ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the caution with which modern historians have begun to approach many of the older, more essentializing ways of viewing occupation and household in the medieval urban context. Another interesting difference between the rentier and merchant groups was the number of households sharing a given family name. If the large scale of rentier investment in annuities is unsurprising, it is still interesting to discover just how little rentiers spent on mercantile goods or capital stocks. In early fifteenth-century Manresa, however, the relatively few rentiers who dominated politics shared the political arena with an equal number of equally wealthy menestrals—members of the technically socially inferior ma menor. Still, the Manresan merchants had recently been granted a political identity of their own, and the Liber Manifesti reveals that as a group they did pursue remarkably characteristic economic policies. For these reasons it is worth analysing the Manresan merchants as a group.
