Five Dijon Households

In conjunction with the major exhibition entitled, "Passés intérieurs: une immersion numérique dans l'habitat médiéval de Dijon," on view at Le 1204, Dijon’s center for architecture and heritage, DALME has published the five inventories featured in the exhibition. The documents come from a remarkable archival collection: nearly 700 post-mortem inventories drawn up by the clerks of the Dijon mairie between 1390 and 1459. Whenever a resident died leaving minor children or unknown heirs, the town ordered an inventory of the household's movable goods. Because the procedure applied to everyone, the Dijon inventories provide insights on households at every level of urban society, from the humblest lodgings to the houses of the ducal elite.

The five inventories, selected and transcribed by Guilhem Ferrand (Université de Toulouse), represent five interiors and five very different lives. Jaques de Nulley (1398) was a master mason and one of the craftsmen who built the duke of Burgundy's charterhouse at Champmol. Millot and Ysabeaul Lobereaul (1413) were a winegrowing couple who lived in two rooms on the rue des Crez. Guillemote, the wife of Jehan Aubert (1413), headed a large household consisting of fifteen rooms in the orbit of the ducal court. Perrenote, widow of Constantin le Tondeur (1414), left little more than a worn-out bed, a mortar, two battered chests and a box of rags. Finally, Bertrand de Pasques and his wife Arambour (1423), winegrowers who died at the same time, left two daughters and a house on the rue Chaude organized around the making, storing and probably selling of wine. All five have been modelled in 3D by historians of the ARTEHIS laboratory at the Université Bourgogne Europe, and the reconstructions are the centerpiece of the exhibition. On DALME, readers can consult the manuscript images alongside full facing-page transcriptions, line by line, with deletions, additions and marginal notes encoded as they appear on the page. Click here to explore these inventories as well as several others in the Dijon collection.

Some of the remarkable entries include a small library listed in the inventory of Guillemote, the wife of Jehan Aubert, who was a former paymaster of Duchess Margaret of Flanders and a relative of the famous copyist David Aubert. The household owned a copy of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy that was bound together with a copy of the Testament of Jean de Meun. Other works include a book of Tristan, an old psalter, a Romance of the Rose, Mandeville's travels, a Mappemonde, and a Golden Legend "written in the hand of the said Jehan Aubert," valued at forty francs. Nearby stood a harp and tapestries from Arras woven with roses, dogs and rabbits. Because Jehan’s wife died just after the 1413 grape harvest, more than forty casks of wine were stacked in the cellar, the stable and the galleries.

Jaques de Nulley's house had a "chamber painted with dogs," and his own bedroom held a mail coat, a "chapeau de Montauban" helmet, a visored bascinet and gauntlets: all the gear a Dijon burgher would need to take a turn on the watch on the town walls. The Lobereaul inventory, by contrast, shows the ordinary furnishings of a vineyard worker's household, from the goys (a winegrower's billhook) to a small pan "for a child." Readers who follow the clerks from room to room will also catch them at work, striking out entries and correcting valuations. In Jaques de Nulley's inventory, additional entries by an unknown clerk noted which goods the guardian had returned.

We are grateful to Guilhem Ferrand, Jean-Pierre Garcia and the City of Dijon for making this collaboration possible. Visitors in Dijon can see the exhibition free of charge until 3 January 2027; everyone else can explore the inventories on DALME.