SLAVERY & ABOLITION, 2017

VOL. 38, NO. 2, 303–319

https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1316969

The enslaved wet nurse as nanny: the transition from free

to slave labor in childcare in Barcelona after the Black
Death (1348)
Rebecca Lynn Winer

ABSTRACT
After the Black Death (1348–1400), Barcelona elites moved
from hiring free wet nurses to purchasing enslaved women.
This was not simply because the supply of slaves increased
making enslaved wet nurses affordable. The gold standard
before the plague was a married wet nurse of good
reputation who lived in. Such women had families; as the
labor market turned in their favor, they negotiated terms
that benefited them, for example, bringing their child with
them. Employers wanted wet nurses without children who
could not leave their positions over those with what they
deemed good characters. The slave’s inability to negotiate
terms for herself or her child or to cut her period of service
short made her more desirable.

The first of September 1399 was a bitter-sweet day for the slave wet nurse
Caterina; her master, the powerful and wealthy merchant Pere Vytubri,
dangled freedom before her. He purchased a contract offering manumission
if Caterina continued breastfeeding his children for the next eight years; and
if he never found fault with her. Caterina might have been skeptical: would
this promise be fulfilled and, if so, what would freedom mean for her? She
might have known that some enslaved women in the city of Barcelona
gained their freedom, then made marriages, and had families of their own,
but she had already spent many years breastfeeding her master’s children
and her prospects of finding a husband after eight more years must have
seemed slim. While a slave, Caterina had not been permitted to marry; she
had given birth to children, hence her ability to breastfeed, but the contract
does not mention them; presumably, her master had taken them away so
as not to interfere with her tending of his progeny. Although Vytubri
claimed he was making this conditional offer based on Caterina’s previous
good service, he did not respect women like her and the contract reflected
this. Caterina was described as of the ‘race of the Tartars’ not a native-speak-
ing Catalan; since Tartars were only baptized after capture and enslavement,

CONTACT Rebecca Lynn Winer [email protected] Department of History, Villanova University,

800 E. Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085, USA
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
304 R. L. WINER

Barcelonins tended to doubt their religious belief. Her master also distrusted
Caterina as a childcare provider and a domestic servant and explained to her
that his offer of freedom would be null and void if she harmed his son or
jeopardized her milk supply in any way – in particular if she had sex again
while breastfeeding – or if she stole anything from him.1
Twenty years before Caterina served as a wet nurse under her master’s
exacting gaze, the freeborn peasant woman Guillemoneta negotiated better
work conditions and future prospects for herself and her family through her
wet nursing work. On 1 October 1379, Guillemoneta, with the approval of
her husband Pere Oller, accepted an offer of employment as a wet nurse
from Eulàlia, wife of Guillem de Vilatorta, a ‘venerable’ legum doctor (creden-
tialed legal expert of the patrician elite in Barcelona). Guillemoneta would earn
300 sous for nursing and caring for the Vilatorta daughter Isabel – over twice
the highest wages paid to an adult woman in domestic service in the city
during that decade – two fine towels, two shifts, and a dress to aid her in
breastfeeding. The Ollers would be paid an advance of 15 florins, then Guille-
moneta had to serve under Eulàlia’s roof to her employer’s satisfaction for one
year continuously to receive the balance of her pay, keep her clothes, and gain
the good will of the Vilatortas. During that time, the Oller family secured an
important concession: Mistress Eulàlia swore that she would not only provide
ample food and drink to Guillemoneta herself but also to ‘a certain child
daughter of yours during the entire time period, as is fitting for you and
her.’ Guillemoneta would have to leave her husband behind in the Catalonian
countryside, on the farm they held as serfs of the Viscount of Cardona, during
the year she and her daughter resided in Barcelona. Still, mother and child
would not be separated from each other.2 While this concession may have
made the sacrifice of weaning an infant early bearable to the Ollers, Eulàlia
may well have resented the wet nurse’s daughter as a distraction from her ser-
vant’s responsibilities.
This essay will show how and why the practice of wet nursing in the families
of the elites in Barcelona altered after the Black Death hit in June 1348 through
to the end of the fourteenth century. Before the Black Death, the gold standard in
child care was a wet nurse like Guillemoneta, a free, married woman who came
to live in the home of her charge under the supervision of her mistress, the
child’s mother.3 By 1400, most patrician men purchased or leased enslaved
women to act as wet nurses for their children. Enslaved women were not
allowed to marry, so were not viewed as reputable matrons. They were usually
foreign captives from faraway pagan lands, as was Caterina, sold into slavery
and baptized as part of that process, since it was illegal for non-Christians to
breastfeed Christian children.4
The shift in childcare practices from free to slave labor was due to a series of
factors. This article traces the labor arrangements around wet nursing over time
to explain how and why slaves become important as wet nurses in Barcelona.
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 305

Larger struggles between employers and their workers, both domestic servants
and peasant farmers, as well as the downward shift in the economic fortunes
of the city of Barcelona and its region of Catalonia were important. Power
dynamics within elite households were also crucial as employers became less
able to constrain free laborers to remain in their positions as wet nurses
long-term. The human cost of wet nursing as masters wanted it done was
high. The breastmilk needed for the infants and toddlers of the elite displaced
the nurslings of servants and slaves from their mothers’ breasts, since a
nursing woman was thought to have only enough to feed one child.
Impetus for having wet nurses stay in the employer’s home came from a
desire to separate them from their husbands as well, since there was a wide-
spread notion that a nursing woman who engaged in sexual intercourse
harmed her milk supply.5
The shift from free to enslaved wet nurse also had to do with the type of
slavery practiced in fourteenth-century Barcelona. In medieval and early
modern cities in the Western Mediterranean littoral, the majority of the enslaved
were women, who served as domestic servants.6 Ecclesiastical and civic officials
denounced masters’ sexual exploitation of enslaved women, but masters contin-
ued this abuse putting the blame onto the women and publicly bemoaning the
dishonor to their families and themselves when they became pregnant.7 Further-
more, masters actively profited from the byproduct of the sexual exploitation of
their slaves: breastmilk.
The experiences of enslaved women in later fourteenth-century Barcelona
thus resembled those of slaves in the manor houses of the Atlantic world
in the quotidian labor they did (laundering, cooking, sewing, etc.), their
sexual exploitation, and use as wet nurses. In both slave systems, stereotypes
about enslaved women’s voracious sexuality masked and excused the sexual
exploitation of slaves by masters.8 The wet nurse’s maternal feelings and
the needs of her own children were callously ignored or minimized; in Bar-
celona, this was rationalized by denigrating the children as ‘bastards,’ and
in the Americas, the English colonized-north in particular, gendered racist
ideas contributed to the callous disregard for black children and mothers.9
In both slave systems, masters and mistresses prized having wet nurses
they could control in their own homes.10 Medieval Mediterranean slavery
was distinctive from the North American Atlantic world, and more similar
to the situation in colonies where men outnumbered women, as in
St. Domingue/Haiti, in that enslaved concubines and their children could
be recognized and manumitted, which was illegal in the Chesapeake after
1662.11 Even if concubinage and freedom for her children were a possibility
for some enslaved women in Barcelona, however, the fate of an enslaved
wet nurse like Caterina in an elite household could still be much worse
than that of a free wet nurse like Guillemoneta. Ultimately, the broader
aim in this essay is to suggest some ways in which attending to the particular
306 R. L. WINER

lives of enslaved women in Barcelona helps us to understand the broader

antagonisms of domestic slavery as a gendered system through the lens of
wet nursing.

Evidence on wet nursing in Barcelona

In order to analyze the relative positions of the enslaved and free wet nurse in
fourteenth-century Barcelona, it is important to determine who did this work
and when and who their employers or masters were. Despite the above extra-
polation from two contracts to paint a picture of how an enslaved and a free
wet nurse might have understood their situations, recovering the actual voices
of the wet nurses of fourteenth-century Barcelona is extremely challenging.
No biographical account of an enslaved woman who engaged in wet
nursing work is extant, but the experiences of wet nurses are preserved in
commercial transactions in protocol registers of notaries (the Mediterranean
version of solicitors).12 Two hundred seventy-one references to wet nursing
exist for Barcelona from 1295 to 1400 in the form of slave sales, contracts
of hire of slave labor between free people, manumissions, legacies in last
wills and testaments, employment contracts, and receipts for payment of
wages.
The documents list the backgrounds of wet nurses and employers and the
terms of service; therefore, analysis of the data can reveal the choices of
employers over time about which women to purchase or hire as wet nurses.
Between 1300 and 1347, 30 documents survive on wet nursing out of which
only one contract, from 1341, concerns an enslaved wet nurse.13 In the first
half of the fourteenth century, the most common type of wet nurse in the
homes of the great in Barcelona was a freeborn, lawfully married Christian,
although women who had given birth outside of wedlock also did this
work.14 In 1399, the record reveals a completely different picture. There are
18 documents related to wet nurses preserved from 1399 alone. Of these, 12
relate to enslaved women. The enslaved now made up at least two thirds of
wet nurses.15
Most masters in the sample came from the pinnacle of the urban hierarchy,
those who served in the administrative council governing the town and who
attended the king at court, although artisans and tradespeople are not entirely
absent. Free wet nurses who contracted to work in the homes of the great had
something to gain from this work. From the later fourteenth through the nine-
teenth centuries in Europe, there was a wet nursing hierarchy with free wet
nurses residing in wealthy urban or noble households, creating links of patron-
age for themselves and their families, at the top. Next came those who took
children from private families into their homes in town or, the next level
down, in the country.16 At the bottom were municipal wet-nurses, who
cared for numerous abandoned children at charity hospitals.17 The vast
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 307

majority of wet nurses in the Barcelona contracts, free and enslaved, came to
reside in the homes of their wealthy and powerful employers; the few contracts
concerning wet nurses who brought their charges into their own homes for a
monthly wage relate to nurslings from less important families or the infants of
slaves.

Economy in Barcelona after the Black Death of 1348 and wet nursing
The foundation for the transformation in wet nursing practices lay in the
changing labor market in Barcelona after the Black Death. The Catalan experi-
ence of plague, famine and demographic crisis over the course of the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries was distinctive. Early famines that struck
northern Europe around 1315–1322 did not hit Mediterranean areas like Cat-
alonia, which experienced its first desperate year in 1333. The effects of the
Black Death in Barcelona were arguably more demographically catastrophic
than elsewhere; and those poorer members of society who survived benefited
unevenly from higher wages due to the shortage of labor. In much of Europe,
the population saw some recovery after the devastation by the fifteenth
century; in Catalonia, on the other hand, the population continued to
decline (including during the great famine of 1374–1376).18 After the initial
Black Death struck in June 1348, there were several other calamities that hit
Barcelona before 1400. In 1362–1363 the second wave of plague hit, the
third followed in 1370–1371 and a fourth in 1381. Waves of plague were
the norm throughout Europe during the later fourteenth century but, in Bar-
celona, they were accompanied by the economic collapse in 1381 of the key
private banks. A city bank was not established to fill that void until 1401.19
Paul Freedman estimates that between 1348 and 1378 the population of the
city of Barcelona declined from 50,000 to 38,000.20 By the 1400s, Barcelona
had clearly fallen behind Italian and southern French rivals, ceding its place
as top city in its kingdom, the Crown of Aragon, to Valencia.21 Studies of
wages and prices in Barcelona and the Crown of Aragon during this period
of crisis find a sharp overall rise from 1340 to 1380, instability due to a scarcity
of both goods and labor from 1380 to 1420 and relative continuity from 1420
to 1460.22 This differs from England where elites managed to keep wages and
prices relatively level until after the 1360s when they began inexorably to rise
until the standard of living of common people had improved appreciably by
1400.23
The wages for wet nurses in Barcelona do not follow the general trends. They
rose significantly immediately after the Black Death (having been relatively con-
stant for the 50 years before) and continued to climb noticeably after each new
wave of plague hit, reaching their height in the 1380s. The wages for all women
in domestic service rose post plague but experienced plateaus in the 1350s and
1380s. Those of wet nurses, however, rose continually and to a much greater
308 R. L. WINER

Table 1. Highest recorded wages of adult women domestic servants

in fourteenth-century Barcelona (in sous).
1294–1347 48–90
1348 100
1350s 60–100
1360s 40–120
1370s 66–140
1380s 72–100
1390 50–200
Source: Data Source for ‘Highest Domestic Service Wages’ is Josep Hernando i
Delgado, ‘L’alimentació làctia dels nadons durant el segle XIV, les nodrisses o
dides a Barcelona, 1295–1400, segons els documents dels protocols notarials,’
Estudis històrics i documents dels arxius de protocols 14 (1996): 54.

degree through the 1380s and beyond, experiencing only a slight fall in the 1390s
(see Tables 1 and 2).
The wages of free wet nurses soared to as much as six times that of the best
paid adult woman in domestic service who was not engaged in wet nursing work.
In a climate of labor shortage, employers increasingly had to pay wet nurses top
dollar.

Peasant wet nurses in the post-plague economy

Changes occurring in the countryside of Catalonia by the 1380s would have
contributed to a shortage of free wet nurses. Post plague, Paul Freedman attri-
butes a more than a generation-long ‘seigneurial victory’ to the nobles and
lords of Catalonia because they were able to force their tenant farmers to
remain on their estates, successfully checking the peasants’ efforts to
improve their lot through systematic violence.24 Furthermore, lords sup-
plemented their flagging revenues by coercing tenants to pay increased arbi-
trary dues and labor services, the mals usos, degrading customs, and depriving
the peasants of the right to seek redress in royal courts. Indeed, although its
roots are earlier, the institution of serfdom underwent a renaissance during
the second half of the fourteenth century in the region of Old Catalonia
(essentially the area north of the Llobregat River which empties into the Med-
iterranean Sea near Barcelona).
The situation in the countryside affected Barcelona in multiple ways. First,
although most free wet nurses were from the city itself, many came from the

Table 2. Wages of wet nurses (in sous).

1295–1347 40–96
1349 320
1350s 140–360
1360s 160–420
1370s 240–420
1380s 320–600
1390s 220–540
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 309

countryside around it; and second, many of the Barcelona elite were also great
landholders in the rural areas. So, for example, when the serfs (pagesos de
remença) of the 1391 castle district of Mataró, in the comarca (Catalan dis-
trict/county) of Maresme, rose up against their lord Pere Marquès and his
daughters Isabel and Aldonça they were attacking three ‘urban notables
who had bought estates and seigneurial titles, a common pattern in this
region near Barcelona.’25 The notarial registers show the wet nurse Brunissén,
daughter of Gueraula, from this same region of Maresme, coming to Barce-
lona to serve in 1314.26 Brunissén, and other women like her, traveled
from the countryside of Old Catalonia to Barcelona either because they
sought to maximize what they could earn by offering their services as wet
nurses in the city or they were forced into wet nursing because Barcelona
elites owned the land they rented. The latter seems likely for some peasant
women from the areas where serfdom was having a resurgence.
The power of the Barcelona elite to coerce such women to serve as wet
nurses may have been increasingly blocked after 1380, however, when the
salaries of free wet nurses reached their zenith. From 1348 to 1380, rural
nobles and lords kept peasant efforts to benefit from the shortage of labor
in check but, by the 1380s, Freedman has identified signs that the peasants
were organizing and pushing back.27 Documents expressing the unfree pea-
sants’ demands were elaborated only in 1462 when their representatives com-
plained of a series of abuses against women including forcing wives and
daughters to serve as wet nurses and domestic servants, taking them away
from their children and families.28 If the peasants of Old Catalonia resisted
seigneurial demands concerning wet nursing back in the 1380s too, this
would have affected the practice in Barcelona. Wet nurses came to work
in Barcelona from as far afield as Sicily and Portugal with the single
largest group (63) coming from Barcelona itself. Yet several comarques
from Old Catalonia were the original homes of a rather large number of
wet nurses. Most of these are close to the city itself, so Baix Llobregat
with six wet nurses and Vallès Occidental and Vallès Oriental (both with
nine) are all adjacent to the city’s comarca of Barcelonès.29 The largest
number of wet nurses from outside of Barcelona (13), however, came from
the comarca of La Selva, which is closer to the major urban center of
Girona than to Barcelona. Proximity was thus not the reason for the promi-
nence of the women of La Selva among wet nurses in Barcelona: La Selva
was in the heartland of serfdom in Old Catalonia. Moreover, the last wet
nurse in the record to come to work in Barcelona from La Selva did so
in the early 1380s, on 2 January 1384.30 No historian can argue conclusively
from silence, but it seems likely that after the 1380s, the peasant women of
La Selva were successfully resisting demands that they take up wet nursing
work.
310 R. L. WINER

Cost and conditions of service

Before the women of La Selva stopped reporting to work, other free women
parleyed their leverage as wet nurses in a seller’s market into better conditions
of service. Guillemoneta, with whose story this article begins, was only one of
four wet nurses whose contracts included provisions to support members of
their families. Three of these women obtained these special concessions in
the 1360s and Guillemoneta alone did so in the 1370s. Guillemoneta and
one other mother were able to secure the ability to bring a child with
them when they entered service as wet nurses and have them well fed out
of the household larder. The other mother swore a public oath not to give
her child her breastmilk – the milk she had contracted away to her employer’s
child.31 Two additional women were allowed to bring their husbands into the
household should they become ill; provisions for husbands were to be paid
out of the wet nurses’ salaries.32 Employers feared allowing the wet nurse
to feed her baby or toddler some of the precious breastmilk that, in their
opinion, their children owned. They also wanted to keep their wet nurses
from having regular contact with their husbands – to protect the breastmilk
supply. So Guillemoneta’s positive situation was actually the exception not the
norm.
It is likely masters resented such concessions. In addition, in the 1380s free
wet nurses gained the highest wages on record for the fourteenth century, so
masters started to buy slaves in quantity. The numbers of slaves engaged in
wet nursing would exceed free women by the 1390s and would be more than
twice their number in 1399. (See the graph below.)33 But the actual number of
enslaved wet nurses was probably greater. If a master purchased a slave
without milk and she became pregnant in his home, he may then have used
her as a wet nurse for his own children and never freed her. She would not
have appeared in the record. Before the 1380s enslaved wet nurses are rare,
although, they would have been economical; as Jeffrey Fynn-Paul has calculated,
the steady rise in the cost of hiring a domestic servant made most slaves a good
financial investment by the 1360s.34 One enslaved wet nurse appears each
decade in the 1340s and 1350s, none in the 1360s, and in the 1370s, of the
five that appear, three were actually the acknowledged mothers of their
masters’ children for whom they were described as serving as wet nurses. In
the 1380s, when one free wet nurse was paid 600 sous for a year’s service, an
enslaved woman could be rented out by the year for between 400 and 560
sous. And while the outright cost of purchasing a lactating woman was from
1000 to 1200 sous, this was roughly equivalent to the cost of a free wet nurse
for two years. Was the change from free to enslaved wet nurse only about
cost efficiency? Or were there other aspects of having an enslaved wet nurse
that masters prized?35
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 311

Beyond cost: what patrician Barcelonins wanted from their wet nurses
Economic change, the increased shortage of free women, and the agitation for
better conditions among those available to work, pushed masters to consider
purchasing enslaved women to breastfeed their children. There was also a pull
or inherent attraction for masters in using unfree labor for childcare: slaves
could not leave service when they wished. Elite masters wanted wet nurses to
reside with their families for many years. Their children were breastfeed for
18 months at least; and the gold standard was to have a wet nurse stay on
long after weaning as the growing child’s nanny.36 In Castile before ca. 1300,
royal wet nurses were hired for 10–20 years and among townspeople wet
nurses served for 3–4 years.37 Continuity and length of service are issues that
come to the fore in moralists’ discussions of wet nursing only in the fifteenth
century, but not in earlier narrative sources, such as Ramon Llull’s advice to
early fourteenth-century parents, which focuses on surrounding the child with
servants of good moral character and feeding her or him only breastmilk for
the first year of life.38 The late fifteenth-century chronicler and moralist, Fray
Antonio de Guevara, claimed that noble infants died more frequently than
those of peasant women because they had to change wet nurses:
Every day we see a disproportionately higher mortality rate among the children of
noblewomen in comparison with those of plebeian women, and we would say that
this is … because … it often happens that the child of a poor woman has the same
source of milk for two years, and a noblewoman’s child changes nurses three times
in two months.39

Moreover, Fray Guevara believed the situation was worse for those below the
nobility who had to send their children out to villagers’ homes to nurse. And
he was not alone. The Valencian Jaume Roig, in The Mirror (c. 1460), accused
freeborn wet nurses who took children into their homes of hiding the fact
312 R. L. WINER

that their charges were starving due to their lack of breastmilk by pouring liquids
in the swaddling.40
Some Barcelona labor contracts for free wet nurses residing with their masters
contain clauses stating that masters might extend their terms of service as long as
they wanted, but many, like that of Guillemoneta, do not. The term of service for
a free wet nurse was often for one year only. Married matrons like Guillemoneta
were more likely to embody the values of moral living and good character that
medieval moralists and physicians urged parents to seek in a wet nurse, as
opposed to the stereotypes of evil-living which were projected onto enslaved
women like Caterina, but this meant they had families to which they wanted
to return. Enslaved women in the towns of Catalonia could not leave and also
had little hope of escape; if they were Muslim apostates, their former coreligio-
nists were far to the south in Valencia and if they were from the far off Dinaric
Alps, or Black Sea region, like Caterina, reunion with their people of origin was
essentially impossible.41

The fate of children born to enslaved mothers: abandonment, slavery,

and freedom
In the 1380s, enslaved women may not yet have outnumbered free wet nurses in
the homes of the elite, but hints that the enslaved were being used as wet nurses
appear in the notarial record in the first references to the fates of unwanted slave
children. While medieval Mediterranean slaves were not generally bought for
their reproductive labor, lactating slaves were the most expensive on the
market because of their capacity to breastfeed. By the 1390s, sales of enslaved
women breastfeeding their newborns were common and the fate of infants
was precarious. One master stated outright that he found the enslaved infant
to be a nuisance. On April 25 1397, Aimó Dalmau, legum doctor, gave his
one-month-old slave Perico to Pere Serra of Sant Feliu in Sant Cugat de
Vallès (about a day’s walk north of Barcelona). Dalmau had purchased Perico
along with his mother Lucia on April 10 and explained he now needed to get
rid of Perico since the infant was: ‘useless and harmful in that his mother was
to breastfeed or suckle a certain daughter of his.’42 The milk supply of a wet
nurse was supposed to be established; colostrum, called ‘dead milk’ in
Catalan, was deemed unhealthy, so a few weeks postpartum was considered
best to start wet nursing. This precise timing could be exacted from an enslaved
mother while a free one might resist leaving such a young infant. Lucia may have
breastfed Perico until her mistress gave birth at which point she was forced to
separate from him. In Barcelona, enslaved mothers were often sold away from
their newborns about two weeks to four months after the child’s birth. Several
donations of enslaved infants to those who would hazard an attempt at
keeping them alive to later sell them are recorded. On 12 March 1394, the
enslaved newborn Eulàlia, who was all of 15 days old, was given away twice.
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 313

First by her original owner Elisenda, widow of Bernat Codina, of the village of
Sant Cugat de Vallès, to Antònia widow of Nicolau Coll, citizen of Barcelona,
and then a few hours later to Jacmeta, conversa and wife of the converso Joan
Elias, all of Barcelona.43 The conditions of each donation were the same. If
the recipient could manage to feed the baby, once this slave child grew, she
would serve her mistress for the rest of her life.
Other enslaved infants were put out to nurse in the countryside so their
mothers could be employed as wet nurses in Barcelona. On 5 November
1380, three Barcelona elites, Francesc de Lena, juris peritus (jurist below
legum doctor), Margarida, widow of Guillem Verdaguer, and her son Joanet,
acknowledged receipt of an unnamed enslaved two-year old girl into their
custody from a man called Bernat Roure from Sant Cristàfol de Fogars in the
adjacent comarca of Vallès Oriental. Roure had ‘nourished’ the growing baby
and toddler for 20 months; with what is left unstated – perhaps his wife’s breast-
milk, but possibly with animal milk and milk substitutes. De Lena and the Ver-
daguer mother and adult son together paid the expenses involved. It is likely that
the baby was Joanet Verdaguer’s daughter by Francesc de Lena’s Tartar slave
Margarida since the Verdaguers were required to share in the expenses in the
enslaved baby’s upkeep although she belonged to de Lena. Her master refers
to the toddler as ‘a certain bastard girl, [who is] my slave and captive … the
daughter of a certain slave of mine … of the Tartar race, called Margarida.’44
The future fate of the little girl remains unknown. There is no mention of any
intention to free her and so now, at two years of age, she probably went to
work in the de Lena household, as best she could, alongside her mother.
Still other children of the enslaved were in a different category altogether as
the children of masters who wanted them. In later fourteenth-century Barcelona,
if masters acknowledged their children by slaves these children were free. Their
mothers, on the other hand, were not; three manumissions survive from the
1370s where the master and father frees his slave on the condition that she
breastfeed their child for a certain number of years, two to four.45 On 9 Septem-
ber 1377, the merchant Bernat Ubac freed his enslaved concubine Gomicel-la on
condition that she breastfeed Antoni, ‘the son he engendered in her’ for two
years avoiding sexual intercourse during that time (to protect the milk
supply). Ubac notes that Gomicel-la had to become his slave because of the
war between the Crown of Aragon and Sardinia. (Sardinians like Gomicel-la
were born Christians and the papacy had decried their enslavement and
would gain their emancipation a generation later.) Previously, Ubac had set
Gomicel-la up in a house and furnished it; in manumitting her, Ubac also
granted her the clothes, utensils and bedclothes in her home, and promised to
provide her with food, drink, shoes, hose and all that she and their son might
need during the two years.46 Ubac also grants Gomicel-la her peculium – a
slave’s property that technically belonged to her or his master. Ubac explicitly
stipulates that, while she was breastfeeding their son, Gomicel-la not have sex
314 R. L. WINER

with any man; her manumission would be voided should she break this con-
dition or show any ingratitude to her master. It is not known if Ubac was
married or if he had any other children. It is more than likely, though, that he
was either a bachelor or, if married, was childless; either way, he wanted to do
everything he could to secure his son’s future.
Other fathers valued the welfare of the acknowledged mothers of their chil-
dren less than Ubac did Gomicel-la’s. That the raising of his child was the
father’s main goal is apparent in the manumission, on 8 December 1375, of Cat-
arina ‘the Tartar’ by Joan de Turra, the rector of the church of Belsa in the
diocese of Lleida under the condition that she feed their son Guillem ‘with
her own milk’ – and that no other milk (animal or otherwise) be given the
baby – for three years. De Turra was also to dictate where Catarina was to
live. He made her no other concessions, grants, or promises.47 As Joan de
Turra was an ecclesiastic, the baby Guillem was perhaps the only child he
would have and he wanted to give him the best chance of survival possible –
breastfeeding by his own mother.
Some childless masters and their wives adopted masters’ children by enslaved
mothers. A well-known fourteenth-century example comes from the family of
the Francesco Datini, international merchant of Prato, whose wife Margherita
was childless. Datini had a daughter, Ginevra, with his enslaved woman Lucia.
The girl was sent to the S. Maria Nuova (later Ospedale degli Innocenti) as an
abandoned child but when she reached the age of six, Datini’s wife agreed to
take her.48 Although initially Datini’s adultery with Lucia infuriated his wife,
in the end the enslaved woman acted as a surrogate in producing a child
which her master and mistress adopted as their own. Debra Blumenthal has
documented a similar occurrence in judicial proceedings surrounding a
custody dispute from the 1460s between the Genoese merchant Alberto de
Pont and his freedwoman Catalina over their 11-year-old daughter Beleta.49 Cat-
alina and her daughter were living in Valencia where Catalina worked as a dom-
estic servant to support them both. De Pont had returned to his native Genoa
and married but he and his wife were unable to have a child. He decided to
take Beleta from her mother, and distance the girl from her enslaved roots, so
that he and his wife could raise her as their own in Genoa. The best fate for
the child of an enslaved woman was to no longer be considered her child, a
sad circumstance. Indeed, Catalina delayed handing Beleta over to de Pont
because she did not want to be separated from her daughter. The best fate for
a woman like Catalina was that of Datini’s slave Lucia, to be freed and
married to another man, but the cost was giving up her child.

Conclusions
Both the enslaved Caterina and the free wet nurse Guillemoneta negotiated
economic and social systems controlled by powerful masters. The later
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 315

fourteenth century was a time when free wet nurses strove to contest the con-
ditions of labor. However, in the end, it was the masters who called the shots,
hiring or purchasing labor as best suited their needs. In the first half of the four-
teenth century in Barcelona, employment contracts far outnumber transactions
related to slavery and wet nursing. And a few decades after the Black Death,
there seems to have been a short period where freeborn wet nurses were able
to negotiate favorable terms of service for themselves, their children and families.
But by 1400, the trend in who did wet nursing work was reversed: there are twice
as many references to enslaved wet nurses as there are for free women engaging
in the trade. Although wet nursing remained well paid, the favorable situations
for wet nurses and their families that had existed in the 1360s and 1370s were no
longer possible in 1399. And the enslaved wet nurse, with little or no ability to
champion the needs of her own infant, became a more desirable child care pro-
vider. The purchase of an enslaved woman to serve as a wet nurse was a finan-
cially shrewd one and cost was always an issue for employers; however, over the
course of the fourteenth century, the decisions of elite masters to employ
enslaved instead free wet nurses had just as much to do with their terms of
service. Getting free wives and mothers to remain as wet-nurses for the multiple
years infants and toddlers required was challenging, even for the elite, since these
women needed to return to their own families. Enslaved wet-nurses could not
leave. An enslaved woman was not the ideal wet nurse the moralists of the
1300s envisaged. She was, however, a person who could not negotiate her con-
ditions of service. Domestic slavery in later fourteenth-century Barcelona and
the Atlantic world was a gendered system in which enslaved women supported
the reproduction of their masters and mistresses. An enslaved concubine in Bar-
celona might produce a child her master and mistresses would adopt, while one
in late seventeenth-century Virginia could not. But in both places and times,
enslaved wet nurses were sought out because they had to breastfeed and look
after their charges as long as their masters mandated.

Notes
1. Arxiu Històric de Protocols de Barcelona (AHPB) Arnau Piquer, Manual (January 2–
December 24, 1399), 50/6 folios 98–98v.
2. Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona (ACB), Notaris, vol. 203, s.n. (October 1,
1379): ‘providebo quandam infantam filiam vestram per totum [dictum] tempus de
cibo et potu prout vobis et ei decet … ’
3. See my ‘The Mother and the Dida [Nanny]: Female Employers and Wet Nurses in
Fourteenth-Century Barcelona’, in Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images,
Rhetorics, Practices, ed. Jutta Sperling (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 55–78.
4. For Church and State prohibitions, see my ‘Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery
and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300’,
Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 2 (2008): 173.
5. See William MacLehose, ‘A Tender Age’: Cultural Anxieties over the Child in the Twelfth
and Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University e-Gutenberg Series, 2006).
316 R. L. WINER

6. The classic study of medieval Western Mediterranean slavery is Charles Verlinden,

L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, 2 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1955–1977). For
the current literature on the subject, see ‘Medieval Mediterranean Slavery: Compara-
tive Studies on the Slave Trade and Slavery in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Societies
(8th–15th Century)’ at http://med-slavery.uni-trier.de:9080/minev/MedSlavery and
William D. Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, 2014). Recent studies of Catalan-speaking towns include
Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century
Valencia (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2009) and Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol and
Josefa Mutgé i Vives, eds., De l’esclavitud a la llibertat: esclaus i lliberts a l’Edat
Mitjana: actes del col-loqui internacional celebrat a Barcelona, del 27 al 29 de maig
de 1999 (Barcelona: Consell Superior d’Investigacions Científiques, 2000).
7. See Debra Blumenthal, ‘“As If She Were His Wife”: Slavery and Sexual Ethics in Late
Medieval Spain’, in Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed.
Jacqueline L. Hazelton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 179–89, 180: ‘masters
and their heirs portrayed slave women as calculating temptresses who used their sexu-
ality as a weapon’ and for masters raping enslaved girls as young as eight see her
‘Sclaves Molt Fortes, Senyors Invalts: Sex, Lies and Paternity Suits in Fifteenth-
Century Spain’, in Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World,
ed. Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 17–35.
8. For the antebellum American south, see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a woman?
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 27–61 and for the 1855 Missouri trial of Celia,
who killed her master after being repeatedly raped from age 14, see ‘Celia, A Slave,
Trial (1855) by Douglas O. Linder (2011)’. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/
ftrials/celia/celiahome.html (accessed January 16, 2017); For a master in nineteenth-
century Brazil who raped enslaved girls as young as 10, see Keila Grinberg, Liberata:
a lei da ambigüidade as ações de liberdade da Corte de Apelação do Rio de Janeiro
no século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais, 2008).
9. See Katie Simpson Smith, We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–
1835 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013), 244: one of ‘countless’ examples of lack of
concern for the emotions of an enslaved black mother whose infant dies and a
white baby ‘is pressed on her breast’ within hours. The cruel separation of mother
from child was at the heart of the violence of enslaved wet nursing – see Maria
Helena Perreira Toledo Machado, ‘Between Two Beneditos: Slave Wet-Nurses amid
Slavery’s Decline in Southeast Brazil’, Slavery and Abolition. doi:10.1080/0144039X.
2017.1316983 and Stephanie Jones-Rogers, ‘“[S]He Could … Spare One Ample
Breast for the Profit of her Owner”: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible
Labor in American Slave Markets’, Slavery and Abolition. doi:10.1080/0144039X.2017.
1317014.
10. In 1753 Princess Augusta of England confronted Eliza Lucas Pinckney, the wife of a
South Carolina planter, with the putative negative effects of slave wet nurses. Pinckney
countered that a wet nurse at home was better than sending children away as some
Europeans did – see Paula A. Treckel, ‘Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality in Colo-
nial America’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 1 (1989): 49.
11. See Arlette Gautier, Les soeurs de Solitude: La condition féminine dans l’esclavage aux
Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1985), 174, 179; Jennifer
Morgan, ‘Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law and Re/Production for Enslaved Women’,
address delivered to the ‘Mothering Slaves Network’ at Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
on April 8, 2015. https://research.ncl.ac.uk/motheringslaves/events/newcastle/
keynote/ (accessed January 16, 2017).
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 317

12. For the Antebellum South see Harriet Ann Jacobs’s portrait of her ‘Aunt Nancy’, in her
(aka Linda Brent’s) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Signet Classics,
2010), 161–6; and WPA interviews conducted with ex-slaves, for these as sources on
the family, see Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave couples in Antebellum South Carolina
(Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 2004), 5–8.
13. AHPB Llorenç de Canals, Capibrevium sive protocollum notularum sive rogacionum
(December 11, 1341–April 27, 1342), 12/3, f.103r.
14. Twenty of the 30 wet nurses documented before 1348 were married, two widowed, the
marital status of one was unknown, six were unmarried free mothers, and one was
enslaved.
15. Notarial evidence increases significantly for the second half of the fourteenth century.
In spite of the small sample from before 1350, the record shows a change in the
practice of wet nursing.
16. Scholarship for Italy reveals entire rural regions where widespread wet nursing work
led to increased mortality in infants and toddlers. See Richard Trexler, ‘Infanticide
in Florence: New Sources and First Results’, History of Childhood Quarterly 1, no. 1
(1973): 98–116.
17. See Teresa Vinyoles i Vidal, ‘L’Esperança de vida dels infants de l’hospital de Santa
Creu de Barcelona’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales 43, no. 1 (2013): 291–321.
doi:10.3989/aem.2013.43.1.10 (accessed October 6, 2016) and Leah L. Otis, ‘Municipal
Wet Nurses and Fifteenth-Century Montpellier’, in Women and Work in Preindustrial
Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1986), 83–93.
18. See the PhD thesis of Adam Joseph Franklin-Lyons, Famine – Preparation and
Response in Catalonia after the Black Death (Yale, 2009).
19. Thomas Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 165.
20. Paul Freedman, ‘Barcelona, City of’, in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed.
E. Michael Gerli (New York: Routledge, 2013), 147.
21. Freedman, ‘Barcelona, City of’, 148.
22. Earl Hamilton, Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351–1500
(Cambridge: Harvard, 1936), Claude Carrère, Barcelone, centre économique à l’époque
des difficultés, 1380–1462 (Paris: Mouton, 1967) 665–71 and Joseph O’Callaghan, A
History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca: Cornell, 1975), 625 (citing Jaume Vicens Vives).
23. Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520
(New Haven: Yale, 2002), 293–7.
24. Paul Freedman, Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991), 176.
25. Freedman, Origins of Peasant Servitude, 181–2.
26. ACB, Notaris, vol. 13, f. 30v-31r.
27. Freedman, Origins of Peasant Servitude, 179.
28. Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), 245.
29. For a list of the places of origin of free wet nurses by comarca, see Josep Hernando i
Delgado, ‘L’alimentació làctia dels nadons durant el segle XIV, les nodrisses o dides
a Barcelona, 1295–1400, segons els documents dels protocols notarials’, Estudis his-
tòrics i documents dels arxius de protocols 14 (1996): 43–5.
30. AHPB, Berenguer Escuder, Septimum manuale (December 28, 1383–December 24,
1384) 46/5, f.5r-v.
31. AHPB Pere Borell, Manual (June 13, 1363–August 17, 1364), 13/2, f. 38v–39v.
318 R. L. WINER

32. ACB, Notaris, vol. 107, s.n. (November 4, 1367) and AHPB Guillem de Santilari, Sex-
agesimum tercium capibrevium notu[larum] (January 16, 1369–June 11, 1369), 20/10,
f. 72v–73.
33. Jewish employers of wet nurses are not included since their ability to purchase slaves
was limited – see Winer, ‘Jews, Slave-Holding, and Gender in the Crown of Aragon
circa 1250–1492’, in Cautivas y esclavas: el tráfico humano en el Mediterráneo, ed.
Aurelia Martín Casares (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2016), 43–60.
34. See his ‘Reasons for the Limited Scope and Duration of “Renaissance Slavery” in
Southern Europe (ca. 1348–ca. 1750): A New Structuralist Analysis’, in Schiavitù e ser-
vaggio nell’economia europea, secc. XI-XVIII = Serfdom and slavery in the European
economy, 11th–18th centuries, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Florence: Firenze University
Press, 2014), 337.
35. James Schmitt designed the following bar graph. There are 271 references to wet
nursing in the notarial registers of fourteenth-century Barcelona in AHPB, ACB and
l’Arxiu Històric de la Cuitat de Barcelona. Hernando i Delgado ‘L’alimentació làctia’
gives 270, but further archival research revealed an additional one.
36. Late medieval peasant children were weaning at 18 months – see Simon Mays ‘The
Effects of Infant Feeding Practices on Infant and Maternal Health in a Medieval Com-
munity’, Childhood in the Past 3, no. 1 (2010): 63–78, doi:10.1179/cip.2010.3.1.63.
37. Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest. Women in Castilian town society, 1100–
1300 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 156–7.
38. Ramon Llull, Doctrina pueril, ed. Gret Schib (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 1972), 218.
39. Quoted in Emilie L. Bergmann, ‘Milking the Poor: Wet-nursing and the Sexual
Economy of Early Modern Spain’, in Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early
Modern Iberia, ed. Eukene Lacarra Lanz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 95.
40. The Mirror of Jaume Roig: An Edition and an English Translation of MS. Vat.Lat. 4806,
ed. and trans. María Celeste Delgado-Librero (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 353.
41. After 1400 Catalan owners were required to insure enslaved men against escape, but
not women since they posed less of a flight risk. See Roser Salicrú i Lluch, Esclaus i
propietaris d’esclaus a la Catalunya del segle XV: L’assegurança contra fugues (Barce-
lona: Consell Superior d’Investigacions Científiques, Institució Milà i Fontanals, 1998).
42. AHPB Francesc de Pujol, Capibrevium septimum decimum (December 20, 1396–July
21, 1397) 38/19, f.97–97v: ‘inutilis et dampnosus ex eo quia eius mater lactat sive nutrit
quandam filiam mea’.
43. AHPB Jaume Vidal, Manual (January 4, 1394–October 1397) 71/1 4r-v.
44. AHPB Joan Eiximenis, Llibre comú (August 20, 1380–May 20, 1381) 29/20, f.53v:
‘quandam burdam servam et captivam meam … filiam cuiusdam serve mee dictum
Franciscum de genere tartarorum vocata Margarita’.
45. AHPB Felip Gombau, Llibre comú (December 8, 1372–July 8, 1373) 37/7, f.118r-v;
ACB Notaris, Pere Borell, vol. 110. s.n. (December 8, 1375); AHPB Pere Martí,
Llibre comú (July 31, 1377–December 31, 1378) 17/23, f. 38v-40r.
46. AHPB Pere Martí, Llibre comú (July 31, 1377–December 31, 1378) 17/23, f. 38v-40r:
‘ad tuum tuorumque salvamentum et bonum etiam … quod tu tenearis lactare et
nutrire per duos annos … Anthonium filium ex me in te procreatum et infra
dictum biennium fornicationem aliquam cum aliquo homine non facias nec comittas’.
47. ACB, Notaris, Pere Borell, vol. 110, s.n. (December 8, 1375).
48. Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco Di Marco Datini (London: J. Cape, 1957),
169.
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 319

49. Blumenthal. ‘Masters, Slave Women, and their Children. A Child Custody Dispute in
15th-Century Valencia’, in Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800), ed. Stefan
Hanss and Juliane Schiel (Zürich: Chronos, 2014), 229–56.

Acknowledgements
The author thanks the members of the Faculty Forum of the History Department of Villa-
nova University, Diana Paton, Emily West, and Maria Helena Machado for their comments
on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
Thanks go to the Albert R. Lepage fund of the History Department of Villanova University
for supporting research for this article conducted in archives in Barcelona, Spain.

Notes on contributor
Rebecca Lynn Winer is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Villanova Univer-
sity, 800 E. Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085, USA. Email: rebecca.winer@villanova.
edu
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