Basel Inventories

The inventories in this collection derive from the second volume of the Basel Beschreib­büchlein (1475‒1478), a series of nineteen volumes running from 1407 to 1666 found in the State Archive of the city canton of Basel (Switzerland). They were compiled by judges and other officials attached to Basel's court of law. The law court produced inventories for three reasons: in cases of flight (that is, when the owner wished to evade justice); suspicion of heirlessness; and insolvency. Most of the cases edited here arose from suspected in­solvency or heirlessness. In order to preserve the original sequence of the acts in the register, the names assigned to the records in this collection include a reference to the position of each act in the register.

The inventories in this collection document the goods of individuals from a broad spectrum of the population, ranging from a physician, a printer, and a gentleman, to a swineherd, a day laborer, and a maid. The amount of wealth is similarly broad, with some inventories covering only half a page and some filling more than ten pages. Nine of the forty-eight record the estates of women.

This collection has been edited by Prof. Dr. Gabriela Signori, Professur für Mittelalterliche Geschichte, Universität Konstanz.

Due to the abundance of everyday items found listed in household inventories, these documents have become highly valued and frequently used sources for European anthropology and for the history of material culture. The significance of the things found in this collection is the focus of Katharina Simon-Muscheid's work, published under the telling title Things at the intersection of social networks, and based mainly on the Basel court inventories of the late 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries.✱ As the title clearly states, the aim of her work is to dynamize the static inventory by moving things into the center of social relations.✱ In this respect, my present edition of the second volume of the Basel Beschreib­büchlein (1475‒1478) is also conceived as a tribute to an inspiring colleague who unfortunately passed away far too early. The Beschreibbüchlein are kept in a series of 19 volumes running from 1407 to 1666 in the State Archive of the city canton of Basel (Switzerland). The word Beschreiben In Middle High German means "describing," and is the term usually used for the act of compiling an inventory.

The purpose of an inventory, of course, is not to see items in motion, but rather to capture a moment in time when they belonged to one person's estate, so as to prevent their loss to greedy kinsmen or creditors, for example. But above all, the inventory is a legal means used in both civil and criminal jurisdictions — more precisely, as an instrument for securing justice.✱ The records of these two fields of law (civil and criminal) are kept in different places in the Basel State Archive. The books of the penal jurisdiction are assigned to the council books in the older, main archive (älteres Hauptarchiv), whereas the books of the civil jurisdiction are ranged in the court archive, which form a section of the ältere Nebenarchive.✱ The separation between Haupt- and Nebenarchiv, between politics and justice, is not contemporary; it took place at the end of the 19th century when archives all over Europe were being reorganized, following the spirit of the age.✱ As witness hearings (Kundschaften), the court inventories were assigned to the court archive because they are subsidiary instruments for finding and securing justice. In both cases their function essentially determines their form.

As far as the inventory is concerned, the form consisted of two parts. Essential information about the act is found at the head of the entry, which includes the inventory's date, the name of the person whose goods are being inventoried, sometimes the place where this person had lived or died, and the administrative staff involved in the proceedings. This information made it possible, if necessary, to connect the inventory to proceedings found elsewhere in the court's archives, including seizures, settlements, and judgments (Figure 2).

The second part of the entry consists of the inventory itself, that is, a list of items. Some inventories fill only half a page whereas others extend over more than ten pages.

According to Basel town law, there were three reasons for compiling an inventory:

1. In cases of flight, i.e. when an accused person was evading justice,
2. If the deceased died without heirs (not defined in the town law)✱, and
3. In cases of insolvency, for which Middle High German provides no technical term, but describes the persons as "lúten, der guͤt mit gericht gefroͤnt und bezogen worden were" (people whose movable and immovable property had been seized).✱

Thus, the inventory is usually but one step in a chain of legal proceedings (Figure 1).

The inventory was compiled by the judge (Schultheiss), the bailiffs, and the court clerk. The compilation of the inventory was supervised by two councilors who accompanied the proceedings from the on-site inventory to the forced sale and the final satisfaction of the creditors. They had to ensure that the costs of the proceedings were kept as low as possible in the interest of the creditors, as it is emphasized in the records.✱

In the case of suspected insolvency, the creditors usually became actively involved (von an­ruͤffung der schultforderen wegen), either individually or as a collective. In the case of flight or suspected death without heirs, on the other hand, the council intervened, either by issuing a recommendation (empfelniß) or an order to take an inventory (von befelch miner herren der reten wegen or geheiss). Most inventories were initiated by the council or other office holders, and most cases are related to suspected in­solvency or death without heirs. Obviously, insolvency as well as heirlessness were at this time understood as "state affair."✱

In the case of insolvency or death without heirs, the inventory was usually compiled before the goods' seizure and forced sale, which were documented in the settlements books of the court (Verrechnungsbücher). The first time the city council seized the movables of a person designated as bankart, i.e. as an illegitimately born person who died without children, was at the end of the 15th century,✱ although a corresponding entry in the account books is lacking. On the other hand, the court did not ask for an inventory in the case of Ulrich Holzapfel, who was convicted of murder and whose goods had been seized and sold in February of 1477.✱ It seems that in the case of insolvency, inventories were considered superfluous when the proceeds of the forced sale would go to the city treasury (laden) or if the goods in question were deemed to be too low in value. Be that as it may, at the end of the 15th century the city of Basel chan­ged its policy and, in several respects, took on increasingly state-like features.

The act of compiling an inventory was done by following an itinerary through the house common throughout most of Europe✱: namely, the inventory process would begin at the top of the house, right under the roof, Jtem oben im huß vnder dem tach..., and end in the cellar.✱ Items listed in each room were often found in boxes, chests, or other containers: Jtem ein kisten darinn... All kinds of movables were recorded, including household goods, tools, and materials used for work. Unlike in other areas of Europe, however, perishable foodstuffs, such as beans, grain, seed, or wine, were seldom listed in the Basel documents. Real estate, on the other hand, followed a different legal logic in the town law. In the 1478 case of a townsman named Wurzeler, for example, his heirs asked for a survey of his real estate that included a house opposite to the warden’s house, a half jucharte of vines and one and a half meadows near the gibbet.✱ But this level of scrutiny was the exception, not the rule.

Judging from the Basel tax books, the household effects were a part of the taxable assets. Moreover, the liquidation of these assets, or the assets themselves, consistently constituted the resources from which creditors were satisfied after the foreclosure sale. The movables were therefore not only consumer items, but also served as financial security for the very last settlement of one’s life debts. Thus, the inventories are closely connected to the Basel settlements book in which the administration fees and the creditors’ shares are recorded.

And all over Europe, too, the household goods found in inventories are very similar in nature. They were material necessities and as such, correspond to the household essentials attested to in German-speaking regions in the so-called poems of household goods.✱ The poems invited the reader-consumer to buy; they displayed, offered, and even created demand! They were conceived as an inventory, for the poems both mimic the length of a typical inventory and guide the reader-consumer from one room to the next, with furniture and items specific to each space. In the poems, acquiring household goods is linked to wedding and New Year's gift giving. A further occasion of gift giving was the birth of a child, and in the case of Nuremberg, relocation.✱

The items listed in the inventories are in general not socially marked: the cobbler, for example, owned the same things as the merchant. The social difference lies instead in the number of items and what they were made of, whether earth or clay, tin-alloy or silver, silk, cotton or wool. Over the years, the description of how items were shaped or formed dropped out of the record, and the court clerk preferred only to use diminutives, such as "tiny," "small," and so on, to describe them. They tell of better times when they deal with used, worn and holey items or keep alive the memory of lost children and wives.

The lack of household items is also a strong marker of marginality and legal dependency. This is also true, somewhat paradoxically, with the absence of cre­ditors, for the lack of household items usually points to individuals who were only loosely integrated in the urban society, or to legally bound persons who were companions and lodgers. Women are represented in the Basel inventories to varying degrees; in the second volume there are comparatively few—9 out of 48, or about one-fifth (Figure 3). Their numbers grew in times of economic depression, as seen in volume three (1478–1481).

The aim of the edition is to reproduce the Basel Beschreibbüchlein (1475‒1478) as faithfully as possible. Thus, u/v are not transcribed according to their phonetic value, but according to the spelling in the manuscript.✱ Abbreviations and nasal strokes are usually resolved, the latter usually with an n. The abbreviations for shilling (ß), pound (lb), and denarius (d), on the other hand, are retained as such; the Roman numerals (weight, monetary amounts, number, or year) are also not translated into Arabic numerals.✱ The j with large serif, the sign for a half unit (money and weights), cannot be represented with ordinary computer fonts; it is reproduced here as j. Frequently recurring phrases (darzu, darfür, etc.), which are written apart in the original, are brought together to make the text easier to read. Proper names (people, places, rivers, etc.) are written in capital letters, nomina sacra in lower case. Words, letters, or sentences that are crossed out are, to the extent they are decipherable, represented as such. Words or phrases added in the margin or interlinear additions are marked at the appropriate place in the text and again indicated as additions or corrections by means of a note. So are later additions, such as pagination and short comments of the editor. As far as possible, the people named in the inventories were identified in the footnotes with the help of the tax registers (conserved in the older main archive). From 1452 onward, the city kept settlements books related to the forced sale (series G); these make it possible to estimate the value of the inventoried items. The corresponding entries are put in the footnotes.