Page 248 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

IMAGES OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Life in a Medieval Town
MOST URBAN RESIDENTS were merchants involved in
trade and artisans who manufactured a wide variety of products. Master craftspeople had their workshops in the ground-level rooms of their houses. In the illustration directly above, two well-dressed burghers are touring the shopping districts of a French town. Tailors, furriers, a barber, and a grocer (from left to right) are visible at work in their shops. Butchers were usually restricted to districts of the town that were downstream and downwind from where most people lived due to the smells from the waste products, many of which were often pitched into a nearby stream. Guild regulations forbade butchers from selling the meat of dogs, cats, and horses, and butchering places were routinely inspected to ensure that no spoiled meat was sold. The illustration at the top right above shows a medieval butcher shop in an Italian town. Although butchers wore aprons, they were relatively small, extending only below the waist, because medieval butchers were skilled individuals who wasted little of the animals they butchered. Even the blood was collected carefully in order to make a kind of sausage called blood pudding. Because violence was often a feature of medieval life, criminals, if apprehended, were punished quickly and severely, and public executions were considered a deterrent to crime. As one can surmise from the illustration at the right, executions were also a form of entertainment.
210 Chapter 9 The Recovery and Growth of European Society in the High Middle Ages
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