[148] The day-to-day life of Castilian townspeople centred on their 'populated houses' in the urban core, or else in one of the villages of the alfoz where they resided with their families. The medieval settlement was notably and deliberately hospitable to married couples and, while a wife and her husband shared child-rearing and the demanding business of running a municipal household, childbearing, infant care and domestic chores consumed much of a woman's time and energy. These labours were often coupled with work in a family trade or an occupation she pursued outside her home. The activities of townswomen and girls differed exceedingly from those of men and boys since warfare and its preparation accentuated highly distinct expectations of male and female colonizers. The military occupations of townsmen, from actual fighting to the raising of horses, stamped the quality and pace of life in a town, especially in the early stages of its development when both defensive and distant campaign operations compelled continuing vigilance. Leadership in municipal affairs remained in the hands of military men in thirteenth-century towns, and women had very little to do with the militia or the formal conduct of other strictly public matters in their community. It is not improbable that a locally esteemed and prosperous female property-owner might wield influence in the annual elections of municipal officials chosen from among the householders of each urban parish, and she may sometimes have voiced her opinions in weekly meetings of the assembly of property owners where matters of general community concern were discussed and important announcements made. A few tenth- and eleventh century notices of women who took an active part in defending the privileges of their communities against outsiders have survived. The small Navarrese settlement of La Novenera fined women for assaulting other women both outside and during the assembly, [149] although it was more costly when a man attacked a woman there. ⁽¹⁾ Increasingly, however, town assemblies came to be dominated by the men who held municipal offices, and women certainly held no authoritative positions in a large town's administrative and judicial apparatus. Two rather noteworthy exceptions were the occasional woman of the high aristocracy who inherited the lordship of a town and the royally appointed señora de villa. The 'lady of the town' was an absentee queen, princess or noblewoman who exercised largely ceremonial functions, named a few administrative and military officers, and collected crown revenues. Such female governors neither brought discernible changes to the lives of ordinary townswomen, nor affected perceptibly their participation in public affairs which, in so far as concerns government and taxation, was officially null. ⁽²⁾ Women were certainly present to witness the official business that took place within their neighbourhoods, frequently at their parish church after Saturday vespers or Sunday mass: the arraignment of a neighbour, announcements of land for sale, notification of changes in a marriage agreement, and other matters of local importance that required publicity. Any female head of a household had public duties to perform as the widowed or unmarried adult in charge of a domestic establishment. She paid taxes and tithes, was held responsible for disturbances to neighbourly relations by her dependent children or servants, pursued her own and their interests in the town court, and would be haled before the authorities for infractions of the peace and a multitude of regulations that protected land use, health and safety, and other citizens. Women as a group, whatever their official responsibilities and status in a family or household, had far more conspicuous roles in the social and economic spheres of community life than in formal and institutionalized interaction among the households of a town and the men who exercised authority in their community.

Housewives and working women mingled with all manner of citizens and visitors in the streets and plazas or when circulating back and forth between village and town. Some spots in a township, located primarily within the walls of the urban centre, were visited frequently or exclusively by women on daily and weekly rounds. Townswomen congregated at sites which served as focal points of much of a woman's work, social life and feminine exchange. Here any man who put in an appearance would find himself more or less off-limits, sometimes definitely out of bounds, and doubtless more than a [150] bit ill-at-ease. Together they comprised female 'space' or 'turf' within a medieval municipality. ⁽³⁾ These meeting places for towns-women are identifiable in customs which set forth the contexts in which women were expected to serve as witnesses to disputes that came before the municipal courts of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century communities. These were events which had transpired in the absence of reliable men whose testimony at a trial or inquest was a subsidiary political responsibility and normally preferred to that of women. At Cuenca and many other towns only the wives and daughters of permanently resident vecinos were called to give evidence about commotions at a bath house, oven, spring, river and at their spinning and weaving. Zamora summoned women as witnesses to conflicts ending in verbal abuse or assault whenever they occurred at water mills, ovens or the river, in addition to any other occasion when one woman may have insulted another. At Coria, Cáceres and Usagre women testified in quarrels between a male baker and his female customers. Soria admitted women's testimony concerning spinning and other 'womanly doings' (fechos mugieriles), primarily disputes involving no more than the five sueldos which this and other towns set as a limit on the business which married women transacted without the need for their husbands' consent and intervention. These were not the only occasions when women would come before the court in some capacity other than those of defendant and plaintiff but they identify municipal locales where all kinds of women gathered regularly to undertake housekeeping chores, where conflict might arise between women from different domestic establishments and of diverse reliability, and where men were rarely in evidence. ⁽⁴⁾

The springs, fountains and streams of a community supplied  townswomen with drinking and cooking water for their households. According to regional customs from northern Castile, any bridge over water that was used as an exit from a town was supposed to be at least wide enough for two women and their jugs, probably balanced on their heads, to pass side by side. Cáceres, Usagre and Soria fined a woman for washing clothes within fixed distances from any spring. The household washing might be done in the run off from a fountain or a spring, but it was frequently taken to the bank of a river or stream just outside a town. An important municipal privilege for the Jewish women of Haro was access to local laundry spots outside the castle walls, even on Sundays, a right Alfonso VIII guaranteed twice when he granted the castle district to the Jewish community of this town. [151] Women of any town could be found along local water courses, scrubbing the family linen or washing their hair. On other occasions they would carry grain to a water mill to be ground into flour, but mills evidently attracted mixed company more regularly than a community's water sources. ⁽⁵⁾

The townswoman's grain was either grown in a family plot outside the walls or purchased in the municipal market. Once it was ground, she made the family bread at home with the flour and the massa she kept for leavening. Usually she took her loaves to be baked at a municipal oven. At most towns anyone could construct an oven as a matter of right inherent in the ownership of property within a privileged township, but it was frequently regulated in the public interest to serve as a bakery for bread made at home and to provide finished loaves for sale. At Cuenca and other towns such an oven was expected to hold about three dozen loaves, and the owner either operated it himself or rented it to a man and his wife who ran it as a family business and received a quarter of the receipts from sales and baking fees. They were fined for failing to keep it lighted or not getting up early enough to have it hot for their morning patrons. The operator's wife, the fornera, dealt with the customers, primarily women. For cheating them with underweight or insufficiently baked loaves, she was fined by the almotacén, the market supervisor in charge of weights, measures, regulated prices and the municipal sanitation laws. Ovens and bakeries, like a river or spring, were daily destinations for all sorts of women in a town, but dependable property owners' wives and daughters were frequently the only informants the court would heed about deceptive sales practices, pushing and shoving, or any other disturbance that arose at the place. ⁽⁶⁾

Municipal bath houses like bakeries, with which they perhaps often shared a source of heat, were also places where townswomen congregated. Baths, too, were privately owned but commonly rented to an operator or managed by a hired attendant who had to run the facility in accordance with local regulations. ⁽⁷⁾ Segregation by sex was the first order of business to assure privacy for the bathers in a locale that fostered most heightened awareness of the opposite sex. Many towns set aside weekly bathing days for men and women, and for Jewish and occasionally Muslim citizens. Mondays and Wednesdays were designated for women at Cuenca, Sepúlveda, Teruel and other towns, but Brihuega assigned them Tuesdays and Thursdays. They bathed on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at Coria, Cáceres and [152] Usagre, while Plasencia reserved Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. Christian men were usually given three days and Jews often two, Fridays and Sundays so as not to conflict with their holy day. Plasencia allotted Jews only Friday, but women got three days. At Teruel and Albarracín the baths were closed on Sunday 'in honour of the Resurrection'. Women had two days to bathe and Jews only Friday, now in company with Muslims on their weekly holy day. At Coria and other towns neither of the minorities were assigned any day at all. ⁽⁸⁾ Perhaps they operated special facilities for themselves, but it seems plain that segregation by religious faith was advisable to prevent difficulties over the sensitive matter of circumcision as the mark of Jew and Muslim. Since no such difference separated women bathers, Christian, Jewish and Muslim women must have used a municipal bath house simultaneously. Segregation by sex was largely random during the week although Christian men took the premises most often, and the schedule suited male convenience by not interfering with court day on Friday and the meeting of the town assembly, usually Sunday. Certainly men were expected to avoid the place when women were using it, and they were heavily fined for sneaking into the building or peeping through the windows when women were there. Equally serious was stealing the clothes of a woman bather, provided she was not a prostitute. ⁽⁹⁾ Several towns fined women for entering the bath on a day set aside for men, or fined the attendant for admitting them. These were evidently efforts to keep out harlots and loose women who haunted the place, but they arrived mainly after hours. At many towns no woman could bring a charge of being raped in a bath house at night, frequently an occupational disability of the prostitute at any time or place. ⁽¹⁰⁾

The bath house was a locale that presented problems for orderly relations between the sexes and the religious minorities in towns, but it was also a place for washing, grooming, relaxation and sociability, and townswomen visited it in the company of their daughters, servants and neighbours from other households. The entrance fees were minimal, and at many towns a customer's children and servants of the same sex were admitted free of charge. Coria limited strictly the number of a patron's non-paying companions, certainly to keep one household from preempting the facility and to prevent trouble between large bands of retainers. ⁽¹¹⁾ Although the non-functioning bath might conveniently serve as a brothel, especially at night, it was plainly intended as a daytime destination of respectable townswomen [153] who would be called upon to report on squabbles or disorder among other women at the place.

Neighbours must have gathered together in houses and courtyards to spin and weave. Spinning, a medieval woman's most characteristic activity, was a task women could pick up almost anytime, and they wove perhaps small cloths that could be fabricated on portable devices or, more likely, helped one another on larger projects. At Cuenca and elsewhere a piece of fabric that may have been stolen was to be certified by the woman who made it and two others. ⁽¹²⁾ Townswomen were familiar with one another's handwork, and they spent time together in the production of yarn, thread, fabric and clothing for their households. All of those present at any such bee were not invariably on the best of terms since altercations plainly arose at these labours.

The private houses and public spaces in which women assembled in a municipal setting were primarily places to which they were drawn in the course of domestic work. The fountain, river, mill, oven, bath house and their residences together comprised a regular municipal itinerary for all kinds of townswomen, especially those going about the business of housekeeping. A woman might be accompanied by her daughters and servants, particularly to the bath house, but at all these spots she would visit with friends, make new ones and keep abreast of important matters and news. She might also encounter women of whom she disapproved, a clergyman's barragana for instance, or perhaps an individual she disdained as a member of some rival household. These common grounds provided opportunities to socialize and exchange views and gossip, but the women who met there also indulged in name calling and physical violence. Townswomen took umbrage at a range of defamatory epithets likely to provoke assault in return. An urban fracas might easily erupt with open bickering and battery between two townswomen. At Cuenca a husband could go to his wife's defense in a brawl without added penalty and vice versa, but other supporters, 'even a child or cousin', were given prohibitory fines. Zamora, by contrast, reduced the fines of spouses and any household member who aided another. ⁽¹³⁾ Trouble brewing between rival citizens or households of citizens could readily manifest itself in slander and disorder among women at one of the places where they were accustomed to congregate in a town, and female spectators might have to be called upon to verify exactly what had happened.

[154] It was generally a man's duty and prerogative to give sworn testimony as a third party in any court case, either as an eyewitness or an oath helper who vouched for another citizen's complaint or plea of innocence, but townswomen were sometimes summoned about matters that assumed special feminine knowledge and competence. These witnesses had to be 'good', 'upright', 'believable' or otherwise dependable women like the wives and daughters of vecinos. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Plasencia called for a man to support the oaths of two women at an inquest. Here, moreover, it was stated that women did not testify except about disputes at springs, bakeries and other such places because they were flighty, and man had authority over woman. In lower Navarre the testimony of a widow was inadmissible when she had buried two husbands. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Such aspersions on a woman's oath are exceptional, and other evidence suggests that the word of a reliable woman would be preferred in any case to that of some shifty, feckless and untrustworthy man. ⁽¹⁶⁾ There were, however, also women of this ilk in towns. Dependability was the essential quality alcaldes looked for in a witness, and this was much more easily measured in one's fellow man. Some cases, nevertheless, required the court to consult reliable women for expert opinion. A woman suspected of theft at Daroca would be acquitted solely on the strength of supportive oaths given by women. 'Believable' women of Brihuega would be called to defend another accused of sorcery, selling a Christian into slavery, her child most likely, or to establish that a virgin had been raped. At Zamora 'good women' certified that a woman had been pregnant and was thus exempt from mañería, the customary seignorial, although not usually municipal, levy on the property of deceased childless persons. At San Sebastian and Estella 'legal women' could confirm the last wishes of a dying woman, probably because they had been present, perhaps as midwives, at her death in childbirth. At Cuenca, Cáceres and many other towns a wife whose husband suspected her of adultery could summon a jury of women to refute the charge. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Doubtless the 'womanly doings' for which Soria required sworn testimony from women might be interpreted broadly, but they were rarely summoned to the trial of a man. Women were not always but very often on hand when one of their peers came to trial, especially when one woman was in contention with another, or the accused was supposed to have done something about which only women, familiar with her habits and motives, could be counted on to know the truth. A townswoman would find herself before the court more frequently as a [155] plaintiff or defendant, often assisted by her husband or another male citizen, than as an authoritative third party in a suit. Certainly the judicial formalities of Fridays' hearings were less a part of most townswomen's regular weekly routine than the chores and rounds that could land her in difficulty. Accustomed gathering places for men only, including the meeting chamber of the alcaldes on many occasions, the town's castle, administrative offices of king and bishop, or taverns, survive much less clearly in the sources than those where women assembled nearly every day, but their separate municipal 'space' highlights the different rhythms and patterns of women's and men's lives in a town. Women were occupied in highly distinctive womanly doings that were usually of little admitted concern, if not without mystery, to men. Nonetheless these activities smoothed the functioning of neighbourly relations in a town, and they provided a woman with both ordinary contacts and friends she might one day have to count on in some vital legal business. The society of other women certainly eased the daily burdens of running a municipal household.

Medieval housekeeping was a many-sided and exacting occupation, and townswomen often managed cooking, cleaning, provisioning, preserving and all the tasks of a housewife alone or with the help of their daughters. The well-to-do lady of a house (sennora de casa) directed a predominantly female staff that could include maids, housekeepers and nurses who assisted her with chores and child care. Domestic employment (as, e.g., mancebas, sirvientas, mugeres de soldada), was a readily available source of income for women in towns, but we hear nothing of men being hired to work in a house. At many Castilian communities the women contracted to work for a year like male shepherds, herdsmen, beekeepers, vintners and the other agricultural employees of an affluent municipal household. The men were paid annual wages, some of which were fixed by law, or they were compensated with shares of something they produced, wool or cheese for instance. ⁽¹⁸⁾ The wages of most female domestics were flexible and their work much less specialized, although the professional laundress shows up conspicuously in records from large ecclesiastical establishments. ⁽¹⁹⁾ The sennora might have a deputy housekeeper (clavera, cellariza, cameraria) in charge of comestible stores kept under lock and key. Typically the housekeeper was not a daily worker but a domiciled domestic who lived in the house that employed her. ⁽²⁰⁾ Other households of a town and its villages were the [156] source of hired help, and some of the female servants must have been wives and daughters of men who performed agricultural work for the family on its property in the countryside. A servant girl was sometimes a niece whose aunt or uncle paid her wages. Prosperous municipal households hired the children of poor relations as paid servants. The primary responsibility of any worker was absolute loyalty to the master and mistress, and relatives could best be counted on to persevere conscientiously in the interests of an employer. ⁽²¹⁾

A prominent female domestic was the nodriza or ama, a wet nurse who was commonly brought to live with the family of a newborn infant. This arrangement enabled parents to superintend the woman charged with a child's survival during its hazardous early years. The nurse was an important personage in the household and a most characteristic figure on the municipal scene. Her services were essential in any society in which the parturient death rate was high, a need noted at the time. She was hired to nurse a maternal orphan as well as by mothers who survived childbirth and could afford her services. At many towns the nurse contracted to work for a span of three years when the child was presumably weaned. During that time she earned room, board and a small annual wage fixed by law. ⁽²²⁾ Towards the middle of the thirteenth century the nurse's period of employment was increased to four years at Sepúlveda, Madrid, Atienza and other towns where Alfonso X excused the personnel of a knight's household from municipal taxation, a special privilege of this class. ⁽²³⁾ The royal privilegios, in which the king elaborated the conditions whereby a knight's widow and children could retain his prerogative to patronize certain essential agricultural employees, name no women except the nurse in their lists of privileged workers. Several mention her husband, and the couple (ama and amo) was perhaps now given the municipal knight's child to care for in the nurse's home for its first four years. She was the more important of the pair, and her selection was preferably undertaken with care. Passages in the Partidas, based on the then current Graeco-Arabic medicine of Avicenna and Maimonides, who drew from the second-century Soranus of Ephesus, stress that a royal nurse was to be of good health and lineage and possess an abundance of milk and an even temperament. Also desirable were good looks, deemed necessary to maintain the infant's hunger for the nourishment the nurse provided. ⁽²⁴⁾ Castilian royal nurses, unlike their counterparts in the towns, were hired for ten or twenty years as governesses, and their [157] importance to royal children is attested by the gifts of land many received at their retirement in recognition of devoted service. ⁽²⁵⁾

The value of all female domestics in the running of a municipal household was not underestimated, and at Cuenca and other towns they could expect to be compensated a bit more favourably than male agricultural workers. These men were paid in lump sums during the year, usually between one Michaelmas and the next or after the agricultural season. They lost back wages if they quit before pay day, while female domestics were given wages for each work-day until their departure, even if they had not fulfilled their contract. This was justified, it was explained, by the fact that men did not work equally at all times, for example, during the season of the snows. ⁽²⁶⁾ Women's work was never done, and the better pay schedule highlights the importance of their labours, including those of the sennora who directed the staff. The society of acquisitions, by which a wife took half of all the earnings of a marriage, recognizes the indispensable function of women in the operation of the populated municipal house. Wives, daughters and female servants maintained the establishment and represented it wherever they went in town, but the lady of a house led the way to forge social contacts, promote neighbourly relations among households and establish mutually beneficial ties between families when she made her habitual rounds within the community.

Provisioning was an important task for a townswoman. The municipal sennora, her housekeeper and servants took a decisive role in the preparation and storage of grain, wine and garden produce from the family's private plots and gardens outside a town's walls and near its villages, of meat from its herds and flocks raised on private meadow and the town commons, and of fish and game from the streams, forests and mountain wastes of the township. ⁽²⁷⁾ What a townswoman's household did not itself produce, she could purchase in the markets or from the shops and vendors of her town, sometimes becoming even an extravagant consumer.

From the eleventh century weekly markets, seasonal fairs, permanent districts of shops, warehouses, inns and bazaars purveyed local, peninsular and foreign merchandise to the buying public, periodically but also on a daily and permanent basis.⁽²⁸⁾ Municipal and other lists of wares subject to excise taxes (portazgo) levied on the merchants who brought them to a town reveal a wide and increasingly varied selection of necessary and luxury goods. ⁽²⁹⁾ About [158] the year 1200 a townswoman would be presented with a broad range of items from which to supply her household and feed, clothe and adorn herself and her family. The merchandise included grain, meat, game, fish, wine, fruits and vegetables as staples of the municipal diet. She would doubtless be tempted by figs, pomegranates and sugar from Al-Andalus, along with such necessities as salt, oil, butter, lard, cheese, dried ocean fish, honey and wax. Also available, were many kinds of ordinary woollen, linen and hempen cloth, besides leathers, furs, and the luxury fabrics imported by land and sea from the major textile towns of Flanders and northern France. A woman could choose from many manufactured garments, including silk belts, chemises, coifs, imported capes or a burnous for her husband. For her own spinning, weaving and sewing, she might purchase wool, flax, silk, spindles, scissors, thread and other mercery and trimmings. For furnishing the house she would find chests, barrels, pottery, rush mats, razors, knives, sieves, blankets, sheets and other bedding. She would certainly be attentive to the mirrors, combs, henna, perfumes, spices and medications available.

A townswoman perhaps needed building materials for her house or plough shares, hoes or sickles for her rural property. She might even wish to buy horseshoes, harness, a saddle, or any of the wide variety of livestock she would find for sale. If she could afford a Muslim slave, she could buy one from a merchant. A female nursing an infant would be expensive since the merchant would have paid double duty for importing her. ⁽³⁰⁾ The slave would provide desirable household or agricultural labour, but a townswoman would occasionally prefer a costly ransomable Muslim captive who could be exchanged for her husband or son held prisoner in Al-Andalus. Livestock also served this purpose, and the woman could buy sheep to send with a visiting Muslim or Christian caravan going southward with Muslim captives and Christian goods, an outfit that would return with redeemed Christian prisoners and Andalusian merchandise.

In the course of her marketing the housewife would encounter characteristically female tradeswomen whose occupations frequently attracted the attention of a town's market official. Bread, among the staples of the municipal diet, was one of the main items produced and sold by townswomen who mixed it at home but would commonly have it baked in a municipal oven. Servile women who did not live in towns must frequently have had to bake, for by the early twelfth century at León and Villavicencio the king's bailiffs were forbidden to [159] oblige women other than his personally obligated servants to supply loaves for the royal retinue when he was in town. At Alba de Tormes registered panaderas, together with other male victuallers and municipal officials, were obligated to contribute to special royal levies (moneda) from time to time. ⁽³¹⁾ Numerous towns fined panaderas for selling insufficiently baked loaves or wheat bread adulterated with other kinds of flour, but especially for underweight loaves. ⁽³²⁾ These were the large round breads seen in the arms of the women represented on the sculpted corbels of the thirteenth-century archiepiscopal refectory at Santiago de Compostela. Whether they were housewives, wives of bakers or independent tradeswomen, women invariably had a hand in the fabrication and distribution of bread, and when Juan Ruiz's courtier set his net for the Panadera Cruz in the opening parts of the Libro de buen amor, he picked the most typical of municipal tradeswomen as the object of his fickle devotions. ⁽³³⁾

Another prominent occupation of townswomen was that of wine seller (vinadera), more commonly called a barmaid (tavernera). She was obligated primarily to give her customers a fair measure of an undiluted commodity at a stable price. As with other vendors of perishable goods sold publicly in a town, she expected to be paid promptly by her customers who were not usually supposed to obtain food on credit. She worked out of a tavern or purchased wine by the barrel from a woman or man who was a local grower. Barmaids were far less estimable than bread sellers, for the Partidas include the former with female slaves, daughters of slaves and procuresses as women unsuitable to become the barraganas of gentlemen. A tavern was a place which respectable townswomen did not frequent. ⁽³⁴⁾

Most commonplace were female shopkeepers, primarily retailers of staples and non-perishable items like wax, oil, pepper and dried fish. Of the twenty-five shops rented out by the cathedral of Toledo in 1234 seven were leased to six women. Their wares are unknown although one was called Maria 'the Laundress', a nickname which probably denoted her trade. ⁽³⁵⁾ Townswomen elsewhere were widely engaged in selling merchandise. At Ledesma the town porter's wife operated a small salt business, vending the salt the porter kept as salary from the full quantity he appropriated as import duty, and she was probably able to make it available at some advantage to her customers. ⁽³⁶⁾ At Coria the seller of cheese was a woman, although her husband would usually have made it. Here and at other towns the wives and children of men who caught fish in the streams of the [160] township marketed the catch in town. At Alba fisherwomen as well as men cast their nets into the Tormes from those sand spits that were not reserved for the alcaldes and other local dignitaries. They all divided the catch and then sold it separately, although each could keep the most desirable trout, mullet and eels. ⁽³⁷⁾ At Toledo various women specialized in the sale of fish, chickens and rabbits, although perhaps not out of shops. ⁽³⁸⁾ Other towns invariably prohibited retail shopkeepers, both women and men, from selling fresh fish, eggs, poultry, game and sometimes other field or forest commodities from the alfoz. Prime comestible merchandise, as distinct from the nonperishable inventory of a legitimate shopkeeper, had to be offered in the weekly market so as to be available not merely to private customers but to anyone who was ready to buy. Retailers, together with their customers, were consistently fined for trading illegally in foodstuffs which farmers, hunters and any other local producers were supposed to sell on the open market to all municipal consumers at fixed or competitive prices. ⁽³⁹⁾ Many vendors of provisions, however, must have hawked their wares in the streets and plazas on a daily basis, especially the panadera, tavernera and female fishmonger. Whether the tradeswoman was one of these specialists, a municipal shopkeeper selling the permissible staples, or a village woman bringing eggs, poultry, game or cheese to market, women of all sorts took a leading part in purveying foodstuffs to municipal households, as well as to soldiers, clergy, merchants, artisans and all the other local residents and strangers who attended a town's weekly market or annual fair. Judging from the notices of commercial transactions between married and other women, together with the prohibitions against a shopkeeper's trafficking in illegal merchandise and bans on private sale, housewives and housekeepers must have been the preferred customers of many vendors, especially shopkeepers and village women who could do a brisk and steady business by delivering their best produce to townswomen under the table or through the back door before it was offered to the public at large. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Whether she wanted the freshest eggs or needed to hire a washerwoman it was helpful for an affluent townswoman to stay on good terms with the tradeswomen of her community.

Many working women were certainly unmarried girls, particularly those employed in domestic service or taverns, and as 'parented girls' they contributed their wages to help support their families. At Soria the shopkeeper was explicitly a married woman in business for herself, [161] as was the bread seller in Old Castile, but in lower Navarre the latter was a widow who supplemented her reduced income by selling bread in a small community. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Women undoubtedly went to work as the need arose, but numerous others besides the oven operator of Cuenca or the cheese and fish sellers of Coria must have been wives and daughters in families that worked as a unit. The fact that daughters inherited shares of their parents' assets, while widows were entitled to large interests in accrued marriage property, meant that a woman might operate or work in almost any kind of trade. Surviving records are disappointingly uninformative about municipal crafts and trades, and no more so than in 'their reticence about the participation of women in the workforce. Among the independent occupations a town's market supervisor regulated, in order to make goods and services available at reasonable cost, were many in which the women of a family would have had a hand in sales or production, perhaps especially those of tavern keeper, apothecary, jeweller, tailor, furrier, shoemaker and draper. Many trades probably employed fewer women. Textile manufacture required dyers, fullers and weavers, while masons and carpenters, supplied by tile, brick and lumber yards, worked in construction. Woodcutters, together with charcoal and barrel makers, were occupied mainly in the mountain wastes of the alfoz. All kinds of smiths produced plough shares, hoes and carefully regulated horseshoes and nails for farriers. Tanners prepared the hides used by makers of tack, harness and saddles. Other artisans who supplied war materiel specialized in the fabrication of shields and arrows. ⁽⁴²⁾ The extent of wives' and daughters' assistance in such characteristically urban trades and crafts is unknown, but it would be unwise to suppose that women necessarily shied away from even the heaviest labours when necessary. In thirteenth-century Navarre they found employment helping in the construction of stone and wooden buildings or presses, wheels and sluice gates for irrigation projects. In the next century at Seville women were hired as masons, carpenters, hod-carriers and other construction workers, although at lower wages than men. ⁽⁴³⁾

Working women would doubtless have found some aspects of the textile industry more hospitable to their domestic skills. Commercial production of most exportable wares developed slowly during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but cloth manufacture was expanding rapidly at Segovia and other centres. At Alcalá de Henares women and men worked for wages in weaving coarse hemp and [162] burlap materials and making women's coifs, bed coverings, rugs and carpets. The town's wage scale fixed a man's pay at one mr. for eighteen lengths of carpet and fourteen of rug, while women received the same for forty lengths of carpet and twenty-three of rug. The differential to the disadvantage of female workers on these items (120 per cent in the first case, over 60 in the second) was perhaps typical, but Alcalá may have made a speciality of rugs, with workshops employing women part-time or under less exacting conditions than men. Light weaving as well as spinning was certainly a normal activity for any housewife and the other women of a household, but it is impossible to say to what extent they took this skill into the market place as readily as they did provisioning. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Women's work in a town was often an offshoot of some domestic capability, or it was auxiliary and subsidiary to the occupation of the men they married. Since the wives of many tradesmen helped earn a couple's income and a couple might pursue the man's trade, it was far less important to train girls than boys in the fine points of an article's production. A well-schooled daughter who married a man in a different occupation might continue in a trade she learned as a girl, especially when she inherited substantial interest in a family business that her husband could join, but selling or elementary bookkeeping experience would give her flexible skills she could transfer from her father's to her husband's livelihood. Those were the more useful processes a woman could learn about a trade, but they did not necessarily equip her to take up a professional occupation of her own. A girl's different upbringing surely explains the prevalent notices of women among a town's shopkeepers who frequently combined experience, although not necessarily any formal training, in sales and accounting with knowledge of foodstuffs and the needs of female customers. The extent of formal schooling made available to children in towns is unknown, but quite a few women of exceptionally large and prosperous Toledo named their schoolmasters in the wills they drew up between 1180 and the middle of the thirteenth century. One of their contemporaries was called Maria 'la Maestra', probably not a teacher but perhaps considered something of a blue stocking. For the Castilian, as for the medieval French or English woman, work was often complementary or supplementary to that of her husband; or else it was often 'bye-work', such as baking or textile production, and she earned income from the marketing of a domestic skill or product. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

Although evidence about women in the municipal workforce is in [163] fact scanty, even less is known about their participation in commerce and the distribution of goods on a regional or long-distance basis. Importantly, however, many women can be found running inns, like the female innkeepers of Toledo who bought and sold establishments that housed merchants and served as emporia for their wares. In northern Castile women and their families operated inns that catered to pilgrims and merchants at stops along the French road to Santiago de Compostela. Here, too, we find notice of the pedlar's wife who worked with her husband in that occupation. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Over much of Castile, however, women had a reduced role in commercial enterprise, particularly in the exchange and circulation of goods between towns, both within Christian Spain and southbound into Muslim Al-Andalus. This was undertaken by caravan men (requeros) who traveled to markets and fairs with local products and, in the case of. the trans-frontier operations, with prisoners of war and animals used for ransoming captives. The dangers and uncertainties of highwaymen, kidnappers, and road accommodations, where the last existed at all, dictated that most women would remain at home, this despite high royal fines for crimes committed against travelers on the public roads. The merchants' wives usually stayed behind, as is shown by regulations adopted in about 1200 by the guild of caravan men at Atienza when they set down requirements for giving one another mutual support on the road and providing appropriate pomp at the burial of a colleague. When one of them died at Atienza while the others were away, wives of the absent fellows could represent them, but only then. Every merchant's wife may not have stayed at home at all times, but where caravans of townsmen worked in groups for safety as well as profit, women in the family were unlikely to make the journeys, especially when the outfits crossed into enemy territory. We hear about these organized caravan teams of male citizens at numerous towns where an expedition provided a man's wife with a legitimate excuse for deferring payment of their debts, at least until he failed to return as expected.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Most of the leading citizens of many towns were not merchants or artisans but soldiers, stockraisers and agriculturalists who lived within the walls but owned all kinds of property in the countryside. Townswomen managed their own properties and supervised the raising of crops and flocks outside the walls in the alfoz. Others found employment in agricultural pursuits or, as in urban trades and crafts, they complemented the occupations of their husbands. Although [164] some of these farm workers may have lived in town, many were village women who came to the walled municipal centre of their community on diverse errands: for safety in time of danger, on legal business at court, to celebrate a fiesta or attend church when there was none in the village, or perhaps to conclude a day of selling produce with a stop at the baths. Some village women were rural tenants of town dwellers for whom they evidently did routine farm chores. ⁽⁴⁸⁾ Paid agricultural labour, however, was commonplace in towns, and at Cuenca a salaried ploughman, whose services were those of a farm manager for grain crops, was assisted at harvest by his wife and another woman whom he hired for gleaning. The extra woman he took on as a labourer and his wife's contribution were part of the bargain he struck with his employer at Michaelmas to plough, plant, fertilize, irrigate, mow, thatch and care for oxen, with or without additional labourers. At Alcalá de Henares the hired ploughman's wife was fined for failing to help with garden weeding and the cultivation of garbanzos and fava beans. At Zamora it was said that any farm superintendent's wife was under the protection of his employer, implying she had duties to perform on the latter's behalf, but here she may have expected wages for her services. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Women do not appear among the workers hired by affluent municipal citizens for full-time agricultural employment, although the wives and daughters of men who contracted to work as bee-keepers, vintners and other specialists must have helped in certain processes of these predominantly male occupations while also tending barnyard animals and crops of their own. The daughters of agriculturalists might find employment as domestics in the employer's or another town resident's house, but many undoubtedly became seasonal workers, especially at harvest when the demand for extra labour was most critical. The Cortes of Jerez in 1268 set the day wage of a woman labourer in Andalusia at six mrs., half that of a man, although as a wet nurse she would earn ten. North of Andalusia the wage scales were lower, and women were said to be paid whatever was customary. Where the lowest daily farm wage for men was three sueldos, with meals probably added, women and children were paid only one to pick grapes and help with spring ploughing. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ About that time women could be found working in the fields outside Andalusian towns where they were captured by Muslim marauders, and they were hired for carting, cultivating and other farm work in Navarre. ⁽⁵¹⁾

Female tenants on monastic and other large estates, like the widows who were sometimes excused from some of their fiscal obligations to landlords, were familiar figures in the fields of the [165] Peninsula throughout the centuries of the Reconquest, and not all townswomen, especially aldeanas who lived in a town's dependent villages, escaped agricultural tasks. Mandatory labour services, however, were not usual requirements of tenants who rented houses and plots from more prosperous town residents. The lack of onerous seignorial labour dues to a landlord was doubtless a major attraction of municipal residence for women, even those who resided in the villages of a community's alfoz. Most expected to be paid for doing field work, and dependent female tenants elsewhere evidently attempted to avoid some of their work responsibilities, like the ploughman's wife of Alcalá who apparently received no additional salary for helping him with garden chores. ⁽⁵²⁾

The fundamentally agrarian character of many towns' economic base meant that townswomen were often involved in agricultural pursuits but frequently as managers of property they owned, leased to others or cultivated themselves. Women of thirteenth-century Toledo owned not only vineyards, gardens, cropland and an occasional olive grove but also cottages, mills, corrals, salt works and other productive assets in the immense territory of the city. Women here were engaged in diverse rural occupations, earning their livings from rural enterprises although they lived inside Toledo. ⁽⁵³⁾ Often we learn of their property only at the time of sale, as when one woman reserved the use of well water for her garden when her brother sold adjoining property on which the well was located. Numerous women worked in partnership with their husbands at trapping rabbits, milling and gardening but especially at planting and harvesting grapes and other crops. Here many married townswomen and widows, like those to whom towns frequently guaranteed small subsistence holdings out of matrimonial assets, were engaged in agricultural work, not as labourers or entrepreneurs but as producers of foodstuffs to supply their own cellars and municipal customers. ⁽⁵⁴⁾

Women participated in the livestock industry more as owners than as caretakers of animals, at least of the large commercially valuable flocks and herds which pastured primarily on the town commons and in the mountains of the alfoz. Women as well as men contracted with shepherds and cowhands in agreements by which the latter often received shares of hides, cheese or wool as wages. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ The municipally cooperative livestock associations with their market orientation necessarily included women as heiresses of sheep and cattle, although men took them up into the mountains for extended summer pasturing and on the long winter treks outside the townships of Salamanca and [166] other communities, absences lasting for six to nine months. Extremaduran widows sent their sons or hired knights to guard the wintering herdsmen and the stock they dispatched with those of their neighbours. This kind of expedition was exceedingly dangerous and unfit for women. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ Not all, however, stayed behind. Prostitutes evidently stowed away in these outfits, and the towns of Cáceres and Usagre imposed a pecuniary fine on any man responsible for bringing one along, a sum the towns' officials shared with the man who reported her. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ She was probably condemned less as an improper companion than as a troublesome focus of conflict among the men who made up these seasonal migrations, but she was obviously intruding into a masculine activity where no decent woman belonged.

The wives and children of shepherds, cowhands, mare keepers and other such men must have helped out with the milking, cheese-making, shearing and other tasks that employers expected of salaried husbandmen, although the actual tending of large animals rested primarily with the men. The women inevitably assumed major responsibility for their own families' cultivated crops and the barnyard and other animals when the men were away, and probably also for much of the time they were at home. The participation of women in all phases of a town's food and fibre production, whether for home consumption, for the family which employed a man, or for sale to the public at large, was necessarily extensive. Many men were absent for prolonged periods with animals, from the end of June or earlier until grape harvest. They were gone throughout the summer growing season, supervising the sheep and cattle they led to graze in the nearby mountains. This was the season when as many as half of a town's militia departed on military campaign.

The village women of a municipality, in particular, performed agricultural work, and many must have grown up with the rough ways of Juan Ruiz's mountain girls who were herders of cows and mares. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Domestic service in town opened opportunities to avoid heavy farm work but also to learn the proper manners of a townswoman, especially from women of more prosperous municipal households who employed servants and presided over large establishments. Urban sennoras and duennas with their social aspirations doubtless set standards for dress, deportment and the ways of women in a community, but a village girl would observe, first of all, that many wives and daughters in the municipal elite had employees for agricultural and domestic labours. The style-setters of the community were not sun-burned outdoor workers nor those whose hands were [167] toughened by heavy chores and scrubbing at the riverbank. On the contrary, they were women who had been freed, in large part by other women, from the most demanding of a townswoman's ordinary labours. Such differences, together with a myriad of other details about one's neighbours, could hardly escape notice at the spots where townswomen of all sorts gathered to work, socialize, observe and report. Townswomen were plainly highly conscious of one another, and whatever was not immediately evident about another woman or, indeed, concerning any topic of vital public interest, or of just passing curiosity, could be clarified rapidly by inquiry and just as quickly spread from house to house through the gossip networks of a town's téléphone arabe. Rumour and opinion were transmitted, and information and lore preserved, at the spring, the river, the bakery and the bath house. Women thus made important contributions to the knitting of a town's social fabric, especially since men were not infrequently away on campaign, scouting, caring for animals, doing business or attending to the king's or the town's affairs away from home. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ The departures of men alone and in groups were regular and their absences prolonged, notably from households of soldiers and those where livestock ownership and its care, rather than crop farming or some artisanal trade, was a family's major activity and source of income. These absentees included the most prosperous and prestigious men of a town. Women were the more permanently anchored sex while men not infrequently left town, wives and their local responsibilities behind for both ordinary business and perilous adventures. Women gave continuity to a community's social and economic life, not only in new but also in well-rooted settlements. For long periods of the year towns remained in the care of women, children and limited numbers of men, and townswomen would have to count on one another in emergency or disaster. The absences of men added to the burdens of women but also deepened self-reliance, quickened resolve and sharpened wits as well as tongues in those who had to shoulder the major responsibilities for a family's welfare. Municipal residence challenged the talents of a woman, but it also offered more attractive possibilities than the countryside, both for work and society. Few country women would pass up an opportunity to move to an established town and dwell in the centre of things. Towns were women's friends, and women had a good deal to say, literally and figuratively, if not always officially, about the way matters were handled in their community.

1. FLa Novenera 24, 25, and see the documents cited by Carlé, Del concejo, pp. 105-6.

2. Several dominae appear in foral confirmations; Gugliemi, 'El dominus villae en Castilla y León', CHE 19 (1953), 55-103. See FToledo 34; FLlanes 56; FCarmona 18; FCórdoba-Cartagena, pp. 33-4. Los fueros de Sepúlveda, Ap. 27, pp. 227-9. Alfonso VIII, vol. 2, pp. 857-63, and Alfonso IX, vol. 2, pp. 448-451. Sancho Izquierdo, El fuero de Molina de Aragón, pp. 31-3. At Valfermoso de las Monjas the abbess and nuns held lordship but governed through a male bailiff.

3. For the concept see, e.g., L. Roubin, 'Espace masculin, espace féminin en communautés provençales', Annales, E.S.C. 26 (1970), 537-60; M. de Fontanes and M. Fribourg, 'L'Utilisation de l'espace dans un village de Castille (Peruela)', Pratiques et représentations de l'espace dans les communautés méditerranéennes, ed. H. Balfet, P. N. Boratav, et al., Les Communautés Méditerranéennes: Recherche Ethnologique sur l'Unité et la Diversité Socio-culturelle du Bassin Méditerranéen, cahier 3 (Paris, 1976), pp. 125-37.

4. FCuenca 2.32; FIznatoraf 52; FAlarcón 54; FAlcaraz 11.33; FZorita 44; FBéjar 68; FPlasencia 440. FSepúlveda 111. FZamora 20. FCoria 154; FCáceres 157; FUsagre 158. FSoria 227, 162.

5. LF 187; PON 24; POL 6; FAntiguo 1; FViejo 5.3.16. FCáceres 240; FUsagre 255. FSoria 268. FHaro, Alfonso VIII, vol. 3, pp. 661, 662. FZamora 20. For references in the cancioneiros to women washing clothes and hair, see K. K. Hill, 'The three faces of Eve: Woman in the medieval Galician-Portuguese Cancioneiros', Kentucky Romance Quarterly 16 (1969), 97-101.

6. FCuenca 2.31; FIznatoraf 50; FAlarcón 52; FAlcaraz 2.31; FTeruel 318; FBéjar 66; FPlasencia 437. FSepúlveda 110. Cf. FCoria 154; FCáceres 157; FUsagre 158. For the housewife's massa, see, e.g., FCuenca 17.1. Cf. FJaca ms B 172, ms C 92, ms D 98. For an earlier seignorial oven, see, e.g., FLogroño (1076), MC, p. 338; for a private but not permissibly commercial one, FVillavicencio, ibid., p. 173.

7. Baths are frequently cited in charters of sale, exchange or donation, and twelfth-and thirteenth-century fueros name them with ovens, mills and other income-producing structures as permissible privately owned buildings (e.g., FNájera, MC, p. 290; FCalatayud, ibid., p. 461; FSan Sebastian 1.6). For medieval bath houses and bathing, see J. F. Powers, 'Frontier municipal baths and social interaction in thirteenth-century Spain', American Historical Review 84 (1979), 649-67, and the works cited there.

8. FCuenca 2.32; FIznatoraf 51; FAlarcón 53; FAlcaraz 2.32; FTeruel 319; FAlbarracín 105; FBéjar 67; FPlasencia 438, 439; FSepúlveda 111. FCoria 118; FCáceres 126; FUsagre 127. FBrihuega, p. 162. Cf. FJaca ms A 98.

9. FCuenca 2.32; FIznatoraf 5l; FAlarcón 53; FAlcaraz 2.32; FBéjar 67; FSepúlveda 111; FPlasencia 438, 439. For stealing clothes, e.g., FCuenca 11.32, FPlasencia 73, and FTeruel 321.

10. FTeruel 319; FLTeruel 291. FCoria 118, with a higher fine for women than men who enter illegally, although it is the same in FCáceres 126 and FUsagre 127; cf., e.g., FSepúlveda 111. Cf. V. L. Bullough, The history of prostitution (New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1964), p. 115.

11. FCuenca 2.32. FCoria 118. For pictures of women bathing, with their children in a smaller pool nearby, and a bath house similar to the surviving three-chambered 'Baños Arabes' at Gerona, see the illustrations from a Valencia ms of Arnald of Vilanova, Tratado de balnearios, as reproduced in Truc, Historia ilustrada, vol. 2, opp. pp. 232, 236.

12. E.g., FCuenca 40.20; FAlcaraz 12.22.

13. FCuenca 13.2; FIznatoraf 313; FAlarcón 293; FAlcaraz 4.89; FZorita 309; FBaeza 312; FBéjar 395. Similarly, FAlcalá 7. Cf. FZamora 70. For the insults, see below, Ch. 7.

14. FZamora 20, 37. FBrihuega, p. 162. FLa Novenera 12, 198. FEstella 2.11.8; FSan Sebastian 3.9.8.

15. FPlasencia 749, 440 ('mugieres de aliuiancia'); but see García Ulecia, Los factores, p. 278. FLa Novenera 45 and short FViguera 47.

16. For unspecified instances in which women are named as witnesses, see FAvilés 31, 35; FOviedo, pp. 130-1. FAlba 61. FMadrid 44. For women hesitant to testify, FViejo 3.1.3; for unreliable men, FSoria 282; FReal 2.8.9.

17. FDaroca, MC, p. 540. FBrihuega, pp. 138, 146, 148, 162. FZamora 37; cf. FLa Novenera 9. FEstella 2.11.8; FSan Sebastian 3.9.8 ('mulieres legales'). For adultery, e.g., FCuenca 11.50, FCáceres 302, and FLa Novenera II, 12. See LF 14, 39. Cf. FJaca ms B 170.

18. FCuenca 36.6-8; FIznatoraf 785; FAlarcón 720-2; FAlcaraz 11.71-3; FBaeza 814, 815; FZorita 752, 753; FTeruel 678, 679; FPlasencia 679. FSepúlveda 60. Short FViguera 44, 46, 51, 54; FLa Novenera 42, 44, 52, 214. Gibert, 'El contrato de servicios en el derecho medieval español', CHE 15 (1951), 5-129.

19. FPalencia 27 (Latin and Romance). FSanta Maria de la Vega 23, HD, p. 113.

20. FCuenca 36.6; FIznatoraf 785; FAlarcón 720; FAlcaraz 11.71; FBaeza 814; FZorita 752; FTeruel 678.

21. FZamora 73. FCoria 44; FCáceres 49; FUsagre 46. FAlcala 61, 293.

22. FCuenca 10.35; FIznatoraf 212; FAlarcón 202; FAlcaraz 3.109; FBaeza 216; FTeruel 449. Cf. FZorita 752 and FBéjar 270.

23. FSepúlveda 199. FAtienza, p. 267. Privilegios to Madrid, HD, p. 169; Peñafiel, MHE, vol. 1, p. 90; Buitrago, ibid., p. 94; Burgos, ibid., p. 98; Escalona, ibid., p. 179; Valladolid, ibid., p. 226.

24. Partidas 2.7.3 (royal sons), 11 (daughters). Soranus, Gynecology, trans. O. Tempkin (Baltimore, 1956), 2.11-15, pp. 88-103; Avicenna, A treatise on the canon of medicine of Avicenna incorporating a translation of the first book, trans. O. C. Gruner (New York, 1970), pp. 367-72; idem, Avicenna's poem on medicine, trans. H. C. Krueger (Springfield, Ill., 1962), pp. 60-1; Moses ben Maimon, The code of Maimonides, Bk IV: The book of women, trans. I. Klein, Yale Judaica Series (New Haven, 1972), pp. 133-5.

25. Alfonso VIII, vol. 2, pp. 633-5, 907-9, 941-3; F. Simon y Nieto, 'La nodriza de D^a Blanca de Castilla', Bulletin Hispanique 5 (1903), 5-8; H. Grassotti, 'Pro bono et fideli servitio', CHE 33-4 (1961), 5-55.

26. FCuenca 36.6, et fora alia, above n. 20; but FZamora 64 shows women paid only at the end of the year, with a fine for leaving beforehand like the men.

27. E.g., FAlcalá 143, 261.

28. Sanchez Albornoz, Una ciudad hispano-christiano hace un milenio, Estampas de la vida en Leon, 5th edn (Madrid, 1966), pp. 17-46; G. de Valdeavellano, El mercado, Apuntespara su estudio en León y Castilla durante la edad media, 2nd edn rev. (Seville, 1975), pp. 23-53, 55-103, 134-7 L. Torres Balbás, Ciudades hispano musulmanas, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 217-34.

29. FVillavicencio (1130?), MC, pp. 173-4. FCuenca, ed. Ureña, pp. 834-52; FSepúlveda 223; FAlcaraz 13.33, 34; FAlarcón 822-3. FEstella 2.24; FSan Sebastián 4.5, 6. Import duty rolls, ed. Castro, 'Unos aranceles de aduanas del siglo XIII', RFE 8 (1921), 1-29, 325-56; 9 (1922), 266-76; 10 (1923), 113-37.

30. For the slave, e.g., FCuenca, p. 838. The caravan (requa) is documented as early as FLSepúlveda 5 (1076); cf., inter fora alia, FCuenca 41.2 and FCoria 311; González, Repoblación, vol. 2, pp. 388-9. Royal privileges protected Ledesma's Jewish community, but the Jewish bride imported by a local Jew was taxed, as was the body of any Jew in transit to burial elsewhere (FLedesma 305-8, 313-15, 384).

31. FLeón 38; FVillavicencio, MC, p. 173. Cf. the royal levies on victuallers in ibid. and FLeón 43-4, to FAlba 142 (moneda, a currency tax).

32. FLeón 35; FVillavicencio, MC, p. 173; FCastrocalbón (1156), p. 376 (with flogging added, but punishment 'secundum volunptaten populi' at Villavicencio). FAlfambra 52. FUclés 179, 332. FAlcala 206. FBrihuega, p. 186. FMadrid 52. FLedesma 233. FCoria 153; FCáceres 156; FUsagre 157. Cf. Cortes of Jerez (1268), pet. 12 (Cortes, vol. 1, p. 75).

33. G. E. Street, Some account of gothic architecture in Spain (2 vols., New York, 1914, repr. 1969), vol. I, p. 217; Libro de buen amor, coplas 115-22; Cantiga 258, ed. Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, vol. 3, pp. 22-3.

34. FMolina 132. FUclés 100, 179. FAlba 120. FCoria 115, 116, 233; FCaceres 122, 123, 228; FUsagre 123, 124, 240. Partidas 4.14.3.

35. GM, vol. prelim., pp. 171-3; Gonzalez, Repoblación, vol. 2, pp. 416-20.

36. FLedesma 307, 308.

37. FCoria 116, 144, 145, 237; FCáceres 123, 146, 234; FUsagre 124, 147, 246. FAlba 101-3.

38. 'Maria la Pescadera' (GM, no. 66); 'María la Conejera' (no. 520); 'Doña María, la que vende pescado de mar' (no. 645); 'María, vendadora de gallinas' (no. 1119).

39. Diversely, FCoria 116, 237; FCáceres 123, 234; FUsagre 124, 246. FAlcaraz 12.28. FMadrid 106. FSalamanca 158, 229; FLedesma 102, 152. FCuenca 42.18-20. FPlasencia 651. FGuadalajara 13. Cf. G. de Valdeavellano, El mercado, pp. 142-5.

40. E.g., FSoria 135, 162, 227, and FCoria 142; FCáceres 145; FUsagre 146.

41. FSoria 135. LF 239; FViejo 5.1.12. FLa Novenera 200.

42. E.g., FCuenca, cap. 42; FTeruel 750-69. Cf. FCuenca 13.12. For war materiel, see esp. FCuenca 43.3, 4; FPlasencia 662. FAlcalá 168. FSalamanca 344. FAlba 118, 124, 125. FUsagre 119, 120, 164. FSepúlveda 249a, 224-9.

43. El registro de comptos de Navarra de 1280, ed. J. Zabalo Zabaleguí (Pamplona, 1972), nos. 213, 240, 242. Seville's municipal expenditures for 1384-92, ed. R. Carande, 'Sevilla, fortaleza y mercado: Algunas instituciones de la ciudad, en el siglo XIV especialmente estudiadas en sus privilegios, ordenamientos y cuentas', AHDE 2 (1925), 397, 400, 401, and cf. p. 269.

44. FAlcalá 201. Cloth of Segovia figures in all the Castilian portazgo rolls (e.g., FSepúlveda 223, p. 139) while only the luxury textiles and garments are northern European. At Usagre the price of a man's shirt, locally made, was 10 dineros, a woman's slightly fancier garment 1 sueldo (FUsagre 408).

45. GM, nos. 146, 634 (María la Maestra, 1180); also nos. 1016, 1018, 1020-4, 1027, 1029; for a male teacher of children, see no. 369. Cf. Power, Medieval women, pp. 53-75.

46. GM, nos. 48, 111; and see the notes in Gonzalez, Repoblación, vol. 2, pp. 416-20. FEstella 2.8.1. LF 2, 20, 55, 239. Lacarra, Las peregrinaciones, vol. 1, pp. 263-5, 271-2.

47. 'Ordenanzas de la cofradía de recueros y mercaderes de Atienza', CD, pp. 130-1. Cf., e.g., FMarañón (1134), MC, p. 496; FCuenca 23.14, 20; 25.2.

48. FAlba 9, 75, 76.

49. FCuenca 3.29; FIznatoraf 82, 83; FZorita 76; FAlarcón 85; FAlcaraz 2.60; FBaeza 83; FTeruel 414; FPlasencia 413. FAlcalá 142. FZamora 73.

50. Cortes of Jerez (1268), pet. 32, 33 (Cortes, vol. 1, pp. 77-8). Similar wage discrepancies are seen in the post-plague labour laws of 1351 (Ordenamiento de menestrales, Cortes of Valladolid, 1351, ibid., vol. 2, p. 277), where women were paid five dineros per day, men fifteen, from 1 March to 1 May, both receiving three meals.

51. Marcío de Cossío, 'Cautivos', pp. 65-6, 68, 70, 82; El registro, ed. Zabalo Zabaleguí, no. 1504, and ibid., above, n. 43.

52. E.g., Juicio (1040), MC, pp. 157-8; FCelaperlata 2 (1200), HD, p. 99. Cf. J. Caro Baroja, Los pueblos del forte de la peninsula, 2nd edn (San Sebastian, 1973), pp. 142-52.

53. GM, nos. 458 (1220); 520 (1236); 531 (1238); 546 (1241); 551 (1242).

54. Ibid., nos. 66, (1279); 909 (1205); 910 (1217); 913 (1246); 915 (1245); 917 (1261); 918 (1265); 919 (1272); 921 (1293); 922 (thirteenth century). For sharecroppers, see nos. 931 (1287) and 986 (1248), a pleito in which the wife asks for her share separately. For the widow's holding, see above, Ch. 4, notes 22-30.

55. FAlba 24, 63-65. Animals given and taken in pledge by women are mentioned in cap. 121, 122, 126.

56. FSalamanca 183. FCoria 136; FCáceres 245, 403, 406; FUsagre 254, 444, 447. See FCuenca 39.1-3 and 43.1, inter fora alia.

57. FCáceres 419; FUsagre 461.

58. Libro de buen amor, coplas 950-1042.

59. E.g., FAlba 55. FSalamanca 246, 287. FCoria 224, 383; FCáceres 222, 225, 371; FUsagre 231, 371. FAlcalá 31. FSoria 563. FCuenca 23.10-17; 40.12. FPlasencia 735.