Market Power pp 97-121 | Cite as
Commercial Crossroads
Abstract
The notarial records of Santa Coloma depict a sophisticated financial market in operation, but the economic expansion of Santa Coloma centered upon the development of the town as a place to which the people from the Baixa Segarra region could come to conduct the business of daily life. 1 As discussed in the preceding chapters, the mechanisms of credit and commerce evolved and flourished in Santa Coloma during the last third of the thirteenth century. Along with the written contracts of the notarial culture, a sophisticated use of currency and money of account, and fair standards of lending and available credit, the town provided the legal components and physical structures that attracted traders and consumers. These latter elements included a weekly market regulated by officials of the lord of Queralt to which “foreign” merchants from Cervera, Montblanch, Igualada, and even Barcelona would bring merchandise to sell to the villagers come to market in Santa Coloma. By the 1290s, the citizens of the town itself had begun to participate in market exchanges as producers and merchants, in addition to serving as officials, landlords, and financiers. Local and “foreign” merchants operated in partnerships, providing security in their transactions as well as greater flexibility for the movement of people and goods. This market served a social role as well as an economic one, providing a public space where locals and foreigners, men and women, Jews and Christians worked, traded, and spoke with one another.2
Keywords
Notarial Record Finished Clothing Local Merchant Weekly Market Deceased HusbandPreview
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Notes
- 3.Economic studies of late medieval England have utilized systematic wage and price information extensively, such as in D. L. Farmer, “Prices and Wages,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales , ed. H. Hallam (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 715–817; also Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages. For Spain, Vicens Vives, Economic History , 223–227 charts inflation in Spain based on grain yields and prices.Google Scholar
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- Marci Sortor, “Saint-Omer and Its Textile Trades in the Late Middle Ages: A Contribution to the Proto-Industrialization Debate,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993): 1475–1499.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- James R. Farr, “On the Shop Floor: Guilds, Artisans, and the European Market Economy, 1350–1750,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 1 (1997): 24–54. Some scholarship has attempted to consider the economic role of women, as producers, of course.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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- Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- and Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
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- Marjatta Rahikainen, “Ageing Men and Women in the Labour Market—Continuity and Change,” Scandinavian Journal of History 26, no. 4 (2001): 297–314;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- and Rebecca Lynn Winer, Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, ca.1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).Google Scholar