The arrival of eyeglasses in medieval England

March 4, 2024 2:54 PM

Eyeglasses’ Arrival: How Immigrants Transformed Medieval England’s Vision. Eyeglasses can be considered one of the most important inventions of the Middle Ages. A recent study shows that by the 1440s people in England could buy their own spectacles, thanks to a group of immigrants living just outside of London.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (23 comments total)

so, by late 1400s, a high end commerical pair could set one back 18 shilling roughly £561.96 in 2017. " time when a middle-class stonemason was earning about 17 shillings per day.*  Spectacles were becoming attainable by the middle class."
posted by clavdivs at 3:35 PM on March 4 [7 favorites]

My favorite story from that period is the artisan who tripped, fell into the lens-grinder, and made a spectacle of himself.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:55 PM on March 4 [18 favorites]

Eye can see that.
posted by clavdivs at 4:03 PM on March 4

We've really lost something when you no longer find Spectakelmakere as a last name.
posted by mittens at 4:14 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]

Spectakelman indeed! What a fine name.
posted by doctornemo at 4:35 PM on March 4

Spectakelman, Spectakelman
Does whatever a Spektakel can

-Early TMBG lyric
posted by hippybear at 4:52 PM on March 4 [7 favorites]

There's a Brexit joke to be made here, but I can't quite see it.
posted by clawsoon at 5:09 PM on March 4 [3 favorites]

I feel like anyone who complains that people shouldn't wear glasses in shows that take place in historical periods can kind of bug off for anything starting in the 1400's and on.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:18 PM on March 4 [12 favorites]

Occuexit.
posted by clavdivs at 6:33 PM on March 4

so, by late 1400s, a high end commerical pair could set one back 18 shilling roughly £561.96 in 2017. " time when a middle-class stonemason was earning about 17 shillings per day.*  Spectacles were becoming attainable by the middle class."

Nearly £150k/year in 2017 money? That's a bloody rich stonemason...
posted by Dysk at 6:57 PM on March 4 [2 favorites]

I'm too tired to check the 17 shillings figure (or the conversion to modern figures, both of which seem a little suspect), but construction was seasonal then as it is now--more so, actually. Demand would have been fairly uneven. I wouldn't be stunned if the average English mason were actually in work only a hundred or so days a year (but that's me guessing randomly, rather than a statement of fact). Also, the mason would've had to maintain his own tools and pay for his own travel if he were going to a big project. If he was operating as a "general contractor" equivalent for a project, of course those costs, too.

So...not a bad gig as medieval times went, but they weren't rolling in it.
posted by praemunire at 9:22 PM on March 4 [4 favorites]

But masons were literally, like, Masons. They had a guild, they looked out for each other.

I can't research this right now, and somebody probably already knows, but who and what stonemasons were even in the 1400s was a pretty powerful class in society, I think. Look at all the buildings being built! And masons, like you talk about tools and travel but I'm pretty sure tools weren't a problem and if you were such a high quality mason to be needed to travel for a job you were probably compensated for that. There were SO many buildings being built and masonry was probably one of the trades that could be inherited as well as easily entered from outside... there were probably a zillion people chopping at stones and giving themselves lung diseases all over Europe even before Columbus had a ship on the ocean. How else were Cathedrals being built? Or the Vatican? Or even for that matter, the Coliseum, or for that matter, the Acropolis, or for that matter the Gates Of Babylon, or for that matter the Pyramids...

Sorry, I got a bit carried away thinking about the history of the need to fit rock together.

But truly, the high Renaissance was probably also peak time for needing stonemasons, and I do believe they had organized by then. So, I can't disbelieve it as a wage.
posted by hippybear at 9:46 PM on March 4 [5 favorites]

These were all reading glasses, which would have been a (literal) godsend to all those religious scholars poring over closely written texts under inadequate lighting, let alone artisans doing close work (if they could afford them). They effectively extended the working lives of anyone whose close vision began to fail with age, and they couldn't possibly be of the devil since so many saints wore them!

I'm asuming here that glasses correcting for short sight were developed much later, since while reading glasses only need a simple convex lens to give some improvement in sight, correction for short sight requies concave lenses ground more precisely. I haven't checked this, but I'm thinking late 19th/early 20th centuries.
posted by Fuchsoid at 6:15 AM on March 5 [3 favorites]

I'm asuming here that glasses correcting for short sight were developed much later, since while reading glasses only need a simple convex lens to give some improvement in sight, correction for short sight requies concave lenses ground more precisely.

You're right, they did come later, but not that much later. From another article on medievalists.net, linked from the article: "These early glasses featured convex lenses to help the farsighted focus on items up close. Concave glasses were invented in the Early Modern period."
posted by fogovonslack at 7:54 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Medieval Prices And Wages

Mason's wages in medieval England.
posted by clavdivs at 9:05 AM on March 5

They had a guild, they looked out for each other.

This is a very rosy view of guilds. There were rich guilds and much humbler ones. There was mutual aid, and there was also oppression.

Look at all the buildings being built!

Again, a rosy view of the late medieval (or even early modern) economy. Big stonework projects were expensive and hence relatively rare. (For example, there were only 17 dioceses in the late medieval English church, and I think none of their cathedrals were built in the 1400s. Of course, there would be recurring demand for maintenance work on them.) You just did not have a steady constant demand for stonework (in particular) construction over a man's career, such that a mason could comfortably assume that all the time the weather permitted (and the liturgical season allowed), he would be in work. Far better to be a mason than a poor farmer, for sure; prosperity was attainable; but precarity isn't a modern invention.

Now, the ink spilled on trying to determine relative wages and prices prior to the sixteenth century way outstrips our actual ability to know with confidence, and I don't know enough to evaluate the claim of affordability of eyeglasses (though the use of the phrase "middle class" immediately flags for me that the underlying scholarly work is outdated). I am making the much more modest observation that, for someone who was effectively a freelancer and who generally couldn't ply his trade for a good chunk of the year due to the weather, you can't confidently annualize a daily wage derived from surviving contract(s) to get an annual revenue. It's amazing how much we still don't know.
posted by praemunire at 11:35 AM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Very cool - I had no idea glasses were invented so long ago, although I guess they were nothing like the lightweight, super-accurate devices capable of correcting for complex prescriptions we have today.
posted by dg at 2:38 PM on March 5

Yeah, today's glasses are okay, but do they have heavy wooden frames that fold up like scissors? I think not.
posted by mittens at 3:07 PM on March 5

As a modern optical lab technician (such a less exciting trade name) and nerd, the history of the actual innovations and inventions involved in my work often pale in comparison to the societal and individual history of what it felt like and was considered by others to be a 'glasses wearer'. In short, prior to the very modern era it absolutely sucked, like in every way you can imagine.

Material quality was far worse, the best glass produced in those centuries would be laughable today if we didn't know what damage it can cause, comfort was non-existent, tons of basics about fitting and prescription did not exist. We are legitimately talking about strapping basic magnifying lenses to your face. These things were not popular, they were devices used for very specific purposes, and the blunt and grim reality is that folks with what we'd now consider pretty simple visual acuity issues probably weren't making it to a point in life and society where 'affording optical care' was an option.
posted by neonrev at 5:17 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone ever involved in making corrective lenses more widely available. I've been wearing glasses since I was five, and my vision has gotten so bad over the intervening years that I'd be useless with them now.
posted by mollweide at 5:56 PM on March 5 [3 favorites]

And by 1600 they'd spread to Japan, which shows how rapidly people adopted glasses since Japan was pretty darn closed off back then. There's a memorial to eye glasses being brought to Japan in Ueno Park.

And yet despite glasses being around since the 1400s for whatever reason no one figured out ear pieces until the 1700's, which is just staggering to me.

Which also makes Mizu's glasses in Blue Eye Samurai anachronistic. Glasses did exist in Japan at that time, but not with rigid ear pieces.
posted by sotonohito at 7:54 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Interesting article!

I watched the linked video. Did anybody else who watched it find the narrator's voice to be extremely uncanny valley and just... odd? If it's computer-generated some really weird choices about how to sound human have been made, but if it's human-generated it sounds like someone trying to sound computer-generated.

For the record, I don't expect at this point to be able to consistently tell the difference.
posted by inexorably_forward at 3:49 AM on March 7

for whatever reason no one figured out ear pieces until the 1700's, which is just staggering to me.

Consistent metallurgy with non-reactive alloys, is the core answer. There are a lot of problems involved with what materials can comfortably and safely sit on the face for hours, and getting metals that thin yet strong isn't easy. These are expensive items and no one wanted them getting broken easily, and think of how often stems break even now.
posted by neonrev at 5:26 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]