Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe by Daniel Lord Smail (review)

In Legal Plunder, Smail unveils the secret to doing material history without material objects. Combing through post-mortem inventories and records of goods taken for repayment of debts in arrears (what he describes as "legal plunder"), Smail delivers a detailed assessment of the new consumption economy that emerged in fourteenth-century Europe. Because of the nature of the detail with which inventories describe high value possessions, particularly textiles (clothing, tablecloths, bedlinens), which typically do not survive the rigours of time but were key tools in constructing an individual's social identity, Smail argues that legal documents surpass the archaeological record as a reliable index of the lived experience. The scope of the book is much less extensive than its title proposes, covering only two Mediterranean cities (Marseille and Lucca) during a decade of debt crisis (1333–1342) rather than all of late medieval Europe. Nonetheless, Smail's book skilfully expands on his thought-provoking 2012 essay, "Violence and Predation in late medieval Mediterranean Europe" (Comparative Studies in Society and History) to make useful contributions not only to the discipline of material history, but also our understanding of the credit economy, household management, debt procedure, sumptuary law enforcement, and legal violence in the process of state formation.

Divided into five chapters, the book falls naturally into two parts. The first two chapters explore the consumer economy. Chapter one dwells on the minutiae of the inventories, examining the objects, their descriptors, and what they can tell us about how people lived. Smail leads his reader through a typical house room by room, with forays into unexpected subjects such as recycling of broken objects, hoarded wealth, and the ratio of immovable to movable goods. What is perhaps most remarkable are Smail's observations about what is absent from the inventories: devotional objects, despite their pronounced presence in the households of the laity in northern Europe; objects identified as family heirlooms; children's culture, not only clothing but toys; spices of any kind; and what Smail refers to as "the material culture of petdom" (85). Chapter two is a microhistory of one family and its account book. Where scholars once accepted without question clerical condemnations of usury, reasoning that medieval men and women did not engage in lending because of the moral implications of charging interest, Smail joins the growing contingent of scholars who see the ubiquity of microcredit in order to compensate for the general scarcity of coin in medieval households. In doing so, Smail offers curious insights into the communal nature of debt collection through the presence of guarantors, the enduring presence of the wage gap, and the popularity of lending on pledge in order to ward off poverty.

The second part of the book transitions to debt collection and the legal process. Chapter three looks at a creditor's options for coercing repayment of debt, from do-it-yourself debt collection (surprisingly an option pursued primarily by women creditors), to public spectacles of household plunder (the most common route), and debtor's prison (the least common). Smail grounds the centrality of debt in the numbers, explaining that one in ten households suffered an act of legal plunder each year (175). Chapter four walks the reader through the process of legal plunder, how sergeants decided which objects to seize, and the social meaning of those objects. In particular, Smail explains why debtors chose to undergo the humiliation of legal plunder, which he describes as a widely acknowledged less expensive alternative to pawnbroking. Finally, chapter five explores the violence of legal plunder and the active resistance of debtors who not only fought back by hiding their goods, but also by attacking sergeants to retrieve their possessions.

Legal Plunder is a creative use of sources that are often overlooked by historians. In an effort to persuade material historians of the value of the legal record, Smail regularly includes lengthy excerpts from legal inventories in translation, which...