One of the greatest challenges facing the socio-economic historian of the Middle Ages is to understand the still poorly documented reality of servants attached to household economies. In Marseille, fortunately, from the thirteenth century onwards the evidentiary record becomes less elusive with the commercial expansion of the harbour city. By mid-century the intensity of transactional activities stimulated the production of notarial and judicial records, the oldest series in the French territory. It is also in the middle of that century that the city’s prosperity paved the way for the Capetian prince Charles of Anjou, the new count of Provence, to strike a peace treaty with Marseille’s rebellious citizens and recognise the community’s self-governing institutions and body of laws (c.1257).
1 Georges Lesage, Marseille angevine. Recherches sur son évolution administrative, économique et urbaine, de la victoire de Charles d’Anjou à l’arrivée de Jeanne 1re (Paris, 1950), p. 61. Collectively, these sources form a sufficiently solid corpus to draw a picture of the profile and the fate of men and women in the service of the city’s propertied classes over several generations. However, the main focus of this essay is on agricultural labourers who worked for urban dwellers in Marseille – the most populous city of Provence – in the decades following the Black Death. Two main arguments are rehearsed here: first, Marseille’s economy, despite its overtures to maritime and commercial ventures, relied heavily on its agricultural sector. Chronically dependant on wine and wheat production, and having lost up to half of its pre-plague population by the end of the fourteenth century, the city faced severe labour shortages within a climate of military instability that pervaded the county until 1400.
2 Marseille’s population hovered around 25,000 before the Black Death: see Édouard Baratier, La démographie provençale du XIIIe au XVIe siècle. Avec chiffres de comparaison pour le XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1961), p. 66 note 1. Throughout the fourteenth century several grain crises (disettes) hit Marseille, according to the city council minutes of 1318, 1323, 1340, 1358, 1363 and 1383. The municipal deliberations also contain episodic references to contingency measures regarding wheat supply: see Philippe Mabilly, Inventaire sommaire des archives communales antérieures à 1790, vol. 1 (Marseille, 1909). On wheat production, distribution and dependency: Gilbert Buti, ‘La traite des blés et la construction de l’espace portuaire de Marseille (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle)’, in Brigitte Marin and Catherine Viroulet (eds), Nourrir les cités de Méditerranée. Antiquité – Temps modernes (Paris, 2003), pp. 769–99; Monique Bourin, Sandro Carocci, François Menant and Lluis To Figueras, ‘Les campagnes de la Méditerranée occidentale autour de 1300: tensions destructrices, tensions novatrices’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, 66 (2011), 670, 673. On Provence’s political upheavals and military disturbances in the second half of the century: Martin Aurell, Jean-Paul Boyer and Noël Coulet, La Provence au Moyen Âge (Aix-en-Provence, 2005), pp. 275–94. Securing the input of agriculturists was vital to its economic recovery. Second, and deriving from the first argument, rural workers represented, with seafarers, the largest and most cohesive group that can be tracked in the extant sources, especially from the mid-century, when Marseille opened its doors widely to migrants, predominantly rural folk. More than half of the 1076 apprenticeship and labour contracts collected between 1248 and 1400 concern seafarers (302), agriculturists (160) and domestics (112).
Given the city’s sudden and massive mortality, and the ensuing steady influx of transient and migrant workers it welcomed into its walls, it is of interest to consider the fate of foreign workers in their new surroundings and how they were integrated into the community. Migrants undoubtedly sought to improve their fortune while competing with local hands for decent work conditions. But in a relatively short period of time the labour market went through such a transformation that it was bound to generate some degree of tension in the workplace. When in the fall of 1351 Robert de Rocha sued for breach of contract a certain Jean, a migrant from Brittany, he petitioned the court to have him jailed because, ‘as a foreigner, he ought to be suspected of flight.’ Himself an English goldsmith, Robert had moved to Marseille, became a citizen, started a family and built there a successful life.
3 Marseille, Archives départementales des Bouches-du Rhône, Marseille (hereafter ADBRM), 3 B 48, fols 60r–61v (1 October 1351): in the court document, Robert introduced himself as a new resident, habitator Massilie; a decade later, in the apprenticeship contract for his eleven-year-old son Antoine, he was ‘now citizen of Marseille’. ADBRM, 351 E 25, fol. 73r–v (9 July 1362). Being foreign was thus not an unsurmountable condition in achieving social acceptance, integration and upward mobility, but access to capital and assets was key to such success, which was assuredly denied to most unskilled workers.
The aim of this chapter is to understand how this turbulent period marked by high epidemic mortality and recurring warfare in the larger county of Provence altered the labour conditions and status of rural workers in Marseille. Departing from the formal parameters that regulated household service in the city, the interfacing of administrative, notarial and judicial sources helps capture the profile of servants who sought placement in farming households; the nature, form and conditions of their employment; and their evolving place in the workplace at the turn of the fifteenth century.