WOMEN'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ECONOMY OF MEDIEVAL TOWNS
Women were viable members of the economy of medieval towns in the Middle Ages.
They were not able to participate in the formal political process of the towns, but unlike
monarchies which were dynastic, political service in towns was by election. This republican form
of governing, whether through consuls and communes in Italy and parts of France or through
mayors and common councils in England, meant that men had the exclusive right to be citizens
and serve in the governmental structure. While infrequently mentioned in the surviving sources,
enough information is available to relate their economic contributions, and the wide-variety of
employment opportunities they had. Women made their testaments, witnessed charters and deeds
to property, and were subject to the legal system, all of which produced documentation. A
woman's right to make a will, if she was married, had not completely become law by the late
medieval period, but the church had long advocated this right. Widows and spinsters could make
their testaments without the approval of a male.
Far fewer female than male criminals appear in medieval court records. Some studies
show the ratio was 1:9. Women were punished for crimes just like men, but their punishments
were often times different. Women were usually punished by some kind of public physical
shame. Common convictions for women had to do with them being quarrelsome and overtalkative women. France made the women take off all their clothes except their shift, and then
carry around their neck a hefty stone circling the church on Sunday in full view of their fellow
parishioners. In England the favored punishment was the ducking stool and the thewe, a pillory
just for women. Women were also beaten if they were guilty of being accomplices in minor
crimes. In the high middle ages, being burned at the stake or buried alive were the only forms of
capital punishment for women, apparently out of fear the corpse if hung might be profaned; that
is sexually asssaulted. Burning was usually reserved for the most serious offenses: treason,
sorcery, and infanticide. Later on hanging, especially in England, will be added. Torture was an
integral part of the justice system, and here again women were excepted from certain forms of
torture. They could not be broken on the wheel, and if the woman was pregnant then she was
exempted from all forms of torture and even execution.
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Our most fulsome knowledge on women in towns comes from their economic
contributions. Girls and women were generally expected to work in addition to their usual
occupation of keeping the house. As large-scale manufacturing did not exist in the middle ages,
each home was a cottage industry unto itself. Parents served as the mentors of their daughters,
teaching them their trades, including how to run a household, because most all women would
marry. Only about seven to ten percent did not wed. In towns, the workplace or shop was
attached to the living quarters. Only in a few specialized skills such as silk manufacturing did
women go outside the home or family-run shop to serve an apprenticeship, and only if the
parents could afford the fees. Once the young maidens married they would continue to practice
the occupations they had learned at home, while taking care of their family. Many times they
learned new skills during their lifetime or were taught their husband's trade enough to assist him
in the family-run shop. In contrast men pursued a more or less steady course whether they were
peasants, urban workers or nobles. Men acquired the necessary skills for their occupation and
continued to work until old age or death. Marriage and having a family might make their work
more or less profitable, but it did not change what they did. Women's occupations were
influenced by changes in their life cycle. Unmarried women generally held lower-status jobs with
the majority of them domestic servants, and then retailers: sellers of food, new and used
household items and clothing. Some towns placed restrictions on certain jobs based on a
woman's marital status. For instance, generally single women did not brew ale in rural England.
Women who operated their own businesses without a male were called femme soles. If a femme
sole became involved in a legal dispute her husband was not held responsible. Only when the
married couple was in business together was the husband held libel. In widowhood a woman had
lots more options. She could determine to remarry or not, and whether or not to continue with her
husband's business. Women could therefore change their work frequently over the course of their
lifetime. The magistrates of England recognized this when the Statue of Laborers was reissued in
1363. All men were required to choose a trade and confine themselves to it exclusively, but
women were not limited to one occupation. They could be "dabblers". A woman might
concentrate on thread production if that was paying well, but switch to brewing or retailing if the
market was more robust in those areas. As women's training was primarily for the domestic
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sphere, they were unlikely to develop skills that would permit them to enter high-status positions.
Men were reluctant to admit women into their craft and its mysteries. A wife and daughter might
be taught part of the mystery, but not the whole process. Men believed that if women entered
their craft, they would take over because women were paid less. At Bristol in 1461, women were
accused of contributing to unemployment among weavers: "For as much as divers persons of the
weavers' craft hire their wives, daughters, and maidens, to weave in their own looms and men
learned in the said craft go vagrant and unoccupied; therefore no weavers from this day forward
set, put or hire, his said wife, daughter or maid to weaving on the loom...upon pain of six
schillings eight pence, a considerable sum. Once crafts became more regulated into guilds in the
later Middle Ages, women gradually were eliminated from those professions regulated by guilds.
Men discouraged women from organizing their own crafts into guilds. In a survey circa 1300 in
Paris, women participated in eighty-six of the one hundred guilds. Fourteen guilds excluded all
women, but seven guilds were exclusively for women, although management was male. At about
the same time Cologne had five guilds solely for women whereas London had none. It appears
that in Europe no trade was closed to women legally. The only respectable alternative for women
was to work within the home economy. It has been determined now that medieval women had
more access to high-status and independent employment than women had in later periods of
history, basically until the twentieth century.
Women worked in a wide-range of jobs. While most women worked as domestic servants
and retailers in the towns, all women learned how to spin thread. The distaff was a symbol of this
endeavor and had been since the days of the ancient Greeks. Most girls also learned how to
weave, but if the cloth was to be sold, then it was usually done by men. We find women also
being employed as tanners, skinners, butchers, mercers, grocers, brewers, vintners, fishnet
makers, blacksmiths, armorers, prostitutes and bakers. All these occupations are portrayed in
illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Women in some of these positions had
apprentices. Not too many woman could get into the baker's guild as they used the specious
argument that women were not strong enough to knead the dough. Women in Paris appealed this
discrimination and won. A small selection of professions women were employed in will be
discussed in more detail.
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Women were the mainstay of the retail trade. Most all food items, household goods, and
clothing were sold by these women. As medieval society was stratified, so too was this
occupation. Those that could afford it had their own shop where they would make and sell
specific items, like candles and seals, and be called a chandler. Some women rented space, and
others hawked their wares from the street corners. These hucksters were not as well respected as
the retail traders, and even less flattering were the regrators, who bought goods in the market
early in the day and then sold them at a profit later in the day, when scarcity drove up the prices.
Customers felt that these regrators and hucksters charged too much, and a popular poem by
William Langland, Piers Plowman, relates how the man, Avarice, recalled his wife as Rose the
Regrator...she hath holden huckstery all her lifetime. Rose commonly cheated her customers
using false weights and sold thinned ale by the cupful to poor people for the price of better-made
ale. Unfair business practices did not just begin in the twentieth century. The courts even seemed
to have been prejudiced against these regrators, leveling stiffer fines to the women than to the
men.
Domestic servitude was a common occupation for young girls. They usually signed a
multi-year contract to work for a set amount. Some signed ten year contracts, and these maidens
could be sued if they left before the contract was finished. Pay was dismal being about 1 pound
per year plus room, board, and clothes. Young women were subject to being sexually assaulted
by their masters, and if an infant resulted from this, the woman had to give it up to a foundling
home or it also could be exposed, a subject of infanticide.
Ale and later on beer were imbibed by all in the middle ages. It was usually the women
who brewed the ale. Most all women brewed ale for their household's use, and many went into
commercial production, producing larger amounts for resale. Women brewsters or ale-wives
usually came from the more successful merchant families, at least in England. Lower class
women frequently got into trouble with town authorities because they failed to obtain a license,
called the assize of ale. Medieval towns regulated all aspects of the brewing process, and women
could make a good living as brewsters. Margery Kempe was a successful brewster in King's Lynn
before becoming a pilgrim and mystic.
Cloth production was the most labor-intensive industry in the middle ages. Over twenty-
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five different occupations were connected with producing primarily woolen cloth. Women served
in all of these, although the most prestigious job was weaving and it was usually reserved for
men. Throughout Europe various types of cloth were produced with the raw wool coming from
England and Spain. Each town specialized in a particular type and sometimes color. Each step of
the cloth industry was highly regulated, and women generally received lower wages than men for
the same work.
Through the close reading and translation of the custom accounts, it has been found that
many women were overseas trading and not just buying wholesale for their large households.
Women were actually in the wholesale trade importing and exporting goods to Iceland, France,
Spain, Wales and other destinations. Some were widows who continued their husband's business,
and others were trading at the same time as their husbands. As women were not to travel far
without male companionship, women wholesale merchants usually hired a male buyer to make
the purchases abroad. Many towns in England like Bristol, Coventry, London, and Exeter all had
women who traded locally, nationally, and internationally in such items as cloth, iron ore, and
wine. One of the famous traders was Alice Chestre, who lived in Bristol in the fifteenth century.
Initially in business with her husband, after his death her business acumen was demonstrated by
her lucrative trade that she carried on for twelve years. For at least a decade, she was responsible
for one-fourth of all import and export trade in Bristol, the second largest city after London in the
Middle Ages. She was successful enough to purchase ships herself, so she did not have to lease
them, and even had the first ship-loading crane constructed at a cost of 41 pounds. Wealthy
enough to build a new four-story house on High Street in Bristol, she also spent a considerable
amount of money on her parish church, who have maintained her philanthropic endeavors in their
written records.
In reconstructing the experiences of women healers in the Middle Ages, only two
monographs were written on this. Prejudice about women as healers in many ways is based on
the modern reconstruction of the history of medicine. Victorian and earlier stereotyping of
midwives as fat, dirty, drunken old women was passed from fiction into fact, and by extension
included all woman healers of history. All medieval women were expected to know something of
medical practices. They were expected to treat wounds, fevers, colds, and contagious diseases.
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Women served as physicians, surgeons, barber-surgeons, midwives, herbalists, and apothecaries.
Physicians were university trained and dealt with general diagnosis using urine samples, feeling
the pulse, and consulting astrological charts. Surgeons did bone setting and amputations, while
barber-surgeons were largely confined to minor surgical procedures, especially bloodletting.
Apothecaries dispensed medications from their herb gardens and other sources besides giving
medical advice, antithetical to physicians. An empiric was a generic terms loosely defining all
those who practiced on their own, independent of university, licensure and usually guild
regulations. Herbalists and leeches came under this category as well as many midwives. Duties of
the midwives varied greatly in the middle ages. These various medical care giving categories
were more fluid and much cross overing of duties and titles existed in the Middle Ages. Also,
few medical practitioners during these centuries relied solely on medicine for their livelihood. So
many families could not afford to pay the requisite fees for consulting one of these care givers,
especially if they were male, for men charged considerably more than females did. It has also
been established that women medical care givers also treated poorer patients, and in some cases
purely for charity. Once universities and medical schools were available for training, then women
who wanted to be a physician, were slowly eased out because it required a professional education
and license, not available to women. As the guilds developed, from the High to Later Middle
Ages more specialization occurred in medical care, and the various medical professionals were in
separate guilds. While delivery of babies was still strictly reserved for women, over time male
physicians realized the lucrative fees that could be obtained for deliveries. When the male
physicians espoused the scientific medical rhetoric to a patient, it made the female midwives
appear uneducated and not up to the important task of bringing an infant into the world. The
oldest and most prestigious medical school in the west was the medical school at Salerno in
Southern Italy. Women here not only attended these schools studying medicine and pharmacy,
but some were the professors. Dame Trotula was the most famous woman from Salerno. While
some scholars doubt her existence, most now agree that she was a real person sometimes
between the mid eleventh century and early thirteen century. It appears she was the author of a
famous book on the diseases of women, translated into middle English as On the Diseases of
Women before, During, and after Childbirth. Even the well-known English author, Geoffrey
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Chaucer wrote about Trotula, and is a reflection of the long respected position that women held
in medicine.
We have some documentation from the southern part of Italy, in the Duchy of Calabria,
that the Duke was the one to grant the medical license after the candidate was tested by the
faculty of medicine at the University of Salerno. Extant is the medieval medical license for
Francesca, a new surgeon, which states: "...the law permits women to practice medicine and
because it is better, out of consideration for morals and decency, for women rather than men to
attend female patients, we grant her the license to heal and to practice, having first received the
usual oath from the said Francesca to the effect that she will loyally abide by the traditions of the
said art...Naples 10 September 1321." Francesca would have had her own herbal garden to obtain
the necessary plants to carry out her medical practice, which would have included blood letting,
teeth pulling, and other procedures. Irises, marigolds, peonies, violets, sage, borage, and
pulmonaria would have all been part of her flora and fauna. Hildegard of Bingen, was an
infirmarian before becoming an abbess in Germany and was renowned for her cures and skill,
writing a book on human biology, illnesses, and describe some 485 herbs and plants. This work
was the most advanced of the time, and reflects the knowledge available long before Arabic
Medical works were translated into Latin in the twelfth century and later. In fact, there are
Hildegard of Bingen homeopathic clinics in Germany and America today, attesting to her skill
and knowledge of medicine.
Midwifery has been practiced by women for thousands of years. Up until the last several
centuries, the majority of births were attended by women. Many towns had official midwives.
These midwives controlled access to their profession and maintained its standards, including a
four-year apprenticeship with very specific rules and regulations. Probably in earlier times and in
smaller villages apprenticeships were shorter. These women served as the local doctor or what
today would be called a nurse practitioner. Married women with families could not be midwives
as the authorities felt they were too busy with their own households. In some places where there
was a shortage of women in this profession, the midwives that took in apprentices received a
good fee together with free citizenship in the town. Dovetailing these financial benefits, many
midwives would get exemption from taxes, a pension, and citizenship. Other rules that these
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midwives followed were: to threat rich and poor expectant mothers the same, distributing public
welfare to poor expecting women, doing the vaginal examinations for the male doctors, giving
the annual examinations for leprosy, doing minor surgeries, and backing up other medical people
during outbreaks of pestilence and other epidemics. Outside requirements were also given to
these care givers. Some towns required them to report all illegitimate children, abortions, and
infanticides. If the midwives did not then they could be subject to the same punishment of the
perpetrator of the crime: buried alive, burned at the stake, or drowned in a sack. During the labor
process, the midwives had a large repertoire of ways to alleviate the pain from secret ingredients
to superstitious incantations. In the centuries to follow, it will be these mysterious practices that
will help lead to the accusations of witchcraft on the part of midwives. The Textbook of
Midwifery, published in the late sixteenth century, stated emphatically that "many midwives
were witches and that they offered infants to satan after killing them by thrusting a bodkin into
their brains." However, no evidence of this exists.
By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as towns greatly increased in size and prosperity,
various medical institutions were established for orphans, lepers, and for the poor, services that
today would be called medicare and medicaid. Wealthy merchants and even the nobility
established hospitals for the ill, and separate hospitals for lepers outside the town walls. In Paris,
St. Catherine's Hospital was founded to take care of poor or sick women. It had only six nuns,
whose duties included gathering up drowned corpses from the Seine River, the dead prisoners,
and those found dead on the streets. After collecting the bodies, they then took care of burying
them. St. Catherine's also served as a short-term lodging for penniless women coming to Paris to
seek work, suggesting the medieval equivalent of the YWCA. Poor pregnant women could be
housed in these hospitals too. Two hospitals founded in the middle ages are still functioning
today: Hotel Dieu in Paris and St. Bartholomew's in London. It was during the Middle Ages that
the Augustinian Order of Sisters was founded, whose nuns were mainly in the nursing
profession. By the end of the thirteenth century it has been estimated that 200,000 women were
serving as nurses within church orders. It was not uncommon for poor mothers, especially single
ones, to surreptiously leave without their babies. Other infants were abandoned on the hospitals'
doorsteps, at monasteries, and at churches. Because of the scarcity of wet nurses, the nuns
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attempted to feed the babies using earthenware or tin bottles with a cloth teat. Survival rates were
very low, but then this was true for at least the next five hundred years. Too many unwanted
babies were abandoned to their fate, and there were not enough personnel and money to care for
them.
Prostitution was generally legal in the Middle Ages. Mainly municipal but also religious
authorities regulated this profession, including the type of clothing a prostitute must or must not
wear, where they could ply their trade in the town, and the actual name of the street where they
were located. St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in the 5th century, wrote the definitive
statement on why prostitution could be allowed: "If you expel prostitutes from society,
prostitution will spread everywhere...the prostitutes in town are like sewers in the palace...it was
better for a man to have non procreative sex with a prostitute than with his own wife because
then he at least would not be corrupting an innocent woman...If you take away the sewers, the
whole palace will be filthy." Prostitutes kept licentiousness from spreading all over. Research in
medieval Florence, Italy suggests that institutionalization of prostitution was to increase the
falling birth rates due to men's homosexuality. For the Church, the prostitute was a contemptible
creature not because she posed as a loving woman and had sexual relations with men in return for
financial reward, but because her entire life was devoted to the lust of the flesh, which was one of
the seven deadly sins.
Why did women become prostitutes? The most common reasons were poverty and male
violence. The poor included widows with small children, servants sexually abused by a master,
and non-residents unable to get legitimate work. In Dijon, France, the town provided young men
with opportunities for fornication with prostitutes as a remedy for the epidemic of rape, for in
Southeast France groups of young men often practiced sexual violence, what would now be
called gang rape, on lower class women. This was an acceptable amusement for young males.
These victims were either virginal young girls or young wives with husbands temporarily absent.
Once these maidens were deflowered, they were easily recruited by a madame or brothel keeper.
Initially prostitutes had to reside outside the town walls, but then they were allowed inside, but
restricted from too close of proximity to churches, monasteries, and cemeteries. Paris had an
official "red-light" district rather than municipal brothels many towns had in England, and in this
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case it is though that powerful citizens controlled the brothels, so Paris and other towns did not
establish municipal brothels. London relegated prostitutes to only one part of the city in Cock's
Lane, but mainly outside of the city in Southwark, the area south of the Thames. The Bishop of
Winchester owned this land, so he regulated the brothels. Interesting, the prostitutes were
nicknamed "Winchester Geese." Some towns in England forbade prostitution, but their
assessment of fines against them indicates a form of licensing fee. Town authorities changed
street names to represent colloquially the emotional state of the prostitute. Hot Street was the
street name in English towns and Caliente Street in Spain. One enterprising harlot gave herself
the name of Juliana Full of Love. If a prostitute would not relocate to the proper street, then her
door and windows could be removed. Public bath houses were supposed to be segregated by
gender, but often this rule was ignored, and illicit activity occurred. Prostitutes were forbidden to
touch food in the marketplace, just like the Jews. In many places prostitutes were forbidden to
attend church with or speak to respectable women. In Paris prostitutes solicited clerics who
passed them by, but if these clergy did not respond then these women cried out "sodomite". In
France there was a special official whose job was to take a fee of two schillings a week from a
prostitute to allow her to follow royal armies. His title was King of the Ribalds. Even the Papacy
earned income from prostitution. All town authorities had strict rules outlining the clothing
regulations. Each town had different rules, and it was important for women traveling to be aware
of the certain color that was set aside for the prostitutes. In some areas it might be a red or yellow
scarf or gown, and in other places, white or saffron. Yellow and then red seem to be the popular
choices for the pigment. Bristol was unique in stipulating a stripped hood. In some towns the
height of the prostitutes' heels, and the depth of her decolletage were also measured and
regulated. Brothel keepers in one town even had to wear a specific garment, a red hood with a
bell attached. Pimps were regulated in many areas too, but they definitely had more advantages
than the women. In certain places brothel keepers could sell prostitutes to another brothel or
pawn them. Parents in some places could sell their daughters to brothel keepers. Many prostitutes
were able to save enough to provide themselves with an adequate dowry to marry a respectable
man.
Detailed explanations have been given of women's work in the middle ages because
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women will continue their involvement in these occupations until the Industrial Revolution, circa
the nineteenth century. While opportunities will increase or lessen as the economy fluctuates,
women were employed in a wide variety of professions, and were an essential part of the
medieval economy in the towns and in the countryside.