Dumolyn Speecke Ryckbosch Cycles of urban revolt in medieval Flanders (original) (raw)
The medieval county of Flanders experienced an extraordinary number of rebellions and revolts, opposing the count, the patricians and the urban middle classes, in various combinations. If the fluctuating balance of power inclined too sharply to one group, or if specific demands of privileged citizens were not fulfilled because they lacked access to power, political challengers rebelled. Representative organs could solve socio-political and economic problems, but a rebellion usually ended in a struggle between social groups and networks within the towns and a war between rebel regimes and prince. These two struggles continuously intermingled and created a rebellious dynamic, ending in victory or defeat and in repression and, in turn, inspiring the next rebellion. This remarkable pattern of rebellion started in the phase of 'communal emancipation', in the twelfth century, a period in which the counts granted privileges to the Flemish towns, as social and political contradictions developed within the city. From the 1280s until the end of the fourteenth century, craft guilds constructed alliances with other challengers, such as noblemen, and fought for political representation and control over fiscal and economic policies. As state power became more and more important after the arrival of the centralising Burgundian dynasty in Flanders, this pattern changed significantly. The urban elites gradually sided with the dukes and urban rebellions became less successful. This did not mean, however, that the Flemish rebellious tradition was exhausted. The end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth century would witness new challenges to princely power. In this article we will consider the role of alliances and leadership, ideology, mobilisation and rebellious 'repertoires' in medieval Flemish towns.
Patterns of urban rebellion in medieval Flanders
Journal of Medieval History, 2005
The medieval county of Flanders experienced an extraordinary number of rebellions and revolts, opposing the count, the patricians and the urban middle classes, in various combinations. If the fluctuating balance of power inclined too sharply to one group, or if specific demands of privileged citizens were not fulfilled because they lacked access to power, political challengers rebelled. Representative organs could solve socio-political and economic problems, but a rebellion usually ended in a struggle between social groups and networks within the towns and a war between rebel regimes and prince. These two struggles continuously intermingled and created a rebellious dynamic, ending in victory or defeat and in repression and, in turn, inspiring the next rebellion. This remarkable pattern of rebellion started in the phase of 'communal emancipation', in the twelfth century, a period in which the counts granted privileges to the Flemish towns, as social and political contradictions developed within the city. From the 1280s until the end of the fourteenth century, craft guilds constructed alliances with other challengers, such as noblemen, and fought for political representation and control over fiscal and economic policies. As state power became more and more important after the arrival of the centralising Burgundian dynasty in Flanders, this pattern changed significantly. The urban elites gradually sided with the dukes and urban rebellions became less successful. This did not mean, however, that the Flemish rebellious tradition was exhausted. The end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth century would witness new challenges to princely power. In this article we will consider the role of alliances and leadership, ideology, mobilisation and rebellious 'repertoires' in medieval Flemish towns.
In th is contribution I want to consider elite discourses on late medieval Flemish urban rebels who tried to speak out politically. Following theoretica I perspectives like John L. Austin's 'speech act theory', Pierre Bourdieu's insights in language and symbolic power and Norman Fairclough's 'critical discourse analysis', I consider discourse a form of sodal practice.! The sodal cannot be reduced to the discursive, as radical postmodernist historians would claim, but discourse is fundamental in constituting sodal relations. lt has by now become a cliché that since the so-called linguistic turn in historical practice, the dividing lines between sodal history and cultural or intellectual history have been blurred. The combination of these points of view can provide new insights on medieval collective actions as the innovative approach of Peter Arnade, who studied the ritualized forms of mobilization in Flemish revolts, has shown. 2 The discursive aspects of these collective actions in late medieval Flanders have hitherto been neglected in sodal history. I will focus both on sodal and political structures in Flemish urban rebellion and also on the sodal struggle for legitimate speech. lt is my intention to show that the ruling elites, and the chronicles in which their views were represented, used sodal classification as a form of sodal power, while marginalized rebels looked for political space to express their own utterances.
Historical Research 85, 2012
Twentieth-century scholarship gave birth to two distinct and antagonistic traditions regarding the feuds that frequently occurred in the urbanized society of late medieval Flanders: that factionalism was rooted in the clashes within urban elites; or that it rose from the tensions that existed between different socio-economic layers of society. This article develops a perspective that integrates those older traditions through a synthetic discussion of the discourse on factionalism in late medieval sources and a reassessment of the distribution of wealth, power and honour in late medieval Flanders. It also connects the debate on urban factionalism to recent scholarship on the genesis of the 'princely state' in the medieval Low Countries. The growing political influence of the Burgundian dynasty in urban factional conflict in Flanders is unmistakable, but the growth of state power probably did not lead directly to a decrease in 'private violence'.
Factional conflict in late medieval Flanders
Twentieth-century scholarship gave birth to two distinct and antagonistic traditions regarding the feuds that frequently occurred in the urbanized society of late medieval Flanders: that factionalism was rooted in the clashes within urban elites; or that it rose from the tensions that existed between different socio-economic layers of society. This article develops a perspective that integrates those older traditions through a synthetic discussion of the discourse on factionalism in late medieval sources and a reassessment of the distribution of wealth, power and honour in late medieval Flanders. It also connects the debate on urban factionalism to recent scholarship on the genesis of the 'princely state' in the medieval Low Countries. The growing political influence of the Burgundian dynasty in urban factional conflict in Flanders is unmistakable, but the growth of state power probably did not lead directly to a decrease in 'private violence'.
The identity of the commoners in thirteenth-century Flanders
This article studies the social protest of the 1280s in the main cities of the county of Flanders. The protestors were a very heterogeneous group, because wealthy tradesmen, craftsmen and middle class artisans united forces to fight their common enemy, the established families that had governed the cities for many decades. The protesters had a shared, distinct and insistent identity. They presented themselves as the meentucht, a vernacular translation (or better: a contemporary interpretation) of the Latin communitas. The use of this term as a basis for their self-definition justified their protest because the rebels saw themselves as the true commoners of the city.
Urban History, 2016
The absence of a ‘real’ urban chronicle tradition in fifteenth-century Flanders similar to the Italian or German models has raised questions among scholars. However, there is also no satisfactory consensus on the exact meaning or contents of medieval ‘urban historiography’. Some were ‘official’ city chronicles, while others lauded patrician lineages or took the viewpoint of specific social groups or corporate organizations and reinforced construction of the groups’ collective memories. Some seem to express the literary aspirations of individual city officials or clerics with strong connections to their towns.We propose an analytical framework to identify and measure the ‘urbanity’ of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.
Urban Space and Political Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1162 002219502317345538, 2006
editors' introduction This essay investigates political claims over space in Ghent, urban Flanders' largest city during the late Middle Ages. Distancing itself from the long tradition in which the Low Countries' urban history deciphered city life principally through market relations, it argues for the independent importance of political culture. Political contests were enacted through rituals of rulership and authority performed, ªrst, by members of the commune in the high Middle Ages and then by the politically enfranchised urban members and the Burgundian princes. Ritual space-iconic spaces-were not just the site of the contests but also the prizes. The goal was possession of these spaces and the symbols of power they bequeathed. The late medieval period was a key crucible for the formation of urban space. As important as economic life was to Low Country cities like Ghent, the market did not determine spatial arrangements so much as intersect with a set of political valences forged out of political contests between urban factions and the emerging composite state of the Burgundian Netherlands. URBAN SPACE IN LATE MEDIEVAL FLANDERS When considering urban history in medieval Flanders, just as in adjoining areas such as the Duchy of Brabant and the Bishopric of Liège, it is tempting to paraphrase the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the word, and the word was Pirenne. Indeed, Henri Pirenne's scholarship on urban history has long dominated urban historiography throughout the Low Countries, and inspired a strong body of work in economic and political history. Pirenne was fascinated with questions of state formation, national identity, and the urban locus of early capitalism. Markets and the urban economy, he argued, were the engine behind urban development
The historiography of urban revolts in northwestern Europe is abundant, yet events of thirteenth-century urban protest are mostly neglected. They are usually only mentioned briefly as forerunners of later, better documented events. Sources for thirteenth-century events of urban protest are scarce, but not absent. This article gives an overview from the first industrial action in Brabant, Flanders and northern France between 1220 and 1250, to the factional struggles between urban elites, in which craftsmen took sides, in the towns of England and the Holy Roman Empire in the 1250s and 1260s, and back to Flanders and northern France as the epicentre of violent revolts in 1275-85. These events reveal the way artisans entered the political stage, they underline regional differences and common features, and they uncover the interplay between changes in urban society and overall development in northwestern Europe in this crucial period of profound transition.
Imagining Flanders : the (de)construction of a regional identity in fifteenth-century Flanders
Mario Damen & Kim Overlaet (eds.), Constructing and representing territory in late medieval and early modern Europe, 2022
This chapter examines the construction of collective historical identities in late medieval Flemish towns in the early fifteenth century. The Burgundian dukes and the Flemish elites tried to shape and ‘control’ representations of their principality, but in literary, pictorial, and historiographical sources the focus on the Flemish count gradually gave way to a focus on the largest Flemish cities. Analysing the Imago Flandriae, a Latin prophecy on the Hundred Years’ War, and the Flandria Generosa C, a Latin chronicle of Flanders, I argue that these literary sources illustrate the new influence of major Flemish towns in new regional institutions, such as the Four Members of Flanders, and on regional politics under Burgundian rule.
The recent debate between Chris Wickham and Shami Ghosh reveals different interpretations of the political economy of Europe between c. 1200 and 1800, with one scholar arguing for the persistence of the “feudal economy” up to the Industrial Revolution, and another scholar imagining a distinct phase in which economic development was not yet capitalist but no longer decisively shaped by the demands of lords. This article contributes to this discussion with the story of Flanders, where two contrasting trajectories interlocked. On the one hand, Coastal Flanders became a hotbed of agrarian capitalism from the fourteenth century onwards, when small-scale farms were amalgamated in large agricultural enterprises that relied on the wage labour of disposessed peasants and their offspring as well as temporary labour migration from nearby regions. On the other hand, Inland Flanders saw the persistence of a peasant society dominated by small-scale landownership. “Middle class lordship” was critically important for this divergence. Having reduced seigneurial taxes to a minimum, the peasants of Inland Flanders acquired an unusual measure of control over seigneurial courts and its regulatory capacities, which were used to stimulate the progressive commercialization of society while thwarting experiments with agrarian capitalism. Contextualized with references to other parts of Europe, the Flemish evidence thus complicates narratives about “feudalism”, which partly revolves around seigneurial lordship as a supposed vehicle for elite interests, while revealing that the spectrum of possibilities in the political economy of lordship after c. 1300 deserves closer scrutiny.
This book has a long and complicated history. It originated in a four-year project on lordship and state formation that began in 2014 with the generous funding of the Flemish Research Council (FWO). The original plan was for Miet Adriaens to write a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Frederik Buylaert, but due to increasingly challenging circumstances in her private life, Miet eventually had to abandon her pursuit of a doctoral degree. While she continued to work on the database of seigneuries that underpins much of this volume, the book has been written by Frederik Buylaert, who was able to do so thanks to the generous
Political Ideology and the Rewriting of History in Fifteenth-Century Flanders
BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review
Political Ideology and the Rewriting of History in Fifteenth-Century Flanders lisa demets, jan dumolyn and els de paermentier Medieval views on rulers from the past were often politically instrumentalised in the service of contemporary interests. In the recent historiography on medieval Flanders, the reconstruction of how 'historical truth' changed over time to cater for topical needs has primarily been examined from the perspective of 'social' or 'communicative' memories, which were orally transmitted over a short period of time. This line of research followed the dominant 'communicative memory'paradigm. However, historians have paid far less systematic attention to the question how urban elites and state officials used histories that went farther back in time and dealt with the 'high politics' of princes and rulers to assert (rebellious) political ideologies of the moment. In this vast topic of research, historians are dealing with histories that were transmitted through manuscripts and not through oral communication. Instead of relying on the 'communicative memory'-paradigm, which allows historians to consider how the recent past has been ideologically reconstructed, this article examines how late fifteenthcentury Flemish urban elites rewrote, interpolated, deformed and manipulated histories from a more distant past to shape a functional 'cultural memory' (in the sense of Jan Assmann's definition) that influenced a society's ideological vision on history. Taking the political speech of Willem Zoete (1488) and the late fifteenth-century popular and widespread Flemish historiographical Middle Dutch corpus, the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen, as a starting point, this article shows how rulers from the past served as a vehicle to express contemporary rebellious ideas against the regency of Maximilian of Austria, and how ideological article-artikel motives and discursive strategies were deployed to advocate the ideology of the 'political contract' between the prince and his subjects, as well as the idea of the 'natural prince'. Middeleeuwse opvattingen over vorsten uit het verleden werden vaak politiek geconstrueerd in functie van eigentijdse belangen. Uit de recente historiografie over middeleeuws Vlaanderen blijkt dat historici de manier waarop de 'historische waarheid' door de eeuwen heen werd ge(re)construeerd voornamelijk vanuit het perspectief van 'sociale' of 'communicatieve' herinneringen hebben onderzocht. Deze benadering past binnen het dominante theoretische model van 'communicatieve herinnering', waarbij de focus ligt op herinneringen die binnen de korte tijdsspanne van enkele generaties en voornamelijk mondeling werden overgeleverd. Tot nu toe is er veel minder aandacht besteed aan hoe stedelijke elites geschiedverhalen over de politieke daden van vorsten uit een verder verleden hebben gebruikt om actuele (opstandige) politieke statements te maken. In dit onderzoeksdomein staan geschiedverhalen centraal die veeleer schriftelijk dan mondeling werden overgeleverd. Anders dan in het heersende model van 'communicatieve herinnering', onderzoeken wij in dit artikel hoe de laatmiddeleeuwse stedelijke elite in Vlaanderen de geschiedenis uit een ver verleden herschreef, vervalste, vervormde en manipuleerde in functie van de constructie van een 'culturele herinnering' (in de definitie van Jan Assmann), die van invloed was op de eigentijdse ideologische visie op het verleden. Aan de hand van een analyse van de politieke redevoering van Willem Zoete (1488) en het bekende, laat vijftiendeeeuwse Middelnederlandse historiografische corpus, de Excellente cronike van Vlaenderen, wordt getoond hoe geschiedverhalen over vorsten uit een ver verleden werden ingezet om zich tegen het actuele regentschap van Maximiliaan van Oostenrijk te verzetten, en hoe ideologisch geladen discursieve strategieën daarbij werden ontplooid om de gangbare opvattingen over zowel het 'politieke contract tussen de vorst en zijn onderdanen' als ook over de 'natuurlijke vorst' te verdedigen.
The family or the farm: a Sophie's choice? The late medieval crisis in Flanders
To verify the neo-Malthusian Duby/Postan thesis about the so called late medieval crisis, the county of Flanders is an interesting test-case. The reason is that, at the eve of that period, this county was one of the most densely populated areas of Europe. So, one could expect pure theoretically that -in the Malthusian thinkingthere would have been a great tension (‘bottle neck’) between food supply and demand causing important crisis phenomena and population losses during the ‘crisis’. It is nevertheless -often too easily- accepted, that these crises phenomena ware relatively light in Flanders. Even the black dead could not disorder the economy. A plausible and consistent explanation has never been given. Does this proves that the Malthusian check was, at least partly, overcome due to specific situations, characteristic for this area? Or does it denies the liability of the Malthusian model itself? Actually, for a long time one could only speculate about these questions. This paper is based on new research on the crisis phenomena. It will show that the crisis needs to be explained within the structure of the medieval rural economy. It will not only show that the crisis was underestimated in parts of Flanders, it especially will allow us to warn for generalizations and to formulate new explanations which are much more well-founded. Since, as we will see below, the ‘classical’ crisis phenomena were quite differently felt within the (rather) small county of Flanders, a regional explanation is necessary. So, it has to be explained why these areas were different, how they were different and why they reacted differently on economic growth and decline. This will make necessary a definition of economically socially differently structured areas. Therefore we established a theoretical framework to define these areas as ‘social agro-systemic’ areas. (Published as: Thoen (E.) en Soens (T.), "The family or the farm: a Sophie's choice? The late medieval crisis in Flanders", in: Drendel (J.) (ed.), Crisis in the Later Middle Ages. Beyond the Postan-Duby Paradigm, Turnhout, Brepols, 2015, pp. 195-224 (The Medieval Countryside 13)
THE REVOLT OF THE FLEMISH NOBLES IN 1566
Willy van Ryckeghem The year 1566 was marked in Flanders by two singular but interconnected events: the revolt of the nobles in April which led to the gueux movement and the Iconoclastic Fury ("Beeldenstorm") in August. Both were directed against the religious repression by the so-called placards issued by the regent Margaret of Parma who was governing in the name of her halfbrother Philip II of Spain. We propose here to have a fresh look at these events and show how they differed from previous revolts in Flanders such as those of 1452 and 1487.