Women carding, spinning, and
weaving wool, from a 14th-century
manuscript. B.N. fr. 12420, fol. 71.
Courtesy of the Bibliothèque
Nationale,Paris.
through the warps), although some grudgingly permitted carding and wheel-spinning for
the wefts alone. Above all, they insisted upon the laborious, traditional method of foot-
fulling, which took three or four days for each cloth.
Some of these changes involved in the evolution of the medieval felted woolen
broadcloth also involved changes in the sexual division of labor, which, however, were
more related to the commercialization and urbanization of the French woolens industry.
A growing dependence on competitive export markets required greater specialization of
labor to provide both lower-cost efficiency and better quality. Insofar as early-medieval
and Carolingian cloth production was much more oriented to local consumption, it had
been a largely rural domestic or household craft with little formal division of labor,
except in the large workshops of manorial estates and religious orders, called gynaecia.
As that term indicates, the cloth-manufacturing processes of this era were performed
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