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2 results

  • 7 - Living “Noblement”

  • from Part II - The Merchants’ Selbstzeugnisse
  • Martha C. Howell, Columbia University
  • Book:
    Making Merchants
    Published online:
    19 September 2025
    Print publication:
    09 October 2025, pp 87-108

  • Summary

    This chapter presents evidence that some of the merchants under study either were actually ennobled or otherwise lived “nobly,” easily socializing with the lower nobility in German-speaking Europe and sometimes with the high nobility. Despite many historians’ claims otherwise, such merchants did not leave trade; nor did they marry “out of” the mercantile class, even if some of their wives bore names indicating noble status. The chapter also presents evidence assembled by other scholars that demonstrates the same patterns: merchants often lived as “city nobles” (Stadtadel) even while continuing their work in commerce.

  • 19 - The condition of the rural population

  • from PART VI - LATE MEDIEVAL SOCIETY (c. 1350–1520)
  • Edited by Knut Helle, Universitetet i Bergen, Norway
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Scandinavia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    04 September 2003, pp 581-610

  • Summary

    Rural society in Scandinavia was marked by the repercussions of a dramatic loss of population well into the second half of the fifteenth century when the first signs of recovery manifested themselves in some areas. Nobles and the Church were the dominant landowners in Denmark at the end of the Middle Ages, possessing together 75 per cent of the farms, but there were districts in the peripheral forested areas where freehold farms could amount to 50 per cent of the total. As a consequence of the late medieval loss of population the profitability of certain forms of agricultural production decreased radically, destabilising the economy of those involved. On the other hand, large groups of the rural population profited from the changes that occurred in the period of crisis. Auxiliary means of livelihood often permitted farmers to accumulate wealth. In the course of the high Middle Ages, the rural population of Scandinavia came to comprise only legally free persons.