Craftsmen or merchants: Medieval drapery from Italy to Normandy

Historians have long believed that, in medieval wool drapery, the putting-out system, or Verlagssystem, dominated. The great merchant-entrepreneur could alone control all the operations, reducing craftsmen to the status of wage earners. Italy served as a model. But it was probably an exception. Elsewhere, weavers were often asked to choose either to work for a merchant or to become a draper, taking on a role of craftsman-entrepreneur. They would then sell their cloth to a merchant: this is known as the Kaufsystem. The example of the Rouen region helps us to clarify the role of merchants, their involvement in production, and their influence on the rural drapery business in general. It also allows us to look at the reality of the control by merchants, the financing of the businesses, the dispersion of production, and the role played by the poor people involved in drapery, who lived from cloth to cloth. An important point to look at is the size of the businesses. This “small commodity production” seems to have been the dominant form. To compare this model with the “bazaar economy” gives a better picture of how it functioned: wide availability of credit, inversion of hierarchies, multiplicity of transactions, and particularly good flexibility in the organization of work, which involved credit and a wage system. The putting-out system was not the only path to the Industrial Revolution.