[HN Gopher] Common Jobs in a Medieval City
___________________________________________________________________
Common Jobs in a Medieval City
Author : devilcius
Score : 231 points
Date : 2021-12-04 07:43 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.medievalists.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.medievalists.net)
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| My first reaction at seeing the headline was - I wonder if I
| could guess these jobs by people's family names, IE: Blacksmith,
| Cooper, Chandler, Brewer, Baker, etc.
| [deleted]
| mastazi wrote:
| 6th to 10th place are interesting:
|
| 6 - Tailors
|
| 7 - Notaries
|
| 8 - Barbers
|
| 9 - Retailers
|
| 10 - Stonemasons
|
| More notaries than barbers, retailers and stonemasons!
| kashyapc wrote:
| On notaries (and related officials) in the middle ages, see
| this[1] painting by Pieter Bruegel from around 1615. Here
| Bruegel mocks the tax collectors that are bamboozling the
| farmers with paperwork. "The work was boldly socio-critical in
| its time."[2]
|
| [1] https://kunstberatung-zurich.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/12/...
|
| [2] https://kunstberatung-zurich.com/pieter-breughel-payment-
| of-...
| ralfd wrote:
| I guess people from villages/provinces would maybe travel quite
| far to the city to notarize something? But barbers would only
| cut the hair of the city population.
|
| What surprised me was the many shoemakers.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Notaries ~ Lawyers today.
|
| Barbers ~ Doctors today.
| usrusr wrote:
| I suspect that the ranking is somewhat distorted by the data
| source: every person working in the general field of notary
| would be represented in those lists of taxed household heads,
| whereas in e.g. the field of stonemasonry this would only be
| true only for a few masters I think, but not for their
| apprentices or various other forms of low-level support. And I
| suspect that the wandering stonemasons traveling from project
| to project wouldn't appear there either. In short: I suspect
| that interpreting the source like that might be a tiny little
| bit like trying to derive the percentage of Americans working
| as plumbers by looking at what is listed at the NYSE.
| drcode wrote:
| Likely not too surprising, given that most people were
| illiterate. Probably they also helped with letter
| writing/reading?
| bluGill wrote:
| I've seen arguments that most people were literate. Learning
| to read and write is not hard, and it is a useful skill.
|
| Of course literate was relative: before the printing press
| there wasn't much to read (book took months to copy by hand).
| You were reading and writing short notes. Spelling wasn't
| standardized so you phonetically spelled things and had to
| figure out what the other person meant. Good enough for
| letters, but nobody was writing books on anything since
| teaching in person was (or seemed to be) more efficient.
|
| I'm not a historian, but the above seems like a good
| argument. Does anyone have a real reference as to the truth?
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Learning to write is difficult. You need paper and pen, and
| free time, and some reference, and probably a teacher
| LegitShady wrote:
| It kind of seems like your job as someone making the claim
| to come up with a reference?
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Barber-surgeons.
| nradov wrote:
| Many barbers also did some dentistry.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| I always want a shave and a blood letting after getting
| some rotten teeth pulled. It was a very convenient trade.
| hammock wrote:
| I'm guessing the medieval toothpulling would count as a
| good bloodletting as well.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| It depended if you were a bleeder or not. My barber gave
| me some salted fish to pack in there, so it really didn't
| bleed all that much.
| Aerroon wrote:
| For those who don't know: barbers were also surgeons and
| dentists until around the middle of the 18th century. Not
| only did they cut your hair they also pulled out your teeth
| and performed surgery on you.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And where generally closer to our modern day MDs then real
| mediaval MDs. As those where theologists coming from
| christian universities where they received basically zero
| true medical training.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Secular doctors were also terrible: before the late-19th
| century, seeing a doctor was more likely to shorten your
| lifespan than lengthen it. Unless you needed surgery,
| which meant that you were in serious trouble anyway, so
| even with the extreme likelihood of infection your odds
| were a bit better than just leaving it alone.
|
| As far as I can tell, before like 1880 they prescribed
| mercury for everything.
|
| Even though they were universally terrible, when you read
| their writings they're no less confident in what they
| were doing than modern doctors are.
|
| My favorite historical doctor was Benjamin Rush, a
| "founding father," who was hilariously bad at his job
| even for the time.
| elliekelly wrote:
| The BBC did a short series called "Victorian Pharmacy"
| where they attempted to use Victorian-era cures on modern
| people. Except they couldn't even try most of them
| because they were too dangerous - opium, arsenic,
| mercury, cocaine, etc. And the things they _could_ try
| (excepting Lea & Perrins sauce) were basically torture
| devices like the Malvern Water Cure[2].
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXnVTMzSy3s
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvern_water
| hef19898 wrote:
| Medival doctors seemd to be fairly good, for their time,
| when it came to broken bones and such. Basically
| battlefield injuries that didn't damage inner organs. I
| remeber when they discovered the bones of an English
| archer. That guy in hos forties had all kinds of broken
| bones, healed cuts to his bones and head... That and the
| Egyptian medics, and before, that drilled holes in heads
| to relieve pressure. Why know those surgeries where
| successfup because the bone healed on the skeletons we
| found. Also back the day people seemed to be not too bad
| when it came to healing properties of herbs.
|
| But you are right, generally speaking you had the choice
| between really bad, utterly had, extremely bad and
| outright killing theit patients bad doctors for the most
| part of history.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > before the late-19th century, seeing a doctor was more
| likely to shorten your lifespan than lengthen it
|
| Medical malpractice is the third-leading cause of death.
| (After cancers and cardiovascular problems, aka "old
| age".)
|
| This is inevitable as we can't really experiment on
| people and do real science.
| trgn wrote:
| Yep. Apothecaries were the main source of routine medical
| care for the masses. To the extent that "an apothecaries
| wages" was an idiom to refer to their high incomes,
| somewhat pejoratively.
|
| This is still the case in many communities worldwide, a
| good pharmacist is a real anchor for providing care for
| day-to-day health care. It's a great filtering mechanism
| too, the pharmacist as a buffer for frivolous doctor's
| visits.
|
| Contrast that to here in the US. When's the last time
| somebody sought out direct medical care from a
| pharmacist? Pretty much the kneejerk always is go
| straight to a doctor, no matter how small the discomfort.
| kemiller wrote:
| Interesting that there are no smiths or millers on that list,
| given how common those surnames are.
| dejj wrote:
| Bypass broken ad-blocker detection:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211128175917/https://www.medie...
| everyone wrote:
| I wonder what the most common jobs are in a modern city. Probably
| all bullshit.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Dunno about major cities, but there's national statistics for
| these things: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-
| major-industry-...
| gullywhumper wrote:
| BLS has the OEWS (occupational employment and wage
| statistics) at the national, state, and metropolitan/CBSA
| levels.
|
| https://www.bls.gov/oes/home.htm
| agumonkey wrote:
| It all boils down to what a good job means for a human. I may
| be special but I find a few axis that I need:
|
| - skillful
|
| - useful
|
| - well organized enough
|
| Today people don't do much, they don't master much, most of it
| is done far away in large shops or plants. It's rarely that
| useful (we're overwhelmingly comfy) and recent management
| practices are surreal most of the time.
|
| I talked to a few people that prefered low wage in exchange for
| more skills or usefulness, even if the job might look less
| impressive in the first place.
| dmurray wrote:
| Probably not. Of course, it's highly dependent on how you group
| related professions, but according to [0], which has a
| granularity similar to our medieval source, the three most
| common occupations in New York in 2020 were retail salespeople,
| nurses and labourers. You need to get to 4 and 5 before the
| office and management jobs usually associated with the
| "bullshit jobs" epithet start to appear.
|
| [0] https://stacker.com/new-york/new-york-city/most-common-
| jobs-...
| technothrasher wrote:
| Healthcare and retail/restaurant work I would imagine.
| izzymiller wrote:
| I grabbed some public data and took a quick look in comparison:
| https://app.hex.tech/hex-public/app/fffe29ce-a5b2-42b7-92d5-...
| bruce343434 wrote:
| bullshit in whose opinion? As someone who does not believe in
| god, are all of the church related jobs bullshit? Or are they
| not, since a lot of people want churches and their services? If
| a job exists, there's apparently at least one person who wants
| it done.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Church worker; social worker: what's the difference?
| watwut wrote:
| That they are two massively different occupations, with
| different goals, different processes and different
| regulations they fall under. Just about the only thing they
| have the same is low salary.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The point is that there's more overlap than how it looks
| like on the surface level. E.g. part of what a A.D. 1500
| village pastor does is what's done nowadays by
| psychotherapists and marriage counselors; the role in
| filling the people's needs is similar even if the
| processes and regulations are wildly different, just as
| the processes and regulations of A.D. 1500 shoemaker or
| surgeon are wildly different than the modern shoe factory
| worker or surgeon.
| agumonkey wrote:
| That's ignoring a lot of structure induced jobs. Often nobody
| wants it done but you can't fire a person so you invent a
| role. Or sometimes the need is mostly a factor of higher rank
| carelessness or incompetence.. fix the tooling and there's no
| need to hire 5 more guys to grind through endless papers or
| mails.
| thedailymail wrote:
| I think the parent quote may be in reference to David
| Graeber's commentary on "bullshit jobs".
| bruce343434 wrote:
| I figured as much. But I don't agree with the premise of
| the book. Sure, we all "know" the jobs are bullshit, and
| yet they aren't. Let's go over the wikipedia summary at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
|
| >flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel
| important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants,
| door attendants, makers of websites whose sites neglect
| ease of use and speed for looks;
|
| They _serve_ , hence, not a bullshit job. We might look
| down on it, but they are providing value to their employer.
| Sadly perhaps, humans are just deeply subjective. See again
| my religion example. Also, this seems really dismissive of
| receptionists/PAs. These people do a _lot_ of _real_ work.
|
| >goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of
| their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers,
| telemarketers, public relations specialists, community
| managers;
|
| Not very nice no, but again they provide value to their
| bosses. Probably to themselves too.
|
| >duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be
| fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated
| code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do
| not arrive;
|
| This just seems to be naive idealism.
|
| >box tickers, who create the appearance that something
| useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey
| administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate
| compliance officers, quality service managers;
|
| Here it gets interesting. These people may actually be the
| first that don't provide value, but trick others into
| thinking they do.
|
| >taskmasters, who manage--or create extra work for--those
| who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership
| professionals.
|
| This is a mix of dumb (mis)managers, and malicious time
| wasters. I think it's obvious that a lot of resources of
| all kinds are wasted by inefficiencies caused by stupidity.
| That's a human (as in, we as a species) problem. Then
| there's malice, which fits into the "tricks others into
| believing they provide value" category.
|
| Anyway, that's just my take on it.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I guess a job can't be bullshit to you as long as one
| isn't committing outright fraud.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > providing value
|
| That's the crux, isn't it? What kind of "value" are we
| talking about? The argument doesn't hold unless we start
| defining this in concrete terms. That's where you'll find
| that there are many different ways to attribute value.
| Inevitably, value attributing is inherently human and
| therefor subjective. "value", such as it is, is a social
| construct.
|
| Sure, many of the "bullshit jobs" "provide value to
| employers", but that doesn't invalidate the argument to
| grant them the moniker "bullshit job".
|
| So, what makes a job a "bullshit job"? Well, the defining
| criteria would be that they only exist to the benefit of
| their employer. They don't generate any value as far as
| the stakeholders of an employer is concerned: clients,
| customers, members, patrons, patients, visitors, other
| employees, etc.
|
| Dedicating staff to calm passengers whose bags do not
| arrive is a clear cost/benefit trade-off as far as the
| airline is concerned. Clearly, it's cheaper / easier to
| have staff comfort passengers, then fix the issue in a
| structural fashion. The example of a "bullshit job" is
| apt, because the customers of the airline can clearly
| push through the illusion that the airline would actually
| care about their luggage.
|
| Context matters as far as public perception is concerned,
| though. Things are not always that clear cut.
|
| For instance, corporations aren't necessarily "evil" or
| "good" in binary terms. Their impact on the world tends
| to be judged in a morally ambivalent fashion. A corporate
| lawyer may defend not just their employer, but also
| squarely aligns their convictions / principles with the
| ambiguous impact their employer may or may not have on
| the world, for better or worse. Arguably, the tobacco
| industry has enabled the social mobility of millions of
| people, and at the same time, their product has caused
| the death of millions as well. Depending on what moral
| stance you'd take, it's valid to perceive a corporate
| lawyer both as a "goon" defending a reprehensible view on
| the world, as well as a honest employee defending the
| livelihoods of many. (note: I'm not taking sides here,
| it's just an example!)
|
| In a complex and ambiguous world, "bullshit jobs" are
| labelled as such because they are perceived as such
| through the lens of current morals, values, socio-
| economic, political, cultural zeitgeist. A corporate
| lawyer is seen as a "bullshit job" because society
| accepts the ambivalence in what they do, and why their
| role is a thing, even though it's role most people feel
| the world wouldn't have to need in the first place.
| watwut wrote:
| > flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel
| important, e.g., receptionists, administrative
| assistants, door attendants, makers of websites whose
| sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks;
|
| Imo, receptionists, administrative assistant and "makers
| of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for
| looks" are all actually useful. Their function is not
| just to make someone feel superior. Instead, I would
| argue that whoever wrote that was caught in own feeling
| of superiority over service staff.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Exactly. I can't imagine running a doctors office without
| a reception. Or really any public facing company/office
| without a reception. Would anyone like to have the
| dentist use his time to answer the phone rather than fix
| teeth? Seems like that would under utilize the dentist's
| degree.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Reception at my doctor's in Norway are all qualified
| nurses. My sister on the other hand goes to a surgery in
| the UK has a dedicated receptionist. My sister's
| experience of visiting the surgery is considerably worse
| than mine. At the dental practice that I use the
| hygienists take turns to run the reception desk.
|
| > Would anyone like to have the dentist use his time to
| answer the phone rather than fix teeth?
|
| I don't care who answers the telephone as long as they
| are competent to answer questions and have authority to
| solve problems.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Wouldn't that raise prices, to use a nurse as a
| reception?
|
| In the US it would be something like:
|
| Receptionist: 30k / year
|
| Nurse: 80k / year.
|
| So you have:
|
| Doctor's office 1: 3x Nurse, 240k per year in salary
|
| Doctor's office 2: 2x Nurse, 1x Receptionist, 190k pear
| year.
|
| That 50k in extra cost has to come from somewhere. Lower
| paid doctors, higher costs, ???
| alphager wrote:
| In Germany, the "nurse" (it's a separate profession from
| nursing) performs a variety of medical tasks (like
| vaccinations, blood tests, allergy tests) and does
| prioritization of incoming patients based on initial
| assessments. I've also had the "nurse" complete initial
| medical history with me.
|
| This model is strongly influenced by the size of the
| clinic: we usually have small clinics owned and run by
| the only doctor in the clinic (though they sometimes team
| up). As the amount of patients per day is hard-limited by
| the doctors time, such small clinics have no need for a
| full-time receptionists.
| JackFr wrote:
| I don't know how things have changed over the past 25
| years, but I used to work as a defense contractor and
| would frequently have to visit the Navy Annex in Virginia
| which was also HQ US Marine Corps.
|
| It always struck me as weird that the guardhouse gate to
| enter was manned by a $12 hour off-brand security guard.
| I mentioned it to someone at one point, and I was told
| "Do you know how much it costs to train a Marine? It
| would be an outrageous waste of resources to staff that
| guardhouse with a Marine."
|
| Go figure.
| handrous wrote:
| A relative who put in over 20 years in the army told me
| that a lot of their post gate guards were contractors
| these days. Considering that when he told me this it was
| the height of the occupation of Iraq ('05, maybe?), and
| that lots of the soldiers on these posts would soon be
| _guarding gates and checkpoints in Iraq_ , it struck me
| as super fucking weird that they didn't use that as a
| training opportunity to get them experience doing that
| stateside--very different, sure, but any experience beats
| none, surely, and training's a ton of what they do when
| not deployed _anyway_ , so seems like a win-win, but I
| guess either that's not true _or_ whoever landed those
| contracts had some really good lobbyists.
| w_TF wrote:
| knowing their spending habits, i tend to assume the DOD
| is paying that off-brand gate guard 10x whatever it costs
| to train a marine
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| > box tickers, who create the appearance that something
| useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey
| administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate
| compliance officers, quality service managers;
|
| IDK, I think these sort of workers provide value too.
| Some industries need QA (quality service manager), or
| else we'd see a lot more shoddy production across the
| board. Compliance officers provide a defense against
| fees/fines incurred by violations of law/policy. Survey
| administrators ensure the quality of survey collection
| via planning/organizing/QAing. In-house magazine
| journalists... well it depends on the company, but some
| company blogs are actually entertaining/useful. I always
| kind of hated the Graeber book because it's ultimately
| just a value judgement that people could be doing
| something better with their time... which is probably
| true... in a perfect world? But until then, the
| occasional corp blog post keeps me from bashing my head
| in on Monday morning :)
| [deleted]
| s5300 wrote:
| Something related to Wal-Mart.
|
| Seriously.
| baud147258 wrote:
| or maybe Amazon now
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| "Executive communication facilitator" ranks up there in terms
| of BS, but not that common.
|
| Most common would be truck driver, for-hire driver,
| salesperson, lawyer, or janitor.
| thorin wrote:
| I guess a recent pandemic would have shown which jobs were
| important these days:
|
| Farmers Truck Drivers Shop Staff Medical Specialists Teachers
| Infrastructure specialists (power,fuel,extending into IT work)
| --- Purveyors of leisure activities, bars/brewing,
| restaurants/takeaways, online gaming, gambling --- Venture
| capitalists and financial experts Consultants specializing in
| skimming and offshoring Sales, marketing and influencers
|
| I'll let you assign the weightings
| claudiulodro wrote:
| A fun one that I'm personally familiar with is the Upholder,
| predecessor to the modern Upholsterer. Back in medieval times,
| the upholder was a combination furniture and textile producer as
| well as interior designer and the person who did the banners in
| castles, bedsheets, etc. Basically anything involving textiles.
| Over time, padded furniture became the main focus of the trade,
| leading to what we think of as upholsterers.[1]
|
| [1] https://spruceaustin.com/uncategorized/history-of-the-
| uphold...
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| It surprises me that all 10 jobs still exist, while there are
| several more recent occupations that no longer exist (albeit they
| were not that common):
|
| Milkmen, Elevator operator, Switchboard Operator, Ice Cutter,
| Bowling Pin Setter, Film projectionist, Lamplighter, Leech
| collector, Alchemist, Bematist, Redsmith, Daguerreotypist, Town
| crier
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Leech collector
|
| That profession seems to still be around, we just call them
| politicians :-)
| pram wrote:
| Fresh milk delivery seems like something that could definitely
| make a comeback though!
| bagacrap wrote:
| most of those didn't exist in medieval times either. Is it
| surprising that most common are also most timeless?
| kibwen wrote:
| See also The Lindy Effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| anthony_r wrote:
| <chuckles nervously as a software developer>
| bserge wrote:
| The industry is over half a century old by now, barring
| some absolute catastrophe, it's not going anywhere.
| adamc wrote:
| Thanks for the link! Hadn't heard of that, although I've seen
| similar reasoning in other contexts. (Basically, the most
| reasonable estimate, absent other data, is that you are at
| the mean -- so, for example, one could reasonably guess that
| half the people to ever be born have been born at present.)
| stevesimmons wrote:
| So some people have 4 testicles?
|
| (assuming I'm average...)
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I'm probably missing the point here but yes, in fact.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyorchidism
|
| A Rare Case of Polyorchidism: Four Testes:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4747319/
| dionidium wrote:
| The milkman is alive and well here in Rhode Island. Every other
| house has one of these on their front porch:
| https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-55YYt59jQqk/TxnrEKJT4BI/AAAAAAAAA...
| gumby wrote:
| Milkmen, elevator operator, and switchboard operator were
| _extremely_ common occupations in their heydays, all of which
| overlapped with my childhood.
|
| I only stopped milkman service here in Palo Alto a couple of
| years ago (though the dairy downtown shut down maybe 30 years
| ago). It turned out to be a direct milkman->teenager pipeline
| which was better than walking to the grocery store twice a day.
| irrational wrote:
| Why are you going twice a day? We drink 3 gallons of milk a
| week, but only go once a week.
| gumby wrote:
| I didn't really go twice a day, what I meant was that a
| teenager can drink a gallon of milk, eat five square meals,
| every day and still be thin as a rail.
|
| Given all the other food being bought we didn't really have
| to have milk delivered, but milk the doorstep seemed to
| result in less junk food consumption.
|
| As an empty nester I drink less than half a gallon a week.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Alchemist became Chemist. Dageuerreotypist became photographer,
| which has only recently gone away.
|
| Town crier is now the guy flipping a sign for the new burger
| joint.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Town crier [1] is now news anchor.
|
| [1]: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/79/2b/89/792b8997970b433b06b10
| 721b...
| beebeepka wrote:
| Been a while. Is that from Rome or Spartacus?
| ativzzz wrote:
| Photographers have absolutely not gone away, at least not in
| the wedding industry.
| zuminator wrote:
| A building I worked in recently finally got rid of its elevator
| operators (along with a set of frighteningly rickety elevators)
| about 4 years ago. They must still exist in some places, maybe
| a few grand old hotels and social clubs.
| ericd wrote:
| We had a milkman from a local farm until recently. Highly
| recommend it. Or if you're in the Bay Area, Farmstead delivers
| glass bottle straus milk and picks up the empties.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I would argue that a daguerrotypist is exactly analogous to a
| modern photographer; and print media is still developed as
| well.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Milkmen definitely still exist in the UK, and likely other
| places.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| https://www.milkandmore.co.uk/
|
| These guys do doorstop milk deliveries to much of the UK. In
| our area they comes on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday
| mornings at around 5:30am.
|
| Milk in old fashioned glass bottles, Welsh cakes, yoghurt...
| Yummy!
| seanhunter wrote:
| Milkmen 100% exist in the UK. Even though I don't drink actual
| milk they have a massive range of products they will deliver,
| so I get fruit juice, various foods and oat milk delivered by
| my milkman.
| phonebanshee wrote:
| Milkmen 100% exist in the US also. Several houses close by
| have delivery coolers for https://www.smithbrothersfarms.com/
| and their trucks appear regularly.
| MikeTaylor wrote:
| Striking that there were more shoemakers than tailors.
| ldoughty wrote:
| This statistic might also be a specialization for just this
| case/city. The author noted that Montpelier was known for
| shoes, which might mean people traveled there for shoes, or
| they were exported/bought by traveling merchants and sold
| elsewhere.
| analog31 wrote:
| They may have been exported to the surrounding countryside
| too. The one thing that a farmer couldn't make for
| themselves.
| PeterisP wrote:
| As the article mentions, a lot of the "most popular jobs" is
| determined not by the popularity of the industries but by the
| fragmentation of jobs. If you have 20 people working on shoes
| and 40 people working on clothing, then if shoemakers are a
| single profession/guild but clothing has 10 people each working
| on a different stage of the product (which actually is the
| case, with the most labor-intensive tasks of medieval clothing
| production being in making the actual cloth, not tailoring it)
| then shoemakers become a more common job.
| dmurray wrote:
| 4% of the workforce being shoemakers seems enormous. One person
| working full time making shoes for every fifty-ish adults?
|
| I don't know what the right comparison is today. According to
| [0], the fashion industry accounts for about 3% of world GDP.
| Perhaps shoes are a quarter of that?
|
| [0] https://fashinnovation.nyc/fashion-industry-statistics/
| honkdaddy wrote:
| It does seem a bit strange, you're right. When you read into
| it though, this city seemed to have a higher cobbler
| population than most, as alluded to by the author.
|
| > They were organized in different guilds, based on the
| street in which they kept their shops. In 1360, nine
| cobblers' guilds were attested in documents, all situated
| within the city's walls
|
| I know almost nothing about medieval France, but perhaps
| peasants from smaller surrounding cities may have come to
| this one to learn or work, leading to this skew?
| wildzzz wrote:
| There's always an overlap of skills. Cobblers may have been
| tailoring on the side but wouldn't be counted as such. I've
| been to many dry cleaners that will do alterations or
| repairs on clothes but also will do some light shoe repair
| as well. They won't make you a shoe but can fix a broken
| heel just like I'm sure there are cobblers out there who
| are capable of clothing repairs.
| ghaff wrote:
| Cobblers are very good for doing repairs of anything that
| requires heavier duty needles and threads.
| dotancohen wrote:
| So, full-text search making full use of every core under
| the heatsink? ))
| nradov wrote:
| They were serving a lot of customers from outside the city
| who would occasionally visit to trade and shop.
| kingcharles wrote:
| When I was a kid there were vastly more shoe repair places
| than there are now. I guess if we plotted the graph backwards
| there would be way more several hundreds years ago.
| qw wrote:
| The shoemakers also repaired and maintained shoes. They would
| replace soles, repair holes etc.
| dmurray wrote:
| That's an argument for needing fewer people, not more -
| since it happens in situations where it's less labour-
| intensive to repair shoes than to make them from scratch.
| Someone wrote:
| Not necessarily. If the materials are expensive, paying
| somebody to repair a shoe can be the cheaper option.
|
| I think people still repaired socks after knitting them
| was automated for that reason.
|
| The first automated knitting machine was from 1589. Queen
| Elizabeth I denied its inventor a patent _"because of her
| concern for the employment security of the kingdom 's
| many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened
| by such mechanization"_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor))
|
| Edit: maybe not. https://www.historylink.org/File/5721
| learned me that gear for us soldiers in World War One was
| knitted manually. Maybe, those machines weren't used
| (much) yet by then?
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Isn't the main reason that making from scratch is less
| labour-intensive than repairing because of mass
| production?
|
| With medieval production methods, I would bet that making
| from scratch is significantly more labour-intensive than
| repairing.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I assume 1) people walked a lot more, 2) shoes took longer to
| make, and 3) didn't last as long which means more people
| necessary to handle demand. I could be completely off,
| though.
| telesilla wrote:
| Exactly, walking! Something few of us do these days even at
| short distances. I prefer shoes that can recobbled but I
| know from the dwindling numbers of cobblers that I'm a
| shrinking demographic.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Point 3 is the key one - soles, especially. Rubber soles
| weren't a thing - they were made of leather (or sometimes
| textiles) and they wore out in a matter of a couple months
| or even a few weeks with heavy usage, especially give point
| 1. Point 2 isn't really the case - your later period and
| fancier pointed-toe, lace-and-ribbon-bedecked shoes for the
| higher classes took probably some time, but a pair of
| common leather turn-shoes can be made in a couple hours.
| Xylakant wrote:
| It's much easier to make clothes at home than shoes. I could
| probably cobble together an odd looking shirt given some time
| and instructions without needing to buy special tools, but
| leather shoes are an entirely different thing.
| ajross wrote:
| Exactly. The article nods to this in a few places, but it's
| important to recognize that this is an accounting of
| "recognized" professions, something that left some kind of
| written account (most of the article is based on tax records
| it seems like). Which means at the end of the day this is
| mostly a list of what the men were doing.
|
| Stuff done "at home" obviously involves work, but it wasn't a
| "profession" in a notional sense so it wasn't recorded.
| Certainly we should assume that there was trade within and
| between cities based on this kind of output too (i.e. "Is
| that one of Marie's sweaters?", "Here's a few coins, go to
| Sophie down the street and see if she has any more of that
| jam from last summer").
| guythedudebro wrote:
| I'm amused and perplexed at your choice of the word "cobble"
| there
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Mind you -- my amusement was "odd looking shirt". It made
| me imagine what that would actually look like.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I'm not a native speaker so this was entirely
| unintentional, but now that you point it out I see the pun.
| Thank you.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I've never met a non-native speaker who used the word
| "cobble", and successfully too. Props to you!
| Xylakant wrote:
| Why I missed that is not the meaning of the phrase "to
| cobble something together", but its root in "cobbler",
| which is - at least for me - something I rarely use.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Also Cockneys in old London would say cobblers if you
| were talking out of your hat. Also balls to refer to the
| pawnbrokers on account of their three ball shop signs.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| On a related note, this article reminded me of something one
| of my professors had to say about William Shakespeare.
|
| There's a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing around
| Shakespeare, that he didn't actually write his own plays,
| that they were instead written by Francis Bacon or Queen
| Elizabeth or something ridiculous. These arguments usually
| start from his background: how could the son of a common
| glovemaker have gotten the sort of education necessary to
| write like this?
|
| The thing is, glovemaker was a highly skilled profession.
| Exactly like you said, any dum dum could cut a hole in a
| sheet of fabric and call it a poncho, but handmade shoes and
| gloves take serious craftsmanship. This kind of profession
| would have put Shakespeare's family firmly in the upper-
| middle class.
| photojosh wrote:
| In tracing my family tree, I found a branch that went back to a
| small town in Scotland, and at least 3-4 generations back were
| shoemakers. When did my forefather leave the family trade?
| Circa 1850, when the Industrial Revolution apparently hit
| shoemaking hard.
|
| He ended up keeper of a coffee shop in Glasgow, and his
| daughter was on a ship to Australia in 1891.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > on a ship to Australia in 1891
|
| What was she accused of? ))
| monknomo wrote:
| They quit transporting people in 1868
| kingcharles wrote:
| I traced mine back to 1600. They were all shepherds.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Perhaps the ranking may be also influenced by reporting
| requirements.
|
| According to the article, the shoemakers were organized in
| guilds, so possibly this would standardize the reporting to the
| city gov.
| lqet wrote:
| I would expect that. Clothes last significantly longer than
| shoes (you can wear a cheap T-Shirt for way over 5 years, but
| even good midrange shoes start to fall apart after 2 years). It
| is also fairly easy to repair or even make clothes at home. But
| shoes?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd say one would suffer a lot more with borked shoes than
| torn upper clothing.
| bluedino wrote:
| Shoes might fall apart in 2 years if you wear them every day.
| Do you wear the same t-shirt every day?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, false equivalence. If you wear a dozen shoes on
| rotation, they will also last for 5 years.
| vincebowdren wrote:
| Weaving and making clothing was done mostly within the
| household, by women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_medi
| eval_clothing#:~:t....
| lordnacho wrote:
| You can keep wearing clothes that are messed up, broken shoes
| will stop you being able to do a lot of stuff.
| StupidOne wrote:
| I'm surprised blacksmiths didn't cut to the top 10. Almost
| everyone would need some kind of metal tool(s) to do their job in
| medieval time.
| duxup wrote:
| My grandfather was a doctor in WWII and at one point traveled
| up through China and other places that had been heavily
| decimated / damaged / looted.
|
| I remember him talking about how access to a ship (even if over
| long distance) with a good machine shop was critical to just
| get locals up and running with basic metal tools for everyday
| use and medical uses.
|
| It reminded me of the importance of a local blacksmith and
| such.
| gota wrote:
| On topic - I suggest the following blog post series:
|
| https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
|
| I learned a lot about the production and manufacturing of metal
| (iron) items. If I recall correctly, for iron production, a lot
| of people are involved in obtaining the fuel (wood, ash,
| charcoal) and not so many blacksmiths are necessary
| bluGill wrote:
| Blacksmith wasn't a major job until the 1800s when industrial
| revolution made the job possible. In the 1800s a blacksmith
| should made nothing: everything was made in a factory and the
| blacksmith just did the final fitting or repair work. Sure they
| could and did do some custom decorative stuff, but only the
| rich could afford that.
|
| Before then a city might have a couple in employee of the noble
| to make armor or swords, but the common person did without, or
| handed down tools until they couldn't be used at all. In a
| village a blacksmith was a side job of a talented farmer, but
| it couldn't pay the bills as nobody could afford to buy much
| custom made metal.
| cafard wrote:
| In Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ there is a smith in the
| Miller 's Tale, who worked on farming equipment: plow
| harness, shares, and coulters. (Unless my Middle English is
| more forgotten than I thought.)
| hef19898 wrote:
| Farming tools? Wood working rools? Tools for builders? All
| made a blacksmith of sorts. Those making arms and armor where
| a highly specialized bunch.
|
| That being said, arms manufacturing was a very well developed
| industry during tue middle ages. Including general
| contractors, cuttlers, in case of weapons that coordinated
| the work of the people making the blades, the handles, the
| scarbords and dis the heat treatment.
|
| If anything, the classic blacksmith went into decline during
| yhe industrial revolution. With tools, weapons and everyday
| stuff being mass produced in a factory somewhere.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Weren't bladesmiths a separate profession? I was under the
| impression that blacksmiths were your run of the mill iron
| workers, especially considering that a good blade could
| take far longer to produce than a blacksmith might be able
| to devote time to.
|
| Slapping a wedge of metal on a pole and calling it a pike
| could be done by anyone though, I suppose.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| So who shoe-d the horses then, was it the farmers?
| eschneider wrote:
| That would be a farrier, which is a sort of specialized
| blacksmith. That said, sure, farmers can (and do!) do that
| themselves.
| datameta wrote:
| Sure there were self-learners that expanded their trade to
| supply others for coin. However blacksmithing was certainly a
| skilled artisan / tradesperson role from antiquity to
| medieval times that operated on an apprenticeship scheme. One
| often had to dedicate themselves to it exclusively.
| josh8042 wrote:
| Same, also surprised there how highly butcher ranks with baker
| not even in the to 10. I had the impression that meat was a
| luxury in Medieval times
| handrous wrote:
| Maybe paying someone else to make your bread is _even more_
| luxurious. I wonder if people who ran communal ovens, where
| you bring your own dough ready-to-bake and then take it out
| after it cooks, were counted as "bakers".
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Definitely a blacksmith in almost every city, but probably
| fewer blacksmiths per city than the other jobs. Metal tools are
| built to last, and are expensive, so it was probably often a
| low volume high cost kind of business where production could be
| covered by a minimal number of smiths.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I bet most of a blacksmith's business was shoeing horses and
| making nails, not making tools.
| bserge wrote:
| If only they knew about planned obsolescence /s
| JackFr wrote:
| They must have been quite prolific then. There's a reason
| Smith is the most common surname in the English speaking
| world.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| TBF there are many types of smiths, so maybe that's why:
| blacksmith, goldsmith, tinsmith, coppersmith, etc.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Probably not; the odds are very high that the name
| "Smith" (or any analogue like "Kuznets") originally
| refers to a blacksmith. Most metalwork is ironwork.
| cafard wrote:
| According to Mencken's _The American Language_ any
| metalworking job qualified one for the surname.
| c54 wrote:
| Ive heard the possibly apocryphal reason for this is that
| invading armies would kill or appropriate workers in other
| professions but keep around the trained blacksmiths working
| the forge and producing weapons and tools for war. Smiths
| survived the waves of conquerors.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| Wouldn't be true for England which has gone the last
| millenia (almost) without invasion.
| c54 wrote:
| Duchies etc still changed hands quite frequently
| swiftcoder wrote:
| There were technically invasion attempts up until the
| 18th century, but even discarding most of those as
| insignificant, we can hardly neglect the War of the Roses
| and Henry Tudor's (successful) invasion in 1485...
| bsza wrote:
| Maybe it was such an honorable craft that people were more
| likely to name themselves after it compared to other
| trades?
| mackinley wrote:
| I have that surname but not for the reason that a
| blacksmith was in my family. My great grandparents took
| the name Smith at Ellis Island to Americanize themselves.
| I suspect this backstory is probably quite common in the
| US, especially amongst Irish and Italian immigrants in
| the late 18 to early 1900's.
| credit_guy wrote:
| My Dad was born before WW2 in a village in Eastern Europe,
| which was probably closer to a medieval village than to a
| 21st century one. He told me that a blacksmith would ask for
| 3 plum trees to do a certain job, presumably in order to make
| charcoal. I don't think there was anything special about plum
| trees, other than the local availability: people were (and
| still are) growing plum trees in order to make spirits.
| Giving up 3 plum trees meant giving up the spirits you could
| get from them for six years until the new trees would grow to
| maturity. So, yes, you wouldn't go to the blacksmith very
| often, if you could help it.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Of extraordinary interest is the fact that the blacksmith
| made his own charcoal and presumably other consumables and
| tools. From whence his anvil?
|
| Would you mind sharing some more details, such as where was
| the village? This is exactly the type of history story that
| I enjoy telling my children.
|
| If you'd prefer to share privately, my Gmail username is
| the same as my HN username. Thank you!
| JackFr wrote:
| > Of extraordinary interest is the fact that the
| blacksmith made his own charcoal
|
| True. In medieval Europe charcoal burner was typically a
| very specialized profession.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_burner#Medieval_ch
| arc...
|
| "During the Middle Ages, charcoal burners were
| ostracised. Their profession was considered dishonourable
| and they were frequently accused of evil practices. Even
| today there is a certain denigration of this former
| occupation."
| irrational wrote:
| I always knew there was something off about all these
| Traeger enthusiasts.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Correct. They want to smoke meat using electricity,
| buttons and timers. Like an oven.
|
| Give me an offset stick burner, that I have to fiddle
| with constantly. That is the proper art of smoking.
| easytiger wrote:
| > True. In medieval Europe charcoal burner was typically
| a very specialized profession.
|
| This thread reminds me of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a
| computer RPG which has done in incredible job recreating
| aspects of life in medieval Bohemia. It has a fantastic
| level of historical accuracy and things like charcoal
| trading as a dependency to a forge are integral to one of
| the DLCs of the game.
| JackFr wrote:
| While barbecuing last summer one afternoon I fell down
| the Wikipedia rabbit-hole and for a few days afterwards I
| was an expert on the chemistry, physics, history and
| economics of charcoal.
|
| Sadly now all I've retained are a few dirty smudges.
| apcragg wrote:
| Both of those lines have no citation so while I wouldn't
| doubt it, that page seems unreliable.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > From whence his anvil?
|
| As to that specifically, I'd guess (based on not much)
| that he inherited it.
| credit_guy wrote:
| I'm not sure if the blacksmith was making his own
| charcoal, or exchanging the wood for charcoal from
| someone who specialized in that. My Dad's village was
| about 250 km from this village [1] where people make
| charcoal even these days (one of the last remaining
| charcoal burning sites in the world). It's possible back
| in the day there were much more numerous such sites, so
| one would not have to travel far.
|
| But even if they had, trade over large distances was
| surprisingly common. When I was a kid and spending summer
| vacations on the countryside, my grandparents were
| involved in a business of selling timber that was felled
| in some forests about 500 km away. The lumberjacks would
| bring the logs during the summer months, lots of it
| (maybe hundreds of cubic meters), and my grandparents
| would sell it to whoever needed it throughout the year.
| This was happening during Communism, so I guess it was
| some form of under-the-tables Capitalism at work. I
| imagine similar arrangements existed throughout the
| Middle Ages.
|
| [1] https://wanderingcows.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/the-
| charcoal-...
| phonebanshee wrote:
| While it might be one of the last charcoal burning sites
| locally, large-scale charcoal burning is an active
| problem - https://www.unep.org/news-and-
| stories/story/charcoal-burning....
| Nick87633 wrote:
| Sounds like a wholesaler/retailer arrangement.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who
| specialized in that
|
| This is actually an interesting example of a market state
| that's sort of intermediate between barter and full
| monetization. Not everyone is going to want wood, making
| it a bad currency. Except that The Charcoal Guy always
| does want wood, so transactions that somehow involve him
| suddenly can use wood as currency.
| mbg721 wrote:
| What was the purpose in making the customers give up the
| opportunity to make spirits, if the charcoal wasn't any
| more special? Was demand high and the blacksmiths wanted to
| reduce the volume of low-priority requests?
| credit_guy wrote:
| I think the blacksmith simply needed that charcoal in
| order to do the job. Since people didn't have charcoal
| themselves, the blacksmith would take wood instead.
| "Three plum trees" was probably one option, the most
| relevant for the local population. I guess the blacksmith
| would have been happy with "one large oak tree", but that
| could be used for timber, while plum trees not so much.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The venerable ACOUP blog says that in order to produce 1 kg
| of iron, you would need 14,6 kg of charcoal, which
| translates into 105 kg of raw wood.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-
| they-...
| irrational wrote:
| It's interesting to think about what my life might have been like
| if I had been born 500 years earlier. I think carpenter or
| stonemason are what I would have been most interested in. But I
| really love books, so maybe I would have ended up in the clergy.
| Thank goodness I was born now.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I wonder what I would be born again as if rebirth was real.
| Maybe a prince. Or maybe a Nobel Prize winning physicist...
|
| You would likely have been a peasant. The veil of ignorance
| doesn't even make exceptions for HN readers.
| lokimedes wrote:
| You would very likely have ended up with the same profession as
| your father (assuming you are male).
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Totally explains why the most common English last name is "Smith"
| LambdaTrain wrote:
| Just visualized this Montpellier as Oxenfurt in witcher 3
| distribot wrote:
| Cool website. I miss this kind of internet.
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