Trade, Crafts and Markets in Norman Realms

Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, Norman rule brought Normandy in northern France, England after 1066, and southern Italy and Sicily into overlapping political and commercial networks. Merchants used rivers, ports and markets, while local rights determined where goods could be sold and which rulers or institutions collected revenue. The routes and currencies differed by region, and craft production ranged from cooking vessels to textiles made for a royal court.

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Rouen and the Norman shipping network

Rouen, on the lower Seine in Normandy, joined a river route to maritime crossings. By the early eleventh century it attracted merchants from England, Flanders, a region spanning parts of present-day Belgium and northern France, Francia, the neighboring French kingdom, and Ireland. Deniers, small silver coins minted in Rouen, have been found in hoards in Scandinavia, Italy and Poland, showing how far its coinage circulated. Merchants from Rouen also had their own wharf in London by the reign of Edward the Confessor. A ducal act dated around 1150 to 1151 directed ships sailing between Normandy and Ireland through Rouen, with one ship each year allowed to call first at Cherbourg.

The port and its river traffic produced income for the dukes. A bridge across the Seine probably increased traffic toward the city, while licenses to navigate, mooring charges and fees on wine and other merchandise stored in riverside warehouses turned movement into ducal revenue. These arrangements linked sea travel with the handling and storage of goods on land, under rules the dukes could grant and enforce.

Markets and food supply in England

Markets gave rural producers a regular place to bring food and other goods to town buyers. A formal charter granted the right to hold a market, tying a place of exchange to lordship and regulation. Woodstock received a market grant in 1154 and Banbury in 1155 to 1156. Banbury was already an ecclesiastical center when its market was formally recorded.

Archaeology at Oxford helps explain food preparation at household level. A study of pottery residues from cooking vessels spanning the tenth to thirteenth centuries found animal fats, especially from ruminants such as cattle, sheep or goats, in many sampled pots. Dairy fats appeared in just two pre-Conquest vessels: a Late Saxon Shelly Ware sherd from St Aldate’s and a St Neot’s Ware sherd from Queen’s College. The market charters show how authorities established selling places, while the residues identify foods prepared in particular vessels.

Craft work joined local materials to wider demand

Wool could leave England as a fleece or be made into cloth for local use and sale abroad. Fibers were spun into yarn, then woven into cloth by crossing lengthwise warp threads with weft. A fuller washed the woven fabric to remove grease and pounded or trampled it so the fibers tightened into a thicker, smoother textile. In a water-powered fulling mill, a wheel turned a shaft whose cams lifted and dropped hammers onto cloth soaking in a tub. A gift to the Norman abbey of Saint-Wandrille records a fulling mill by 1087, an early example of water power applied to cloth finishing in the region.

Pottery production joined makers, local resources and town customers in another way. At Pound Lane in Canterbury, an excavated kiln produced wheel-thrown vessels around the middle of the twelfth century. The pottery used local materials but included glazing and rouletted decoration, made by rolling a patterned implement across the clay before firing, unfamiliar in the local Kentish tradition. Archaeologists suggest that a continental potter, perhaps a Norman, worked the kiln. Oxford’s cooking residues, by contrast, show how pots were used in households.

Ports, property and credit in southern Italy

In the principality of Salerno in southern Italy, the Benedictine abbey of Holy Trinity at Cava bought and managed houses, land and port rights. Its archive preserves a house sale in Salerno from 1130: the price was recorded as 150 solidi, a monetary accounting unit, and the seller handed over four older charters concerning the property. He and his heirs could borrow those documents for a limited period if they needed to testify about the sale, then had to return them. In 1142, another man secured a debt to the monastery against two pieces of land and deposited seven charters relating to them. When he could not repay seven months later, he transferred title to the abbey. Credit thus joined a recorded sum, land as security and documents that established who held the property.

A port was also a valuable right. In 1086 Duke Roger Borsa granted Cava rights at Vietri on the coast near Salerno. In 1182 the abbot brought the duke’s charter, authenticated by a lead seal, and a royal mandate to a hearing at Salerno to defend those rights against the local governor. The documents supported the abbey’s claim to harbor access and the revenue attached to the port right.

Sicily and southern Italy: records, coins and royal work

About eighty Arabic documents from Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily, dated from around 1060 to 1250, record the administration of land and exchange. Some set out estate boundaries when land was granted to Christian churches or lords; others list Muslim households on estates. Documents drawn up under Muslim qadis, judges, include property transactions and commercial contracts, while other agreements concern irrigation. The corpus also records land taxes and the religious poll tax owed by Muslim peasants to Christian lords. These texts connect estate administration, cultivation, commerce and Muslim judicial authority within Sicily’s economy.

Across southern Italy, people encountered different coin traditions as they moved between regions. Apulia used Byzantine gold nomismata and copper nummi, while cities on the Tyrrhenian coast such as Salerno and Amalfi used Arab quarter-dinars called tarì or local imitations. Sicily had a more uniform currency, largely in Arab-style coins. After the Normans captured Palermo in 1072, its mint struck gold quarter-dinars with Arabic inscriptions and a small cross, the tau, marking Christian rule on a familiar coin form. Roger II’s reform of 1140 introduced a silver ducale alongside the tarì. The article on Norman coins explains these regional issues in more detail.

Palermo’s royal workshop brought specialized artisans together for court commissions. Made for Roger II in 1133 to 1134, the mantle combined rich silk samite with gold embroidery and pearl, enamel and gemstone ornament. Its gold Kufic inscription, an angular form of Arabic script, records manufacture in Palermo’s royal workshop during his reign. The mantle passed with Norman treasure to the Hohenstaufen and later joined the coronation robes of Holy Roman kings and emperors.