Marseille’s wider opening to foreign rural workers toward the end of the century puts into perspective the traditional advantage enjoyed by the
laboratores’ families of old stock, who had long identified with the civic body. After the Black Death, the municipal government did not envision harsh labour laws in its attempts to reduce rampant inflation, in part because citizen ploughmen were both landowners and wage earners, and sought instead a rough consensus around labour policies.
1 In so far as legislation ‘revealed how the elites felt about wage labour and wage workers’, Marseille’s ruling class were compelled to take into consideration the ubiquitous economic situation of the ploughmen, not just the needs of ‘merchant entrepreneurs and wealthy master artisans’ to secure cheap labour, as in other regions at this time: Lis and Soly, Worthy Efforts, pp. 438–9. Despite the economic stress created by the demographic crisis, Marseille’s political elite did not overtly rule along class-divided lines or opt for anti-immigration measures, unlike some other governments across Christendom.
2 Such as England, where parliament favoured the landed classes, or Florence, where the government vied to protect its citizens’ interests against those of rural workers and migrants: Samuel Cohn, ‘After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes Towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe’, Economic History Review, 60 (2007), 457–85.However, the city ploughmen’s relatively secure position within the community started to dwindle under the gradual, but unstoppable, competition in the work market from foreign rural workers. This trend, occurring in the last quarter of the century, proved a protracted effect of the second outbreak of the 1361 epidemic in Provence which, compounded by years of military insecurity across the county, saw the deepening of local communities’ dislocation. These very circumstances stimulated, in turn, an unprecedented migration flux toward Marseille, the safest urban centre in the region. By then, the velocity of money had slowed down and indebtedness accrued, further precipitating a process of socio-economic displacement within Marseille’s own agricultural class.
We will remember the disdain for landless foreign workers that the goldsmith Robert de Rocha, an English immigrant himself, had expressed in his 1351 lawsuit; years later, he pronounced in his own son’s apprenticeship contract that ‘a trade is what keeps a man honest with God’s help’.
3 See above, note 3. The sudden and growing presence of foreign fieldworkers in post-plague Marseille partly challenged this view: it arguably enhanced labour competition, helping to suppress ‘unbridled’ wages and reduce not only the traditional advantage held by ploughmen but also, in broad strokes, the social hierarchies among the agricultural class.
4 On this point: Pere Orti Gost and Lluís To Figueras, ‘Serfdom and Standards of Living of the Catalan Peasantry before and after the Black Death of 1348’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Schiavitù e servaggio nell’economica europea secc. XI-XVIII. Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy, 11th–18th Centuries (Florence, 2014), p. 163. No doubt this change provoked an identity crisis among Marseille’s
laboratores, who had customarily positioned themselves in the social arena as citizen artisans and not as mere low-skilled interlopers.
5 As a result, they were poised to experience an ‘increasingly narrowly based “hierarchy of belonging”’: Lis and Soly, Worthy Efforts, p. 460. This was a period of social contraction, when the trades – a traditional leverage for social mobility – had become far less accessible to the lower and middling classes: Michaud, Earning Dignity. Only a thorough proposographical study on Marseille’s ploughmen in the second half of the fourteenth century would add depth and texture to a process that saw them lose a firm grip on the labour market.
6 This may also help explain what can be gleaned from the labour litigation records: a culture of distrust that surreptitiously permeated work relations, prompting the perception of alterity to take new forms towards landless newcomers, many unskilled. On the increased degree of animosity between masters (especially ploughmen and small artisans) and their servants, the majority foreign to the city, see Michaud, Earning Dignity, chapter 5. This process, all the same, also saw rural migrants set down new roots in a time of both insecurity and opportunity, and carve for themselves a place in the recovering community that was Marseille, a city ‘hungry for men’ that had little choice but to opt for sustainable coexistence.