Family, Work, and Household in Late Medieval Iberia

A Social History of Manresa at the Time of the Black Death

Jeff Fynn-Paul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317599302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Family, Work, and Household presents the social and occupational life of a late medieval Iberian town in rich, unprecedented detail. The book combines a diachronic study of two regionally prominent families—one knightly and one mercantile—with a detailed cross-sectional urban study of household and occupation. The town in question is the market town and administrative centre of Manresa in Catalonia, whose exceptional archives make such a study possible. For the diachronic studies, Fynn-Paul relied upon the fact that Manresan archives preserve scores of individual family notarial registers, and the cross-sectional study was made possible by the Liber Manifesti of 1408, a cadastral survey which details the property holdings of individual householders to an unusually thorough degree.

In these pages, the economic and social strategies of many individuals, including both knights and burghers, come to light over the course of several generations. The Black Death and its aftermath play a prominent role in changing the outlook of many social actors. Other chapters detail the socioeconomic topography of the town, and examine occupational hierarchies, for such groups as rentiers, merchants, leatherworkers, cloth workers, women householders, and the poor.

1 Introduction

Work, Status and Society in Urban Catalonia in the Era of the Black Death

1.1 Scope and Argument of this Work

This book presents the fruits of some fifteen years of researching the labour and social history of Manresa and environs in the later medieval period. It can be seen as a companion piece to my Rise and Decline of an Iberian Bourgeoisie, which recently appeared with Cambridge University Press.¹ At the same time, it is designed to stand entirely on its own. Whereas Rise and Decline emphasized the political and economic history of Manresa, with a focus on institutions and their effects, this book is an attempt to define and delineate, ideally in more detail than has ever been done by a single author before, the society of households and individuals resident in a particular town during the late medieval period. That this is possible is due to a combination of Manresa’s moderate size, together with the survival of a remarkable series of sources, which will be introduced below. Whereas the bulk of the material written for Rise and Decline was originally present (in embryonic form) in my dissertation, all but two chapters of this book have been newly written as a result of research undertaken over the past several years.

The questions that are asked, and partly answered, by our study of these inhabitants are many. But before going into the series of sub-questions which will be of interest to historians working on various aspects of late medieval social and labour history, it might be worth taking a step backwards, to justify this project as a whole. Together with Rise and Decline, this second and final volume in my investigation into late medieval Manresa represents what might appear to have been a strange investment. Why would anyone take the time to investigate a single late medieval town, seemingly a relatively minor one at that, in such detail, and spend a significant proportion of their lifetime work capital on it? Whereas a generation ago, it seemed natural for an historian to spend a decade or two on a book detailing some aspects of life in a medieval city, in today’s world of neoliberalism and globalization, with their concomitant emphasis on ‘assessment and monitoring’ of workers, there is an increasing push for historians to immediately justify their work’s larger societal purpose. In the case of historians, this is perhaps not all bad, since there are very compelling reasons why society needs historians, and it is good to be pushed now and again to justify our work, especially if we expect to be paid to any extent out of the public purse. Wilde’s ‘art for art’s sake’ is simply not good enough in this regard. That being said, the current trend, in which managers seek to turn historians and other academics into productivity slaves, with endlessly uncertain contracts and little prospect of entering the middle class of homeowners unless one is extremely lucky, is likewise going too far in the opposite direction. It is precisely this sort of abuse of people-as-workers, now current in so many fields, that this study is ultimately designed to alleviate.

In any event, I embarked upon this investigation of Manresa because as an undergraduate I had become interested in the origins of the ‘middle class’ in Europe—that fabled group who, alone it would seem in the history of civilization, succeeded in pulling the bulk of a given population out of dire poverty while granting them scope to pursue their humanity more fully. It is fortuitous that this topic has come back again with a vengeance—indeed, it seems to be becoming the defining issue of our time—because during most of the nineties and ‘noughties’ the emphasis in the social sciences was overwhelmingly on what I have called ‘Foucaultian’ discourses of power, rather than Marxist/Weberian conceptions of power.² Put simply, Foucaultian discourses focus on in-group vs. out-group dynamics, highlighting, for example, the oppression of minorities and women, utilizing linguistic, conceptual and legalistic mechanisms of power, while Marxian/Weberian discourses focus on the economic oppression of working and/or labouring classes. At this point in history, progressives have tended to work in either a Foucaultian mode, or else a Marxist/Weberian mode, and have tended to ghettoize themselves accordingly. But it has always been apparent to me that both of these modes are emphatically necessary if we are going to draw a more comprehensive picture of the workings of power, and it would seem as though the progressive political classes are beginning to realize this as well.³

Meanwhile, I chose to work in the Marxist/Weberian mode and focus on ‘class’, seeing it as a corrective to a discipline-wide overemphasis on ‘Foucaultian’ modes of analysis in the 1990s and 2000s. And while I have paid the price in terms of reducing my chances in an (artificially) anaemic job market in the US, it now seems as though this was not a wasted endeavour. Though it may have looked to many in the developed world that the Western ‘middle class’ model was on an inexorable march to global dominance (as, for example, Gregory Clark asserts in the opening pages of his influential 2007 economic history A Farewell to Alms), in fact this was an illusion. As is all too apparent in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, even as Clark and other neoliberal triumphalists were heralding the beginning of a new era of global prosperity, an overdose of neoliberalism was undermining the hard-fought and hard-won bases of middle-class life in the developed world, while preventing middle-class lifestyles from taking root or expanding in the developing world. All this points to the fact that we desperately need to understand the long-term historical bases and evolution of the middle class in Europe (and we need to do this while remaining fully responsive to Foucaultian interpretations of power, and heedful to the voices of minorities and historically oppressed groups) if we wish to try again to create stable and permanent foundations for widespread middle-class lifestyles in the global future.

What then has fifteen years’ study of Manresa taught me about the origins of capitalism and the urban middle classes? First, these years of research have made clear to me that there is no such thing as ‘capitalism’ in the sense this is usually understood. The old-fashioned, ultimately Marxist notion that economies and economic processes can be divided into ‘capitalist’ and ‘not-capitalist’ modes continues to hold great sway amongst non-specialist social scientists, even while Marxism itself is generally out of favour.⁴ Rather than beginning with some deductive concept of what an economy might be, as Marx did, it seems to me much more logical and fruitful to begin with an inductive concept of how economies are actually structured and regulated in reality. It is better to focus on the fact that for given commodities and services, in given times and places, there are markets; and these can be interacted with in three basic ways. Some colleagues and I have proposed a model, where states can be seen as a) attempting to subvert the market via commandeering property or creating monopolies, b) attempting to work with the market (i.e., by hiring mercenaries), or c) attempting to bring parts of the market under the umbrella of the state via the creation of ‘nationalized’ or ‘socialized’ processes.⁵ In this volume, we see that it is not only states which have these options, but individuals likewise can attempt to subvert, supplement or utilize markets to their personal or familial advantage. For example, nobles might try to subvert local markets by simply stealing or otherwise utilizing violence rather than honouring commercial agreements. But non-nobles often tried to do the same by means of what we might describe as ‘dishonest’ or ‘illegal’ behaviour.

All this leads to a second major insight, which is that it is institutions which determine the shape of an economy. The policies of a ruler or government can radically and quickly change the stance of a given economy vis-à-vis various markets. In this regard, I consider myself to some extent a member of the Northian or ‘institutionalist’ school of economic history.⁶ Thus, while capitalism is difficult to define, it can be seen as the product of a number of particular institutional configurations which have been evolving in Europe since at least the high middle ages. And although non-specialists remain for the most part unaware, a great deal of work has been done recently to break the institutional basis of ‘capitalism’ and its evolution into its component parts.⁷ Briefly put, this includes at least three major inheritances from the Graeco-Roman world: property regimes with emphasis on positive property rights for ‘private citizens’, representative institutions which kept alive the notion of elections and public law, and monogamy, which later fostered the formation of small, market-oriented households. Medieval additions include the demise of slavery, which led to the augmentation of a wage labour regime in both city and countryside, the rise of public debt regimes, the rise of an (originally urban) middle class which took trade and profit as a vocation, and the rise of states. Renaissance or early modern evolutions include the rise of financial capitalism, the rise of scientific mentalities and a global trading culture which increased the desire to work and consume. These were all prerequisites without which the factory system would probably not have arisen, at least not in England in the late eighteenth century.

My third major insight is that while ‘capitalism’ is the confluence of a number of processes and institutional configurations, in fact the notion of a ‘middle class’, as it evolved in the cities of later medieval Latin Europe, is much easier to define. Moreover, this middle class represents a distinct step towards ‘modernity’, insofar as it offered a lifestyle characterized by the potential for meritocratic upward mobility, together with standards of personal freedom, rights and dignity, both for men and for women, which not only has seldom been equalled in pre-modern global history, but which forms the very foundation upon which the modern ‘middle class’ is based.

Having thus justified some of the largest goals and findings of the Manresa project as a whole, we can turn to a list of the historiographically significant questions which this book hopes to pose and at least partially answer. These include such questions as: who were the Manresan bourgeoisie? How can they be compared or contrasted with the gentry? Is this term ‘bourgeoisie’ useful? What horizontal boundaries are discernable between classes at Manresa? How did they function? What differences were there between upper-, middle-, and lower-class lifestyles in the city? What did these differences mean, and how were they experienced? Are vertical divisions readily apparent in the social fabric of the city? Did factions of families or patronage systems between wealthy and client families influence politics and economic opportunities? How was work organized in the city as a whole? How were professions and occupations organized individually? What parallels and differences were there between the organization of different professions and occupations? What role was played by guilds in these patterns, and what role was played by political office? What role did wealth play in determining occupational choice—and conversely, what role did occupation play in creating or maintaining wealth levels? How did occupation determine patterns of capital holding? How did geography, topography, neighbourhood and parish define life and opportunity in the city? How rigid were social strictures created by wealth, statute and custom? How did women of differing classes or who were involved with various occupational groups experience urban life? What presuppositions about women’s work and agency are challenged and confirmed by our sources? And more generally, did the urban system create more opportunity than it destroyed?

Finally, it should be said that no small portion of the goal set for this volume is simply to recreate, reanimate and conjure the people of late medieval Manresa from the pages of the many volumes they have bequeathed to us. Most of these sources are by nature dry administrative legal or economic documents which were never intended to aid in any such endeavour. But the fact remains that the richness of the Manresan sources, coupled with the size of the city, enables us to cross-reference individual lives from a number of angles, which is usually not possible in a late medieval context. The fact that few communities possess sources of this richness, dating from such an early date, means that the towns of Catalonia are some of the few societies on the globe which could ever be reconstructed in such a fashion for a time which lies some 600–700 years before our own. Thus, the lives of a Cluseta de Talamanca, of the various Jaume Sartas, or of a Ramon Desglesias are some of the oldest ‘normal’ human lives—i.e., apart from kings or similarly exceptional people—about which we can know so much detail. This in and of itself makes such a reconstruction worthwhile.

1.2 Structure

In order to answer the questions, both specific and general, which are raised above, this book takes two different but complimentary approaches. These are pursued in Part I and Part II respectively. Part I will present the history of two families in some detail. The first family is introduced and presented in Chapters 2 and 3. These are the de Talamancas, a castle-owning family who were members of the Catalonian ‘castellanate’.⁸ As donzells (squires) and knights, as the family heads were variously known, the family were members of the Second Estate of the nobility, and sometimes attended Corts (the Catalan Parliament) in this function. These might strike the reader as an odd choice for an urban history, especially in a fourteenth-century Catalan town where the nobility was both barred from participating in civic government and generally shunned participation in civic life, but indeed the choice was deliberate. The purpose in investigating and detailing the history of the Talamancas was to discover possible parallels and differences between the knightly families which ruled the Manresan hinterland of the Bages, and the burgher families which held sway in the city itself. As it turns out, the differences are marked and striking. This holds true even though the extent of the interaction between the Talamancas and the Manresan bourgeoisie was surprisingly great, particularly prior to 1348.

The second family to be presented, in Chapters 4 and 5, is the Sarta family. This family was chosen because they were a ‘typical’ Manresan burgher family, not of preeminent rank in the city, but who nonetheless rose to become some of the most influential merchants and important town councillors in the decades after the Black Death. Along the way, it will be seen that the history of the women of both families is often more illuminating than that of the men, since women often moved between families and their marriage alliances say a great deal about family alliance and social mobility. It is hoped that the parallel histories of a castellan and a bourgeois family provided in Part I will, when read in conjunction, serve to emphasize just what it was that made ‘bourgeois’ life unique in late medieval Catalonia.

Part II then moves away from individual family histories to provide a picture of Manresan society in aggregate. Chapters 6 through 9 accordingly present Manresan households aggregated by occupation and, in the case of women (since our sources do not as a rule name female occupations), gender. The intention is that the family histories in Part I will provide a sense of movement over time, detailing political, economic and social evolutions over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while Part II will then present a ‘snapshot’ of the city and its occupational structure as this stood just after the turn of the fifteenth century. Chapter 6 presents the occupational structure of the city, presenting figures and discussion of how many householders claimed to pursue which occupations, and what assets these householders held. The chapter then presents a ‘social geography’ of the city, providing a portrait of how wealth was physically distributed in the city, and how neighbourhoods were populated. Chapter 7 singles out two of the more important occupational groups in the city: the rentiers and the merchants, who are well known in the historiography as some of the leading political actors in Catalan cities during the fifteenth century. Over the course of this chapter, different ways of looking at occupational groups are presented and tested against the Manresan evidence, with some surprising results. Chapter 8 presents a third occupational group, the ‘craftsmen’ menestrals, who are revealed to have been anything but a uniform group of ‘labouring-class’ males. This chapter also presents a detailed portrait of Manresa’s women householders in aggregate, with the aim of showing how gender and wealth affected women’s economic strategies. C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Glossary
• Note on Citations, Money, Names, Accentuation and Capitalization
• The Kings of Catalonia-Aragon
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Work, Status and Society in Urban Catalonia in the Era of the Black Death
• Part I Knightly and Burgher Families
• Part II Occupations and Households in Manresa
• Bibliography
• Index