Making things by hand
Almost everything a medieval person owned was made by hand, and much of it was made in a town. A villager might weave coarse cloth or build a simple tool at home, but anything that needed special skill, equipment or capital usually came from a specialist. Tailors, cobblers, smiths, bakers, potters, saddlers and many others sold their work from the same building in which they made it.
The result was a town full of small businesses. Most were tiny by modern standards: a master, perhaps a spouse, one or two apprentices or hired workers, and a few tools. The scale grew in a few industries, especially cloth, where many separate hands were involved before a piece reached a customer. But the typical workshop was a household.
The workshop as a household
In many towns the front room of a house was the shop, with a shutter or counter facing the street. The workroom lay behind it or above it, and the family lived upstairs or at the back. Apprentices and journeymen often ate and slept under the master’s roof, so the workshop was also a place of domestic discipline and care.
This arrangement shaped the roles of family members. The master’s wife commonly handled sales, kept accounts informally, or worked in the trade herself, and widows sometimes carried on a business after their husbands died. How far women could act independently varied by town and trade, and the evidence is uneven, but women and work were closely tied in many crafts, especially in textiles and brewing. Children learned by watching and helping, and in this sense medieval childhood often included early training in the family’s trade.
Training: apprentices, journeymen and masters
A standard path ran in three steps. A young person began as an apprentice, usually for several years, living with a master who taught the trade and provided food and lodging. Afterward the worker might become a journeyman, a paid employee who worked for one or more masters. The journeyman who produced acceptable work, and who could afford the fees and set up a workshop, might in time be admitted as a master. The details differed between towns and trades, and not everyone completed every step. Written agreements often set out the terms of that training.
Guilds and regulation
Most towns organized crafts into associations, often called guilds or companies. Craft guilds typically set standards of quality, limited who could practice a trade in the town, regulated training, and sometimes provided help to sick members or widows. They also arranged religious observances and processions, and many were attached to a patron saint.
Regulation of this kind served several purposes at once. It protected customers from poor goods, protected established masters from competition, and gave town authorities a way to supervise trade, collect payments and settle disputes. Critics, then and now, point out that rules could also keep prices high and shut out newcomers. The question of who was allowed in, tied to guild membership, was often a point of tension.
The range of crafts
Historians often group medieval trades by what they made.
- Textiles and clothing: shearers, spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, tailors and hatters. Cloth was often the largest industry in a region, tied to the wool trade that supplied it.
- Metal: blacksmiths, locksmiths, armorers, goldsmiths, pewterers and others, working iron, copper alloys, tin, silver and gold.
- Food and drink: bakers, brewers, butchers, cooks and fishmongers, heavily regulated because they supplied daily necessities.
- Building: carpenters, masons, tilers, plasterers and glaziers, working under a master or a client’s supervisor on everything from houses to cathedrals.
- Leather and wood: tanners, cobblers, saddlers, coopers and wheelwrights.
- Ceramics and glass: potters, tile makers and glass makers.
- Books and writing: scribes, parchment makers, binders and illuminators, working from workshops in monasteries, in towns around universities, and later in print shops.
Some towns became known for one specialty, and traveling merchants carried those goods to markets and trade fairs far away.
Who bought and who sold
Craftspeople sold to neighbors, to the church, to nobles and to passing merchants. Some made goods only to order, such as a suit of armor or a window. Others made stock for market days. In a larger town, the sellers of goods and the makers of goods could be separate, with merchants and markets linking the two, and some merchants controlled the supply of raw materials and the sale of finished cloth. Craftspeople who depended on those merchants had less independence than those who sold directly to the customer.
Skills, secrecy and tools
Knowledge passed mainly by example. Written manuals existed for some crafts, and collections of recipes survive for pigments, glass and metal, but most skill lived in the hands of masters. Tools were simple but well adapted: hammers, tongs, shuttles, chisels, kilns, vats and presses, some made by the craftspeople themselves. Water power was applied to certain tasks, such as fulling cloth or working bellows, which is one way in which the watermills and windmills of the period shaped urban industry.
Change over time
Trades did not stay fixed. Town growth between roughly the 11th and 13th centuries expanded demand and made specialization possible. The Black Death in the mid-14th century reduced the population sharply, and in many places wages rose as the labor shortage made workers harder to find, which led authorities to try to control pay and movement. Later centuries saw wider use of paid wage labor and, in some industries, putting-out systems in which merchants supplied materials to workers in their homes. These changes were gradual and uneven.
What the surviving evidence shows
Most of what is known comes from guild ordinances, town court records, wills, tax lists, contracts and the objects themselves. These sources tend to show the rules rather than everyday practice, and they say more about men in recognized positions than about women, casual workers or the poor. For that reason, modern descriptions of a typical workshop are best read as general patterns rather than rules that applied everywhere.