Exotic linens in Provençal villages

The village of Auriol, in the county of Provence, is located in the valley of the Huveaune, under the shadow of the Sainte Baume, about 30 kms upstream from the city of Marseille. Between 1361 and 1391, a public notary named Hugo Marolle worked regularly in Auriol, drafting legal instruments for the residents of the village. Nine of Hugo’s registers survive, meaning we have a small trove of perhaps a thousand notarial acts drafted for residents of the village during the second half of the fourteenth century. Similar records have survived from many locales elsewhere in rural Provence, providing remarkable insights into the lifeways and habits of thought of countryfolk in the later middle ages.

Among the acts are ten household inventories, in the form of post-mortem inventories or acts of guardianship. Three more acts recording dowries also contain complete or nearly complete household inventories, since the brides in question had recently inherited their father’s or previous husband's estates and chose to assign the entire set of goods to their new husbands. As this set reveals, the material profile of the houses in Auriol, with several exceptions, was thoroughly undistinguished. Most of the thirteen houses display the characteristic traits of rural poverty: rough furniture; iron tools and implements with little in the way of the more prestigious metals, copper or tin; almost nothing made of silk or gold or other signs of luxury.

But something remarkable can be found amidst all the drab things, for ten of the thirteen estates included among their possessions one or more table linens imported from France, along with one or more table linens from a place described by the notary, Hugo Marolle, as Planenhia. The objects featured in this month’s essay were listed in the inventory of the estate of Raymundus Boniparis, who died in July of 1387.

Item v mapas operis Francie bonas
Item iii mapas operis Planenhie bonas
Item v manutergia operis Francie
Item iii manutergia operis Planenhie

“Next, 5 good tablecloths in the style of France
Next, 3 good tablecloths in the style of Planenhia
Next, 5 hand towels in the style of France
Next, 3 hand towels in the style of Planenhia”

The inventory itself was compiled by Raymundus’s widow, Rixendis, who was acting on behalf of herself and their two small boys.

At first blush, nothing about these entries sparks immediate interest. Only when we make comparisons between these and other Provençal inventories do we begin to appreciate the remarkable nature of the provenance phrases found in the records of Auriol. The rich notarial archives of southeastern France preserve something on the order of several thousand household inventories from the period 1250-1500. Several hundred of these are currently available in the collection “Greater Provence.” Roughly three-quarters of the records in this collection, at present, derive from the city of Marseille, and the remainder are from other locales in Provence. Since Provençal inventories typically average about fifty object phrases, there are approximately 10,000 object phrases in the current collection from Provence.

References to a locale named Planenhia appear only in the valley of the Huveaune. Although we cannot securely identify the place to which Hugo Marolle was referring, it is possible he meant the Italian city of Piacenza, references to which are quite rare in Provençal inventories. As this suggests, Planenhia (or Piacenza) is exceedingly unusual as a source of provenance for table linens. References to items from France are somewhat more common; at least seven inventories from Marseille include items supposedly sourced in France, and French things are occasionally found elsewhere in Provence. Strangely, however, references to France, measured in terms of relative frequency, are far more common in inventories from the valley of the Huveaune than in those from Marseille. Eight-five percent of the household inventories from Auriol include items sourced in France. In Marseille, the corresponding figure is less than 8 percent. Moreover, none of the inventories in Marseille refers to French table linens; we find instead references to items made in France such as a silver garland; a type of garment known as a garde-corps (twice, in two different inventories); another garment known as a houppelande; cushions; wool fabric woven in France; and a bedspread. French table linens, like linens from Planenhia, are found only in the valley of the Huveaune.

Auriol was not the only village in the valley of the Huveaune from which notarial records have survived, for Hugo Marolle also worked in the nearby hamlets of Peypin and Saint-Zacharie, leaving one inventory from each locale. Here, too, we find the distinctive pairing of table linens from France with table linens from Planenhia, rare luxury items in otherwise drab lists of household possessions. A little downstream, in the town of Aubagne, seven of the eleven secular houses for which we have inventories feature linens sourced in France. Here, we don’t find the characteristic reference to Planenhia, although it is only in Aubagne that we find a related expression, consisting of variants on the phrase mappa plana. Here, the adjective plana could mean “a simple tablecloth,” but it could also be a reference to «the Plain» or something similar. ✱ In this case, perhaps Hugo Marolle used the word Planenhia to refer to the plain of the Po River in Italy, and perhaps the word plana was the adjectival version for referring to the Po that was preferred by the notaries of Aubagne. Needless to say, all this is guesswork.

As these phrases reveal, the valley of the Huveaune, in the local geographical imagination, was connected by thin conceptual threads to the world beyond. In the later fourteenth century, the world was hardly global in a strict geographical sense, but following recent trends in archaeological theory, we can characterize these threads as part of globalizing processes as long as they participated in the stretching of the local.✱ Strikingly, the connection to the global in this microworld operated entirely through table linens. Nowhere else in the inventories from these villages do we find a single reference to other items of foreign provenance.

What we have here is a phenomenon in search of an explanation. Since the notary, Hugo Marolle, was the author of the inventories from Auriol, Peypin, and Saint-Zacharie, where the pairing of France and Planenhia is especially distinctive, one’s initial thought is to imagine that Hugo was particularly attuned to the provenance of table linens and therefore responsible for the pairing. But this is exceedingly unlikely. First, and most important, inventories in this age were compiled by guardians and/or family members. Even though notaries occasionally assisted in the process, it was the responsibility of members of the family or executors to identify the items and their attributes. Second, there was no legal or procedural requirement to list the attributes of any item. Nothing formal or legal, in other words, prompted the widow Rixendis to add provenance phrases. Finally, the inventories from Aubagne were drafted by other notaries. Although those inventories do not mention Planenhia, they regularly mention the French provenance of linens, and use an adjective, plana, that was probably a version of Planenhia. It is almost certain, in short, that the provenance phrases reflect local knowledge systems, not the distortions introduced by the notaries.

What explains the presence of these linens? Did a peddler ply a successful trade in the valley of the Huveaune, selling bolts of linen cloth from France and the plain of the Po to the locals over a period of three decades? This is certainly possible. Even if true, though, it does not explain what was going on. Table linens are among the items most commonly found in Provençal households: perhaps 90 percent or more of the inventories in the collection include references to table linens. In the vast majority of cases, however, no reference is made to the provenance of those linens. The word mappa, or «tablecloth», is one of the more thinly described nouns in the Provençal corpus, typically attracting only modifiers that refer to size or condition, such as «large», «small», or «shabby». By way of example, consider this list of table linens featured in an inventory from Marseille in 1387.

Item undecim mappas tam parvas quam magnas
Item duas mappas
Item unam longeriam
Item tres mappas
Item tres longerias

"Next, eleven tablecloths both small and large
Next, two tablecloths
Next, a long tablecloth
Next, three tablecloths
Next, three long tablecloths"✱

How many of the unprovenanced table linens found in Massiliote inventories also came from France or Planenhia? Probably a good many. Provence did not produce flax, and home looms for weaving linen thread into cloth are exceedingly rare in inventories. In other words, it is likely that most of the table linens found in Provence came from abroad. Knowledge of the origin of the cloth, however, had either been forgotten or deemed irrelevant. What is distinctive about the valley of the Huveaune is not the unusual presence of the foreign in the local. What is distinctive is that the villagers chose to be aware of the source of their table linens.