Port labor in medieval England

Summary

ABSTRACT. In contrast to the scholarship on sailors, waterfront workers have been little studied. The author identifies six categories of these workers and analyzes their status and working conditions. They include port administrators, those who built and maintained waterfront structures, shipwrights and naval suppliers, cargo handlers, ship handlers, and those who provided hospitality and entertainment on the waterfront. Very few of these waterfront workers were ever organized into guilds, and most were poorly paid.

RÉSUMÉ. Contrairement à nos connaissances sur les marins, les ouvriers du bord de mer ont été peu étudiés. L'auteur identifie six catégories d'ouvriers et analyse leur statut et leurs conditions de travail. Elles comprennent les administrateurs portuaires, ceux qui construisent et entretiennent les structures du bord de mer, les charpentiers et les fournisseurs de matériel naval, les dockers, les manoeuvres et ceux qui assurent hospitalité et accueil en bord de mer. Peu de ces ouvriers sont organisés en corporations et la plupart sont très mal payés.

Maritime historians have spent more time studying those who labored at sea than those who worked on shore, even though port laborers played an essential role in the smooth functioning of maritime trade and enterprise and probably outnumbered those who went to sea. Medievalists have had especially little to say about port laborers, in contrast to the fuller scholarship on late modern quayside workers such as stevedores and porters, among others. The problem is exacerbated by the scanty extant documentation for these largely un-organized, poorly remunerated, and low-status workers. Some progress has been made recently, however, in archaeological publications on the physical structure and topography of medieval ports. This chapter aims to redress this gap by bringing together the scarce documentary evidence with recent archaeological research to assess the types of work, remuneration, status, and regulation of those who labored on English waterfronts from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. It is centered around a typology of port labor with six categories.

The first is port administration, which had the highest status of the six groups, but also represented the smallest number of workers (barely totaling ten to thirty men in most ports), which helps explain why they never formed any guilds.