p. 36 Quicklime for the mortar came from a furnace by the river run by a redoubtable widow, Dona Guizas. Into her courtyard came the peasants from the high plateux, fathers with sons, brothers together, their cards piled high with springing bundles of broom that went to feed the furnace. These bundles were often all the cop their poor fields could produce. Once the lime was burned, ox-carts took it slowly up to town, where it was stored in the basement kitchen of the consuls’ old meeting house… Sometimes the start of a call was attended with grand ceremonial, drinks all round and tops for the builders, as the consuls got their robes muddy laying the first stone; sometimes it was all rushed, grim and businesslike, because the English were expected. …all the time the work was interrupted by the need to deal with suppliers, bickering and thirsty, sweat soaking their hair (the drinks they had to be given were factored into the wall accounts), and by the consuls, whose chief prerogative was to keep chaning their minds.”
p. 37 “At least there was no shortage of labour. In the mornings del Cayro would arrive to find the workers waiting: 14 or 15 regulars from town and, hanging back slightly, countrymen who had walked for miles, or refugees, with bowls and bundled blankets, driven by the mercenaries. In the evenings he would see the pay handed out, sometimes in coin, sometimes in pieces of bacon, to these still nameless folk, while the paymaster flapped and panicked. (“Paid to Master Guilhelm Vigorous, 10 sous, which he gave to the people who worked on the ditch at Bullieyra: which 10 sous are not accounted for, because he got mised up and does not know who he paid them to”.)
p. 52 “Little Elm Tree Square, off the main square of the Bourg. Hectic commerce was going on all round them. Stalls and trader covered almost every inch of ground: butchers, cloth-sellers, cheesemongers, pasty-cooks. … Jugglers and dice-players squatted under the small, battered elm tree that shaded the centre of the square. ..Women wandered about: some with trays of venetables from those steep little plots on the hillside, others, showing an ankle or a shoulder, with better kinds of fruit to sell. Marot and Barbier, perhaps half-naked as they worked, might have shouted some encouragement. But Gasc was middle-aged, with a reputation to sustain; and besides, as a City man, he knew that the low-life on show in the Bourg square was one of the main reasons why the City was nobler, and why he was lucky to live there.”
p. 56 “One had discovered a man on top of a woman as he was crossing the square one night, going through the butchers’ quater. “I don’t know who they were,” he said, “but I think they were committing adultery.” Peyre Massabuou, too, remembered being part of a drinking party, with Guilhem Gaffuer and Johann Ebrart the apothecracy, who bantered with a girl called Guilberta and her friend at La Cadena, in the square, after suppor on the Thursday after Christmas. It cannot have been loitering weather, up in those cold hills, and Peyre’s opening gambit was direct. “Shall we do it with you, or will you do it with us?” “You can’t we’re cousins,” Guilberta told him. Peyre then seized her and, according to Gaffuerm “hugged” her on top of one of the work benches, “but I didn’t see whether he did anything else to her.” Guilberta certainly thought he had.”
p. 89 “The count also policed and organised the town’s join fairs, held every year at the end of November and the end of June. … At the ende of the fairground the meadow was left uncut, full of ox-eye daisies and feathery seedling grass that ran into the old abandoned vines. Respectable merchants… avoided this part, for this was where the prostitutes set up shop. Every so often the count’s officers would drag them out, confiscating their veils and the pouches, hoods, belts and knives of their customers; sometimes th officers would go after pickpockets, or charlatans playing “country games to cheat fairgoers”.
p. 96 “The difference is certainly as clear as day in the tax registers. The City’s balance of payments was in the black continuously between 1350 and 1380, and the Bourg showed only two financial years when it was not in the red. But very few people saw, and nobody would have had the chance to compare, the figures. Perhaps the worsy that the citizens knew of the count in 1370 was that “his people” had unaccountably left a dead mule in the cathedral building office, bloated, stiff and staring, which cost 2 sous 6 deniers (or a workman’s daily wages) to drag out and dispose of.
As for the bishops, these drove citizens mad in a different way. They were not avaricious … and they were not, as the counts could be, consistently careless or cruel; but they were even more consistently absent, and their heads were often in the clouds. Bishop Peyre de Plenacassanha had a library with 130 books in it .. Bishop Bernard d’Albi, in the 1330s, wrote poetry: he could turn out more than 300 lines in an hour, a feat which moved Petrarch (no less!) to tell him that if he carried on at that rate, he would certainly make progress.”
p. 157 “A reputation was a delicate thing. .. there might even be something disreputable about standing still. Country women, for example, stood for hours in the Bourg square holding out smal trays of what they had been able to grow or bake: leeks, apples, cabbages, fresh loaves of brad… But they ran the gamut of people’s suspicions. “I’m not sure whether they’re honest or not,” Johna Monmato had said once. After all, prostitutes (putanas) lingered too, with their wares on display: skirts up round their shins, showing their underskirts, and skimpy veils perched on too much hair.”
p. 158″But when a girl called Vivas and her shoemaker friend went all the way in the church of St Amans, she was the one… who went to the pillory for it. In the same way, when Marguarida, a priest’s servant, “made Father Johan a baby”, it was she who paid the fine – 10 sous – and bore all the disgrace. Possibly something similar had lain behind the case of Galherdeta, handed on the stinking trees for the death of a child.”
p. 181 “Alhunbords… it was the wife who spent money from day to day and had to see that the children were presentable. In this at least she seemed to succeed: nieighbours commented that the children… looked well fed, with proper shoes and tidily combed hair, and that Alhumbords herself managed to keep a good table with salt meat and wine and that enviable sign of sufficiency, “two sorts of bread”, coarse black and white… fresh meat was a luxury. The salt version, with a thick brown rind and a stripe of lean between two laters of flat, was called baco, a word the men of Rodex had borrowed from the English … fruit was costly… a full basket, nicely arranged, took a day’s wages for a skilled man. A tray of eggs cost a third as much; soft cheese, young cantal that could almost be spread like butter, was an expensive present. Rye bread, hard cheese, bacon and greens were what filled most people’s plates”.
p. 182 “there was a royal wholesale tax, a gabelle, on luxury goods… included figs, raisins, almonds, large wax candles, eau-de-vie, pepper and spices… green was the fashion shade of the moment, always mentioned in inventories, and to lose a green coat or a green good was plainly thought worse than losing one of any other colour”.
p. 195 “One court case of 1337 opens a small window … Berengaria (she was not given the courtesy of a surname, being too poor) was once a priest’s servant, doing the cooking and cleaning for the chaplain-curate of St Amans, in the Bourg… Berengaria butted in “He isn’t a good man and he never was. He shut me up one time and locked the door and had laid me.” Astruga told this to the court; her evidence went no further, and it s abruptness suggests a shocked silence greeted the remark… For Berengaria, a priest was a man like any other; and men wanted only one thing.”
p. 197 “The line between priests and laymen was, in fact, very thin, in some ways. Some tonsured clerks were mere children: one, ten years old, was accused of the accidental death of another boy “in a childish game out in the fields, playing darts”. Curates of smaller chirches … had only the flimsiest knowledge of reading, Latin or how to sing the Office; they subsisted on the small offerings for gabbled Masses, and frequently went into partnerships in trade to try to make ends meet”.
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