Flanders wool

NAME: Flanders Wool Industry

ALTERNATIVE NAME:

None

LANGUAGE:

Flemish

TIME:

fl 12th /13th centuries

LOCATION:

Flanders (Bruges, Ghent, Ypres)

CATEGORY:

Industry

DISCIPLINE:

Wool trade

ASSOCIATION:

Economy/International trade

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

Cloth industry on which wealth of towns and expansion of trade in Flanders was largely founded

DESCRIPTION:

Flanders was a medieval principality in what were known as the low countries of northern Europe. The name Flanders means lowland, or flooded land. Flemish territory then included land which is now part of Belgium, Holland and north-western France. Large herds of sheep were kept in Flanders from the fourth century, a sign that cloth-making was always of importance, and the industry grew over the centuries.

During the twelfth century, the rulers of Flanders, in particular Philip of Alsace, increased the powers of the municipal centres and Flemish towns became important centres of trade and industry. The wool industry took off and became international. Imports to northern Europe were mainly of English cloth and in England a tapestry hanging was known as an arras - after the town of Arras. Like other towns, Arras was given a charter, and its prosperity supported a rich literary and artistic life where writers and musicians such as <funded> De la Halle* obtained patronage from wealthy merchants.

Quality finished goods were exported from Ghent and Ypres. At first the Flemish merchants travelled to England, Scandinavia and southern Europe to conduct the wool trade but during the thirteenth century the trade began to come to them.

Bruges became a major seaport, taking advantage of Flanders's position, with ports between Scandinavia and the Baltic in the north and the Mediterranean in the south, and between England and the Rhineland. Families of merchants became municipal aristocrats and the workmen also gained power as they united in guilds.

The wool industry guild was the dominant guild. Organised to protect the trade from competition, it maintained industry standards and organized the cloth workers. (The guilds were powerful bodies with their own chapel in the church, a common fund for welfare, an inn for celebrations, and a body of rules regulated by guild officers. Masters and apprentices were separated only by skill, not by rank. After several years' apprentice an apprentice became a journeyman and received a wage rather than being paid in lodgings and instruction. When a journeyman had a house of his own, his own tools and sufficient capital to buy raw material and employ apprentices, he became a master. As the industry grew more important, he was first required to produce a piece of work which proved that his own craft skills were up to the mark.)

As long as political conditions remained stable, the members of a guild were almost guaranteed to prosper. By the fourteenth century, the southern Netherlands was the most urban area of Europe, and Flanders and Brabant were the most important states in the south of the country. The importance of the wool industry can be seen in the fact that English envoys seeking support for their king, Edward III's, claim to the French throne chose to apply to Jacques van Artevelde, and not to the Count of Flanders who was the nominal ruler of Flanders.

Van Artevelde was a member of the cloth-makers' guild and belonged to one of the most influential burgher families of Ghent. It was under the protection of Artevelde that Edward assumed the title King of France. Van Artevelde reorganised Flanders with three separate capitals (Ghent, Ypres and Bruges) and in all places the guilds were supreme.

By this time conditions had been disrupted by political unrest and income from customs taxes diminished. Foreign merchants complained there was no security and hundreds of Flemish workmen emigrated to England and made their new country a competitor of Flanders. In addition, Calais, now in English hands, became the staple town for the English wool trade and by the end of the fourteenth century the Netherland buyers of English wool were going to Calais to get their raw material. English merchant adventurers were increasingly by-passing Bruges and were already making contacts in Holland.

When the river which provided access to the sea for Bruges finally silted up, Antwerp became the centre of commerce and trade in Flanders. But by now the province of Holland was as important as Flanders and Brabant, and in the sixteenth century the war between Spanish Netherlands in the south and the northern provinces caused more upsets in the wool trade in the south.

After Spain recaptured Antwerp in 1585, its trade declined and the Flemish Protestant merchants flocked to Amsterdam, taking their expertise, their contacts and a great deal of their capital with them.

<supported work of> Stevin*, a native of Bruges, emigrated to Holland where his engineering skills were of significant value to Prince <funded> Maurice* of Nassau who was busy consolidating the union of the northern provinces. Maurice welcomed the Flemish merchants and encouraged shipbuilding and overseas trade. The result was that the management of the wool trade shifted to Amsterdam where the wealth it generated strengthened the hand of the Dutch Republic against Spain and helped it to fight off interference from France and England. By end of sixteenth century, Dutch merchants were financing the Amsterdam fleets to look for new trade routes to the eastern Spice Islands.

In 1601 the merchants set up the Dutch East India company, based in Amsterdam. The Dutch were also active in the Baltic trade in the Arctic, and on the American seaboard and in the Caribbean. The expansion of the money markets combined with these events was the springboard for the success of the Dutch republic in the seventeenth century and the flowering of its culture.

ONELINER: Flanders wool, the basis of the early Dutch economy

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Blok, Petrus Johannes, History of the People of the Netherlands, G P Putnam's Sons, New York and London, 1899

Israel, Jonathan I., The Dutch Republic, The Oxford History of Early Modern Europe, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995,