In the house of Nicolaua Petre

In March of 1396, Lucia, the widow of Antoni de Roussillon, appeared before a judge in Marseille to announce the death of her sister, Nicolaua, the widow of Jacme Petre. In her last will and testament, drafted five years earlier, Nicolaua had named her sister Lucia as her universal heir, from which we can infer that she and her husband had no surviving children of their own. Following normal procedure, Lucia asked and received permission to conduct an inventory of her sister’s estate. The resulting list offers precious insights into ordinary lives in the years around 1400.

Nicolaua and her late husband, Jacme, were not conspicuously well-to-do people. They lived in the Tannery, a quarter located in the southeastern part of the city of Marseille where many agricultural laborers lived. All three of their neighbors were laborers or urban peasants. Like many Massiliote households, theirs was dedicated to the production of wine.

Among other equipment found in their storeroom, there were five casks for the secondary or major fermentation phase of wine. Each cask had a capacity of 25 milleroles in the local metric system, equivalent to 1650 liters or 435 U.S. gallons. Some sense of the size of these enormous casks can be gained by setting one of them alongside the average bourbon or whisky cask, which today is typically around 53 gallons, or about eight times smaller. Wine prices at the time fluctuated from 1/3 of a florin to a florin per millerole, meaning that if the family managed to fill all five casks during the wine harvest, their annual gross revenue would come to anywhere between 40 florins and 125 florins. This was probably enough to get by on, at least in years of good harvest, since the expenses of an ordinary household might come to around 80-100 florins per year. Members of the family almost certainly had other sources of income as well.

The sense of just-getting-by is reinforced by the size of house that Nicolaua and her late husband shared with their household servants, if any. The inventory begins by enumerating all the wine-making equipment in the storeroom. From there, Lucia, who took responsibility for compiling the inventory, proceeded to the dining hall, probably located on the second floor, where she found little enough: a dining table on its trestles; four round chairs or stools; four empty chests; an armoire with two drawers; and eight pavises or decorative shields hung on the walls. She next went into the bedroom off the hall, which is where most of the household’s things were kept. Then she popped her head into the kitchen, where she found a relatively limited assortment of cooking equipment, plates, trenchers, and other things made of wood, tin, and copper, along with two mortars and pestles, an essential medieval kitchen implement featured in a DALME essay. Three hoes were also stored in the kitchen. And that was it. Apart from the cellar with all its wine-making equipment, the couple lived in a three-room dwelling. The name given to the bedroom (camera aule in Latin) suggests that the bedroom itself may even have been an alcove situated off the hall rather than a separate space.

But despite the small size of the dwelling and the rather austere furnishings in the hall and the kitchen, the Petre family were well off where real estate was concerned. In addition to their dwelling, Nicolaua and Jacme owned a second house located on the same street in the Tannery and a third house located in an entirely different part of the city, on the street of the Bathhouses. In the countryside nearby, they also owned a large field (terra), probably for grain, and two large vineyards, no doubt the source of at least some of the grapes for their wine business. They possessed the lordship of two agricultural lands that together generated an income of 40 shillings or about 1 ¼ florins per year, not to mention a share of the purchase price whenever the land was sold.

In addition to all the real estate, the couple’s bedroom, unlike the other two upstairs-rooms, was full of interesting and expensive things. Lucia began by listing two great chests, two coffers designed to be slung on pack animals, and two coffrets or strongboxes. Next came the bed with the usual furnishings as well as something highly unusual: a bedspread made of kidskin (cohopertorium lecti de penna capriolorum). On the bed she found three pillows in green sendal, a fine silken fabric, and nearby, a towel or cloth of slate-blue silk. And then came all the jewels and rings: a silver crown or headband with pearls, described as being “of little value”; a gold ring with a gemstone called camahil in Occitan; another gold ring with a diamond and a third one with a sapphire; a fourth gold ring described as “broken”; two paternosters or sets of prayer beads, one made of coral and another of amber; and three silver cups each weighing 4 ounces. Although Nicolaua had apparently sold off her husband’s clothes, a common practice at the time, Lucia found some of her late sister’s clothing in the room, including a good cloak lined with vair, another parti-colored cloak in black and purple, and a cotehardie made of medley fabric. Finally, Lucia noted a bolt of fabric and, somewhat oddly, a tool used for planting grapevines.

What explains this juxtaposition of penury and wealth? Part of the explanation lies in the uncertainty of income: those reliant on agriculture managed the fluctuations in the harvest by having stores of wealth that could be sold or pawned off to bridge the gaps. But alongside that, it is important to remember that by 1396, Europe had already experienced three rounds of plague, with a fourth just over the horizon. By the end of the fourteenth century, the population of Marseille had probably diminished by half, even accounting for the influx of immigrants. In times of plague, people die, but property does not. Nicolaua and Jacme Petre almost certainly acquired their two extra houses and possibly one or two of the agricultural properties from dead relatives who had no surviving issue of their own. They may have been using the houses for rental income, or they may have just allowed them to stand empty. Strikingly, the inventory says nothing about any furnishings in the other houses.

Had they been tempted to sell off the two houses? Perhaps. The fact that they had acquired or purchased two lordships suggests the possibility that they had converted at least some of their liquid assets into investments generating stable revenue streams. But like the jewels and silver cups, the houses served perfectly well as stores of wealth, and there may have been no pressing need to sell them. Nicolaua and her late husband, it seems, were doing just fine.