Women at Work: Blacksmiths and Bell-Founders
Employers in medieval England were generally happy to hire women, for one blunt, unflattering reason: female labour was consistently cheaper than male labour for the same work, across essentially every trade open to them.
Women couldn’t become priests, lawyers, or officially practise as physicians, but they turned out to have a genuine presence in trades that might surprise a modern reader. Two separate London widows are documented taking over and successfully running their late husbands’ bell-foundries in the 15th century, one of them continuing the business for years — bells cast in that foundry’s workshop, bearing its maker’s mark, reportedly still survive in church towers across southern England today. Blacksmithing shows up too: one woman is recorded being paid to keep the royal forge at the Tower of London running and to sharpen the royal stonemasons’ tools while her husband was dead and her son away on campaign with the king. Another woman inherited and continued running her father’s architecture and stonemasonry business after his death from plague, keeping his (more famous) surname for professional reasons even after her own marriage, and was later commissioned to build an extravagant £100 royal tomb.
Because English surnames sometimes derived directly from occupation, and many trades had distinct feminine forms, an entire hidden vocabulary of women’s work survives purely in old tax and court records: throwster (female silk weaver), webster (female textile weaver), brewster (female brewer), baxter (female baker), lister or dyster (female dyer), and dozens more, some — like “fillister” — genuinely defeating modern historians’ attempts to pin down exactly what the job involved. Hucksters and tapsters, interestingly, became common enough occupations for women that the feminine form of the word eventually got applied to men doing the same job too, a rare instance of gendered vocabulary running in the opposite direction from usual.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.