UNIT FOUR

RISE OF TOWNS

The beginnings of towns

This chapter will concern the craftsmen, whom we left in the last chapter living on the manor in huts like the peasants, having the same status as peasants, doing their work of making things for the noble of the manor. From the craftsman's point of view, this was not a particularly satisfactory arrangement. He doesn't get enough out of it for it to be satisfactory. Unlike the peasant, the craftsman has a skill that not everyone has. What's more, his skill is a necessary one. And, also unlike the peasant , the craftsman does not need a lot of land to do his work. Therefore, the craftsmen are going to stop living in little huts on the manor. They are going to form something called a town. The Roman Empire had had thriving cities, but when the barbarians came, they hadn't seen the use of cities, so those cities had all gone to ruin. Now some of them will be revived, and others will be set up. Sometimes the town was still on a noble's property. If this was so, at certain times of the year, the craftsmen would have to do service for the lord. The craftsmen tried to get out of this by getting the noble to give them a charter. If he did, in England, the town was know as a borough and the people were known as burgesses. Said quickly, this often turned into "burgh" or "burg". It might be interesting for you to see how many cities you can find on the eastern coast of the United States with "burg" or "burgh" as part of the name. Now you know where that came from. A charter from the king or noble allowed the town to govern itself, to have its own law court and merchant guild. In return for the charter, the town paid the king or noble rent and sum of money.

What did a medieval town look like?

First of all, medieval towns had big stone walls around them. These were to keep the enemies out as well as local outlaws, thieves and robbers. Unfortunately the wall made it difficult for the town to grow; the wall also kept in disease and fire. Streets were very narrow, and in that time, unpaved. Down the middle of the street ran the sewage and the garbage, because the people in these towns threw that sort of thing in the streets. They did not know, and didn't seem to catch on, either, that putting that in the street had anything to do with the fact that disease was often rampant in these towns. Houses were built close together. The poor of the town, who if they worked at all, would have had the type of job where they swept the craftsman's shop, lived in huts similar to the ones the peasant had on the manor. The craftsmen lived in houses with two or three stories, made of wood and plaster walls. The craftsman's shop was on the first floor; the family lived above the shop on the second and third floors. Rich merchants might have a house built of stone with pretty gardens and stables. The towns had churches, and the people of the town aspired to building a cathedral for their town someday. Cathedrals were huge churches; in some of the cathedrals, a bishop had his see. Cathedrals required the work of all the craftsmen; it was very much a joint effort; that was why if a town built a cathedral, they were very proud of it.

Craftsmen and trade

Craftsmen had to live in towns because they had to live close together. They had to live close together because they had to trade. Each craftsman only knew how to make one kind of item. He needed other people's goods as well as what he could make. This is why he had to trade. He couldn't be too far from a manor either, because he had to trade goods for food. Originally, the craftsmen bartered. That is, they traded goods for goods. This soon turned out to be unsatisfactory. It was hard to tell what might be an even trade; also, the number of goods in the town was limited and you soon had something from everybody, and you needed new people to trade with and you wanted different goods. We say you needed a new market. The solution, obviously, is to take your goods to a new place to trade them, but there was a problem: the craftsman could not leave his shop to do this.

MERCHANTS

Craftsmen solved this problem by hiring people to carry the goods. These people were called merchants. With the advent of the merchant and trips to other towns, craftsmen began to use money to trade with. This money was in the form of gold coins, and they used whosever they could get. This meant that one thing a merchant had to know how to do was "to make change"; that is, be able to know how much this coin was worth of the other one and so on. It was confusing, and the merchant didn't like it. The merchant also didn't like working for the craftsmen. He wanted to work for himself because he knew he'd make more money that way, and there would be fewer trips. So merchants took what they were paid and began to buy the stuff from the craftsmen, and then they would go to another town and sell it. In between towns, unbeknownst to anybody, the merchant changed the price on the goods he had bought. We say he marked the goods up, meaning he charged the people he sold the goods to a higher price than he paid for them, and kept the difference as his profit. Now travel was difficult in the Middle Ages, and sometimes downright dangerous. Every trip might be a merchant's last. So to pay for the trouble and the danger, the merchants charged a lot for the goods. He knew he could get the price he asked-people wanted the goods badly enough to pay. Also, no one particularly watched him to see that he didn't cheat! and many merchants did. Seeking new goods and new customers, merchants traveled ever more widely as time went on, eventually reaching places like the Middle East, where the merchants will be among the first Christians to encounter the Muslims and their goods, technology and knowledge.

Merchants found it a real drag to have to carry all those heavy coins around, plus the fact that the coins made the merchant a prime target for thieves and outlaws. So merchants began the first banks; at first to be a place to put your money to keep it safe, and later as a profit-making business itself. Instead of money, merchants carried "letters of credit"; these were rather like a present day bank check. Merchants soon learned they could make money off the banks by getting into the loan business and charging interest.

While they were often pretty rich, and while lots of people might be in debt to them , the merchant was looked down on in feudal society. This was because he had no particular skill, and he worked all the time with money, which wasn't considered the thing to do in those days. You will want to remember this for a later chapter.

CRAFTSMEN, MERCHANTS, AND THE FEUDAL SYSTEM

The feudal system caused problems for the merchants and craftsmen. Feudalism made it hard for the craftsmen and the merchants to do business. First, there was the requirement to do feudal service to the local noble unless you had a charter. Second, as merchants traveled from one manors’ land to the next they had to pay a toll, or fee, for passing through the land. Third, since there was no one person in charge of catching thieves and outlaws, merchants were in danger on every trip of being robbed or killed. Fourth, since there was no central government, there was no standard money that everyone used. Merchants, as you read earlier, had to be able to change the money - know how much this kind of coin was worth against that kind - and of course, from the customer's point of view, this wasn't good because the merchant could cheat you mega big time. Fifth, language wasn't standard either. Merchants had to know lots of dialects, little varieties of a language, so they could make their trades. Sixth, there were no roads for the merchants to travel on. Seventh, the merchant's trading could be interrupted by local wars between manors. Of course, anything that hurt or impeded the merchant by extension hurt the craftsmen, too. Eighth, some of the towns also charged a toll for the merchant to enter the gates of the town.

The merchant and craftsmen saw central government as the solution to their problems. Central government then meant a king who would take control of some of the areas in the paragraph above and straighten them out. For example, a king could deal with the law and order problem. He could stop the nobles from taxing merchants to cross their land. He could institute one kind of money and a standard form of the language. He could build roads and stop the local wars. Craftsmen and merchants were willing to pay taxes to a king who would do these things for them. In the long struggle between nobles, the king , and the church, the craftsmen and merchants will be strong supporters of the king, until the time comes later on when kings forgot where their support came from and began not doing their job.

The craftsmen and the merchants were the beginning of a new social class in the society of the Middle Ages. This class was the middle class. The middle class valued hard work and success in life, which to them meant you made a comfortable sum of money. They hated to waste money as they were well aware of how long it took and how much work was involved in earning it, so they were pretty thrifty people. They liked their governments to be thrifty, too. No money down the drain on foolish projects, please! They saw the medieval church as being wasteful of money, so they will be increasingly less supportive of it, which is something else you need to remember until a later chapter.

The training of a craftsman

It took many years of training to produce a master craftsmen. Many of the skills were not all that easy to learn, and you could get hurt in some cases if you did not know what you were doing. Glass blowing, for example, involved using an enormous fire and tools that must get very hot. You could easily get burnt if you didn't have the skill.

There was a three stage learning process to become a master craftsman. This might have been copied after the knight's training; knights were the "in" thing in that society, and they had a three stage learning process. Craftsmen began their training at about seven years old. The father took his son to another craftsman of the same kind he was and apprenticed his son to that craftsman. The son would then live with that craftsman and learn the trade. He was called an apprentice. Like the knight at this same stage, the major focus was on learning the skills of the trade. The apprentice also did odd jobs for the craftsman, ran errands, helped clean the shop and so on. When the boy got to be about fourteen, he became a journeyman. This word comes from the fact that journeymen worked by the day (French jour, day) for craftsmen for a wage. The journeyman stage was where you got your practice. You did not always find work, so journeyman stage was not all that easy. During this stage, you had to save your money toward the day when hopefully, you'd have your own shop. Before you could have this shop, however, you had to pass a sort of entrance examination. In order to open a shop, a craftsman had to belong to the guild, or association, of his kind of craftsman, and to get in the guild, you had to prove you were worthy of getting in; hence the "entrance examination". The examination was to make the best possible example of your kind of skill; for example, if you were a glass blower, you had to make a perfect piece of glass for the guild to judge. This piece was called your "masterpiece". The guild then judged your masterpiece and decided if you would be admitted to the guild. If you were accepted, you had to pay the guild a fee, and then you were ready to set up shop. You were now called a master craftsman, and you could take apprentices and teach. Since the guild expected all its members to do high quality work all the time, you could never just relax and slack off, because the guild kicked out people who did sloppy work. They believed then that the bad work of one person reflected on them all, so they wouldn't tolerate people who did less than their best. Since you had to be in the guild to have a shop in the town, this pretty much kept craftsmen on their toes.

The Guilds

You have already read a little about the guild in the paragraph above. A guild was an association of all the craftsmen of a particular kind. There were also merchant guilds in some towns. The guild built its own meeting place, known as a guild hall. Therefore, a town could have many guilds in it, as many as it had different kinds of craftsmen, and many guild halls. Guilds were important to the towns and to the different crafts. Guilds did many things. Guilds set prices; it was the common thought then that competition between individuals was not a good thing. Set prices meant that the craftsmen couldn't undersell each other. Guilds checked quality of the goods their craftsmen produced. As you learned above, the guild wanted no sloppy work. They believed it reflected on everyone in the guild; so if you got too sloppy, they kicked you out. Merchant guilds checked on merchants in the town to see to it they did not cheat by using faulty weights and measures. Guilds met regularly and passed on the masterpieces of journeymen trying to get in the guild. Guilds supervised the education of apprentices; they made sure apprentices were taken care of and not overworked. Guilds provided for the poor of the town; each guild had a common box, to which the members donated money to this cause. Guilds took care of their own craftsmen if they became ill; they took care of the family if a craftsman died. To get the money for this, each guild member paid dues every year. Guilds provided entertainment for the town such as plays, singing groups, juggling acts, acrobats, dancers, and so on. Guilds, meeting together, ran the town in terms of government. Last, guilds cared for the towns. They were proud of their towns. They had nothing against competition between towns, so each town tried to be the best looking and all wanted to build a cathedral. In short, the towns could not have survived without the guilds.

Markets and Trade Fairs

Thursday was 'market day' day in the towns . On Thursdays, people came to the towns to buy and sell goods. Especially people from the local manor came. However, market days were nothing particularly special.

Two or three times a year, through the 'license and good will' of the local noble or the king, the towns had what they called a 'trade fair'. Trade fairs were really special because on these days , merchants came from miles around with new and different things to buy! For the people then , who didn't have all the entertainment opportunities that we do, these fairs were the big thing in their lives. The fairs always had special food to eat, games, dancing. music and other kinds of entertainment as well as the booths to visit and shop.

Chapter Questions and Outline

The Rise of Towns(title of outline)

The beginnings of towns

Why was the craftsman not satisfied with living on the manor?

In what ways was the craftsman’s situation different from a peasant’s?

What are the craftsmen going to set up?

Either craftsmen redid old Roman towns or they set a town up on the manor. If they did this, what would they still have to do for the noble?

Why did the craftsmen want to get a charter? What privileges did it give a town?

1.

2.

3.

What did the town give the noble for the charter?

What did a medieval town look like?

What did medieval towns have around them?

What was the purpose of this?

What disadvantages did putting this around a town have for the people inside?

1.

2.

What kind of a house did the craftsman live in?

Where was the craftsman’s shop?

Where did the family live?

How were the houses arranged?

What kind of house did the poor have?

What sort of job did the poor do?

What kind of house did the merchants have?

The town liked to have a cathedral. What was a cathedral?

Why was the town proud of the cathedral if they had one?

Craftsmen and trade

Why did craftsmen have to live close together? (which was the reason the town had formed in the first place)

How did craftsmen trade originally?

Why did this turn out to be unsatisfactory?

What is a ‘market’?

What was the solution to the problem of finding a new market?

However, the craftsman couldn’t do this. Why?

Merchants

How did the craftsmen solve the problem of getting goods to another town?

What did the craftsmen call these guys?

What did the merchants use to trade with? Where did they get this?

Why didn’t the merchant like working for the craftsman?

What did the merchant begin to do instead of working for the craftsman?

How did the merchants make big profits for themselves?

How did the merchant get by with doing this?

What amount of the money that the merchant made was his profit?

Why did merchants charge high prices for goods? 3 reasons

What drove merchants to travel more widely all the time?

What culture that we have already studied this year will the merchants eventually meet?

Why did merchants begin the first banks?

How did merchants make money on their banks?

How was the merchant regarded by feudal society?

Why was the merchant regarded this way?

Craftsmen, merchants, and feudalism

How did the feudal system cause problems for the merchant?

List specific problems feudalism caused: (7)

Why did anything that hurt or impeded the merchant from making money by extension also hurt the craftsmen? This is a thought question.

What did merchants and craftsmen see as the answer to their problems?

Why would having a strong central government help?

What specific things could a king do that would help merchants and craftsmen?

What did the craftsmen and the merchants have that the king might want and that the merchants and craftsmen might be willing to pay as long as the king did his job?

In the long struggle between nobles, church and the king, whom did the merchants and craftsmen support? Why?

What social class did the merchants and craftsmen become?

What did this new class value?

What did ‘success’ mean to the craftsmen and merchants?

Why did the craftsmen and merchants absolutely hate to waste money?

Why did the craftsmen and merchants become increasingly less supportive of the church?

The training of a craftsman

Why did it take many years of training and practice to produce a master craftsmen?

How many stages in learning were there in learning to be a craftsmen?

What were the names of stages?

What was the focus of the training at the apprentice stage?

What was the next stage of training called?

What did the person do during this next stage?

While the person was doing this, he also had to accomplish two other things if he ever wanted to open a shop. What were these 2 things?

What was a perfect piece of your work called?

Why did some people never leave journeyman stage?

If you ‘passed’, what did you then have to do?

If you ‘passed’ you were known as a _____________; what were you now allowed to do?

Why could a master craftsmen never allow himself to do? Why?

Why were the guilds so strict about quality?

The guilds

What was a guild?

Where did guilds meet?

How many guilds would a town have?

Guilds were important to the towns. What did they provide? List 10 things

What kinds of entertainment did guilds provide?

How did the towns compete?

Markets and trade fairs

What day was market day in the towns?

What did the people do on market day?

What was a ‘trade fair’?

How was a trade fair different from market day?

Extra Credit Projects And Questions

1. Find out what's involved in a certain craft and report on it.

2. Some crafts could be safely demonstrated in your class. Some of you could learn those that we can do safely and demonstrate them.

3. Find out just how many kinds of crafts there were then. What did they work in? Masons worked in stone, for example. The list is long. Here are a few: mason, carpenter, weaver, tailor, clark, potter, tinker, goldsmith, blacksmith, armorer - there's lots more. Some people's last names came from trades; carpenter, for example, or clark; fuller, tailor..

4. Crafts and guilds came over to the colonies in America with the English settlers. In what guild hall in Philadelphia was our 'Declaration of Independence' written?

5. People in the Middle Ages considered artists of all kinds, lawyers, doctors, teachers as just different kind of craftsmen. The head of a boy's school is called a headmaster. Why do you suppose he is called that? Why did they used to sometimes call teachers 'masters'? What were they masters of? Why is Rembrandt's most famous painting called his 'masterpiece'?

6. What social class were the merchants and craftsmen? What social class today are doctors, lawyers, teachers and other professionals? Why are these people considered this class?

7. What would be the modern day equivalent of a merchant?

8. This is a hard one! What is the modern day equivalent of a craftsman?

9. What do you suppose might be the origin of the word 'merchandise'?

10. Have you ever gone to a store and either asked yourself or heard someone else ask if the store 'carried ' something? What do you mean when you ask this? This statement comes from the time when merchants literally did 'carry' things......

11. The closest thing we have today that might be like a trade fair is a shopping mall. What similarities can you see between the two?

UNIT FIVE-The Christian Church