‘Truly, Sir, all that I live by is with the awl: I meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor women’s matters, but with awl. I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger, I re-cover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neats-leather have gone upon my handiwork’.
Second Commoner, Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 1 (Shakespeare)
This paper summarises what is currently known about leatherworking in England from the middle years of the 11th through to the end of the 12th centuries. While drawing on the published work of others, it also incorporates recent work by the authors and serves to extend their consideration of leatherworking in Anglo-Saxon England (Cameron and Mould 2011) into the period immediately following the Norman Conquest (1066 AD).
What we know of the developing Anglo-Norman leather industry is based principally on the study of the surviving leatherwork as, like the preceding Anglo-Saxon period, our understanding is limited by the lack of evidence for tanneries and workshops (Driel-Murray 2011; Cameron and Mould 2011). Leatherwork excavated from urban centres such as London, York and Oxford provides increasing evidence that by the end of the 11th century vegetable-tanned leather was in common use by all but the very lowest members of society. Does this mean that by this time leather was indeed the product of an affordable craft?
In most production processes the value of an item increases with each intervention until the point of sale. The production of vegetable-tanned leather required many interventions and the resulting material was costly. It is generally accepted that the traditional ways of vegetable-tanning in England continued little changed from the medieval period up to the end of the 18th century. Let us attempt to assess the relative value of leather in the medieval period by examining here the chain of socio-economic processes involved in its production. At its outset, a cow is taken to market, the owner having already invested in the cost of its feed. The cow is bought by a butcher who slaughters it and sells the meat for consumption, the major bones to the boneworker and the hide, with its horns and hooves attached, to the tanner. The tanner immediately sells the horns to the hornworker and the foot bones and hooves to the gluemaker (MacGregor 1998, 14). He cleans the hide, removing the hair and remaining flesh and prepares it for the tanning pits (Jackson 1985, 8; Thomson 1998, 4–5). He will be able to sell on the animal hair to the plasterer, and potentially any lime infusion used during the initial processing, although it is now thought that liming was not commonly practiced until the 14th century (Driel-Murray 2008, 485; 2011, 74). The hide is soaked in a tanning solution of water and oak bark for at least twelve months, occasionally up to three years, during which time it is moved through a series of pits containing solutions of increasing potency (Thomson 2011, 5), before being removed to the drying sheds. At this point, the cost to the tanner is large because in addition to the initial purchase of the hide can be added further outlays for land tenure, access to running water, supplies of oak bark and its milling, and later of lime. Even at this stage the resulting crust leather cannot be used because it is thick, uneven and inflexible. It has yet to be processed by the ‘currier’ who reduces the hide to a uniform thickness and then softens it by working in fats and oils, smoothes it using special tools and finally colours it with dyes. It is only after all this that the leather can be sold for profit.
The finished hides could now be bought by the leatherworkers but the cost was such that an opportunity for further profit presented itself. Amongst other activities the ‘leatherseller’ sometimes acted as a middleman purchasing hides, cutting them into smaller pieces and selling them to leatherworkers who could not afford the price of a complete hide themselves. This had the added benefit that the leatherworkers were able to select only those parts of the hide that had the particular properties they required. It was the skill of the leatherworker, whether shoe-maker, sheath-maker, saddler or bottle-maker, which added the final value to the finished product. With these commodities it was the ingenuity of the cutting pattern, the fineness of the stitching and the beauty of the decoration which enhanced the sale price.
For our particular period of interest, the second half of the 11th and the 12th century, English documentary evidence for the various leatherworking trades provides some insight into the range of leatherworking crafts that were supported in the urban setting. At York, a guild of glovers, a guild of leatherworkers (corariorum) and a ‘craft’ of saddlers are recorded in 1181. Twelfth century charters recording land transactions mention as witnesses a currier, a saddler, cordwainers (corveisor and allutarius both terms referring to a maker of shoes of fine leathers), a buckler-maker (shield-maker), a girdler (le cainturer), a tanner and a skinner (Liddy 2003, 3222–3). The relative financial standing of these various leatherworking trades in the 12th century is difficult to gauge but later medieval documents suggest that manufacturing leather was more profitable than making it into goods as late 14th-century tax returns show that tanners paid more tax than those who made shoes (cordwainers) or those who repaired them (cobblers) (Cherry 1991, 309 quoting the Victoria County History, Oxon iv, 45). Of all these actors, it is the tanner who invests the most in terms of stock, premises, labour and time. The length of his investment, from the initial purchase of raw materials until the eventual sale of the finished leather, required capital on a scale that sets the tanner apart from the rest.
If leather was so costly to produce, how did it come to be so widely available? We can assume that élite members of 11th and 12th-century society commissioned their own fashionable leather goods not only as necessities but also as expressions of social status. The evidence suggests that as these goods became less desirable, perhaps through wear or a change in fashion, they were passed down to other, lesser, members of the household and servants. Despite being heavily worn, many leather items were not discarded but repaired in order to extend their usable life. Footwear, which represents the majority of leather recovered from medieval sites, frequently shows evidence of the work of the cobbler who, traditionally, bought old, worn shoes and refurbished them for resale (see the quotation from Julius Caesar at the beginning of this paper).
A collection of late 11th and early 12th-century shoes from the moat at Oxford Castle shows signs of repair in 15% of the total, and half of these had been repaired more than once before being finally thrown away (Mould 2010a). In the years immediately before the conquest, the occurrence of repairs on shoe soles at Coppergate, York is 13% of the total, while in the following period it increases to 26% with some soles having been repaired as many as six times (Mould et al. 2003, 3349 table 378). It would seem that the demand for repairing old leather goods to extend their use was strong and increased with time.
The recycling of leather was widely undertaken. In the shoe trade the most extreme recycling of old shoes took the form of cutting away the upper from the worn out sole and adding a new sole to produce a shoe of smaller size. Examples of such radical refurbishment, later to become known as ‘translation’, can be seen in early groups of leatherwork including an early-mid 12th century example from Finzel’s Reach, Bristol (Figure 9.1). The cobbler carefully salvaged as much reusable leather as he could for his work. Consequently, the discarded seams are often all that we find remaining of larger leather objects, the greater part having been recycled. Patches used to repair worn areas of shoe sole occasionally retain features of the other shoe parts from which they have been cut. It was perhaps this process of repeated repair and resale always at a reduced cost that allowed leather objects to be afforded by increasing numbers of people of lower social standing. Traditionally, cobblers were regarded by the other branches of the leatherworking trades as being at the bottom of the social scale, reflecting the status of the people they served. 14th-century tax returns for Oxford show, tellingly, that shoemakers’ families commonly employed servants whereas cobblers’ families, on the whole, did not (Oxford Poll Tax 1381).