In 1629, on the 12th of December, Hanns Oellsenn and the bailiff Lauritz Christensenn gathered at the council house in Helsingør a trading town in Denmark to discuss and make an inventory of the items that were stolen from Kirstinne Berrnt’s bleachfield. It was the linen bleacher Jenns Andersenn, who reported the theft, where multiple other people also had lost their precious linen garments, left outside to be bleached. The thieves were soldiers and when they were caught, they were sent to the prison Bremerholm in Copenhagen.
Een bleekveld in een dorp, Joos de Momper & Jan Brueghel the Younger, ca, 1650. ( Wikimedia Commons)
In the household-inventories from Danish trading towns, linen items ranging from sheets, towels and clothing items constitute an important part of household and personal textiles. Textiles were desirable items to steal, as they could be transported easily and resold or pawned, and acted as a kind of currency.
The Bleaching ground, David Teniers II ( 1610 – 1690), The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham.
As the documents indicate, the thieves were caught, but it is a bit unclear whether the stolen linen goods were retrieved, or if the aim of the inventory was to account for how much people had lost.
The linen bleacher, Jens Andersen himself, had lost one linen shirt and some linen garments belonging to his wife and children. Among the other people who had lost linen textiles, was the woman Citze Villums. She had kept 78 ells ( 48,9 meters) of flax linen in the fields, and had lost 42 ells ( 26, 3 meters). The wagonner, Hanns Rickersenn, was the owner of 42 ells ( 26,3 meters), but had lost 12 ells (7,5 meters) of flax linen. Furthermore, the brewer journeyman Søffren Madsen was the owner of 4 ells ( 2,5 meters) of linen, but none of his linen fabric had been stolen by the thieves.
A page from the inventory where all the stolen goods are recorded, Helsingør Byfoged, 1628-1631, p. 246 r, Danish National Archives.
The records also indicate that the soldiers had been stealing linen from other bleaching grounds in town. Among the goods that the bailiff and Hans Olsen made up were 32 ells (20 meters) of blårgarn, a courser variety of linen. This belonged to Lenne, the wife of a bell man named Annders, but was stolen from Christenn Dauidsenn´s bleachfield.
The goods were likely retrieved when the thieves was caught, as the council house also found items that had no owner; these included one flax linen sheet and two linen shirts. This was valued by two women and was assessed at 4 daler.
Fine linen shirt, decorated with lace trim, ca 1650. ( Rijksmuseum)
Even though this is a very small case-study, it gives us basic information about practical aspects of dress, such as how people living in towns handled the process of bleaching their linen textiles.
Furthermore, we get insight into the consequences of textile theft, and how the community handled this, and not least how much work was put into finding the rightful owners and the extent of people’s textile losses.
In 1587 and 1588 Alessandro Vignarchi, a peddler in the Tuscan countryside, was traveling across the mountainous area northeast of Florence. Alessandro was selling a wide array of products: grains, wine, cheese, but most importantly, woolen and linen cloth. He was part of a family of retail traders, that had been operating in the area since at least 1570, with their main activity based in San Godenzo.
Figure 1. Morozzi Ferdinando, Vicariato di Pontassieve, 28 September 1780. Source: Cartografie Storiche Regionali, Regione Toscana.
Alessandro spent several years traveling throughout the different valleys, meeting people that not only came from the Tuscan Apennines , but also from the countryside of Lucca, from the nearby Emilia region, and from the Chianti area. With his activity he reached a few remote villages that still today are in the middle of the Apennine woods.
Alessandro’s activity, and that of his family, is testified by a series of account books that are organized using single entry bookkeeping, which chronologically report the debts and credits of the peddler, recording the transactions in the name of the creditors/debtors.
These books will be the basis of my new research, which will focus on consumption patterns, information networks, and fashion culture among non-urban populations in the early modern period. The Vignarchi case study, besides being an interesting family saga by itself, deals with several historiographical issues. Firstly, fashion historians have showed how trends and fashions spread horizontally and vertically across social groups. However, it remains unclear which information networks and carriers were diffusing trends and fashions among lower social groups. Secondly, the peddler’s activity is also connected to more recent historiographical debates in mobility and migration studies. Thanks to this peculiar source, it will be possible to address issues related to the identity of buyers, the role of peddlers in the spread of fashion, and the influence of the city on the countryside. It also helps us to understand the role of geographical networks on habits of consumption. Moreover, peddlers played an important role in the creation of informal social relations, thanks to their action in settling credits and debits among their clients.
Figure 2. Gaetano Zompini, Le Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia (1746-1754).
The role and relevance of the itinerant trade has been well-studied, particularly for Northwestern Europe and Italy, mostly for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Places such as the countryside and the mountains have been left behind in research, while a preference has been accorded to urban areas. While most European cities provide rich documentation of their retail systems during the ancién regime, the countryside and mountainous areas suffer from a lack of research, in particular for the early modern period. This is due to a lack of sources for several of these regions, but also the historiographical idea that the landscape of consumption in these territories was significantly less developed with respect to consumer culture.
However, understanding peripheral areas is as important as understanding the consumption patterns and retail trade of cities like Florence or Venice, since in this period the biggest share of the population lived in non-urban areas. And, at least in Italy, this demographic distribution did not change until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the country started to industrialize.
Peddlers and itinerant traders are figures that are always difficult to define precisely. It is difficult to find, including for urban areas, sources that may shed light on their roles, functions, and movements since they very often moved along the borders of the different economic systems that characterized the Italian regions. Despite the difficulties in following their exact activities and displacements, these traders had a fundamental importance as suppliers to non-urban areas, for the exchange of small goods and textiles, the circulation of news, and for the connections they created between areas. Interesting, for instance, is the role of itinerant traders in the labor market and work mobility described in the work of Laurence Fontaine.
The development of this professional figure was probably a result of a context characterized by people moving seasonally from one place to another, and in a situation characterized by rural pluri-activity (that was linked to the issue of subsistence in several areas of the peninsula). A gradual process caused some of the rural workers to transform into itinerant traders.
Itinerant traders were, of course, involved on a more general level in regional and supra-regional trade, since they had strong ties with city merchants, the main suppliers for their goods. Peddlers not only sold their products to peasants in the most remote valleys of the Apennines, but also attended fairs and weekly markets that were held at the foot of the mountains, and directly supplied from the city’s merchants. In the case of Alessandro, because of his strong ties with Francesco Vignarchi, a cousin who was already a retailer of cloth, we can assume he infrequently needed to travel down to Florence to buy the merchandise himself.
Figure 3. Picture of a carta from the Vignarchi account book.
Peddlers, in the context of the Apennine area, had a strategic role since they connected different valleys and villages, spreading news (of different sorts) and products (particularly locally manufactured goods, as in Alessandro’s case pannibigi casentini– an heavy wool cloth from Stia – and wheat, which was insufficiently produced in the mountain area). In this sense, itinerant traders had a fundamental role in supplying the valleys with these vital goods. And, hopefully this research, now in its initial stage, will shed light on the activity of Alessandro Vignarchi and his family and help us understand what was happening in the mountains surrounding Florence, one of the most fashionable cities of the early modern age.
Finally, this research may show that peddlers were responding to the demand for flashy items by inhabitants of the Apennines. It is unlikely that these rural people did not have any sense of fashion, since, as a trimming master in mid-eighteenth-century Turin said: “Ama il contadino la comparsa, ma le facoltà non s’adattano al di lui desiderio”.[1]
[1]The peasant loves to appear, but his wealth doesn’t match his desire.
Since I started my PhD studies one year ago, I have mainly been focusing on collecting relevant sources on artisan dress in Renaissance Denmark in 1550–1650.
The sources I have gathered range from travel accounts, sumptuary laws to religious and moral writings about dress, printed sources, and images that shows the dress of ordinary people and artisans. However, most of my time during the first year has been spend in the Danish National Archive, collecting inventories of artisans from the town of Elsinore. Going through 15 handwritten protocols and one published, I have collected over 400 artisan inventories that contains lists of dress.Furthermore, these represents artisan masters, journeymen, artisan wives and widowers and their children.
In general, the records give information on the types and styles of dress, colours, accessories and sometimes the condition of clothing. Some of the inventories also give examples on people from the artisanal group who kept fabrics for having clothes made. In 1592, when the Blacksmith Peder’s estate was drawn up, the valuers found wool worth of 1 mk, which was supposed to be made into a kirtle. Furthermore, his estate contained a red woman’s skirt made out of say, an old leather kirtle with five pairs of silver hooks together with a leather jacket.[1]
The inventory from Peder Blacksmith from 1592
I have also found evidence on how dress items were circulated within the family, when they were for example given as heirlooms. In 1644, when Hans Petersen Brewer´s wife had passed away, his daughter, who at that point was only one-and-a-half-year-old, inherited a pearl ribbon, with small pearls from her mother. [2]
These few examples are only a fraction of the information that the inventories reveal.From January onwards I will be focusing on structuring the information from sources, and this will hopefully uncover lots of exiting things about the clothing culture among artisans in in Early Modern Denmark.
[1]Helsingør Byfoged, Skifteprotokol: 1644-1648, p 190-191
[2]Helsingør Byfoged, Skifteprotokol: 1583-1592, p 292-293
