Jan Dumolyn

Patterns of urban rebellion in medieval Flanders

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.

“Vivre Noblement”: Material Culture and Elite Identity in Late Medieval Flanders

The example of two fifteenth-century, high-ranking officers of the Burgundian court shows how a radical transformation of the physical environment and an imitative interaction with material culture could create a powerful elite identity for those not born to nobility. A combination of evidence from archaeological, written, architectural, and art-historical sources reveals the ways in which Peter Bladelin and William Hugonet were able to parlay their newly gained social positions to achieve their ultimate goal of vivre noblement by adopting the trappings of Duke Philip the Good and other members of the Burgundian court.

Sumptuary legislation, material culture and the semiotics of ‘vivre noblement’ in the county of Flanders (14th–16th centuries)

The question addressed in this contribution is a simple one: how was nobility structured in a society in which this particular form of social identity was not yet regulated by the princely state? Historians of the Southern Low Countries (roughly present-day Belgium) all agree that, in the later Middle Ages, being noble was still first and foremost a form of social recognition. In the kingdom of France, for example, the princely state had successfully established a monopoly to determine who was noble and who was not in the fifteenth century, but a similar system was only fully established in the Southern Low Countries at the turn of the seventeenth century. In the preceding centuries, a person was basically noble if considered as such by his contemporaries. This social judgement was also a legal one, as nobility was grounded in customary law. Those who were asked to prove their noble status did so by invoking testimonies of undisputed nobles. In 1398, for example, Guillaume de Tenremonde, a noble inhabitant of the city of Lille, had expressed his desire to join the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem. To be admitted to this prestigious knightly order, he had to be noble. Guillaume asked six high-ranking noblemen from various regions of the Low Countries to vouch for him being kin to them and ‘extrait de noble sang et lignee’. The French prior of the Hospitallers

‘Our land is only founded on trade and industry.’ Economic discourses in fifteenth-century Bruges

Economic historians study production, consumption, market phenomena, and economic policies, while what is referred to as ‘the history of medieval economic thought’ largely remains the province of historians of ideas. However, participants in medieval industry and commerce, informed by daily production, market and financial practices, also uttered discourses on the state of the economy and on the measures governments should take to resolve crises or economic decline. When the burghers of Bruges formulated their economic demands in times of crisis, such as during the revolt of 1488, their utterances reveal commonly accepted presuppositions of which institutional levels, the prince, the town, or the guilds, should stimulate the economy by reducing transaction costs.

‘Let Each Man Carry on With his Trade and Remain Silent’: Middle-Class Ideology in the Urban Literature of the Late Medieval Low Countries

ABSTRACT The vernacular literary output of the ‘chambers of rhetoric’ in the Low Countries provides us with some insight into the ideology of the urban medieval middling classes. This literature included criticisms of social order, and it is argued here that whilst these come from an inherited religious discourse of reform, they can nonetheless be read as speaking to a political ideology particular to the urban context of the late Middle Ages. This article seeks to bring these ideological expressions into view, to contribute to our understanding of the political practices and popular uprisings of this time and place.

Privileges and Novelties: The Political Discourse of the Flemish Cities and Rural Districts in Their Negotiations with the Dukes of Burgundy (1384-1506)

During the negotiations with their Flemish subjects, the Burgundian dukes generally asked for taxes or military aid, while their subjects demanded the confirmation of privileges and the political and economic stability necessary for trade and industry to flourish. In this analysis of the institutionalized bargaining sessions between cities, rural districts and the dukes in Flanders, it will be shown that a specific political discourse developed among the Flemish delegates, that can be considered ‘corporatist’ or ‘communalist’.

Aragonese Tiles in a Flemish Castle: A Chivalric Gift-Exchange Network in Fifteenth-Century Europe

Abstract Excavation of the mid-fifteenth-century castle of Pieter Bladelin, a high-ranking Burgundian official, in the village of Middelburg-in-Flanders, near Bruges (Belgium), has unearthed a remarkable series of blue and white painted and glazed floor tiles. Post-excavation archival and heraldic inquiries into the tiles has led to a deeper understanding of the role that gift exchange of luxury objects played within the diplomatic network of Alfonso V “the Magnanimous”, King of Aragon, and Philip “the Good”, Duke of Burgundy, in shaping a shared chivalric and crusading culture between Burgundy and Aragon. The study demonstrates the added value of the integration of archaeological and historical data in studying economic, political and cultural processes for the later medieval or early modern period.

The Legal Repression of Revolts in Late Medieval Flanders

Charles Tilly introduced the concept of collective action for studying revolts2. Subsequent scholars have fruitfully utilised this framework to analyse a variety of collective acts. Increasingly the concept has also attracted the attention of medieval historians ‘from below’, especially those interested in analysing organised and spontaneous resistance against authority, the processes of state formation, and the development of capitalism3. In medieval Flanders, the concept of collective action can be applied to quite a variety of different movements: revolts of entire communities, spontaneous riots, strikes motivated by hunger, illicit assemblies of workers (‘conspiracies’), resistance to princely officers, aldermen, or guild authorities. When consulting many of the general studies of popular revolts during the medieval period, it is striking that not even one of them (Zagorin, Mollat and Wolff, Fourquin, Bercé)4, devotes even a para-

A Chemical Compound in a Capitalist Commodity Chain: The Production, Distribution and Industrial Use of Alum in the Mediterranean and the Textile Centers of the Low Countries (Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the sixteenth century saw the emergence of a capitalist world economy in which labor was organized on a global scale, and the production, distribution and use of goods and services were integrated across national boundaries. This article argues that, though exceptional, an integrated, hegemonic division of labor on an international scale did occur before 1500. Adopting one of Wallerstein’s conceptual tools, the commodity chain approach, it analyzes the production, distribution and industrial use of alum, a chemical compound, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The high-quality cloth industry of the Low Countries, the most prominent artisanal sector of the period in Europe, strongly relied on alum as a mordant to fix colors. Yet the best varieties of alum could only be won in Asia Minor until the middle of the fifteenth century and in central Italy after 1450. The combination of the inflexible demand structure and the mineral’s limited supply resulted in the creation of commodity chains that crossed national and even continental boundaries and allowed those in control of the alum mines to establish exactly those dependency relations that were particular to Wallerstein’s world economy of the sixteenth century. If the aim is to study the conditions in which economic actors lived and worked and the ways in which they organized their labor, a focus on the production contexts of specific commodities, rather than on comprehensive world systems, might therefore be more revealing.

Modelling Monnikerede : the topographical reconstruction of a deserted medieval outport near Bruges

The small outport of Monnikerede was part of the portuary system of the later medieval international market of Bruges, which used the Zwin tidal inlet as its gateway to overseas markets. When political, economic and environmental conditions in the Zwin harbours deteriorated, Monnikerede slowly became depopulated and eventually disappeared from the landscape. In order to localise and analyse the morphology of this deserted harbour, an interdisciplinary research scheme was initiated and aimed at integrating historical, cartographic, archaeological and geophysical data. The GIS-based methodology showed that this combination of complementary sources enabled a topographical reconstruction up to the level of individual parcels and allowed for the discernment of social topography. The decline of the city could be visualised through a series of time slices between 1450 and 1850, indicating that Monnikerede’s misfortunes are reflected in the disintegration of the urban fabric. We conclude that integrated research into the available historical and archaeological data can be successful in piecing together the topographical evolution of a now deserted settlement.