The lives of Pierre and Jean Maury, Pellissier, Benet, Maurs and a few others, as they are revealed by the Fournier Register, together with many minor facts about the shepherd’s life scattered throughout the documents, provide a useful basis for an ethnography of the sheep-raising regions of the Pyrenees in the first quarter of the fourteenth century.
Considering first its economic aspect, the shepherds and shepherdesses were men and women of business, of borias,1 and sometimes tough. Boria is boria, as Pierre Maury learnt to his cost from his dealings with Guillemette Maury over wool, lambs and sheepskins. Trade in the mountain pastures was to a certain extent carried out in money, but not to the point of excluding barter and pledges in kind when there was a temporary lack of cash. Pierre Maury had no money, so he pledged thirty sheep, all he had, to Raymond Barry as part of the price he would normally have paid to buy a hundred sheep from him (iii. 186). This practice seems to have been quite widespread. Alazaïs Fauré of Montaillou offered half a dozen or even a dozen sheep to Bernard Benet of the same parish if he would agree to conceal from the Inquisitors the fact that her brother Guillaume Guilhabert had been hereticated (i.404). More generally, whether it was a question of bribing a gaoler or winning the goodwill of the goodmen, a gift of wool would always help. But the widespread use of barter did not preclude a monetary economy as well, probably more active in the sheep-producing mountains than in the cereal-producing lowlands. Money intervened between the sale of wool and the purchase of lambs. Pierre Maury asked Guillemette for the money she had got from the sale of the wool produced by the flock he had left in her charge the year before. She answered (iii. 172), ‘I bought some lambs with that money.’
Guillemette was not always to be believed, but it was true that wool, with its high purchasing power, could realize considerable sums to be metamorphosed into sheep in the course of the economic cycle. The heretic Arnaud Marty of Junac had great need of money: so he sold twenty sheep for ten livres tournois, and the wool of these sheep for six livres tournois. So the wool alone was worth over a third of the total price of a flock (six livres out of sixteen). It was not surprising if the shepherds sometimes had the feeling that they had got rich, or at least comparatively rich, rich enough for their eyes to be bigger than their purses. It was because he suddenly decided to buy a hundred sheep for a thousand Barcelona sous that Pierre Maury sank to his neck in debt (iii. 177; ii. 186).
Fortunately, we are relatively well informed concerning the territorial organization of this pastoral economy. Migratory sheep-raising had to cope sometimes with the rights of the big village communities, sometimes with the rights of nobles who had managed to assert their authority over part of the mountain pastures in Spain or the Pyrenees. This duality of powers already existed in the period we are dealing with. For example, when Pierre Maury was in the Flix Pass in the region of Tarragona, he grazed his sheep in an extensive pasture cultivated and ruled over by the Bishop of Lérida (iii. 170). Twelve of the Bishop’s agents, enraged at this trespass, came up specially from Bisbal de Falset in order to confiscate Pierre’s sheep. Pierre only extricated himself from this tight corner by cooking an enormous pie which was shared between the Bishop’s henchmen and the shepherd’s friends from Cerdagne, Catalonia and Ariège. Manorial authority could operate at two levels: that of the land, and that of the flocks themselves, often the property of nobles, ecclesiastics or Knights Hospitallers. Among the great sheep-owners with whom the shepherds from Ariège had dealings as employees or competitors were Brunissende de Cervello (ii.185 and passim), and the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in the region of San Mateo (iii.179).
As well as all these gentry, the urban and peasant communities also had a right of inspection, concerned more with the land over which the flocks passed than with the sheep themselves. Guillaume Maurs relates that Pierre Maury for two summers grazed his sheep in the Pal Pass in the territory of Baga and, another summer, in the Cadi Pass, in the territory of Josa.1 The reference to territorial limits seems to suggest that the Catalan communities of Baga and Josa exercised jurisdiction over the migrant flocks which made use of their common pastures. The outer limits of these pastures were the limits of the commune’s actual territory. The inner limits were marked by the plantations and market gardens bordering the parish, where sheep were forbidden to graze. Jeanne Befayt [of Montaillou], who lived in Beceite, helped Pierre and Arnaud Maurs to lead their flock out of the village, taking care that the flock should not invade the gardens and vineyards of the said village (ii.390). Another frontier was that which separated the pastures, whether communal or otherwise, from the crops. The great problem for the parishioners charged with crop-watching was to prevent flocks from trampling the standing harvest (ii.505). There was always this danger, because near habitation, cornfields and vineyards there were, at least in some places, areas where wild animals had become scarce, so that the shepherds might risk leaving their sheep unattended and go off to enjoy themselves. Guillaume Bélibaste and Pierre Maury, as they grazed their sheep, could go where they pleased, because in the meadows where they were there was no fear of wolves; the only danger was of ‘trampling’: so at night the shepherds could send their flocks to graze in the pastures and go where they pleased until daybreak (ii.182).
Sometimes some of the nearest or most fertile meadows had become the private property of local sheep-farmers. Some were still common land (often under the ‘eminent proprietorship’ of a nobleman). We can only conjecture how the pastures were allocated to the migrant shepherds. Sometimes it was done by drawing lots, as in the case of the Montaillou shepherds who brought their own or other people’s sheep to graze on the territory belonging to Arques, in the Aude region (iii. 140). In other places, on the Catalan side of the mountains, the conditions imposed on the Ariège shepherds were more drastic. The migration of flocks was more or less forbidden, and in order to have the right to graze sheep on the common land a man had to marry a local girl and become a resident. While Jean Maury was living in Casteldans,1 the local bayles ordered him either to get married on the spot or to get out, so that his sheep should not eat up their pastures. And Jean Maury could not find a woman in Casteldans who would agree to be his wife. So he went … to Juncosa2 and lodged in the house of Esperte Cervel and Mathena, her daughter. With the help of the priest of Juncosa, he arranged to marry Mathena, who had taken his fancy.
Though village communities kept jealous watch over the territory where sheep could graze, they seem to have played only a small part in the way the flocks were organized. The nineteenth century was the heyday, in upper Ariége, of the ramados, communal and intercommunal flocks. In the fourteenth century there was nothing comparable. In this area, and among the migrant shepherds who came from it, flocks belonged either to a single person or, at the most, to associations of individuals (groupings which in modern times have been called orrys). So the communal spirit, far from being a survival from pre-history, must have developed in upper Ariège between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, parallel with the growing role of the village community as a force within the state and as a fiscal and political unit.
In Montaillou, the Pays d’Aillon or Sabarthès there was no communal organization of flocks in the period 1300–25. However, not far from this area there was communal herding of cattle, which remained very important right up to the nineteenth century (as in the big communal and inter-communal dairy farms (bacados) of around 1850 in the region of Tarascon and Montségur). But apart from a few oxen used for ploughing, there were hardly any cattle in Montaillou in 1320, and the problem of a communal bacado did not arise. But slightly to the south, in the village of Ascou, which was to remain one of the outstanding centres for collectivist dairy-farming right up to the twentieth century, there is every reason to believe that this tradition goes back to the fourteenth or even the thirteenth century. Raymond Sicre of Ascou relates (ii.362): One Sunday in the month of May [1322], I was leading a heifer of mine to the mountain called Gavarsel near Ascou; and when I saw that it was beginning to snow I sent my heifer to join the herd of common cows of the village of Ascou, and I went back to the village.
The role, then, played by the village community in the shepherd’s life was real but limited. For them the essential social unit, independent of the village, was the cabane. We have already seen how in his youth, at La Rabassole near Arques, Pierre Maury had been in charge of a cabane (chef de cabane) during the summer, where he had to see to the making of cheese and was responsible for a team of eight shepherds.1 The Fournier records contain other passages about this system of cabanes, which the shepherds from Montaillou regularly adopted. Guillaume Bailie (iii.519) alludes to a shepherds’ cabane in the Pyrenean pass of Riucaut, between Andorra and L’Hospitalet (this may be the present Envalira, near the Mérens Pass). That summer two shepherds from Cerdagne, together with Guillaume Maurs of Montaillou, lived in a cabane in the Riucaut Pass. Arnaud Maurs, brother of Guillaume Maurs, was the cabanier [chef de cabane] and made the cheese (ii.381).
After the summer cabane in the Pyrenean mountain pastures came the winter cabane in Catalonia. The following winter, said Guillaume Maurs (ii.186), I went with my brother and our flocks to winter in the plain of Peniscola … and we already had so many sheep that we could form our own cabane. It should be noted that the winter or Lent cabane had a certain minimum of comfort. There was a kitchen area, and a corner for hanging clothes (ii.181) and for sleeping. The shepherds entertained their friends there. It was in this cabane at Peniscola that Pierre Maury and his cousin Arnaud visited the Maurs brothers. The four men discussed, with some satisfaction, Jacques Fournier’s recent capture of the priest Pierre Clergues. The cabanes were where dairy products were made, where the various shepherds’ comings and goings intersected and where news was exchanged from their native village far away (ii.477). The Maurs brothers had spent the previous season in upper Ariège and Aragon. As for Pierre Maury, his travels in the past two years had included Aragon, Cerdagne, the Comté de Foix and south Catalonia. And yet what did they talk about in the cabanes, these men who could not be accused of parochialism or even provincialism? They had each of them been all over several different provinces, but now they chatted quite simply about the village, about home, about Montaillou, out of sight but not out of mind.
Another cabane briefly sheltered the shepherd Guillaume Gargaleth, perhaps a Saracen, and his partner Guillaume Bélibaste, who had been hired for a fortnight by the farmer Pierre Capdeville (iii. 165, 166). This cabin was in the spring and summer pastures of Mount Vézian, near Flix in Catalonia. Gargaleth and Bélibaste grazed the sheep during that fortnight, until Easter; they stayed alone in the cabane, and had their own hearth, away from everyone else. Not far away were some of the temporary sheepfolds (cortals) for migrant shepherds. Around these the men erected fencing and, under the guidance of Pierre Maury, who was appointed chef, Catholic, Cathar and Saracen shepherds cooked and shared garlic-flavoured pies, mingling together as brothers regardless of their different opinions (iii. 165).
So the cabane was to the migrant shepherd of Montaillou what the domus was to his family back at home in the old country. It was an institution: cabanes, designated as such, with all their weight of human relationships, are recorded from Ariège and Cerdagne in the Pyrenees to the Catalan and Moorish areas of Spain. The cabane area stretches a long way south, as far as southern Andalusia, which long remained under Saracen domination. Under the Andalusian system of the cabañera, the shepherds were paid a small salary in money supplemented by a fixed contractual amount of food. So both cabane and cabañera are well-defined institutions: they belong to that community of culture, at once Moorish, Andalusian, Catalan and Occitan, in which both the local and the migrant civilization of the people of Montaillou were involved at so many levels.
In contrast to the cabane, the corral (cortal) was simply a space with the minimum of roofing and a floor of earth or trodden dung, enclosed with branches or stones as a defence against wolves, bears and lynxes. One end of the enclosure consisted of a narrow entrance which would let in only one sheep at a time. In the fourteenth as in the nineteenth century, the essential element in the cortal was the fence. Pierre Maury, who in the cortal as in the domus was a generous host to seasonal migrants and heretics (iii.165, 199 and passim), did not for all that forget his fences. At the beginning of Lent, Pierre Bélibaste, the heretic Raymond of Toulouse, and the believer in the heretics Raymond Issaura de Larnat, came to my cortal in the pastures at Fleys. I was making bread. I told one of the shepherds, a Saracen who was working with me, to give the heretics something to eat ... As for the heretics themselves, I told all three of them to make some fences, and this they did all day long in the cortal … I myself went out with my sheep … In the evening, in the cortal, me ate a dish of garlic, bread and wine. One of the heretics blessed the bread secretly in the heretical manner. (We spent the night in the cortal). Next day I made two big pies, one for the above-mentioned heretics, and another for myself and my friends in the team of shepherds. The heretics then set out for Lérida, where they knew Bernard Cervel, a smith from Tarascon who was of their faith; they planned to hire themselves out to dig the vines in the region of Lérida. This passage clearly illustrates the functions of the cortal, both complement to and substitute for the cabane. A passing labour force (in this instance polarized by heretical friendships) built the indispensable fence against wild animals, before going down again to the lowlands to engage in other seasonal work. The cortal acted not only as a sheep-run but also as kitchen and bakery for the various workers who passed through. It was a cultural cross-roads for the lower classes, which in this case were heterodox and consisted of Cathars and even Moslems. The way in which work was organized in the cabane and the cortal in Pierre Maury’s time seems not to have been very different from what it was five hundred years later. Each cabane sheltered a team of from six to ten shepherds who lived there either seasonally or temporarily, to be replaced by another team, equal in number but of totally different geographical origin and identity. There were also smaller cabanes, of two or three shepherds.
Agricultural inspectors of the nineteenth century found from two hundred to three hundred sheep to each cabane, and this was about the same as in the Middle Ages. Sometimes there were only between a hundred and a hundred and fifty. The two or three hundred sheep to each cabane would be provided by several shepherds joined together. Often each one would bring his own sheep and almost always he would bring those of his employer. Pierre Maury, for example, might bring thirty to fifty of his own sheep among the much larger flock entrusted to him as chief shepherd, cabanier, fromager or majoral. He was, as we shall see in greater detail later, at one and the same time a partner, an employee and foreman over his friends, the other employees.
The rhythms of the daily or, rather, monthly life of these shepherds during winter and summer pasturing were dictated by lambing and milking. The lambs were born at Christmas, as in the story of the crib in Bethlehem, already popular in the iconography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the beginning of May the lambs were weaned, and from May onwards the milking began. Associations were formed between shepherds, or between shepherds and employers. In June the shepherds went up to the cabanes. The chief shepherd (majoral) armed with ladles and wooden bowls, supervised the making of cheese, to be sold in the shops in Ax-les-Thermes to all the neighbouring villagers, including those from Montaillou.
The cabane of Spain or the Pyrenees contrasted with the domus of Sabarthès or Montaillou in that it was entirely masculine, only disturbed from time to time by a brief visit from some courtesan or mistress come to disport herself with a shepherd richer or more attractive than the others. In the domus, despite a certain division of labour which assigned outdoor matters to the men and indoor matters to the women, masculine and feminine roles did interact and overlap. But in the cabane everything was strictly adult and masculine.1 In fifteenth-century paintings of the Adoration of the Shepherds, the presence of a Virgin and child in the sheep-fold in the pastures is an unexpected element, surprising and wonderful. But although the cabane was a society of men, brought together through cooperation and not ties of blood, it was nonetheless a repository of the most ancient traditions, lunary and mental, of one of the oldest occupations in the world. These were shortly afterwards to find public expression in the shepherds’ calendars. The summer mountain cabanes played a similar role for Cathar as for cultural survivals, guarding them as long as possible from the persecuting forces of the lowlands, through oral transmission from old shepherd to young shepherd. Perhaps it is a vestige of this transmission that is referred to by La Roche-Flavin in the only known text alluding to a possible Cathar survival after the beginning of the Renaissance. ‘A saintly bishop,’ says La Roche-Flavin, ‘going to Rome to be made a cardinal, met near the mountains of Albi an old peasant of the fields, and as he spoke to him about the news of the country the old man said that there were a multitude of poor people, wearing only sackcloth and ashes, living on roots in the wastes of those mountains like brute beasts, and these were called Albigensians, and the continual war that had been waged against them for fifty or sixty years, and the murder of more than fifty thousand men, had only served as seed to make them grow and increase, and there was no means of wooing them from their error, except the preaching of some excellent person.’2
So far we have been dealing with long-term tendencies, transhistorical trends, during which, from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, the cabane remained unmoved, a living institution. Underlying these structures are the great movements of migration. A concrete picture of the details of migrant life during the decade beginning 1310 is provided by Guillaume Bailie, a shepherd of Montaillou (ii.381, 382). That year we lived in a summer cabane with the Maurs brothers and two Cerdans, at Riucaut. In September, at Michaelmas, the Maurs and the two Cerdans, now joined by Pierre Maury, went south with their sheep, a long stretch of some thirty leagues right across Catalonia. We went to spend the winter with our sheep in the pastures at Peniscola, and in the plain of San Mateo, among the first territories of the kingdom of Valencia. Pierre Maury went as far as Tortosa, where he recruited two more shepherds, two Occitans. One of them, Raymond Baralher, was from Aude; the other was from Mérens in upper Ariège. Once the team was complete and settled down with the sheep, the winter timetable followed the traditional pattern. Up to Christmas, the whole team remained mostly together. We had our two meals together, prandium [at the beginning or in the middle of the day] and cena [dinner, in the evening]. After each meal we split up, both day and night, to graze our sheep. The sheep were divided up into several different flocks or sub-flocks. The division into sub-flocks was a regular feature of pastoral life, then as now. Guillaume Maurs declared (ii.188), Raymond, of Gébetz, and Guillaume Bélibaste (then Pierre Maury’s partners in guarding the same flock) could easily have talked to one another, even on heretical subjects, in the pastures at Tortosa, because the sheep they were each in charge of grazed close together.
Things became more complicated for Guillaume Bailie’s team at the end of December. At Christmas, when the lambs were born, a happening which witnesses explicitly associate with the Nativity, the division of tasks and of space, hitherto only begun, grew more marked. I, Guillaume Bailie, went on looking after the sheep ‘properly speaking’ [i.e. gelded]. Not far away, Pierre Maury looked after the group of lambs and marranes – in other words, the lambs of the present and of the previous year. Maury and I were thus separated at work both day and night; but we had our midday meal [prandium] and dinner [cena] together, in company with Raymond Baralher, who brought our provisions. As for the other members of the team, Guillaume Maurs, Jacques d’Antelo, Guillaume de Via and Arnaud Moyshard, they were settled some distance away in the village of Calig. There they had taken charge, from the beginning, of the ewes, first with lamb, and then suckling. The division of labour did not always coincide with relationships between friends. In those days Pierre Maury showed greater familiarity to Guillaume Maurs and Raymond Baralher than to his other work-fellows (ii.382). ‘External’ social relationships linked the team to the people of the nearby Spanish towns and villages, such as Calig and San Mateo, which were full of emigrants from Narbonne and Cerdagne (ii.188, 382). They used to go to these places, on foot or by donkey, to fetch provisions. In the tavern, where people would bring their own food at Christmas, they met shepherds working in the same region but for different farmers. These meetings provided opportunities for seeing passing heretics. That winter, says Pierre Maury (iii.171), I came back to spend the winter in the pastures at Camposines, in the territory of Asco [in the Tarragona area]. And there, around Christmas, I met two friends: Raymond, who was staying with Pierre Marie [probably a sheep-farmer from Ariège], and Pierre, who was staying with Narteleu, of Villefranche-de-Conflent [Roussillon]; we had all three gone into a tavern in Camposines and suddenly I saw Raymond de Toulouse, the heretic, come up to me with his bale of peddler’s goods. I went out to meet him and talk to him, while my two friends cooked the meat and eggs they had brought with them.
For the summer work, generally done in or around the Pyrenees, we have fewer details than for the winter. But Pierre Maury throws some light on the chronology of the summer hirings (iii. 163). After having given notice to Guillaume André, my former employer, I hired myself out as a shepherd to Pierre Constant of Rasiguières in the Fenouillèdes. I stayed with him from Easter until Michaelmas in September of the same year, and I spent the summer on the passes of Mérens and the Lauze [in upper Ariège]. I had with me … five shepherds. That summer I did not see any heretics or any believers in the heretics. And then, around Michaelmas, I gave notice to Pierre Constant, and hired myself as a shepherd to Raymond Boursier of Puigcerda, with whom I remained for two years.
We have scattered information about various episodes in the summer pasturing, in particular about the shearing, which was done in May, just after the arrival of the flocks in the mountain pasture (alpage). As Guillaume Maurs says (ii.185), We set out again from San Mateo towards the mountains and the pass of Riucaut. When we got to the pass, near the Mérens Pass, we sheared our sheep. Shearing-time, followed by the sale of the wool, was the time for settling urgent debts. It also provided an opportunity for the social intercourse which the shepherds loved, between the people of Montaillou itself and with those from elsewhere. I was with Pierre Maury my brother at the Lalata Pass [in Cerdagne], says Jean Maury (ii.505). We were shearing our sheep. Pierre Maurs came to see us there on a mule that he owned. We all ate together – I, my brother Pierre Maury, the three brothers Pierre, Guillaume and Arnaud Maurs, their cousin Pierre Maurs and, Guillaume Bailie [all of Montaillou]. The shearers also ate with us, but I have forgotten their names. We had both mutton and pork. And then Pierre Maurs loaded Arnaud Maurs’s wool on to his mule to take it to Puigcerda. But this social activity could also be the occasion for ‘evil communications’ with mountain heresy. In 1320, Arnaud Cogul of Lordat said (i.380): Sixteen years ago or thereabouts - I don’t exactly remember how far back – I went up to Prades d’Aillon to shear my sheep, which were being looked after for me by Pierre Jean of Prades. I spent the night there, and during the night I was seriously and painfully ill. Next day I got up and found myself in the courtyard of Pierre Jean’s house, because I meant to leave, and Gaillarde, Pierre Jean’s wife, said to me: ‘Do you want to speak to the goodmen?’
And I replied: ‘You go to blazes, you and your goodmen!’ I knew very well that the goodmen in question were heretics, and that old Gaillarde was thinking of having me hereticated by them if I were to die of my illness!
Shearing in May was followed in June and July by the cheese-making up in the cabane. Round about the feast of Saint John, Pierre Maury said to his sister Guillemette, whom he had just rescued from the clutches of her Catholic husband (iii. 155), ‘It is time for me to leave you, for I am worried about my master’s sheep; and above all it will soon be time for making cheese.’ In the case of both summer and winter pasturing, there is a great contrast between the internal social intercourse among the groups of shepherds, which was necessarily inter-regional, and the external social intercourse which the wandering shepherd sought as often as he could in the villages of the exodus, where he met friends from home and mixed with the diaspora, Cathar or otherwise, from Montaillou. I brought my sheep back, said Pierre Maury (iii. 168), from the winter pasture [in Catalonia] to the summer pasture [in the Pyrenees]; the shepherds in my group, apart from the Maurs brothers from Montaillou and Charles Rouch from Prades d’Aillon, were all from Cerdagne … ; when we stopped over in the village of Juncosa, in the diocese of Lérida, I met Emersende, the wife of Pierre Marty of Montaillou, Guillemette Maury, the wife of Bernard Marty, Bernard Marty, her husband, Arnaud their son, all of Montaillou, all believers in the heretics except for Bernard Marty. Whenever they could, and wherever they were, the shepherds and emigrants from Montaillou got together and recreated, though on a different scale, their native village.
The world of the shepherds, involved on the one hand in the ecology and chronology of transhumance, was on the other hand part of the network of wage-earning and association, though it was never, as such, involved in the concatenations of feudal dependence, still less in those of serfdom. The shepherd from Ariège or Cerdagne in the fourteenth century was as free as the mountain air he breathed, at least as far as feudalism was concerned.
We may disregard the future shepherd’s earliest days, when he was training for what was to become his life’s work: When the heretics came to my house, said Jean Maury (ii.470), later one of Montaillou’s best professional shepherds, I was not at home; I was out, keeping my father’s sheep. I might have been about twelve or thereabouts. But the adult shepherd was an employee, a wage-earner. In stock-rearing regions he occupied a place parallel to that of the skilled labourer in grain-producing regions; but he had greater opportunities for getting rich and developing his potentialities, though set against these advantages was the risk of accident, not negligible in that mountain country. Instability was the hallmark of a shepherd’s life, as of the lives of all rural workers in Occitania: ‘Every year’, says Olivier de Serres in his book on agriculture, ‘change your farm hands, make a clean sweep. Those that come after will put all the more heart into their work.’1 The people we are concerned with did not feel this instability as some kind of oppression or alienation. On the contrary, the migrant shepherd changed his master more often than his shirt! Pierre Maury was quite typical in finding it equally usual to be dismissed by one employer, to give in his notice (dimittere) to another, and to hire himself out (se conducere) to a third. The fact that the sheep farmer who employed him was called master (dominus), just like a feudal lord, added no extra element to the contractual link between the sheep-owner and the shepherd. As we have seen, the hiring of shepherds might be seasonal, based on the pattern of migration: Pierre Maury relates how, finding himself in the Tarragona area of Catalonia at Easter (iii. 172), I hired myself out as a shepherd to Arnaud Fauré of Puigcerda, and remained with him some six or seven weeks, or almost; I took his sheep to Puigcerda [the summer pastures in the Pyrenees]. When I got there I hired myself out as a shepherd to the lady Brunissende de Cervello and to Raymond Boursier of Puigcerda; and during the summer I remained in the Quériu Pass on the land belonging to Mérens [in Ariège]. And then, when the summer was over, after the end of my summer pasturing in the service of the lady Brunissende and Boursier, I hired myself out again to Arnaud Fauré of Puigcerda! And I came down again with his sheep to pass the winter on the plain of Cénia [south Catalonia]. Thus Arnaud Fauré was Pierre Maury’s employer for two successive winter pasturings, or more precisely migrations between winter and summer pasturings; while Brunissende de Cervello was his employer for the summer pasturing itself.
Some passages speak of shepherds being hired specifically for a year, after a probationary period arranged through some third party, a friend or relation or fellow-citizen of employer and shepherd. Pierre Maury says (iii. 148), Arnaud Bailie the elder, of Montaillou, son-in-law of Barthélemy Borrel of Ax-les-Thermes, said to me: ‘If you want to hire yourself as a shepherd to my father-in-law, I will see to it that he gives you a good wage.’
I agreed to this suggestion. My new employer sent me to winter his sheep at Tortosa [Catalonia], When I returned to Sabarthès [for the summer pasturing], the said Barthélemy gave me a shepherd’s contract by the year.
Instability of employment was more marked in the case of those who specialized in the seasonal migration, like the Maurs and the Maurys, than in that of comparatively sedentary and stationary shepherds, with more or less fixed employers, like for example Jean Pellissier.
The relationship between employer and shepherd was generally close and easy. The employer might be a relative of his employee, or a relative of one of his friends or fellow-citizens. In any case, the employee had no hesitation in speaking his mind to his employer’s wife. He often actually lived in the same place as his master, either in the master’s house, on Sundays and feasts and days when he had come down from the mountains, or in the pastures themselves, where the master would often spend several weeks or months together with his employees. I hired myself out to Pierre Constant of Rasiguières, says Pierre Maury (iii. 163), and I stayed with him from Easter until Michaelmas in September, keeping his sheep on the summer pasture in the Mérens Pass. On other occasions, Maury tells how he stayed with his master Barthélemy Borrel of Ax (iii. 155, 156) or with Brunissende de Cervello, whose sheep he was pasturing.1
The shepherd was a wage-earner. Part of his ‘salary’ or ‘pay’ was in kind, or in food. When Pierre Maury was staying in Arques, he regularly left his flock to go to his employer’s house for bread: One morning I went down from the pastures to Raymond Pierre’s house, for my stock of bread (iii. 127). But when they were in the Tarragona area, where their employer was too far away, it was Pierre Maury himself who acted as baker, cooking the bread in the oven of the cabane or the cortal: These people came to see me in the cortal where I was at that time, in the pastures at Fleys. I was making bread (iii. 165).
The other part of the wages was in money, a very small sum which might be paid monthly: When Pierre Maury and Guillaume Bélibaste were in the service of Pierre Castel of Baga [in the diocese of Urgel], says Guillaume Maurs (ii.176, 181), Pierre Maury collected the month’s wages which Guillaume was supposed to receive from Pierre Castel; and with this sum he bought peas and leeks for the said Guillaume.
In addition to wages, the contract between employer and shepherd often provided for the sharing of the natural increase of the flock, the cheese and sometimes the wool. The frontier between wage-earning pure and simple and a lease of livestock was often vague.
An employee was a factotum, entrusted with every kind of task. He could be postman as well as baker. In a world where people could not read or write and where there was no official post, the shepherd in his seven-league boots might act as go-between, carrying verbal messages for his employer about some business affair, or perhaps some matter Cathar and ultra-secret.2 Pierre Maury, said Guillaume Maurs, remained as shepherd and as messenger with Barthélemy Borrel of Ax for a year; and he went with Borrel’s sheep to Tortosa. Afterwards he brought them back to the Comté de Foix. During the time he dwelt thus with Borrel he carried various different messages to various different places, but he never told me what he was charged to convey, nor to whom.
At some periods of his life the shepherd who had hitherto been an employee might become, temporarily or permanently, an independent sheep-farmer. This was what happened with Pierre Maury, when he happened to find himself in good shape financially, a state which usually did not last long. Guillaume Maurs again (ii.183): My brother Arnaud and I were then shepherds to Raymond Barry of Puigcerda; and we had wintered with his sheep on the plain of Peniscola. That winter Pierre Maury stayed with us on the said plain, but he was independent, without a master, because he had bought a hundred sheep from Raymond Barry; while I and my brother were shepherds to Raymond Barry, Pierre Maury, though he lived with us, lived at his own expense.
Finally, the shepherd might remain an employee and never become an independent sheep-farmer, even temporarily. But he might, just the same, become an employer by, so to speak, taking a sub-lease on some lesser shepherd. In the only known example of this, the ‘employee-cum-employer’ was in fact a collective, a team of shepherds all from Montaillou and strongly bound together by family ties. I hired myself out as a shepherd, says Pierre Maury (iii. 166), to Pierre Castel of Baga. I stayed two years with him, wintering in the pastures at Tortosa. Also shepherds with me were Guillaume Maurs and Pierre Maurs (Pierre Maurs is the first cousin of Guillaume, and the son of Raymond Maurs of Montaillou). The first year, around Lent, Guillaume Bélibaste came to see us in the pastures; he stayed with us for three months, because we had taken him on as a shepherd. Other hirings or sub-hirings were purely seasonal; additional workers might be taken on for shearing towards the end of spring.
As well as vertical links between employers and workers, such as still exist today in agriculture and stock-raising, there were also horizontal links, forms of association between colleagues, or with employers of other shepherds, owners of other sheep. Guillaume Bailie (iii.390) recounted how he and his companions, Guillaume, Pierre and Arnaud Maurs went to winter in the pastures at Calig [near Tarragona]. We did not have many sheep: because of this, we joined together with a group of shepherds and sheep which belonged to Pierre Vila of Puigcerda; this group contained four shepherds and one muleteer, all from Cerdagne. On another occasion Pierre Maury, the Maurs brothers and the employer of them all (who at that time was none other than the Catalan, Pierre Castel of Baga), entered into association with some Cerdans. The following summer, says Pierre Maury (iii. 167), we took our sheep to the pass of Pal [in the present-day department of Pyréneés-Orientales] and we entered into association with the shepherds and sheep of Arnaud Fauré (of Puigcerda); all his team of shepherds came from Cerdagne.
Sometimes, for a few seasons, when favoured by good fortune and well rewarded for his labours, Pierre Maury managed to be his own boss. He would then use various techniques: fraternal mutual aid, the hiring of paid shepherds or association with another employer – of whom he himself became, in fact, the employee. These combinations usually occurred when the situation in the mountains grew difficult as the result of some private war between feudal lords. That summer, says Pierre Maury (iii. 195), I went to the Isavena Pass [in the Pyrenees] near Vénasque. I stayed there during the summer pasture with my brother Jean; Jean and I then took on Bernard of Baiuls to help us guard our sheep … afterwards, at Michaelmas, we came down from the pass and went to Lérida; we had to avoid the Casteldans territory because of the war there, between Nartès and Guillaume den Tensa. So we joined our sheep with those of Macharon and Guillaume Maurier, two sheep-farmers of Uldecona [in the Tarragona region]. With the sheep of these two farmers, we went and wintered in the pastures of San Mateo, I, my brother and two shepherds, one from Cerdagne and the other from Vénasque. These various types of association broke up almost as easily as they were made: Pierre Maury, says Guillaume Maurs (ii.182), decided to separate his own sheep from those of his then employer, Pierre Castel…. So he went off with his animals and claimed, when he came back, that he had sold them to a merchant in San Mateo.
As well as wage-earning and what might be called ‘simple association’, there was also a whole class of contracts covering ‘sheep share-cropping’. Among the people from Montaillou, whether they stayed in the village or emigrated, this kind of lease of livestock took the form of the parsaria. The contract between Pierre Maury and the sheep-farmer Guillemette Maury, the relation and fellow-countrywoman whom he met again near Tarragona, was a variation of this arrangement (iii. 169). Despite the somewhat acrimonious disputes between the two partners, this association lasted some time. Shortly afterwards, Guillemette invested twenty additional sheep in the association, as well as her money. Pierre Maury notes (iii.181), The next morning I received twenty sheep from Guillemette and I returned with them to the pastures at Calig.
The parsaria also existed in Montaillou itself. In about 1303 Guillemette Benet, whose husband Guillaume Benet was a kind of labourer-cum-farmer – he owned oxen for ploughing which had to be shut up in the evening after work (i.478) – entrusted her sheep by means of a parsaria arrangement to the people of the great house of Belot, who seem to have specialized in sheep-rearing. About eighteen years ago, or thereabouts, said Guillemette Benet in 1321 (i.477), my husband and I held some sheep in parsaria with the house of Belot. It was evening, sunset, during the summer pasturing. I was taking some bread to the Belots’ house so that they could send it to Guillaume Belot as well as to Raymond Benet, my son, who were guarding the ‘partiary’ sheep. Thus, by means of a contract which was probably merely verbal, without benefit of notary, the Benets supplied the Belots with part of their livestock and part of their labour, together with home-made bread for the shepherds.