The most graphic evidence can be found in the rapid decline of the Champagne fairs
during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Most of the textile industries scattered
across central and northern France, the Low Countries, and the adjacent Rhineland had
been vitally dependent upon these fairs, which had long served as the hub of western
European and especially Mediterranean-oriented commerce. During the mid-13th-century
apogee of these fairs, and in the famous Hanse of the Seventeen Towns, producers of the
cheaper, lighter textiles well outnumbered those of luxury woolens. The great majority of
the draperies were then francophone; and even in Flanders, a French county, francophone
draperies then predominated over the draperies flamigantes. But by the mid-14th century,
the big urban draperies flamigantes of Ypres, Ghent, and Bruges had gained a decisive
ascendancy by specializing more and more in those luxury woolens whose commerce
could better withstand rising marketing costs; in stark contrast, dozens of the smaller,
cheaper-line French draperies in French Flanders (annexed to the royal domain), Tournai,
Artois, Ponthieu, Vermandois, Champagne, and the Île-de-France had either disappeared
or were relegated to a much more modest existence in supplying purely local or regional
markets. Of the linen industries in this region, only the luxury producers, chiefly at
Reims, survived and prospered. The supremacy of those urban Flemish draperies was
short-lived, however, as they encountered increasingly severe competition in luxury
woolens from quasirural nouvelles draperies within Flanders itself and from draperies in
neighboring imperial Brabant, Holland, Florence and other north Italian towns, and
England. Within France, by the late 14th and early 15th centuries, several new Norman
draperies also provided some competition in the luxury field, while in the south new
draperies in Languedoc and Catalonia sold cheap to medium-priced woolens in
Mediterranean markets that the northern draperies could no longer effectively service.
Finally, in 1470, with the dawning of the early-modern era, France gained a new textile
industry, when Louis XI successfully established an Italian-style silk-making craft at
Tours.
John H.Munro
[See also: CHAMPAGNE; CLOTHING, COSTUME, AND FASHION; FAIRS AND
MARKETS; FLANDERS; TAPESTRY; VESTMENTS, ECCLESIASTICAL; WOOL
TRADE]
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