There's a long tradition of conspiracy theorizing around Shakespeare, that he didn't actually write his own plays, that they were instead written by Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth or something ridiculous. These arguments usually start from his background: how could the son of a common glovemaker have gotten the sort of education necessary to write like this?
The thing is, glovemaker was a highly skilled profession. Exactly like you said, any dum dum could cut a hole in a sheet of fabric and call it a poncho, but handmade shoes and gloves take serious craftsmanship. This kind of profession would have put Shakespeare's family firmly in the upper-middle class.
They were born only a couple of months apart and had the same sort of background- the sons of skilled craftsmen working with leather (Marlowe's father was a shoemaker) who attended their local grammar school.
Both schools still exist- King's School Canterbury is a much more prestigious institution than King Edward VI School Stratford these days, but I'm not sure how much of a difference there is then.
The course of their lives diverged in their late teens- while Marlowe obtained a scholarship to study at Cambridge, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in some haste as she was pregnant with his daughter...
Stuff done "at home" obviously involves work, but it wasn't a "profession" in a notional sense so it wasn't recorded. Certainly we should assume that there was trade within and between cities based on this kind of output too (i.e. "Is that one of Marie's sweaters?", "Here's a few coins, go to Sophie down the street and see if she has any more of that jam from last summer").
He ended up keeper of a coffee shop in Glasgow, and his daughter was on a ship to Australia in 1891.
> on a ship to Australia in 1891
What was she accused of? ))I do have about 1/4 convict heritage though.
I don't know what the right comparison is today. According to [0], the fashion industry accounts for about 3% of world GDP. Perhaps shoes are a quarter of that?
I think people still repaired socks after knitting them was automated for that reason.
The first automated knitting machine was from 1589. Queen Elizabeth I denied its inventor a patent “because of her concern for the employment security of the kingdom's many hand knitters whose livelihood might be threatened by such mechanization” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lee_(inventor))
Edit: maybe not. https://www.historylink.org/File/5721 learned me that gear for us soldiers in World War One was knitted manually. Maybe, those machines weren’t used (much) yet by then?
With medieval production methods, I would bet that making from scratch is significantly more labour-intensive than repairing.
> They were organized in different guilds, based on the street in which they kept their shops. In 1360, nine cobblers’ guilds were attested in documents, all situated within the city’s walls
I know almost nothing about medieval France, but perhaps peasants from smaller surrounding cities may have come to this one to learn or work, leading to this skew?
According to the article, the shoemakers were organized in guilds, so possibly this would standardize the reporting to the city gov.