Because guild regulations sometimes limited the production allowed to each shop in order to make sure all masters' workshops had a market for their products, wealthier masters or merchant-entrepreneurs sometimes hired individuals or families in nearby villages to produce goods outside of guild rules. Guilds attempted to stop this, sometimes by force. In this petition from late sixteenth-century Frankfurt, a widow reports that guild members have blocked her attempt to find a weaver for her relatively small amount of yarn. In petitioning the city council, she is appealing to those who were politically and socially superior to the weavers' guild. She skillfully uses rhetoric that will appeal both to the council members' sense that they should be the ones to determine economic policy in the city, and to their sense of pity.
Distinguished and honorable sirs, I, a poor and distressed widow, wish to respectfully report in what manner earlier this year I spun some pounds of yarn, 57 to be exact, for the use of my own household. I wanted to take the yarn to be woven into cloth, but didn't know whom I should give it to so that I could get it worked into cloth the quickest and earliest.
Therefore I was talking to some farm women from Bornheim, who were selling their produce in front of the shoemakers' guild house, and they told me about a weaver that they had in Bornheim who made good cloth and could also make it quickly. I let him know - through the farmers' wives - that I wanted him to make my cloth. I got the yarn together
And sent my children to carry it to him; as they were on their way, the weavers here grabbed the yarn forcefully from my children, and took it to their guild house. They said they had ordinances that forbade taking yarn to foreigners to weave, and told me they would not return it unless I paid a fine.
I then went to the lord mayors, asking them about this ordinance that would let people confiscate things without warning from the public streets. They said they didn't know about any such ordinance, and that my yarn should have long been returned to me. I then went to the overseer of the guild, master Adlaff Zimmermann who lives by the Eschen-heimer tower, who answered me with rough, harsh words that they would in no way return my yarn to me, and that the guild did have such an ordinance.
Therefore I respectfully request, if they do have such an ordinance, I didn't know anything about it, and so ask you humbly and in God's name to tell the weavers to return my yarn. If, according to this ordinance, I am supposed to pay a fine, they should take it from the yarn, and give the rest back. I ask this of your honorable sirs, as the protectors of widows and orphans, and pray that you will help me.
Your humble servant, Agatha, the widow of the late Conrad Gaingen.
(Unpublished petition in Frankfurt Stadtarchiv, Zunfte,
Ugb. C-5o, Ss, no. 4. Translated by Merry Wiesner-
Hanks)
The households of merchants and masters depended on the work of servants, who made up between 15 and 30 percent of the population of most cities. Larger commercial and manufacturing centers had a higher percentage of servants than the smaller cities, whose economies were more dependent on agriculture. Perhaps one out of every twelve people in early modern France was a servant, two-thirds of them female. Children might begin service as young as seven or eight, traveling from their home village to a nearby town. They often depended on friends and relatives to find positions for them, gathered at certain spots in the city where employers knew to look for servants, or in some cities of Germany and France used the services of an employment agent. Some urban servants were in fact slaves, purchased from eastern Europe in Italian households or from northern and western Africa in Spanish and Portuguese ones. Most households with servants could afford only one, a woman whose tasks were highly varied; she assisted in all aspects of running the household, and generally ate and slept with the family, for there was rarely enough space for her to have separate quarters. Even in wealthier households with many rooms, servants were rarely separated from their employers the way they would be in the nineteenth century, but lived on quite intimate terms with them.
No matter what their age, servants were legally considered dependants of their employers, and could be punished or dismissed by them with little recourse. Male heads of household in particular were expected to oversee the conduct of their servants at all times. The city council of Frankfurt, for example, required employers whose maids became pregnant to pay the costs of the delivery and care for the maid and her infant for three months no matter who the father was. They reasoned that the pregnancy would not have happened had the master been keeping a proper eye on his servants. Though servants usually came from poor families, they identified in many ways with their employers, and tended to wear fancier clothing than poor people who worked for wages. This upset bourgeois notions of the proper social order, and many cities expanded their sumptuary laws to forbid servants to wear fine materials or jewels, even if they had been given these by their employer. Ordinances regulating the conduct of servants became stricter during the sixteenth century. Some laws even charged servants with causing the general inflation, as they were now demanding wages instead of being satisfied with room and board.
World History
