Seamen's Guilds, Labor Organizations and Social Protest in Northern Iberia in the Late Middle Ages (original) (raw)
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Spanish historiography has studied widely the political strategies surrounding maritime affairs, producing numerous volumes on coastal or ports realities, both local and regional. This essay offers a comparative vision of the different modes of administration in the Castilian Atlantic's ports. Firstly, to analyse the system comprising ports in the Iberian north. Secondly, to explicate the established system in the Guadalquivir's estuary and in the Bay of Cadiz. Although both systems were constructed independently, they converged in maritime traffic while displaying two distinct models of ports administration. The main differences between both models are determined by the degree of intervention of official bodies, local oligarchies, and mercantile institutions.
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International Review of Social History
From the twelfth and certainly from the thirteenth century onwards, a social group of artisans with their own political and economic aspirations can be clearly delineated in Netherlandish towns. Bound through common skilled work, they made up a distinctive group with a self-image and a developing political vision and economic programme. Their “guild ideology” is increasingly clearly expressed in the sources they produced from the fourteenth century onwards as a self-confident group in urban society. Labour, certainly when organized within guild structures, was the cornerstone of community life, cultural experiences, and practical ethics. Even though there were socioeconomic differences among guildsmen and many geographical and chronological variations in the degree of political power they wielded, the ideal of artisan ideology in the late medieval Low Countries was one of a community of brotherly love and charity centred on the value of skilled labour.
In Alban Gautier and Lucie Malbos (eds.), Communautés maritimes et insulaires du premier Moyen Âge. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020 (Haut Moyen Âge, 38), ISBN: 978-2-503-58551-2, p. 97-125.
Information about north Iberian maritime communities and their workings during the early Middle Ages is scanty when compared to that on the North Sea or the Mediterranean. This has helped to perpetuate the idea that the sea repelled rather than attracted settlement in this period. Modern historiography, concerned as it was for a long time with the processes of inland conquest and colonization (the so-called Reconquista), is partly to blame for that notion. But the textual and material evidence available is still insufficient to advance an alternative view. Archaeology does hint at some maritime activity along the north Iberian coasts up to the early seventh-century, but it seems to fade away immediately after. This strengthens the case for a striking contrast between the small and rural maritime communities of Christian Iberia and the large port cities of Muslim al-Andalus. Focusing on the northern shores of the Peninsula, this paper aims to assess whether the extant sources actually reflect an underpopulated and rural littoral before the twelfth century, or rather a peripheral status of maritime activities and communities in a period when the main socio-political centres lay inland. The first section questions the “periphery” paradigm constructed by early medieval sources and modern historians alike, the second discusses the evidence of maritime networks encompassing northern Iberia between the ninth and eleventh centuries, the third reflects on the density of coastal settlement and its indicators, and the fourth looks into the documentary records preserved by two littoral monasteries — São Salvador de Moreira (Portugal) and Santa María del Puerto (Cantabria) —, in order to gain some insight into how coastal communities were affected by their maritime experience.
Fishermen's Taverns: Public houses and maritime labour in an early modern French fishing community
International Journal of Maritime History, vol. 28, no 4, 2016, p. 671-685.
This article is based on civil proceedings brought before Dieppe's Admiralty Court by actors from the local fishing world, especially boat masters. It provides an account of the functions performed by inns, taverns and alehouses within this professional environment. Paying close attention to the social uses of public houses which transpire through judicial archives, it aims to show how these institutions, which played a key role in Old Regime societies, not only worked as nodes in fishing organisation, but also as public arenas where the craft community's relationships were built.