Chambres des dames – women’s workshops

Women as landowners were exceptions to the lives of the overwhelming majority, and it is easy to envision the medieval landscape as populated exclusively by a few wealthy folk immured within the walls of fortresses, but otherwise peopled by a sea of undifferentiated peasants with a few scattered islands of monastic contemplation.

The Roman gynaecea survived, or evolved, into the Early Medieval period when law codes began to attempt to regulate them and Christian women’s communities inherited some of their economic and social functions, often faintly echoed in the vit? of saints. David Herlihy’s fascinating 1990 study of women’s work in medieval Europe, Opera Muliebria, teases out the fragmentary evidence to paint a chiaroscuro of servitude and opportunity, skill and drudgery, oppression and liberty, where small-scale factory met finishing school, brothel, orphanage and convent: the backdrop to an irresistible theatre of narrative, scandal and moral fable.

Archaeological evidence from excavations and burials, particularly from continental Europe, shows that women were responsible for the dyeing, spinning and weaving of woollen cloth and linen in every settlement, to meet the immediate needs of their families. But cloth and clothing were also subject to lordly renders. As courts grew larger and as small trading settlements evolved into towns, production became increasingly specialised and long-distance trade allowed for surplus goods to be turned into profit.

There seems to have been a spectrum of management practices. A Carolingian law known as Capitulare de Villis – a sort of estate administration directive – provides the following:

Let the members of our household be well cared for, and let no one impoverish them.

Let [our stewards] set apart each year what is necessary for the workers and for the women’s workshops, and let them supply this fully at the proper time…

Let [our stewards] give materials to our women’s workshops at the proper time, as is usual, that is, wool, woad, vermilion, madder, wool-combs, teazles, soap, oil, vessels and any other small items which are necessary for their work.

Let our women’s workshops be well-ordered, with houses, heated rooms and cottages; and let them be enclosed by good fences and strong doors, such that they may do our work well.³

Sometimes the laws and ordinances of the Early Medieval kings reveal glimpses of the workings of such chambres des dames through their sanctions against crimes. The Alamanni of the Upper Rhine collected fines from men who had sex with the women of their workshops, listed as vestiaria (a wardrobe-keeper), ancilla (slave girl) or genitiaria (probably the senior girl, or supervisor). Transgressions with the senior girl attracted double the fine for the others.

Women’s specialist skills, not to mention their hard labour, were in demand: they required protection, the right tools and good working conditions – at least in theory. Some of the buildings associated with the various processes of preparation, weaving and finishing might be very large: a tenth-century royal palace excavated at Tilleda in Germany included a structure more than 24 metres (80 ft) long containing vertical looms at which perhaps a score or more of women worked side by side. Often, it seems, they slept in rooms above dye works, which, if smelly, might at least be kept warm by their furnaces. In the summer, looms and flax-scutching posts were erected under canopies outside, to take advantage of long daylight hours.

Saints’ vit?, in particular, allow us to sketch a credible picture of what life in these women’s workshops was like. St Liutbirg was a ninth-century native of Saxony, a lowly servant in a convent where she was famed for her unsurpassed skills, energy and beauty. She seems to have been an orphan, or the child of very humble parents; she had no protection outwith the religious community in which she was raised. Her vita tells of a childhood sin – a lie about a broken needle when she was learning the art of weaving – for which she later repented. Liutbirg came to the attention of Gisla, the widow of a Count of Saxony, who adopted her and took her to work in her own household. Gisla was a woman of considerable power, with administrative authority over a large tract of territory. As a patron with substantial wealth she founded monastic houses and promoted missionary work on her own initiative.

She possessed such talent that she surpassed all others in the places where she lived and was reckoned to be a lady D?dalus of the diverse arts…^§ she had such a grasp of the administration of affairs that the governance of the palace rested almost entirely with her…⁴

After the countess’s death, Liutbirg served her son Bernhard in turn, helping to raise his children. Later, seemingly yearning for a more contemplative life, she retired to a cell from which she nevertheless still managed a dyeing furnace and schooled younger girls in the arts. The workshops allowed some women the chance of a better life, a passage from powerless dependence towards the huge benefits of noble patronage within a professional career structure.

A starkly different picture of the fortunes of those raised in chambres des dames emerges from a chivalric tale of the twelfth century: Chretien de Troyes’s Yvain: The Knight with the Lion, a tale often regarded as a forerunner of the modern novel.^# It’s a vivid and beautifully constructed fable of heroic valour and the deferred consummation of love. It contains, as a subplot, the description of a palisaded enclosure, the Castle of Dire Adventure, in which Yvain encountered

…three hundred maidens doing various kinds of needlework. Each one sewed as best she could with threads of gold and silk; but they were so poor that many among them wore their hair loose and went ungirded. Their dresses were worn through at the breasts and elbows, and their shifts were dirty at the collar, their necks were gaunt and their faces pale from hunger and the deprivation they had known.⁵

Seeing them weep, the gallant Yvain asked them the cause of their sorrow…

We shall remain poor and naked forever and shall always be hungry and thirsty; no matter how hard we try, we’ll never have anything better to eat. Our bread supply is very meagre: little in the morning and less at night, for by the work of our hands we’ll never have more to live on than fourpence in the pound; and with this we cannot buy sufficient food and clothing… Here we are in poverty, while he for whom we labour grows rich from our work.⁶

Only in the verses of the medieval romantic poets are these women liberated by a chivalric knight. In reality, many of the chambres des dames must have been sweatshops. The women’s plea to Yvain might, seven hundred years later, have been made by one of Charles Dickens’s Coketown mill workers in Hard Times.