Maritime historians have spent more time studying those who labored at sea than those who worked on shore, even though port laborers played an essential role in the smooth functioning of maritime trade and enterprise and probably outnumbered those who went to sea. Medievalists have had especially little to say about port laborers, in contrast to the fuller scholarship on late modern quayside workers such as stevedores and porters, among others. The problem is exacerbated by the scanty extant documentation for these largely un-organized, poorly remunerated, and low-status workers. Some progress has been made recently, however, in archaeological publications on the physical structure and topography of medieval ports. This chapter aims to redress this gap by bringing together the scarce documentary evidence with recent archaeological research to assess the types of work, remuneration, status, and regulation of those who labored on English waterfronts from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. It is centered around a typology of port labor with six categories.

The first is port administration, which had the highest status of the six groups, but also represented the smallest number of workers (barely totaling ten to thirty men in most ports), which helps explain why they never formed any guilds.