[MikeTaylor]

Striking that there were more shoemakers than tailors.

[Xylakant]

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.

[Eric_WVGG]

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.

[guythedudebro]

I'm amused and perplexed at your choice of the word "cobble" there

[ajross]

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").

[vincebowdren]

Weaving and making clothing was done mostly within the household, by women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_medieval_clothing#:~:t....

[photojosh]

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.

[dotancohen]

  > on a ship to Australia in 1891

What was she accused of? ))

[kingcharles]

I traced mine back to 1600. They were all shepherds.

[ldoughty]

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.

[analog31]

They may have been exported to the surrounding countryside too. The one thing that a farmer couldn't make for themselves.

[dmurray]

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?

[0] https://fashinnovation.nyc/fashion-industry-statistics/

[mysterydip]

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.

[nradov]

They were serving a lot of customers from outside the city who would occasionally visit to trade and shop.

[qw]

The shoemakers also repaired and maintained shoes. They would replace soles, repair holes etc.

[honkdaddy]

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?

[kingcharles]

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.

[lordnacho]

You can keep wearing clothes that are messed up, broken shoes will stop you being able to do a lot of stuff.

[PeterisP]

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.

[zoomablemind]

Perhaps the ranking may be also influenced by reporting requirements.

According to the article, the shoemakers were organized in guilds, so possibly this would standardize the reporting to the city gov.

[lqet]

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?

[agumonkey]

I'd say one would suffer a lot more with borked shoes than torn upper clothing.

[bluedino]

Shoes might fall apart in 2 years if you wear them every day. Do you wear the same t-shirt every day?