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Jehan Boinebroke († 1286 in Douai) was a French merchant from Douai, and 'undoubtedly the most famous merchant-draper "capitalist" to be found in medieval western Europe'.
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Life
Boinebroke was nine times alderman (échevin) of his city and accumulated in the course of his life a considerable fortune. He had wool imported from England to Douai and had peasant women spin it into yarn. He also developed a dying factory. He made his workers live in its houses at inflated rents. Already in 1245 he faced a riot by artisans and workers in Douai. In 1280 there was again unrest, which extended from Ypres to Tournai and Douai, but in Douai Boinebroke overcame the rebellion.
In his will Boinebroke decreed that the executor should first pay his debts and make up for all the wrong caused by him before his property should go to his four children. When he died in 1286 at Douai, published numerous individuals that submitted their complaints. The complaints grew into a 5.5 m long parchment.
Modern historians, in the tradition of Karl Marx, have often viewed Boinebroke's business activity as an early example capitalist exploitation of his workers. However, in the assessment of John H. Munro,
he was no 'industrial capitalist', a term that is clearly an anachronism for this era. He was instead principally a wool merchant, dealing in English and domestic wools, and his role as a cloth merchant was only secondary ... he owned land, with many properties in Douia itself and a sheep farm outside. As a merchant, he provided wool on credit to industrial drapers, who pledged their cloths, looms and sometimes even their home as security; and some of them also rented their houses from him. But most of his wage-earning employees were those required for the wool trade itself: sorters, beaters, washers and some wool dyers (who worked in his dyehouse). Although Boinebroke did employ a few others in cloth making, chiefly to work some tentering frames that he owned, there is absolutely no evidence that he ever directly supervised the central processes of cloth production.