Reply To: Inventory of Andrea di Clemente 1461

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#1766
Hans Hellinger
Moderator

Yes, but as with so many other things in the late medieval period, there was a great deal of regional variation. What is true in Bristol or even Dijon is not necessarily true in Florence, or Zurich or Krakow. Especially with cities.

The Rhine is a big dividing line for this kind of stuff. When it comes to artisans, it also varied a lot from town to town. In one city, shoemakers might be a prominent craft, in another they may be marginal. In each town there were some dominant crafts, sometimes specialists like goldsmiths or cutlers, sometimes big industrial crafts like weavers – and there were also always ‘lesser crafts’.

Generally though artisans usually did live in small houses, but that didn’t mean they were anywhere near as poor as was typical in English or French towns the 17th or 18th Centuries.