Travail, salaire et pauvreté au moyen âge

Abstract

Hired working is a topic rarely dealt with by medievalists. It is nevertheless a central matter: beside the corvée and the range of constraints that goes with the seigniorial system, wages play an important part in the organization of rural or urban working. In the first place, every kind of work, even constrained work, has a cost. This ranges from the material organization of the tasks to the offering of a meal or to the payment of a monetary counterpart in exchange for the work. These features are compensations for the time passed in the fields or in the workshop and for the strength and skill used to satisfy the demands of the master. The fact that this cost is not necessarily, and never entirely, monetized is a barrier to thinking that between tenth and fifteenth centuries work could be considered a mere commodity whose wage is a price. The existence of counterparts in working means that there are reciprocal obligations: this fits well with an economic system in which acts and things can be valued according to social or political circumstances. Hired working appears to have been part of the seigniorial system from its very beginnings, as a marginal but useful way to obtain work from free workers. The way in which the different tasks are remunerated, and not only the amounts concerned, reveal the hierarchies in working: there is a gap between the gold given once a year to an architect (or to a professor at a university) and the bullion used to pay workers once a week on construction sites. The ways of remunerating work can be very complicated, mixing payments in cash and in kind. These payments show a considerable confusion in the conception of what the remuneration consists of: different words are used, even in the same contexts, to indicate the same economic reality, especially in rural contexts where the remuneration can involve clothes, cash, food, and accommodation. In the end, salary and poverty appear to be closely linked in the mentalities as well as in the social and economic reality. Hired working, salary, and misery are clearly three interrelated features of the medieval economic and social reality.