[Guild certificate for Margueritte Baillet]

Rouen, 5 May 1700

1 document | 225 x 260 mm

A guild certificate for one Margueritte Baillet, dated 5 May 1700, declaring her a maitresse—specifically as a daughter of a master, and so surely with some curtailed privileges—and granting her the right to work as a merchant in and around Rouen selling ribbon, lace, and fringe. In all likelihood, this document would have allowed Baillet to handle much more than the three materials specified, giving her a wide berth in the textile business. Eighteenth-century French guild statutes, for example, often speak of a broader tissutier-rubannier guild. The certificate would have functioned much like one's first certificat de congé, a standard guild discharge document given to workers after leaving a master's employ. These were vital endorsements in a laborer's search for work, and no doubt for housing, too. ¶ Despite evidence that women’s opportunities for paid work decreased as the early modern period advanced, many women still played an active role in the textile trade. One need only look at the witnesses here attesting to Baillet's competence, all of them women: Catherine Crestien, Marie Tubeuf, Anne Collas, and Catherine Quillebeuf. Still, while we highlight the role these women played in this industry, “one must avoid triumphalism. A number of women resisted ‘inclusion’ in the guild system, finding the cost and regulation entailed by membership to outweigh its benefits” (Crowston). Many women instead found themselves before a judge for working without proper documentation. ¶ A wonderful relic of pre-revolutionary working-class France, documenting not one, but five women active in the Rouen textile trade in 1700.

PROVENANCE: With the signatures of Catherine Chrestien and Anne Collas on the blank verso, in different hands, and presumably their own. Both of these women were among those who bestowed Baillet her master status. An additional early note reads, "Twenty-second piece of the fifth book" (Vingt deuxième pièce de la cinquième livre). Part of an employer's or administrator's organizational scheme?

CONDITION: Printed on parchment and completed in manuscript, with an official city stamp at the top, and signed at bottom by several authorities. Near the bottom of the document, Margueritte appears instead as Madelaine, which we take to be a mistake. ¶ Quite soiled; creased at least three times across each dimension; a couple of small holes, and some small tears in the edges.

REFERENCES: Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Is there a decline in women’s economic position in the sixteenth century?” Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 165-166; Clare Crowston, “Women, Gender, and Guilds in Early Modern Europe: An Overview of Recent Research,” International Review of Social History 53, suppl. 16 (2008), p. 44 (cited above); Daryl M. Hafter, “Women in the Underground Business of Eighteenth-Century Lyon,” Enterprise & Society 2.1 (March 2001), p. 14 (in 18c Lyon, half of defendants in guild-related lawsuits were women accused of working without proper credentials); Janine Lanza, “Women Minding the Store in Eighteenth-Century France,” Early Modern Women 10.1 (Fall 2015), p. 131 (“Despite the preponderance of men who directed businesses, women played an active and often crucial role, particularly in family businesses in the skilled trades—the bakeries, shoemakers’ shops, mercers’ boutiques, and other guild-sanctioned shops—that dominated the business landscape of pre-Revolutionary France”); Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge Univ, 2019), p. 32 (“Guilds were fundamental to medieval—and, we shall see, early modern—urban industrial economies, but the sheer bulk of their surviving records and their multifaceted role in public life can create an exaggerated sense of their strength, solidarity, inclusiveness, and significance.”); James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe 1300-1914 (2000), 141 (“For all but the wealthiest master craftsmen, economic insecurity was a constant fact of life for artisans from the late Middle Ages into the age of industrialization. For most masters and journeymen of most trades, employment was uncertain and irregular”), 251 (“If life was precarious and uncertain for the relatively sedentary master craftsman, how much more so it was for the transient journeyman. For him, knowing and being known was of paramount importance because it was the only path to acquiring and preserving material security, respectability, and the social status all artisans of whatever rank craved.”)

Item #722