Life in a Medieval City (13 page)

Five years ago something incredible happened in Douai, one of the richest Flemish cloth towns. The weavers got together and refused to work. The outraged cloth merchants crushed this insurrectionary movement, and every burgher trusts that workingmen will never do anything of the kind again.

A merchant may enter into a long-term contract with one of the great English abbeys to take all the shearings of the abbey for a period of years, often seven. He pays a cash sum in advance, and agrees to a fixed annual payment for the duration of the contract. The contract is drawn by a notary, first in rough draft, then with care on parchment in three copies, one for each of the parties and one for his own files, which acquire the force of legal records.

When a wool consignment from England is delivered to a merchant of Troyes, it is first given preliminary treatment at his house. An apprentice removes damaged wool and sorts the good wool into three grades—fine, medium, and coarse. Next it must be washed in lye to remove grease, and spread on boards in the sun to dry. Forceps in hand, the hardworking apprentice gets on his hands and knees to remove bits of soil and other particles. If they cannot be picked out, he clips them with small shears. The wool of carcass sheep is kept separate; it is an offense to mix it with live shearings.

When the wool has been washed and dried, it must be laboriously beaten, combed, and carded. Then the merchant consigns it to the weaver, whose wife spins it into yarn with a distaff and spindle. The warp thread, stronger than the woof, must be sized and wound and sorted into the required number of threads of a certain length, and the woof thread must be wound onto the bobbin to be inserted in the shuttle. Although spinning is still done in ancient fashion, looms have advanced well beyond Roman models. The weaver sits in a high-backed chair with his feet on the treadles, tossing his shuttle of wool back and forth between the rising and falling heddles, which raise and lower the warp threads.

The material that comes from the weaver’s loom is not finished cloth. It must be taken to the fuller, who soaks and shrinks the fabric, and rubs it with fuller’s earth, not only to clean it but to give it body and help it take dye. The soaking is done in a trough, the fuller and his assistants trampling the mixture in their bare feet (whence another word for fuller—“walker”—the English surnames Fuller and Walker denoting the same trade). This process also hardens the material. When the cloth has been soaked, it is hung to dry on an upright wooden frame called a tenter, fastened by tenterhooks placed along parallel bars which can be adjusted so that the cloth is stretched to the right length and breadth. This task is often undertaken by women. Then the cloth is finished by raising the nap with teasels while it is still damp and by shearing it when dry with great flat shears, three or four feet long. The finest cloth is shorn and reshorn a number of times. Finally it is brushed, pressed, and folded.

Dyeing may take place at any stage in the manufacture. Sometimes the cloth is already dyed in the yarn stage, or even in its original raw form, whence the expression “dyed in the wool.” Sometimes it is sold as undyed cloth, especially to the
Arte di Calimala
, the clothfinishing industry of Florence. Sometimes dyeing is the last step in the process. The dyer heats his tub over a fire and, turning the cloth with long poles, soaks it in water colored with woad (blue), madder (red), or other dyes, tempered by wood ashes. One can tell a dyer anywhere by the color under his nails. He dyes not only cloth, but sometimes other products, such as wooden crucifixes and ornaments.

Besides wool, the merchant may deal occasionally in three other textiles. One is linen, woven from flax, a vegetable fiber grown widely throughout Europe. Another is silk, imported from the East for hundreds of years, but now a major industry in Italy, Sicily, and Spain. The third is cotton, originally imported from India, but introduced into Spain by the Moors and manufactured in France, Italy, and Flanders.

Wool is the beginning, rather than the end, of a Troyen wool merchant’s business. When he sells cloth at the fair to the Italians, he may buy spices from the Far East, wines from Burgundy, or metal from Germany. Some merchandise he can resell immediately to customers pledged in advance. Some he must break down into small lots. Some he may warehouse and hold for a rising market. Some, such as wood and metal, he sends out for finishing.

He is likely to invest part of his profits in real estate. He can rent houses in the city, perhaps to his own weaver families, and outside the city he may buy forest land, which cannot fail to rise in value, and in the meantime can be farmed for timber. He may acquire fishing rights in a stream or pond, operating as a fishing landlord and dividing the catch with his fisherman tenants.

Almost inevitably, whether he wants to or not, the successful merchant turns moneylender. People who want to borrow money go where the money is. In mid-thirteenth century the ancient monopoly of the Jews has become a large-scale business from which most of the Jewish lenders have been elbowed aside. The Italians are the biggest bankers today, but businessmen of northwest Europe give them increasing competition. Moneychangers tend naturally to become moneylenders. The men of Cahors, in southern France, who have long made a specialty of moneychanging, are among the most prominent pawnbrokers. Their knowledgeability in coinage makes them also expert at evaluating silver plate and jewelry. The word “Cahorsin” has joined “Jew” and “Lombard” as a synonym for moneylender.

All moneylenders are resented—even Christian knights. The Templars, originally a band of Crusaders from Champagne who swore an oath at Solomon’s Temple to devote their lives to defending Jerusalem, are celebrated as much for their financial as for their military prowess. Their commanderies, which stand in most of the important towns of northwest Europe, including Troyes, are usually square stone buildings looking like a cross between a blockhouse and a bank.

But if moneylenders are resented, they are also respected. So prestigious is the profession of moneychanger that instead of the master paying his apprentice or even supporting him, he demands and gets a payment from the apprentice’s father for the lad’s education. The following clause appears in a contract between a moneychanger and an apprentice’s father in Marseille in 1248: “…and if it should happen, which God forbid, that the said William should cause you any loss I promise to reimburse you by this agreement, believing in your unsupported word…”

Moneylenders run risks, so interest rates are high. The Church officially condemns all interest as usurious, but churchmen nevertheless borrow, and lend, too.

The highest rates are charged by the Jews, who run the greatest risks, partly because their political position leaves them vulnerable to the connivance of their debtors with the authorities, and partly because they draw the worst borrowers—those who have trouble borrowing anywhere else. Like the Cahorsin, the Jewish moneylending business is largely pawnbroking. To become a pawnbroker in Troyes one must purchase a “table,” a license from the count.

Nevertheless a moneylender, Christian or Jewish, has a growing power behind him, and it is much easier to collect a debt in 1250 than it was a hundred years earlier. Generally a debtor who fails to meet his obligations may expect to have his goods seized and handed over to the creditor. If they are insufficient to meet the debt he will be imprisoned or banished from the city, the latter punishment being more effective from the creditor’s point of view, since it gives the debtor a chance to raise money. By an old custom a defaulted debt is an obligation of the debtor’s commune. It is to the advantage of both sovereign and citizens to have their town enjoy a reputation of security for businessmen.

Noblemen are the greatest borrowers. Count Henry II of Champagne borrowed from ten bankers to equip himself for the Third Crusade, and ultimately he left the debt to be paid by his successor. The present count, Thibaut IV, borrowed large sums in his youth and refused to pay up. The bankers, some of whom were Italian and one a Jew, appealed to the Pope, who excommunicated the count and placed the whole of Champagne under interdict; no church services could be celebrated till the debt was paid. Not long after, spendthrift Thibaut got himself into another such jam. This time he went even further; he seized one of his creditors, an Italian banker named Ilperni, threw him into prison, frightened him, and extracted twelve hundred livres from him. The Pope, furious, threatened fresh excommunication and interdict, and rash Thibaut only escaped by promising to go on Crusade. At this very moment Thibaut owes two thousand livres to the monks of St.-Denis in Paris, who hold the gold cross from his chapel of St.-Etienne-de-Troyes as a pledge.

Lending and credit are intimately connected with the Champagne Fairs. Promises to pay are often dated from one fair to the next, or extended in installments over the next several fairs. Discounting is often done on such promises to pay; that is, a merchant may sell such a promise at something less than its face value if he needs immediate cash.

House “rent” is a form of interest. The householder borrows money to build or buy his house, agreeing to pay a certain rate of interest, usually eight to ten per cent. He may never pay anything on the principal of the loan, for which the lender always has the security of the house. The house may pass through several generations of such “rent paying.”

Besides feudal lords, businessmen, and ordinary citizens, towns themselves often borrow, offering “life rents” in the form of annual or quarterly payments during the life of the lender. Sometimes the obligation is made for two lives, the lender’s and his heir’s. To combat fraud, towns offer prizes for news of the death of a rent holder.

The successful bourgeois entrepreneur stirs considerable envy. He is reputed to have acquired his wealth, the amount of which is generally exaggerated, by sharp practice rather than by hard work. The mystery by which capital grows is not understood by those who do not possess it. Neither are the worries of the businessman whose capital is committed to the hazards of a baron’s whim, a flock’s health, the stormy seas, or the chance of war.

The silver of commerce has in everyone’s eyes, even in those of the merchants themselves, something of the diabolical. “He owes a fine candle to God, one may believe, who has remained honest in commerce without scorning the poor and without hating religion,” says a popular proverb. And a writer describes a character: “After having passed most of his life in innocence, he became a merchant.”

Nevertheless, the poets do not accord the merchants the kind of contempt they heap on peasants. Even the trouvères, spokesmen of chivalry, show a grudging respect for these townsmen, who not infrequently cross the line dividing their class from the nobility. A wealthy burgher may be knighted for his financial services to a great lord. Renier Accore, for example, a Florentine merchant who became a citizen of Provins, did business with the great nobles of Champagne, and became a knight and the Seigneur de Gouaix. Many burghers have seen their sons knighted. Some of the trouvères themselves are burghers, such as Adam de la Halle, whose graceful verses to his equally non-noble wife are widely quoted, and Gilbert de Barneville, who compares his mistress to the Northern Star.

Patents of nobility are hardly necessary. Universally accorded the title of “Sire,” the wealthy merchants may be said to possess their own rank of nobility. Such officials of the count’s service as Sire Doré (“Golden”), who married a noble Genoese lady and was Keeper of the Fair in 1225, and Sire Herbert Putemonnaie (“Badmoney”), financial agent of the count, need not genuflect to knights or petty barons. A son of a fishmonger, Sire Girard Meletaire, served as provost of Troyes in 1219, chamberlain to the count in 1230, and was its first mayor in 1231. Another burgher, Pierre Legendre, was bailiff of Provins in 1228, mayor of Troyes in 1232, and Keeper of the Fair in 1225 and 1228. His daughter married a wealthy Italian, Nicholas of Cremona, whose family handled transalpine affairs for the count.

If the breach between wealthy townsmen and the poor is indisputably widening, that between wealthy townsmen and the lordly aristocracy of the countryside is narrowing.

8.

The Doctor

Requesting a urinal, Renard had Noble the Lion fill it, then held it up to the light and examined it to distinguish the effect of the divers humors in the King’s body. Then he pronounced, “Sire, you have an ague fever, but I have the remedy for it…”

—
ROMAN DE RENARD

I
n a city the size of Troyes there are fewer than half a dozen licensed doctors,
¹
not counting the numerous midwives, barbers, monks, and outright quacks who practice medicine or some branch of it. The trained physician is an aristocrat of professionals, enjoying high status and excellent fees. His practice is naturally confined to the better class, as the medical texts and treatises make clear.

One such treatise recommends interrogating the servant who has come to fetch the doctor, so that “if you can learn nothing from examining the patient, you still may astonish him with your knowledge of the case.” At the patient’s house the well advised doctor conducts himself with a certain ceremony. In the sick room he bows, seats himself, and drawing a sand-glass from his bag takes the patient’s pulse. He requests a sample of urine, which he sniffs and tastes for sugar. In case of a gross infection he examines the urine for sediment. He inquires about the patient’s diet and stool, and then delivers a discourse on the disease. The stomach, he may explain, is a cauldron in which food is cooked. If it is filled too full, it will boil over and the food remain uncooked. The liver supplies the heat for this interior furnace. The humors must be kept in balance—phlegm, blood, bile and black bile, which are respectively cold and moist, hot and moist, hot and dry, and cold and dry. Fevers are tertian, quartan, daily, hectic, and pestilential. Which kind is present can be determined by the pattern of recurrence, whether every third day, or every fourth, and whether it grows more severe. Recovery depends on many things, including the phases of the moon and the position of the constellations.