Doing the Dirty Work: Ribalds, Armies and Public Health in the Southern Low Countries, 1100–1500

Abstract

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, so-called ribalds performed crucial tasks in civic-military communities, labouring as porters, haulers and engineers in siege warfare. They did the dirty work of looting and insulting the enemy on campaign and removing waste in the city. Civic-military festivals played with the double-edged reputation of these poor, migrant workers, shaming the ribalds in order to reaffirm civic honour. This chapter argues the ambivalent policies towards these ribalds constituted a form of vital politics, a term used to understand how governments manage the ‘quality of citizens’. Pejorative images of the ribalds, as non-citizens, thereby served to mirror urban self-representations of the city’s clergy and burghers as hygienic, disciplined, virtuous members of the community. In the course of the fifteenth century, the tasks performed by ribalds increasingly were institutionalised, and ribalds shunned from the city.

1 Introduction

Civic-military financial accounts across northern France, the Low Countries and Italy mention so-called ribalds in their expenses between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The name ribald was generally a pejorative term used for the social group of able-bodied paupers, often migrants without legal citizen status, who moved in and out of the city in search of temporary work in sanitation, public works and the military.¹ Towns appointed funds for ribalds to sweep market squares, clean fountains and remove dead animals from canals, for instance in Ghent.² These multitasking ribalds, often from rural backgrounds, also scrabbled as servants and low-status recruits in the seigneurial armies and urban militias campaigning outside the city, at a time when urban communities held significant military responsibilities. Ribalds transported military materials in the wagon train, maintained roads and bridges and worked the siege engines, as Franck Viltart has shown. Ribalds, thus, did the dirty work to preserve the city’s sanitation, infrastructure and security.

Ribalds’ status, however, was fragile. The citizens’ attitude towards these workers was double-edged. They considered ribalds, in legal, social and moral terms, to be non-citizens, who nonetheless were indispensable to the city’s health and security by doing the dirty, shameful work in the cities’ public spaces and militias.³ In moral terms, the literate clergy depicted ribalds as an uprooted mob of ragamuffins, the riffraff associating with sex workers, gamblers and drinkers at court and in the city. Complaints rang that these ne’er-do-wells were deceitful wasters, who loitered around taverns and would rather feign sickness than work.⁴ On the other hand, clerics and administrators, men of the pen, acknowledged the sheer necessity of the hard manual labour these ribalds performed. Indeed, without these workers there to remove corrupt matter and dirt, cities assuredly failed to meet the standards of hygiene or to adequately manage the infrastructures supporting their economic and military needs. Thus, the moralist Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), who was affiliated with the church of Notre-Dame in Paris, commented that ‘vagabonds or ribalds are haulers and sanitation workers in the city, just as new sex workers are seemingly necessary to avoid far more shameful lust’.⁵

How the ribalds and the city negotiated the civic-military and social boundaries that typically marked urban communities in this region, is the question addressed in this contribution.⁶ As this chapter argues, several interacting issues were at play in the give and take over the social status of ribalds between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. As Christ’s poor, ribalds laboured by the sweat of their brow in this world, awaiting their rewards in the next.⁷ Doing the dirty work in the city and on the battlefield also meant these ribalds, often young men and women, played a key role in upholding the military-civic identity of communities, as Richard Trexler commented in his work on Tuscan cities.⁸ Ribalds performed the shameful tasks associated with it: collecting spoils, removing dead bodies, mucking out stables, insulting enemies, that good citizens preferred to avoid. Thus, as mostly non-citizens in legal terms, ribalds made a crucial contribution to the urban community, yet their presence and behaviour was spurned and satirised to distinguish it from good citizenship. The city’s attitude thereby hardened in the course of the fourteenth century, especially when the labour pool shrunk after the first major outbreak of the Second Plague Pandemic in 1347–1353, known as the Black Death. Afterwards, ribalds more often were actively shunned or even criminalised.⁹ In the same period, military and sanitary tasks increasingly were institutionalised in towns and cities, while religious confraternities took upon themselves the so-called good works looking after the poor and sick. Thus, in the second half of the fifteenth century, cities more frequently issued bylaws expelling the ribalds, if they did not conform to the social and economic order.¹⁰

Before exploring this fluctuating status of the ribalds in more detail, we can note how their position was subject to a form of vital politics. This is a term used to understand how governments manage the ‘quality’ of citizens, factoring in presuppositions about a person’s physiology and competencies.¹¹ Closely related to vital politics is the concept of biopolitics, entailing the negotiation of power at the level of life: life as a political-economic object, necessary to create manpower, to sustain armies or economic viability, upheld through regulations. From a biopolitical perspective, maintaining health thus has less to do with the pursuit of health of populations to its own end, although populations certainly might reap the benefits of biopolitical interventions.¹² As this chapter suggests, vital politics marked the ribalds’ status on various levels: they made a vital contribution to population health by sanitising public spaces and maintaining military and economic infrastructures such as roads and canals, yet were considered dirty, unhealthy workers, corrupting the material and the spiritual environment. The ribalds’ position as able-bodied labourers, accordingly, rested upon their indispensable efforts, spending their muscle strength, for the security and economy of a rapidly expanding urban landscape. Nonetheless, urban and Church authorities commented negatively about the spiritual-physical qualities of these manual labourers. They lacked discipline, easily succumbed to strong sexual appetites, were lazy and deceitful.¹³ What is more, their handling of corrupt matter—dirt—was viewed in medical-theoretical terms to present a direct health hazard.¹⁴ Thus, men of the pen depreciated ribalds’ vital, hazardous efforts for the community as the lowest form of labour, reaffirming society’s complex hierarchy of spiritual and physical work.

From the perspective of vital politics, how did city authorities secure the efforts of the ribalds within a civic-military infrastructure and how were their toils represented? As this chapter shows, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, seigneurial and urban militias appointed ribalds as temporary workers in their armies to execute infrastructural labour. Outside of the military expeditions, ribalds held sanitary and maintenance tasks in the city. Their toils, in- and outside the city, thereby formed a significant element of civic identity. Ribalds’ vital effort, doing the dirty work for communities, was acted out during civic festivals, mirroring the ‘good virtues’ of the higher echelons of urban society. As such, it can be argued that dirt dwells at the core of urban citizenship, whose act of removing it as matter out of place served as a vital performance of civic identity.¹⁵ However, as this chapter argues, in the course of the fifteenth century, sanitation and security tasks increasingly were institutionalised, pushing the temporary migrant workers called ribalds out of the social order and into the sphere of criminalisation.

2 Ribalds in the Military-Civic Arena

Before turning to the ribalds’ contribution to civic-military infrastructural and sanitation requirements, it is necessary to address briefly how sanitation mattered in this period. The cities that mushroomed in Europe from the twelfth century took sanitation seriously as a public health policy—as they did in the Mediterranean region and Middle East. In recent years, historians have argued extensively that municipalities organised and in part financially supported various types of sanitation work out of concerns over the health of populations.¹⁶ Although its organisation was decentralised, towns and cities actively endeavoured to promote public hygiene for the sake of disease prevention. This had to do with the medical premise that corrupt, decaying matter, from which poisonous particles known as miasma arose, was considered the root cause of disease.¹⁷ Cities accordingly strove to remove foul matter, recognised by its stench, from the streets, pools, ditches and waste heaps where- and whenever possible.¹⁸ In many cities, for instance in Brielle, Haarlem and Gouda in the Low Countries, magistrates ordained that households and shop owners clean the streets in front of their houses or outsource the cleaning at their own expense.¹⁹ They also appointed multitasking cleaners to remove dirt and waste at specific sites of significance to the city, such as market squares, the town hall and important waterways, by the same stroke facilitating the flow of traffic of people and goods. To this end, many cities in northern France and the southern Low Countries, as elsewhere, established sanitary policing outfits. Corruption, and its policing, also extended to the moral sphere, dirt representing material pollution emerging after the original sin and expulsion of mankind from the spiritually and physically pure locus of Eden.²⁰

Now from circa 1250, we come across a so-called king or count of the ribalds supervising sanitation workers in various cities, including in Bruges and Ghent.²¹ The regional presence of this king or lord of the ribalds, and his package of tasks, suggests that his early origins lie in the military sphere of the French principalities. Indeed, early accounts mentioning ribalds recall the world of the routiers, mercenary bands from the northern French area. The earliest surviving reference to a rex ribaldorum concerns a military commander in a list of armed men taken hostage after the Battle of Bouvines in 1214.²² The king of the ribalds afterwards surfaces in an ordinance concerning the hôtel of French King Philip V dating to 1316. In this capacity, the roi of the ribalds was tasked with policing the extensive royal household, the king’s soldiers on military campaigns, and controlling who entered court and the presence of sex workers and gamblers.²³ The position was duplicated by the dukes of Normandy, Orléans, Berry and Burgundy. Subsequently, the office gained foot in cities, in particular in the southern Low Countries and northern France, including Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen, Ieper and Rijsel (Lille).²⁴ In all likelihood, some of the ribalds policed by this so-called king, consequently found employment as sanitation workers in his outfit. According to Richard Trexler, in Italian cities, these ribalds usually were poor non-citizens from rural backgrounds, young men and women, boys and girls.²⁵ There is little reason to think that this was different in northern France or the Low Countries, although it is possible that the term ‘child’ (kinderen) was also used for adults lacking citizenship rights, whose status therefore resembled that of children.²⁶

A supervisor of poor recruits, the king of the ribalds himself belonged to the upper station. The Occitan troubadour William of Tudela (fl. 1199–1214), in Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, comments that the ribalds, camp followers, fell under an aristocratic military ‘king’. According to the Italian Franciscan friar Salimbene de Adam (1221–1290), the ribalds elected the king themselves.²⁷ In urban militias in the Low Countries, ribalds usually fell under a conincstavele, a constable elected by the city magistracy and the general council, often in consultation with the regional principality. The title conincstavele is a derivation of the Latin comes stabuli, the head of the stables holding a military position similar to the French maréchal. This helps explain why the supervisor of ribalds was called a king (rex, in Middle Dutch coninc) or a count (comes, in Middle Dutch graaf). As we shall see, the practice of nominating a king as a supervisor was carried through into fifteenth-century urban festival culture, where such appointments were re-enacted in satirical plays performed by the ribalds themselves. Crossbow and longbow guilds, for instance, held king-making competitions, appointing a king for one year.²⁸

In chronicles from the twelfth century, ribalds also feature as low-status foot soldiers used to scale walls in siege warfare. The role of these common soldiers, engineers and siege crews, as Randall Rogers argued, was critical to urban warfare at this time.²⁹ Thus, in 1189, the chronicler Rigord, who was affiliated with the French king, states that ribalds ‘were accustomed to make the first attacks in storming the fortifications’.³⁰ Several accounts narrate the attack by ribalds, also called arlotz, vulgi and gartz camping close to the bridge and walls, on the city of Béziers in the Albigensian Crusade in 1209.³¹ The papal legate and Cistercian abbot of Cîteaux, Arnaud Almaric (d. 1225), who led the crusade, calls them ‘servants and other persons of low rank and unarmed’.³² The Cistercian monk Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay (d. 1218) describes them as ‘servants of the army’.³³ These foot soldiers suffered high casualties in the forefront of attacking armies.

Already in the early accounts, the ribalds also were tasked with doing the dirty work, on both a physical and moral level. They not only cared for the wagon train, but also pillaged the towns after they fell, an act considered too shameful for mounted knights. The chronicler William the Breton (c. 1165–c. 1225), who likewise worked at the French royal court, in his Philippide defines ribalds as a contingent of unarmed troops, who collect the spoils of war.³⁴

From the late thirteenth century, we come across ribalds in the financial rolls of civic communities, straddling the civic-military boundaries. The biography of Jan Stevens, count of the ribalds in Bruges, is a case in point. Jan Stevens’ career is highly reminiscent of that of the king of ribalds in Ghent studied by Janna Coomans.³⁵ In Bruges, Jan Stevens first appears around 1300 in the financial accounts as the conicstavele heading one of the six military contingents drawn from the city’s districts, presiding over a hundred militia men. Acting as count of the ribalds, he is also responsible for public health policies, however, for instance handing out of gloves to lepers in Bruges to limit the spread of the disease.³⁶ In 1316, as count of the ribalds, he twice oversees the fire workers, supervising thirty-five men and women carrying water during the fire at the Poterie, and 455 persons at the lock at Swaenekine. In 1318, we come across Jan Stevens removing dirt from around the fountain of the Beurze.³⁷

But this was not all. As a mounted military leader belonging to the aristocracy, Jan also acts as conincstavele of the crossbowmen in Bruges. In this capacity, he accompanies the city on various military expeditions. In 1301, he marches with the burgomaster Martin van der Vooght to Gravelines along with two hundred shooters. In 1304, we see him heading, as hoofdman, twenty shooters and being remunerated 25 pounds for the cost of the bows. He also leads the haulers on the expeditions and takes care of the tents and pavilions. For these tasks he is honoured by the city council: in 1305, the city of Bruges commissioned the minting of a silver badge costing 3 pounds for Jan Stevens to wear.³⁸

Conincstaveles like Jan Stevens were accompanied by ribalds both inside the city and outside on military expeditions, alongside the shooters, sergeants and busmeestres, carpenters, cooks and washerwomen. Ribalds transported the partially horse-driven wagons. Their haulers’ role concentrated on the transport of materials such as tents and supplies for the militias. They were tasked with setting up camp and clearing sites in preparation for battle, digging ditches and constructing temporary wooden bridges. Ribalds worked at infrastructural maintenance and repair of roads. According to the Parisian bishop William of Auvergne (1180/1190–1249), at tournaments, ribalds went about collecting fragments of broken lances, to sell them on afterwards.³⁹ They also took care of logistics and sanitation during jousts.⁴⁰ On the battlefield the wagons, marked with a banner, served as a rallying point for the contingents. In Florentine armies, the ribalds carried a white flag, depicting their activities as looters and gamblers.⁴¹

Ribalds, known for their technical knowledge of mining walls, took on more specialised tasks in the geniecorps, labouring alongside the pioneers working the siege engines. Their military exploits are reflected in name of the so-called ribaudekins, a piece of machinery used to fire canons, to destroy walls or bridges.⁴² These ribaudekins were transported on wagons—probably by ribalds. The wagons used in conflicts were supplied by the regional monasteries and hospitals as part of the services owed to the principalities in this region. In Bruges, the financial accounts show that servants from the hospital of St. John’s transported the ribaudekins into battle.⁴³ The carts of the ribalds also served to carry off the injured and dead. In the fourteenth century, the chronicler Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405) recalls how during the uprising in Ghent in 1379–1385, ‘poor, dreary servants amidst large mounds of the dead threw bodies on the piles here and there’.⁴⁴ This was dangerous work, for corpses in particular were considered sources of miasma.⁴⁵

It is possible that ribalds cooperated with the surgeons appointed at the city hospitals. On military expeditions, surgeons on the city’s payroll, who cared for the wounded and sick, accompanied the army recruits. In 1324, on Ghent’s campaign to guard the gate of Aardenburg, the surgeon Gillis Van Hoye and 45 selschutters marched alongside the military contingents. Two years later, in 1326, a campaign from Ghent advanced to Oudenaarde, including five hundred men headed by the constables, preceded by a hundred schutters, two surgeons and a chaplain and followed by dozens of carts transported by ribalds. At the siege of Damme, the shooters and ribalds worked under the supervision of Cornelisse van Aeltre, while master Hannekine the surgeon cared for the wounded with ointments, bandages and other materials.⁴⁶ The city of Bruges carefully documented the costs of the military campaigns surrounding the urban revolt of 1302 and the surgeons’ expenses, even specifying the names of the wounded receiving treatment. The accounts of the military campaigns of Bruges call the military surgeons asatres rather than chirurgijns or medici.⁴⁷ Thus, in 1302, Bruges rewarded Lippine den Arsatre and his companions the significant sum of 7 pounds for serving on its military campaign. Lippine’s wife, as well as the spouses of Philip and Godevaerd, accompanied the men on the battlefield, preparing unguents and instruments. In 1305, Lippine the Asatre, Janne the Arsatre and Jan Raepsade each received financial compensation for the costs of medical equipment.⁴⁸ On average, on these campaigns, four to five surgeons were active.

On military campaigns, dealing with the wounded and the dead, ribalds would have picked up knowledge of public health through osmosis. That armies developed knowledge about group health in this period has been argued by Guy Geltner.⁴⁹ From Antiquity, health experts produced military regimens advising commanders on pressing issues including the provision of food, drink and shelter, upkeep of infrastructure and sanitation. Regimens written by Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab and French strategists advised on using natural resources and handling environmental hazards, avoiding miasma and stench arising from marshes or stagnant waters. Indeed it was crucial, as Sander Govaerts showed, that armies could sustain themselves in their natural environments, protected from disease such as dysentery and plague.⁵⁰ Ribalds, working in the military infrastructure, dealing with the dirt, mud and water considered to play a large part in disease transmission, must have been familiar with the basic ideas about health hazards, sanitation and environment in the context of military campaigns, and by extension, in civic public spaces.

The activities of the ribalds highlight the military responsibilities cities held at this time and how they might inform civic practices. Cities in the Low Countries were expected to structurally contribute to the military campaigns of principalities. From the thirteenth century, cities recruited military companies at the level of either neighbourhood wards and districts, or guilds. Hence, military campaigns often worked with both professional soldiers and part-time recruits, citizens and non-citizens. In the Duchy of Brabant, for instance, citizens were expected to annually render military service for forty days, either to protect the city or to contribute to its military duties upon the summons of the principality.⁵¹ In Ghent, the city called all weerbare men between twenty and sixty years old to arms.⁵² According to Peter Stabel, Bruges, around 1340, could drum up about 8.300 militia men based on a population of 42.000, divided into 10.500 households.⁵³ Most able-bodied male citizens were active in the militias in some form or manner. The militias, whose civic members bonded through oaths, were donned with various uniforms and equipped with different types of arms. The officials of the principality—the bailli, prévôt, châtelain—were actively involved, alongside the constables, in the recruitment of townspeople for these militias.

That military recruits were drawn from the city meant that military service left its imprint on the infrastructural make-up of it. Indeed, the organisation of the city’s defence informed the drawing of the maps of its districts and parishes, variably called constabularies, wards, thirds or quarters. The focal point of the districts was generally the city gate, which was guarded by the night watch and often used as an arsenal. The quarters served as the basic unit for municipal elections and the collection of taxes. Georges Espinas, in his study of the finances of Douai, observed that extending their status as military units, the districts or wards in that city also functioned as the basis unit for the organisation of sanitation, fire protection and the maintenance of public order. The cleaning of the ditches in Douai, for instance, was organised according to the same principles as military tasks. The city sounded the banklok to summon, in this case, the citizens and villeins to clean out the ditches, maintain the roads and strengthen the parapets, just as they would call men to arms. The constables gathered their men, providing them with ‘shovels, pick and long axes’ under their district’s banner. In the cases of Douai, Lille, Frankfurt, Hildesheim and Cologne, the financial accounts recording the costs of the cleaning of ditches, fire prevention and the purchase of materials in preparation for warfare were drawn up separately from the central urban city accounts. Often these accounts have not survived, unfortunately.⁵⁴

3 Ribalds’ Labours after the Black Death

If until the fourteenth century, ribalds negotiated the military-civic boundaries by meeting demands for sanitary and infrastructural work, after the first major outbreak of plague in the mid-fourteenth century their status shifts. In the poor laws issued at this time, increasing attention was paid to the work conditions of able-bodied men and women. At this time, state and commercial enterprises attempted to subject the working poor—able-bodied workers based on criteria of health and age—to stringent labour regulations.⁵⁵ Principalities proclaimed poor laws in an attempt to put a cap on rising labour costs as a result of the disastrous mortality rates. In the ensuing period, public offices increasingly became institutionalised and differentiated. In the Low Countries, thus, it were no longer the generic ribalds, but increasingly the moosmeisers, slijkburgers, cellebroeders, reeuwers and schrobbers who were involved in sanitation and public health related to communicable diseases, such as the plague. At the same time, the ribalds, male and female, were criminalised, as vagrants, driven from the cities and satirised in texts.

The policing of labourers after the Black Death not only was geared at restricting rising labour wages. Authorities also wielded the stick by limiting the number of people eligible for charity. This was not an entirely new development. Scholars have recorded more negative attitudes towards the poor from 1200. Sharon Farmer refers to a mid-thirteenth-century injunction in the regulations of Touraine-Anjou encouraging the judiciary to ban masterless, poor men who hung around in taverns and led a supposedly wayward life.⁵⁶ Yet in particular after the first major outbreak of plague, laws proliferate banishing ‘idle workers’; in the Low Countries, similar regulations emerge in the course of the fifteenth century. For instance, in 1456, the city of Louvain decrees that only children under the age of twelve and workers above sixty, the disabled, sick and parents with the care for young children, are allowed to collect alms or beg for bread.⁵⁷ To police the access to charity, the city authorities introduce a visual system, using lead tokens hung around the necks of those eligible for support. Hospitals, taverns and innkeepers were held responsible for ensuring that nobody other than the bearers of such tokens be admitted to their properties, under the threat of closure.

Besides limiting access to charity, urban authorities took to penalising the presence of migrant, working poor as beggars, ribalds unable to support themselves. In many cities, regulations determined that beggars should leave the city within a few days. On 9 October 1424, the city of Sint-Truiden in present-day Belgian Limburg, for instance, stipulated that ribauden and female ribaudinnen only stay in the city and the vrijheid for the duration of one night, under the threat that their mandibles or jaws be marked with a hot iron.⁵⁸ Louvain, in 1456, ordered that pilgrims and poor vagrants rest in the villages for a day and a night, and in the towns for two nights and a day. Exceeding these terms automatically led to punishment, unless one could argue convincingly that one was unaware of these regulations. In Louvain, the authorities sentenced begging women to three days imprisonment at St Michiel’s Gate, on a diet of bread and water. Men were shamed to spending three hours on the pillory.⁵⁹ In this same period, royal houses were organising armies of professional soldiers, to which cities contributed by paying a fee rather than manpower. In Italy, professional condottieri rented out their services as so-called mercenaries. It is conceivable that the reduction of temporary work in the armies also reduced the ribalds’ perceived or accepted usefulness to the community. Bad experiences with roaming, masterless army recruits in the Hundred Years War undoubtedly also harmed their reputation.⁶⁰

As ribalds increasingly were shunned, in the course of the fifteenth century, they began to slip from the civic fabric as sanitary police. Sanitation work was, more and more, institutionalised. So-called meurderaars in Bruges were, for instance, tasked with removing dead cats, dogs and pigs from the city’s canals and sanitising the city in preparation of festivities.⁶¹ Cities assigned religious confraternities, such as the cellebroeders, -zusters and grauwzusters, with the care for and burial of plague victims, as they did reeuers and later schrobbers and schrobberessen with cleaning the houses of the sick.⁶² Thus, the temporary and itinerant nature of dirt work transformed into institutionalised forms of work.

Under these conditions, some non-citizen ribald workers managed to improve their lot. They might be authorised to draw income from fines collected while walking their beat. Janna Coomans identified one former servant, Gossine, who was elected king of the ribalds in Ghent in the 1350s—was he already a citizen of Ghent?⁶³ Poignantly, the city of Utrecht, from the 1390s, offered so-called slijkburgers temporary, non-hereditary citizenship in exchange for cleaning specific sites such as the stairwells to canal waterfront—over ninety cases and contracts from Utrecht issued in the fifteenth century have survived.⁶⁴

Nonetheless, we can assume that many ribalds continued to seek work as masterless men without, albeit temporary, citizenship status. They now featured in literary sources, such as those narrating the adventures of the Aernoutsbroeders, vagabonds active particularly around the coal mines in the Liège and Maastricht region. These ribalds are depicted carrying nets, with gauze covering their faces to protect them from hazardous dust (Fig. 1). Paintings show them dancing and singing.⁶⁵ They also appear in sixteenth-century depictions of carnival, swirling around the centre piece of the urban well, where food and drink was distributed (Fig. 2). It is to these images, in the context of civic festivities, that the final section of this contribution will now turn. As we shall see, within discourses of citizenship and wellbeing, ribalds continued to take centre stage as figures mirroring ‘good citizens’, whereby they formed part of the social hierarchy, yet dwelled on its very edges.

Fig. 1

Detail from Sebastiaan Vrancx, Allegory of Winter (1608), of workers with nets covering their faces. BD/Rubenianum/digital collections (afb.nr. 1,001,204,064)

Fig. 2

The Fight between Carnival and Lent, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1559. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. In the rear left, lepers march into the city; to the right, beggars and cripples leave the church. In the right, front, a sick woman and child beg. In the centre stands the well and food wares are traded, symbols of civic public health-amenities

4 Performing Citizenship in Civic-Military Festivals

As non-citizens responsible for the vital dirty work, from the thirteenth century, ribalds played a central role in performing military-civic identity. As outsiders, they were pivotal in drawing the city’s inner physical, social and moral boundaries. Thus, ribalds took on the shameful, indispensable tasks that citizens shunned. As a form of socio-economic, physiognomic and gendered othering, their position in the civic fabric was shamed, however, allowing the citizens to disassociate themselves from such low-status toils. This role the ribalds enacted in civic-religious commemorations of military feats.

In Tuscan siege warfare, Richard Trexler showed, ribalds not only were expected to man the machinery, firing projectiles, scaling and mining walls, but also to hurl insults at the enemy to defame them. Siege warfare included tactics of shaming, as is observed in the early thirteenth century by William of Auvergne in northern France, stating that ‘kings customarily exposed cities under siege to ribalds, actors and prostitutes when the great armies failed to fight and capture them’.⁶⁶ Youths, on the part of the victor-aggressors, were mobilised to act out the insults hurled at the governors of conquered cities. Afterwards, races on foot and on horses, such as the Palio in Siena, celebrated the endeavours of militias who had staged similar races outside city walls during siege warfare.⁶⁷ The dirty work of ribalds in siege warfare was re-enacted in these urban festivities. However, ribalds, as non-citizens, were now insulted in these civic festivals, sometimes at the city gates, in order to restore the honour of the city after the less honourable, dirty work of warfare was spent. Thus, the festivities within the city echoed, through re-enactment, the shameful exploits perpetrated in the heat of warfare, yet offered citizens the opportunity to expose, control and quench any taboos violated in the fray.

In doing so, civic festivities satirising the ribalds’ work held up a mirror to the ‘good citizens’, shaming the onlookers to uphold good civic morals. In this sense, the ribald actors hired on these occasions for the festivities—including sex workers in Italian cities—served as moral policers as well as being morally policed. In 1329, the town of Ivrea for instance organised races to celebrate the city’s saint’s vital day and its military victories supervised by a podestas meretricum. These enactments served in particular to control—through an orchestrated public enactment of taboos—female virtue, productive and reproductive work.⁶⁸ In satirical texts, plays and fabliaux, such as the later sixteenth-century Der fielen, rabauwen, oft der schalcken vocaulaer, scenes represented women feigning false pregnancies and beggars simulating illness.⁶⁹

In this context, we again come across the king of the ribalds, appointed temporarily to manage large crowds of vagrants visiting the towns during these fairs. Viltart has observed that in Rijsel (present-day Lille) the king of the ribalds was employed for various small jobs during such festivities. Alongside the city herald and his messenger, the king was rewarded with some wine for helping in the great procession of the Fête de l’Épinette, in 1404. In Abbeville, the pastor of the parish of Notre-Dame self-appointed himself king of the ribalds during an annual fair while the church staged performances of minstrels, storytellers and hawkers. In Picardy, Saint-Quentin and Péronne, the king of the ribalds similarly presided over the annual festival.⁷⁰ In Ghent, ribalds assisted the night watch procession (Auweet) in the middle of Lent.⁷¹ These festivities often attracted hawkers selling theriac and pills, as well as beggars and lepers coming to the city to collect alms.

Ribalds’ role in fairs, working alongside actors, jesters and hawkers, placed them in a society of itinerant sellers of medicinal wares and entertainers who negotiated the boundaries of reality and illusion, such as the so-called charlatans at fairs who alongside histriones, storytellers, peddled their cures.⁷² In the course of the fifteenth century, city magistrates increasingly attempted to exclude these non-professional health workers from cities, restricting medical care to certified barbers and surgeons who were members of guilds. For instance, in Utrecht in 1434, 1459 and 1461, the aldermen issued ordinances against so-called quacks.⁷³ It is conceivable that some of these so-called quacks belonged to the sphere of the ribalds who had picked up their knowledge in public sanitation and the military. Ordinances forbade ribalds from going to the houses, church, taverns and weddings with niewelen, little cakes usually taken with medicines, and spiced wine (clareyt).⁷⁴ In 1407, the Buurspraakboek of Utrecht records the punishment of a man for peddling medicinal wares, who is penalised by being placed in a barrel.⁷⁵

5 Urban Panegyrics and Citizenship

If the ribalds working in sanitation suffered low status, the urban elite—the clerics and secular administrators who did not perform dirty work—endeavoured to emphasise in panegyrical texts their own cleanliness, dwelling in a perfect environment. Indeed, from the twelfth century, scholars revitalising the classical genre of urban panegyrics sketched theirs a beneficial environment, emphasising how the clean streets, fresh air and clear water where they lived produced virtuous citizens.⁷⁶ The ideal space of Eden’s pure environment—untainted by corrupt matter—invited the clergy to compare the walled urban community to that paradisical site in whose centre stood the fount of life (satirised in depictions of carnival). Walled cities, like monastic communities, thereby echoed the ideal conditions of a health-giving Eden, where man in its perfect form once spent his days in a vermin-free, gated community.

Several encomia claimed that the decency and urbanity of the civic population evolved directly from a health-giving environment.⁷⁷ Integrating Graeco-Arabic medical texts, encomia stressed that the air quality and climate not only benefitted health but also the mental, and by extension moral, capacities of population groups. In addition to extolling the virtues of salubrious air, panegyrics commented on the quality of sanitation in the city. The Parisian scholastic Jean de Jandun (1280–1328), for instance, remarked in his laudes of Paris (1323) that the city was clean (propitius) and admired by all men of good will.⁷⁸ The Italian grammarian Bonvesin de la Riva (1240–c.1313) claimed that, supported by good government, laws and institutions, city dwellers might derive additional benefits from a healthy environment.

Civic panegyrics focused on the dress, behaviour, virtuous character and physical qualities of their burghers, upholding the honour and common good (bonum commune) of the entire community. From a biopolitical, racialising perspective, the texts comment on the morality and fecundity of the female population, who protected the survival and ‘pure lineage’ of the citizens by sustaining population numbers. Virtuous civility was, moreover, entrenched in Christian values. Ribalds, who so often ensured the water streamed freely and the streets remained clean, were usually not considered part of this honourable company.

In order to achieve the status of ‘good citizenship’, burghers could turn towards specific scripts, laid out in the so-called regimens or books of conduct produced in large numbers from the twelfth century onwards in Europe in Latin and vernacular languages. In the thirteenth century, translations appeared of the poems like the Facetus about household manners. Extracts from popular manuals taught about health and hygiene, such as the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, drawing from the mirror of princes the Secretum secretorum, a translation of the tenth-century Arabic Kitᾱb (also known as Sirr al-asrᾱr). These texts and conduct books, such as the thirteenth-century Middle Dutch Bouc van Seden, featured in urban school curricula where young male citizens between about seven and fourteen years old were prepared for public life.⁷⁹ These manuals contained advice how to meet the standards of Christian citizenship equipped with status-enhancing manners, in pursuit of an ideological common good, and how to regulate the community, household and one’s own body. Many Church chapters owned such regimens in the Low Countries, as is visible from this graph which shows ownership based upon contemporary wills and library catalogues (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Graph showing the ownership of conduct books in the southern Low Countries in contemporary wills and library catalogues catalogued in Corpus catalogorum Belgii: De middeleeuwse bibliotheekscatalogi der Zuidelijke Nederlanden, ed. Albert Derolez, 7 vols. (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1966–2009). 452 manuscripts in total contained medical information

Poor migrants would have had little access to such texts at least before the establishment of poor schools in the course of the late fifteenth century.⁸⁰

6 In Conclusion

Studying the fragile position of the ribalds gives insight into how citizenship discourses integrated material and spiritual notions of cleanliness in constructions of identity. The disparaging comments made about the vital, indispensable efforts of ribalds reflected and maintained their marginal social and economic position. With the increasing institutionalisation of low-status work, ribalds’ precarious situation sharpened. Those lacking citizenship status, increasingly were shut out from civic society.

In most circumstances, the poor, masterless men remained outside of the civic, idealised arena. The reality was that ribalds led a rough, homeless existence, sleeping outdoors at night ‘at the ovens’.⁸¹ At best, ribalds were praised as good, honest workers who took on any dishonourable chores. Thus, the early thirteenth-century vita of the Cistercian monk and former constable of the French king, Jean Montismirabilis (1165–1217) from Longpont in northern France, praised ribalds as hard workers. Jean Montismirabilis dedicated his final years to tending to the lepers and poor at his abbey. He commented that ribalds’ ‘duty it was to clean the stables, to collect waste, to submit humbly to whatever things ought to be discarded, and to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. Their life, though it may be reckoned vile and despised by men, is nevertheless praiseworthy and very precious in the sight of the Lord’.⁸² However, Jean Montismirabilis’ companion at Longpont, the abbey’s prior, was astonished that Jean should express such a benevolent view. In his own opinion, ribalds were a ‘race of men despised before God and men’, who swore, committed perjury, played dice, connived with women and drank. Surely, this was not good company, the prior responded, thus carefully grooming his own enhanced status within the social hierarchy.⁸³

Above all, as this comment suggests, the marginal position of ribalds on the edges of the civic community allowed burghers to, when necessary, make use of their services, while distancing themselves from any dishonourable acts involved. With the growing institutionalisation of public services in the fifteenth century, however, temporary migrant workers more often were pushed entirely out of the city’s jurisdiction. Doing the dirty work had now become integral to the city’s own institutional infrastructure, running through the very heart of the community.