writing. Jews make their living, like Christians, by manufacture and trade—as goldsmiths and leatherworkers, tanners and glass-blowers, weavers and dyers. In the south of France they practice viticulture, though agriculture generally is closed to them, as are many avenues of commerce. Some enlightened princes, like Louis IX of France and Edward I of England, favor abolishing the Jewish disabilities, even while Louis’ zeal for the Christian religion causes him to burn copies of the Talmud.

Many Jews lend money, mostly on a small scale, against pledges. A dozen are wealthy and even own land outside town. Some devote their lives to scholarship. The ghetto of Troyes, which had one of the earliest Jewish schools in northwest Europe, has been the home of several of the most famous Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages, such as Salomon ben Isaac (Rashi) and his grandson Jacob ben Meir, who presided over a major synod in Troyes in the previous century. The most important member of the community in the thirteenth century is the wealthy Jacob of Troyes, who holds the title “Master of the Jews.” He is in effect mayor of the ghetto, which is a separate, privileged community, a foreign colony, not unlike the Christian merchants’ colonies in the Levant, or the colonies of Italians and other nationalities in London. Jews do not belong to the commune and do not participate in the town government. A legal case involving a Christian and a Jew must be taken to the count’s court, where the testimony of a Christian against a Jew, or of a Jew against a Christian, must be corroborated by a coreligionist. A Jewish merchant receives full protection against thieves. If he is robbed in another principality, on the road to Troyes, the count demands restitution as forcefully as for a Christian merchant.

The same is true of other sovereigns. The Pope has threatened excommunication in defense of Roman Jewish bankers. When a Jewish merchant from Aragon was robbed by Castilian bandits, the king of Aragon promised to repay him at the expense of Castilian merchants unless the king of Castile made good the loss.

Princely punctilio about the rights of Jewish merchants and bankers is securely anchored in self-interest. But princely self-interest is a capricious force. The chief threat to Jewish life comes not from popular outbursts, which are rare, but from official edicts. A prince who needs money is tempted to lose his tolerance, listen to a charge (or cause one to be made), and order expulsion of all Jews from his territory. Expulsion automatically involves confiscation of goods.
²
It also, almost as automatically, involves an increment to the sovereign at some later date when the Jews are graciously permitted to reenter the territory. Seventy years ago, at the time of the Third Crusade, the Jews of Troyes suffered expulsion, as did Jews in many other places. The synagogue in the old ghetto was taken over by Christians and converted to a church, St.-Frobert. A second synagogue in the new commercial quarter west of the
cité
suffered a similar fate, and became St.-Pantaléon. The street next to it remains, and will remain through the centuries, the Rue de la Synagogue.

Even the emotionally charged accusation of ritual murder is usually a pretext for a fine rather than capital punishment. An alleged ritual murder in London in 1244 resulted in an exorbitant fine—60,000 marks, levied against the Jewish community. Frederick II, king of Sicily and emperor of Germany, recently heard an indictment against the Jews of the town of Fulda. The scientific-minded emperor ordered an investigation, interrogating converted Jews from England. Concluding that there was no basis for the ancient charge, Frederick forbade further accusations. However, he did not neglect to collect a fine from the Jews of Fulda for breach of the peace. The Pope (Innocent IV) has also discredited the ritual murder superstition, which nonetheless persists among the ignorant masses.

Jewish conversion to Christianity is rare, but not unknown. Sometimes special protection is extended to converts not only against reprisals by Jews and insults by Christians, but against loss of property. More often, however, a converting Jew faces a considerable bill from his Christian prince, who does not wish to sacrifice the Jewish taxes without compensation. There are many other ways a prince may make money from his Jews. Henry III, present king of England, has recently mortgaged his Jews to his brother, Richard of Cornwall.

Forcible conversion is forbidden, as is interference with celebration of Jewish rites. However, the terms in which the prohibition is couched indicate that Christians are less tolerant than one could wish. “During the celebration of their festivals,” Pope Innocent III ruled, “no one shall disturb them by beating them with clubs or by throwing stones at them.” It is also expressly forbidden to extort money from the Jews by threatening to exhume the bodies of their dead from the Jewish cemetery.

Yet despite the suspicion and hostility with which the Broce-aux-Juifs is hedged around, contacts between Christians and Jews are numerous and not necessarily uncongenial. Jews have often served as bankers to the counts and have farmed tolls and taxes. The erudite Count Henry the Generous, the present count’s grandfather, is said to have consulted Jewish scholars on textual problems of the Old Testament. Jewish and Christian merchants and moneymen often embark on joint ventures. That many Jews of Troyes prosper is demonstrated by the fine houses along the Rue de Vieille Rome, south of the ancient donjon.

If the thirteenth century is not the best time to be a European Jew, neither is it the worst.

7.

Big Business

Buy stingily and sell dear,
And practice usury and fraud
.

—
RUTEBEUF OF TROYES

F
eudal dues, guild regulations, princely prerogatives and ecclesiastical dicta notwithstanding, the western European businessman of the thirteenth century makes money—often a great deal. There are two main avenues to fortune, the cloth trade and banking. Very commonly the two are combined by a single entrepreneur.

The typical capitalist of Troyes conducts his typically many-sided business from the ground floor of his house in one of the better streets on the outskirts of the fair quarter. There are two rooms on this floor. In front is the workroom where the apprentice puts in his long hours. It is likely to be piled with a variety of merchandise—skins, furs, silks, utensils, copper wire, iron tools, paper, parchment—whatever the merchant happens to be dealing in. But the most important item is fairly certain to be wool, which is raw, semi-finished or finished.

In the rear is the counting room, where the merchant and perhaps his eldest son do their office work. Light is poor. A prominent piece of office equipment is the calculating board, a table marked out with horizontal lines on which bone counters are manipulated. The bottom line represents units, the next not tens but twenties—because in the universal money of account, twenty shillings (sous) equals one pound (livre). Vertical lines assist in positioning the counters.

Records are kept on wax tablets. Parchment, a seal, half a dozen quills, ink, and ribbon or cord supply the tools for correspondence. When a merchant writes a letter, he closes it with his seal affixed to a ribbon or cord. Most business letters are written in French, but sometimes correspondence is in Latin, and occasionally in Italian, or even a more exotic tongue, in which case the assistance of a professional scribe may be required. A couple of tables, three or four hard chairs or stools, a chest or two, and a few candles nearly complete the inventory of office furnishings.

But there is one more piece of furniture, the most important. The merchant’s strongbox is bound with iron and fastened with a large iron lock. In it he keeps his working capital. Though cash is less important in business life than it was a hundred years ago, a prosperous merchant still has a tidy hoard of silver-copper-zinc deniers (pennies),
¹
along with a stack of parchment pledges. The livre (pound) and sou (shilling), though used to count with throughout Europe, do not yet actually exist as coins. The only important coin circulating in any volume is the penny, which comes in a remarkable variety of sizes and alloys. About five-eighths of an inch in diameter, and at its best about one-third fine silver, it will suffice to hire a workman for three or four hours. It varies capriciously because a large number of princes and bishops enjoy the right of coinage. Mints being expensive to operate, they require profit margins, and the temptation is strong to widen this margin by increasing the copper content of the coins. The
denier de Provins
(Provins penny), minted at Troyes’ sister city, is universally respected for its reliable content of thirty per cent fine silver. But some lords take a shortsighted view and profit from debasements. However, even those who debase the currency are very jealous of the privilege, and tampering with coinage by subjects is attended everywhere by the most ferocious legal penalties.

Though the pounds-shillings-pence ratio (one to twenty to twelve) may seem clumsy, merchants have no difficulty with it. Lately a big new silver coin has been minted in Italy. Called a
grosso
(groat),
²
it has the value of twelve pennies, thereby converting the imaginary shilling for the first time into a reality. But the grosso circulates very little outside Italy, where business is bigger than in the West.

Troyen merchants invest their pennies in many things, but above all in wool. Some wool is grown locally, but the best comes from abroad, especially from England. A poet uses the metaphor “carrying wool to England” in the sense of “carrying coals to Newcastle.” Long-wooled flocks roam the grasslands and fens of the Cotswolds and Lincolnshire; short-wooled animals, the hills and moors of the Welsh and Scottish borders and the downlands of Shropshire and Herefordshire. The flocks belonging to monasteries, such as those of Tintern Abbey, are especially famous. Most of the English wool feeds the looms of Flanders, but some finds its way to France and Champagne. Merchants of Troyes also buy Burgundian wool, nearly as good as English. Buying in quantity, a merchant gets a much better price than could an individual weaver. He then in turn supplies weavers, specifying the kind of weave he wants. In theory he sells raw wool to individual weavers and buys finished wool back, but since he usually buys from the same weavers, a wool merchant actually operates a factory scattered through town.

If the wool market is strong, as it usually is, the weavers are able to buy bread to feed the wives and children who crowd their upper-story tenement dwellings and who help spin and weave. But if the cloth market drops, as a result perhaps of a war which severs trade routes, merchants naturally turn their attention and capital elsewhere, and weavers’ families beg in front of the church doors.

The weavers’ guild is the first to include a number of “valets” or “journeymen.” By 1250 the towns of Flanders have many of these. Finished with their apprenticeship, the journeymen are not yet permitted to become masters, yet their labor is needed by cloth merchants. Even in good times they are subject to the caprices of the market and their employers. Every Monday morning they gather in the squares and before the churches, where the masters hire labor for the week. On Saturday night, after a week’s dawn-to-dusk work, the journeyman is paid off and must again look for work on Monday morning.