Two distinct categories of agriculturalists were recruited by masters: fieldworkers (
cultores) and ploughmen (
laboratores). Both could find employment as either day labourers or resident farm workers, although twice as many ploughmen took up longer-term engagements on farms across the city and its territory.
1 Ploughmen were involved in 100 out of 160 contracts collected for this study, but they too took casual work, as evidenced in the judicial records. What truly set apart Marseille’s ploughmen from fieldworkers, though, was their self-identification in the civic body as skilled artisans trained in the
arte laborando, drawing on both technical mastery and managerial experience; boasting ownership of land, livestock, draft animals and heavy agricultural implements, they enjoyed the full privileges of citizenship.
2 In Marseille ploughmen were not considered ‘less skilled workers’ (Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages. The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven and London, 2002), p. 279), and the arte laborando, as routinely stated in labour contracts, was an acknowledged trade that justified the formal training of apprentices (e.g., 3 April 1353, ADBRM, 381 E 79, fol. 7r–v; 24 July 1380, ADBRM, 351 E 50, fol. 148r–v). See also Michaud, Earning Dignity, chapter 4; Francine Michaud, ‘The Peasants of Marseilles at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century’, in Kathryn Reyerson and John V. Drendel (eds), Urban and Rural Communities in the South of France (Leiden, 1998), pp. 275–89. In a display of urban patriotism exhibited on the occasion of a pageant organised for the translation of Saint Louis of Anjou’s relics in 1319, the ploughmen’s place within the
natio could hardly be doubted: parading their banner behind the king’s and the city’s, the
laboratores ranked ninth among the twenty-six trades in the procession.
3 May 1319, AMM, BB 11, fol. 53v and fol. 123v. In the context of Provence under the Angevines, Marseille saw itself as forming a distinct political entity from the rest of the county, thanks to the constitutional privileges it had secured through the peace treaty of c.1257 (see note 1 above). Well into the fourteenth century the city council asserted that ‘Marseille et la Provence formaient chacune une “nation”’ (‘Marseille and Provence each formed a “nation”’): Martin Aurell and Jean-Paul Boyer, ‘Une journée qui fit Marseille: le 5 décembre 1288’, in Thierry Pécout (ed.), Marseille au Moyen Âge, entre Provence et Méditerranée. Les horizons d’une ville portuaire (Paris, 2009), p. 209. This concept of natio was used and displayed in both official documents and public ceremonials. See also Noël Coulet, ‘Entrées royales au XIVe siècle: un rituel du faste et de la cohésion municipale’, in Pécout (ed.), Marseille au Moyen Âge, p. 223. Wielding a modicum of wealth and professional authority, ploughmen acted as engaged citizens, from performing philanthropic acts – such as the wife who donated a house worth forty florins to the municipal hospital
4 Mabilly, Inventaire, p. 147 (14 January 1378, AMM, BB 27, fol. 260r). As the value of dowries indicates social status, consider Raymond de Cardona, whose wife brought him in marriage 100 librae, a three-acre vineyard, and a house near the harbour: 6 August 1322, AMM, 1 II 50, ff. 59v–60r. – to offering their expert opinion in policy-making, while their consent was sought by city council to set ‘just and reasonable’ agricultural wages after the Black Death.
5 Their assensum was deemed necessary along with that of ‘other artisans’ (‘aliis artistis’): 14 December 1365, AMM, BB 25, fol. 54r–55v; see also Mabilly, Inventaire, p. 145 (7 September 1378, AMM, BB 27, fol. 244r). Conversely, the landless fieldworkers held no sway in civic life: they were hired to perform menial chores on rural estates and a fair proportion of them, especially by the last quarter of the century, were immigrants (Figure 2.2).
6 Some 54 per cent of agreements were notarized with foreigners.~
Figure 2.2. Evolution of local vs foreign rural workers under contract in Marseille, 1349–1400. Sources: As for Figure 2.1.
~
Map 2.1. Evolution of immigration radius of rural workers, 1349–1400. Map by Peter Peller, Director, Spatial and Numeric Data Services, University of Calgary.
However, as Map 2.1 indicates, more than four in five of all foreign workers (sixty-six of seventy-six contracts) travelled within the familiar parameters of Provence. But this trend became far less pronounced in the last three decades of the century (map inset), when the city’s porosity expanded farther, attracting transient workers from further afield, primarily inland and around the western shores of the Mediterranean (larger map), including villages in Catalonia, Piedmont and Calabria (off-map). Indeed, as Table 2.2 shows, over a quarter of them travelled a distance greater than 100km, an impressive range for rural workers. Some were quite young too, such as twelve-year-old Huguet Payen, from the village of Muret in Haute Garonne, who crossed 330km in rugged conditions to find employment in the port city with a farmer and his wife.
7 November 1384, ADBRM, 355 E 30, fols 50v–51v. Most migrants travelled inland through the hilly and rocky terrain leading to Marseille from the backcountry.Table 2.2. Distance of origin of migrant rural workers, 1349–1400.
Sources: As for Figure 2.1
Table 2.3. Communities of origin of agricultural workers in Marseille, 1349–1400.
Sources: As for Figure 2.1
As Table 2.3 indicates, most agricultural workers flocked to Marseille from villages or small towns.
8 Provence did not boast large cities. In fact, before 1348 only seven urban centres had a population of over 10,000 inhabitants: Baratier, La démographie provençale, p. 109. Socio-economic historians of the period usually divide Provençal communities into four categories according to the number of fiscal hearths: villages (fewer than 200), small towns (200–400), large towns (400–1000) and cities (over 1,000). They are agreed that the decisive criterion is not the type of habitat but the demography and socio-economic structures. Hence a village had fewer than 1,000 people and, while a small town might have up to 1,800 people and a large one 5,000, the largest city – Marseille – still had fewer than 25,000 inhabitants before the Black Death. Population density, however, by stimulating greater occupational diversification, defined further the urban character of a community, even though artisanal production was not absent from villages: Noël Coulet and Louis Stouff, Le village de Provence au Bas Moyen Âge (Aix-en-Provence, 1987), pp. 11, 55. But the tangible difference between a rural and an urban community in medieval Provence remains blurred. While population density may have determined the importance and variety of trades that inform the distinction between urban and rural societies, cultural considerations could also bring them closer. Let us consider the number of settlements – a few in existence since Antiquity – spreading north of the Mediterranean, between the Rhône and the Durance valleys, on both sides of the Aurelian way. Sharing a common notarial culture, Provençal valley communities, big or small, routinely interfaced through a tight and intricate network of administrative centres, laced with commercial hubs, markets and trade roads, which, in turn, were stimulated by commodity production and exchange that intensified in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
9 John Drendel, ‘Le crédit dans les archives notariales de Basse-Provence (haute vallée de l’Arc) au début du XIVe siècle’, in François Menant and Odile Redon (eds), Notaires et crédit dans l’occident méditerranéen médiéval (Rome, 2004), pp. 283–4. Scholars now consider notarial culture as a central factor that determined the urban character of the Midi’s rural communities: Bourin et al., ‘Les campagnes de la Méditerranée’, 680. The Black Death, despite its horrendous death toll (some localities losing two-thirds of their populations), did not change these dynamics in fundamental ways.
10 Baratier, La démographie provençale, p. 120; Coulet and Stouff, Le village de Provence. To be sure, contemporaries recognised the binary opposition of ‘urban–rural’ as a constructed understanding: when a villager from La Bastide des Jourdans, in the Durance valley, was asked by royal officers during a fiscal inquiry to define the word
usage (custom) that he had just expressed, he responded, tongue in cheek, that he could not, because he was, after all, only a ‘grossus homo et ruralis’.
11 ‘An uncouth peasant’: cited in Coulet and Stouff, Le village de Provence, p. 12, note 49.