This chapter presents new findings about changes in the agrarian social structure of early modern Catalonia that illustrate the rapid emergence of landless households. The presence of this group in the Catalonian countryside has largely been ignored by historians, because evidence of its existence is difficult to find. In this chapter, we will examine new evidence of the existence of a large workforce of French migrant wage labourers, which points to the wider presence of such wage-earners in the rural economy. This adds another layer to the deep structural changes that the existing historical literature has already identified.

After the social and economic crisis of the late medieval period, many historians have stressed that important changes in property rights and land tenure led to the formation of new social groups. In particular, social differentiation increased among peasant groups. These groups consisted of the owners of a mas – the main productive unit of the Catalan countryside – who were still serfs but were successful in keeping the usage rights of their land from the lords; and those peasants who had lost their right to possess a mas.

Like other holders of perpetual customary tenures in Europe, in effect mas owners, also known as pagesos (s. pages), became landowners and could add extensive plots of land as well as other masos to their estate via the land-market and marriage strategies. The labour requirements for such enlarged farms could not be satisfied by the peasant family itself, so farmers had to adopt many strategies in order to get their lands cultivated. The most important of these was the leasing out of a mas to another peasant family, who became masovers (sharecroppers). Thus, sharecropping contracts increased from the mid-sixteenth century.

However, it was not possible for all peasants to lease a mas if they did not own one. Many households who had tiny holdings or no land had to turn to wage labour to make ends meet. During the early modern period, this social group increased both in number and as a proportion of all households in Catalonia. Their emergence was linked to the appearance of a new social label from the first half of the sixteenth century: treballador (labourer).