Françoise Desportes
In Chartres, in the first third of the thirteenth century, merchants in the food trades, together with artisans in textiles, leathers, metal, and wood, financed a substantial number of the stained-glass windows intended to fill the wall openings that gave the newly constructed cathedral its remarkable feeling of lightness. Like other donors, these tradesmen were keen to sign their offerings, and the cathedral’s master glaziers obliged by depicting them with the tools of their trade in unobtrusive locations on the windows they subsidized. Thanks to this practice, we can still see the bakers, butchers, fishmongers, grocers, and tavern keepers of that time engaged in activities typical of their respective professions. At the end of the same century, during which time urban life in the medieval West reached its apogee, the Lombard poet Bonvesino de la Riva, celebrating the splendors of the powerful city of Milan, included the many tradesmen who contributed to its renown. At the head of the list he mentioned the city’s 300 bakers, 440 butchers, 500 fishmongers who caught and sold fish from the region’s lakes and rivers, and more than 150 tavern keepers.
From the Ancient City to the Medieval City
As the western Roman Empire gave way to medieval Europe, the food trades changed in various ways across the continent. Outside of Italy, where urban life continued relatively unperturbed, many cities shrank in size as wealthy families fled to their country estates and the poor gradually moved beyond city walls. As new patterns of social and political power emerged, two groups became the principal clients of those who traded in food and drink. The first of these groups was made up of the entourage of clerics and soldiers surrounding the bishops who wielded power in most cities; the second consisted of skilled artisans whom these privileged individuals employed. Tradesmen either found places in the kitchens and pantries of the powerful or found other lines of work.
Two trades survived these difficult centuries fairly well, however—the tavern keepers and the bakers.
Tavern Keepers
From Cologne and Trier to Nîmes and Barcelona, from London to Paris and Lyons, to say nothing of the streets of Naples, Rome, and Milan, the keepers of taverns, cabarets, and inns continued to supply the merchants and peasants of the diocese, the intimates and servants of the great, and even the poorest members of the clergy with food and drink in a convivial setting. (“Tavern,” “inn,” and “cabaret” were interchangeable terms throughout the Middle Ages, as we know from the fabliaux and other literary sources, which often used such places as settings.) Although they dispensed mainly wine, barley beer, and mead, many also sold bread and cheese and served foods prepared in their kitchens.
Later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, taverns appeared in the towns that sprang up around crossroads, fortifications, and monasteries, as well as at the gates of episcopal cities and of the new towns that proliferated in various European principalities after 1100. Because of the extensive range of their acquaintances, many tavern keepers became personages of note. When Guibert de Nogent discusses the beginnings of the communes of Laon and Amiens in a well-known passage of his autobiography, the only artisans he mentions, other than butchers (macellarii) and cobblers, are tavern keepers (caupones), whom he found notable for both their wealth and their foul tempers. Significantly, the pious monk does not use the adjective “base,” a label that the church attached at that time to most of the food trades, especially the two that concern us here. In 1147 Count Thibault IV of Chartres recognized the social influence of tavern keepers by issuing a set of rules that established and governed their guild.
Even more indispensable to the life of the city were the men who tended its ovens. Their job was to bake bread brought to them in the form of dough. They loaded their ovens with loaves and removed them when done, ovens being dangerous pieces of equipment that only authorized bakers were allowed to use and maintain. Their work relied on age-old know-how and a long practical tradition: there was as much of a hierarchy of privilege at the door of the oven as at the gate of the mill, and disputes were common.
Until at least the end of the twelfth century there was little distinction between oven tenders (fornarii) and bakers (pistores), who, according to the consecrated expression, “knead and shape dough for sale.” It was primarily the latter who fell under the clause of Charlemagne’s edict of 793, which stipulated that henceforth one denier would be the price of twelve wheat breads, fifteen rye breads, twenty barley breads, or twenty-five oat breads, each loaf to weigh, according to the new standard, two “pounds” (804 grams). The confusion between bakers and oven tenders arose from the fact that the latter also sold bread—namely, loaves left by users of their ovens, including both private individuals and other professionals, as payment for their services. As the demand for bread increased, oven tenders were more and more tempted to make and sell loaves of their own. The fornarii of Piacenza had sufficient wealth and influence to sponsor a column capital in the nave of the cathedral, on which one sees a man tending his oven and surrounded by clients. These were the men who, in the first half of the twelfth century, baked bread from dough prepared by the servants of the wealthy and executed special commissions with grain or flour provided by clients. This specialty persisted through the end of the Middle Ages and often much later in the cities of Italy, Provence, and reconquered Spain. Along with the bakers, the fornarii put bread on everyone’s table.
Outside the Mediterranean region, bakers quickly began to resist the competition from fornarii. Between 1150 and 1200, in a number of cities under French royal dominion, bakers petitioned the king for the exclusive right to make bread, which was granted in return for an agreement to make a regular payment to the royal treasury and submit to inspection by royal officials. Soon thereafter the bakers also won the right to build their own ovens. English bakers, who were governed by John Lackland’s edict of the early thirteenth century regulating the weight of loaves, already owned their own ovens; the same was true of bakers in most German cities. Nowhere did private ovens totally supplant public ones, and the fact that, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in southern Europe, people of all stations regularly bought bread from bakeries did not mean that baking at home was no longer practiced.
At the same time, many millers who were paid in grain for their services tried to use that grain for baking bread. They soon encountered opposition from municipal authorities as well as customer resistance. The millers’ reputation for dishonesty, laziness, and fecklessness worked against them. Although their services were indispensable, their social position remained somewhat marginal. The number of millers in cities and suburbs rose dramatically after the year 1000, but the only service they were asked to perform was that of grinding grain between properly adjusted millstones and extracting an equivalent weight in flour. Nothing else was to be done at the mill. The chore of sifting raw flour, aptly termed “flour as milled” or “as it comes from the mill,” was for the private kitchen or bakery. Millers in regions where malt-based drinks were consumed—beer in northern Germany and ale (made without hops) in England—were also called upon to crush malt for professional and home brewers.
Other Trades in Middle-Sized Towns
Some decades after the founding of Montauban in 1144 by Alphonse-Jourdain, the count of Toulouse, the anonymous author of the Chanson des quatre fils Aymon credited Renaud, the eldest of Aymon’s four sons, with building the town and bringing people to it. No sooner did Renaud call for settlement within the town’s walls than five hundred wealthy bourgeois settled there: “One hundred are tavern keepers, one hundred are bakers, there are one hundred butchers, one hundred fishermen and fishmongers, and one hundred are merchants whose business ventures extend all the way to the greater Indies.” Three hundred other residents worked in trades that the poet did not see fit to mention. Was this account notable for placing food at the center of its description of the new city, or was it an expression of satisfaction, rather surprising for this particular literary genre, at the prospect of being well nourished on the part of a man of middling station? In any case, these lines are of great interest for their catalog of the various trades that were apparently necessary to sustain a small town in the late twelfth century: bread, meat, fish, and wine (from grapes that grew within the walls or were imported from elsewhere), supplemented on occasion by small amounts of costly spices, the most readily available of which were probably already pepper and saffron. Local gardens and chicken coops could be readily tapped for the rest, which consisted of vegetables and herbs, eggs, and cheese, along with other dairy products now and then.
The same trades crop up a half century later in the vitriolic sermons that the Franciscan monk Berthold of Regensburg delivered not only in his native city but also in Munich and Constance. Using examples taken from life, he vilified the principal vices of each of the estates that constituted the workaday world as ordained by the Creator. The fourth of the six estates in Berthold’s classification consisted of “those who sell food and drink. Their job is to bake our bread, sell us meat, brew our beer, prepare our mead, and catch our fish. Some supply cheese and eggs, others oil, herrings, and other foods. We absolutely depend on these trades. One roasts, the other boils.” Elsewhere, the Franciscan did not fail to include millers, “who have more than one trick up their sleeves,” as well as those egregious swindlers, the grocer and his wife.
Big Cities
Berthold’s description of the food trades in middle-sized towns omitted none of the many food-related specialties. The sources, which include both official regulations (already numerous in the thirteenth century, which was an age of organization in all areas and a prolific promulgator of both economic regulations and guild by-laws) and a few surviving fiscal documents, mention none that Berthold does not cover. Things were different, however, in great metropolises such as Paris, Venice, Genoa, Milan, and Naples and in big cities like London, Cologne, Rouen, Toulouse, and Barcelona.
Consider, for example, Étienne Boileau’s Livre des métiers (Book of Trades), which deals with Paris. This volume, established in 1268 under the auspices of the royal provost responsible for supervising the trades, included the statutes of 101 Paris “communities” in the order in which they were submitted to the Châtelet. All branches of the food trades are represented, with the exception of the butchers, who failed to file their guild regulations. It appears that in each sector of the food business there was room for two or three different specialties, each with its own guild. In the case of fish, for example, there was a guild of freshwater fishmongers, another of saltwater fishmongers, and a third consisting of “fishermen in royal waters,” who took pike, mullet, eel, and carp from boats anchored in the Seine and Marne from the tip of the Île Notre-Dame all the way upstream to Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. And the bread peddlers (regrattiers et regrattières de pain), who had a guild of their own, were authorized to sell not only bread, which comprised the bulk of their business, but also small amounts of saltwater fish, cooked meat, salt, fruit, eggs, cheese, and certain common spices (such as pepper, cumin, and cinnamon). This privilege set them apart from other hucksters who traded in garlic, onion, and shallots, for which there was a demand in every kitchen; their additional wares were limited to butter, eggs, cheese, vegetables, and “local” fruits.
In the big cities of both northern and southern Europe, butchers left the viscera of slaughtered animals to specialized organ-meat dealers, who prepared their merchandise for sale in communal markets. Europeans generally, and Italians in particular, had a decided taste for these inner organs. In one of the superbly illuminated manuscripts of the Tacuinum sanitatis in medicina, compiled in the fourteenth century for the Cerruti family of Verona, eight of nineteen illustrations depicting the butcher trade are devoted to the sale and home preparation of brains, hearts, udders, livers, spleen, and other organs, while two or three others feature the head and feet. Or, to take another example, consider the Three Hundred Stories, written by the Florentine Franco Sacchetti at the end of the fourteenth century. One of the best-known of these stories features tripe from a heifer that has been simmered for a Sunday dinner. Two groups of friends, Florentine merchants living in Venice, quarrel over this tasty dish. The butcher in the story sells both meat and inner organs. The citizens of Palermo, especially the poor, were also fond of malcuchinatu, which included tripe and other variety meats.
The Emergence of New Food-Related Trades
New food-related trades did not begin to appear until the first half of the fourteenth century in many cities, the fifteenth in a few others. The new trades did not deal in new products, however. Artisans banded together to form guilds, which nearly always succeeded in persuading the authorities to approve and register their statutes—or in some cases even to draft them. Their purpose was simply to secure an exclusive right to prepare and sell some type of food that had previously been prepared and sold without regulation by local journeymen.
Several factors contributed to the proliferation of new food-related specialties. First, there was a general tendency toward greater specialization in all sectors of industry, from textiles and leathers to metal and woodworking. Artisans were prohibited from working in trades related or complementary to their primary activity. Second, there was a long-term improvement in the standard of living, coupled with the emergence, toward the end of the Middle Ages, of distinctive big-city tastes.
THE BAKERY The evolution of the bakery trade is illuminating in many respects. Wheat flour had been widely used by bakers throughout Europe since the thirteenth century. Indeed, in many places no other kind of flour was used for bread: “good wheat bread” had become a touchstone of urban civilization. Nevertheless, there were two or even three varieties of such bread. The best was made of top-quality white flour and baked to a golden crust; this was called pain de bouche or pain mollet in France, Semmelbrot in Germany, and pandemain or white bread in England, and it was prized by people of privilege. Bread of somewhat lower quality was eaten by a larger group of people consisting of government officials and others with regular sources of income. In France this category of bread was represented by loaves known variously as bis-blancs, jaunets, and bis (brown bread). In Paris and Reims in the fourteenth century people also ate a loaf known as the pain à bourgeois. A third type of loaf, whole-wheat bread (pain à tout, pain de tout blé), was generally eaten by the poorest people and used in a variety of dishes.
Whenever there was a major religious holiday or grain prices were low, bakers used some of their flour for cakes and pastries. They made wafers and waffles by heating light, unleavened pastry dough between two red-hot pieces of iron. Or they plunged balls of dough into boiling water and then dried them in the oven, a technique that required adding yeast and kneading the dough until it was almost hard before plunging it into the water. Bakers sometimes added milk, eggs, and herbs to bread dough or made pastry baskets that they filled with minced meat, fish, or cheese. These delicacies generally could not be sold without the permission of the municipal authorities, and in northern Europe the authorities sometimes regulated their weights and prices, as they did everywhere for bread.
Wealthy individuals ordered their bakers to use some of the flour they supplied to make pastries all year round. These were served after dinner or supper or consumed with wine as a morning snack. Soon the demand for pastries was so great that bakers could not keep up with it, and the authorities found it difficult to limit production to Christmas, Easter, and processional holidays. The cookie trade was about to be born.
In Paris, where cookie makers (oubloyers) were granted privileges as early as 1270, King Charles VI reaffirmed their status by issuing new guild regulations in 1397 and 1406. From these we learn that the trade was “very dangerous and difficult to learn.” A journeyman cookie maker needed to be able to make at least five hundred large wafers (oublies) in a day, along with three hundred supplications and two hundred esterels. Only small wafers could be sold in the street. Supplications and étriers were varieties of oublies. The former took their name from the fact that they were originally eaten only on certain religious holidays and some were placed on the altar as offerings. Étriers were probably named for their shape (the word means “stirrup”).
The bakers appear to have retained control of the fabrication of pâtés and similar “products of the oven” for a longer period of time. Although the Paris pastry guild did not record its first constitution until 1440, there may well have been pastry specialists before that date. Once their guild was recognized, they began to expand the range of their production: in addition to meat pastries and tarts, they also created pastries out of milk, eggs, and cream, usually sweetened, such as darioles, flans, and dauphins. In order to become a master pastry maker in Le Mans in the early sixteenth century, one had to be able to use sugar loaves to make hypocras, a sweet, spiced wine used as an aperitif and after-dinner drink. It was not until 1566 that the king joined the Paris cookie makers’ guild to that of the pastry makers, and the two would be wedded frequently thereafter. Meanwhile, the candy makers, who consumed vast quantities of sugar and sweet syrups, began to form their own guilds in Valencia in Spain, in Sicily, and in the cities of northern Italy after splitting off from the guilds of grocers, who had previously monopolized the production of dragées, pignolats, marzipan, and nougat.
THE DELICATESSEN Another special case, about which much less is known, was the delicatessen. In various Mediterranean cities in the fourteenth century, some butchers began to specialize in the sale of pork. They apparently did not form a distinct guild, however.
Nevertheless, in Bologna around 1380 the authorities designated an area around the Ravenna gate for the skinning of hogs, a particularly polluting and foul-smelling activity that must have been carried on previously in streets closer to the slaughterhouse. In Provence, meanwhile, stalls laden with pork butchered that day or the day before occupied a special place in the mazel, or market. In other cities we find, as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, a range of trades whose names—porcatores, salaterii, salaroli, lardaroli—indicate that they were involved with the meat of the pig. Their job was to cut up the animal’s flesh, salt it, and separate out the lard. These workers apparently did not slaughter the animals themselves but were obliged to purchase carcasses from butchers. Nor were they permitted to enter into private contracts with farmers. The first regulations of the arte dei salaroli, recorded in Bologna in about 1250, granted them the right to sell not only salt pork and lard but also olive oil, cheese, vegetables, seeds, suet, and candles. Strangely enough, the statutes make no mention of other items that we know to have been in great demand, including the mortadella, salami, and sausages with which the pork peddlers of Carpentras, Arles, and Marseilles filled their stalls.
In northern Europe, especially in the north of France, charcutiers saucissiers were late to appear on the scene. In Paris the first regulations governing this trade were issued by the royal provost, Robert d’Estouteville, early in 1476. At that time there were only a dozen or so merchants involved in the business of “cooking pork and making sausages” as well as selling lard “and other butcher products.” By giving their trade a distinctive name, they hoped to set themselves apart from the many itinerant vendors who sold cooked meat illegally. Their intention was probably to reclaim the title of cuisiniers de chair, or “cookers of flesh,” as opposed to “roasters,” a distinction dating from the end of the reign of Saint Louis. Like the roasters, they promised to buy meat only from guild butchers, to use only fresh, unspoiled meat, and, from September 15 to the beginning of Lent, to make sausages only from “well-minced pork—well salted with fine salt and [with nothing but] good, clean, well-chosen fennel or other fine spices.” As the etymology of the word charcutier suggests, these northern dealers sold both fresh and cooked meat, mostly pork sausages along with smaller quantities of mutton and veal stew. In Italy and Provence, salumerii sold pieces of salted meat, ham, and salami, usually along with cheese and olive oil.
PASTA Finally, we must not neglect the development in Italy, toward the end of the Middle Ages, of an industry with a great future in store. Pasta, inspired by an Arab tradition and first prepared in the kitchens of wealthy Sicilians, was already being produced by artisans in Sicilian towns as early as the twelfth century. By the middle of the thirteenth century there were pasta makers in Naples as well as in various Ligurian cities, most notably Genoa, which imported large quantities of durum wheat and, later, semolina for making macaroni and lasagna. Not exactly a luxury item, pasta was still a quality food, reserved for the tables of the wealthy. Before long, Tuscany and other regions of Italy began manufacturing a food whose long shelf life was not the least of its advantages. Despite this, its consumption was not democratized until the seventeenth century. Similar products were developed in the cities of the Spanish Levant around the same time.
Where Food Was Processed and Sold
Food workers plied their trades in all parts of Europe’s cities, not simply in the many taverns, inns, and hotels, often located near city gates or crossroads or close to crowded markets, ports, or schools. In France, at least, these were among the few establishments marked with signs indicating not the building but its function. Similarly, in winemaking regions of southern Germany, wine makers who wished to sell their own wine retail placed a piece of vine or a straw “cork” over their doors. Many taverns were just rooms that opened directly onto the street. Others were located in cellars or half-basements equipped with benches and tables where customers could serve themselves directly from the barrel.
Food and other shops were intermingled along city streets. A baker might sell his wares next door to a goldsmith, a grocer next to a cobbler, or a candy maker next to a barber. In the foreground of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous fresco The Effects of Good Government in Siena’s city hall is a delicatessen located next door to a classroom in which pupils hang on their teacher’s every word.
In medieval vernaculars, the workplace of the artisan who was both the maker and seller of his own wares was never named for the type of work done there. In other words, the baker’s shop was referred to not as a bakery but as the baker’s “house” or “establishment” or simply “workshop.” Other generic terms, such as botiga in Occitan or bottega in Italian, but in northern France boutique, were relatively uncommon until the end of the Middle Ages. By contrast, the room in which bread was baked in monasteries, schools, and maisons Dieu as well as in aristocratic houses was called the bakery (boulangerie), and fruits and vegetables were kept in the fruiterie.
A SPECIAL CASE: THE BUTCHER While most food shops were located for the convenience of their customers in different parts of the city, butchers and fishmongers had long been confined to specific areas by decision of the authorities. In regard to butchers, a number of different policies were adopted. Italian city governments restricted their macellarii to locations on the outskirts or even outside the city walls along roads used for bringing livestock to town. Farther north, in France and along the Baltic coast, butchers were allowed to set up shop in the center of town, close to the major market, which often revolved around the meat business. In still other cities butchers were scattered around town, mainly because more than one authority had jurisdiction over them.
In any case, animals were inspected for good health before being slaughtered on an open killing ground, sometimes surrounded by a fence and preferably located close to a stream. After slaughter, the animals were gutted and skinned. By regulation, blood, viscera, and other “filth” had to be packed in sealed containers and disposed of in the countryside or dumped in a stream at a suitable distance from town. Such was the law, at any rate. Nevertheless, many butchers throughout Europe persisted in killing livestock, especially smaller animals, in the street right in front of their shops, or in small, private killing grounds, which sometimes received grudging authorization (for example, in Orléans in the fifteenth century). Carcasses were then either taken whole to the market or cut up and sold on the spot.
There were two sorts of meat markets, and it is not clear why one was preferred over the other in any particular case. The most common seems to have been the large market shed in which vendors specializing in different types of meat tended stalls of prescribed dimensions. Whenever the sale of meat was authorized, the vendor would open his stall, which he purchased or rented for an amount that depended on various factors. In surviving images, however, it is more common to see small open shops with butcher blocks for cutting and slicing meat, racks of cleavers and knives, meathooks, and bins for waste with dogs always hanging about. Meat that remained unsold at the end of the day and had “passed its prime” was often salted for resale by the butcher himself or by a peddler.
ANOTHER SPECIAL CASE: THE FISHMONGER The authorities also prescribed the locations of fish markets. Ocean and freshwater fish were packed in seaweed or grass in baskets, hampers, or barrels and kept cool with periodic infusions of fresh water for transport to market stalls. Saltfish, most notably herring, were sold in the regular markets. Only the city’s own fishermen were entitled to sell fish from their own private establishments. Some even maintained fish hatcheries along riverbanks.
Shops
Shops, which also served as warehouses, were invariably small, and sales usually took place “at the window.” A sort of shutter opened outward to form a counter over the sidewalk. At night it could be raised to cover the lower part of the window and secure the shop.
Late medieval iconography features numerous representations of these “windows.” One of the finest such images, from the Rhineland, appears in the fifteenth-century Tacuinum sanitatis, mentioned earlier. It depicts a sumptuous German bakeshop whose counter holds a basket brimming with small rolls, while the baker can be seen in the background removing another batch of rolls from the oven. Many shop windows had a second shutter that could be raised to serve as a kind of awning to protect the merchandise from dust, rain, and sun.
A celebrated miniature from Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, a late-fifteenth-century work now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, illustrates a somewhat different system. On the left side of this picture one sees a candy and pastry shop that was entirely open. A heavy wooden sideboard with three panels projected into the street and prevented clients from entering the shop itself, but in the background one can see pots and bottles arrayed on shelves, a large vessel with handles that may contain the “good hypocras” advertised on a placard affixed to an awning, several tarts, and a large sugar loaf. A bulky chest similarly restricted access to the minuscule Sienese salumeria in Lorenzetti’s fresco. It was only in the north of Europe, and probably at a later date, that one began to find closed shops that clients were allowed to enter. Although these shops had doors, they were always kept open to allay the suspicion of fraud that inevitably arose when merchants hid themselves from the gaze of passersby.
Last but not least, one should not neglect the men, women, and children who, with or without official permission, peddled food on the street. A baker’s apprentice might be sent out to sell rolls, flans, miniature pies, and cookies. On the streets he would be likely to rub shoulders with shadier peddlers, often unscrupulous youths out to earn a little cash by unloading inferior goods on unwary buyers. These were a constant concern of the police. A peddler’s wife might fill a basket with eggs, cheese, and fruit and try to hawk her wares on the streets. Or a fishwife might try her luck with a pail of fresh fish. Interestingly, women, though ubiquitous when it came to selling food other than meat, had very little to do with food processing. Thus until the end of the fifteenth century, we can be sure that Margot the pork butcher, Jehanne the baker, and Marie the grocer were widows who, with the assistance of a devoted male employee, had taken over their late husband’s business.
The Status of the Food Trades
The numerous urban food workers of the Middle Ages were by and large of low economic status. The food trades were closely supervised by local authorities and often treated with an understanding and toleration appropriate to a group on which everyone relied. The welfare and reputation of a city depended on its bakers, butchers, and fishmongers. Magistrates were governed by one paramount concern: to ensure an adequate supply of “good and honest” food.
The same fundamental principles reigned across Europe. All food and beverages sold on the market were required to be “worthy to enter the human body,” to be of good odor and flavor, “neither putrid nor stinking,” and free of adulterants and additives intended to conceal shortcomings. Manipulation of foodstuffs was particularly frowned upon. As Berthold of Regensburg put it, the deceptive practices of a shoemaker, tailor, or blacksmith “affect only property” whereas those of the butcher who blows on old meat to improve its appearance or of the innkeeper who perfumes his wine and beer “harms life itself”; the perpetrators of such crimes were guilty of murder and risked their very souls. Regulations were similar everywhere, as were the punishments for infractions, which included destruction of the offending goods together with fines and humiliating penalties as well as possible revocation of the right to continue in the trade.
The authorities’ concern with maintaining a regular supply of food had an economic as well as a moral basis. Although they treated food workers as partners, civic leaders never relaxed their oversight of this fundamental activity.
