Between Patronage and Social Mobility: The Brokers of the Labouring Poor in Late Medieval Rhineland

• Applicant: Dr. Julia Exarchos
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439956137

The investigation of lower classes in medieval society has concentrated for a long time on the unemployed poor such as beggars or other social marginalized groups, as well as on the measures to fight poverty, especially on poor relief. Most of the poor in the Middle Ages, however, did work, although those jobs were insufficient to enable them to build a secure existence beyond poverty. Those labouring poor just as other members of society used social structures of their community. They had contact persons and networks they could turn to in order to obtain access to jobs, credits, goods, merchants or institutions and their representatives. Although scholars have pointed to the significance of those contact persons in order to examine the labouring poor and entire late medieval economic life, no thorough fundamental study has been made so far on those brokers of the labouring poor for the late Middle Ages. The study will fill this gap in scholarship and will focus on those intermediaries who functioned as important switch points between working poor and the urban authorities, merchants, work, credits or goods and will investigate their importance for late medieval urban economic area.The brokers were active in different fields, for instance in commerce (e.g. the so called “underkeuffer”), in employment services (e.g. so called “GesindezubringerInnen” or “Knechtz-Makeler”) or in cases of garnishment (e.g. as valuers, so called “keufferschen”). The project will examine on the basis of source material from the three cities of Cologne, Aachen and Essen the brokers of the working poor and their business models from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. In the centre of the study will be an individual-related analysis of the brokers and their milieux. Furthermore, the study will investigate possible dependent relationships between brokers and their customers and will elucidate the brokers’ contribution to a social mobility in the cities. Another important aspect will be the gender-specified analysis of the brokers and their specific business models. The study will thereby contribute to a better understanding of the structures which late medieval working poor had to cope with, and will help to shed new light on the economic activity of the lower classes in late medieval contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants