Alternative currencies and quality of life in Late Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-century Marseille: Negotiating labour in times of turmoil

From Firenze University Press Book: Alternative currencies. Commodities and services as exchange currencies in the monetarized economies of the 13th to 18th centuries

Francine Michaud, University of Calgary

In late August 1297, Doucette Bermond, a young woman who was fearing a postpartum surgical intervention, was granted a miraculous recovery by Saint Louis of Anjou: she was healed after vowing to clean every Saturday for the rest of her life the Franciscan church of Marseille, where the holy man was buried, because «she was too poor» to buy beeswax offerings. Years later in 1308, when summoned to testify before the papal commission investigating the canonization case of the Angevine prince, she reiterated, more pointedly this time, that she had requested to be fed by the friars while on duty in the sanctuary for «she had to work with her own hands to make a living». In other words, she had offered the Minor Brothers her worthy ancillary services with two ends in mind: to clear a spiritual debt and to obtain earthly sustenance. In November 1326, Raymond Garrigue approached the jurist Bertrand Aydolphe to remit his person, goods, and labour into his hands, «given Bertrand’s sincere affection toward him» and willingness to ensure his basic needs for the remainder of his life. Although Raymond explained his decision on the grounds that having nothing to live on he had to beg, he was a family man with a minimum of resources since, prior to the transaction, he had returned half his assets in repayment for his wife’s dowry and children’s alimony. Emotional and psychological factors — although indebtedness cannot be ruled out — may well have been at play, but Raymond and Bertrand’s mutual agreement was not predicated on chronic material destitution: akin to a corrody, it was rather a reciprocal understanding of goods and service exchange requiring no money transfer. No cash was transacted either in December 1375 when Monette Lambert, a single woman, accepted a wet nurse position in the household of the noble Jacques Ricau, whose wife Lucie had just given birth. Monette contented herself with a salary consisting of her meals and her shoes, one veil and one shirt, in addition to a dress of striped fabric that had belonged to her mistress. Yet, the very same day, Monette had also initiated another labour contract along with her employer to hire out Antoinette Féraud, an acquaintance of hers (they were both from Les Arcs, a village in the Var Valley), to nurse Monette’s own newborn son. Unmarried herself, Antoinette was living with her mother and willing to settle for modest wages, no more than 10 florins. Despite her wageless salary, Monette had perhaps wisely calculated that, given her personal circumstances, the quality of her living conditions under the nobleman’s roof together with the care of her child by a trusted third party was more advantageous. What Monette, Raymond, and Doucette — a cleaning lady, a family man, and a wet nurse — had in common was their unequivocal willingness to accept, if not welcome, commodities and other forms of tangible goods rather than money in return for their output. Workers in late medieval Marseille, a society hard-wired by a monetized economy, proved keenly attentive to forms of non-pecuniary payments in labour agreements. In this commercial harbour, the trades were loosely organized and, notably with respect to work conditions and wages, bereft of strict corporate regulations. This is made plain and manifest in the municipal statutes, formally enacted in the middle of the thirteenth century, when Charles I of Anjou, the new count of Provence, solemnly acknowledged the city’s privileges (Pernoud 1949; Lesage 1950). Governed by the spirit of contractual law binding two free individuals or their families, work conventions rested on the transfer of specie for the vast majority of adult labourers, but then again rarely without due consideration to other exchange currencies, such as goods and services.5 Weighed against their market value, these loomed large in agreements involving young and vulnerable dependants, who represented a considerable segment of the workforce (Michaud 2016).6 All the while, material goods and services were carefully assessed, especially in periods of economic downturn, severe inflationary trends, or sharp demographic fluctuations, which characterized the better part of the late thirteenth and fourteenth century in Marseille, and Provence as a whole (Coulet 1988; Bourin et al. 2011–13).7 That a landowner in 1371 accepted to give in salary bonus to his hired ploughman a pair of stockings worth up to one florin, which, in case of a breach of contract, he would expect a tenfold repayment in the form of a houppelande worth ten florins, speaks volume of the trade value assigned to goods, especially in times of high living costs.8 For this paper, I have examined the oldest apprenticeship and work agreements from the notarial series of Marseille (1076 contracts) between 1248 to 1400, along with other pertinent archival materials and narratives from the legal, administrative, judicial, and religious records, with a focus on what appears to have mattered the most to the contracting parties across all trades9: victuals, clothing, education, and health care.10 In the first instance I discuss the contemporary understandings and the nature of compensation in labour agreements, before turning to the contractual parties’ expectations and obligations with respect to payments in kind and/or service for rendered labour. In final analysis, I place attention on labour negotiations to question whether and how the fourteenth-century crises, foremost in the wake of the Black Death, altered significantly conceptions and expectations relative to goods as currencies.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0347–0.11

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