Women of the Marketplace: Horizontal and Vertical Links

Reyerson, Kathryn L.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-38942-4_7

Women of the Marketplace: Horizontal and Vertical Links

Kathryn L. Reyerson³

Chapter
First Online: 13 August 2016

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Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

Abstract

The central Herbaria Square of Montpellier was the site of retail activity of market sellers or hucksters who set up their stalls in the early morning, renting a small space daily from the owners and renters of houses around the square. Litigation over control of the square between Agnes’s grandson and the consuls and king of Majorca has left witness testimonies by the square’s market sellers, 15 women testifying for the side of Agnes’s family. Through the voices of these hucksters are revealed a stable, long-lasting community of women who sold goods on the square and benefitted from the vertical ties they entertained with elite and middling women whose protection and involvement may have contributed to their stability and modest success.

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Notes

1.
While resellers and hucksters have been the subject of scholarly study, there is very little, if any, investigation to date of such networks. In general on resellers, see Keith Lilley, Urban Life in the Middle Ages. 1000–1450 (Houndmills, Basinstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2002), 238–241.
2.
Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 128–32. See “Les réseaux économiques entre femmes à Montpellier (fin XIIIe-mi-XIVe)” (forthcoming).
3.
McIntosh, Working Women, used the term “huckster,” which some view as pejorative. I have chosen to call hucksters “market sellers” or “market retailers.”
4.
See The Art of the Deal, Chap. 2, for discussion of a local market environment. In Ghent, women were active in market spaces in a variety of occupations. See Hutton, Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent, 115–119.
5.
Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives. Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 200–201.
6.
Murray, Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism, 307.
7.
Maryanne Kowaleski, “Women’s Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century,” Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 148–149.
8.
René de Lespinasse and François Bonnardot, Les métiers et corporations de la Ville de Paris: XIIIe siècle, Le Livre des Métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1879).
9.
Janice Marie Archer, “Working Women in Thirteenth-Century Paris,” (PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 1995), 119–120. I am indebted to Kate Kelsey Staples for this reference. Kate Staples has a current research project on fripperers, sellers of old clothing, which could also be hawked. See her articles, “The Significance of the Secondhand Trade in Europe, 1200–1600,” History Compass, 13 (2015): 297–309 and “Fripperers and the Used Clothing Trade in Late Medieval London,” Medieval Clothing and Textiles, 6 (2010): 151–171.
10.
Murray, Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism, 307.
11.
Murray, Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism, 307. See also Merry Wiesner Wood [Hanks], “Paltry Peddlers or Essential Merchants? Women in the Distributive Trades in Early Modern Nuremberg,” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 12 (1981): 3–13, for a useful early modern exploration of the topic.
12.
David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, 70.
13.
Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, 155.
14.
Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, 155.
15.
Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, 95.
16.
Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, 203.
17.
William Langland, The Vision of William concerning Piers Plowman, ed. W. W. S keat (Oxford, 1886), 51. The Norton Critical Edition of Piers Plowman, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: Norton, 2006), 74–75, speaks of “Rose the regratere,” and in the translation, “Rose the retailer was her right name: She’s lived the life of a market seller eleven years,” implying some continuity.
18.
McIntosh, Working Women, 131–132.
19.
See Michaud, “Famille, femmes et travail: patronnes et salaries à Marseille aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” 244, for data on the limited formal apprenticeship of women in Marseille: 59 acts out of 1079 contracts or only 5.5 % involved women and girl workers in the period 1248–1400. The data before 1350 for Montpellier reveal 30 of 208 contracts involving women workers or 6.9 %. See “The Adolescent Apprentice/Worker in Medieval Montpellier.”
20.
See “Public and Private Space in Medieval Montpellier” and “Le témoignage des femmes (à partir de quelques enquêtes montpelliéraines du XIVe siècle.” The archival documents are from the Archives municipales de Montpellier, Louvet nos. 234 (the inquest itself), 236, and 243 (related documents). Louvet 234 is a dossier of 274 folios, 243 has rough drafts regarding the case, and 236 contains the compromise resolving the lawsuit.
21.
See the discussion of these prohibitions in “Population Attraction and Mobility,” 265. See also Chap. 5. On the cloth trade, see “Le rôle de Montpellier dans le commerce des draps de laine avant 1350.”
22.
See the list of witnesses in Appendix 1. The makeup of the witness lists is interesting and much more diverse than that of most Montpellier judicial dossiers. Compare the witness lists in dossiers studied in my articles, “Commercial Fraud in the Middle Ages: The Case of the Dissembling Pepperer,” Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982): 63–73 and “Flight from Prosecution: The Search for Religious Asylum in Medieval Montpellier,” French Historical Studies 17 (1992): 603–626. The consuls counted on their side of the case only one female witness, Gausenta, wife of Bernardus Conul, gardener.
23.
Compare Hanawalt’s comments on market sellers in The Wealth of Wives, 11.
24.
On widows, see the articles in Mirrer, ed. Upon My Husband’s Death.
25.
Among the 20 male witnesses on the same side as Johanna and her colleagues in this lawsuit, only four stated that they were 50 or more years old. The Bon Amic male witnesses were more diverse in social and economic background than the women, ranging from the relatively modest chicken merchant, fisherman, cultivator from Pignan, two candlemakers, three resellers, and a stonemason to more prestigious representatives of the town, three drapers, four merchants, two legal specialists (jurisperitus), a spice merchant, and a burgensis, Raymundus Grossi, son-in-law of Agnes and husband of her daughter Raymunda, supporting the family cause. Six of the women claimed memories of 40 or more years, compared with one man claiming 35–40 years’ memory and the rest, less. For the latter witness, see A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 133r.
26.
A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 67v. This witness, Maria Pictamina, reseller, said that Petrus Bon Amic had a man who defended the renters of the stands.
27.
See A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 99r. For memory problems, see the consular witness, f. 144v.
28.
See McIntosh, Working Women, 128–132, for annual rents for stalls in London’s Cheapside in 1379.
29.
A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 49v and f. 102r, for examples.
30.
Alatheta, wife of a farm worker, and her mother had rented benches from the late Petrus Bon Amic and Johannes. A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 49v (really 59v, due to misnumbering).
31.
For details of the lawsuit that reveals these facts, see “Public and Private Space.”
32.
For other examples, see my article, “La participation des femmes de l’élite marchande à l’économie: trois exemples montpelliérains de la première moitié du XIV^e s.”
33.
Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, 58–62.
34.
A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 49v (really 59v).
35.
A. D. Montpellier, II D 95/369, J. Holanie, f. 47r. The setier of Montpellier contained 48.92 liters.
36.
A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 40r.
37.
A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f.40r.
38.
A. M. Montpellier, Grand Chartrier, Louvet no. 234, f. 56v–59r.
39.
A. D. Hérault, II E 95/377, f. 43rff, Bernardus Egidii.
40.
Martine Sainte-Marie, “Fonds de la Confrérie des penitents bleus de Montpellier (1404–1972),” Répertoire numérique détaillé de la sous-série 115 J, (Montpellier: Archives départementales de l’Hérault, 2000), 1. There were confraternities established there.
41.
On hospitals in the south of France, see Jacqueline Caille, Hôpitaux et charité publique à Narbonne au moyen âge (Toulouse: Privat, 1977).
42.
A. D. Hérault, II E 95/ 377, B. Egidii, f. 82r.
43.
See “Land, Houses and Real Estate Investment,” for forms of property holding.
44.
See “Commerce and Society in Montpellier,” I: 232–240, on vineyards and wine in the region of Montpellier.
45.
A. M. Montpellier, II 3, J. Laurentii, f. 13rff, 5 April 1342.
46.
On inns and innkeepers, see The Art of the Deal, Chap. 3. See also “Medieval Hospitality: Innkeepers and the Infrastructure of Trade.” In fact, Agnes had a significant cluster of properties near the Montpelliéret gate and other holdings, including a compound near Saint-Denis and a mansion near Notre-Dame des Tables, the famous pilgrimage church, as noted in Chap. 3.
47.
For techniques for real estate exploitation, see “Land, Houses and Real Estate Investment.”
48.
A. D. Hérault, II E 95/374, G. Nogareti, f. 51rR and G. Nogareti, f. 4rR.
49.
See “La participation des femmes de l’élite marchande à l’économie.”
50.
“Land, Houses and Real Estate Investment in Montpellier,” 79–81, for women’s participation in commercial rental revenues. The term fondaco refers to an establishment of hospitality, in this case for Pisans in Montpellier. By Agnes’s time, it was no longer used in this fashion. In general, on hospitality in the Mediterranean world, see Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World. Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
51.
“Land, Houses and Real Estate Investment in Montpellier.”
52.
See “La participation des femmes de l’élite marchande à l’économie.”
53.
I am indebted to the late Eric Monkkenen (1942–2005) for his detailed comments on my initial study of the Herbaria Square in the 1990s. I have relied on his insights in this chapter conclusion.
54.
It was Max Weber in a 1919 lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” who made the argument for the state’s right to physical force. See Max Weber, Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society, trans. and ed. by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Kathryn L. Reyerson

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Reyerson, K.L. (2016). Women of the Marketplace: Horizontal and Vertical Links. In: Women's Networks in Medieval France. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38942-4_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38942-4_7
Published: 13 August 2016
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-38941-7
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