A list compiled in London in 1422 recorded 111 groups or guilds of merchants and craftsmen then active in that city. Fourteen of these concerned themselves with leather or with articles made of it in large part:

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.

In a few years, however, some tanners and shoemakers had been sent over and were at work in Jamestown. But not enough of them came or else (as is more likely) they abandoned their trades to grow tobacco. A 1625 report declared that an extreme shortage of shoes and other apparel endangered the health of the population. Soon thereafter the Virginia Assembly took the first of many steps to promote leathermaking and other manufactures in the colony.

Sometimes with the support of the home government, sometimes without, the assembly passed laws in 1632, 1645, 1658, 1660, 1662, 1680, and 1682 forbidding the export from Virginia of hides, skins, and certain other commodities. They hoped in this way to assure ample supplies of the raw materials and thus encourage colonial craftsmen to make more of the needed products.

The legislation, in actuality, had less effect in Virginia than in England. Colonial craftsmen continued to prefer leathers imported from England, reputed to be the best of their kinds, for quality work—and to prefer tobacco growing to leatherworking anyway. But English merchants and craftsmen repeatedly protested the threat of competition in a market they felt belonged solely to them, so each colonial law in turn was either repealed on orders from London or simply allowed to lapse.

The 1662 effort, somewhat more elaborate than the others, had no greater success in the end. At Jamestown the legislature that year passed three laws intended to increase local manufactures. One barred the export of hides, wool, and iron; another exempted from taxation any craftsman who followed his trade and did not plant tobacco; the third required each county in the colony of Virginia to erect “one or more tanhouses, and ... provide tanners, curryers and shoemakers, to tanne, curry and make the hides of the country into leather and shoes.” The manager of this trade for each county was to allow the people two pounds of tobacco for each pound of dry hide they brought to the tannery, and “sell them shoos at thirty pounds of tobacco [for] plaine shoos, and thirty five pounds of tobacco for [shoes with] wooden heels and ffrench falls of the ... largest sizes, and twenty pounds of tobacco per pair for the smaller shoos.”