Making a Living in the Middle Ages by Christopher Dyer

Author:Christopher Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-10191-1
Publisher: Yale University Press

iv. Techniques of trade and manufacture

The growth in the population and in exchange increased the volume and value of trade with the continent. Records made in the course of assessing and collecting English royal taxation allow an estimate that in 1204 the combined value of exports and imports was worth between £55,000 and £75,000, and that the equivalent sum a hundred years later lay in the region of £500,000 per annum. Allowing for inflation, these figures suggest a threefold increase in overseas trade, and a growth in the quantity of exports and imports per head of population. The total value of inland trade cannot be estimated, but its growing importance is indicated by the higher proportion of rents paid in cash by 1300 and the section of the population which obtained most of its living from nonagricultural activities, which by c.1300 amounted to well over 20 per cent, counting those working in rural industries as well as the town dwellers.

Was this merely a growth in quantity, or was it accompanied by changes in technique and business methods? Perhaps those who made their living in manufacture or trade could expect to benefit from cheap labour and higher demand, and so were not impelled to make savings in labour costs or to improve the efficiency of their operations. No ‘industrial revolution’ can be identified at this time, but there were technological advances, designed to expand production and to increase profits. Water power was applied to a number of industries, notably clothmaking, with the first reference to a fulling mill in 1185. The water wheel operated wooden hammers which rose and fell rapidly on to cloth in a trough containing water and fuller's earth, a naturally occurring detergent. Traditionally the process had been performed laboriously by fullers agitating the cloth with wooden clubs, or more often by trampling it underfoot – hence the name ‘walker’ by which fullers were commonly known. By the end of the thirteenth century about 800 fulling mills had been built in England. The main motive for investing in the mills, as we have seen, was the local lord's desire to make some profit from a local industry, and as fulling represented only one operation in the many stages of cloth manufacture, these mills cannot be compared with the textile factories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which a number of processes were mechanized. On the other hand, the mills would not have been built unless the local clothmakers could have been persuaded to use them. Lords' attempts to use compulsion had limited effects, and the main motive for people to bring their cloth to be fulled was the labour and money that could be saved. It was said that fulling by foot produced better results than the new machinery, so efficiency seems to have been the main consideration.

Water mills could also be used to power heavy metal shod hammers to forge iron after it had been smelted, or to work up wrought iron into implements and tools.

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