7.
Buy stingily and sell dear,
And practice usury and fraud.
—RUTEBEUF OF TROYES
Feudal 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.
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.