[Xylakant]

It's much easier to make clothes at home than shoes. I could probably cobble together an odd looking shirt given some time and instructions without needing to buy special tools, but leather shoes are an entirely different thing.

[Eric_WVGG]

On a related note, this article reminded me of something one of my professors had to say about William Shakespeare.

There's a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing around Shakespeare, that he didn't actually write his own plays, that they were instead written by Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth or something ridiculous. These arguments usually start from his background: how could the son of a common glovemaker have gotten the sort of education necessary to write like this?

The thing is, glovemaker was a highly skilled profession. Exactly like you said, any dum dum could cut a hole in a sheet of fabric and call it a poncho, but handmade shoes and gloves take serious craftsmanship. This kind of profession would have put Shakespeare's family firmly in the upper-middle class.

[Ichthypresbyter]

This gets particularly amusing when the conspiracy theorists start saying that Shakespeare's plays must have been written by Marlowe.

They were born only a couple of months apart and had the same sort of background- the sons of skilled craftsmen working with leather (Marlowe's father was a shoemaker) who attended their local grammar school.

Both schools still exist- King's School Canterbury is a much more prestigious institution than King Edward VI School Stratford these days, but I'm not sure how much of a difference there is then.

The course of their lives diverged in their late teens- while Marlowe obtained a scholarship to study at Cambridge, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in some haste as she was pregnant with his daughter...

[guythedudebro]

I'm amused and perplexed at your choice of the word "cobble" there

[Xylakant]

I’m not a native speaker so this was entirely unintentional, but now that you point it out I see the pun. Thank you.

[kingcharles]

I've never met a non-native speaker who used the word "cobble", and successfully too. Props to you!

[Xylakant]

Why I missed that is not the meaning of the phrase "to cobble something together", but its root in "cobbler", which is - at least for me - something I rarely use.

[mrlonglong]

Also Cockneys in old London would say cobblers if you were talking out of your hat. Also balls to refer to the pawnbrokers on account of their three ball shop signs.

[hungryforcodes]

Mind you -- my amusement was "odd looking shirt". It made me imagine what that would actually look like.

[ajross]

Exactly. The article nods to this in a few places, but it's important to recognize that this is an accounting of "recognized" professions, something that left some kind of written account (most of the article is based on tax records it seems like). Which means at the end of the day this is mostly a list of what the men were doing.

Stuff done "at home" obviously involves work, but it wasn't a "profession" in a notional sense so it wasn't recorded. Certainly we should assume that there was trade within and between cities based on this kind of output too (i.e. "Is that one of Marie's sweaters?", "Here's a few coins, go to Sophie down the street and see if she has any more of that jam from last summer").