- ‘Nobles, Patricians and Officers. The Making of a Regional Political Elite in Late Medieval Flanders’, in: Journal of Social History, 2006, 40/2, 2006, pp. 431-452. (original) (raw)
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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.
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 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.