Legal Plunder

Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe

Daniel Lord Smail

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780674737280
• eBook ISBN: 9780674970120
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

As Europe began to grow rich during the Middle Ages, its wealth materialized in the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of ordinary households. Such items were indicators of one's station in life in a society accustomed to reading visible signs of rank. In a world without banking, household goods became valuable commodities that often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers and resellers sprang up, helping to push these goods into circulation. Simultaneously, a harshly coercive legal system developed to ensure that debtors paid their due.

Focusing on the Mediterranean cities of Marseille and Lucca, Legal Plunder explores how the newfound wealth embodied in household goods shaped the beginnings of a modern consumer economy in late medieval Europe. The vigorous trade in goods that grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries entangled households in complex relationships of credit and debt, and one of the most common activities of law courts during the period was debt recovery. Sergeants of the law were empowered to march into debtors' homes and seize belongings equal in value to the debt owed. These officials were agents of a predatory economy, cogs in a political machinery of state-sponsored plunder.

As Daniel Smail shows, the records of medieval European law courts offer some of the most vivid descriptions of material culture in this period, providing insights into the lives of men and women on the cusp of modern capitalism. Then as now, money and value were implicated in questions of power and patterns of violence.

[CHAPTER ONE]

THE VALUES OF THINGS

IT is a strange and almost voyeuristic experience to accompany an heir or a guardian as he or she records the details of a postmortem inventory in a late medieval Mediterranean household. The scene itself can be reconstructed with little effort of imagination: a silent house, emptied of its children; the presence of servants or grieving relatives who help to identify the objects; the objects themselves arranged stiffly at attention. The contents of a life unfurl as you move from room to room, taking notes as the members of the party discuss each object in turn (see Plate 2). Here is a plank for carrying bread. There a carpet. Upstairs, perhaps, a bedroom containing a chicken coop, with the chickens clucking nervously in the unfamiliar silence. In another bedroom, the bed where the body of the deceased has until recently been laid out, the mattresses and blankets and bolsters all fixed and squared away by the maid.¹

A postmortem inventory unfolds like an itinerary through a collection of Russian dolls. As you walk from room to room, horizons or objects open up to reveal other objects nestled inside. The itinerary begins with the house itself, enfolded within the embrace of the city and its streets, houses, and neighborhoods.

From the inventory of Mosse Creguti, Marseille, 1405²

To begin with, Abraam, the guardian of the children, reported that he had found the following goods, namely, a house located in the Great Street of the Jewry, abutting the house of [blank space], and on the other side, the house of Peire Dalmas, a merchant, and behind, a dowry house belonging to the wife of the nobleman Bernat Elie. At the front, the house touches the street of the Jewry. The house is servile to the lordship of the nobleman Bernat Martin of Marseille and pays an annual ground rent of 100 sous on the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle.

Inside this house, he said that he found the following things …

The door of the house then opens to reveal an arrangement of rooms: the entryway, the storeroom, the kitchen, the dining hall, the bed chambers, all depending on patterns of domestic architecture and the wealth of the family. Ranged inside each of the rooms are containers, often dozens of them. In the storeroom and kitchen, there are casks, chests, jars, and sacks; peering inside, you can find the staples of the Mediterranean diet: wine both red and white, vinegar, olive oil, salted fish or pork, wheat, flour, millet, rye, sorghum, beans of many types, lentils, nuts, and for the livestock, supplies of vetch, hay, oats, lupins, and straw.³ In the hall and the bedrooms, containers for storing food give way to boxes, chests, coffers, and caissons, identified with an expansive nomenclature that attests to the importance of the container, throughout Europe, both as metaphor and as practice (see Fig. 1.1).⁴ The chests sometimes contain little caskets, and as these are opened, they reveal their secrets.

From the inventory of Laurens Vassal, Marseille, 1405⁵

[In the bedroom off the dining hall, he found] … a small chest inside of which he said he found a casket with a bar worked in gold and three golden rings, namely, one with four pearls and a green stone, and another with six pearls and a red stone, and another with five pearls but no stone.

Sometimes, the container holds containers such as purses that appear to be valued for what they are, and not for what they might contain (see Plate 7).

From the inventory of Laurens Vassal, Marseille, 1405⁶

[In the bedroom off the dining hall, he found] … a small green coffret, made of iron, with four small purses, namely, one made from a gold fabric, another of green velvet, a third of slate blue with a piro, and another made of red and green silk.

The lids of other chests, lifted up, reveal articles of clothing. These are also containers of a sort, even if, rather like the empty purses, they are deflated by the absence of a body.

Figure 1.1. Coffret. A coffret is a small coffer, a strongbox used for storing documents or valuables. Coffers and coffrets were typically made of wood, iron, or leather and were secured with iron fittings. This fifteenth- or sixteenth-century coffret is made of tooled leather and is similar to a “small, iron-bound coffret made of leather” that appears in a Marseille inventory in 1410. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of George Blumenthal (41.190.252). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Used by permission.

From the inventory of Guilhem Bertrand, Marseille, 1405⁷

• Next, a woman’s houppelande in the color called roheyha
• Next, another houppelande made of the same fabric with eighteen tiny pearl buttons
• Next, a woman’s greatcoat of a bloodred cloth, with three great buttons and two small ones made of pearl
• Next, two houppelandes belonging to Guilhem’s grandsons, made of burel cloth and trimmed with a ruby-red woolen serge

Great bolts of cloth sometimes stand in the corners, and spools of thread nestle in a drawer or a compartment, for regardless of whether it was food or fabric, the people of the Mediterranean bought many of the things they consumed in bulk. Draped around the beds or folded away in the chests are curtains, often green, some of them quite fancy, and these too are containers (see Plates 1 and 6). The curtains might offer a nice contrasting effect with some nearby cushions.

From the inventory of the gentleman Guilhem de Cavalhon, Marseille, 1405⁸

• Next, five seat cushions with ruby-red edgings
• Next, five curtains of a green linen
• Next, three curtains made of a green fabric

Ditto for the women’s veils, a different kind of curtain, these neatly folded away in the chests and the coffers.

From the inventory of the fishmonger Antoni Robaut, Marseille, 1422⁹

• Next, ten women’s veils, made of linen, worth 3 florins
• Next, four women’s veils, made of cotton, worth 2 florins

Through their objects, the houses attest to their own poverty or wealth. Their contents also reveal an ordering mentality, a sense of what belongs where, an order violated, at times, by the presence of an apparent incongruity: a large copper cooking pot or a broken saw in the bedroom; a bed frame in the stable. The goods found in inventories, such as the pavises or ornamental shields that adorned the walls of the dining hall of Antoni Robaut, a Massiliote fishmonger, speak to the social aspirations of the household. Most of the beds, at least in the cities, are thick with mattresses, sheets, blankets, pillows, and bolsters, and even the straw pads found in households of Marseille’s urban peasants are covered by a bedspread or softened by a cushion of some sort. The fancy clothing ensembles and silver-buckled belts, ubiquitous in the more upscale households, tell us that clothing historians are justified in speaking of a revolution in dress and dress fittings. Just as eloquent, though harder to see, are the goods that are but rarely found, or sometimes not at all, such as toys and games, devotional objects, books, highly descript ceramic finewares, chopines and other kinds of fashionable footwear, pepper and other spices, tapestries, pets, and retables. With inventories, the trick is to read them both as photograph and as photo negative. Much of their meaning is conveyed by things that are not to be found even in the corners and the shadows.¹⁰

As discussed in the introduction, the household goods listed in inventories and documents of all descriptions form part of the rising tide of wealth whose fingers, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were creeping into the households of Mediterranean Europe. The tide, understandably, ran most strongly into the houses of the well-to-do. But fingers of the tide also found their way into the houses of the less well-to-do. With the rising of the tide, the rooms described in these inventories slowly began to fill up with stuff and with the containers required for giving some shape or order to that stuff. Some of the stuff has a stunning, museum-like quality that gives one an urge to reach out and touch it.

From the inventory of Laurens Vassal, Marseille, 1405¹¹

Next, a ruby-red houppelande trimmed with white fustian, with padding, and twelve buttons made of pearls and a fringe of gold damask.

Quite a lot of it, though, is pedestrian, and even more is frankly disappointing, that is to say if one’s tastes, as a voyeur, run only to the luxury objects. Often as not, the chests and coffers and boxes contain little more than a few tattered sheets or tablecloths. Alongside some nice frying pans, roasting spits, or copper bowls, the kitchen might stock some battered cookware and a broken jar (see Plate 12). Surveying the wreckage, one gets the impression that the Massiliotes and the Lucchese of this age kept almost everything, because, like the compulsive hoarders of the present day, they were never fully convinced that an object had outlived all its possible uses. Nearly everything could be recycled, even a broken pot, whose intact base could serve as a rough bowl and whose sherds could be chipped out to make game pieces or buttons.¹²

From this instinct to hang on to whatever is at hand arises one of the principal patterns of categorization that informed the making of the inventories, namely, the habit of dividing the world of goods into things of value and things of little value. The other pattern that figures prominently in the ontology of the inventory is found in the patterns of attribution. Some, perhaps most, of the goods found in inventories were nondescript. Dining tables, notably, are rarely assigned any attributes other than the word for table, tabula mensale or tabula comedendi. Wine is simply wine. Though it was described, especially in the records of the Lucchesia, on a scale that runs from young, pure, and fresh to old and sour, wine otherwise had no vintage, no label, none of the system of cultural value that would begin to emerge by the sixteenth century.¹³ Other goods, especially clothing, were strikingly descript. We might conceivably come up with a legal or institutional rationale for this pattern: a houppelande, perhaps, needed description so as to distinguish it from another houppelande at auction. But reading the inventories, we might find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the notaries and sergeants and the men and women who redacted the inventories just saw the objects that way, as objects possessing a special charisma that attracted thick description. Curiously, they did not see ceramics as beautiful things worthy of being descript. Some of the local coarsewares brought in from nearby Uzès were indeed fairly drab, but the archaeological record shows that from the twelfth century onward, the Massiliote table had become decorated with ceramics from Byzantium and the Aegean Sea, the Maghreb, al-Andalus, Catalonia, Italy, and other pottery-producing zones across the Mediterranean (see Plate 10).¹⁴ Some of these are stunningly beautiful, and the lusterwares, bearing the characteristic green-brown glaze symbolizing respectively the Prophet and the caliph, were redolent of Muslim exoticism. Marseille, in this regard, was special: these wares typically did not penetrate into the Provençal interior.¹⁵ Yet all these wares fell into a blind spot of cultural value and appear in the inventories in black and white, compared to the glorious Technicolor reserved for fine metalwares and for clothing. The latter constituted what Sarah Stanbury has called the visual objects of desire, and for that reason they became the ready targets of the moralists’ wrath.¹⁶

Reading the inventories closely, we can assess both value and meaning. Over ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Money, Units of Measurement, and Calendars
• Introduction
• 1. The Values of Things
• 2. Credit and Coin
• 3. The Pursuit of Debt
• 4. The Plunder
• 5. Violence and Resistance
• Epilogue
• Color Plates
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index