It's much easier to make clothes at home than shoes. I could probably cobble together an odd looking shirt given some time and instructions without needing to buy special tools, but leather shoes are an entirely different thing.
On a related note, this article reminded me of something one of my professors had to say about William Shakespeare.
There's a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing around Shakespeare, that he didn't actually write his own plays, that they were instead written by Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth or something ridiculous. These arguments usually start from his background: how could the son of a common glovemaker have gotten the sort of education necessary to write like this?
The thing is, glovemaker was a highly skilled profession. Exactly like you said, any dum dum could cut a hole in a sheet of fabric and call it a poncho, but handmade shoes and gloves take serious craftsmanship. This kind of profession would have put Shakespeare's family firmly in the upper-middle class.
This gets particularly amusing when the conspiracy theorists start saying that Shakespeare's plays must have been written by Marlowe.
They were born only a couple of months apart and had the same sort of background- the sons of skilled craftsmen working with leather (Marlowe's father was a shoemaker) who attended their local grammar school.
Both schools still exist- King's School Canterbury is a much more prestigious institution than King Edward VI School Stratford these days, but I'm not sure how much of a difference there is then.
The course of their lives diverged in their late teens- while Marlowe obtained a scholarship to study at Cambridge, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in some haste as she was pregnant with his daughter...
Why I missed that is not the meaning of the phrase "to cobble something together", but its root in "cobbler", which is - at least for me - something I rarely use.
Also Cockneys in old London would say cobblers if you were talking out of your hat. Also balls to refer to the pawnbrokers on account of their three ball shop signs.
Exactly. The article nods to this in a few places, but it's important to recognize that this is an accounting of "recognized" professions, something that left some kind of written account (most of the article is based on tax records it seems like). Which means at the end of the day this is mostly a list of what the men were doing.
Stuff done "at home" obviously involves work, but it wasn't a "profession" in a notional sense so it wasn't recorded. Certainly we should assume that there was trade within and between cities based on this kind of output too (i.e. "Is that one of Marie's sweaters?", "Here's a few coins, go to Sophie down the street and see if she has any more of that jam from last summer").
In tracing my family tree, I found a branch that went back to a small town in Scotland, and at least 3-4 generations back were shoemakers. When did my forefather leave the family trade? Circa 1850, when the Industrial Revolution apparently hit shoemaking hard.
He ended up keeper of a coffee shop in Glasgow, and his daughter was on a ship to Australia in 1891.
This statistic might also be a specialization for just this case/city. The author noted that Montpelier was known for shoes, which might mean people traveled there for shoes, or they were exported/bought by traveling merchants and sold elsewhere.
4% of the workforce being shoemakers seems enormous. One person working full time making shoes for every fifty-ish adults?
I don't know what the right comparison is today. According to [0], the fashion industry accounts for about 3% of world GDP. Perhaps shoes are a quarter of that?
I assume 1) people walked a lot more, 2) shoes took longer to make, and 3) didn't last as long which means more people necessary to handle demand. I could be completely off, though.
Point 3 is the key one - soles, especially. Rubber soles weren't a thing - they were made of leather (or sometimes textiles) and they wore out in a matter of a couple months or even a few weeks with heavy usage, especially give point 1.
Point 2 isn't really the case - your later period and fancier pointed-toe, lace-and-ribbon-bedecked shoes for the higher classes took probably some time, but a pair of common leather turn-shoes can be made in a couple hours.
Exactly, walking! Something few of us do these days even at short distances. I prefer shoes that can recobbled but I know from the dwindling numbers of cobblers that I'm a shrinking demographic.
That's an argument for needing fewer people, not more - since it happens in situations where it's less labour-intensive to repair shoes than to make them from scratch.
Not necessarily. If the materials are expensive, paying somebody to repair a shoe can be the cheaper option.
I think people still repaired socks after knitting them was automated for that reason.
The first automated knitting machine was from 1589. Queen Elizabeth I denied its inventor a patent “because of her concern for the employment security of the kingdom's many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened by such mechanization” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor))
Edit: maybe not. https://www.historylink.org/File/5721 learned me that gear for us soldiers in World War One was knitted manually. Maybe, those machines weren’t used (much) yet by then?
It does seem a bit strange, you're right. When you read into it though, this city seemed to have a higher cobbler population than most, as alluded to by the author.
> They were organized in different guilds, based on the street in which they kept their shops. In 1360, nine cobblers’ guilds were attested in documents, all situated within the city’s walls
I know almost nothing about medieval France, but perhaps peasants from smaller surrounding cities may have come to this one to learn or work, leading to this skew?
There's always an overlap of skills. Cobblers may have been tailoring on the side but wouldn't be counted as such. I've been to many dry cleaners that will do alterations or repairs on clothes but also will do some light shoe repair as well. They won't make you a shoe but can fix a broken heel just like I'm sure there are cobblers out there who are capable of clothing repairs.
When I was a kid there were vastly more shoe repair places than there are now. I guess if we plotted the graph backwards there would be way more several hundreds years ago.
As the article mentions, a lot of the "most popular jobs" is determined not by the popularity of the industries but by the fragmentation of jobs. If you have 20 people working on shoes and 40 people working on clothing, then if shoemakers are a single profession/guild but clothing has 10 people each working on a different stage of the product (which actually is the case, with the most labor-intensive tasks of medieval clothing production being in the multiple stages of making the actual cloth, not tailoring it) then shoemakers become a more common job.
I would expect that. Clothes last significantly longer than shoes (you can wear a cheap T-Shirt for way over 5 years, but even good midrange shoes start to fall apart after 2 years). It is also fairly easy to repair or even make clothes at home. But shoes?
