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The cloth exports of Flanders and northern France during the thirteenth century: a luxury trade?
Author(s) -
CHORLEY PATRICK
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
the economic history review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.014
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1468-0289
pISSN - 0013-0117
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0289.1987.tb00436.x
Subject(s) - economics , international trade , economic geography , geography
pirenne was emphatic that the wool textiles of Flanders and northern France that were exported throughout Europe and to the Levant during the thirteenth century and formed the basis of the prosperity of the region were "in the full force of the term luxury products". Although this view has been questioned, it remains the accepted orthodoxy. The most recent historian of Flanders, for example, repeats Pirenne almost word for word and goes on to describe the Flemish cloth as a product held in "matchless esteem" by an "exclusive public throughout Europe". The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive picture than has so far been undertaken of the structure of the trade and to address more particularly the question of whether the cheaper varieties of cloth were an important component of the trade and what their characteristics were. On this basis the validity of the standard view can be tested.1 The pertinent evidence is of two types. There is commercial evidence, which itself falls into two categories; the record of actual transactions in notarial contracts and in the accounts of merchants and consumers on the one hand; and on the other, official schedules of prices, duties, and cloth lengths laid down by the authorities. Such documentation is largely limited to the Italian, southern French, and Iberian markets, but it is sufficient to permit a detailed breakdown of the relative prices of textiles entering into long-distance trade-both of woollen cloth proper and the various special types of cloth such as says, stanforts, and biffes and of their place of manufacture. On relative volumes, although it provides some pointers, it is not so informative; still less so on the classes of consumer. Secondly, there is the evidence of guild regulations, which, although not as abundant as for the subsequent period, survive from the later thirteenth century for a number of the major centres of production. These throw more light on the structure of the trade. More importantly, the specifications laid down by the guilds make it possible to relate the range of prices demonstrated by the commercial evidence to differences in the techniques of manufacture, and so of quality, an obscure