I propose a reflection upon women’s work in the medieval world. To do this, we could set out from the feudal theory of the tripartite society: those that pray, those that fight and those that work; but medieval thinkers already realised that it was very difficult to classify women in this strict social division, and an Irish priest was quick to assert: I do not say that the function of women is to pray, work or fight, but rather that they are married to those who pray, work and fight, and they serve them. To this “serve” we could give a double meaning. In the first place we could interpret it as carrying out servile tasks, that in a real sense are manual and heavy tasks, those for which women slaves were also used; equally we could say that they carry out a task that goes beyond paid work, they serve, they are useful. Following the text verbatim we would have to say that the mission of women consisted of being useful to the men of the community; giving it a wider sense we could assert that it is recognised that they serve the whole community.

Manual work, especially the work of the land, belonged to the serfs, men and women; all the daily tasks of the home belonged to women of any social class. Throughout the medieval centuries the tasks that were done propter lucrum were considered servile, not just the manual jobs, but any paid ones; those jobs that could not be done on a Sunday. Many daily women’s tasks could appear to be materially servile, that is, manual, but formally they were free, since they were not paid; thus they would not be considered morally servile, and could therefore be done on a Sunday. In this way, in fact, the work of the housewife was dignified, but her tasks were endless, they did not have any day for leisure for themselves. The life of the women was a life full of work.

I said that the tasks of women could appear to be merely manual, but we know that is not so; we could say that women’s work appears in two distinct forms: as servile work and as “emotional work”; the servile work relating to the long days of repetitive domestic tasks, with ephemeral results; the emotional work being a series of complex tasks and practices, of transmission, of relationship, of care. Some medieval thinkers recognised this function: Do not ignore the fact that when someone finds themselves healthy or ill (women) serve very diligently, and better, and in a cleaner way than men. Let us note that the sense of “serve” is insisted upon.

There are skills of women, accumulated over generations and transmitted from mothers to daughters, from ladies to servants, even from women servants to ladies, from women teachers to apprentices; it is knowledge belonging to the feminine collective; amongst the many things that they had to know how to do we also have to think about management and administration.

These tasks were often opposed on a theoretical level to the spiritual task; the sermons spoke of Martha and Mary; the work of Mary the contemplative one, which up to a point we could consider to be intellectual, was reserved almost exclusively for the nuns; all other women, including the noblewomen or the middle class ones, had to be Marthas, that is, they all had to put their energy into devotion to the family, to the tasks and the running of the home, to the work with the distaff. While for the men of the well off classes moments of leisure presented themselves, all the women were expected to be always occupied.

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The medieval home, be it a farm, a castle, a town house, was a unit of production, consumption and reproduction; the woman of all the social classes was in charge of the administration and the good running of the house, she collaborated in the professional activities of her husband, who on occasion she stood in for, she took charge of everything on becoming a widow; she had to have some practical knowledge and put some strategies into practice, which meant that she was required to have some skills and also some attitudes; all in all she had to be wise. It suits a woman to live wisely and to run herself and her house with good judgement, and instruct her sons and her daughters and her companion .

Housewives had to administer the domestic economy and carry out the daily tasks, although only the women of more humble class did them alone; in the better off and sometimes not so better off homes, there was some woman servant or slave who helped with the heaviest jobs; it might seem, then, as though the lady of the house were often at leisure, but, as we shall see, it was not so; normally they were up to date with the business and the family income and they also worked with their hands.

It was evident that the women of the working classes could not stop working; Eiximenis refers very directly to it: it is not necessary to speak of the simplest and the youngest of them, since they have no alternative but to work if they want to live. Besides the domestic tasks, they had to devote part of their time to some paid work, as helpers in the work of the land, in the workshop of the artisan families, or with a job of their own, normally poorly qualified and badly paid. The impression given by the medieval documentation is that all of the women were capable of carrying out a multitude of activities, they knew very diverse techniques, the tasks took up their hours and their days; many of these tasks were linked to the daily jobs, that is, to life. We can also observe that they were the depositaries and transmitters of a culture that, in part, differed from the dominant culture.

The document presented offers us a sample of the multiple tasks, the surprising pieces of knowledge, of the constant activity of a widow of the nobility. It contains some fragments of an accounts book of the noblewoman Sancha Ximenis de Cabrera, which affords us a journey through food, the domestic economy, the administration of the feudal lands, clothes, the relationship with her daughters, correspondence, manual work and the running of a spinning workshop; in this way we can enter into this woman’s culture, and by extension that of the women of her time and her class; but we can also see her relationship with other women of the working classes with whom she maintained professional contacts.

When she wrote what she entitled Primer libro memorial, Sancha Ximenis had been a widow for twenty three years; she had married in 1408 a son of the Countess de Foix, Arquimbau de Grailly, with whom she had two daughters, and who she was widowed by after nine years of marriage. She left her lands of the earldom of Foix on a date which we cannot specify, without having recovered all the dowry she was owed; she invested her money and effort in the chapel of Santa Clara of Barcelona Cathedral and in the acquisition and administration of the rights of the valley of Osor that she bought from her stepbrother Ramón de Cabrera. She died an old lady; she would be around eighty years old, in the year 1474. That is, she remained a widow for fifty seven years.

The moralists emphasized that the widow should be distinguished by her austerity in her dress and in her bearing. Saint Jerome says: widowhood should be shown not only in black and long clothes, but in any adornment... Oh, what would Saint Jerome have said in these times if he had seen our widows flirting a la castellana, their faces painted... in their houses the household tasks are never done, or rarely, but from the bed to the table and from the table to the window. Evidently, this is not the case we are dealing with: in her account books dresses are rarely cited, with the exception of a considerable amount of veils; in Sancha’s house, as we shall see, there was work, and some.

In spite of what Eiximenis tells us, the situation of widows had considerably worsened in Catalonia from the fourteenth century on; the new laws, such as the so-called Recognoverunt Proceres (1284) and those passed in the Courts of Perpignan in 1351, taking up the tradition of Roman law, reduced women’s rights and had an impact on widows, who lost the life interest that the previous law had acknowledged them, and left them at the mercy of their dowry - if they were able to get it back – something that on occasion was not easy; and on the will of the husband, who could leave the woman well provided for or, on the contrary, literally in the street, once the year of lamentation was over. I did not want to go deeper into the aspect of widowhood since it moves away from the central theme of the essay, which is the world of work; but I should state that widows, because of their unusual economic and legal situation, are the woman that the documentation shows us most visibly worked; I am convinced that all women worked, but their participation in the working world often remains more hidden when they were married. All women collaborated in the family business, whether this consisted of the running of a fiefdom, or a mercantile business, a farm or a workshop.

This collaboration was not taken into consideration in the statutes of guilds, there remain few work contracts of women and the work that they did was recognised on very few occasions. However we have pieces of evidence: some widows kept the tools of their deceased husbands; it is clearly taken for granted that it was in order to continue working, since they knew the techniques of the trade: it does not seem very clear that it was so in the case of the widows of weavers, tailors, or other artisan workers related to clothes, but also the widows of skilled workers of trades that may seem to us to be far from the tasks that women habitually carried out, were interested in keeping some tool from the workshop. Thus, for example, the wife of a Barcelona knife grinder bought grindstones in the market with the estate of her deceased husband. Or the extremely interesting case of Isabel, widow of Genís Solsona, a Barcelona chemist who died in 1445, who received as a testamentary legacy from her deceased husband an oil press with all the necessary tools for the production of starch, which would be the work that she would habitually do in the workshop and at which she would be a professional expert. Once the husband had died, it would appear that the widow could act for herself, but sometimes this was not so; poverty prevented many widows from doing anything apart from survive, we see that the older, childless widows were especially helpless. We also find young widows who had to bring endless lawsuits to be able to recover their dowry, and others controlled by the family or inheritors of the husband, or others separated from their sons and daughter since the husband had not left them as their guardian. In fact, society exercised control over widows, but evidently in a more distant way than a father could exercise it over his daughters or husband over his wife.

Sancha Ximenis, during her long widowhood, had to deal with adverse circumstances; however, in the period of the text we are talking about, the decade of 1440, she would be under fifty, we find her full of energy, lucid, wise, prudent, decided, stubborn and active, in essence, very active.

She normally lived in Barcelona with a small group of women and men servants; but she often travelled to the lands of Gerona where she had her domains and where other members of the Cabrera family lived. It is very clear that she used to go personally to do the accounts and charge her fees and also that she herself wrote it into her accounts book: Today, Wednesday, the 18th of April of the year 1442, inside the castle of Verges, I, Sancha Ximenis de Foix y de Cabrera, lady of the Valle de Osor, have come to count. And I have counted with Pedro Sobirà, deputy mayor of the said valley. She adds up the incomes: she received part of the taxes in money and the rest in cereals and pulses, for which she was not paid in kind but rather the amount of the sale once sold, she also received taxes from the wine, meat, hemp and of other products; at the same time she also received some payment in kind such as chestnuts.

Sancha Ximenis, as the lady of the valley, received repayments and other minor taxes, as various entries show: as an agreement of rent a repayment certificate of men and women of various farms of the valley of Osor. We can cite the repayment of a man who is allocated the quite high amount of 43 sueldos, on the other hand the daughter of a peasant redeems herself for the minimum amount foreseen by the law in the case of the redemption of young virgins leaving the farm to get married, 2 sueldos and 8 dinars, although the lady would not receive it all as 3 dinars are for the salary of the mayor. Differently, a woman pays 25 sueldos to go into a farm. If we take into account that the girl would be redeemed from the farm of the father to go and live at the farm of the husband, added to the dowry, the wedding dress and other expenses, a wedding in the country was quite expensive for the purchasing power of the peasants of the fifteenth century.

We spoke before of a certain scarcity in the references to dresses; in general Sancha’s expenses are austere. She only seems to have three weaknesses: the cathedral chapel, the defending of her levies on which she spends money and effort, and the gifts for her daughters who lived in Bearn.

Sancha Ximenis belonged to the privileged classes; this meant amongst other things the access to written culture; Sancha was a learned woman who did her own accounts personally and sustained an active correspondence of which unfortunately we are left with very little. In the text we are speaking of she herself tells us that she wrote and sent letters and that she received and answered them: she wrote to her daughters, or people close to them, to other members of the family, to diverse authorities, both religious and civil, above all she wrote in order to demand her levies or those of her daughters.

The text that we are analysing mainly concerns the domestic economy. Sancha was a housewife and she took care of the good running and the administration of the home, amongst other things, of the daily food, ordinary expenses, such as bread and the extraordinary ones, the food for parties. With regards to bread, the basic food, she took care of the whole process of its making: she usually bought the wheat through a priest servant of hers, and we think that she did so in order to save herself some charge, she had it sieved and ground, for which she paid both the work of the grinder and that of the bearer and the help or due tax. The bread was kneaded at home, most probably some female servant would do it and afterwards it was taken to the oven, for the batch she paid the baker. She notes it down meticulously: We began to knead the said flour on Thursday 7th November; on Saturday 7th December I paid María, the baker, to cook the bread.

She took care of the clothes, making the laundress’s list with exactness, that is, all the items of clothes that were sent outside of the house and deposited in the hands of a professional woman for her to return them clean; often we can read: List of clothes washed away from home. It was white clothes, sheets, tablecloths, towels, serviettes, drying cloths, curtains...

Normally there are no superfluous expenses, the objects and things that got broken were mended; thus were a wool mattress or some rugs darned. In the house chickens were raised and preserves were made, above all of quince jelly, for which the quinces and honey were bought.

For the Christmas festivities in the house of Sancha Ximenis and we might suppose in many more or less well off houses of the time, nougats and angelets, which I think would be rolled wafers, were made, and spiced wine or clareia. Together with her faithful helper, making nougats for Christmas 1440, Sancha wrote down in her book a week before the festivities: for nougats with sesame (alegría) (5-18), and mylady Constanza went for them, 4 pounds of honey, 4 pounds of toasted hazelnuts, and a pound of wine for a pound of sesame; she gave gifts of nougat to some of the women of the family and held the party of the obispillo for the young lads in her service or her circle.

What could most surprise us about Sancha Ximenis’ accounts book are the pages devoted to her professional activity. Once we have read the book with care we reach the conclusion that she managed a spinning workshop, where she herself worked, and four or five more women. In the first place we would have to cite mylady Constanza, her main collaborator throughout those years and a woman of her trust; there was also Juliana, the Castilian woman, and Esperanza, la Magarola figures as a spinner and also as seamstress. She had at her service la Servalls who very probably worked in the workshop and besides would take on work outside the house.

They all spun together, Sancha noted down in her book the skeins that each of them had spun and the weight of the thread. And she states that she herself spun and after wrote in her own handwriting spun by me, Sancha Ximenis. Afterwards she had the thread whitened, la Berala, a whitener of thread, was the person that habitually took care of this job for which she charged three sueldos per pound; this professional woman received the thread untreated and had to submit it to a series of operations to extract the impurities that it contained raw and which gave it a certain shade, so that it finished up white; throughout this operation the thread lost weight. That is why Sancha Ximenis weighed the skeins of yarn before and after the whitening.

Once this operation had been carried out the thread was taken to be woven, above all this was given to professional women weavers, also to male ones at times, but on most occasions it was the women weavers who worked for Sancha: Aldonça, wife of Gabriel Bofill; Catalina la Aragonesa, la Creixells, la Seguera or la Cortadella, weaver of the Street of Carmen in Barcelona; they would be weavers of veils or weavers of linen.

When she went to her lands in Gerona to do the accounts of her domains we might think that she broke off from her daily activity and routine; but this was not the case, she was accompanied by the women of her house and they took the work and continued to spin: on Wednesday 26th September I asked Torruella, in all likelihood from Osor where she had gone to do the accounts with the lord mayor, to send for me to Barcelona to Bofill 33 skeins of thread, 10 skeins were spun by the hand of mylady Constanza and the other 22 by all of us. It may have been thread to be woven by Aldonça, wife of Gabriel Bofill.

When she writes down her expenses she also mentions a shopkeeper, Margarita Esiberta who she bought some things from; María, the baker who baked the bread for them; the laundresses María and Salvadora who took the clothes to wash outside of the home.

This environment of transmissions and relationships went further than the walls of the house. Sancha, around September 1440, meticulously wrote the recipe down to preserve aubergines in such a way that we can follow the process step by step. I think that she might have received the recipe orally from a peasant woman, and that she, an educated woman, wrote it down, making it into a rung of transmission of feminine culture.

With this text, written with an eminently practical end, a book of accounts, we can have a look at the different kinds of knowledge that were born out of practice, of experience; that is, of work, of learning, of teaching, that always set out from and are projected in relationship. We can speak about provisions, the kitchen, the preserving of foods, the making and taking care of dresses, the ritual celebration of feast days, home medicine, care of daughters and sons, and a great accumulation of popular wisdom, feminine wisdom, practices of relationship, care of the other and care of the things in the service of others. It is a recognition of women’s tasks, the paid ones, usually badly paid, and the unpaid; the recognised, normally only half recognised, and the silenced ones. It draws us closer to the other culture, that ran – still runs – in parallel to the dominant culture, and that was in the hands of women and was transmitted from one woman to another.