Other occupations, which now received special impetus in mediæval Grenoble, were the weaving of hemp textiles—for hemp was the most prolific crop of the alluvial river valleys—paper-making, and the manufacture of playing-cards; about 1630, the fruit of the vineyards on the mountain slopes, was turned into wine for exportation, and beautiful pottery and tiles were made of the rich clay deposits of the Drac. But of all these crafts, the one taking first rank from the very start, and the one which quickly identified itself with the town, was gloves. In the municipal acts, glovers often appear after 1606. In 1619 Claude Honoré, a master glover, was elected consul. And in 1664 a certain skilled workman, Jean Charpel, an artist in his line, proclaims himself glover to the king.
“One sees the glovers,” observes a noted traveller of those times, “filling all the streets after 1610, and especially the _rues_ Saint-Laurent, Perrière, Très-Cloître, and the suburb, together with the curriers, tanners and tawers, and the combers of hemp.”
Although most historians date the close of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of modern Europe from the era of the Protestant Reformation, spanning the period from 1517 to about 1560, Grenoble remained for a hundred years longer a mediæval city in every sense of the word. France continued a Catholic country, and Grenoble, sequestered in a southern province, scarcely felt the disquieting breath of the great religious revolution which was sweeping mid-Europe. Its ideas and its civilization changed little, even while fresh consciousness of its natural powers and material resources was impregnating the city with new industries. The spirit of craftsmanship—that joyous love of perfection, not only in the fine but also in the useful arts, which characterized the Renaissance—was still the ruling temper of its citizens; and the guild of glovers, the most numerous and influential of all the artisans, particularly personified this civic character. If we would gain some notion of the part glove-making actually played in the lives of these people, and the status of the glove-craft as it first appeared in mediæval Europe, we have only to journey in imagination to Grenoble in the middle of the seventeenth century, on the occasion of the great annual festival of the glovers.