Saint-Omer and Its Textile Trades in the Late Middle Ages: A Contribution to the Proto-Industrialization Debate

Abstract

THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT MEDIEVAL CLOTH-PRODUCING CITIES of Flanders and Artois has long attracted the attention of historians because it touches on a number of themes central to our understanding of both the medieval economy and the emergence of the modern industrial economy. Flanders and Artois comprised the most urbanized region in medieval Europe north of the Alps, and, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the principal cities of this regionBruges, Ghent, Ypres, Douai, and Lille in Flanders, and Saint-Omer and Arras in Artois-rose to prominence through international trade and the manufacture and sale of woolen textiles. By the late thirteenth century, there were signs that these cities had passed their apogee and were entering a period of prolonged decline. Changes in international trade patterns, especially the decline of the fairs of Champagne, the rise of the German Hanseatic League, and the growing activity of Italian merchants in north European commerce, undermined the position that they had played in long-distance trade. At approximately the same time, these cities sustained a blow to their cloth manufacturing interests from the proliferation of new locations producing cloth for,the export market, beginning with the villages and small towns of Flanders and Artois in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, then the villages and cities of Brabant and Holland in the second half of the fourteenth century, and finally those of England in the fifteenth century. These new cloth manufacturers either competed directly with the traditional textile centers by producing similar types of cloth, often at less cost than the traditional producers could manage, or indirectly, by dividing the market for textiles. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the cities that had predominated in Flanders and Artois during the High Middle Ages clearly were in decline: their populations had shrunk, their cloth manufacturing had diminished, and their central position in trade had been lost to new rivals. The history of these medieval textile centers took on special significance for scholars at the end of the nineteenth century. As northwestern Europe completed