‘Type A’ class distinctions: ‘classical’ ideas of class

This set of ideas encompasses a broad group of writers, writing through the 1980s, who tended to make a number of broad but characteristic assumptions about occupation, ‘class’, merchants, rentiers, nobles, patricians, old and new rich, class struggle, revolution, the existence of ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ and similar concepts, which might for our purposes be lumped under the heading ‘classical’. While many of these ideas were ultimately derived from Henri Pirenne, particularly from his Early Democracies in the Low Countries (1915), and were hardly Marxist in any strict sense, they were nonetheless seen by Anglograph historians, particularly after 1989, as being at least somewhat associated with Marxism, and were therefore all the more readily dropped from historians’ agendas at that time. For this reason of perception alone, our association of the label ‘classical’ with the notion of ‘Marx-influenced’ is appropriate.

In fact, historians who called themselves Marxists tended to retreat from the late medieval city very early on, despite the interest showed by Engels on the subject; preferring rather to concentrate their forces on England after 1600, or else on English agrarian production after 1348.Footnote ¹⁵ Rodney Hilton himself, who wrote the most influential – perhaps the only genuinely influential – Marxist interpretations of medieval cities in the later twentieth century, spent the greater part of his energies trying to prove that English (and French) towns were essentially part and parcel of a ‘feudal’ world, through and perhaps beyond the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁶

While it is true that neither Henri Pirenne nor the annales school were Marxist, it is also true that Marxism, Weberian class analysis, Pirenne, Sombart, the annales school, and a host of other long-ascendant theories coming out of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared a number of concerns regarding class in the pre-modern city.Footnote ¹⁷ And Weber, Sombart, Pirenne and the annales school all engaged with Marx, because they came after him, and wrote during a time when he and the paradigms he helped to articulate were highly influential. Through the 1980s, in any event, Pirenne remained chained in scholarly narratives with Marx and Marxism, and prominent British Marxists such as Maurice Dobb.Footnote ¹⁸ Individual urban historians then tended to take up one or more of these related strands, which have here been labelled ‘classical’ or Type A. Some of these ideas were mutually exclusive or even contradictory, and some were based on a clear misinterpretation of Marxist thought, but a basic typology can nonetheless be constructed.

One of the principal Type A assumptions was that the shape and significance of social class was determined by material life, that is, by economics. This is what moved Marc Bloch, Braudel and a highly influential strand of urban historians including Claude Carrère to begin some of their seminal studies with a description of material culture, which they sometimes portrayed as the ‘structure’ of political and social life.Footnote ¹⁹ More specifically, many classical writers felt that class was determined by what has come to be known as a ‘Mode of Production’.Footnote ²⁰ Each Mode generated a different type of wealth, and each type of wealth in turn created two classes: a class of possessors, and a class of labourers whose labour was exploited for the benefit of the possessors. In this schema, each Mode ultimately created a distinct set of political and cultural institutions which was anchored (as a ‘superstructure’) to the economic ‘structures’ prevalent in the wealth-generating activities pertaining to the Mode. Theorists tended to write as though there were two main Modes of Production in the later Middle Ages, namely ownership of land and ownership of capital.Footnote ²¹ Each Mode therefore created a class of possessors, who were shaped by the realities of their Mode into holding a certain set of beliefs and outlooks on life. The ownership of land naturally generated an ‘aristocratic’ outlook, while the ownership of capital naturally generated a ‘bourgeois’ outlook. From here, it was easy for various writers to suggest that the mutually exclusive nature of the modes of production, and of the nobles and burghers who possessed each, might inevitably come into conflict, until one or the other gained the upper hand, thus creating political and legal institutions which were best suited to the further generation of wealth by their own kind. Along the way, there would be occasional violent clashes between the possessors and the labourers whom they routinely exploited, although, in the pre-modern period, this generally resulted in victories for the possessors.

Most of these ideas are present in Pirenne's interpretation of the genesis and evolution of the late medieval city, particularly as given in his Early Democracies in the Low Countries, and Medieval Cities.Footnote ²² Similar categories such as burghers, nobles, patricians and plebeians can be found in Weber's The City, although Weber arguably had much less of an impact on urban historiography than Pirenne – not least due to the imprecise nature of many of his key observations. Indeed, from the days of Pirenne through the 1980s, much of the work done in medieval urban history was concerned with locating and nuancing the urban groups highlighted by Pirenne. Later studies, for example, implicitly took the earlier ‘Mode of Production’ idea and broke it down into individual occupations, focusing on how various occupational groups might participate in social and political life differently. Thus, their specific occupation could be seen as playing a significant role in how they engaged with the community, often mediated by guild membership.

By way of example, to show how long-lived and influential were these ‘classical’ paradigms, we can point to two classic studies of Florentine government from the period around 1980, John Najemy's Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280–1400, and Gene Brucker's The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence.Footnote ²³ While these are quite careful to distance themselves from ‘Marxist-sounding’ narratives of class conflict, the subjects they treat, which include a heavy focus on revolution, and the shift of power from ‘popular’ to ‘elite’ groups, mark these works as being of the ‘classical’ school. James Amelang's 1986 book, Honored Citizens of Barcelona, also maintains clear continuities in this vein, compared with works written after 1990, and Richard Britnell's Growth and Decline in Colchester, appearing in the same year as Amelang's book, takes for granted the notion of a merchant class that has much in common with definitions used by Sylvia Thrupp.Footnote ²⁴

A related concept was ‘revolution’, since it was widely held, even by professed non-Marxists, that conflicts between these different groups of possessors, and between the possessors and the labourers, were inevitable. The struggle between nobles and burghers, which Marx believed had resulted during the French Revolution in a victory for the bourgeoisie, was again seen in some theoretical lines as having roots in the Middle Ages, and this provided the basis for much work on noble vs. burgher relations in late medieval cities.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, because Marxists believed that the ‘next stage’ of history, after the victory of the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution, would see a victory of the proletariat over the now-dominant bourgeoisie, the issue of pre-modern class struggles between labourers and their masters long remained infused with significant interest. They were seen by some as being the ‘prime mover’ in what was supposed to have been a ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’. For this reason, the struggles of groups like the Florentine Ciompi long held a central place in urban historiography. As late as 1993, Richard Britnell was pointing out that any ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’ was likely to have been less calamitous, and to have taken place over a longer time period, than generations of historians had come to expect.Footnote ²⁶ It was about this time, however, that the subject fell fallow.

Taking a longer view, it is fair to ask, what fruits have emerged from decades of research on Type A class distinctions? Speaking generally, it should be recognized that many concepts are worth rescuing from the wreckage of ‘classical’ or ‘Marxistic’ analysis. Concepts such as exploitation, revolution, economic determinism, even perhaps ‘the bourgeoisie’, are certainly worth re-examining in the light of more recent scholarship, and worth re-integrating into some of our narratives about the local, national and global roles played by European cities since the Middle Ages. The fact that few other sets of ideas can serve as a useful counterweight to liberal economic analysis, which too often serves as an enabling ideology for currently reigning global elites, remains important in this regard.

More specifically, in the urban context we need to distinguish between two types of Type A class conflict: namely, that between ‘possessors and workers’, and between those held to possess different types of capital (i.e. nobles vs. capitalists/bourgeoisie). Regarding the first type: over the long term, and across western Europe in general, it has been concluded that there was rather less ‘conflict’ between ‘capitalists’ and ‘workers’ in the late medieval city than was once believed, and this holds true well into the early modern period. The principal exceptions to this occurred in the regions of Flanders and northern Italy, particularly during the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but outside of those relatively specific times and places, instances of ‘guild agitation’ become increasingly scarce.Footnote ²⁷ Even in the epicentres of guild disturbance, one must be very careful, since the ‘guildsmen’ who achieved political influence were frequently wealthier masters and petty capitalists – i.e. merchant-employers, rather than wage-earning workers, and so one must be wary of characterizing ‘guild revolutions’ as a revolt of ‘the workers’ against ‘dominant classes’.Footnote ²⁸ In our interpretation, most of this guild struggle is a Type D struggle between groups of relatively well-off non-nobles, who utilized existing urban institutions to gain greater political power.

Major studies of strikes or agitations by workers or petty artisans against their employers for the medieval period remain limited to a handful of works, and it is therefore difficult to refute Samuel Cohn's recent judgments on the topic.Footnote ²⁹ As a whole, the guild system regulated such commercial relations between owners and producers as there were, and many manufacturing chains were so spread out in a cottage-industry format that notions of ‘exploitation’ or ‘class consciousness’ do seem anachronistic in the great majority of medieval contexts. Plenty of urban disturbances can be found over the course of the later Middle Ages, of course, but as Cohn has discovered after sifting through the records of thousands of such disturbances, Type A ‘class struggle’ paradigms do not fit in most cases.Footnote ³⁰ Instead, Cohn argues that these relationships need to be interpreted in terms of contemporary understandings of justice, and the right functioning of society. Furthermore, the entire notion of ‘conflict’ itself has recently been called into question. Outside of the exceptional regions mentioned above – and during relatively brief periods of time – students of individual cities have generally been surprised at just how little urban unrest there actually was in any given urban context. Although there was undeniably a good deal of unrest in certain times and places, it should be observed that, for the most part, medieval and early modern authorities were quite good at keeping things from boiling over into orgies of riotous violence. There is a well-established school of English historiography which argues that ‘consensus’ between governors and governed, and, by extension, between possessors and workers, was normative in the late medieval urban setting.Footnote ³¹

Regarding the second type of ‘class conflict’, there is ample evidence to support notions of occasional rivalry, and sometimes long-standing conflict, between nobles and burghers, in various times and places. This was not always the case, of course; in England, by the later Middle Ages, few nobles bothered to live in cities, and if they did, they generally did not interfere with urban government.Footnote ³² In thirteenth-century Italy, however, there were momentous struggles between ‘magnates’ and ‘non-magnates’ which had definitive impacts on the histories of various cities, depending on how these played out.Footnote ³³ In the various Iberian kingdoms, and in France, the rights and privileges of the nobility likewise had a definite impact on the flavour of urban life, which, arguably, had far-reaching impacts on the economic development of cities.

Of course, few analysts would now describe these conflicts between ‘nobles’ and non-noble burghers as ‘class conflicts’ in a ‘classical’ sense, i.e. that they were fuelled by some essential difference between ‘money capital’ and ‘landed capital’, which rendered conflict between their possessors inevitable. In fact, recent work has pointed to the fact that land and money capital could be held, quite interchangeably, by both ‘nobles’ and ‘burghers’, and that the same could often be said about land. Even if Pirennian analysis did not explicitly use ‘modes of production’ as an engine of ‘class conflict’, this was always lurking in the background as a dynamo of change, and so in its absence, we need to seek other explanations for the still-pressing issue of how and why noble vs. burgher conflict existed and persisted in European urban spaces for as long as they did. Our institutionalist typology aims to address this issue.

‘Type B’ class distinctions: economic strata

Before discussing these alternative explanations, we should address our ‘Type B’ class distinction, which focuses upon differentiation between economic strata in a given urban society. Theoretically, this is the most straightforward of our four types. The usual way of determining the shape of Type B class structure in a given city is to construct a table showing the distribution of wealth. Unfortunately, for the later medieval period, existing sources have enabled us to create few such tables. The most famous include those published by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber for various Tuscan cities, and those published by David Nicholas for Ghent.Footnote ³⁴ The author's own findings for Manresa, in Catalonia, provide a third data set.Footnote ³⁵ It is simple bad luck that no sources yielding appropriate information have survived in English archives.Footnote ³⁶ This raises the question: of what use can such tables actually be?

The answer seems to be: while urban distributions of wealth are of some use, they are less useful than was once believed. Part of the problem is again theoretical: if there are fewer pressing reasons to identify Type A classes in a given city, then a (Type B) distribution of wealth is of less inherent interest. Conversely, if we accept that institutional (e.g. Type C and D) differences are of some theoretical use, then Type B differences come into play again, albeit as supplementary information. A more practical difficulty is the fact that most urban societies have shown a ‘pyramid-like’ pattern of wealth distribution, in which a few people hold a disproportionate share of the wealth, while most people live on little. Once a few pyramids have been constructed for ‘representative’ cities, one might ask: what is the point of constructing more? The most optimistic answer, of course, is that a comparison of different pyramids can help to determine whether one city or region was providing greater or lesser opportunities for different Type B classes of people. However, this must be done in conjunction with per capita wealth figures, ideally for each social class, since distributions of wealth per se are open to differing interpretations.

This is due to the fact, that, as economic historians have increasingly come to realize, the same Gini Coefficient (a number between 0 and 1 which quantifies distributions of wealth, in which 0 means that everyone holds perfectly equal shares of the wealth, and 1 means that one person holds all the wealth) can mean many different things. A Gini Coefficient of .5 for India and .7 for the United States suggests, on the surface, that India's distribution of wealth is significantly more equitable than that of the United States. However, the per capita wealth in the US remains far higher than that in India, and few would go so far as to suggest, despite the many injustices of contemporary American society, that India is a more equitable or desirable place to live than the US. The early modern historian Jan Luiten van Zanden has addressed this issue squarely, noting that during the Dutch Golden Age, wealth inequality in Dutch cities was actually a measure of increasing prosperity amongst elites, which over time did translate into higher per capita wealth and other benefits both tangible and intangible for the majority of urban inhabitants.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, high Gini Coefficients can emerge in societies which are in the midst of economic expansion and are experiencing high social mobility. At the same time, the high Gini coefficients found by David Herlihy for the Italian town of Pistoia most likely indicate a society which is stagnant, ossified and offers little hope of social mobility.Footnote ³⁸

Context, then, is everything when it comes to distributions of wealth. Detailed data can give a sense of how large were the various economic strata, and these figures serve as anchors for a host of social, political and economic analyses, which otherwise must be anchored on flimsier foundations than is ideal. For all of these reasons, Type B analysis remains perennially valid, if ancillary.

‘Type C’ class distinctions: noble vs. non-noble

The notion that late medieval and early modern urban ‘class identities’ were primarily determined by existing social and political institutions has received little attention, despite this being a pillar of Weberian analysis.Footnote ³⁹ Instead, older analyses tended to focus on material conditions, or on occupations, as determining factors. This section will argue that Type C urban class distinctions, that is, those between nobles and non-nobles, were sustained by the concurrent institutional history of the European nobility and the urban office-holding elite.

The institution of ‘nobility’ became a feature of life in every western European polity by the high Middle Ages, forming, after the church, a ‘Second Estate’ of privilege.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although the peculiarities of European nobility can easily be taken for granted, it is, of course, the product of a particular set of institutions and assumptions, and this becomes apparent if one compares European to Islamic, Indian and/or Chinese society. The features of European nobility are of course complex and the subject of ongoing debate, but a few details will serve our purpose, which is to define how this institution affected the history of urban ‘class’ distinctions in pre-modern Europe.

One of the more fateful aspects of the European nobility from an urban history perspective was their licence to settle disputes by violence – symbolized by their right to bear arms – while enjoying a degree of impunity from the law.Footnote ⁴¹ This right to use violence stemmed from the ‘banal’ lordship which was spread during the so-called ‘feudal devolution’.Footnote ⁴² In Catalonia, many of these rights were enshrined in the Usatges (1087), but similar privileges were normative throughout western Europe. From about the twelfth century, kings and other territorial lords sought to regain a monopoly on the right of violence within their realms, which led them to restrict nobles’ right to violence in certain contexts. The ‘Peace and Truce’ movement was an early manifestation of this. However, the nobles’ right to violence remained prevalent in many countries even into the twentieth century. Other privileges, which provided grist for conflict, included the right to tax exemptions, or the right to a trial outside of ‘normal’ channels.

Of course, the nobles had a set of peers in the church hierarchy who, as a ‘First Estate’, also claimed immunities from the regular course of justice. Church hierarchs were often chosen from noble families, and thus shared the aristocratic outlook of their cousins.Footnote ⁴³ Into the high Middle Ages, church hierarchs’ privileges frequently included the right to wield violence with impunity, together with tax exemptions and the right to trial in an ecclesiastical court.

In the context of the late medieval and early modern city, members of both the First and Second Estate could pose problems to non-noble urban residents who would themselves pretend to power and influence. Many cities were ruled by bishops; and in many regions, the pretensions of knights posed hindrances to what non-noble burghers might see as the fair collection of taxes, the fair distribution of justice and the functioning of contracts. As long as non-nobles remained powerless and disenfranchised relative to nobles and church hierarchs, however, there was little chance that a European ‘bourgeoisie’ would develop a means of meeting nobles and church prelates on equal ground. For this reason, any struggles between ‘commoners’ and elites in Europe long took the shape more of protests or rebellions, rather than of different elite groups jockeying for power. Thus, early Type C class distinctions might erupt in peasant rebellions, or in revolts of townspeople against their lord.

But the spread of a second institution throughout Latin Europe, beginning in the mid-eleventh century, was to leave a fateful mark on the history of European and global society, and this was the urban ‘commune’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This form of urban government, a revival of forms that had been prevalent in Roman cities prior to the rise of the bishops as urban administrators by the fifth century, was virtually unique to western Europe during most of the second millennium CE. The ‘communal’ government first appeared in Italy after the 1060s, and quickly spread to France, whence it spread to England, Germany, the Low Countries and Iberia. In Italy, the first communal elites were local nobles, whose families owned castles and feudal estates in the countryside, but who also came to be resident in the cities. Over the course of the thirteenth century, however, more and more non-nobles began to achieve urban office.Footnote ⁴⁵ Successful trade during the thirteenth-century economic boom increased the fortunes of many non-noble urban citizens, and the existence of urban governments, with their myriad public offices, proved fruitful ground for the ambitions of non-noble nouveaux riches.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the stage was set which pitted nobles against non-nobles in competition for urban office in cities across northern Italy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similar conflicts can be found in cities throughout Europe.Footnote ⁴⁷ These urban offices brought not only political prestige, but many economic benefits. For example, parties in power often had a say in the distribution of the tax burden, and so wealthy people who did not have friends in government might find themselves the victim of partisan fiscal schemes. To some extent, then, the struggle for urban office was a struggle for the legal right to maintain or increase one's fortune. Although these types of conflicts have been written about extensively, they have not generally been singled out as a distinct type of conflict, created by a clashing of the institutions of nobility and the urban commune.

Part of the value in labelling this type of class distinction with a particular name is that it enables us to highlight the spectrum of ways in which the type of conflict it engendered was resolved (or not). Type C class distinctions, and the struggles they could engender, were resolved in a variety of ways, depending on local or regional conditions. In Florence, the ‘magnates’ (i.e. those who were identified as knights) were proscribed in a series of measures, the most famous of which was the Ordinances of Justice, promulgated in 1293.Footnote ⁴⁸ This created an atmosphere in which all urban offices could be held by ‘commoners’, and helped set the stage for the most ‘democratic’ period of the medieval Florentine republic. In Venice, however, the Serrata of 1297 largely precluded any non-nobles from entering the Venetian senate. In later medieval England and Catalonia, nobles were generally debarred from holding urban office, and this gave ample space for commoners to exercise their urban political careers in an atmosphere where there was little direct competition from nobles. Perhaps it is unsurprising that analysts have suggested that these urban societies rested on a ‘consensus’ model of government, and were characterized by relatively peaceful relations between governors and governed. In the Low Countries, as well, nobles were generally excluded from holding urban office by custom, although they increasingly effected mergers with urban elites, particularly by the close of the medieval period.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the cities of the kingdom of Valencia, however, the later Middle Ages were characterized by a long struggle between ‘knights’ and ‘burghers’, which was finally resolved through the creation of town councils on which knights and burghers were given certain proportions of seats.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Castile, an altogether different situation prevailed, in which a class of nobles monopolized urban office, while non-nobles, who had no direct voice in legislation, were forced to pay all of the taxes owed by the city to the crown. This stemmed from a decree by Alfonso X in 1252 which stated that all hidalgos would be tax exempt in return for their service against the infidel.Footnote ⁵¹ Unfortunately, this situation created viciously stark divisions between nobles and non-nobles in the cities. It is perhaps not surprising that a culture of nobility, which glorified personal lineage, and frowned upon business practices, was particularly virulent in Castilian cities during the later medieval and early modern periods.

From these examples, it is possible to speculate that the amount of power held by nobles in the urban regimes of a given European region had a definite effect on the urban culture of that region. In some regions, such as parts of Italy and Valencia, nobles and commoners jockeyed for urban office, and urban life was characterized by a good deal of Type C class turmoil. In Castilian cities, nobles were so dominant that noble-on-noble factional violence was characteristic, and commoners reduced to mere adherents.Footnote ⁵² In Venice, the Serrata effectively precluded opposition to the ruling junta of nobles, with the result that the city's relative political quiet earned it the nickname La Serenissima. In fourteenth-century Florence, and in the cities of Catalonia and the Low Countries, an absence of noble power led to forms of urban culture which might be characterized, to some extent, as more ‘republican’ or ‘bourgeois’ than the cities of Castile or Valencia. Of course, these observations are only beginning points, but they are made here in order to emphasize some of the possibilities opened up by the Type C label.

‘Type D’ class distinctions: non-noble vs. non-noble

Our fourth type of class distinction covers differences between groups of non-nobles in urban society. While this could theoretically encompass many types of difference, in practice, we will focus on those conflicts concerning access to urban office. This is because, in European urban society between the high Middle Ages and 1800, the exercise of urban office was often the most obvious means for a non-noble to increase his political and social prestige. Conversely, the systematic exclusion of others from access to office was an obvious means of safeguarding one's own hold on power. Our Type D distinction thus gains much significance from the fact that urban office was often genuinely powerful in the late medieval and early modern periods. Most late medieval parliaments, for example, created a ‘Third Estate’ composed of representatives from the larger towns. Furthermore, Type D class distinctions are worth separating from Type C distinctions, since non-nobles did not as a rule have the right to exercise violence, or avoid judicial or fiscal strictures, with as much impunity as nobles. Thus, non-nobles had to pursue their goals by legal means, or else face a real threat of imprisonment, fines or worse at the hands of royal authorities. The nature of noble privilege, and its obvious potential for abuse, meant that cities with Type D class conflicts thus tended to have reduced levels of open violence compared to those with Type C conflicts, or where nobles were dominant in city life (as they were in Castilian cities).

The easiest way to illustrate Type D class distinctions is through the use of examples. The most famous example of Type D class strife in later medieval cities comes, again, from Florence.Footnote ⁵³ The 1293 Ordinances of Justice ordered the exclusion of the ‘magnates’ from the city. These were actually a mixture of nobles and non-nobles, but were labelled by the government as having ‘aristocratic’ pretensions. A lasting effect of the law was that, until well into the reign of the Medici, anyone with a claim to ‘nobility’ was now officially excluded from Florentine government. Nonetheless, factionalism within Florence continued apace, between groups who self-identified as Popolo Grasso and Popolo Minuto, and as members of the various Arti Maggiori, Arti Minori and other guilds. These labels reflected a definite perception of hierarchy on the part of the Florentines, and the distinctions were often based on distinct levels of wealth, and of occupational hierarchies (i.e. they were based partly on Type B and Type A class distinctions, amongst other criteria). Throughout this ‘noble-free’ era of Florentine politics, there were always ‘aristocratic’ parties of wealthier Florentines who tended to identify as a group, and which fought against the inclusion of poorer people in the communal government. These struggles, often labelled as struggles of ‘patricians’ against ‘the lower orders’, eventually resulted in the re-establishment of Type D patrician monopolies by the 1380s, after the failure of the Ciompi Revolt.

At times, guild institutions became important creators of both Type C and D class distinctions within European cities. Since nobles were excluded from guilds, these institutions could serve as platforms for focusing the concerns of non-noble elites. In the Low Countries and northern Italy, guild organizations were utilized as platforms which could drive nobles from political life, as occurred during the expulsion of the magnates from Florence. More often, the multiplicity of guilds in a given urban environment led to these organizations being used as platforms for Type D class struggles, as guilds jockeyed for position within the civic hierarchy. Though they seldom had formal political power, they could serve as stepping stones to power for individuals, or influence the civic government in more or less direct ways.Footnote ⁵⁴ By the later Middle Ages, the fluidity of the earlier period gave way to increasing ossification.Footnote ⁵⁵

The cities of later medieval Catalonia serve as a further exemplar for highlighting the significance of Type D class distinctions, and for illustrating their relationship with Type C distinctions. For most of the thirteenth century, Catalan cities were politically weak, with few if any formal institutions through which urban inhabitants could participate in their own government. The ‘communal’ movement had spread to Catalonia in the later twelfth century, but had been put down by the count kings of Catalonia–Aragon.Footnote ⁵⁶ During this period, urban society was divided simply into probi homines (the ‘better men’) and everyone else. Note that according to our typology, the distinction between probi homines and the rest of the urban householders was a Type D class distinction. However, this distinction was a relatively unimportant one, since the largely informal status of the probi homines meant that there were relatively few advantages to be gained by being so labelled, and there were no formal offices from which this or that group of probi homines could exclude one another. Note also that this Type D class distinction existed in the urban arena alongside Type C distinctions, insofar as nobles were sometimes resident in Catalan towns. Even in the thirteenth century, however, nobles were generally excluded from taking decisions affecting the universitas of the town. This was to have interesting consequences in the coming centuries.

By the 1320s, royal policy had established communes, known as consulates, in most of the larger Catalan royal cities and towns. This reorganization elevated urban governments to a more formal status, which, within a short period of time, greatly increased the prestige of urban officeholders. Cities with consulates also began, in this period, routinely to send delegates to meetings of the Catalan parliament, known as the Corts, and together the urban representatives made up the Braç real, or the Third Estate.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, urban consellers quickly rose to places of prominence in Catalan society. Holding the consulship, even for a single year, entitled a man to be called for the rest of his life by the Latin honorific venerabilis, the same title borne by a knight.Footnote ⁵⁸

It has been suggested that fourteenth-century Catalan cities were remarkably free from Type C class strife, due to the exclusion of nobles from urban office. This was upheld by the crown and seldom challenged. There were occasional struggles between knights and townsmen outside of the arena of urban government.Footnote ⁵⁹ Often, the instigation for such attacks was a dispute over tax burdens in parliament.Footnote ⁶⁰ But fourteenth-century Catalan cities were relatively free from Type D class strife as well. There is little evidence that groups of ‘citizens’ or ‘burghers’ were self-identifying against other groups of burghers, either to monopolize civic office, or to gain other forms of increased economic, political or social status. Thus, for example, men from the highest economic strata created lasting business partnerships, and friendships, with men from secondary economic strata.Footnote ⁶¹

Beginning in the 1390s, however, the evolution of Catalan urban ‘class struggles’ took another sharp turn. Once again, royal policy, and the political institutions created by royal directives, proved decisive in creating new urban social categories – in this case, what we would call Type D classes – and these increasingly came to define the social identity, and the political status, of a given urban family over the course of the fifteenth century. The fateful step came during the relatively brief reign of Joan I (1387–96). In an effort to quell some factional hostility which had broken out in during the 1380s, Joan decided to allot a certain number of seats to members of three distinct groups of citizens known as ‘hands’ (Catalan mà, plural mans). The composition of these hands remains a matter of some uncertainty. While Carmen Batlle Gallart has argued that membership in the Barcelona hands was determined by wealth (Type B distinctions), the Manresan evidence suggests that, there at least, membership was based primarily on a householder's occupation (Type A distinctions).Footnote ⁶² Thus, in Manresa, the mà major was composed mostly of rentiers, that is, men who ‘lived like gentlemen’ and did not practise a profession, together with a few wealthy lawyers. The mà mitjana was composed mostly of merchants, and the mà menor was composed of menestrals, i.e. men seen as labouring with their hands. In most Catalan cities, the mà major began to call themselves ‘the citizens’, even though members of the other hands were also, technically, urban citizens.

The ‘hands’ system adopted in most Catalan urban governments from the 1390s thus institutionalized a set of Type D ‘classes’ at a stroke. Over time, ‘identity fissures’ began to separate the families whose heads were identified with the mà major, mà mitjana or mà menor. This process was helped by the fact that the Type D mans also corresponded significantly with Type B class distinctions. The wealthiest strata of Manresan society contained a high proportion of lawyers and rentiers, while the next stratum had a large concentration of merchants.Footnote ⁶³ More precisely, the average wealth of a member of the mà major (i.e. a rentier) was over £1,000; by contrast, the average member of the mà mitjana was worth £550, while only the wealthiest members of the mà menor were worth this amount.Footnote ⁶⁴ But note that in the fourteenth century, these gradations in wealth had made significantly less political and social difference than they now came to mean under the ‘hands’ system.

From about the 1420s, the ‘citizens’ of the mà major in Barcelona began to figure more prominently in the civic records, when they formed the core of a newly crystallizing faction known as the biga. Also around this time, the mà major began to distinguish themselves by the more pretentious title of ‘honoured citizens’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The biga were increasingly defined in opposition to a group known as the busca, itself composed of the merchants and wealthier wholesalers of the mans mitjana and menor. Between about 1420 and the start of the Catalan civil war in 1462, much of the energy of the biga and busca factions was taken up by infighting. As a rule, the biga attempted to increase or maintain their superior status, while the busca sought something of their former equality with the biga.

Carmen Batlle Gallart and Alan Ryder have chronicled the role of these two factions in pitching Barcelona into a civil war against the monarchy, which erupted after decades of tension in 1462.Footnote ⁶⁶ After the civil war, however, the power of the busca was crushed, and the crown preferred to rule by propping up the biga as an unchallenged local pillar of royal administration. Thus, access to urban office became greatly restricted compared to what it had been a century before, since now merchants and menestrals had little hope of exercising high civic office. This was clearly a blow to those who wished to be active in commerce and exercise political authority at the same time.

A further change in the history of Type D and Type C class distinctions in the Catalan cities occurred in the years around 1510, when, as a result of simmering tensions between the non-noble ‘citizens’ of the former biga party and the Type C nobles (knights and squires) who were residing in Barcelona, the king ‘allowed’ the local nobility to hold civic office. This meant that Barcelona's Type D families of the former biga faction were now blended with the local nobility. This resulted in an increase of status for the honoured citizens, who were absorbed into the lower nobility beginning in 1510.Footnote ⁶⁷ From that time forward, however, Barcelona became a city ruled by a Type C noble elite, and there was no longer pretence of the city being ruled by a (Type D) portion of the non-noble citizenry. In this way, most traces of an elite ‘republican’ or ‘burgher’ lifestyle, which had characterized the Catalan civic elites since the fourteenth century, were overwritten by a characteristically ‘noble’ outlook and ideology, with what has been described as a typical European aristocratic emphasis on heraldry, lineage, chivalry, hunting and the like.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this way, the formerly potent Catalan ‘bourgeoisie’ became largely extinct as a cultural force.