The Leatherworker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg / Being an Account of the Nature of Leather, & of the Crafts Commonly Engaged in the Making & Using of It.

by Thomas K. Ford

loriners (or lorimers)

malemakers

pouchmakers

saddlers

skinners

tanners

whitetawyers

Of these, only tanners, curriers, cordwainers, and saddlers showed up prominently in colonial Virginia—although always as individual craftsmen, not as members of an organized craft or guild.

Cordwainers—the word comes from cordovan, a kind of sumac-tanned leather much favored in medieval England and made originally in the Spanish city of Cordoba—were shoemakers. The craft is to be carefully distinguished from that of cobbling, which is the mending of shoes. Although practically all colonial Virginia shoemakers also did shoe repairing, the trade of cobbling was looked on, especially by cordwainers, as inferior in status.

Curiously, the initial groups of colonists sent to Jamestown by the Virginia Company lacked any leather craftsmen. Somehow the London “adventurers” thought that the real adventurers to America could get along without tanners, curriers, or shoemakers. Just how the colonists were expected to acquire shoes grows even more puzzling in light of the English law that forbade exportation of goods made of English leather.