Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from Below in Late Medieval Europe (Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800)) (SEUH: Studies in European Urban History (1100-1800), 48) 9782503583860, 2503583865

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Words and Deeds

SEUH Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800)

Volume 48 Series Editors Marc Boone Anne-Laure Van Bruaene Ghent University

Words and Deeds Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe

Edited by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers

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Cover illustration: Chroniques de Hainaut [1447-48]; Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) – ms. 9242, fol. 274v; copyright KBR.

© 2020, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2020/0095/48 ISBN 978-2-503-58386-0 eISBN 978-2-503-58387-7 DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.116730 ISSN 1780-3241 eISSN 2294-8368 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Shaping Urban Politics from Below Citizen Participation in Late Medieval Europe Jelle Haemers and Ben Eersels

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Part I Institutional Bargaining The Universitas Massilie, an Assembly of the Whole City? 33 Power Struggles and Social Tensions in Marseille During the 14th Century François Otchakovsky-Laurens Popular Politics and Political Transformation in Burgos, 1345-1426 Pablo Gonzalez Martin

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The Introduction of Large Councils in Late Medieval Towns The Example of Stockholm Sofia Gustafsson

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Part II Interest Groups and Interactions Requested and Consented by the Good Crafts A New Approach to the Political Power of Craft Guilds in Late Medieval Maastricht (1380-1428) Ben Eersels Craftsmen, Urban Councils, and Political Power in the Imperial Cities of Swabia (14th-15th Centuries) Dominique Adrian Giving Artisans a Voice The Political Participation of Guilds in German Towns Sabine von Heusinger

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Part III Discourse, Ideology, and Conflict Injury and Remedy The Language of Contention in the Southern Low Countries, 13th-16th Centuries Jelle Haemers Discourse and Collective Actions of Popular Groups in Castilian Towns before the ‘Revolt of the Comuneros’ The Case of Valladolid Beatriz Majo Tomé Ideologies and Political Participation of the Commons in Urban Life of Northern Atlantic Spain during the Late Middle Ages Jesús Ángel Solórzano-Telechea

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The Politics of Record-Keeping in Fifteenth-Century English Towns 195 Eliza Hartrich Conclusion: Urban Revolts and Communal Politics in the Middle Ages Problems and Perspectives Jan Dumolyn

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Jelle Haemers and Ben Eersels  

Introduction: Shaping Urban Politics from Below Citizen Participation in Late Medieval Europe In 1992, Francis Fukuyama famously declared that the ‘end of history’ was upon us. After the fall of the Communist Soviet Empire, ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ would only be a matter of time.1 The Western system had ultimately triumphed, and slowly but steadily, other regions would embrace the dominant ideology as well. However, in contrast to Fukushima’s expectation, debate over the nature of democracy has only intensified in recent years. Although soon after it erupted in 2010, the Arab Spring was celebrated by many observers as the final breakthrough of democracy in the Middle East, when the revolution died out in 2012 almost all the countries had either returned to the status quo ante, or the situation had become even worse. In more recent years, issues around democracy have sprouted in the West as well. The British newspaper The Economist noted in the 2016 yearly edition of their ‘Democracy Index’ that the global score of the Index decreased for the first time since its debut in 2006. This global decline was caused not only by falling scores in Latin America and the Middle East but also by recent evolutions in the US and Western Europe, so often described as the cradle of democracy.2 Many have argued that one of the reasons for the decline in the West is the so-called ‘democratic deficit’, a term used to reflect the wide-spread feeling among citizens that their representatives do not really defend the interests of ordinary men and women. Indeed, in the 2010s the aura of the Western democracy as a stable, widely supported form of government wavered. More and more citizens protest that a democratic system should go further than voting for politicians every few years. In other words, debates about democracy should not only deal with questions of political representation but also with methods of political participation. This theme – the involvement of citizens in politics – lies at the heart of the essays of this book. It focuses on the city and urban politics, because historically towns have been an interesting laboratory for the creation and development of political ideas and practices, as they are also today.3 The contributions in this



1 The quote comes from Fukuyama’s essay ‘The end of history?’, The National Interest, 1989, 1. 2 https://infographics.economist.com/2019/DemocracyIndex/ (accessed 20 August 2019). 3 See for instance: Benjamin Barber, If mayors ruled the world. Dysfunctional nations, rising cities (New Haven: Yale, 2013); and several essays in Cities in world history, ed. by Peter Clark (Oxford: OUP, 2013). Jelle Haemers and Ben Eersels • KU Leuven Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 07-29.

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DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.119788

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volume shed light on why, how and when citizens participated in the urban political process in late medieval Europe (c. 1300-1500). In other words, this book reconsiders the involvement of urban commoners in political matters by studying their claims and wishes, their methods of expression and their discursive and ideological strategies. When identifying the conceptions of proper governance held by medieval people and their manifestation in practice of politics, it is imperative that we consider urban internal politics as a potential source for these ideas and as an arena, and complementary and contributory to the national stage, in which they were played out. For institutional and ideological reasons, therefore, towns and their inhabitants were just as munch intertwined in the political history of late medieval Europe as were courts, gentry, and aristocrats.4 Especially the later medieval period was marked by important changes in urban political institutions, caused by numerous socio-political protests that spread in towns across Europe. However, scholars still fiercely debate whether these changes eventually resulted in a more participatory form of urban politics, or whether opportunities for participation actually declined. While some have labeled the late medieval period an era of growing exclusivity and oligarchy, others have seen the same time frame as a period of increasing popular participation in government.5 Similarly, historians continue to debate the extent to which urban political conflicts revolved around concrete, individual cases of bad governance, or represented a struggle between fundamentally different perspectives on the political system and ‘the common good’, the key consideration all stakeholders claimed to cherish. This book hopes to contribute to these debates by studying the patterns of Europe as a whole and variations in the degree of political participation during the period in which many citizens acquired rights of political representation, the later Middle Ages. Political citizenship and urban politics from below Scholarship generally uses the term ‘popular politics’ as the common denominator for the political actions of ‘ordinary men and women’, including those perceived as both participation and opposition.6 However, using this umbrella term for all kinds of political acts taking in place in different social, political



4 As is also remarked by Eliza Hartrich, Politics and the urban sector in fifteenth-century England, 1413-1471 (Oxford: OUP, 2019), pp. 4-6. On the agency of cities within a wider national context, see also Bert De Munck, ‘Disassembling the city. A historical and epistemological view on the agency of cities’, Journal of Urban History, 43 (2017), pp. 811-29. 5 Cf. Elizabeth Ewan and Stephen Rigby, ‘Government, power and authority’, in The Cambridge urban history of Britain, ed. by David Palliser (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), p. 291. 6 See, for instance, studies on England: Ian Harvey, ‘Was there popular politics in fifteenth-century England?’, in The McFarlane Legacy, ed. by Richard Britnell and Anthony Pollard (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1997), pp. 155-74; Jane Whittle and Stephen Rigby, ‘England: popular politics and social conflict’, in A companion to Britain in the later Middle Ages, ed. by Stephen Rigby (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 65-86; Andy Wood, Riot, rebellion and popular politics in early modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

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and institutional contexts hinders clear understanding of the social history of politics. ‘Popular politics’ connotes a binary opposition between ‘elite politics’ and the actions of the populace, a vaguely defined term that usually infers a relatively powerless group of people. The same issue occurs in the terminology used by other scholars, such as Vincent Challet and Ian Forrest, who used the term ‘the masses’ to refer to those who were excluded from power.7 Another variation on this terminology is the concept ‘subaltern’, suggested by Gayatri Spivak to designate non-elite or subordinate groups who were silenced by their oppressors.8 However, the black-and-white distinction between the powerful and the powerless that all these concepts entail is not compatible with urban reality in late medieval Western Europe. In many towns, citizens had at least some say in politics. In some regions, ordinary citizens possessed electoral rights, which they could use to vote for their preferred candidates, from their membership in a number of associations.9 Since a large proportion of those representatives also deployed power in craft or parish associations, these political systems established strong networks between the urban government and the citizenry. They created a kind of intermediary level that was consulted both by town dwellers as well as by the authorities in order to pacify the urban society.10 But even where citizens did not possess electoral rights (or where representatives failed to meet the expectations held of them), citizens still had the opportunity to influence policy-making through other legally accepted means, especially petitions and negotiations during public assemblies, further outlined below. In some Italian cities, of course, the distinction between the ‘popolo’ and the urban elite is really important and indeed quite necessary for an understanding of medieval politics.11 However, the distinction between ‘political elites’ on the one side and ‘the people’ or ‘the masses’ on the other is too rigid to be useful for towns in Western Europe as a whole, and thus the concept of ‘popular politics’ is less applicable here.

7 Vincent Challet and Ian Forrest, ‘The masses’, in Government and political life in England and France c. 1300-c. 1500, ed. by Chris Fletcher, Jean-Philippe Genet and John Watts (Cambridge: CUP, 2015), pp. 279-315. 8 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Marxism and the interpretation of culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 271-313. The same goes for James Scott, Weapons of the weak. Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven: Yale, 1985). 9 A general survey on medieval voting can be found in Olivier Christin, Vox populi. Une histoire du vote avant le suffrage universel (Paris: Seuil, 2014), and in Cultures of voting in pre-modern Europe, ed. by Serena Ferente, Lovro Kuncevic and Miles Pattenden (London: Routledge, 2018). 10 See, for instance, Samantha Sagui, ‘Mid-level officials in fifteenth-century Norwich’, in Society in an age of plague, ed. by Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 100-21; Jeroen Benders, ‘Nachbarn und Behörde. Formen und Funktionen von Vierteln und Nachbarschaften in Spätmittelalterlichen und Frühneuzeitlichen Städten im Osten und Norden der Niederlande anhand der Fälle Zutphen und Groningen’, in Gelebte Normen im urbanen Raum? Zur sozial- und kulturgeschichtlichen Analyse rechtlicher Quellen in Städten des Hanseraums (13.-16. Jahrhundert), ed. by Hanno Brand et al. (Hilversum: Verloren), 2014, pp. 129-48. 11 Andrea Zorzi, ‘The popolo’, in Italy in the age of the renaissance, ed. by John Najemy (Oxford: OUP, 2004), pp. 145-64; Claire Judde de Larivière and Rosa Salzberg, ‘Le peuple est la cité. L’idée de popolo et la condition des popolani à Venise (XVe-XVIe siècles)’, Annales ESC, 68 (2013), pp. 1113-40.

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Instead, this book uses the term ‘urban politics’ as the central focus of its essays. ‘Urban politics’ designates the entirety of political interactions between citizens in the urban franchise. The term ‘citizens’ is to be understood as city residents who had acquired official rights of citizenship. In fact, whenever townsmen intervened in urban politics, they acted in their capacity as privileged citizens. Employing the term ‘urban politics’ allows us to avoid the problematic binary between the ‘elite’ and the ‘powerless’ and at the same time include both ‘traditional’ forms of political involvement (such as bargaining through elected delegates and collective petitioning) and more contentious actions (such as speech acts and public displays of protestors) in a broad view of politics. For it is our strong conviction that we can only understand the nature of the political process in late medieval urban societies if we acknowledge the versatility of all interactions that contributed to the making of politics as much as possible. Our research scope is defined by a focus on the ‘political process from below’. This demonstrates our intention to study the political capacities of citizens – as opposed to the actions and activities of urban governments. Although recent scholarship has shed light on numerous, but often isolated, cases of bottom-up decision-making, it is true that many ‘ordinary’ actions of citizens also had a political meaning.12 However, it remains rather unclear to what extent these actions structurally contributed to political change in history. Citizenship was perhaps not a necessary but certainly an important condition for involvement in urban politics. Late medieval citizenship in Europe was not a continuation, reproduction, or extension of ancient Greek and Roman ideas of citizenship – which also inspired later Renaissance political thinking. Medieval citizenship distinguished itself from these predecessors in the sense that it was a concept and a practice peculiar to towns and cities.13 It entailed several tangible advantages such as legal security and the right to be free from domination by a lord. But above all, citizenship was a source of identity, based upon a feeling of belonging. City dwellers branded themselves ‘commoners’ (le commun, die Gemeinde, het ghemeen, el pueblo común, popolo minuto etc.), i.e. people who were part of the ‘commune’, the term that was most frequently used to designate the citizenry of a given town.14 Belonging to the urban commune

12 Claire Judde de Larivière and Julien Weisbein, ‘Dire et faire le commun. Les formes de la politisation ordinaire du Moyen Age à nos jours’, Politix. Revue des sciences sociales du politique, 30 (2017), pp. 9-30. 13 Christian Liddy, Contesting the city: the politics of citizenship in English towns, 1250-1530 (Oxford: OUP, 2017), pp. 20-21. See also Marc Boone, A la recherche d’une modernité civique: la société urbaine des anciens Pays-Bas au Moyen Âge (Brussels: ULB, 2010), pp. 29-56; Maarten Prak, Citizens without nations. Urban citizenship in Europe and the world, c. 1000-1789 (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), pp. 50-82. 14 On the different political connotations of the term ‘commune’ and ‘commoners’, see Claire Hawes, ‘The urban community in fifteenth-century Scotland: language, law and political practice’, Urban History, 44 (2017), pp. 365-80; John Watts, ‘The commons in medieval England’, in La légitimité implicite, ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris: Sorbonne, 2015), II, pp. 207-22; Gisela Naegle and Jesus Solorzano Telechea, ‘Geschlechter und Zünfte, prinçipales und común. Städtische Konflikte in Kastilien und dem spätmittelalterlichen Reich’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 41 (2014), pp. 561-618.

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had a political connotation; citizens believed that towns should be governed by the community (or its representatives) for the ‘common’ good of every citizen. With the creation of ‘communes’ in the twelfth century, citizens acquired the right to govern themselves. After this time, the city can be considered as a political actor, a ‘social pact’ in which the community had a voice in its governance.15 On the other hand, citizenship was also an institution of regulation and control. In addition to its perks, citizenship rights entailed several liabilities: everyone had to contribute financially to their town and serve in the army if the city was in danger. The reciprocal relationship of privileges and obligations materialized in the late medieval metaphor of the ‘urban body politic’, which described the political system in late medieval towns as a physical body in which every participant had their proper place, rights and responsibilities.16 Indeed, although citizenship was the common feature of all politically active city residents, it is well established that some citizens possessed significantly more privileges than others. According to their different backgrounds and status, citizens were awarded different roles in the ‘body politic’. As the essays in this volume show, the social, economic and political inequality among citizens was the seedbed for much of the political conflict that arose in late medieval towns.17 Contention and participation in urban politics For a long time, the history of citizen involvement in late medieval urban politics has been told as a succession of (often violent) protests and revolts in which ordinary people fought for rights of representation. Compared to this scholarship, the essays of this book devote considerably less attention to the role of open rebellion and the use of violence in the urban political process. We are quite distant from allegations such as those of André Leguai, who wrote that medieval people could only intervene in politics by using (often physical) force.18 In the last few decades medievalists have demonstrated that the picture of violent, uncontrolled, or even anarchistic uprisings in the Late Middle Ages needs to be nuanced. Building on work of Eric Hobsbawn (1917-2012) and his ‘History from Below approach’, they have shown that protesters were often

15 The ideas and customs feeding this political view of the city are studied at length by Thierry Dutour, Sous l’empire du bien. “Bonnes gens” et pacte social (XIIIe-XV e siècle) (Paris: Garnier, 2015). See also the seminal work of Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and communities in Western-Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford: OUP, 1984), particularly chapter 6. 16 See, for instance, for the Low Countries: Bert De Munck, Guilds, labour and the urban body politic. Fabricating community in the southern Netherlands, 1300-1800 (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 74-76. 17 Patrick Lantschner, ‘Revolts and the political order of cities in the late Middle Ages’, Past and Present, 225 (2014), pp. 3-46; Christian Liddy, ‘Urban enclosure riots: risings of the commons in English towns, 1480-1525’, Past and Present, 226 (2015), pp. 41-77; Jelle Haemers, ‘Révolte et requête. Les gens de métiers et les conflits sociaux dans les villes de Flandre (XIIIe-XV e siècle)’, Revue Historique, 677 (2016), pp. 27-55. 18 André Leguai, ‘Les troubles urbains dans le Nord de la France à la fin du XIIIe et au début du XIVe siècle’, Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, 54 (1976), p. 284.

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privileged citizens, who used sophisticated discourse and structured forms of ‘collective action’, as described by Charles Tilly (1929-2008), to pursue common interests.19 In the view of political scientists, today citizens can avail themselves of a wide ‘ladder’ of types of political activities, ranging from crying out loudly in public squares, through voting in urban elections, to controlling budgets of governments. According to Sherry Arnstein, political participation from below works most effectively when ‘there is an organized power-base in the community to which the citizen leaders are accountable’.20 Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of the people inhabiting medieval towns, because, as we will see, in some towns guild structures fulfilled such a role. Medieval citizens also had a wide range of activities at their disposal to influence the decision-making process, and many were ‘constructive’. Urban insurgents and petitioning citizens did not really wish to overthrow existing governmental institutions; they demanded participation in existing political structures, or aspired to modify structures that they thought were not functioning as intended. Whenever possible, commoners often preferred to cooperate within a political institution instead of destroying them. The new trend in historical scholarship has made clear that a significant portion of political change and institutional reform within states and monarchies was not an exclusively top-down process. In fact, Peter Blickle has concluded the opposite: that pre-modern states actively sought the participation of the Gemeinde in the political process. States regularly needed their subjects to become aware of problems within their territory and produce policies to solve them. Because urban governments were often happy to provide states with this input, they can in many ways be seen as basic nodes of the State.21 A similar relationship existed between government and citizens within an urban franchise, since urban governments, as the essays of this book show, regularly designed their policies based on the input they had received from interest groups in their dominion. Equally important to understand late medieval politics is therefore what people thought their rulers should do with their resources, and more widely, how government should be run.22 As scholarship on Italian cities has shown, for instance, contention of citizens has lead to the creation of institutions and channels of communication that served as a vehicle to present claims to their governors on a regular basis. On a local level, ordinary meetings of family heads, in the church or more frequently in the churchyard, cemetery or in the public square in front of the church,

19 Eric Hobsbawm, On history (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997); Charles Tilly, Contentious performances (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). 20 Sherry Arnstein, ‘A ladder of citizen participation’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 35 (1969), pp. 216-24, at p. 221. See also Kate Callahan, ‘Citizen participation: models and methods’, International Journal of Public Administration, 30 (2007), pp. 1179-96. 21 Gemeinde und Staat im alten Europa, ed. by Peter Blickle (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998); Empowering interactions. Political cultures and the emergence of the state in Europe (1300-1800), ed. by Wim Blockmans, André Holenstein and Jon Mathieu (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 22 Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe. From the breakup of the western Roman Empire to the Reformation (New Haven: Yale, 2016), p. 235.

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decided about community issues. Inhabitants of villages or town dwellers could present problems with and complaints about local governments to these meetings, where the sanior pars decided about their outcome.23 In bigger cities, the podestà, as the chair of the town council, originally had the task of gathering the different opinions and making a final statement: the assembly needed to translate proposals and discussion into a clear text, in order to reach a final decision. However, during the central decades of the thirteenth century, the decision-making input no longer came from the podestà, but rather from the popolo, that is the representatives of crafts, professional corporations, or popular associations, who were usually organized into small councils of priori or anziani. Newly created communal assemblies defined a typical structure: a small center of political decision, usually helped by a few skilled sapientes, and a large participatory assembly where decisions were confirmed and subsequently recorded in legislative measures and statutes.24 Some of these gatherings and institutions gave the impression of a very open and wide participation, whereas in fact decisions were made by a very small group of politicians and only ratified by the common acclamation of the people. Furthermore, the power in urban institutions could be monopolized by factions or parties (corporate groups whose basic units were lineages of mighty families), with little place for individuals or other groups to participate in council meetings.25 However, the concentration of power in the hands of the ‘happy few’ in many Italian cities did not prevent that citizens who did not hold political mandates could intervene in local politics. Behind the actions described in records of the town council lay complex processes, which began with the decision-making machinery inside the government, involved outsiders as well as insiders, and led to the never easy effort to implement those decisions in collaboration, or contrast, with wider sections of the population. Each of those actors, at each of those stages, worked through constant communication with others – from dialogue to confrontation. As research on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice has shown, even the most secretive oligarchs, ensconced in the secrecy of the ducal palace’s most restricted councils, were constantly preoccupied

23 Massimo Della Misericordia, ‘Ritual surveys. Conflict, articulation, and composition of local societies within the sacred sphere in the Lombardy Alps during the Late Middle Ages’, in Communities and conflicts in the Alps from the late Middle Ages to early Modernity, ed. by Marco Bellabarba, Hannes Obermair and Hitomi Sato (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2015), p. 137. 24 The literature is enormous. We based this short overview on Lorenzo Tanzini’s essay ‘From discussion to vote. Practices of political deliberation and written records in communal Italy’, in Cultures of voting, pp. 172-86. 25 Marco Gentile, ‘Forms of political representation in late medieval Northern Italy. Merits and shortcomings of the city-state paradigm (14th-early 16th century)’, in Political representation. Communities, ideas and institutions in Europe (c. 1200-c. 1690), ed. by Mario Damen, Jelle Haemers & Alastair Mann (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 79. See also Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Villes vivantes. Italie, XIIIe-XV e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009), passim.

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by the voices of their subjects in the squares below.26 All kinds of speech acts, such as gossiping, shouting, or complaining, were used to spread subversive messages and more constructive ideas in order to influence the decision-making processes in towns. Of course, authorities often ignored claims and wishes that were uttered by the middling sort of people, though it is hard to know to what extent they could remain deaf for them. Regular violent confrontations between urban authorities, factions, craftsmen and other groups of citizens demonstrate that conflict was never absent from these cities. As a result, peaceful interactions between the governors and several groups of town dwellers are eclipsed by these violent confrontations which are so well documented, both in the contemporary sources, as well as in the literature about medieval Italian politics.27 With the publication of several studies on other regions in Western Europe, this book not only presents research that makes a comparison possible with Italian cities, but above all it adds new findings on nonviolent means of contention to that violent history. Our choice to prioritize ‘peaceful’ interactions between the different stakeholders in urban politics does not imply that episodes of violent contention should be seen as unimportant events. Patrick Lantschner has convincingly argued that violence was in many ways the intensification and acceleration of already ongoing political processes in late medieval towns.28 However, physical force was only one of the manifestations of conflict between citizens and the urban government, as examining the collective meetings of citizens’ associations in public places makes clear. Jelle Haemers’ essay shows that the weavers and fullers went on strike for more than sixteen days in Ypres in 1359, for example. At the end of their strike, they assembled with their arms and banners on the main market square, in front of the cloth hall, to request the abolition or modification of certain taxes. Although they carried their weapons, the craftsmen only used them as a show of force – such a meeting was called a wapening in the middle Dutch vernacular.29 In most cases, peaceful demonstrations mainly served as a threat to pressure urban leaders into starting negotiations. Rebellion was in most cases – but not always, as Pablo Gonzalez Martin shows in his essay – only the protesters’ last resort, deployed when negotiations had fallen through and

26 Filippo de Vivo, Information and communication in Venice. Rethinking early modern politics (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 3-4. See also Claire Judde de Larivière, La révolte des boules de neiges. Murano face à Venise, 1511 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), and Elisabeth Horodowich, Language and statecraft in early modern Venice (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). 27 As is noted by the authors of several essays in Rivolte urbane e rivolte contadine nell’Europa del Trecento: un confronto, ed. by Monique Bourin, Giovanni Cherubini and Giuliano Pinto (Florence: FUP, 2008). 28 Patrick Lantschner, The logic of political conflict in medieval cities. Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370-1440 (Oxford: OUP, 2015), pp. 200-07. 29 Georges Espinas and Henri Pirenne, Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière en Flandre (Brussels: Kiessling et Imbreghts, 1909), III, p. 784.

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other means of more ‘disciplined dissent’ had proven to be unsuccessful.30 And even then, violence was targeted and often ritualized and carried out in symbolic ways. For instance, in 1303 several aldermen of Ypres were imprisoned by the craftsmen after the town government had refused to listen to their complaints. In the radical phase of the tumult, craftsmen threw some of the aldermen out of a city hall window.31 The rebels’ act was mainly symbolic; with this violent action, they wanted to demonstrate that they no longer considered these men good city fathers fit to work in the town hall as rulers of the commune. Typically, collective deeds went hand in hand with words. In the course of gatherings and strikes, protesters shouted slogans and sang political songs to spread their message and make clear their demands.32 Furthermore, use of the written word belonged to the contentious repertoire: bill-casting and spreading leaflets with deviant speech were excellent means to mobilize discontent.33 The utterances that are recorded in chronicles or the verdicts of aldermen who punished citizens for verbal deviancy and subversive writing probably cover only a minor portion of all the acts of political protest in late medieval towns. Analysis of these sporadic mentions demonstrates that most contained radical language, or even insults. However, they also show that citizens spread political ideas by using a wide range of media. It is worth pointing out that the citizens participating in these contentious acts sometimes included women. While their formal involvement in urban politics was often forbidden (women could not be elected as a civic official), the protest of citizens was less gendered. Just like men, but to a lesser extent, women rallied in the streets, shouted in market

30 Disciplined Dissent: strategies of non-confrontational protest in Europe from the twelfth to the early sixteenth century, ed. by Fabrizio Titone (Rome: Viella, 2016). See also several essays in The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt, ed. by Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (London: Routledge, 2017). An inspiring book on the thin line between loyalty and disobedience is also Angela de Benedictis, Neither disobedients nor rebels. Lawful resistance in early modern Italy (Rome: Viella, 2018). 31 Jean-Jacques Lambin, Verhael van den moord van eenige schepenen, raeden en andere inwooners der stad Ypre (Ypres: Lambin, 1831), p. 43. 32 Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘A bad chicken was brooding’. Subversive speech in late medieval Flanders. Past and Present, 214 (2012), pp. 45-86; Chris Fletcher, ‘News, noise, and the nature of politics in late medieval English provincial towns’, Journal of British Studies, 56 (2017), pp. 250-72; Peter Burke, ‘Popular revolts and oral traditions’, in Rhythms of revolt. European traditions and memories of social conflict in oral culture, ed. by Eva Guillorel, David Hopkin and Will Pooley (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 359-71. 33 See, for instance, for medieval England: Wendy Scase, ‘“Strange and wonderful Bills”: bill-casting and political discourse in late medieval England’, New Medieval Literatures, 2 (1998), pp. 225-47; Christian Liddy, ‘Bill casting and political communication: a public sphere in late medieval English towns?’, in La gobernanza de la ciudad Europea en la Edad Media, ed. by Jesus Solorzano Telechea and Beatriz Arizaga Bolumburu (Logroño: La Rioja, 2011), pp. 447-61; Amanda McVitty, ‘Prosecuting treason in Lancastrian London: the language and landscape of political dissent’, in Medieval urban culture, ed. by Andrew Brown and Jan Dumolyn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 93-109. Compare with Jelle Haemers and Valerie Vrancken, ‘Libels in the city. Bill-casting in fifteenth-century Flanders and Brabant’, Medieval Low Countries, 4 (2017), pp. 165-87.

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squares, and sang political protest songs in public.34 Even though the essays of this book focus on institutionalized and formal methods of political participation (which were dominated by men), women make an occasional appearance. For instance, as the essay of François Otchakovsky-Laurens shows us, women were occasionally able to address urban governments with petitions that they themselves delivered to the council. While this last example is a striking demonstration of the social diversity of politically active citizens, it also testifies that, in addition to conflict, active participation and constructive co-operation were endemic to the dynamics of citizen participation in urban politics. Petitioning, for instance, was usually a non-controversial method to influence governmental practices. Recent research has amply demonstrated that it was a ubiquitous practice across Europe for citizens to hand over oral and written claims and wishes in a ritualized matter. As we discuss below, both governors and governed thought of petitions as a legal method for citizens to propose concrete governmental improvements.35 Additionally, urban governments even facilitated bottom-up political participation to some extent. In many towns, it was customary to discuss important matters in ‘common’ or ‘public assemblies’, meetings of the citizenry in a public space. While many urban governments seem to have used the meetings as a tool to find consensus on difficult decisions, the contributions of Ben Eersels, Pablo Gonzalez Martin and François Otchakovsky-Laurens show that in some towns, the citizenry was regularly and actively involved in the decision-making process preceding promulgation of ordinances. Eliza Hartrich’s chapter on English towns furthermore outlines that commons also could obtain the right to control the records that were composed by the urban elite. The power to review municipal pronouncements, to scrutinise the activities of officeholders, and to measure their behaviour against the town’s historic laws and ordinances was a powerful deterrent, preventing civic elites from manipulating records in their favour or from violating set codes of conduct. The boundaries between these different rights and actions were often permeable, and some ‘words and deeds’ led to other actions, just as is the case with participation and contention. We will see how conflict materialized and

34 Sam Cohn, ‘Women in revolt in medieval and early modern Europe’, in The Routledge history handbook, pp. 208-19; Sylvia Federico, ‘The Imaginary society: women in 1381’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), pp. 159-83; Jelle Haemers and Chanelle Delameillieure, ‘Women and contentious speech in fifteenth-century Brabant’, Continuity and Change, 32 (2017), pp. 323-47. 35 Suppliques et requêtes. Le gouvernement par la grâce en Occident (XIIe-XV e siècle), ed. by Hélène Millet (Rome: EFR, 2003); Praktiken des Widerstandes. Suppliken, Gravamina und Revolten in Europa (15.-19. Jahrhundert), ed. by Cecilia Nubola and Andreas Würgler (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2006); Medieval petitions: grace and grievance, ed. by Mark Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009). For petitioning in cities, see Christian Liddy and Jelle Haemers, ‘Popular politics in the late medieval town: York and Bruges’, The English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 771-805; Ben Eersels, ‘Tous les chemins mènent au Conseil. L’influence des corps de métiers sur le processus décisionnel politique à Saint-Trond à la fin du Moyen Age (c. 1400-1500)’, in Les cultures de la décision dans l’espace bourguignon: acteurs, conflits, représentations, ed. by Alain Marchandisse, Gilles Docquier and Nils Bock (Neuchâtel: CEEB, 2017), pp. 105-18.

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evolved in various ways: how petitions could quickly become demands; how the ordinary processes of complaint and negotiation could sometimes turn into resistance and – occasionally – revolt. By identifying a wide repertoire of political interactions, the essays of this book make clear that politics relied upon and consisted of numerous modes of communication between governments and citizens. The multiple channels of urban decision-making The previous paragraphs have emphasised the flexibility of the political process in late medieval towns. However, both the frequency and methods of citizen participation in urban politics differed significantly from town to town, depending on the political channels at the citizens’ disposal.36 In some cities, such as Stockholm, the citizens’ political role was limited to attending public meetings where governments sought public consent for their decisions. As Sofia Gustafsson shows in her essay, the bursprak in Stockholm consisted of gatherings of commoners who came and listened to the public promulgation of new laws and bylaws on the central market square of the town. Stockholm citizens retained the right to consent to or refuse important decisions regarding taxes, yet the production and ‘consumption’ of new legislation essentially remained a topdown process. Furthermore, the fact that the newly proclaimed ordinances were identified by the term bursprak shows that the urban council understood public acclamation of their decisions as an existential requirement.37 Elsewhere, citizens were more structurally and actively involved in this type of public meeting. As Beatriz Majo Tomé and Pablo Gonzalez Martin show for two Castilian towns, parishes and neighborhood associations (cuadrillas in Valladolid; vecindades, or collaciones in Burgos) played a crucial role in shaping the political process. Town authorities knew that they had to govern by consensus, or at least compromise with the leaders of the urban quarters, if they wanted their policies (and the political system at large) to be accepted. Though leading townsmen took care to rule the town in their own interests, they did take into account the wishes and

36 Some interesting case-studies here are Xavier Nadrigny, Information et opinion publique à Toulouse à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: École des Chartes, 2013); Robert Giel, Politische Öffentlichkeit im spätmittelalterlich-frühneuzeitlichen Köln (1450-1550) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998); Julien Briand, ‘Communication, opinion publique et contestations à la fin du Moyen Age. L’exemple des villes champenoises’, in La contestation (Moyen Age et Temps modernes), ed. by Gilles Lecuppre (Paris: Kimé, 2016), pp. 49-70. 37 A similar term was used in some Dutch towns to describe the urban ordinances. For instance, the buurspraakboek of Deventer contained the public announcements that the magistracy made at regular intervals, while the oral tradition likely preceded the written records, see Jeroen Benders, Bestuursstructuur en schriftcultuur: een analyse van de bestuurlijke verschriftelijking in Deventer tot het eind van de 15de eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004), p. 80.

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complaints of the rank and file of artisans and middling groups.38 However, the regular appearance of collective action in Valladolid and the participation of the two cities in the major ‘Revolt of the comuneros’ in the 1520s emphasises that these limited structures of political participation failed to prevent outbursts of violent rebellion in the long term. In other towns, common citizens could participate directly in the main political institution, the town council. Again, the exact authority that citizens deployed in these institutions varied from case to case. For instance, in the fifteenth-century city of Luxemburg, citizens only exercised oversight over the activities of urban government. From 1414 onwards, burghers chosen from the craft guilds (ambachten) were invited for a yearly Rat designed to oversee the expenses in the city accounts. In the second half of the fifteenth century, their authority slowly extended until it finally included the right to approve important decisions regarding military matters, defense of the town and even fiscal policies. Luxemburg citizens never obtained the right to elect the aldermen (Schöffen) of the town, however.39 Elsewhere, common citizens did possess more extensive electoral rights. However, in some towns they merely held the right to applaud the elections carried out by leading families, while in others they fully participated in the election procedure.40 As the essays of Sabine von Heusinger and Dominique Adrian show, the Zünfte were created during the fourteenth century in neighboring territories of the Holy Roman Empire to grant artisans a structural institutional voice in urban administration. In cities such as Augsburg and Strasbourg new election procedures were drawn up to guarantee craft guilds the right to send deputies to the council meetings. In these cities, the Zünfte thus functioned as vectors of political participation.41 Furthermore,

38 Thierry Dutour, ‘Le consensus des bonnes gens. La participation des habitants aux affaires communes dans quelques villes de la langue d’oïl (XIIIe-XVe siècle)’, in Le pouvoir municipal de la fin du Moyen Age à 1789, ed. by Philippe Hamon and Cathérine Laurent (Rennes: PUR, 2012), pp. 187-204. See also several essays in Consulter, délibérer, décider. Donner son avis au Moyen Age (France-Espagne, VIIeXVIe siècles), ed. by Martine Charageat and Corinne Leveleux-Teixeira (Toulouse: PUM, 2010), and in Consensus et représentation, ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet, Dominique Le Page and Olivier Mattéoni (Paris: Sorbonne, 2017). 39 Eva Jullien, Die Handwerker und Zünfte der Stadt Luxemburg im Spätmittelalter (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), pp. 141-47; and Michel Pauly, Luxemburg im späten Mittelalter. I. Verfassung und politische Führungsschicht der Stadt Luxemburg im 13. und 15. Jahrhundert (Luxemburg: Cludem, 1992), pp. 66-74. 40 See, for instance, for the Low Countries: Maarten Prak, ‘Corporate politics in the Low Countries: guilds as institutions’, in Craft guilds in the early modern Low Countries. Work, power and representation, ed. by idem et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 74-106, Jan Dumolyn ‘Guild politics and political guilds in fourteenth-century Flanders’, in The voices of the people in Late Medieval Europe: communication and popular politics, ed. by Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 15-48. For an overview for early-modern Europe, see Urban elections and decision-making in early modern Europe, 1500-1800, ed. by Rudolf Schlögl (Newcastle: CSP, 2009). 41 See their essays for further references, and Knut Schulz, ‘Die politische Zunft. Eine die spätmittelalterliche Stadt prägende Institution?’, in Verwaltung und Politik in Städten Mitteleuropas. Beiträge zu Verfassungsnorm und Verfassungswirklichkeit in altständischer Zeit, ed. by Wilfried Ehbrecht (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), pp. 1-20; Arie Van Steensel, ‘Guilds and politics in medieval urban Europe. Towards a comparative institutional analysis’, in Craftsmen and guilds in the medieval

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urban governors could ask the opinion of the craft guilds on important policies. In places like Maastricht, as Ben Eersels shows, their consent was even necessary for fiscal and military decisions. In Marseille, citizen impact on urban politics was especially notable in the areas of food supply, the amount of consumer taxes and the town’s involvement in military conflict – as demonstrated in the contribution of François Otchakovsky-Laurens. His paper – like those of Pablo Gonzalez Martin and Ben Eersels – illustrates the wealth of information that can be mined from written reports of council meetings. Although these municipal documents have to be assessed with great care, they can provide us with unique insights into the structural influence of citizen participation in the decision-making process of towns.42 Whether citizens possessed electoral rights or not, they always had the option of trying to reach their decision-makers with petitions. By listing and justifying complaints about government actions, these pamphlets were the standard means of seeking redress of grievances in many European cities. Petitions channeled perceptions of unjustness, experiences of illegality arising from the improper application of legal processes, and complaints about the abuse of power.43 Furthermore, they proposed concrete remedies to these situations considered as unjust. Research on the use of petitions in late medieval France, Italy, and Castile has proven that subjects were often successful in the negotiations that followed their oral or written presentation to monarchs, bishops, and lords.44 Practices and early modern periods, ed. by Eva Jullien and Michel Pauly (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016), pp. 37-56; Kristin Zech, ‘Zunftauflösungen als Spiegel politischer Partizipationschancen und -grenzen sozialer Gruppen in der Stadt: Straßburg, Colmar, Schlettstadt’, in Politische Partizipation in spätmittelalterlichen Städten am Oberrhein, ed. by Olivier Richard and Gabriel Zeilinger (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2017), pp. 205-40. 42 See, for instance, for Southern-France: Lynn Gaudreault, Pouvoir, mémoire et identité. Le premier registre de délibérations communales de Brignoles (1387-1391), édition et analyse (Montpellier: PUM, 2014); Caroline Fargeix, Les élites lyonnaises du XV e siècle au miroir de leur langage: pratiques et représentations culturelles des conseillers de Lyon, d’après les registres de délibérations consulaires (Paris: De Boccard, 2007); F. Otchakovsky-Laurens, La vie politique à Marseille sous la domination angevine (1348-1385) (Rome: EFR, 2018). Some notes on the genre can be found in Graeme Small, ‘Municipal registers of deliberations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: cross-channel observations’, in Les idées passent-elles la Manche? Savoirs, représentations, pratiques (France-Angleterre, Xe-XXe siècles), ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris: Sorbonne, 2007), pp. 37-66. 43 Anthony Musson, ‘Patterns of supplication and litigation strategies: petitioning the crown in the fourteenth century’, in Petitions and strategies of persuasion in the Middle Ages. The English crown and the church, c.1200-c.1500, ed. by Thomas Smith and Helen Killick (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2018), p. 108. See also Andreas Würgler, ‘Voices from among the “silent masses”: humble petitions and social conflicts in early modern central Europe’, International Review of Social History, 46 (2001), pp. 11-34; Mark Ormrod, ‘Murmur, clamour and noise: voicing complaint and remedy in petitions to the English crown, c. 1300-c. 1460’, in Medieval petitions: grace and grievance, ed. by Mark Ormrod et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), pp. 135-55; Christopher Fletcher, ‘De la communauté du royaume au common weal: les requêtes anglaises et leurs stratégies au XIVe siècle’, Revue Française d’Histoire des Idées Politiques, 32 (2010), pp. 359-72. 44 Sophie Petit-Renaud, « Faire loy » au royaume de France de Philippe VI à Charles V (1328-1380) (Paris: De Boccard, 2001), p. 269; Maria Asenjo-Gonzalez, ‘Political dissent in towns and cities in Castile and Leon, expressed through complaints and petitions to the crown (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries)’, in Disciplined dissent, pp. 65-88; Sam Cohn, Creating the Florentine state. Peasants and rebellion, 1348-1434 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), p. 269.

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such as petitioning actually established a continual political dialogue between the state and its subjects. However, the influence of petitions on urban politics has received far less scholarly attention. For that reason, several chapters of this book consider the background of petitioners, their claims, wishes and rates of success at length. As Ben Eersels shows for the city of Maastricht, communal requests from the leaders of the town’s craft guilds initiated a large proportion of the discussions about fiscal matters and extraordinary mandates for public officials and economic regulations. In this way, practices like drafting and publicly discussing requests were an integral part of the urban political process. Moreover, petitioning could also be a powerful tool to establish strong political networks that transcended social boundaries. In particular, the contribution of François Otchakovsky-Laurens shows us that even underprivileged groups, such as women, Jews and ‘poor people’, succeeded in reaching the council with their wishes. Clearly, in some cities and village communities, the political process was open to more people than previous scholarship had imagined. Claims, discourses and ideas Naturally, the political demands of citizens were highly diverse. As the essays of this book show, most of the wishes citizens presented in petitions or during negotiations at council meetings concerned concrete changes in their daily lives. Among other things, for example, citizens everywhere asked for higher wages, a more fairly distributed tax burden and better working conditions. Protesters frequently made public claims for more control over their own associations, such as the right to choose the leadership of their craft guilds and assemble at their own behest. But occasionally citizens also fought for fundamental political principles, such as financial and governmental transparency and some degree of political representation. For instance, comparative studies on towns situated in the Upper Rhine region and the southern part of present-day Germany have shown that the political agenda of citizens can be called ‘polyphonic’. Next to concrete wishes (such as cleaning the streets, maintaining roads, guaranteeing the food supply, etc.) commoners expressed more general concerns about the government of their town: issues of corporate prerogatives, the town’s liberties, juridical (in)equality, and the (mis)use of public finances were often put before the governors by citizen petitions.45 There is a long historiographical tradition interpreting the demands of these commoners. Until the 1980’s, the debate was essentially dominated by two 45 Jörg Rogge, ‘Ratspolitik in Oberschwäbischen Reichsstädten als praktizierter Republikanismus. Beobachtungen und Überlegungen für die Zeit von der Gründung des Schwäbischen Städtebundes bis zum Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Verborgene republikanische Tradition in Oberschwaben, ed. by Peter Blickle (Tübingen: Bibliotheca Academica, 1998), pp. 59-79; Maximilian Gloor, Politisches Handeln im spätmittelalterlichen Augsburg, Basel und Straßburg (Heidelberg: DAEM, 2010), passim; Laurence Buchholzer, ‘La participation fiscale et politique en question (Colmar, 1424)’, in Politische Partizipation, pp. 63-97.

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strands. Marxist historians, on the one hand, interpreted political protests in the fourteenth century as emanations of proto-capitalist revolutions. In their view, late medieval protesters fundamentally called the socio-economic inequalities of medieval society into question.46 On the other side, conservative scholarship proposed that the intentions of ‘rebels’ were mainly reactionary. Refuting the classic class-based distinction made in Marxist scholarship, they saw privileged citizens at work in socio-political conflicts. Allegedly, these protesting citizens wanted to return to a ‘golden past’, given their multiple references to existing (or forgone) privileges. Violation of these customs was the main mobilising force behind popular protest, according to Mollat, Wolff and others.47 In a challenge to this ‘reactive history’, Sam Cohn argued in his comparative study of revolts in Western Europe that commoners had progressive claims.48 While Cohn agreed with Mollat and Wolff on the social origins of late medieval protest, he opposed their claim that ‘rebels had no political program at all’ (in the words of Wolff 49), and favoured the insights of Marxist historians. According to Cohn, commoners sought to gain rights that went beyond corporate liberties. Above all, Cohn argued, they strove for ‘liberty’, namely an implicit sense of equality.50 What all those traditions have in common is their implicit or explicit attempt to view the political demands of citizens in a ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ light. Either approach risks an overly teleological view of the history of political participation and protest, informed by present-day opinions about contemporary politics. Both hold little relevance for medieval society. Nonetheless, Cohn was certainly correct in arguing that citizens did have clear political ideas. Behind the wealth of various concrete citizen demands, there was clearly a set of unifying political values and ideas that connected individual requests. For one, citizens agreed that urban government should serve the ‘common good’ of the town. However, debate over the amount of divergence in different urban groups’ outlooks on the precise meaning of the common good is still ongoing. Susan Reynolds, an early advocate of the importance of ideology as a directive factor in medieval urban politics, believed that the middle ages was a period ‘devoid of ideological conflict’. For her, political conflicts between citizens 46 Rodney Hilton, Class conflict and the crisis of feudalism. Essays in medieval social history (London: Hambledon, 1983); Karl Czok, ‘Zunftkämpfe, Zunftrevolutionen oder Bürgerkämpfe’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl Marx-Universität Leipzig , Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, 8 (1958-1959), pp. 129-43. 47 Michel Mollat & Philippe Wolff, Ongles bleus, Jacques et Ciompi. Les révolutions populaires en Europe aux XIV e et XV e siècles (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1970); Guy Fourquin, Les soulèvements populaires au Moyen Âge (Paris: PUF, 1972). Also Pollard wrote that the social outlook of these people was ‘deeply conservative’ because they defended a well-ordered society in which they had their place (Anthony Pollard, ‘The people, politics and the constitution in the fifteenth century’, in Law, governance, and justice. New views on medieval constitutionalism, ed. by Richard Kaeuper (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 325). 48 Sam Cohn, Lust for liberty. The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge: HUP, 2006). See also his ‘Authority and popular resistance’, in The Oxford handbook of early modern European history, ed. by Hamish Scott (Oxford: OUP, 2015), II, pp. 418-39. 49 Michel Mollat, ‘Les révoltes en France et aux Pays-Bas à l’époque des Ciompi’, in Il tumulto dei Ciompi. Un momento di storia fiorentina ed Europea (Florence: Olschki, 1981), p. 251. 50 Cohn, Lust for liberty, p. 239.

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and governments revolved about individual cases of government malpractice rather than fundamentally different political ideas.51 John Najemy and Antony Black are the main representatives of the other end of the spectrum. In his study of Florentine electoral politics in the fourteenth century, Najemy argued that the struggle between the Florentine guilds and patricians reflected a structural ideological conflict between two very different actors. The ‘oligarchy’ (i.e. the patricians) advanced a consensus-based approach to politics, an approach that envisioned political society as a harmonious whole, led by the most prominent members of the social fabric. In contrast, the guilds’ ‘corporate’ interpretation of urban politics advanced the ideal of equal participation of all guild members, which materialized in an urban society built on a ‘federation’ of autonomous corporate bodies.52 Antony Black also saw two fundamentally distinct ideologies at work. He identified them, however, as the corporate ideology and what he called ‘the ideology of civil society’. Whereas the old communal guild ideologies focused their defense on values such as brotherhood, love and equality, ‘civil society’ was a space characterized by ‘liberal values’, such as individual liberty and security of person and property.53 More recent scholarship has tried to reconcile these two approaches. In a volume edited by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Braene, for instance, several authors showed that, although different political actors used the same ideological keywords, thus building on a similar ideological repertoire, their opinions could differ widely on the exact meanings of those claims.54 The essays of this book take off from these recent conclusions by focusing on the use of political thought in concrete political practices, namely all sorts of negotiations and interactions between citizens and political institutions. In doing so, we follow the recent trend set by Susan Reynolds, Heinz Schilling and Jan Dumolyn, who have studied the outlines of urban political ideas in documents stemming from political and administrative practises instead of formal writings on political theory.55 The chapter of Jelle Haemers, for instance, discusses the terminology used to describe their collective actions. Authorities labeled some political actions of craft guilds with the term ‘rebellions’, whereas the artisans themselves considered the same actions ‘gatherings’. The nomenclature was

51 Susan Reynolds, ‘Medieval urban history and the history of political thought’, Urban History Yearbook, 1982, pp. 14-23. 52 John Najemy, Corporatism and consensus in Florentine electoral politics, 1280-1400 (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1982). 53 Anthony Black, Guilds and state. European political thought from the twelfth century to the present (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1984), pp. 66-75. 54 De Bono Communi. The discourse and practice of the common good in the European city, 13th-16th centuries, ed. by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). See also Peter Blickle, Kommunalismus. Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), and Matthew Kempshall, The common good in late medieval political thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 55 Reynolds, ‘Medieval urban history’; Heinz Schilling, ‘Civic republicanism in late medieval and early modern German cities’, in Religion, political culture and the emergence of early modern society. Essays in German and Dutch history, ed. by idem (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 3-59; Wim Blockmans, ‘The medieval roots of the constitution of the United Provinces’, Medieval Low Countries, 4 (2017), pp. 215-48.

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crucial: by opting for the latter term, the craftsmen were referring to their old custom of gathering freely as often as they wanted. By using these words, the craft guilds stressed (at least in their view) the justified character of their actions. Jesus Solorzano Telechea’s study of petitions further debunks the claim of Mollat and Wolff, mentioned above, that the main political priority of citizens was to return to a golden past. Using a discourse in which several claims about ‘good governance’ and ‘abuse of power’ played a central role, citizens asked for fundamental changes to traditional governmental bodies. In their petitions, the citizens of Vitoria, Bilbao and Logrono demanded that the leading factions in these towns govern less in their own self-interest and account more for their deeds. This, according to the citizens, was what governing for the ‘common good of the town’ really meant. In addition to a list of concrete political changes, medieval citizens were able to introduce more fundamental principles, such as accountability, political representation, respect for corporate privileges, fiscal transparency and governmental responsiveness, into urban politics. It is worth stressing, though, that citizens never aspired to absolute equality. Protestors in Castile, the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire demanded the acquisition of new rights and the preservation of existing ones, not the abolition of privilege altogether. Movements with more radical aims – like the Jacquerie in France and the Peasants’ Revolt in England – generally appeared on the countryside. In the towns, what all types of citizen organizations had in common is that they strove to advance the position of their own organizations – they rarely advocated the wishes of others. Non-citizens were not allowed to take part in the decision-making process, and those who did possess citizenship strove to keep it that way. If medieval urban governments were to some extent ‘democratic institutions’, they always remained, as the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne claimed more than a century ago, ‘democracies of the privileged’.56 Nevertheless, the term communitas and its concomitant general claim of granting everyone a share of political participation were used in the political discourse and therefore kept alive.57 As a result, examining the meaning of ‘community’ in a local context, both in the process of decision-making and in concrete utterances of political protest, has allowed us to shed new light on modes of distributing political power, the reciprocity and interconnections of political players and the development of notions of accountability and political participation.

56 Des démocraties des privilégiées (Henri Pirenne, Les anciennes démocraties des Pays-Bas (Paris: Flammarion, 1910), p. 197). See on this: Marc Boone, ‘La représentation politique dans les villes flamandes du bas Moyen Âge: limites et possibilités des “anciennes démocraties des Pays-Bas”’, in Consensus et représentation, pp. 421-50. 57 As has also been shown for central European societies, see Julia Burkhardt, ‘Frictions and fictions of community: structures and representation of power in central Europe, c. 1350-1500’, The Medieval History Journal, 19 (2016), pp. 191-228, at p. 218.

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Citizen participation on a European scale The scope of this book covers the towns in Western Europe. It focuses particularly on towns situated in present-day Ireland, England, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Spain. Thanks to this broad geographic framework, this book is able to test claims about the local, regional or national uniqueness of the urban political process that continue to appear in studies with a more limited scope. By adopting a trans-European approach, the essays of this book are able to demonstrate that the involvement of citizens in urban politics shows striking similarities, despite some regional differences. First, the methods of political participation and contestation at the disposal of citizens were highly analogous. From Stockholm to Bilbao, from Dublin to Augsburg: citizens everywhere acquired the right to see the government’s financial expenditures, and their governments often invited them to approve important political decisions. If such cooperative efforts failed (or if citizens considered an extra push opportune), European city residents possessed a similar repertoire of collective actions to force their agenda on the councils.58 Indeed, the essays of this book amass considerable evidence of similar forms of gatherings, demonstrations and strikes used in Castile, the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire. A second important parallel is the similar ideological repertoire used by citizens across Europe. City residents argued that they wanted to ensure that the government served the ‘common good’ of the city, which meant that governors should put communal interests before their own, be free from corruption, install a fair taxation system and account for their actions.59 When the craft guilds of the Hanseatic town of Lübeck on the coast of the Baltic Sea demanded rechtverdiget (justice) and rekenschop (accountability) from their governors in a 1407 petition,60 their claims were essentially the same as those made by the craftsmen of Laredo (near Bilbao, on the Atlantic coast) in 1494. Just like their counterparts in Northern Germany, the artisans in Castile denounced the lack of fair justice in their town (que nuestra justiçia non es esecutada ny ellos commo debe) in a petition to their king.61

58 See for other regions not mentioned in this book: Resistance, representation and community, ed. by Peter Blickle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Wayne te Brake, Shaping History. Ordinary people in European politics, 1500-1700 (Berkeley: UCP, 1998); John Watts, The making of polities. Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). 59 As is often depicted in didactic poems written by urban administrators, see for the Dutch and the German-speaking regions: Heike Bierschwale and Jacqueline van Leeuwen, Wie man eine Stadt regieren soll: deutsche und niederländische Stadtregimentslehren des Mittelalters (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005), or for Italian city-republics: David Napolitano, ‘From royal court to city hall. The Podestà literature: a republican variant on the mirrors of princes?’, in Concepts of ideal rulership from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. by Geert Roskam and Stefan Schorn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 383-416. 60 Die Chroniken der niedersächsischen Städte. Vol. 26: Lübeck (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1899), p. 409. 61 Jesus Solorzano Telechea, ‘De “todos los màs del pueblo” a la “republica e comunidad”: el desarrollo y la consolidación de la identidad del común de Laredo en los siglos XIV y XV’, Amea. Annales de Historia medieval de la Europa Atlàntica, 1 (2006), p. 85.

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The more difficult task remains to explain these parallels in late medieval European citizen participation, of course. While there were doubtless numerous elements contributing to this process of mutual influence, at least two crucial factors are worth stressing here. First, the dense urban network – as demonstrated by the numerous economic and political contacts between cities – explains that ideas travelled by ship and overland to those who were willing to hear about them. Numerous diplomatic contacts between cities are proof of the strong networks between them. In 1389, for instance, the government of the town of Sint-Truiden inquired with their colleagues in Maastricht if they could provide them – secretly – with details of the election procedures for the council in their city.62 But governments were not the only bodies in regular communication; we possess considerable evidence that citizen organizations in different towns kept close contacts with each other. While most of these contacts were harmless, they could also lead to the initiation of more serious contestations of governmental practises. In the upper Rhine area, alliances were formed between the apprentices of several towns. In 1407 the shoemakers of no less than forty cities, from Basel to Haguenau, allied in order to get higher wages.63 The profile of the leader of the previously mentioned protest in Laredo, Juan de Escalante, is testimony to interregional influences on conflict. Before moving to Laredo, De Escalante lived in Bruges for many years – including the early 1490s, when the city rose against its lord Maximilian of Austria.64 Similarly, Flemish weavers exiled because of their resistance to the count’s fiscal policies emigrated to England in the mid-fourteenth century. By coincidence or not, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was especially vigorous in the regions where they had relocated.65 While social unrest in these regions was not necessarily caused by Flemish immigrants, perhaps their ideas inspired fellow artisans to take up arms. Just as the ‘Arab Spring’ from 2010 spread through social media, the ‘années révolutionnaires’, a phrase coined by Mollat and Wolff for the turbulent years of 1378-81,66 in Europe’s history might be viewed in the light of travelling merchants, pilgrims, and exiles. A second element is that the shared Christian faith of all European citizens may have contributed to the formation of a similar ideological repertoire. In fact, numerous studies have alluded to the Christian roots of urban political ideologies (and late medieval political thought in general).67 Biblical quotes, 62 Maastricht (Regionaal Historisch Centrum Limburg), Oud archief, 20.001A: indivieze raad, nr. 839. More examples are given in Jelle Haemers, ‘Faire alliance. La communication des rebelles en Flandre et en Brabant au bas Moyen Age’, Revue française d’Histoire du Livre, 137 (2018), pp. 131-50, and in Sam Cohn, ‘Enigmas of Communication: Jacques, Ciompi, and the English’, in La comunidad medieval como esfera publica, ed. by Rafael Oliva-Herrer et al. (Sevilla: SUP, 2014), pp. 227-47. 63 Monique Debus Kehr, Travailler, prier, se révolter. Les compagnons de métier dans la société urbaine et leur relation au pouvoir. Rhin Supérieur au XV e siècle (Strasbourg: PSSA, 2007), pp. 330-60. 64 Jesus Solorzano Telechea, ‘The politics of the urban commons in Northern Atlantic Spain in the later Middle Ages’, Urban History, 41 (2014), p. 198. 65 Bart Lambert and Milan Pajic, ‘Drapery in Exile: Edward III, Colchester and the Flemings, 1351-1367’, History. The Journal of the Historical Association, 99 (2014), pp. 733-53. 66 Mollat and Wolff, Ongles bleus, chapter 4. 67 See e.g. Anthony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250-1450 (Cambridge: CUP, 1992).

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mendicant texts and Church sermons were useful aids in structuring the political thought of city residents.68 Consequently, concepts based on ideas stemming from Christian thought, such as brotherly love, judicial equality and respect for the ‘common good’, are found in petitions from Spanish towns and German cities, in England and the Low Countries, as this book illustrates. The occasional presence of clerics in protest movements, such as the upheaval in Valladolid in 1517 that Beatriz Majo Tomé describes, demonstrates that in some cases commoners could directly rely on clerical support. This conforms with other examples of preaching clerics during medieval revolts in Southern Europe, inspiring citizens in their arguments to take up the arms against their governors.69 In addition, perhaps the same can be said of Aristotelian thinking, Roman Law, and other languages of theology and learned law that were widespread among urban communities in late medieval Europe. In practice, these ideas and discourses tended to overlap, merge and interact, while the links between the languages and traditions of theology and canon law, Roman law and local custom, or even the theories of Aristotle and Cicero, are so extensive that it can sometimes seem artificial to draw distinctions between them.70 That being said, we should not be blind to divergences in citizen participation across Europe. Although the parallels between their ideological repertoires and the key points of their agenda are clear, citizens’ exact wishes and the degree of their success differed significantly depending on local context. Although the claims of the citizens in Lübeck in 1407 and Laredo in 1494 were similar – revolving mainly around justice and accountability – they proposed different solutions for these issues. While the citizens in the Hanseatic town asked for the right to participate in a yearly inspection of the communal accounts, their counterparts in Cantabria aspired to break the power monopoly of the urban oligarchy by installing new election procedures for governors. The concept of ‘accountability’, what it entailed and how it was to be achieved, was thus interpreted differently from one town to the next.71 To grasp the precise, local meaning and application of ideological concepts fully, several essays of this book engage in indispensable, in-depth analysis of the vernacular discourse and the socio-political context in 68 John Arnold, ‘Religion and popular rebellion, from the Capuciati to Niklashausen’, Cultural and Social History, 6 (2009), pp. 149-69; Chris Fletcher and Rosamund Oates, ‘Religious thought, political practice, 1200-1600’, ibidem, pp. 297-304; Steven Justice, ‘Religious dissent, social revolt, and “ideology”’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: an exploration of historical themes, ed. by Chris Dyer (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 205-16. 69 See for instance in Spain and Italy: Frances Andrews, ‘Preacher and audience: friar Venturino da Bergamo and “popular voices”’, in The voices of the people, pp. 185-204; Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘Incitation à la révolte. Prédicateurs, audience et culture politique urbaine dans la Castille de la fin du Moyen Age’, in La fabrique des sociétés médiévales méditerranéennes. Les Moyen Age de François Menant, ed. by Diane Chamboduc de Saint Pulgent and Marie Dejoux (Paris: Sorbonne, 2018), pp. 489-99. 70 Watts, The making of polities, pp. 131-32. 71 As is also noticed by Guy Geltner, ‘Fighting corruption in the Italian city-state: Perugian officers’ end of term audit (sindacato) in the fourteenth century’, in Anti-corruption in history. From Antiquity to the modern era, ed. by Ronald Kroeze, Andre Vitoria and Guy Geltner (Oxford: OUP, 2018), pp. 103-21.

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which it was used. In addition, the essays expose a second fundamental difference in the political involvement of common citizens in late medieval Europe: the degree to which they succeeded in becoming structurally and actively involved in the decision-making process. Whereas all over Europe urban governments at times asked the citizenry to affirm important political decisions, there were great differences in the extent of citizens’ ability to negotiate and alter the proposals that were put before them in these meetings. In the Low Countries, the Northern Italian city-states and some German cities (roughly those in the Rhine region), citizens could participate very actively in their political citizenship. But elsewhere, such as in the Scandinavian towns, bottom-up political participation remained more often restricted to affirming (or denying) council proposals and approaching the government ‘from the outside’ with oral or written requests. In short, the evidence of the essays in this book suggests that the wider patterns of citizen participation (their key issues, their actions and their ideology) were fairly similar. Nonetheless, the contributions make also clear that these patterns materialized in many different concrete shapes in cities. As a whole, this book thus defends the claim that while the political beliefs of commoners were greatly similar across Europe, we do not see a ‘general political European program’ inspiring commoners to take up their pens (and sometimes their arms). Structure of the book The book’s essays are divided into three chapters, each clustered around one central theme, namely (1) institutional bargaining, (2) interest groups and their interactions, and (3) discourse and political thought. A precise, ‘clean’ categorization of each essay is impossible, however, since many contributions deal with multiple subjects. The first chapter discusses the involvement of citizens in urban political structures, including the town council. In Marseille (François OtchakovskyLaurens), Burgos (Pablo Gonzalez Martin), or Stockholm (Sofia Gustafsson), commoners did not succeed in obtaining rights of representation in the towns’ main political institution. Instead, supplemental political structures were developed to integrate the citizenry in the political process. Because of their presence in these ‘institutions of broader participation’ and practices such as petitioning and collective claim-making, citizens were still able to influence the decision-making process. Taken together, the essays show that even in towns where ‘oligarchic governments’ appear to have controlled the councils, simplistic distinctions between the ‘governors’ and the ‘governed’ do not do justice to their more complex political realities. Some officials (such as the Marseille tax collectors) were clearly active in both milieus, serving as a bridge between the government and the citizenry. In Stockholm, the political involvement of inhabitants was more restricted, but even there, the Large Council allowed citizens some degree of control over municipal finances. Conflict and uprisings were rare in these towns, but even though this ‘political calm’ could be interpreted as a sign of

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oligarchic domination, these cases also suggest that the inhabitants could rely on their governors. In particular, Marseille and Burgos (most pronounced after 1425, when citizens obtained the right to gather freely) provide evidence that governments often took care of the complaints that reached them – at least when these grievances did not directly conflict with their own interests. The urban government in Burgos even showed its willingness to engage in debates on improving the efficiency of citizen participation in politics. Of course, the outcomes of the bargaining process did not please everyone, though more often than not, they reached a compromise that eventually pacified the urban commune. Much depended on the nature of the associations that represented the citizenry at the negotiating table. Therefore, the second part of this book concentrates on the integration of one particular interest group in the political process: the craft guilds, called the Zünfte in German towns, and ambachten in the Low Countries. In particular, the essays in this part discuss the guilds’ role in Swabia (the southern part of present-day Germany), the middle Rhine region, and the Meuse valley. Dominique Adrian, Sabine von Heusinger, and Ben Eersels, respectively, demonstrate that corporate organizations became the cornerstone of urban political institutions in these regions when they won extensive electoral rights in towns such as Augsburg, Cologne, Strasbourg and Maastricht. As Sabine von Heusinger shows, guild representatives who sat on the council had often acquired significant experience as guild leaders prior to their election to political positions. In addition to demonstrating that they were well aware of workplace conditions, this conclusion suggests the existence of strong networks between the council and the craft guilds. Still, as Ben Eersels argues, the powerful institutional position of the craft guilds did not prevent guild conflicts in the city. Despite the craft guilds’ extensive political power in Maastricht, the council still had to deal with guild strikes and solve numerous disputes between different craft guilds. This underlines the importance of recognizing the social diversity of the craft guilds and the often difficult relations between these organizations. In the council, guild delegates usually lobbied for improved labor conditions, stable coinage, a sustainable food supply and the availability and safety of urban infrastructure. They could rightly argue that these claims were in the interest of the whole town – even though it is clear that the craft guilds primarily advocated for investments in those areas that were in their own interests. As Dominique Adrian concludes, while the system of political guilds in the Swabian cities may have given common citizens a political voice on the highest urban political level, it also barred similar citizen initiatives from associations that did not belong to the corporate structure. Although political claims of the citizenry were highly diverse, the essays of Jelle Haemers, Jesus Solórzano Telechea, Beatriz Majo Tomé and Eliza Hartrich in the third chapter of this book reveal an ideology that connected individual requests and transcended the specifics of local institutions and the forms of the interactions. The discourse citizens used in multiple types of political communication with their governments shows striking similarities in towns all over Europe. In the towns of Northern Atlantic Spain, Jesus Solórzano Telechea argues that political

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discourse of ‘commoners’ was built around three main axes: egalitarianism, public utility and the common good. In their petitions to the Castilian kings, city residents denounced mismanagement of public funds, corruption and unjust legal action by the ruling oligarchs. In Northern Atlantic Spain, commoners generally used peaceful methods to communicate their discontent. However, in Valladolid, where the commoners took to the streets, overthrew the regimento and replaced it with a new governing institution, the commoners’ actions were clearly different. Yet, despite different expressions of citizen discontent, it is easy to detect the same ideological framework as Jesus Solórzano Telechea found in Nothern Castile. Beatriz Majo Tomé points out that the rioting citizens of Valladolid legitimized their actions by emphasizing that they wished above all that justice be done in the city. To justify their claim for political participation, citizens appealed to learned political thought, custom, and the ideology of the common good as motivations for their discontent. Yet because the ideological repertoire of protesting citizens was largely similar to that of their governors, it is often difficult (and even problematic) to distinguish between an ‘elite language’ of governance and a ‘contentious discourse’, as Jelle Haemers shows. Both governors and citizens used similar words and ideas to legitimize revolt and repression. Craftsmen argued that some decisions taken by the government were ‘harmful’ to the common welfare of the town and its citizens, but governors used exactly the same terminology to denounce citizen actions. Eliza Hartrich’s analysis of such seditious speech acts in late medieval English towns demonstrates that citizens could have the opportunity to access and scrutinize municipal records. From her point of view, it is impossible to regard such records purely as a tool through which urban office holding elites accomplished their objectives; the ‘commons’ of a town had access to customals, common assembly rolls, and financial accounts, and exercised their right to protest when they believed that mayors, aldermen, or common clerks had either not observed the tenets laid out in these records or had inserted material in secrecy or in error. In line with other essays in this book, she concludes that archiving and record-keeping can thus testify to the continued power of non-officeholders in urban politics. In our current context of intensified conflict over the legitimacy and efficacy of our democratic institutions, we would do well to recognize the long history of citizen struggle for fair and transparent taxation, governmental responsibility and, above all, political participation. Even as early as the Late Middle Ages, these concrete issues were connected to the wider idea that governance should always be targeted at serving the ‘common good’ of all citizens. Of course, which exact governmental decision would uphold the common good remains the subject of debate – as it was in late medieval urban Europe. To garner support for and establish the parameters of the most important urban policies, medieval urban governments engaged regularly in dialogue with their citizens. While the degree of citizens’ active involvement differed from region to region and even from one town to the next, political participation never remained restricted to voting for representatives at set times. The making of politics was thus not the sole prerogative of the government; it was always, to a variable extent, a bottom-up process as well.

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Part I

Institutional Bargaining Councils and Institutions of Broader Participation

François Otchakovsky-Laurens  

The Universitas Massilie, an Assembly of the Whole City? Power Struggles and Social Tensions in Marseille During the 14th Century An interesting scene takes place in a famous illumination located in the first pages of Marseille’s most solemnly composed book of privileges (the Liber Statutorum, also known as the ‘Red Book’1): the Angevine King of Sicily Louis II, Count of Provence and Lord of Marseille, takes an oath to respect the city’s rights, privileges and statutes by putting his hand on a codex, probably the Red Book itself, in a kind of mise en abyme. A high officer, possibly the Provence’s seneschal, takes the oath, as well. The central position that the king and the Angevine lily-flower pattern on the tapestry behind him occupy in the scene signifies the importance of the royal trusteeship of Marseille. Indeed, from the final submission of the city in 1262, the crown controlled the public finances and the tax system and nominated the main officers (the vicarius, the judges of high jurisdiction and the treasurer). In this image, six important members of Marseille’s council surround Louis, likely the six probi homines in charge of electing the town councillors, officers and agents. Other details indicate the presence of lower-ranking attendees, drawn in a smaller scale, on the picture’s bottom left and right corners. These 10 or 11 men stand inside the wooden fence delineating the meeting area, watching the ceremony and commenting on it. A second illumination a few pages further in the Red Book depicts a similar small crowd of 10 men attending the oath of a lower-ranking officer, the vicarius. Here, the crowd seems to display not so much deference as an attitude of vigilance towards their new superior. However, no revolt or popular protest occurred during the fourteenth century in Marseille. The only known episodes of social unrest were related to faction rivalries, when significant parts of the inhabitants followed two large rival clans of the oligarchy. On 21 July 1351, a major street battle in the centre of the town

1 This copy of the Liber Statutorum Massilie is indeed the only official illustrated book of the Marseille commune (Archives municipales de Marseille (henceforth AMM), AA2). About the composition of Marseille’s medieval statutes, see Régine Pernoud, Les statuts municipaux de Marseille (Paris: Picard, 1949); Pierre Chastang and François Otchakovsky-Laurens, ‘Les statuts urbains de Marseille. Acteurs, rhétorique et mise par écrit de la norme’, in La confection des statuts dans les sociétés méditerranéennes de l’Occident (XIIe-XV e s.). Statuts, écritures et pratiques sociales – I, ed. by Didier Lett (Paris: Sorbonne, 2017), pp. 15-40. François Otchakovsky-Laurens • Université de Paris – ICT Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 33-51.

© F  H  G

DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.119789

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Figure 1 Royal Oath in the Statutory Book of Marseille (late 14th century)2

took place between dozens of armed supporters of the two main parties dividing Marseille’s elite: the families Vivaud and Martin on one side and the Jerusalems on the other. A few years later in May 1356, the fight led to the last recorded event of the dispute, the assassination of Peter of Jerusalem, followed by a series of recorded trials.2Daniel Smail describes these events and the structured hatreds that divided the upper classes of Marseille, who brought into their dispute large groups of citizens of lower social rank.3 However, this discord demonstrates the opposite of what could be called a popular ‘class consciousness’. Such struggles bear witness to something different from a social confrontation between the bottom and the top, between the commoners and the leading group of notables and urban aristocracy. The judiciary and deliberative records are the only almost continuous sources for fourteenth-century Marseille, a period during which no urban or individual chronicle was preserved. So, is our sense that there was a ‘stillness’ among the populace simply due to a lack of sources? That is one possible explanation, but in the deliberative registers – 20 books containing the recordings of the council’s

2 AMM, AA2, fol. 1. 3 Daniel Smail, ‘Hatred as a social institution in late medieval society’, Speculum, 76 (2001), pp. 90-126.

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

Figure 2 An Officer’s Oath in the Statutory Book of Marseille4

assemblies during the fourteenth4century 5 – another, more political explanation can be found in the discreet expression of the interests and yearnings from the least privileged part of the population, ranging from the ordinary citizens to the most destitute. This essay intends to study the functioning of a ‘political space’ in medieval Marseille, of the type that Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard have identified it in Ancient Greece, where the public space made it possible to listen to or to silence political and social tensions.6 I will discuss how political space functioned in medieval Marseille, the main players it contained, and which social and political groups had their interests addressed there. First, I will study the social



4 AMM, AA2, fol. 5v. 5 AMM, BB11-30, 1318-85. 6 Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard, ‘Le politique en Grèce ancienne’, in Historiographies, Concepts et débats, ed. by Christian Delacroix et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), pp. 1162-70. Vincent Azoulay, ‘L’Espace public et la cité grecque : d’un malentendu structurel à une clarification conceptuelle’, in L’Espace public au Moyen Âge, débats autour de Jürgen Habermas, ed. by Patrick Boucheron and Nicolas Offenstadt (Paris: Seuil, 2011), pp. 63-76.

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3,2%

7,6% One single mention 45,1%

2-9 mentions 10-19 mentions

42,4%

20-29 mentions Above 30 mentions

Figure 3 The different involvement levels in the council’s activity

composition of the urban council in order to identify who was governing the town. Second, I will offer an in-depth analysis of the municipal deliberations to show which groups led the decision-making process in Marseille. Although it will become clear that the town’s elite had a prominent role, bottom-up initiatives of the urban populace were not ineffective. Especially during times when the central government tried to strengthen its grip on Marseille’s political community, the town’s rulers and the inhabitants succeeded in resisting together. Social composition and political roles in Marseille’s assembly A case-study of the civic years 1348-1349 and 1349-1351 shows that the names of 370 different councillors were recorded during the 135 sessions that took place in these two years. These names allow for an individualized study of the assembly, in order to assess the different levels of personal involvement in the council’s meetings and activity. Each councillor is mentioned on average five times a year, with great disparities: several councillors appear only once in two years (almost one out of two, i.e. 45.4%), while others are recorded dozens of times in the two relevant deliberative registers. Similarly, the average of 13.7 members present in a meeting should be put into perspective by noting the variance in how names were recorded. For certain meetings, one can read only the names of the officers convoking the session and of the notary, while other sessions include a more complete attendance list.7 Before an examination of the statistical results of the councillors’ name census, it should be mentioned that these data are exclusively from the session records, which often mirror the oral and effective procedures of the assemblies. The subjectivity of the sources is that of the institution, namely that of a council that did not desire to record the full deliberative process, but rather only what the notaries considered necessary to keep in written form. This means that

7 Only three name lists can be found during that time span: two attendance lists and a petition read in public. Sessions: 22/10/1348, 6/8/1349 and 4/8/1349, listing 53, 54 and 65 councillors’ names (AMM, BB20, fol. 40v, 165v-166r, 168v-169r).

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

among the individuals taking part in the council’s meetings, the only recorded ones were those considered worth noting. Therefore, the main criterion in the registers was notability, literally and figuratively. Thus, a selected group of 12 regular and active councillors make at least 20 appearances each during one year. The rate is much higher for some of them, who are mentioned dozens of times, with a maximum of 86 mentions of Laurent Ricavi, a syndic (member of the three men holding the executive government) during the two studied years. Jacques Siaille, another syndic, is present 78 times in the corresponding registers. The influence of this inner circle, who dominated the recorded speech acts in the council, left little space for the other councillors. Thus, the 12 most present members in the registers accumulated an average of 44.3 appearances in 1348-1351, i.e. almost 10 times more than all the councillors together. The dominance of these notable members was reflected in the decisional process itself: this limited group of the most visible persons constituted the ‘bigger and saner’ part in the assembly. The expression of major et sanior pars was recurrent under the pen of the notaries; it defined the group of men capable of influencing the rest of the council and of taking over the decision if necessary.8 These leaders of Marseille’s assembly can be likened to those whom Michel Hébert calls ‘the best and most worthy’ in the representative assemblies of states in Provence. This ‘elite of money and power’ coincides with the sanior pars of the city, the one making decisions because of its superior quality – according to the ideology that permeated the urban writings. A number of attributes distinguished this ruling political class: nobility (nobilis, domicellus), honesty (probi homines), honorability (honorabilis) and prudence (prudens), although these last terms had a political connotation associated with the notion of good government.9 Yet the wealthiest members of the council did not necessarily exercise the power themselves. Certain notaries, everyday workers of law, had influence, such as Antoine Lurdi, who intervened during a particularly delicate session at the time of a resolution of a major conflict between Marseille and the County of Provence between 1348 and 1351. Lurdi finally gained the support of the assembly, including six councillors who were among the most eminent due to their fortunes. Clearly, it was important for him to write down that they had approved his solution. A rarity, Lurdi spoke on his own behalf and in the first person singular; a little later, he made an official protest and drew up a formal document of it.10 This does not mean that social structures and symbolic and material family patrimony did not influence these meetings. However, if one considers the town’s most important families, the political role of the individuals was not automatically determined. There was no established rule in the council assigning people to a place that solely depended on their social or economic status.

8 The expression sanior et major pars is used 10 times during the period 1348-1351. AMM, BB20, fol. 95r, 156v, 159r, 164r (three times), BB21, fol. 20r, 35v, 160r, 160v. 9 Nobilis atque potens; nobilis; domicellus (AMM, BB20, fol. 168r, 89v, 97v, 153r, 158r). 10 Volens ego, idem Antonius notarius, […], consilio, ad honorem Culminis reginalis, […](de) quibus solemniter protestor in hiis scriptis presentibus. De quibus peto intrumentum (AMM, BB21, fol. 158-59).

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The case of Jacques de Galbert, one of the six men who supported Antoine Lurdi, is therefore compelling. An owner of galleys, which he put to the service of the city, he was a powerful personage; his ships also ensured the connection of Marseille with Naples.11 In return for important services provided in early 1348 to Queen Jeanne, she entrusted him with the stronghold of Brégançon.12 He did not occupy an annual office in the council, perhaps due to his trade travels, but he was fairly present in the activity of the institution, with 19 recorded mentions and his proven participation in 14 meetings. One could, thus, expect him to have an elective position, following the example of other councillors who attended less frequently than he. Nevertheless, Jacques de Galbert occupied a place related to his rank in the most important ceremonial and honorary opportunities. He was chosen to organize the reception of the Royal Couple expected in the autumn of 1350 and then to carry the canopy over Louis of Taranto. He was again designated among the sapientes charged with preparing a royal entrance in April 1351.13 He was an important economic and political player in the city and recognized as such within the communal institution, although he chose to be only moderately involved in the common activities of the council. The same nuanced image emerges among the most important Marseille families. The Jerusalems, the Vivauds and the Martins were powerful due to both wealth and antiquity and, according to Daniel Smail, at the head of the factions and systems of alliances then dividing Marseille. All participated in the city council, without one family taking the advantage over the others. For example, there were nine councillors from the Jerusalem family and nine from the Martin family. Three Vivauds – allies to the Martins – were also present, which marks a strong presence as family groups. However, not every member of these families was involved in the same way; only one Jerusalem and one Vivaud were among the councillors most frequently recorded in the records. The evidence suggests that these families did not particularly care to dominate the council, nor to strictly restrict its functioning. Some of their members actively participated in the work of the assembly, while others were less involved and perhaps represented by familiars or relatives whom the records make it difficult to identify. The channels of social power were multiple and not necessarily limited to political ones. We can suspect collective family strategies at work here. Notably, individuals of lower rank who were particularly interested in playing an important role in the council, such as the notary mentioned above, might find themselves overrepresented in these records.

11 In February 1349, he was on a mission to Naples in the Queen’s service. Upon his return, he put a galley at the disposal of the board on the 16/4.1349 (AMM, BB20, fol. 26v, 119v-120r). 12 His role in ensuring the royal flight from Naples in January 1348 is known thanks to Émile Léonard, Histoire de Jeanne Ière, reine de Naples, comtesse de Provence (1343-1382) (Monaco: Imprimerie de Monaco, 1932-7), II, p. 27 n. 2. The now destroyed Neapolitan sources confirmed the Marseille deliberations about the reward of the castle of Brégançon (AMM, BB20, fol. 131v, BB21, fol. 147). 13 AMM, BB21, fol. 46v, 48v, 118r.

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

However, it should be noted that the differing involvement of the members of the ‘major families’ in the municipal activity did not prevent them from occupying a prominent place in the council. With one tenth of the councillors, the six most important families had three times more participants in the sessions than other families, and made up a third of the total number of elected agents and officers. Their influence is best measured in their participation in embassies and civic ceremonies. These families, especially the Jerusalems and the Montolieus, dominated the city’s contact with the outside world, as well as the ceremonies of entries of important personages and other civic processions.14 They occupied the leading ranks in the city, visible to everyone, from the local population to foreign visitors, lay princes or ecclesiastical dignitaries. In these occasions of ceremonial representation, certain usually discreet members of the major families were also placed in the most honorific rows.15 These few great lineages had considerable influence on the council due both to their actual numbers and to their social status. Without every individual of the same blood being equally active in the assembly, their collective interests were sufficiently represented, certainly more than for any other group of councillors. However, while aspects of social and economic logic can explain the varying levels of presence of powerful families, whether or not to participate in municipal activity was a personal choice, which offered to the members of lower social classes the possibility of acquiring influence. Every position within the municipal institution was not attributed a priori according to the rank or the honours in the society of Marseille; one cannot trace a systematic correlation between the social power and the place of individuals in the council. The town council was capable of integrating into its government members from different social ranks and fortunes, and from relatively diverse prestige. In any case, participants from the lower classes were more able to participate than they would have been in a strictly closed oligarchy.16

14 Noël Coulet, ‘Les entrées solennelles en Provence au XIVe siècle’, Ethnologie française, 7 (1977), pp. 63-82; Idem, ‘Dévotions communales: Marseille entre Saint Victor, Saint Lazare et Saint Louis (XIIIe-XVe s.)’, in La religion civique à l’époque médiévale et moderne (chrétienté et islam), ed. by André Vauchez (Rome: EFR, 1995), pp. 119-33; Idem, ‘Entrées royales au XIVe siècle: un rituel du faste et de la cohésion municipale’, in Marseille au Moyen Âge, entre Provence et Méditerranée. Les horizons d’une ville portuaire, ed. by Thierry Pécout (Marseille: Désiris, 2009), pp. 223-24. 15 For example, the procession organized on 5/10/1350 to prepare a royal entrance included two Jerusalems, one Vivaud, one Martin, one Ricavi, one Montolieu and one Boniface, along with other important characters such as Isnard Éguésier and Jacques de Galbert, nine out of the 14 designated for this task (AMM, BB21, fol. 48v). 16 Pierre Monnet, ‘Doit-on encore parler de patriciat dans les villes allemandes de la fin du Moyen Âge ?’, Bulletin d’information de la Mission historique française en Allemagne, 32 (1997), pp. 54-66; Paolo Cammarosano, ‘Élites sociales et institutions politiques des villes libres en Italie de la fin du XIIe au début du XIVe siècle’, in Les Élites urbaines au Moyen Âge (Paris-Rome: Sorbonne-EFR, 1997), p. 199.

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The place of the commoners in the assembly Why did people take part in the council? The citizenship of the city of Marseille was clearly defined and founded in law, as is evidenced by the existence of urban acts in the fourteenth century.17 However, there is no documented record of an admission procedure in the council meeting. We only have those rare attendance lists at our disposal that touch on the body of the councillors of the city. Let us, for example, consider the case of the ‘ordinary participants’, those who were not among the most prominent, most ‘notable’ councillors. The individual movements and actions of these inhabitants are more difficult to follow, especially in the absence of attendance lists. Indeed, a prosopographical study, assuming sufficient frequency of appearance and somewhat personalized details, cannot concern the lowest-ranking members of the council, those who appear only in the few global lists or in the occasional elections, without more precision being given by the notary recorder. Thus, some citizens appeared only once, such as Guillaume de Bormes, Jean Gilles or Guillaume de Serviers, among dozens of others.18 They formed the majority of the different registered names, i.e. 45.1% of the councillors who are mentioned only once and 87.5% of those mentioned from two to nine times. At the most, the tenuous information that can be found about them is related to their professional expertise, which led to their election to a specific task or tied them to their neighbourhood of residence in the city. Furthermore, the lack of detail in the deliberative sources on the practices and the actual conduct of the sessions does not allow us to know the place they occupied in the assembly, the role provided for them, what they said or the electing procedure. Moreover, the boundaries between ordinary councillors and non-members of the assembly were not clearly demarcated, which makes it difficult to study this mostly silent majority, at least in deliberative sources. If election is chosen as a criterion of belonging to the council, all those to whom the council entrusted an elective task may be considered councillors, as holders of part of its authority and responsible to it – the elected representatives frequently reported on their assignments to the council after their fulfilment.19 Yet the Marseillais did not necessarily use this delimitation in the fourteenth century, even assuming that such a formal distinction between councillors and ordinary citizens had taken place. We can, in fact, suppose that such precise criteria did not exist, either to determine the membership of the consular body or to direct the assembly. This is shown by the few attendance lists and the variable boundaries that they applied to the definition of the body of the councillors, during the same municipal year 17 Christian Maurel, ‘Du citadinage à la naturalité: l’intégration des étrangers à Marseille (XIIIe-XVIe siècle)’, in De Provence et d’ailleurs. Mélanges offerts à Noël Coulet, Provence Historique, 195-96 (1999), pp. 333-52. Acts of urban admission, however, remained very scarce for the fourteenth century, with three preserved acts in all (two in 1322, one in 1358). AD13, B15, fol. 9, 20; AMM, BB393. 18 AMM, BB20, fol. 40v, BB21, fol. 11r, 59v. 19 With 9 reports made in session and 16 subsequent reports requested from elected officials, a frequency of one report every 2.9 sessions was reached in 1348-1349.

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

and in the same register. For instance, in 1348-1349, three attendance lists were included in the register of deliberations, containing respectively 53, 68 and 54 names. Only the first of these lists, drawn up 22 October 1348, delineates in four columns a list of 43 councillors, followed by a second, shorter list of 10 appellati, ‘called’ citizens.20 In the following list, from 4 August 1349, this distinction fades with a continuous series of 68 names; this one seems composed of 45 well-known names and 23 more anonymous ones at the end, with each of which the notary associated a craft, such as marjellarius, sartor, piscator, etc. (coral diver, dressmaker, fisherman).21 These professional indications are testimony to their anonymity in the eyes of the notaries, who did not know all of them and, therefore, felt the need to specify their professions in order to recognize them later. If they were occasional members of the assembly, they were singularly quiet and not easily recognizable to the notaries. Finally, on 6 August 1349, the last of the three attendance lists includes 55 names in one and then two columns, without any mention of occupations other than that of the municipal notary.22 A comparison of these three lists shows the possible passage from a status of appellatus to that of councillor, assuming that such a status formally existed. For instance, Jean de Quaturcio, registered with the craftsmen as a marbleman in the second list, was included in the body of the councillors in the third. Giraud Fabre, who was not part of the appellati in the first list, was associated with the craftsmen in the following.23 Referring to the following register of the year 13501351, we can also observe the change from appellati to the rank of members, as elected agents recorded on the annual elective list.24 Similar evidence of citizens who were called to the council without being members can be found in other contemporary municipalities. This is the case in Sisteron, where the regularly drawn up attendance lists mention adjuncti, ‘assistant’ individuals, or ‘associates’ to the group of councillors. Yet here the distinction was clearly made, with a strict definition of the body of the councillors, which is limited to 12 persons whose list is established at the beginning of the year.25 There is nothing similar in Marseille, where some members of the craft guilds regularly participated in the work of the council, and others only occasionally.26

20 21 22 23 24

AMM, BB20, fol. 40v. AMM, BB20, fol. 165r-v. AMM, BB20, fol. 165v, 169r. AMM, BB20, fol. 40v, 169r. It is indeed the case of Jean de Balma and Bertrand de Vellaucio, appellati on 22 October 1348 and recorded on the annual elective list in August 1350. AMM, BB20, fol. 40v, BB21, fol. 5r, 6v. 25 Alexandra Gallo, Sisteron au Moyen Âge. Un atelier de la démocratie, XIIIe-XIVe siècles (Paris: CTHS, 2016), pp. 55-56, 239-41. 26 For example, Giraud Fabre, cobbler (sabaterius, AMM, BB20, fol. 40v, 162r, 166r, BB21, fol. 12r), Jean Étienne, ploughman (laborator, AMM, BB20, fol. 166r, BB21 fol. 7r, 12r), carpenter (fusterius, BB20, fol. 1r, 12r, 165v, BB21, fol. 6r, 14r, 59v, 82v, 84v). However, most craftsmen do not appear more than twice in the registers of deliberations, and the only professional indications among the 46 councillors mentioned at least 10 times in 1348-1351 relate to the most economically powerful crafts: Simon d’A pt, draper (draperius, BB20, fol. 49v); Guillaume Blanc, money changer, banker (campsor, BB21, fol. 136v); or Pierre Austrie, merchant (mercator, BB21, fol. 121v).

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During the first half of the thirteenth century, the town’s craft guilds (artes) were at the heart of the institutional functioning of Marseille. They had a function similar to that of the popolo in the Italian cities of the same period – although no terminology such as populus appears in the Marseille documentation. The Angevine victory of 1250-1260 signalled the abolition of the chief of crafts, who was replaced by the royal viguier responsible for the installation of the new municipality.27 However, with the fading of the trusteeship of the Marseille viguier during the fourteenth century, a more informal functioning was established, leaving de facto and not de jure a place to the craftsmen, along with the inflation of the council – statutorily limited to 83 members, though that number was usually exceeded at that time. This indicates a flexible institutional functioning, proceeding from a deliberate policy of the leaders of the assembly. Indeed, these attendance lists are associated each time with an assertion of the rights of the council in the face of the county supervision. On 4 August 1349, the council obtained from the royal viguier, by means of a petition read in the name of the 68 Marseillais, an agreement that he would pay on behalf of the royal court a sum of more than 938 florins for the dredging of the port, the maintenance of the defences and the city gates and embassy expenses. At the next session on 6 August, the council seized Marseille’s main source of tax revenues, the ‘table of the sea’, ceded at the price of 400 florins to the merchant and councillor Guillaume Mercier, in a deliberation supported by the list of 54 men present, a privilege theoretically reserved for the viguier, according to the Chapters of Peace.28 Thus attendance at the council and participation in its work as a member were sometimes left to the discretion of individuals. At least in particular circumstances, the leaders of the assembly, capable of preparing the meetings with a document such as that of 4 August 1350 spoke on behalf of a number of ‘quasi-members’ with their consent. That is to say, the restricted ruling body of the city government knew how to attract the support of wider sections of the population. The flexible functioning of the assembly, its capacity to open up according to circumstances and needs, can be seen at every level of the council. Its meetings sometimes seem to have been informal, but the event was not actually left to coincidence. Representativeness of the assembly and political crisis The impression of the honorable functioning of the council depended on its ability to fairly distribute responsibilities. The aim was to increase the citizens’ good will, which could only be achieved through equity and through the allocation of elective offices through merit, as such positions and responsibilities were 27 Chapters of Peace of 1257, 7th article, Qualiter eligantur officiales in Massilia, et consiliarii, et per quos… (AMM, AA1, fol. 124v-125r). 28 AMM, BB21, fol. 39, 165r-167r, 168v.

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

coveted. Fraudulent practices were deplored; for instance, on 16 August 1351, councillor Amiel Boniface demanded that the statutory rules be respected at the next elections at the beginning of the following mandate. He thus demanded the limitation of the number of councillors and fairness in their election per neighbourhood – and he obtained the adoption of a council ordinance to ensure it.29 The crises occurring during the years in which these examples took place (namely, the outbreak of the Black Death and latent civil war in Provence) played a significant role. For instance, the passage that immediately follows the deliberation of August 1351, dealing again with the forthcoming elections, is explicit: “Item, considering this period, when the difficulties and discord reign on all sides, especially because the time of the entry of the officers in this city draws near…”.30 The annual elections and the modalities of their running, therefore, were affected by political struggle. Irregularities were denounced by the members of the council, which intended to combat those irregularities. Largely bound to the power relations at work in the city and the council, such conflicts were worsened by the troubled context of ‘difficulties and discord’, in which each opposing group was tempted to claim more favourable access to municipal functions, of course in the name of shared values of equity. As a result, the assignment of positions and responsibilities within the elite governing the city was constantly shifting. This sheds light on the fluidity of individual participation in the various circles of municipal power in Marseille, a social plasticity that was nourished by the large attendance in the council and the fluidity of the boundaries between the different strata of the assembly. However, considering the existence of bottom-up processes, we must still ask how the commoners expressed their needs and demands at the municipal level. Many Marseille citizens, who were not members of the council, addressed themselves to it with ‘humble supplications’.31 Among the non-members of the council who frequented the assembly, these petitioners constituted a clear majority (65.4%). A significant number of citizens had recourse to this means of defending their interests, at the average rate of an identified claimant every 2.6 sessions. Persons who were not members of the assembly addressed their petitions through a councillor who publicly expressed their request or through a notary who read it. The petition of the cobblers presented on 6 February 1349 is an example of this; it is announced in the recording of deliberations with the formula, “Item, concerning the supplication presented by the cobblers, asking that…”. Their request to compel the curriers to supply them with sufficient 29 Reduci faciat juxta hujus civitatis Massilie (libertates) statuta pacisque capitula, ad numerum in dictis statutis et capitulis contentum, quiquidem consiliarii eligendi coequali electione eligantur pro hujus civitatis sexena (AMM, BB21, fol. 152r-v). 30 Item, meditato hujus temporis circulo quo angustie et discordia undique vigent, precipue quia vicinatur tempus introytus officialium in hac civitate (AMM, BB21, fol. 152v). 31 This formulation was for example used by Pierre l’Angevin, baker, “humbly supplicating” the council to let him make his bread according to a certain composition of flour: humiliter supplicati pro parte Petri Angelvini (AMM, BB20, fol. 34r).

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leather at the prescribed price was satisfied by the council, which ordered the town crier to publicize the ordinance on this subject in the city.32 The text presented on behalf of the cobblers is kept in the form of a short note inserted in the register, on a small loose sheet of a texture and format very different from that used by the notaries of the council. Written in Latin, the petition came indirectly to the councillors, after being prepared by a notary who ensured it conformed to the requirements of the registration and then orally translated it in front of the assembly. Therefore, a petition went through several filters, and the procedures did not allow non-councillors to express themselves directly. To speak directly during deliberations was a privilege reserved for the councilllors, and the participation of the cobblers in this session of the assembly was, thus, a few steps removed. However, since council meetings were publicly announced in the city, the presence of one or more members of the cobblers at the meeting on 6 February, although undocumented, is likely. Subsequently, publicity was given to the decision to satisfy the petition. The ordinance obtained by the cobblers was to the detriment of another craft, the curriers, who were implicitly accused of hampering the cobblers in their professional activity. It was frequently the case, however, that requests made to the council concerned disputes within the City, between crafts or between individuals. A petition could also come from the urban elite, counter to the demands of the governed population. The social balance of power outside of the assembly was often related to an increase in wages that landowners and other large employers complained about; they eventually obtained a ruling from the council that a limit would be placed on the ‘uncurbed demands’ of day labourers.33 Sometimes, in the lasting period of supply shortage that began in Marseille in 1348, caused by the Black Death and the political conflicts of Provence, the leaders demanded the punishment of those who were damaging their harvests. On 28 February 1351, Guillaume de Montolieu, jurisperitus, in response to plundering on his properties, requested that an ordinance would punish such acts more severely and that it would be applied more rigorously to the culprit he designated himself, a certain Bertrand de Castillon, a citizen who appears in the deliberations only upon this occasion. The council agreed with the request of the powerful jurist; in doing so, the commune intervened in the judicial process, to dole out punishment and to promulgate new statutory norms, applicable ad hoc and in an immediate and retroactive manner.34 Rejected petitions were rare; 2.3% of the supplications addressed by Marseillais were turned down by the council.35 32 Item, super supplicatione oblata pro parte semellatorum Massilie conquerentium, quod […] (AMM, BB21, fol. 82v). This recording is related to the loose sheet inserted in the same register (fol. 98bis). 33 On 25 January 1349, the council took the first measures of wage control, ad evitandum fraudes preconceptas and ad sassiandum ineffrenatam voluntatem ipsorum (AMM, BB20, fol. 80v-81r). 34 AMM, BB21, fol. 106v-107v. 35 For example, there is only one refusal in 44 supplications in 1348-1351, the request of Jean Bermond to obtain the notarial succession of his deceased brother Guillaume (23 August 1350; AMM, BB21, fol. 27r).

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

The petitions seem to have been presented at the sessions and then recorded to give the impression of an assembly that was amenable to the requests of the population, an institution that listened to the citizens. In return, the practice of supplications coming from the population of the city conferred a power of justice to their municipal institution.36 In number, the craft guilds dominated the petitioners; situated on the limits of the council, this world of craftsmen, fishermen, butchers, goldsmiths and notaries was closely tied to the wellbeing of the city. Therefore, they could hope for the success of petitions to the council, particularly on issues related to wage control or the regulation of manufacturing methods. Notaries in particular were often used by the council because of the succession procedures of notarial cartularies. Their work for the council earned them status and influence in private affairs, as well, which increased their personal wealth.37 The presence of wealthy notaries among the petitioners is, therefore, not a surprise. However, petitioning craftsmen could also be modest people, such as Jean Alaric, who along with two other fishermen from the upper part of the town was prosecuted by the viguier for fishing on a feast day. In this case, all three were defended by the council, which allowed them to sell their catch of the day before it was damaged.38 Yet other petitioners did not belong to integrated urban structures like the craft guilds, and they were often on the margins of the community. Women, Jews and individuals categorized as ‘poor men’ were among those who also turned to the council, and their supplications were not given less consideration than those of better-positioned citizens.39 Although these most vulnerable citizens were scarce among the known non-members of the council, during 1348-1351 all of their requests were satisfied. These few dozen petitioners seem to form a representative sample of the Marseille community. The 78 ordinary citizens concerned certainly did not attend the assembly often, if their average of 1.1 mentions per individual in the registers from 1348 to 1351 is compared with the average of five occurrences per member of the council during the same years. However, both councillors and ordinary citizens formulated requests to the council and were at the origin of a significant part of the assembly’s activity.40

36 This capacity of the petition to open on the judicial field, and more broadly on the government of populations, is developed in Hélène Millet, ‘Introduction’, in Suppliques et requêtes. Le gouvernement par la grâce en Occident (XIIe-XV e siècle), ed. by idem (Rome: EFR, 2003), pp. 1-18. 37 Thus Pierre Verdeillon, a notary, obtained authorization to transport grain out of the territory of the city to seed his land (AMM, BB21, fol. 45v). 38 Attentis personarum supplicantium conditionibus, pisciumque venditorum valet sardinarum fragilitate (AMM, BB21, fol. 132r). 39 The 10 individuals in question represent the fifth part of the persons enumerated here. The term pauper homo is used for Guillaume Micahelis and Girard Fulconis; they asked for the lifting of a fine for not respecting the taxes on the weight of the hay (AMM, BB21, fol. 54 ter, 60 bis r). In this same group, one should also note the presence of Bonjude Mosse, a Jew from Marseille, who was defended by the council, upon request, in a lawsuit against a Jewish inhabitant of Aix; he was defended by the court of Aix. 40 Thus, from 1348-1351, 58 deliberations, or 8.3% of the total, originated from a supplication formulated in the council, whether it was by a councillor or not.

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The demands and arbitrations raised by Marseillais citizens from various social backgrounds put all the people in the same relationship of expectation, even dependence, relating to decisions of the city council. The arguments citizens had to produce in order to be listened to, as well as the answers given to them, constituted an actual mode of government.41 The municipal institution and its assembly were at the centre of the exchanges, beginning with the formulation of requests, which were entrusted to a councillor or notary of the council. Their mediation was then carried out in a deliberation of the assembly, in a kind of negotiation. Finally, an answer was given in the form of ordinances that were often proclaimed aloud – almost one-third – to the whole population.42 In short, the assembly integrated both constituted groups like craft guilds and individuals from different strata of society in the procedure of petitioning. This institutional logic no doubt helped, in the context of generalized crisis, to alleviate the danger of social protest that occurred in other cities of the same period.43 Involving the urban population in the policy of the council, lessening social tensions To what extent was the wider populace of Marseille involved in the meetings of the council? During the crises of the fourteenth century, the council resorted to popular support in its political opposition to the representatives of the king. Registered royal representatives in meetings were, strictly speaking, called to the council (appellati).44 By inviting them, the assembly associated them with the political autonomy of the city. However, the city cleverly used complaints of the inhabitants to overrule these representatives. This was particularly clear on 20 June 1349, when the records mention the complaints of ‘miserable people’ in order to destabilize the authority of the sous-viguier (the royal head of the police in the city). The council availed itself of the plea of those anonymous and marginalized inhabitants, who without the council’s help could not assert their interests – in fact, to carry out its own policy. An inquiry was then organized in the city into the alleged misdeeds of the sous-viguier, and the participation of these inhabitants was encouraged in the form of testimonies and denunciations.45 On such occasions, the council called itself the consilium universitatis totius civitatis, ‘the council of the universitas of the whole city’, the institutional incarnation 41 On requests made in the process of inquiries, as “the system of giving, on which the act of governing is based”, Claude Gauvard, ‘Introduction’, in Quand Gouverner c’est enquêter, Les pratiques politiques de l’enquête princière (Occident, XIIIe-XV e siècles), ed. by Thierry Pécout (Paris: Sorbonne, 2010), pp. 9-19, at p. 18. 42 Eleven of the council’s 31 responses to supplications were proclaimed aloud in 1348-1349, or 35.5%. 43 Albert Rigaudière, ‘Hiérarchie socio-professionnelle et gestion municipale dans les villes du Midi français au bas Moyen Âge’, Revue Historique, 299 (1982), pp. 25-68. 44 There are 23 of them, 29.5% of the total non-members of the board. Sessions of the 22 October 1348 and the 4 August 1349 (AMM, BB20, fol. 40v, 165v-166r). 45 Facte sunt querimonie nonnule, et per personas miserabiles que sine favore debito non possent circa ipsarum querimoniarum procecutionem vacare (AMM, BB20, fol. 157r).

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

of the whole community. Rarely, the assembly was called a ‘parliament’,46 as happened twice in 1350-1351. This occurred first on 20 August 1350, when the new viguier had to admit that the council might impose a statutory amendment on him, which would need to be submitted to a public parliament gathered at the Accoules cemetery. The next occurrence was 18 August 1351, when Councillor Pierre Martin proposed that the ‘populace’ should be called together because he wanted to know its ‘opinion on these matters’.47 Even if it were small, there was a possibility of the meeting of a parlamentum of the entire male population. The parlamentum seems to have been assembled on a third occasion. On 14 July 1351, messengers from Louis of Tarentum and Queen Jeanne presented the letters of the sovereigns in session, raising a new tax for the war. Faced with this demand, the council called for a general parliament of the population, charged with answering the demand.48 The parlamentum itself is not documented, but the reply formulated the following day by the council was a flat refusal opposed to the request for royal subsidy, as prejudicial to the Chapters of Peace.49 These cases show that, as a last resort and for major questions, the assembly was responsible for an assembly of all the inhabitants, legitimizing the existence as well as the decisions of the first. Indeed, the possibility of the meeting of the parlamentum, such as on the three occasions described above, was systematically conceived as a support for the policy of the council and a possible recourse against trusteeship. The assembly, from this point of view, seemed to have had little doubt about its representativeness or the support it could obtain from the population it administered. Crisis, popular pressure, common good and taxes In the midst of a political, military, economic, dietary or sanitary crisis, the situation of the Marseillais, particularly the weakest citizens, was precarious,50 and the ability of the leaders of the town’s main assembly to take charge of the tasks of the common good and the solidarity of the inhabitants was put to the test. During the period of disorder that began in 1348 and lasted for several

46 Such was the exchange of the oaths between Jeanne and the Marseillais on 29 January 1348, which was not an actual deliberation, but in which the expression of the inhabitants was still present, by their collective commitment of fidelity, in reply to that of the queen. AMM, AA72, doc. 5; Thierry Pécout, ‘Marseille et la reine Jeanne’, in Marseille au Moyen Âge, pp. 214-21. 47 Illud quidem parlamentum tunc concedet requirentibus pro parte dicti consilii; quod convocetur de popularibus nonnullis et eorum oppiniones audiantur (AMM, BB21, fol. 20v, 156v). 48 Et ideo necessario opportet dictam universitatem et populum Massilie per ipsum consilium evocare et facere congregari (séance du 14/7/1351, fol. 140-44). 49 Session of 15 July 1351 (AMM, BB21, fol. 144v-145). 50 As can be seen according to the comparative studies before and after the Black Death in 1348; see Francine Michaud, ‘From apprentice to wage-earner: child labour before and after the Black Death’, in Essays on medieval childhood, responses to recent debates, ed. by Joël Rosenthal (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), pp. 73-90; Francine Michaud, Earning Dignity. Labour Conditions and Relations during the Century of the Black Death in Marseille (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016).

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decades, for instance, the important families of the urban nobility and the merchant oligarchy ruling the council were able to silence the rivalries within the municipal institution. Several members who were among the richest in the city used their own wealth to compensate for the financial shortfalls of the Marseille administration, whose tax revenues had been confiscated by the county’s government during the thirteenth century. In performing its fiscal policies, as we will see, the council reconquered its formally lost rights and built a stronger political legitimacy, while also safeguarding its own interests. At that time, the income of the county was affected by the crisis of the 1340s, especially the tax named the ‘table of the sea’, which was collected on the delivery of goods to the port. The tax burden was difficult to levy, as is evidenced by a request to raise the tax on ovens in September 1348 – a request to which the council gave satisfaction. As a result, the financial responsibility of the viguier and his administration was reduced.51 Faced with the financial shortage of the king, the universitas took charge of the City’s supply of food, obtaining in the summer of 1348 the delivery of a wheat cargo by the Avignonian François Raymond, for a value of 2,000 florins. This sum, which remained unpaid for months and aroused sanctions from the papacy, functioned as the engine of the municipal reconquest of the tax system.52 The council began by organizing the distribution of wheat in the city by appointing delegates to collect the proceeds of the sale in each part of the town and by reinforcing control over the weight and the prices of bread. Then, faced with the impossibility of recovering the totality of the due sum, measures of tax deduction were taken, first on the 1000 wealthiest houses.53 Meanwhile, the Provençal crisis had been worsening, resulting in measures of defence and armament, as well as the organization of numerous embassies, all of which were urgent necessities requiring costly financing. The municipal year 1348-49, when the crisis was deepening, was also the year of the implementation of an increasingly important municipal taxation ordered by the council, leading to an exceptional tax on all merchant operations in the city. Specifically, the syndics obtained the proceeds of a collection of one denier for each ‘sou’ on purchases and sales – i.e. a levy of 8.33% – and a recently instituted commission of the ‘Twelve of the War’ received control of the measurements of wine, with plenariam potestatem, the full power to dispose of the sums obtained.54 These new taxes weighed heavily on trade, but also on the Marseille population, and the resistance of the citizens prevented a further increase in municipal 51 The farmer of the tax on ovens justifies his demand by the crisis situation, namely the high mortality during the past year (i.e. the epidemic of plague). Propter pestilentiam anno proxime lapso sustinentem altissimo decurssam in Massila, quia non erat omnino copia personarum; Session of 5 May 1349 (AMM, BB20, fol. 134r). 52 AMM, BB20, fol. 8, 10, 34. 53 The council elected six councillors in charge of drawing up the list (AMM, BB20, fol. 10-12, 19-20). 54 Session of 4 April 1349 (AMM, BB20, fol. 117r-118r). These measures were tightened in the following sessions, by applying them to barter and then to exported fish (session of 7 May 1349; AMM, BB20, fol. 134v).

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

taxation that had been planned. On 14 April 1349, the day on which indirect taxes on market transactions and on measurements of wine were decided, the directors of the council initially intended to carry out an inventory of personal fortunes by elected councillors appointed to each part of the city. However, the debating process decided otherwise: the notary had to cancel the deliberation already recorded, justifying it in the margin of the register with the note that ‘the major pars of the council did not consent’.55 Due to pressure from the assembly and, therefore, of a wider population than the narrow circles of those preparing the sessions, the council renounced the intended seizure of the property of all the inhabitants. The shift in the decision and the adoption of indirect taxation on trade took place to the detriment of economic activities and the town’s supply, which a deliberation at a previous meeting had tried to protect56. These successive turnovers in taxation reveal internal dissensions within the council. While the leaders intended to privilege economic activity and supply, the enlarged assembly wished to protect the property of individuals. This can be understood in several ways. The social and economic interests defended by each party were probably not the same, just as the consciousness of common interest could diverge according to the extension of the decision-making body. In this case, the enlarged assembly could have reflected the commoners’ opinion, since indirect taxation might be considered less painful to the rank and file of the population. However, one can also see in this example the expression of a broader, less opulent milieu than the few large families of the urban aristocracy and the merchant oligarchy. Arguably, craftsmen, artisans and small notables who made up the largest circles in the assembly felt that they were targeted by a seizure and protected their own interests to the detriment of the most fragile populations, who did not take part in the council’s activity. However, in the absence of an explicit justification for this ordinance in the registration, one must limit oneself to these few hypotheses and notice generally that the board used caution on this ground, allowing a discussion that could lead to modifications of their decisions. This example demonstrates that such an exceptional tax, subject to the decision and the control of the council, was difficult to establish. The previously mentioned taxation of market operations was, therefore, subject to avoidance practices by the inhabitants concerned. On 7 May, less than a month later, the council had to create an ordinance to impose barter and exchange transactions, which one can assume they multiplied as a result of the new taxes; three councillors were delegated to estimate the price of the goods exchanged and levy the equivalent of the tax due of one denier per sou.57 Three weeks later, the Marseillais responsible for the indirect levies on consumption, or perhaps 55 Non fuit presens refformatio rescitata, cum eam, licet ordinata prius, dictum consilium revocaverit in eo quod non conscentiit in ea major pars dicti consilii et ideo cancellata (AMM, BB20, fol. 117r-118r, here 117r). 56 On 10 April 1349: abolition of all taxes on the sale of goods (AMM, BB20, fol. 114v). 57 Session of 7 May 1349 (AMM, BB20, fol. 134r).

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rather the merchants who profited from the sales, seemed able to make their point of view heard by the council; the delegate of the council responsible for fixing the measurements of wine was ordered to officiate in moderation, ‘so that those who wish could buy it’.58 The Marseillais who took charge of the city’s finances, namely the tax collectors, the controllers of measurements or distributors of wheat (who also sold it and whose proceeds were used to pay debts contracted with merchants and suppliers) were, therefore, subjected to double pressure: pressure from the council that ordered them and pressure from the population on whom they had to levy the taxes. This explains the length of the recovery of the debts of wheat. In early May 1349, at least nine months after delivery by the merchant François Raymond, the councillors who were elected for each neighbourhood to recover the takings of wheat were summoned to return the proceeds of their distribution, within a week and under penalty of seizure of their personal property. The paragraph concerning this decision is marked by a marginal annotation, a pied-de-mouche traced to the left of the deliberation, indicating the recurrence of this case of wheat payment throughout the mandate 1348-1349.59 This last threat of seizure of the collectors’ personal property throws light on the relationship between the council and the population from the point of view of taxation. First, the difficulties of levying encountered by the councillors responsible for carrying it out are well-documented from 1348 to 1351. In early April 1351, fraud related to new agricultural taxes was reported; the viguier was obliged to charge the contributions to the farmers, by means of documents specifically established for the collection. The council here was at the forefront of the struggle against the malicia of the bad payers and intended to punish them. On this occasion, the existence of a tax registry, now lost, is documented, doubtless a kind of account that included a list of these farmers in the fourteenth century, and by means of which the court notary might call the taxpayers.60 A few days later, the butchers demanded the suspension of another tax, which was refused by the council. Yet during the same session, the assembly agreed to suspend the surety seized from farmers suspected of fraud, the farmers declaring themselves innocent.61 Taxes were, therefore, subject to constant pressures and negotiations with the population. At the next session, the council adopted a deliberation to oblige the ecclesiastics of Marseille to pay the tax of one denier on each émine of wheat, which they refused to pay. Two delegates were sent to the bishop and other ecclesiastical lords to obtain the payment in question.62 Thus, after almost three years of crisis, the entire population, clerics included, were subject to taxes imposed by the council, which itself carried out the collection and tax recovery.

58 Ut inde ad illud precium possit de ipsis per emere volentes haberi (AMM, BB20, fol. 149v; session of 29 May 1349). 59 Session of 7 May 1349 (AMM, BB20, fol. 134r). 60 Session of 5 May 1351 (AMM, BB21, fol. 116r). 61 Session of 16 April 1351 (AMM, BB21, fol. 117r). 62 Session of 22 April 1351 (AMM, BB21, fol. 119v-120r).

The Unive rsitas Massilie , an Assembly of  the Whole City?

Conclusion Thus, a distinction between the councillors, especially the most active and the most prominent, and the rest of the citizens of Marseille did exist. The relationship was that between those who ruled and those who were governed, and it revolved largely around the assembly, which was the place of decision-making, but also a point of contact and a node of exchange between the members of the council and those they administered. However, this distinction had nebulous boundaries, especially in regards to the interactions between all the Marseillais who attended the council and the possibility offered to non-members to become part of the municipal activity and to be more or less involved in the functioning of the institution. If there were a clear separation, it was between the mass of the councillors and the ordinary citizens on one hand and the representatives of the trusteeship on the other. The royal officers seem to have been present at the decision-making process without any real ability to intervene. The context of crisis reinforced this situation, which placed the royal officers almost outside the assembly. The incarnation of the city in its assembly became increasingly effective from 1348 onwards, due to the troubled events of the crisis years for which we have complete quantitative data, as well as over the course of the months during which the reseizing of the municipal privileges took place. A certain political balance maintained itself until the mid-1380s, when the royal trusteeship over the city stabilized during the accession of the second Angevine dynasty. At that time, the social and political elites of Marseille obtained sovereign municipal rules, which assured them firmer control over the city, formalized the diminishment of the royal officers’ role and allowed the leaders of the council to govern without political practices open to the lower-level citizens.63 The assembly and the problems it faced were the instruments of constituting a political society. In the Marseille community, large circles of individuals, varying in social and economic power as well as their individual choices, formed a cohesive whole. Participation in deliberative debates, the implementation of decisions and the involvement of councillors, notably financially through taxation and borrowing, were the constituent elements of this political society. Through these actions, the members of the council constructed a public space, a ‘political space’,64 capable of calming tensions by channelling them against the trusteeship as foreign powers.

63 This set of new municipal rules was granted by Queen Marie de Blois in the summer of 1385, after long negotiations prior to the royal entry of her son Louis the II in the city. Royal letters of 20 August 1385 (AMM, AA8; Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, B 1408, fol. 6; 14E 856). Christian Maurel, ‘Pouvoir royal et pouvoir municipal (XIVe-XVe siècle)’, in Marseille au Moyen Âge, pp. 225-31. 64 Azoulay, ‘L’Espace public’, passim.

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Popular Politics and Political Transformation in Burgos, 1345-1426 To vote or not to vote; is that really the question? Modern democracies pride themselves on allowing the participation of the people in political decision-making, namely through voting in elections and referenda. Nevertheless, over the past few years, media and academia have decried the process and the results of elections in the United States, France, Austria and Brazil, and they have debated and contested, not only the outcomes, but also the holding of referenda in the United Kingdom, Australia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Catalonia. Is the tide turning against democracy? Perhaps, but that is not what these debates are about. Recent public debates examine the conditions in which a meaningful and effective vote can be held, how public debates and discussion inform the vote and how voting tools such as electoral colleges or first-past-the-post systems can be used. We do not debate whether people should participate ‘more’ or ‘less’ in politics; we debate how and when. However, while debates about contemporary popular participation are thus predominantly qualitative, the study of medieval societies remains pervasively quantitative. Most narratives of the political systems of late medieval towns describe popular participation in terms of the commons’ having or struggling to acquire more or less power or being able to participate more or less in political processes. Historians have thus produced over the last decades a number of studies on the means the commons employed to strive for and access power, as well as detailed narratives on the concentration of power by monarchies and oligarchies, the exclusion of the commons and their resistance to these processes.1 A few historians, often focusing

1 The main works on this topic, especially those produced over the past years, are often centred around the themes of revolt and conflict, while previous work paid closer attention to urban elites. It is impossible to give here a complete overview of this vast historiographical field. However, some of the works used for this article include (from more to less recent): The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, ed. by Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Fabrizio Titone, ‘Introduction. The Concept of Disciplined Dissent and Its Deployment: A Methodology’, in Disciplined Dissent. Strategies of Non-Confrontational Protest in Europe from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, ed. by idem (Rome: Viella, 2016), pp. 7-22; The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe: Communication and Popular Politics, ed. by Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); Patrick Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities : Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370-1440 (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Oscar López Gómez, ‘Élites Urbanas y Conflictividad Social. Una Reflexión a Partir Del Caso de Toledo En El Siglo XV’, Vínculos de Historia, 4 (2015), pp. 228-50; La comunidad medieval como esfera pública, ed. by Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer et al. (Sevilla: SUP, 2014); Urban Elites and Aristocratic Behaviour in the Spanish Kingdoms at the End of the Middle Ages, ed. by María Asenjo González (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Pablo Gonzalez Martin • University of Oxford Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 53-71.

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on English towns, have also offered an account of urban politics less focused on conflict and have acknowledged the existence of consensual interactions between the commons and the oligarchies.2 However, they have also used this perspective to offer an analysis that, although rich and nuanced, is still rather quantitative, explaining why and when commoners participated more or less, rather than engaging with how they participated. In this chapter, I will argue that the political transformations of late medieval cities should not only be analysed in terms of quantitative gains and setbacks, but also qualitatively, in terms of transformation, adaptation, and development.3 Late medieval citizens did not just ‘lose’ or ‘gain’ political power; they developed, transformed and refined their means of political participation. These processes of political development and growth were synchronous and related to the processes of strengthening and developing monarchical and oligarchical power, but they were not necessarily concurrent or antagonistic to them.4 Burgos 1345-1426: a municipal reform, and the rise of the oligarchy? Late medieval Burgos provides a rich case study both for what historians have so far achieved and for the many possibilities of further development in the study of popular political participation. Two fundamental episodes marked



Silvia Andrea Mondragón, ‘Participación política de pecheros en Castilla Tardomedieval: los posibles márgenes de acción entre la diferenciación socioeconómica del sector y la imposición del Concejo Cerrado’, Espacio Tiempo y Forma. Serie III, Historia Medieval, no. 25 (2012), pp. 309-26; Marc Boone, À la recherche d’une modernité civique. La société yrbaine des anciens Pays-Bas Au bas Moyen Âge (Brussels: ULB, 2010); Rivolte urbane e rivolte contadine nell’Europa del Trecento: un confronto, ed. by Monique Bourin, Giovanni Cherubini, and Giuliano Pinto (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2008); Charlotte Carpenter, ‘The Formation of Urban Elites : Civic Officials in Late-Medieval York, 1476-1525’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2000); Marc Boone and Maarten Prak, ‘Rulers, Patricians and Burghers: The Great and Little Traditions of Urban Revolt in the Low Countries’, in A Miracle Mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European Perspective, ed. Karel Davids and Leo Lucassen (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 99-134; María Isabel del Val Valdivieso, ‘Ascenso Social y Lucha Por El Poder En Las Ciudades Castellanas Del Siglo XV’, En La España Medieval, 17 (1994), pp. 157-84; José María Monsalvo Antón, ‘La participación política de los pecheros en los municipios castellanos de la Baja Edad Media: Aspectos organizativos’, Studia historica. Historia medieval, 7 (1989), pp. 37-94; José María Monsalvo Antón, El sistema politico concejil: el ejemplo del señorio medieval de Alba de Tormes y su concejo de villa y tierra (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1988); Julio A. Pardos Martínez, ‘Comunidad y “tradición” municipal: Burgos a mediados del siglo XV’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 22 (1986), pp. 131-56; Yolanda Guerrero Navarrete, Organización y gobierno en Burgos durante el reinado de Enrique IV de Castilla, 1453-1476 (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma, 1986). 2 Christian Liddy, Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250-1530 (Oxford: OUP, 2017); Stephen H. Rigby and Elizabeth Ewan, ‘Government, Power and Authority 1300-1540’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. by David Palliser (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 291-312. 3 See John Watt’s ideas of the growth of polities: John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). 4 The collaboration of commons and monarchy has been studied, for instance, in Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, ‘Las voces del común en el mundo urbano de la España Atlántica en la Baja Edad Media’, in Los grupos populares en la ciudad medieval Europea, ed. Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, Beatriz Arízaga Bolumburu and Jelle Haemers (Logroño: IER, 2014), pp. 301-44.

popular politics and political transformation in burgos, 1345-1426

the city’s political history in this period. In 1345, King Alfonso XI banned the system of governance by open council, whereby the assembly of all franchised citizens constituted the city’s extended governing body and established instead the system of government usually called the ‘Regimiento’, after the name of the closed council of governors appointed for life by the crown, who thenceforth ruled the city.5 As the 1345 royal ordinances banned all assemblies of the commons and handed the government to a closed elite, this episode has been traditionally viewed as a fundamental step in the establishment of the power of the monarchy and the urban elites and in the political exclusion of the commonalty.6 Decades later, in 1426, an until then seemingly dormant commonalty confronted the city council and obtained, through the mediation of the crown’s envoy Diego Gómez de Sandoval, a series of new political rights, enshrined in the Sentencia del Conde de Castro. This second episode has been read as a gain for the commonalty, though a very limited one, as the government of the city continued to be restricted to a closed oligarchy.7 The elements of this interpretation are not wrong. From 1345, the monarchy and the oligarchy did expand their powers, and this process was modified but not reversed by the 1426 Sentencia. However, the picture is incomplete. The process of strengthening of monarchies and oligarchies did not necessarily clash with the development of popular participation, and the development of rich and nuanced civic politics was not limited to heightened episodes of conflict or royal intervention. Thus, in this chapter, I will study how Burgos’s political system was transformed between 1345 and 1427, arguing that what took place in these years was a progressive, complex and intelligent process of development of the city’s means of popular political participation, sometimes through conflict but often through broad consensus and collaboration. When King Alfonso XI banned the system of open councils in 1345 and established the Regimiento, he insisted that he did so because, in years past, the gatherings of the people had been riotous and disorderly, a source of confusion rather than a means of good and effective governance.8 Historians of late medieval Burgos, however, have not fully credited Alfonso’s explanation, and







5 Julián García Sáinz de Baranda, La ciudad de Burgos y su Concejo en la Edad Media (Burgos: Editorial El Monte Carmelo, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 68-70 Juan Antonio Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos en la baja Edad Media (1345-1426) (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1978). 6 Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, p. 69; Teófilo F. Ruiz, ‘El siglo XIII y primera mitad del siglo XIV’, in Burgos en la Edad Media, ed. Julio Valdeón Baruque (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1984), p. 174; José María Monsalvo Antón, ‘La participación política de los pecheros en los municipios castellanos de la Baja Edad Media: Aspectos organizativos’, Studia historica. Historia medieval, 7 (1989), p. 39. 7 Juan Antonio Bonachía Hernando, ‘Algunas cuestiones en torno al estudio de la sociedad bajomedieval burgalesa’, in La ciudad de Burgos. Actas del congreso de Historia de Burgos (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1985), p. 73; Julio A. Pardos Martínez, ‘Comunidad y “tradición” municipal’, p. 135; Yolanda Guerrero Navarrete, ‘La fiscalidad como espacio privilegiado de construcción político identitaria urbana: Burgos en la Baja Edad Media’, Studia historica. Historia medieval, 30 (2012), pp. 50-51. 8 AMB HI 154, transcribed in Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, pp. 151-54.

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they suggest that the main reason behind the establishment of the Regimiento in 1345 was the urban elite’s and the crown’s agenda to strengthen their control over the town.9 Nevertheless, it is possible that both explanations are compatible. Alfonso XI might have exaggerated the problems of communal assemblies in order to advance the crown’s interests, but he probably did not completely invent them. Burgos’s population has been estimated at around 10,000 people by the mid-fourteenth century.10 Even if we consider that the female population was excluded from politics and that not all of the male population enjoyed full political rights,11 this would still mean that open councils could have involved several hundred people.12 Modern democratic theory, however, contends that actual deliberation is impracticable in such large gatherings.13 Even our modern parliaments, which have strong regulations and are composed of professional politicians, do not usually have more than a few hundred members, and even then, orderly discussions are not guaranteed. The accusations of disorder, confusion and danger, therefore, might have served the interests of the monarchy and the oligarchy, but they also probably were addressing a genuine problem. Paradoxically, Bonachía Hernando did not point to over-crowding but rather to low attendance as a cause of the banning of the concejos abiertos.14 In fact, overcrowding and low-attendance could have played complementary parts in the decline of the concejos abiertos, as the experience of over-crowded meetings and impracticable discussions would have made citizens less likely to attend them. Open councils were caught between two problems: if everybody came, actual discussion was hardly possible; if few people came, discussion was possible, but the concejo itself was a failed communal assembly. Moreover, according to studies on the open councils, the urban elites who ultimately composed the Regimiento were already prominent in the open council meetings.15 It is easy to imagine that lesser commoners would have been intimidated by the presence of the oligarchs in the meeting, big or small, and that they would have been unlikely to participate in actual debate whenever this meant antagonising the most powerful men in town. The system of participation through open council was, therefore, problematic by the time Alfonso XI banned it. However, the 9 Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, p. 71. He also adds in a footnote that other secondary reasons included demographic growth, decline of the open council for lack of attendance, or the precedents of ‘concejo reducido’ (reduced council) implanted by some Castilian cities during the first half of the fourteenth century. 10 Ibidem, p. 43. 11 María del Carmen Carlé, ‘Boni Homines’ y Hombres Buenos (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 1964); Joaquín Cerda Ruiz-Funes, ‘Hombres Buenos, Jurados y Regidores En Los Municipios Castellanos de La Baja Edad Media’, Actas Del I Symposium de Historia de La Administración, 1 (1970), pp. 161-206. 12 No attendance lists of these open councils have been preserved, hence the need for estimations. 13 Robert E. Goodin, Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn (Oxford: OUP, 2012), p. 11. 14 Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, p. 71. Monsalvo Antón also points to the progrssive decadence of the open concejos in Castile prior to 1345: Monsalvo Antón, ‘La participación política de los pecheros’, p. 39. 15 Bonachía Hernando, ‘Algunas cuestiones’, p. 70.

popular politics and political transformation in burgos, 1345-1426

most important proof that open communal assemblies did not work lies not in the arguments of monarchs and urban elites, but rather in the fact that, after 1345, no popular initiative for further political participation tried to bring open assemblies back. In 1345, therefore, the monarchy and the oligarchy did expand their power and political rights, but the commonalty was also thrust into political transformation, as the 1345 ordinances forced them to abandon an old and ineffective system and pushed them into finding a new, better-suited one. The vecindades and the new participation system It is difficult to know exactly what happened in the decades immediately after 1345, as the earliest council minutes that survive date from 1379. From this year, however, some of the main features of the pre-1426 system of popular participation quickly emerge. First, by the end of the fourteenth century, the commonalty was clearly structured by neighbourhoods –in Castilian, vecindades or collaciones.16 In the late fourteenth century, these organizational units of the commons were fundamental in processes of military organisation and the raising of funds. In 1379, the council minutes record how the city council organised the collection of money for payments to the crown by assigning an amount to each of the vecindades.17 This was not the first time that the vecindades had done this, as the council minutes also register several reimbursements to the neighbourhoods of certain sums that they had previously given as a loan.18 The vecindades were also the basic structural unit for the levying of men for the urban militia, both for the watch and defence of the city and for external military operations.19 It is also important to note that the vecindades were not at this point working as individual or disaggregated groups within the commonalty from whom the urban government could request money or men ad hoc. The neighbourhoods of Burgos were, and consistently acted as, constituent members of a corporate community.20 All of the payments and loans raised from the commonalty from the end of the fourteenth century onward were made by all of the vecindades in a collective and federative effort.21 Each vecindad contributed different amounts according 16 María Isabel del Val Valdivieso, ‘Transformaciones Sociales y Luchas Urbanas por el Poder en el Área del Obispado de Burgos a Fines de la Edad Media’, Edad Media: Revista de Historia, 3 (2000), p. 119. For neighbourhoods and popular politics in other Castilian citiessee Monsalvo Antón, El sistema politico, pp. 243-50. 17 Archivo Municipal de Burgos (henceforth AMB), Libros de Actas (henceforth LA) 1, fol. 74r. 18 AMB LA 1, fols 78r, 82v. 19 AMB LA 3, fols 71r-v, 74r-75r; LA 4, fols 9r-v, 46v-47r, 47r-v. 20 For the importance of corporate politics for popular participation see Christian Liddy and Jelle Haemers, ‘Popular Politics in the Late Medieval City: York and Bruges’, The English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 775, 800-01. See also Maarten Prak, ‘Corporate Politics in the Low Countries: Guilds as Institutions, 14th to 18th Centuries’, in Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries. Work, Power and Representation, ed. by Idem et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), pp. 74-106; Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: University Press, 2014). 21 AMB LA 2, fol. 13v, 36v-37r; LA 3 21r, 26r-v, 33r.

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to their size and economic weight, but all of them contributed towards a single financial goal. The same applied for the levy of men; all vecindades contributed according to their size. The ‘commonalty by vecindades’, the structure of the commonalty which characterised the whole fifteenth century and which was the basis for the organisation of the city during the revolt of the Comunidades in 1520,22 seems to have been in place not long after the establishment of the government by Regimiento in 1345. Therefore, Burgos’s commonalty was around the 1370s already organised in a strong corporate structure, which had a fundamental role in the finances of the city. However, they lacked an effective forum for collective discussion and popular participation. After the 1345 reforms, the only official forums accessible to the commons were the concejos. These assemblies, remnants of the pre-1345 system, were similar in format to the older concejos abiertos – publicly announced gatherings that, in theory, any citizen could attend–23 yet they were nothing like the old open assemblies in terms of their role in civic politics. While pre1345 concejos abiertos were forums for deliberation and decision-making, the post-1345 concejos had an almost exclusively ritualistic and communicational function.24 In the new concejos, the commons were most often required as simple witnesses, such as for ceremonies like the public taking of oaths, the reading of certain royal letters, or the receiving of civic councillors to their offices.25 Public attendance at these concejos, recorded in attendance lists from 1379, was low, and few concejos were attended by more than twenty-five people.26 Furthermore, studies on who was present at these meetings show that attendees tended to be not representatives of the general population, but rather members of the upper layers of the middle classes, what Guerrero Navarrete calls ‘the aspiring elites’.27 Most importantly, even this small and relatively powerful audience had a passive role in the assembly. Concejos might have survived as remnants of the pre-1345 political system, but they had been stripped of any potential for political participation. The fact that concejos were not actual popular participatory assemblies has led some historians to argue that, after 1345, Burgos’s commonalty was completely

22 Hilario Casado Alonso, Nuevos Documentos Sobre la Guerra de Las Comunidades En Burgos (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1985), pp. 247-60. 23 The Concejos are described in Guerrero Navarrete, Organización y gobierno, pp. 87-94. 24 Monsalvo Antón, ‘La participación política de los pecheros’, pp. 56, 58. 25 Ibidem, pp. 87-94. The only exception to this would be the auctioning of rights on tax-farming, which involved a very limited amount of individuals. See Yolanda Guerrero Navarrete, ‘Hacia una prosopografía de los grupos financieros Burgaleses’, in Fiscalidad, sociedad y poder enlLas ciudades Castellanas de la baja Edad Media, ed. by Yolanda Guerrero Navarrete (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2006), pp. 203-39. 26 AMB LA 2 fol. 7r (79 people); LA 5, fol. 21v (43 people); fols 38v-39r (50 people). 27 Yolanda Guerrero Navarrete, ‘Elites urbanas en el siglo XV: Burgos y Cuenca’, Revista d’Historia Medieval, 9 (1998), pp. 81-104; Yolanda Guerrero Navarrete, ‘Fórmulas de transmisión del poder en el sistema oligárquico Burgalés del siglo XV’, in La Ciudad de Burgos. Actas Del Congreso de Historia de Burgos (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1985), pp. 179-84. See also del Val Valdivieso, ‘Ascenso social’, p. 168.

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excluded from institutional politics.28 According to historians of Burgos, the tension resulting from this exclusion exploded in the 1420s, when the commonalty actively fought the city council for extended participatory rights.29 It is, however, difficult to believe that the complex and dynamic city of Burgos would have waited almost 80 years before addressing a political problem that affected the running of its finances and defence and that its powerful commonalty would have endured almost a century of complete political exclusion. Instead, I contend that some of the most important means of popular political participation were progressively developed in Burgos decades before the Sentencia of the Count of Castro and that they were not the product of open conflict, but rather a collective and progressive construction that outperformed the older system of open communal assemblies. By the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the need for collaboration with the neighbourhoods was apparent, and the government began exploring new means of communication and participation beyond the open councils. At the beginning of 1388, for instance, the crown demanded a subsidy of 200,000 maravedís to the city, and the government distributed the payment among the vecindades. In March 1388, however, the city council had not yet managed to collect the money, so they decided to deputy some of their own members to each of the vecindades to accelerate the collection process.30 This did not work well, and by June they still had not received the payment from all the vecindades. They then sent a stern letter to the vecindad of San Gil, reminding them of their duty to contribute like the rest and ordering them to appoint two of their own neighbours to supervise the collection process and to liaise with the city’s mayordomo (bursar).31 Three years later, in 1391, active consent and collaboration of the citizenry was again critically needed32. In September of this year, after what were probably years of conflict over the jurisdiction of certain lands, the city council had just brokered a treaty of peace with the Duke of Benavente. The treaty, however, could have been easily breached if any of Burgos’s citizens attacked any of Benavente’s properties, and this would have resulted in the city’s incurring severe penalties. It was, therefore, of fundamental importance that every member of the commonalty knew about the agreement and swore to abide by it. The council then activated the tool they then had available for the commonalty to come together and swear an oath, and they called a concejo for 9 September.33 That day, the scribe recorded the extraordinarily large attendance of 79 vecinos, around four times the attendance at an average concejo. Yet this number, although high when compared to most concejos, meant that only around

28 Guerrero Navarrete, Organización y gobierno, pp. 106-13; Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, pp. 73-75. 29 Bonachía Hernando, ‘Algunas Cuestiones’. The nature of these claims will be discussed below. 30 AMB LA 2, fol. 13v. 31 AMB LA 1, fol. 32r. 32 The following events can be found in AMB LA 2, fols 7r-10r. 33 AMB LA 2, fols 6r-v.

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3% of the citizens were present to take the oath. The councillors, realising that this was insufficient, stated that ‘because not everybody from the city was there’ (por quanto todos los de la çibdad non estavan) they would have certain men of each vecindad go to the parish churches of their neighbourhoods and there take the oaths of ‘everyone’ (cada uno).34 The city council, at least by 1391, had realised the importance of opening channels for both communication and effective policing, not only with ‘the people’ in general, but also with the units which structured Burgos’s commonalty. Sending their own people to the neighbourhoods had proved ineffective, so they began using neighbours of each vecindad to enable communication and the implementation of policies. This was, of course, a system of collaboration and administration rather than active participation. The men in charge of tax collections by neighbourhoods in 1388, or those in charge of collecting the oaths in 1391, were still not deputised by each vecindad, but rather selected by the government, and their task was to communicate and organise, not to negotiate or convey proposals. However, a fundamental change was underway; the commonalty as a political subject was no longer the mass of citizens of the pre-1345 open council, but instead a corporate structure of neighbourhoods, with which the government needed to engage for effective governance. The space of the commonalty’s expression as a political actor had also begun to be decentralised from the central communal gathering to parish gatherings, and members of each neighbourhood had begun liaising between the government and the neighbourhoods. By 1398, when more council minutes are preserved, the system of participation had taken another step forward. The men appointed by the government to link the neighbourhoods and the city council had turned into neighbourhood representatives. The council minutes mention the attendance of certain ‘omes buenos de las vecindades’ sent by the neighbourhoods at seven city council meetings in 1398, one in 1399 (only January of this year survives), four in 1411, and three between January and April 1423.35 These men attended assemblies where matters of financial, military, and even legislative nature were discussed. The lists recording their attendance linked each of them to a specific vecindad, and often when they spoke the scribe recorded their speech as ‘for the vecindad of X’. The government, furthermore, had no control over who or how many people each neighbourhood sent, and the variety of names and numbers between meetings suggests that the vecindades had complete discretion – and at the moment no fixed policy – over the appointment of their delegates.36 The city had, therefore, by the end of the fourteenth century, fully functional popular representatives.

34 Ibidem, fol. 10r. 35 AMB LA 3, fols 21r, 26r, 26v, 71v, 74r, 77r, 81v, 98r; LA 4 fols 9r, 10r, 46v, 47r; LA 6 115v/9v, 116r/10, 125v/19v. 36 Total numbers of representatives range from seven (AMB LA 3 fol. 75r) to thirty-five (LA 3 fol. 26v), while a single vecindad can be represented by a number of between one and eight different people (for instance, the vecindad of San Esteban sent eight men on 2 May 1398, LA 3 fol. 26v)

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The representation of the neighbourhoods was, however, not the only element of popular participation that was well developed by 1426. The neighbourhood gatherings at the parish churches soon turned into deliberative assemblies with participatory capacities, thus replacing the impracticable deliberation of the commons in the concejos abiertos with a set of smaller neighbourhood assemblies. For the discussion of important military and economic matters, the neighbourhood deputies were summoned to the city council. However, the communal deputies neither deliberated with the city councillors nor took decisions with them. Instead, once the omes de las vecindades had received the proposal, order, or request from the government, they left the ayuntamiento, gathered their neighbourhoods in their parish churches and then brought back the reply given by these assemblies to the Regimiento.37 On 29 February 1411, for instance, the city councillors wanted to establish an urban militia to help the merino, so they ordered the ‘omes de las vecindades’ to ‘gather’ (juntar) their neighbourhoods in their parish churches.38 On 2 March, the neighbourhood representatives were back before the city governors, stating that their vecindades had accepted the government’s command but that they had also requested that the government produce some ordinances regulating the militia’s duties.39 This system in which the participation of the commonalty was channelled through neighbourhood assemblies and neighbourhood deputies was the political means that Burgos’s government used every time they needed to pass important measures, such as the approval of extraordinary taxation or the levy of men, throughout the entire fifteenth century.40 Decades before the Sentencia, Burgos had developed some of the most significant elements of its system of popular political participation. The emergence of this system was a response to problems and challenges regarding the roles and interactions of government and commonalty in governance, but it was not the product of a fight pitching the Regimiento and the vecindades against each other. Instead, both participated in the progressive creation of a system that was mutually convenient. The government, for instance, took a proactive part in developing some of the elements of participation in the early stages of the system’s development. Faced with the ineffectiveness of their fund-raising and oath-taking methods in 1388 and 1391, Burgos’s governors began ordering the neighbourhoods to appoint their own deputies and to gather in their parish churches. The government also oversaw, authorized, and promoted later developments because they established effective means for the necessary negotiation and collaboration with the commonalty. The vecindades also shaped the system of deliberation. On 29 February 1411, for instance, the language of

37 AMB LA 3, fol. 71v; LA 4, fols 9r-v, 10 r-v, 46v-47r, 47r-v; LA 6 fols 115v/9v-116r/10r; LA 5 fols 39v-40r, 40v-41v, 81v, 109v-110v 38 AMB LA 4, fols 9r-v. 39 Ibidem, fols 10r-v. 40 For instance: AMB LA 6, fols 69v-70r, 89r-v, 95r, 95v; LA 7 fols 79r-80r, 80v-81r; LA 8, fols 7r, 8r, 11v, 12v; LA 9 fol. 35r, LA 10 fols 23-24r, 24v-25r, 48r-v, 51v-53v; LA 11 fols 27v, 35r, 47v-48r; LA 14 fols 82v83r; LA 15 fols 19r-20r, 29r-30r.

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Burgos’s government message to the vecindades suggests that the councillors were requesting the neighbourhoods not so much to ‘consent’ to the levy of men but to elect the men for the militia.41 However, when the vecindades sent their deputies back to the city council two days later, they did not only convey an assent that had not been requested, but they also demanded that the duties of the militia be regulated by ordinances, thus making a powerful statement about their right to have a say in the policies that required their collaboration.42 Furthermore, the commonalty did not only assert their right to participate, but they also specifically shaped their means of participation. For instance, on 20 February 1423, when the ‘men of the vecindades’ were asked by the councillors to immediately oppose the appointment of a new merino, the deputies replied that they could not do so until they had first consulted their vecindades. The council had to call a second meeting for the next Monday, which would take place after the neighbourhoods had assembled.43 The commonalty and their delegates thus refused to engage in a strictly representative means of participation and instead defended a model in which the main deliberative and decision-making agents were not the individual representatives, but rather the federation of neighbourhood assemblies. The main means of popular participation in Burgos were the products of collective, progressive development, involving actors who pushed for their own interests, but who were also conscious of the need for collaboration and compromise. Current scholarship tends to emphasize the mediation of external institutions, especially the crown, in the process of internal distribution of power and access of the commoners to civic politics.44 Although in moments of conflict, as we will see, the crown was indeed called in to mediate between belligerent parties, most of the time political growth and development was non-conflictual. In these times, the crown practiced a kind of ‘political economy’; it did not intervene in urban politics, even when it had solid legal grounds to do so, if it had nothing to gain from it. For instance, the 1345 royal ordinances explicitly prohibited any meetings or gatherings of the commons, and yet the city council was not only allowing concejos which commoners could attend, but they were also authorising and even encouraging assemblies of commons in their own neighbourhoods.45 Nobody in Burgos, however, seems to have thought of requesting authorisation from the crown to do this, and nobody from the royal entourage seems to have complained. This cannot be attributed to simple ignorance or passivity by the crown. In 1398, the same year when the minutes began recording the meetings of the vecindades, the regidores complained that the alcaldes were not gathering with 41 AMB LA 4 fol. 9r-v. 42 Ibidem, fol. 10r-v. 43 AMB LA 6, fol. 115v/9v. 44 Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict; Lorraine Attreed, ‘Arbitration and the Growth of Urban Liberties in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), pp. 205-35; Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘The Politics of the Urban Commons in Northern Atlantic Spain in the Later Middle Ages’, Urban History, 41 (2014), pp. 183-203. 45 AMB HI 154, transcribed in Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, pp. 151-54.

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the rest of the councillors, and the crown ordered the council to strictly comply with royal ordinances regarding the appointment of officers and the raising of taxes.46 Crown, civic government, and commonalty were well informed of each other’s activities and were used to policing them continuously. Before 1426, therefore, there must have been a tacit consensus between the different actors with a role in Burgos’s political life. After all, the system that was developed worked; the commons had a say in important matters, the council had the means of making their decisions effective, and the crown received the aids it requested. Perhaps the best proof of the consensus of all three actors around the means of participation introduced prior to 1426 is the fact that these political tools were respected even during times of conflict. Throughout 1426, commonalty and Regimiento wrestled for a certain set of political rights (which will be discussed below). However, during that same year in which political rights of participation were being contested and fought for, the city council authorized assemblies of vecindades at least twice,47 and they called neighbourhood deputies another two times.48 The Sentencia of the Count of Castro, which aimed to settle the conflict, did not even mention either deliberative assemblies of neighbourhoods or neighbourhood deputies, implying that these were never a contentious matter.49 Prior to the struggles of the 1420s, the central elements of Burgos’s participation system had not only been developed, but also accepted by all urban agents and integrated into the city’s political culture, to the point that they survived through internal political conflicts until well into the sixteenth century.50 The 1420s crisis and the Sentencia of the Count of Castro However, if the political system that had been developed prior to the 1420s was so strong and widely supported, what happened in the 1420s? What were the conflicts that shook the city until 1427? The urban oligarchy and the commonalty had not become one over the decades; they had simply brokered a compromise. The consensus that saw the introduction of neighbourhood deputies and the deliberation by neighbourhood assemblies was not a product of ‘fraternal love’ between the members of the urban community, but rather a practical arrangement that had managed to content most urban agents. Although the above-described political elements worked satisfactorily, further elements could be added or changed, and other areas of political activity were open for dispute. The moment the commons made claims over which the oligarchy found no common interests, the lines were redrawn, and conflict developed. From July 1423, when the alcaldes, 46 47 48 49 50

AMB LA fols 23r, 56v, 59v-60r, 60v, 62r. AMB LA 5, fols 35v-36r, 36v-37v. Ibidem, fols 41r, 52r. AMB HI 1411. By 1536 the main structure of representation and participation of the town were still the vecindades and their procuradores. See Archivo General de Simancas, Consejo Real de Castilla, 758,3,8 and 202,2; and AMB HI 4003.

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merino, and regidores first accused the commonalty of encroaching governance and breaching the royal ordinances,51 to 10 December 1426, when Fray Francisco, the last mediator in the disputes, referred to the conflict as being ‘entre los alcaldes et merino et regidores et las vesindades et vesinos de la çibdat’,52 all the references to the conflict describe the two contending parties as the commonalty – namely, the commonalty by vecindades – and the city councillors.53 The crown was also drawn in, and at least three different mediators intervened in the name of the king.54 How was the decades-old consensus finally broken, and how did this lead to the issue of the Sentencia? Historians usually locate the beginning of the conflicts that originated the Sentencia in 1425,55 but it is possible to trace the beginning of the disputes back to 1423. The council minutes for that year stop after 17 April, before any conflict had been noted, and no more municipal records survive until 1426. There is, however, in the last folios of the 1423 book of minutes, written upside down, an extraordinary document, which has so far received little attention.56 The text is a copy of a letter, dated 17 July 1423, sent from the city council to the king, requesting that the commission of a certain royal investigator then present in the city not be extended. In this document, the councillors remind the royal court of some of the reasons that brought the investigator to the city in the first place. According to the councillors’ letter, at some point in late April or May 1423, a group of citizens had tried to raise the vecindades in a ‘scandalous and riotous way’, with the intention of ‘intervening and getting involved in the government’.57 The uprising failed, and the leaders were imprisoned, and their possessions confiscated by the civic government. This, however, was only the beginning of the conflict, as the commonalty immediately complained about the council’s repressive actions and sent envoys to the king, arguing that what the commons had done was for the ‘service of the king and public good of the city’.58 Consequently, the crown sent the licenciado Fernando García de Ciudad Real to the city. The licenciado had an original term of 40 days to complete the investigation of the events, but the commons began asking the crown to extend the investigator’s commission. The councillors wrote to the crown to oppose this, arguing that the vecindades were trying to hamper the investigation.

51 AMB LA 6, fol. 128v. 52 Between the alcaldes and merino and regidore: AMB LA 5, fol. 55r-v. 53 On 31 January pleito que ovieron los omes buenos del comun desta cibdat con los alcaldes merino et regidores (AMB LA 5, fol. 10r). By 16 November, the governors refer to the other part as las colaciones (AMB LA 5, 50r). 54 Fernando Garcia de Ciudad Real (AMB LA 6 fol. 128r-v), the Count of Castro and his deputy Fray Francisco (AMB LA 6 fol. 35v-36v). 55 Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, p. 107; del Val Valdivieso, ‘Transformaciones sociales’. 56 AMB LA 6 fol. 128r-v. 57 Ibidem: los sobre dichos querellantes avian tentado de faser quebrantar a algunas vesindades et personas desta cibdad et de fecho quebrantaran la ordenança del regimiento … moviendo en las dichas personas et vesindades escandalosa et bolliçiosamente con entençion dentrada et de se entremeter turbando el buen regimiento de la cibdad disiendo que procuravan en ello vuestro serviçio et el bien publico della. 58 Ibidem: vuestro [of the king] serviçio et el bien publico della [Burgos].

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Various historical works on revolt propose that uprisings broke out when urban commons had exhausted other institutional means of bargaining.59 However, the conflict in Burgos began, not when the commonalty requested, petitioned, or engaged in litigation for constitutional change through the channels that were perfectly available for this, but when they took executive action and tried to directly effect change themselves. Only when this first ‘direct’ way failed did they turn to constitutional bargaining. The image presented by some contemporary historiographical models of intelligent, wise, and prudent urban commonalties who tried all the legal ways to obtain something and only engaged in ‘urban warfare’ and revolt as their last resource does not work here. For decades, Burgos’s commonalty had not only seen the growth of its political power without any strong opposition, but they had also seen it accepted as practical and beneficial. Political practice had made them conscious of their importance in the city’s financial and military structure; they were well organised, and they counted among their ranks an ascendant elite of merchants, artisans, and liberal professionals. Emboldened and self-confident, they had made new claims, ‘for the good of the king and the city’, though admittedly without consulting either the monarch or the city’s government in advance. In 1423, the commonalty’s bottom-up initiative was not introduced beseechingly, but boldly. This time however, they crossed a red line. What claims of the commons had finally broken the consensus between the council and the vecindades about their roles in the city’s political system? The council’s letter of 17 July does not explicitly mention what the commonalty was pushing for in 1423. Some clues can be gathered from the stern accusations and threats that the councillors introduced in their text. First, the government’s outrage does not seem to be related to violence or disorders; rather, it appears to be of a political nature. Although the governors’ letter does mention at the beginning ‘scandal and noise’, the main accusations against the commonalty throughout the text are about intrusion in governance and usurpation of power. The goal of the commons, according to the Regimiento, was to take the government of the city to the ‘commonalty and to the confusion of multitudes of people’, instead of the current system, where the government was held, they argued, by a ‘certain limited number of persons’ elected by the king and always accountable to him.60 The commoners’ actions, added the councillors, would be harmful to the common weal (cosa publica) and would be to the great disservice of the king. Later in the text, the governors offer more specific information, stating that the commons wanted ‘the city to be governed by vecindades and to gather without the presence of the civic officers, against the ordinances of the Regimiento’.61 This reference, together with the previous mention of ‘multitudes’, suggests that

59 Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict, p. 41 and passim. 60 AMB LA 6 128r: el regimiento que esta oy en ciertas et limitadas personas puestas e ordenadas por vuestro mandado […] queren ellos traerlo a comunidad et a confusyon de multitud de gente. 61 Ibidem: se rrija por vesindades et que enellos fagan sus allegamientos syn los vuestros ofiçiales contra la vuestra ordenança.

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the assemblies of vecindades were at the core of the government’s concerns. It is striking, however, that the city council would complain so sternly about the breach of the 1345 ordinances. These ordinances prohibited any gatherings of the commons but, as we have seen, the civic government had allowed, encouraged, and even organised the meetings of the vecindades for decades. Additionally, in 1426, when the Regimiento was still litigating with the commonalty over the same issues, they authorized the gatherings of the vecindades at least three times. The gatherings themselves could, therefore, not be the problem. Yet there was something that the commons wanted to change about the nature of those meetings, about their role in governance, which had dramatically changed the government’s view on them. The 1423 letter does not give further information, but answers can be found in the document that attempted to settle the conflict: the Sentencia of the Count of Castro.62 The Sentencia was first issued in late 1425. By 31 December 1425, the date when the council minutes resume after the 1423 break, the records were already referring to a certain Sentencia of ‘Diego Gomez de Sandoval, Adelantado de Castilla’, given in the conflict between the ‘good men of the commonalty’ and the ‘alcaldes, merino and regidores’.63 The references to this Sentencia throughout the 1426 council minutes, most often in the form of protests from the governors against it, confirm that it was, at least in its most essential points, the same as the better-known 1426 document.64 The reason why it was referred to as ‘del Adelantado’ instead of ‘del Conde de Castro’, as it would be known for decades afterward, is simple: Diego Gomez de Sandoval had been Adelantado Mayor of Castile since 1411, but he only received the title of Count of Castro in 1426.65 Because the city council initially opposed the Sentencia, this legal document was probably reissued by the end of 1426, when Gomez de Sandoval, already Count of Castro, sent a deputy, Fray Francisco, to settle the ongoing debates over his first resolution.66 This means that the Sentencia is the oldest document preserved after the 1423 letter and, therefore, the most immediate reflection of the 1423 conflicts. The Sentencia developed one specific issue in detail and from its first items: the appointment of the fieles, mayordomo and alcaides (municipal officers) by the vecindades. This might not seem related to neighbourhood assemblies, the main complaint of the councillors in 1423. Nevertheless, this is exactly the issue that triggered the clash between the commonalty and the government in 1423. Two items in the Sentencia specifically develop the means of election of the above-mentioned officers by the vecindades. Item eleven states that the vecindades had to assemble in order to elect these officers, but because the 1345 ordinances

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AMB HI 1411. AMB LA 5, fol. 1r-v. See AMB LA 5, passim. Ismael García Ramila, El Gran Burgalés D. Diego Gómez de Sandobal, Primer Conde de Castro (Burgos: Imp. Exc. Diputación, 1953). 66 References to Fray Francisco begin from AMB LA 5, fol. 47v.

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banned any kind of popular gathering, the Count also ordered the council to authorize the vecindades to assemble for those elections, and he added that, if the councillors refused to authorize this, the vecindades should be allowed to gather anyway.67 Item thirteen furthermore insists that the vecindades had to assemble to elect each one of the officers and that they were to do so without any kind of intrusion by the civic government. This is the key element that must have made the councillors denounce the commons’ gatherings in 1423. Assemblies by vecindad could not be a problem per se for a government that had been authorising such gatherings for decades. Until 1423, however, assemblies of the vecindades were physically separate from the government’s councils (ayuntamientos), but they were politically an extension of the council’s deliberations, as they participated with the government in common discussions about common issues, thanks to the communication facilitated by the neighbourhood deputies. Nevertheless, when the meetings of the vecindades began directly appointing officers without the central government having a say in the matter, the commons had effectively turned their neighbourhood assemblies into small, sovereign ayuntamientos, where executive decisions, namely appointments, were made without the Regimiento. The space of this functionally new type of assembly was seen as completely independent from the city council, and this was in flagrant breach of the 1345 ordinances. The complaints of the councillors’ in 1423 were legally accurate; the commons were trying to take over governance, not in every aspect of course, but at least in the specific area of officers’ appointments, and they were doing so through illegal gatherings. Before this date, the introduction of means of popular participation had presented benefits for both sides. Now, however, the commonalty did not only want something practical; they were also making a bold and original political claim about their role in civic governance. Precisely because of the innovative nature and contentious legal grounds of this claim, Castro was thorough in his ‘legalisation’ of this practice. More than half the Sentencia was devoted to this issue, including repetitions and nuances. Even the potential conflicts with the 1345 ordinances were explicitly addressed, as we have seen, in the eleventh item. The city council was initially reluctant to accept their defeat in this issue, but Castro’s resolution left no place for ambiguity and, despite some emphatic protests, by the end of January 1426 the city council was receiving the new officers appointed by the vecindades68. The commonalty’s new claim on appointments ran directly against the interests of the city council, who saw no benefits in it and had solid grounds to oppose it. Conflict exploded, and the external mediation by the crown had to take the place of decades of internal, consensual development.

67 Por quanto la dicha hordenança de la dicha çibdad no se puede fazer conçejo ni otros ayuntamientos apartados, mando que los dichos ofiçiales sean tenudos a llamar o fazer conçejo quando las dichas colaçiones o qualquier de ellas quisiere o obiuieren a nonbrar las dichas personas para los dichos ofiçios […]; e si non qusieren llamar e ayuntarse para ello, siendo rrequeridos, que las dichas colaçiones o qualquier de ellas puedn nonbrar e nonbren las dichas personas (AMB HI 1411). 68 AMB LA 5, fols 1v, 7r, 9v.

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Not every political development, however, was a product of either intelligent collaboration or heightened conflict. Between these two ends, there were grey areas, where the clash or the conformity of the interests of political agents were not so sharply defined. The implementation of the figure of the Procuradores Mayores was a case in point. Castro’s Sentencia newly introduced these two officers, annually elected by the vecindades, whose main function was to represent permanently the whole commonalty before the city council, where they had a voice but no vote. Historians have usually presented the institution of these officers as the most important innovation of the Sentencia.69 The introduction of the Procuradores Mayores was indeed important for the commonalty’s interests and had long-lasting consequences. However, this innovation followed a different path from that of the appointments by vecindades until its integration into the political system of Burgos. First, from the outbreak of the 1423 conflict until the first issuing of the Sentencia towards the end of 1425, the introduction of the Procuradores Mayores seems to have been a secondary issue. Not only did the council’s letter from July 1423 not contain any references to their figure, but the Count of Castro also did not consider it a central issue to address in his sentence. The figure of the Procuradores Mayores was not dealt with until item seven, the only item exclusively devoted to their role. The text furthermore was not as detailed as it was for the appointment of officers. The nature and functions of the Procuradores Mayores appeared outlined as a check of the commonalty on the activities of the government, but the text does not specify how their check on the government was to take place.70 It would seem, therefore, that the introduction of the Procuradores Mayores was not among the primary concerns of the commons, the councilors, or the Count in the process leading to the issue of the Sentencia. Nevertheless, the most telling element about the ambivalence regarding the Procuradores Mayores was the attitude of the councillors after the issue of the Sentencia. On 31 January 1426, the Procuradores Mayores first complained that they were not being admitted into the sessions of the city council. The governors retorted that they could not legally allow them into their council, and they recommended that they ask the Adelantado (later Count of Castro) to speak on this matter, which he had left unclear in his Sentencia. 71 The councillors were exploiting Castro’s lack of clarity regarding the Procuradores Mayores. While the Count had addressed the contradictions of the 1345 ordinances with the appointments by vecindades, he had not taken into account that the 1345 ordinances could also clash with the figure of the Procuradores Mayores, as the royal ordinances not only banned meetings of the commons, but also barred commoners from accessing the ayuntamientos.72 The city council, therefore, had

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Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, p. 109. AMB HI 1411, seventh item. AMB LA 5, fol. 14r-v. AMB HI 154, transcribed in Bonachía Hernando, El Concejo de Burgos, pp. 151-54.

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solid legal grounds to oppose the figure of the Procuradores Mayores even after the issue of the Sentencia. It is not surprising that the Regimiento kept obstructing the access of the Procuradores to the council until 1427, when Fray Francisco ruled in favour of the communal representatives. However, despite the council’s legal advantage in the matter, and despite the fact that this was their last political battleground after their defeat in the issue of the appointments of officers, the government’s attitude was ambiguous and not directly confrontational. For instance, in contrast to the stark language used against the appointment of officers by vecindades, the council minutes record moderate, even conciliatory speech regarding the Procuradores Mayores. On 31 January 1426, for instance, the councillors refused entry to the communal representatives, but they stated that they did this only because they were legally obliged to do so and that they would otherwise gladly comply with the Procuradores’ request.73 Throughout the rest of the year, the councillors did not engage in further arguments on the matter and instead simply ignored the petitions for access of the communal representatives.74 The commons’ reaction to the government’s reluctance to accept their representatives was also strikingly temperate. Although they threatened several times to call for a corregidor (a royal commissary),75 they never actually did it, and the calling of a deputy of the Count of Castro to arbitrate in the conflict was eventually negotiated by a commission of communal representatives and city governors. Most importantly, however, the governors’ position regarding the Procuradores Mayores was neither constant nor consistent. On 7 February 1426, for instance, the ayuntamiento’s list of attendance records the presence of the Procuradores Mayores in the same paragraph as the rest of the governors, just as they would regularly appear after 1427. The communal representatives had come to that council to complain about the abuses of the alcaide of Burgos’s castle, a man with whom the city council itself often had important conflicts.76 The councillors promised to look into the problem, and they used the presence of the Procuradores to ask both representatives to request that the commons help the merino, the council officer in charge of internal security.77 In this instance, the presence of the Procuradores Mayores proved beneficial for everybody, as they enabled the collaboration between the commonalty and the council around a common problem. The introduction of the Procuradores Mayores provided the commonalty with a continuous source of information and a voice in the council. It was, however, never as radical an innovation as the introduction of the direct appointments by 73 74 75 76

AMB LA 5 fol. 10r-v. Ibidem, fols 17r, 29v-30r. Ibidem, fols 35v-36r, 36v-37v. Yolanda Guerrero Navarrete, ‘Los nobles en las ciudades a finales de la Edad Media castellana: consideraciones a partir de los libros de actas municipales de Burgos (1379-1504)’, in Élites, conflictos y discursos políticos en las ciudades bajomedievales de la península ibérica, ed. José María Monsalvo Antón (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2019), p. 30. 77 Ibidem, fol. 13r. Other examples of conflicts with the alcaide in AMB LA 7, fol. 157v; LA 11, fol. 94r, LA 13, fol. 28v.

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vecindades. The Procuradores Mayores had no executive power at all, and when it came to the most important deliberations, they did not deliberate themselves with the city council, but rather gave way to the procuradores menores in the name of the vecindades. The Procuradores Mayores were thus a check added to the already existing system of negotiation between commons and government, not a radical change. The commonalty pushed for their introduction but not with as much vigour as they did for other issues, and the governors were reluctant to accept yet another check on their power, but they did not perceive the Procuradores Mayores as a threatening addition, and they could see their potential for improved communication with the city. The introduction of the Procuradores Mayores was, therefore, an example of how, even when civic politics did develop through conflict, the outcomes of those conflicts could be more complex than simply ‘gains’ or ‘losses’ for the contending actors and should be understood in terms of qualitative growth and development. Finally, in order to avoid a vision of civic politics as harmonious development with no winners or losers, it is important to note that some changes did advance the interests of some actors over others. The Sentencia, for instance, was perceived by all contemporary actors as favourable to the commonalty. Throughout 1426, the city council consistently protested the Sentencia, while the commonalty demanded that it be upheld.78 The Count of Castro, furthermore, did not only produce a sentence extending the commonalty’s powers, but he also ordered the city council to pay to the representatives of the vecindades before his court the staggering sum of 100,000 maravedís, which prompted protests from the government.79 The understanding of political change as qualitative development and transformation does not mean that social divides and tensions disappeared around common ‘pragmatic’ goals, but rather that political growth was a product of the interaction of different agencies, sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent, often complexly intertwined. Conclusion Systems of popular participation did not always originate as gains for belligerent commonalties or concessions from reluctant urban elites. The development of effective systems of popular participation was neither a top-down act of good will and realisation of democratic ideals nor a bottom-up revolutionary victory of the commons. Commonalties and oligarchies faced common political challenges and engaged in debates over the governance of the city, and this sometimes did lead to conflict. However, more often, these debates just made commons and oligarchies develop collaborative solutions, generally aimed at organising governance, rather than distributing power. From 1345 to 1426, Burgos’s commonalty did not simply struggle to participate more or less in 78 AMB LA 5, fols 1r, 5r, 10r-v, 17r-18r, 29v, 35v-36r, 36v-37v. 79 AMB LA 5, fols 5r, 10r-v, 17r, 18r-22v.

popular politics and political transformation in burgos, 1345-1426

civic politics, nor did Burgos’s government simply try to exclude or include the commons in civic governance. Instead, over eight decades, the main urban agents transformed and developed the means of political participation in the city, in order to create a political system that better responded to each of their needs and interests. During most of the period, this led to collaboration and compromise. However, urban agents and interests always remained distinct and, by the end of the period, bold claims from the commonalty broke the previous consensus and sparked a series of conflicts in which the crown had to mediate. Even then, however, the debates were not limited to a battle for winners or losers, for ‘more’ or ‘less’ power. Different political elements, such as appointments by vecindades and the introduction of Procuradores Mayores, were treated differently according to the ways in which they affected the political system and the position of each actor in it. Political calculations were made, in peace as in conflict, attending to qualitative, not quantitative criteria.

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The Introduction of Large Councils in Late Medieval Towns The Example of Stockholm In the Late Middle Ages, many towns in Northern Europe experienced constitutional changes with the introduction of a large council in addition to the regular town council. The large council, considered to be a representative body of the town’s community, was expected to have some influence over town politics, even if the extent and nature of this influence was seldom specified in detail. Scandinavia is rarely included in discussions of the spread of political ideas and customs among towns during the medieval period. However, this essay will show that political ideas about representation also found fruitful ground in the northernmost area of Europe. The main objectives of this chapter are to analyse the introduction, the constitutional components and the function of the large council in fifteenth-century Stockholm and connect Stockholm to developments in other parts of Northern Europe. While many scholars have viewed the medieval history of the future capital of the kingdom of Sweden, and Scandinavian history in general, as a peculiarity, distinct from the rest of medieval Europe, I will argue that the development of the council in medieval Stockholm should be understood as part of a transnational North European culture. To explain Stockholm’s medieval sources and link its large council to those in other towns, three questions will be discussed: Why was a large council created in Stockholm? What size and constitution did the council have? Which functions did it fulfil? After analysis of these questions, I will turn to the macro level to discuss possible connections between the development of large councils, and some widespread ideals and structural changes in late medieval towns. Large councils in Northern Europe There is no reliable evidence for large councils in any fifteenth-century Swedish town other than Stockholm. However, the absence of large councils cannot be proven, as the scarcity of source material does not allow a complete picture of urban administration. Although a document from Visby in 1532 mentions ‘the Twenty-Four’ after the

Sofia Gustafsson • Linköping University Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 73-87.

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DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.119791

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burgomasters and council, we do not know if this group existed prior to this entry.1 The only representation of the community in Swedish territory that definitely existed during the Middle Ages was the one in Stockholm. German towns have often been portrayed as models for Swedish towns, because many German burghers moved to Sweden in the Middle Ages, and German towns were important for long-distance trade.2 Many German towns had large councils, which included a broader group of people, in addition to the regular council with the burgomasters and councillors of the town. It has often been said that German large councils came into being in connection with protests within towns, especially during the fourteenth century, and they could include many craftsmen (see the essays of Sabine von Heusinger and Dominique Adrian in this book). Although large councils differed to some extent in size and function, the idea behind all of them was that they should represent the entire burgher community and exercise control over the council. They became permanent in many towns with Zunftverfassungen, i.e. mainly in southern Germany, while northern Germany was hardly touched by this development, since towns generally were smaller and lacked strong craft guilds. Some Hanse towns by the Baltic Sea introduced burgher committees to resolve conflicts (particularly at the beginning of the fifteenth century), but most only lasted until unrest subsided.3 At the end of the fourteenth century, Johannes Rothe, town scribe of Eisenach, wrote that it had become common to summon guardians of the community to keep peace in the town. These guardians were to review town finances and give counsel on important economic decisions. The aim was to keep the community obedient and calm, but Rothe emphasized that these guardians were not general advisers and should not know the council’s secrets.4 I wish to mention some examples from the literature about large councils in German as well as English towns, for a comparison with Stockholm. Jörg Rogge has studied the large council in Augsburg, which was regulated in writing in 1368 and had 230 members, both merchants and representatives from the craft guilds. He concludes that its ability to act was limited. It could not take initiative on its own, but was restricted by the small council, which





1 There were also permanent large councils in several Danish towns in the sixteenth century, see Sofia Gustafsson, Svenska städer i medeltidens Europa. En komparativ studie av stadsorganisation och politisk kultur (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2006), pp. 199-200. 2 For a critical discussion about a German influence in medieval Swedish towns, see Sofia Gustafsson, ‘German influence in Swedish medieval towns: Reflections upon the time-bound historiography of the twentieth century’ in Guilds, Towns, and Cultural Transmission in the North, 1300-1500, ed. by Lars Bisgaard, Lars Boje Mortensen and Tom Pettitt (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013), pp. 109-29. 3 Konrad Fritze, ‘Bürgervertretungen in wendischen Hansestädten vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert’ in Verwaltung und Politik in Städten Mitteleuropas. Beiträge zur Verfassungsnorm und Verfassungswirklichkeit in altstädtischen Zeit, ed. by Wilfried Ehbrecht (Köln: Böhlau, 1994), pp. 148-52. 4 Eberhard Isenmann, ‘Ratsliteratur und städtische Ratsordnungen des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Soziologie des Rats – Amt und Willensbildung – politische Kultur’, in Stadt und Recht im Mittelalter. La ville et le droit au Moyen Âge, ed. by Pierre Monnet and Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 290-91.

t h e i n troduction of large councils in late medieva l towns

decided when and why the large council should assemble. There were only two prescribed meetings per year; at the election of the small council and when town finances were presented, justified and discussed. There were rarely any additional meetings. Citing sources from the late fifteenth century, Rogge points out that the small council promised not to make important decisions or policy changes without consulting the large council, an indication that contemporaries still believed it was important.5 According to Rogge, its most significant function was to mediate between council and community, which would promote unity within the town. This meant that the leaders could not only use the large council to prevent conflicts, but also to act as a peacemaker if conflicts arose. Although its political responsibilities were limited, the large council could thus have a considerable impact on urban political stability.6 The smaller town of Schaffhausen formed a large council in 1367 in addition to its regular council. The large council had the rights to participate in regulating coinage, measures and weights, and to determine whether tolls and other charges should be raised or lowered depending on the economic conditions. The large council was authorized to make decisions about military expenditures and financing building projects. However, Oliver Landolt concludes that the small council became a controlling committee within the large council and prepared all decisions. The large council also had some authority to oversee town finances.7 In Köln, a 1396 ordinance regulated urban administration. Next to the regular council of forty-nine members was a council consisting of forty-four men, two from each of the town units (Gaffeln). The regular council had an obligation to consult this second council before concluding treaties with other towns or lords, and making important economic decisions.8 In Braunschweig, a burgher representative body was introduced in 1488 as one of several concessions from the council after protests. Called ‘the Twenty-Four’, the burgher organization was composed of representatives from different craft guilds and the communities of each district. The group should elect many town officials, consult the small council and work for the common good.9 England partially resembled Sweden, in that the king was also a town lord, and towns were relatively small (with London as the most obvious exception). A number of English towns formed a large council to join the regular council. The relationship between the people and the council in London changed in the fourteenth century, when, among other things, election of councillors by a burgher assembly shifted to election by the council. As Caroline Barron demonstrates, general burgher meetings gradually disappeared, replaced, as the need arose, by various committees 5 Jörg Rogge, Für den Gemeinen Nutzen. Politisches Handeln und Politikverständnis von Rat und Bürgerschaft in Augsburg im Spätmittelalter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), pp. 12, 14, 237. 6 Ibidem, pp. 237-38. 7 Oliver Landolt, Der Finanzhaushalt der Stadt Schaffhausen im Spätmittelalter (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2004), pp. 46-47. 8 Brigitte Maria Wübbeke, Das Militärwesen der Stadt Köln im 15. Jahrhundert. Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beiheft 91 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991), p. 73. 9 Rogge, Für den Gemeinen Nutzen, pp. 118-19.

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of burghers from each quarter, sometimes augmented by representatives from the approximately fifty craft guilds. After a number of conflicts over representation and the method of election, a representative body for the community, the Common Council, was established at the end of the fourteenth century. In the beginning, it consisted of 4 men from each quarter, for a total of 96, but soon grew to approximately 180 by the mid-fifteenth century. Representatives were elected by the 24 quarters. In the fifteenth century, this Common Council played a significant role in decision-making, particularly concerning economic matters.10 What about other English towns? Late-fourteenth-century evidence from York shows several councils: one of twelve aldermen and another of twenty-four councillors. In addition to these main ruling bodies, there was an outer council, referred to as the community, with approximately forty-eight men representing the crafts of the town. This group was occasionally assembled to advise the other councils on financial and other issues.11 In 1415, Norwich inaugurated a lower council of sixty burghers, as a direct consequence of a conflict between the council and burghers over the election of burgomasters. In Lynn as well, a large council was created in response to pressure from burghers.12 Beverly created a large council in the middle of the fifteenth century, known as ‘the Forty-Eight’, composed of former ‘keepers’, as the council members were called, and the aldermen of the fourteen guilds, who were to come when the council summoned them, or pay a fine.13 In Salisbury, there was an ordinary council, of twenty-four members and the burgomaster, and another council of forty-eight men, who held responsibility for collecting taxes and fines. Along with the twenty-four councillors, they also elected many town officials.14 When some representative community groups, such as those of Leicester and Northampton in 1489, (which declared that forty-eight burghers should participate in the burgomaster’s election) were introduced, evidence shows that they replaced larger burgher assemblies.15 These German and English examples demonstrate that large councils were introduced in many towns, often because of pressure from burghers, for the purpose of restoring peace and order in the towns. However, for many towns, the context surrounding the creation of the large council is unclear. Large councils seem to have had similar set of functions, with some variations from town to town. Historians often conclude that they played a rather insignificant role. They often had twenty-four, or forty-eight members (whereas regular seated councils 10 Caroline M. Barron, London in the later Middle Ages. Government and People 1200-1500 (Oxford: OUP, 2004), pp. 130-36, 197. 11 Christian Liddy and Jelle Haemers, ‘Popular Politics in the Late Medieval City: York and Bruges’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), p. 776. 12 Stephen Rigby, ‘Urban ‘Oligarchy’ in Late Medieval England’, in Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by John A. F. Thomson (Gloucester: Sutton, 1988), p. 72. 13 Jennifer Kermode, ‘Obvious Observations on the Formation of Oligarchies in Late Medieval English Towns’, in Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by John Thomson (Gloucester: Sutton, 1988), pp. 94-95. 14 David Nicholas, A History of Urban Society in Europe. The Later Medieval City 1300-1500 (London/New York: Longman, 1997), p. 149. 15 Rigby, ‘Urban Oligarchy’, pp. 74-75.

t h e i n troduction of large councils in late medieva l towns

often included six, twelve, or twenty-four men16) and represented the burgher community of the towns. One variation was whether large councils survived the late Middle Ages; in some towns they were temporary and in others they became permanent features of the political structure. Since Stockholm also saw the introduction of a large council in the late Middle Ages, it is interesting to discuss how this relates to the development in other parts of Europe. Early development in Stockholm Stockholm was founded late, in the mid-thirteenth century, but it grew rapidly and soon became the most significant town in Sweden. Although it was the kingdom’s largest town, it had less than ten thousand inhabitants. With its strategic location, as a transit harbour between the Baltic Sea and Lake Mälaren, a locally important body of water, Stockholm was the premier venue for local and long-distance merchants. The most important product was metal (mainly iron, but also copper), exported primarily to Danzig and Lübeck.17 There were no strong specialisations, but the late Middle Ages saw an increase in the social and economic diversity of its population. The town had a council with approximately twenty-four members, but only ten of these councillors belonged to the seated council in any year. Town life was regulated by the Swedish town law, which was unusually thorough in comparison to many other medieval town laws.18 Even though the council held the privilege of determining verdicts in cases where the law did not offer guidance, the law was so detailed that this right was probably more restricted in Sweden than elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is little information about the government of Stockholm before the fifteenth century, due to the destruction of the town archives by fire in 1419, among other things. Therefore, identifying the developments that led to the creation of the town council is difficult. However, this lack of early sources is counterbalanced by relatively rich material from the fifteenth century. A variety of different town record books survive from late medieval Stockholm, of which the council minutes are the most extensive and prominent, but only survive from 1474 onwards. There is also a book listing property transactions, beginning in 1419, and scattered tax records and accounts.19 Like burghers in all medieval towns, those of Stockholm took active role in town administration. The extant ‘ämbetsbok’ gives a detailed account of

16 Gustafsson, Svenska städer, p. 62. 17 Compare with Göran Dahlbäck, ‘Eisen und Kupfer, Butter und Lachs. Schwedische Produkte im hansischen Handel’, in Vergleichende Ansätze in der hansischen Geschichtsforschung, Hansische Studien XIII (Trier: Hansischer Geschichtsverein, 2002), pp. 163-73. 18 Compare with Sofia Gustafsson, ‘Comparability between the Medieval Swedish Town Law and the Lübeck Law’, in Crossing Legal Cultures, ed. by Laura Varela et al. (Munich: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 134. 19 All preserved town books have been transcribed and printed, see Stockholms stadsböcker från äldre tid, Series 1-4 (Stockholm: Kungl. samfundet för utgifvande af handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia/ Samfundet Sankt Erik, 1876-1948).

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office-holding after 1419. For example, representatives of both the council and the community, two men from each, set the amount of taxes and collected them. There were ‘kvartersmästare’, who were responsible for supervising compliance with sanitation ordinances, among other things. There were several gatekeepers who were in charge of the keys to the town gates. Taking on responsibilities for the town’s benefit was a requirement of being a burgher. The town’s community also actively participated in the work and administration of the council. Burghers were often sent out from the court on investigations and asked to act as witnesses. Stockholm sent both members of the council and the community to important meetings concerning the entire country that were held outside of town.20 The council minutes bear witness to the power relationships in town on several levels. The council held a strong position. According to the town law, everyone had to maintain a civil tone when talking to a burgomaster or councillor, and offences against a member of the council were harshly punished. Offences against members were uncommon, according to the minutes.21 The kings and regents of Sweden may have exercised some restraint over the power of the council. At the end of the fifteenth century, the regent of Sweden was the nobleman Sten Sture the Elder, often listed in the minutes as present in the court. Stockholm played a significant role in state politics in this period, and it could be dangerous. In 1520, the men currently sitting on the council along with many other important men were executed in the town square, in what was later called the Stockholm bloodbath. The principal reason for the executions was their lack of support for the Danish king Christian II, who had taken power in Sweden after defeating the regent Sten Sture the Younger.22 In contrast, sources from Stockholm contain no references to unrest or collective protests aimed at the council from the burghers. Likewise, there is no evidence of petitions or a regular practice of petitioning the council. The ‘communitas deputata’ The council minutes of Stockholm survive from April 1474, from the beginning of the year of office. In December 1475, the minutes note the names of a group, referred to as the ‘gode men’, for the first time. In the headline, they were called ‘Communitas deputata ad providendum de bonis istius ciuitatis’. According to the entry, they had a mandate on behalf of the community to take action and raise their voices when there was a need and when they were summoned by the burgomasters and council.23 This initial mention of the large council in 1475, and 20 See for example to Strängnäs in 1477, Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483 samt burspråk, ed. by Emil Hildebrand (Stockholm: Kungliga Samfundet för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, 1917), p. 110. 21 Gustafsson, Svenska städer, pp. 170-71. 22 For further reading on the Stockholm bloodbath, see Lars Ericson Wolke, Stockholms blodbad (Stockholm: Prisma, 2006). 23 ‘Wara fullmektoge pa menoghetins vegna bade göra och lata, ner swa behoff är oc borgamestarene, radet them tilsigiande’, Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483, pp. 39-40.

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the detailed description it received on this occasion, might indicate that it was a novel phenomenon. However, it may have been related to the appointment of a new man to the office of town scribe.24 In addition, there was a new book for council minutes begun in 1474, which may explain the town scribe’s extended definition for a group he was listing for the first time in the new book. For these reasons, we cannot assume that the large council was a new creation in the 1470s. It could have existed earlier without leaving any records. Since many German and English towns created bodies representing the community in response to conflicts, as a way of regaining the goodwill of burghers, it is interesting to note that there was a serious conflict in Stockholm shortly before the first mention of the group in 1475. In fact, the battle of Brunkeberg (inside Stockholm) in the autumn of 1471 is considered, even today, to be one of the most dramatic events in the town’s history. While the town burghers were involved in the battle, the conflict revolved around a power struggle between the king of the Nordic Union, Christian I, and Sten Sture the Elder. However, after the battle, there was a radical change in the constitution of Swedish town councils, aimed particularly at Stockholm. Probably since the birth of the town in the thirteenth century, half of the council seats were assigned to German burghers. The seated council was thus divided into a German bench and a Swedish bench. In the winter of 1471, the winner of the conflict, Sten Sture, and the council of the realm decided that all town councils in the Swedish realm should consist of native Swedish men who owned real estate in the towns.25 Did this decision provoke protest, or issues over representation, which then motivated the introduction of a large council26 in Stockholm? The population of Stockholm was an ethnic melting pot, and a large proportion of its burghers had German roots. Many likely regarded themselves as Swedish, since their families might have lived in Stockholm for several generations. After 1471, German names continued to appear among the councillors, and three of the men previously seated on the German bench remained on the council.27 Instead of Swedish and German benches, the two sides of the council were now called the southern and the eastern benches.28 There were nine men, two burgomasters and seven councillors, who lost their seats, along with their membership in the council.29 These men did not move away or die; almost all appear in the records of Stockholm as active burghers at least until 1480. If the introduction of a large

24 First mentioned in the town books 7 september 1472, according to Lena Moberg, Lågtyskt och svenskt i Stockholms medeltida tänkeböcker (Uppsala: Gustav Adolfs akad., 1989), p. 29. 25 Privilegier, resolutioner och förordningar för Sveriges städer. Första delen (1251-1523), ed. by Nils Herlitz (Stockholm: Stadshistoriska institutet, 1927), pp. 166-67. 26 Note that the group was never called the large council in the sources. 27 Stockholms stads ämbetsbok 1419-1544, ed. by Johan Axel Almquist, Stockholms stadsböcker från äldre tid. Ser. 4:1 (Stockholm: Kungliga Samfundet för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, 1927), pp. 243-45. 28 Gustafsson, Svenska städer, p. 128. 29 Two of the councillors on the German side had recently deceased (Hans Degener and Hans van Minden).

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council in Stockholm was a response to protests over excluding Germans from the council in 1471, one would expect at least some of the twenty-four members of the large council to be German. However, the list does not include any German names. It was not until 1480 that three German councillors, who had lost their council seats in 1471, were first appointed to the large council.30 The conclusion must be that the large council in Stockholm, first mentioned in 1475, did not have anything to do with the constitutional change of 1471. What was the exact composition of the council? In the Stockholm council minutes between 1474 and 1500, there are nine lists of burghers who represented the community.31 Analysis of changes and additions to the lists shows that they were composed or amended on twenty-one different occasions. The lists reveal strong continuity, an indication that representation of the community was a permanent feature of the Stockholm town government, whose officials were usually registered every year. However, there are some breaks in the continuity, with many names on one list disappearing from the succeeding list without ‘natural’ causes (such as members dying or becoming councillors). Although there may have been political reasons behind these changes, the sources give no explanation.32 According to the oldest surviving lists, the council had twenty-four members, but by the end of the fifteenth century, the number varied, and early in the sixteenth century the council permanently expanded to forty-eight members.33 Until then, it was called ‘the Twenty-Four’, or ‘the Twenty-Four of the Community’, if it was labelled at all. Who was chosen to represent the community? Just as in many German and English towns, the members represented the four quarters of the town, with approximately the same number of men from each quarter.34 The quarters were called the southern, western and eastern quarters, and the quarter inside the old wall (‘innan mur’). This division of the town was also used for tax administration and other purposes.35 Although there were craft guilds in Stockholm, they do not appear in the sources in connection with politics.36 There are some names

30 Herman Lintorp, Hans Skymmelpenning and Hans Falkensten, Jonas Berg, ‘Permanent utskott eller tillfällig rådsförstärkning. En studie i Stockholms senmedeltida menighetsrepresentation’, in Sankt Eriks årsbok (Stockholm: Samfundet St Erik, 1967), p. 61. 31 The lists are found in Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483, pp. 39, 110, 282, Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1483-1492, ed. by Gottfrid Larsson, Stockholms stadsböcker från äldre tid, Ser. 2:2 (Stockholm: Kungliga Samfundet för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, 1944), pp. 12-13, 327, 395-96, Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1492-1500, ed. by Johan Axel Almquist, Stockholms stadsböcker från äldre tid, Ser. 2:3 (Stockholm: Kungliga Samfundet för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, 1930), pp. 44-45, 179-80, 225-26. 32 Berg, ‘Permanent utskott’, p. 75. 33 Compare ibidem, p. 73 and Marko Lamberg, Dannemännen i stadens råd. Rådmanskretsen i nordiska köpstäder under senmedeltiden (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2001), p. 221. 34 Compare Lamberg, Dannemännen, p. 221. 35 See for example Stockholms stads skottebok 1460-1468 samt strödda räkenskaper från 1430–talet och från åren 1460-1473, ed. by Johan Axel Almquist and Hans Hildebrand, Stockholms stadsböcker från äldre tid 3: räkenskaper (Stockholm: Kungliga Samfundet för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, 1926). 36 Göran Dahlbäck, I medeltidens Stockholm (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 1995), p. 97.

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followed by craft titles on the lists, but only a few. Jonas Berg has shown that the average member was a trusted merchant of middle age.37 The fact that men serving on the large council were often chosen to fill vacancies on the regular council indicates that they had considerable status. Marko Lamberg has concluded that as many as twenty-four councillors in Stockholm had served on the large council before they were appointed to the regular council.38 Because the Twenty-Four men of the community were seldom mentioned in the minutes of the regular council, analysing the function of the group and its actual power in town politics is a challenge. The initial description of 1475 read that the group was to be assembled when the regular council saw a need for it.39 There was no written regulation (at least not in the surviving town records) of its precise function, meetings, or constitution. When the Twenty-Four were called in to counsel (according to the council minutes), the topics of discussion mainly concerned trade ordinances and codes of conduct.40 It was often the same type of subjects that were regulated in the town ordinances or by-laws, the so-called ‘burspråk’, which were issued by the town’s regular council. The word ‘burspråk’ appears in the Stockholm sources for the first time in 1409,41 and the oldest surviving written ordinances come from 1459. It was, however, probably an older custom. According to a chronicle of King Karl, written in the middle of the fifteenth century, the inhabitants of Stockholm were summoned to the town square in order to declare which side they supported in a political conflict in 1436. The chronicle contains a rhyme: ‘Po bwrspraket the herra ga, alla borgarna nidan för them sta’ (The noblemen went onto the ‘burspråk’, the burghers stood beneath them), which means that the ‘burspråk’ was a balcony or an elevated space in the square.42 The term burspråk was used for the place of the meeting, the actual meeting and the written ordinances. The town ordinances were read to the community on the Saturday before Christmas and at Pentecost. They probably functioned as an official channel of information that both the council and state representatives used to communicate with the inhabitants of Stockholm. According to late medieval sources, Sten Sture, the regent of Sweden, and the Council of the Realm (riksrådet), as well as the town council, often called the community to burspråk together. The ordinances that were read on the burspråk were largely the same every year. Among other recurring ordinances were prohibitions against promiscuous women wearing expensive clothes (‘dandekvinna dräkt’), and pigs wandering freely inside the town, along with different trade restrictions.43 The

37 Berg, ‘Permanent utskott’, pp. 74-75. 38 According to Lamberg, this was equivalent to one-third of all those newly elected in the period 14761520, Lamberg, Dannemännen, p. 222. 39 Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483, pp. 39-40. 40 See, for example, Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483, pp. 174, 282-83. 41 Mentioned in a document as something well-known, see Åke Holmbäck and Elias Wessén, Magnus Erikssons stadslag. I nusvensk tolkning (Stockholm: Institutet för rättshistorisk forskning, 1966), pp. 188-89. 42 Ibidem, pp. 188-89. 43 The preserved ordinances are printed in Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483, pp. 427-96.

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council minutes sometimes mention the council of ‘the Twenty-Four’ shortly before the time that the ordinances were to be read aloud, in connection with specific articles of the ordinances.44 In these cases, the function of the group might have been to review the past year’s ordinances and make decisions about modifications or additions. However, listing of the Twenty-Four in relation to the reading of the ordinances does not form a consistent pattern. Instead, cases that ended up in the council minutes concerned decisions over important changes in the ordinances. This does not rule out the possibility that meetings were held without any changes being made, in which case there was no reason to mention them in the minutes. One of the functions of the large council was to make changes to local ordinances and affirm them with the community. On several occasions, the sources give the impression that the large council had been summoned to safeguard the regular council in the eyes of higher authorities. In June 1477, the large council, called ‘the xxiiij gode men, som mäktoge äro pa menoghetenäs wegna’ (the twenty-four good men, who hold the power of the community), were asked if they were willing to accept the king of the Nordic Union, Christian, as king of Sweden. The minutes then clearly state that their answer was no. In 1494, the Stockholm council came before the Council of the Realm, to ask them to confirm the old freedoms and privileges of Stockholm. According to the document, they did not come alone, but brought with them twenty-four men representing the community. Displaying unity between the council and the community of Stockholm protected individual members of the regular council from possible attack by more powerful political forces. The large council, representing the community, thus functioned partly as a means to implement or underscore regulations in Stockholm, and partly as a tool to emphasize shared responsibility for town decisions, possibly with the intention of keeping individual officials out of trouble. Whether or not these motives were openly expressed, in these cases ‘the Twenty-Four’ has to be seen as an asset to the regular council that legitimized its actions, rather than a necessary evil to meet demands for participation from the people. The body of community representatives shielded the council from higher political powers and from the community of the town. However, it is difficult to determine who took the initiative to form ‘the Twenty-Four’ originally and to assemble it after it was established. The actual power of the large council is not clear, since the minutes only state that the council and the large council agreed upon something, which is then described. The process of reaching an agreement and the presence or absence of conflict were never included. The closest entry to a description of the process dates to June 1478, with the statement that the Twenty-Four of the Community had reached an agreement, which they then communicated to the burgomasters and council in the town hall (‘radzstuffwne’).45 44 For example Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483, p. 174 (5 June 1478), Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1483-1492, p. 10 (11 June 1483). 45 Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474-1483, p. 174.

t h e i n troduction of large councils in late medieva l towns

This indicates that the large council had assembled in a separate location prior to the meeting with the regular council. Why large councils? Searching for answers on the macro level The creation of a large council in Stockholm was clearly part of a larger development in a world which still lacked distinct national borders. The towns of Northern Europe had similar forms of urban government, whatever their geographical location or political situation.46 This is true for Stockholm, a town with deep relationships with other towns in the Baltic Sea region. Some historians still cling to the concept of diffusion, the theory that development proceeded in given directions, from the centre to the periphery, from one town to the next, and so on. As in-depth studies of similarities and differences between towns in different areas have shown, a more useful concept is shared town culture, the idea that common ideas and trends did spread widely, but each town expressed them somewhat differently through local adaptation. One effect of shared town culture is that two quite distant towns can be more similar to each other than two neighbouring towns, as a result of similar local conditions. Even though many towns had large councils, this field of investigation has not yet received much attention.47 Therefore, it is still difficult to reconstruct the development of the large council in most towns. This study of Stockholm’s large council is a contribution to filling the gap. Although there are superficial similarities in the creation, composition and function of large councils among towns, the particular development in each town is distinct, due to the influence of the individuals involved, the political context and other circumstances. Therefore, detailed analyses of more individual towns would be desirable. However, since development of a large council was common to many towns, it is just as important to adopt a broader view, acknowledge similarities and compare development among different towns. Parallels between these towns suggest general reasons and similarities, probably related to structural changes in late medieval towns and the dispersion of ideals over a wide geographical area. I shift now to pointing out some general trends and discussing their relevance to the development of large councils. For a long period of time in a large part of Europe, corporatism was the fundamental principle underlying the organization of a town.48 Corporatism envisioned the burghers of the town as a community in which everyone had certain basic rights and obligations. The responsibility for the wellbeing of the town was shared collectively by the whole group. In reality, a small town council

46 See for example Gustafsson, Svenska städer. 47 Compare Evamaria Engel, Die deutsche Stadt des Mittelalters (München: Beck, 1993), pp. 66-67; Rogge, Für den Gemeinen Nutzen, pp. 231-34. 48 This principle is often mentioned and discussed in literature on medieval towns, see for example Liddy and Haemers, ‘Popular politics’, p. 803.

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came to govern the town, and, on the surface, seems to have monopolized power. But closer analysis of the sources shows that the council’s power was, or at least people thought it was, heavily conditional. The corporatist ideal shows itself in several patterns in the sources; the first is the idea that the council consisted of trusted burghers who represented the whole burgher community when they exercised power. This concept is particularly visible in the many references to the town community in descriptions of decision-making. While the minutes report that the council made the decision with the consent of the community, this was seldom a specific reference to a large council in addition to the regular council, but rather a form of speech. Adding the community as a participant in making the decision implied that there was some form of common consent behind the council’s action.49 In towns, the community/commonalty/Gemeinde/menighet identifies a larger group. Even though the term is common in the sources, it is always unclear who belonged to the group. Was it the entire population of the town, or only the burghers (that is, the part of the population that paid for or inherited the right to be craftsmen or tradesmen in the town), or some fraction of the burghers? If the sources were intentionally vague, scribes may have used the term to legitimize whatever actions and decisions were being discussed in the text. There are strong indications that community meant the burghers rather than all inhabitants of the town. Burghers took an oath to support and obey the council, and councillors and burgomasters took an oath to protect the burghers. Being a burgher meant belonging to a group with rights and obligations that were shared collectively. The council was expected to act in the interest of the burgher community. As recent research has often concluded, medieval sources from towns in many different regions frequently refer to the principle that the council should work for the common good, or ‘bonum commune’. German texts used Stadtnutz and Eigennutz as opposing terms, with Eigennutz describing financial misconduct. Employed quite commonly in thoughts expressed about politics in general, writers used these terms to legitimize political actions as well as criticising them. The common good was thus the fundamental principle for town rule. The council, as representatives of the burghers, was obligated to work for the common good of all the burghers as a group.50 Furthermore, contemporaries thought the council was responsible for the peace within the town, as evidenced by many town ordinances, oaths and didactic texts. In German towns, texts stress that discord is harmful and dangerous, since town lords and noblemen could take advantage of the situation and increase their power over the town. Therefore,

49 Gustafsson, Svenska städer, pp. 190-91. 50 For elaborate discussions on the principle of common good, see De Bono Communi. The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th-16th c.), ed. by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).

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discord between burghers was to be avoided at all cost.51 An enduring, legitimate government was one that adhered to these principles in all their actions, or at least expressed the will to do so. Consulting the community, or at least promising that you intended to do so, conferred legitimacy, while the actual extent of the community’s power may have been less important. These ideals represented a mutual understanding of how late medieval councils were supposed to operate and a set of guidelines for councils in Stockholm and other late medieval towns. The reality seldom fulfilled the ideals, just as ideal rule has probably never existed anywhere, at least for all concerned. In the sources, ideals are particularly evident in the context of expectations that had not been met, protests in different forms, and expressions that things were not working as they should. In the late Middle Ages, ruling with the consent and in the best interest of the community was increasingly challenging as urban socio-economic structures changed. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the expansion of foreign trade and the increasing sophistication of the economy caused more socio-economic differentiation and a continuous widening of the gap between rich and poor. Specialization fostered new groups of merchants and craftsmen, and new guilds were created. As many guilds grew rich and strong, some became political factors. Because of the crises and changes in society as a whole during the fourteenth century, people who were not connected to burghers immigrated to towns in large numbers. As differentiation increased within the community, it must have been more and more difficult to define what the common good was. There were many competing interests, which often became apparent when the community met to make decisions. Political conflicts were more frequent in the second half of the fourteenth and the entire fifteenth centuries. Before this time, the community had been able to make their voices heard in town politics, possibly during general open meetings, as is known from some towns. It is possible that the new way of consulting with the community, through a group of chosen representatives, was designed to avoid large gatherings and preserve political stability. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, along with increasing differentiation in late medieval towns, there was a trend of town councils claiming more power than they had held before. While the governing bodies had previously operated as representatives of the townspeople, they now seem to have shifted to a more dominant authority. A shift in language, as councils more often identified themselves as ‘governors’ or ‘superiors’ and referred to the townspeople as their ‘subjects’, exemplifies this trend. Whereas letters to foreign recipients earlier had been sent from ‘the town’, they were now from ‘the council’, clearly the active institution.52 These linguistic shifts reveal the growing gap between rulers and ruled within the towns, which can also be seen in the narrowing of the group 51 See, for example, Heike Bierschwale and Jacqueline van Leeuwen, Wie man eine Stadt regieren soll. Deutsche und niederländische Stadtregimentslehren des Mittelalters (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 61-62, 66-71; compare with Gustafsson, Svenska städer, p. 160. 52 Concerning this development, see for example Gustafsson, Svenska städer, p. 145.

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who participated in elections of council members. By the end of the fifteenth century, co-optation had become the universal form of election.53 The introduction of large councils has sometimes been seen as evidence for an increasing influence of the people in town politics. It has even been claimed that the community secured an influence that they had never enjoyed before. However, it is difficult to determine from the surviving sources whether the large council increased or diminished the power of the community. The clear and significant result was a new organisation, a new form of political participation. Changes in the social structure and the exercise of power in towns help explain why there was also a change in the method of gaining the community’s consent. Final remarks Historians have often portrayed the creation of the late medieval large council, which included representatives of the burghers, as an act by the small or regular council in response to protests, intended to restore peace and allow them to continue to rule as legitimate leaders of the town. They wished to keep the people happy, while, in essence, they continued to rule just as they had before. There is some support for this image. Large councils were not always permanent institutions in the political structures, but could be abolished as soon as peace was restored. Even if they became a permanent part of town life, their exact role and meeting times were often unspecified. They could be consulted, but were only summoned when the small council saw fit. This strongly suggests a standardized solution to problems with legitimacy in towns all over Northern Europe. However, the introduction of representative bodies of the community beginning in the second half of the fourteenth century and continuing more strongly into the next century, was a significant change, more in the form of the consultation than in the consultation itself. It was a redefinition of the political community, a restriction of popular participation to a particular group of men, and perhaps also a limitation of the times when the community was allowed to participate. Although this could mean that the opportunity to participate decreased for the majority of the people in the community, it can also be seen as a victory because representatives of the burghers were given an official right to a degree of participation and control. Therefore, the development of large councils arose from a combination of socioeconomic changes in towns, the continued existence of ideals which could no longer be satisfied and the councils’ demonstrations of power. Even though it is often taken for granted, it should be stressed that in this world towns exercised great influence on each other. No town evolved in a vacuum, and all exchanged ideas and closely related to other towns. Returning to the relationship between the Twenty-Four men of the community in Stockholm and the general development I described earlier, there

53 Ibidem, p. 189.

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are similarities in the creation of large councils between Stockholm and other towns in the fifteenth century. However, in contrast to the development of large councils in fourteenth-century South German towns, Stockholm’s council was not formed in response to demands from craft guilds for increased participation in town government. Few craftsmen were part of the group. Nothing suggests that difficult conflicts were the reason for the formation of a large council, although sources might have been destroyed. Even though historians have often concluded that protests were the main catalyst for their creation, towns might have commonly introduced large councils without violent pressure from below as well. Sources from medieval Stockholm include rich accounts of collaboration between the community of the town and its rulers, including the ‘burspråk’ and the existence of a large council. Sources also frequently mention representatives of the community performing many types of governmental tasks, such as inspections, tax collection and participation in political meetings on the national level. To conclude this essay, I would say that studies of medieval towns have tended to focus more on internal conflicts than on peaceful collaboration between rulers and ruled. Power relations between community and council, with a focus on the functions of large councils, is a topic that would benefit from further investigation. Beyond representing the community in town politics, a large council could legitimize the power of the council and also strengthen the council’s case in dealings with external powers, as the Stockholm sources indicate.

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Part II

Interest Groups and Interactions Craft Guilds in Urban Politics

Ben Eerse ls  

Requested and Consented by the Good Crafts A New Approach to the Political Power of Craft Guilds in Late Medieval Maastricht (1380-1428)* Several generations of historians have pointed at the important role of late medieval craft guilds as platform that granted common city dwellers a voice in urban politics. Originally associations with a religious, social or economic raison d’être, craft guilds eventually succeeded in obtaining at least some degree of formal political power in many Western-European towns. Scholars often claim that especially occupational organizations in Northern Italy and the Southern Low Countries were successful in carving a spot out for themselves in the urban political system.1 These claims are usually founded on relatively ‘static’ approaches to political power. In this sense, power is perceived as the total sum of several power resources, that can be assessed (and to some extent quantified) by calculating the amount of seats that their representatives occupied in the town councils, and by analyzing the background and resources of these craftsmen-officeholders. For instance, historians have often used prosopografic methods to demonstrate that cities were ruled by an oligarchy of mighty families or by a council in which craftsmen were represented.2 However, this article argues that such an approach can only unravel a part of the story, and does not grasp the complete political potential of the craft guilds – or any other interest group in medieval towns, for that matter. Former studies have shown already that craft guilds also frequently used several other channels, to influence the political decision-making process ‘from outside the council’. Not only were they regularly consulted by the council, but craft guilds also composed requests, complaints and petitions, which they delivered to the authorities in written or oral form. If necessary, they also used ‘collective actions’, like strikes, walk-outs, gatherings and violent revolts, to pressure the authorities in consenting with their wishes.



* I thank Jelle Haemers, Christian Liddy, Graeme Small and my colleagues at the Medieval History Department at the KU Leuven for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank the participants of the workshop that preceded this book, and the participants of the Oberseminar Neue Forschungsdebatte in Cologne, where I presented earlier versions of this study. All remaining mistakes are of course my own. 1 E.g. James Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), p. 28. 2 See the historiography discussed by Bert De Munck, Guilds, labor and the urban body politic. Fabricating community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300-1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 74-81. Ben Eersels • KU Leuven Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 91-111.

© F  H  G

DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.119792

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In other words, craftsmen did not just influence urban politics via their elected officeholders, but they also expressed their political power through interactions with the public authorities. This article claims that a combined assessment of these two aforementioned manifestations of the political power of craft guilds, which are usually studied in isolation from another, can result in a more complete picture of the political role of craft guilds in late medieval towns. I will combine several elements of existing institutional, prosopographic and policy-based methodologies that have been used by former historical work. Due to lack of space, an in-depth study of each of these aspects cannot be undertaken here. Rather, this study hopes to offer an alternative methodological framework that future historical studies can use and further elaborate. The town of Maastricht will act as case-study for this article, thanks to its rich archives and its interesting place in the political history of the Duchy of Brabant and the Prince-Bishopric of Liège around the turn of the fifteenth century. In what follows, I will first sketch several approaches that existing studies have used to address the political power of craft guilds, while demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of these methodologies. Second, some of the key characteristics of the town of Maastricht will be introduced. Third, I will assess the ‘static’ political resources of the craft guilds in Maastricht’s town council, by addressing their rights in the election procedures for the council of Maastricht, the profile of their officeholders, and the changing power balance between the different craft guilds in the council. Finally, I will discuss in which ways craft guilds interacted with the council, and discuss the importance of these channels in relation to another, and to the craft guilds’ structural political presence through their institutional representation. In short, it will be argued that even though institutional representation remained quintessential to be structurally involved in policy-making, petitions, consultancy of the guilds’ governors and especially the ‘general assembly’ of the towns’ population provided important and frequently-used channels for the craft guilds to participate even more actively in several domains of urban politics. Historiography Medieval urban historians have roughly adopted three approaches to determine the political power of craft guilds. Put simply, their studies have focused the attention either on the government of the city (i.e. the political structures of the town), the governors (the backgrounds of the officeholders) or the governance (the ways in which councils interacted with their citizens and the policies that resulted from these interactions). Studies that focus on urban government usually examine the institutional (or constitutional) charters of towns, which stipulate the election procedures for the council and the distribution of council seats among the different social groups in the town. This ‘constitutional’ approach to political history was especially popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth

r equested an d consented by the g ood cra fts

centuries. In the Low Countries, this methodology was introduced by Henri Pirenne with his study of the ‘constitution’ of Dinant.3 In his later work, Pirenne famously wrote that the new electoral privileges of the craft guilds marked the establishment of the first ‘ancient democracies of the Low Countries’. However, Pirenne also contended that these towns remained ‘democracies of the privileged’ since political rights were all but evenly distributed, contrary to the liberal democracy of his own time.4 Partially because of this tendency to look for precedents of contemporary ‘democratic’ values in medieval constitutional texts, this constitutional approach to urban politics was increasingly discredited from the second half of the twentieth century on.5 However, numerous scholars still use institutional approaches to the guilds’ political power to give an idea on the distribution of power in the political structures of towns.6 Prosopographical inquiries into the social composition of town councils have demonstrated that institutional norms provide but a superficial reflection of the council’s composition. On the one hand, institutional reforms did not always cause the transformations that they intended, i.e. a broadening (or narrowing) of the pool of political elites through the introduction (or restriction) of people from a different social background. Research on towns like Ghent and Strasbourg has shown that the political elite remained more or less unchanged for a relatively long period after craft guilds secured rights of representation for themselves.7 Supposedly, the established political elites bought a guild membership and were then re-elected as guild representatives afterwards. On the other hand, when guild members with stronger ties to their guilds were elected for council,





3 Henri Pirenne, Histoire de la constitution de la ville de Dinant au Moyen-Âge (Ghent: Van Goethem, 1889). In England, for instance, especially the work of Frederick William Maitland has been directive. See his work Frederic Maitland, Township and borough. Together with an appendix of notes relating to the history of the town of Cambridge (Cambridge: CUP, 1889). 4 Henri Pirenne, Les anciennes démocraties des Pays-Bas (Paris: Flammarion, 1910), p. 197. 5 On the development of the field of constitutional history, see Alan Orr, ‘A prospectus for a “New” Constitutional History of Early Modern England’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 36 (2004), pp. 430-50. 6 See e.g. Maarten Prak, ‘Corporate politics in the Low Countries: guilds as institutions, 14th to 18th centuries’, in Craft guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries. Work, power and representation, ed. by Maarten Prak et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 74-106 and Arie Van Steensel, ‘Guilds and politics in Medieval Urban Europe. Towards a Comparative Institutional Analysis, in Craftsmen and Guilds in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by Eva Julien and Michel Pauly (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016), pp. 37-56. 7 Paul Rogghé demonstrated that even after the guilds’ victory in the Battle of the Golden Spurs, they had to wait for a long time before they could send delegates to the council. Paul Rogghé, ‘Het Gentse stadsbestuur van 1302 tot 1345. En een en ander betreffende het Gentse stadspatriciaat’, Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 1 (1944), pp. 135-63. For the later fourteenth century and the fifteenth century, see Marc Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, ca. 1384-ca. 1453. Een sociaal-politieke studie van een staatvormingsproces (Brussels: KVAB, 1990). For Strasbourg, see Sabine von Heusinger, ‘“Old Boys Networks”. Die Verfassungswechsel in Straßburg im 14. Jahrhundert’, in Neue Forschungen zur elsässischen Geschichte im Mittelalter, ed. by Laurence Buchholzer-Remy et al. (Munich: Karl Aber), 2012, pp. 153-77. For the further evolution in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Philippe Dollinger, ‘L’évolution politique des corporations strasbourgeoise à la fin du Moyen Âge’, in Pages d’Histoire. France et Allemagne médiévales, Alsace, ed. by Idem (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1977), pp. 229-37.

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they were usually also a part of the wealthiest segment of the urban society. As argued by Raymond Van Uytven, the urban oligarchies in the Low Countries were indeed broken by the introduction of craftsmen in the council, but only to evolve into plutocracies – governments controlled by the wealthy.8 Still, historians should not limit their attention to the power balances in the town council in their search for traces of political involvement. Studies that analysed the policies of town councils have suggested that we should not automatically equate the amount of political power with the degree of institutional representation. In this sense, Martha Howell and Robert DuPlessis have shown that the domination of a particular social group in the council did not necessarily result in a policy that primarily favoured the activities of their own peers. Both authors claimed that in late medieval Lille and Leiden, towns where rich drapers controlled the council, the town’s policy actually protected small commodity-producers, even though these small business-owners remained deprived of any formal political representation.9 Even though their synthesis was later on questioned by Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, their claim does invite us to take a step back, and reconsider how urban politics functioned.10 For obtaining institutional representation in the council, as I hope to demonstrate here, was not the sole way in which one could obtain and exercise political power. Other, recent studies have diversified our view on the possibilities of ordinary citizens to influence urban politics. Commoners frequently used methods as petitioning, strikes and other forms of peaceful protests to assess their grievances to their governors. Similar practices occurred across all regions in medieval Europe, but for the medieval Low Countries, scholars have convincingly shown that popular groups set important changes in motion after successfully petitioning their governments.11 However, these studies do not address to what extent urban policy as a whole was shaped by these popular initiatives. Thus far, historians have primarily analysed a few well-documented, but isolated case studies – i.e. a few preserved petitions or recordings of strikes – and not assessed their more

8 Raymond Van Uytven, ‘Plutokratie in de « oude demokratieën » der Nederlanden’, Handelingen der Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij voor taal- en letterkunde, 16 (1962), pp. 379-409. 9 Robert DuPlessis and Martha Howell, ‘Reconsidering the Early Modern Urban Economy: The Cases of Leiden and Lille’, Past & Present, 94 (1982), pp. 49-84. Robert Giel equally stated that we should not take ‘Sozialspecifisches handeln’ for granted. Robert Giel, Politische Öffentlichkeit im spätmittelalterlich-frühneuzeitlichen Köln (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998), p. 26. 10 They acknowledged that the policy in Lille and Leiden was favorable for small business-owners, but claimed that the drapers were primarily concerned with preventing scaling-up production to ensure their own monopoly on the town’s economy, instead of favoring small business-owners. With this argument, Lis and Soly implicitly stressed the importance of institutional representation. See Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, ‘Ambachtsgilden in vergelijkend perspectief: de Noordelijke en de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, 15de-18de eeuw’, in Werelden van verschil. Ambachtsgilden in de Lage Landen, ed. by Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly (Brussels: VUB, 1997), pp. 11-42. 11 Jelle Haemers, ‘Révolte et requête. Les gens de métiers et les conflits sociaux dans les villes de Flandre (XIIIe-XVe siècle)’, Revue Historique, 677 (2016), pp. 27-55; Jan Dumolyn, ‘Les « plaintes » des villes flamandes à la fin du XIIIe siècle et les discours et pratiques politiques de la commune’, Le Moyen Âge, 121 (2015), pp. 383-407.



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structural impact on urban legislation.12 In short, as the field stands, both the questions regarding the value of institutional representation and the importance of other forms of political advocacy on policy-making remain heavily debated. This study hopes to offer a contribution to these two debates. Maastricht between Liège and Brabant 1380-1428 The town of Maastricht was situated at the border between the County of Loon (from 1366 on incorporated in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège) and the Duchy of Limburg, a title held by the Dukes of Brabant.13 Its population probably amounted circa 12000 inhabitants in the fifteenth century, so Maastricht was probably one of the bigger middle-sized towns in the Low Countries. Economically, the town profited from its strategic location at the intersection of two important trade routes. On the one hand, the magistrate was able to levy tolls on the shipping trade on the Meuse river; on the other hand, the town provided one of the few bridges crossing the Meuse on the east-west trade route between the Rhine cities and the North Sea. Moreover, Maastricht was one of the textile-producing centres in the Low Countries. Hektor Ammann assumed that it was one of the bigger textile towns of both Liège and Brabant, even though Maastricht’s production volume probably never came close to the amount of textile produced in Leuven, Liège or Huy.14 In any case, most historians assume that Maastricht’s economic profile has remained rather multifaceted throughout the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The town recognized 23 different craft guilds, which were subdivided in 11 groups during a brief period of time (1409-1414). Guild membership was, at least in theory, obligatory for all inhabitants. Depending on the guilds’ size, they were governed by two or four ‘governors’ (goevernere) and sometimes a few ‘inspectors’ (keurmeesters), whose main task concerned the observation of the production processes. Even though their main task was to govern their guilds, I will demonstrate later that these governors possessed considerable political powers as well. With regard to its political organization, Maastricht was a tweeheerlijkheid, a ‘double lordship’ that partly belonged to the Prince Bishop of Liège and partly

12 See for instance Eric Bousmar, ‘Si se garde chacun de méfaire. La législation communale à Mons (Hainaut) dans son contexte régional (XIIIe-début du XVIe siècle). Sources, objets et acteurs’, in Faire bans, edictz et statuts’. Légiférer dans la ville médiévale. Sources, objets et acteurs de l’activité législative communale en Occident, ca. 1200-1550, ed. by Jean-Marie Cauchies and Eric Bousmar (Brussels: Saint-Louis, 2001), pp. 153-81. Several other case studies on the impact of petitions on urban legislation can be found in the same volume. 13 A separate study of the medieval history of Maastricht is still lacking. Introductions can be found in J. Geurts, ‘“Onsser stadt in sulken gedranghe”, Maastricht tussen Brabant en het Rijk 15001550’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1993), pp. 17-81 and the contributions in the Historische encyclopedie Maastricht, ed. by Pierre Ubachs and Ingrid Evers (Zutphen: Walburg, 2005). 14 Hektor Ammann, ‘Maastricht in der mittelalterlichen Wirtschaft’, in Mélanges Félix Rousseau. Études sur l’histoire du Pays Mosan (Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 1958), pp. 21-46.

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to the Duke of Brabant. Consequently, the inhabitants were either of a Liégeoise or Brabantine descent, which was passed on from mother to son. Maastricht’s loyalty to two different lords could both be a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, conflicting interests between the Prince-Bishop of Liège and the Duke of Brabant had repeatedly put the city in an awkward position over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Finally, in 1356, after the city had endured at least five sieges during the past 150 years, the prince-bishop and duke agreed that the city would have to remain neutral in any future conflicts. On the other hand, as will we shown below, the citizens were sometimes able to pit their one lord against the other to their advantage. The town’s ‘double lordship’ was reflected by the composition of the town’s council as well: even though the election procedures changed in 1379, 1409 and 1413, the council always consisted of an equal number of Liègeoise and Brabantine office-holders. Still, even though this composition seems to reflect the existence of two parallel political communities in the town, the legislation did not take the inhabitants’ diverging descent (and loyalty) into account. The urban council carried out one, uniform policy that applied to all inhabitants. Maastricht presents an excellent case-study for this inquiry for several reasons. First, the town’s peculiar political and institutional context enable me to make several analyses on the functioning of its urban council and the power balances between the different craft guilds. Second, the town’s council reports (‘Raadsverdragen’) contain extensive information on the policies carried out by the town council and on the professional careers of the town’s officeholders.15 The preambles of these reports seem to have been standardized and remained rather constant during the period under scrutiny, which is of great importance for the methodology used in this paper. It should be noted, however, that these sources only provide information about the meetings that were concluded with a final decision – if the assembly ended without an agreement, the meeting was not recorded in the sources.16 And third, the town witnessed a turbulent (and therefore) interesting time during the period under scrutiny. During the rebellion of 1407-1408, Maastricht found itself as sole loyal city isolated from all the other major towns in Liège, which had risen against Prince Bishop John III, Duke of Bavaria. As I will elaborate further below, the rebellion and its aftermath left important traces on the internal power balances in Maastricht as well.

15 The period under scrutiny in this article corresponds with the first two books of council reports that are preserved in the towns’ archives, published in M. A. Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen van Maastricht 1367-1428 (’s Gravenhage: ING, 1992). 16 This is for instance important when the craft guilds’ requests will be taken into consideration: the only traces of petitions in Maastricht are of the successful ones, the others were not registered. For comments on the genre of council reports, see Graeme Small, ‘Municipal registers of deliberations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: cross-channel observations’, in Les idées passent-elles la Manche? Savoirs, représentations, pratiques (France-Angleterre Xe-XXe siècles), ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet and François Ruggiu (Paris: Sorbonne, 2007), pp. 36-66.

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The council of Maastricht: centre of urban politics? This section addresses the balance of power in the council, the central body of Maastricht’s urban policy-making. I will focus on the institutional framework, the profile of the officeholders, the power balances between the guilds in the council and the importance of obtaining representation to be involved in policy-making. This section aims to defend four interrelated statements: first, the influence of the craft guilds in the council was considerable, taking into account that many councillors had close ties to these organizations. Second, although some craft guilds clearly acquired more representation than others, there was not one single guild (or a small group of guilds) that clearly overshadowed the others. Third, the three institutional reforms of the council had far-reaching consequences on the political balance between the craft guilds. Each reform resulted in a new balance of power, and introduced a new generation of politicians, while meanwhile marking the end of the political career of many politicians of the previous generation. Fourth, tilting the power balance in the council in one’s own favour was important to have a structural impact on urban politics. Even though there were other ways to influence the decision-making as well, obtaining representation remained important to address one’s issues, and be involved when the town’s policies were negotiated. The institutional reform of 1379 constituted a milestone for the political role of the craft guilds in Maastricht. The new institutional charter awarded the right to elect all council seats to the town’s ‘commune’ (ghemeente), with the ‘consent of most of the good craft guilds’.17 The charter was the result of an interesting demarche of the Brabantine and Liégeoise communes, which had successfully played of their two lords against another. The charter’s preamble tells that the commune of Liège had addressed their sovereign, the Prince-Bishop, to ask for a new institutional decree. Supposedly, they had decided to profit from his weak position so soon after his inauguration. After the Liègeoise commune had successfully acquired a new institutional decree, the Brabantine inhabitants heavily complained to their overlord. Subsequently, they asked their Duchess Johanna for a similar agreement, arguing that they were ‘unable to respect the old privilege, after the promulgation of the new charter of Liège’.18 The duchess seemingly had no other option than to issue a similar arrangement for her Brabantine subjects in the town. The passage that the ‘commune’ was to elect the councillors ‘with the consent of the craft guilds’ is somewhat confusing, since it leaves the relationship of the ‘commune’ vis-à-vis the craft guilds and the exact conduct of the councillors’ 17 For the charter, see Louis Crahay, Coutumes de la ville de Maestricht (Brussels: Gobbaerts, 1876), pp. 489-90 (490 for the quote). The towns’ communes had received some first indirect influence on the council’s election procedures in 1373. Each commune could present 24 members for council, but the power of the Duke of Brabant and Prince-Bishop of Liège remained extensive. 18 ‘Welker eyde onse voirseide lude van Tricht, om menigherhande saken wille, die daer in gevallen zijn, niet wail gehalden en connen noch en moegen, aengesien dat nuwe regiment dat des bisschops lude in onser stat voirs. Ercregen hebben, als wij verstanden’ (Crahay, Coutumes, pp. 450-51).

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election unexplained. However, this does not mean that both terms indicated two completely separate forms of organizations: other cases in the Southern Netherlands have shown that if the craft guilds made common cause, they often presented themselves as the ‘commune’ of the city.19 Whether the ‘commune’ in Maastricht also comprised other organizations is not clear, but, as will be shown below, the biggest share of the councillors that seated after 1379 had close ties with the craft guilds. This demonstrates that, even though their exact role remains unclear, these organizations did exercise considerable influence on the town’s elections. Thirty years later, the new prince-elect John of Bavaria issued a new institutional charter, this time after deliberations with the duke of Brabant. This promulgation should be seen in the context of the aftermath of the battle of Othéé, when the rebellious towns of Liège were crushed by the prince-bishop and his allies. The text presents itself as a reward for Maastricht’s loyalty to the prince-elect (‘because of the loyalty the town shows to us and our friends’), but also as an attempt to restore peace in the town. The text states that the previous regiment had led the town to ‘misery’ and ‘discord’, and that the inhabitants themselves had asked the Prince-Bishop to issue this decree as the solution.20 The charter instructs the division of the 23 craft guilds in eleven groups of two guilds each. Every group was allowed to elect one Liègeoise and one Brabantine councilor per year.21 However, the 1409-decree only stood for four years. It was revoked in 1413, when the election procedures were reversed to those of 1379. Interestingly, the institutional ruling of 1413 retakes the argumentation of the text of 1409 almost word for word. The charter served as the ‘remedy’ (remedien) to the ‘miserable’ (mislike) regiment that had been in force in the town, which had caused a revolt (opstant). Supposedly, it was again issued at the request of the ‘citizens and good people’ (burgeren ende goeden luden) of the town.22 As I will elaborate further below, it seems probable that the charter of 1409 should be interpreted as a temporary increase of influence of the smaller guilds in Maastricht, whereas the decree of 1413 constituted a (partial) restoration of the bigger guilds’ power.

19 E.g. when the craft guilds of Ghent and Bruges wrote a complaint to the count of Flanders in 1280. See Jelle Haemers, ‘The identity of the urban “commoners” in thirteenth-century Flanders’, Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum, 10 (2016), pp. 191-213. 20 Crahay, Coutumes, pp. 452-54. 21 This argument contrasts with previous scholarship, which has – I think – not grasped all the consequences of this treaty. Building on the stipulation that the new councilors had to be inaugurated by the town’s aldermen (responsible for the Higher Justice and appointed by the lords), Van der Eerden-Vonk and Geurts have primarily interpreted this decree as an attempt of both lords to increase their grip on the council. In my view, this addition only proves a very small increase of (ceremonial) princely power. The changes in the position of the smaller craft guilds seem much more important. See Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen, XVII-XVIII; Geurts, Onsser stadt, p. 55. 22 Crahay, Coutumes, pp. 127-28. In 1427, a fifth decree in less than 50 years was signed. This final decree would remain in force until 1580, but since the policy after the promulgation of this decree will not be considered here, this charter’s stipulations will not be discussed in detail here.

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This institutional framework makes Maastricht a very interesting case study to see the power balances between the craft guilds at work. First of all, the princes did not possess any formal authority regarding the councillors’ elections, since they were entirely controlled by the town’s communes and the guilds. Second, the council of Maastricht was a very ‘open’ political theatre. Apart from the brief period between 1409 and 1413, there were no permanently assigned seats per guild, unlike many other towns in the Low Countries, where the bigger guilds and the towns’ lineages were assured of a fixed amount of council seats.23 Theoretically, the small guilds in Maastricht possessed the same opportunities to obtain representation as their bigger counterparts, but, as we shall see in the next paragraph, the bigger guilds dominated the smaller ones in reality. Craft guild Unknown

Councilors Amount Craft guild 80 Roofers

Amount 9

Mayors Craft guild Amount Unknown 48

Brewers

35

Blacksmiths

9

Fullers

11

Weavers Tanners Bakers

33 33 28

Gardeners Shippers Bleachers

7 7 6

Dyers Weavers Fishmongers

7 4 4

Butchers

23

Linen Weavers

6

Shopkeepers

3

Dyers

22

Furriers

5

Cloth shearers

3

Fishmongers

22

Millers

4

Butchers

2

Shopkeepers

21

Cloth shearers

4

Grand Total

Carpenters

15

Thatchers

2

Fullers

13

Masons

2

Tailors

13

Shoemakers

2

Fruit sellers

11

Grand Total

82

412

Taking into account that a possible guild affiliation of one fifth of the councillors and almost half of the mayors cannot be retraced, we must remain careful when drawing conclusions. Nonetheless, some interesting patterns emerge. A first observation is that neither a single craft guild, nor a small group of organizations was able to dominate the council. Some craft guilds (either the ones with the highest amount of members or the most prestige) did secure a bigger number of council seats. A second observation concerns the textile guilds, which were 23 This was the case in, for instance, Ghent and Leuven. For Ghent: Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen and for Leuven: Raymond Van Uytven, Leuven, de beste stad van Brabant. 1: De geschiedenis van het stadsgewest Leuven tot omstreeks 1600 (Leuven: Vrienden stedelijk museum, 1980).

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traditionally very influential guilds in political terms. Particularly the relatively low number of council seats secured by members of the fullers (13), compared to the weavers (33), should be pointed out.24 The weavers were also the most successful of all craft guilds in obtaining council seats, but it seems that they have never been so omnipresent in the council like their colleagues in Ghent.25 Finally, the smaller guilds that worked for the local market (e.g. the roofers, masons, shoemakers…) held a very limited amount of council seats, and, as will be elaborated in the next paragraph, were mostly able to do so between the reforms of 1409 and 1413. Indeed, the reform of 1409 had far-reaching consequences for the power balance between the craft guilds. The decree enabled especially the smaller craft guilds to improve their institutional position: due to the fixed council seats per group of 2 guilds, the smaller guilds had a much bigger chance to send their representatives to the council. This is clearly illustrated by the number of seats held by the masons and gardeners. Prior to the reform of 1409, there is no trace of a mason or gardener in the council, but between 1410 and 1414 they were able to secure respectively 6 and 4 council seats. Unfortunately, it remains impossible to ascertain whether the improved institutional position of the smaller guilds did or did not result in an increased impact on the town’s legislation, since almost all council reports carried out during this period are lost. When the reform of 1409 was turned back in 1413, the smaller guilds lost most of their influence in the council again.26 The council of Maastricht was characterized by a high influx of new politicians. Every councillor only took up an average of 2,4 mandates, which is significantly lower than the numbers that Wim Blockmans calculated for Rotterdam (12), Dordrecht (5) and even Ghent (3,3).27 Yet, it should be mentioned that this number probably underestimates the actual average in Maastricht: whereas Blockmans’ calculations cover a period of 150 years, this paper only takes the officeholders of a relatively short period (48 years) into account. Hence it is plausible that many of the officers mentioned between 1380 and 1428 continued their political career later on, or had started it before 1380, a period for which we lack the sources to retrace the councillors’ guild membership. Even then, this number remains very low compared to other towns in the Low Countries. Furthermore, the council consisted of a mix of people with relatively strong links with their guild and representatives with only feeble or even no corporate ties. Of all 153 craftsmen who were elected as councillors, 118 of them exercised at least one other office (e.g. as dean or instructor) in their craft guild. The lion’s share of this group (at least 98), had first exercised a guild office prior

24 The power struggle between those two craft guilds will be addressed further below. 25 Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, mainly pp. 59-71. 26 The thatchers had one more representative in the council in 1425, but there are no traces of any masons or roofers in the council after 1413. 27 Wim Blockmans, ‘Mobiliteit in stadsbesturen 1400-1550’, in De Nederlanden in de late middeleeuwen, ed. by Dick De Boer and Jaap Marsilje (Utrecht: Aula, 1987), pp. 236-60.

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to their election as councillor.28 As such, it seems that accumulating guild offices served as a stepping stone for a later political career. Nevertheless, this was not always the case. 35 councillors seem to have never exercised any guild-related office, and the fact that 18 of those 35 were elected several times demonstrates that a close affiliation with a craft guild was not a prerequisite for a successful political career. Unfortunately, there are no sources that can tell us more about the background of these people. They might have been part of the lineages of Maastricht, a social group that we know very little about.29 Reforms of the political institutions in Maastricht consistently brought about an almost entirely new generation of politicians. Van der Eerden-Vonk demonstrated that the 1379-charter introduced a first new generation to the council: 31 out of 37 council members who held office between 1380 and 1387 were complete newcomers to the political scene.30 The reforms of 1409 posed an equally fundamental change. 33 out of all 56 officials between 1409 and 1413 had never exercised any political mandate prior to the rebellion of 1406-1408. As mentioned before, this can partly be ascribed to the new representatives of the smaller craft guilds, who entered the council thanks to the new election procedures. But the careers of most of these newcomers of 1409 was equally short-lived as the institutional reform. After the promulgation of the charter of 1413, that reversed the 1409-reform, 20 out of the 33 newcomers from 1409 (most of them having represented the smaller guilds) never held office again after 1413. Having discussed the composition of the urban council and the power balances between the guilds, the question of the importance of obtaining representation should finally be addressed. Determining the daily political practice in the council in Maastricht is difficult, since different opinions, deliberations or voting records are not documented in the council records. Still, if we examine the decrees that were carried out by the council between 1380 and 1428, it seems that even though the inhabitants of Maastricht were also able to exercise influence on the political decision-making in other ways – as I will elaborate in the next section – the value of sending a representative to the town’s government remained significant. First, even though 191 decisions were either taken after a request by a craft guild or after explicitly obtaining their consent, the major part of the legislation in Maastricht (85,5%, or 1001 out of 1192 stipulations) was composed ‘in a closed circle’. This meant that the decision was reached 28 It is very well possible that this number is even bigger, since we do not possess the necessary records to retrace the names of guild officials prior to 1380. Consequently, we cannot know if officials serving during the first years of the 1380s first gained experience within their own organization. 29 At least some members of this group possessed noble titles, like Henric Baveir, Servatius de Mulken and Arnoldus de Here, which could indicate their status as being part of one of the town’s lineages. In any case, the mighty families of Maastricht seem to have been a lot less organized and clearly delineated than, say, the geslachten in Leuven, where a few ‘lineages’ were awarded a fixed amount of seats every year. More on this in Van Uytven, Leuven, de beste stad, pp. 217-19. 30 Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverslagen, pp. 229-31. Several members of the ‘older’ oligarchy would return to the council in a later phase. See Kornelis Bosch, ‘Om der stat vriheit wille. Het stadsbestuur van Maastricht tijdens de regering van Jan van Beieren (1389-1418)’ (unpublished master thesis, Ghent University, 2012).

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with only the councillors and mayors present, and without any involvement of the craft guilds. Second, decisions regarding a given craft guild were usually drawn up when that guild was represented in the council, as demonstrated by the decrees promulgated in 1398 – which is the only year when it is possible to retrace the guild affiliation of all serving officeholders. During this year, the council promulgated 5 decisions that regulated to some extent the functioning of a craft guild. 4 decisions affected guilds that were represented in the council: two decrees regulated the fishmongers’ activities (once in combination with the carpenters’ guild), one law concerned the shippers and another the carpenters’ guild.31 Only one decision affected a non-represented guild that year: on the 11th February 1398, the council decreed that citizens who brought their own fur in the city were allowed to sell it without having to deal with the furriers guild.32 Since this decision clearly does not contain an improvement of the furriers’ situation, this stipulation enhances the argument for the importance of representation. Thus, since legislation concerning a given guild was usually drawn up when that guild was represented, we can assume that representation was important for the guilds to put their issues on the council’s agenda. Corporate influence extra consilio Despite the importance of securing council seats, the craft guilds’ political involvement did not remain restricted to the meetings in the town hall. A report of 1382 clearly illustrates this: In the year LXXXII, on the fifth day of august, the following was carried out by the mayors, councilors, governors and the common council, with the support of most of the good craft guilds of Maastricht. Since the governors of the craft guilds described in the council that first the weavers and then the fullers have gone on strike (because of a previous decision of the council and the town), we have decided that, from now on, whoever goes on strike before they have made their case in front of the council […], will be punished with a pilgrimage to St. Jacob, in Galicia.33 Out of dissatisfaction with the council’s solution of their dispute, the craft guilds of the weavers and fullers had gone on strike to pressure the council to reconsider its position. The council’s efforts to force the crafts to resume

31 Respectively nrs 828, 843, 844 and 851 in Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen, pp. 233-37. 32 See report 846 in Ibidem, pp. 236-37. 33 ‘Inden joere LXXXII des VI daghs augusti so wart uytgedragen overmits die meister, gesworen, goevernere, ende den gemeynen raede na den uytdragh ende meysten gevolge der gueder ambachten van Tricht, als die goevernere van bonnen ambachten inden raet bescreven brachten om dat die gewantmeker vore ende die volre na bonne ambachten gelacht hadden om richtinge en uytdraghe wille die der raet en die stat gedoen hadden, dat so we van nu voert sijn ambacht legt […] eir he sijn gebreke en die sake voer den raet gethoint heet dar om he sijn ambacht leggen wilt […] de sal verboeren eynen weech tSent Jacob in Galissien’ (Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen, pp. 77-78).

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their activities did not impress the guilds: during the next years, the fullers and weavers remained in an almost constant state of conflict.34 Usually, the conflict evolved around the wages of the fullers, who were hired by the weavers as wage-labourers.35 The aforementioned report illustrates that urban politics did not remain restricted to the councillors of Maastricht. The record shows us that the craft guilds were able to influence the urban decision-making in three different ways, which will be discussed in this section. First, the guilds were regularly asked for their consent with the council’s decision. This consent could be obtained in two ways. The council could either summon the guilds’ governors and ask for their opinion or present the problem to all the artisans in a ‘common assembly’, a public meeting held on the square in front of the town’s cloth hall. Second, the craft guilds could also initiate the decision-making process themselves, by handing over an oral or written request to the council. As shown by the previous example, the guilds’ governors usually acted as intermediaries between their fellow craftsmen and the council in these instances. Third, the guilds made use of more indirect forms of political pressure, by going on strike or by disputing labour regulations with other guilds. To what extent was the corpus of urban legislation influenced by political actions from outside the council walls? How often were craft guilds included in the political decision-making, and how do these initiatives relate to the ‘ordinary’ occupations of the town council? These are the main questions that I will address in this section. For the sake of my argument, I will determine the impact of each of the three aforementioned categories in turn. Obtaining consent: governors and common assemblies Common assemblies formed a vital part of urban politics all over Europe. They could take many forms: in fourteenth-century Tournai, the council summoned the heads of the families if important decisions needed to be reached. In a later phase in the same city, the ‘banners’, a sort of organization that grouped several guilds, replaced the families as basic unit for these assemblies.36 The exact conduct of such common assemblies is often unclear – it is hard to guess in how far people could express disagreement with the council’s proposals – nor is it stated which requirements needed to be fulfilled for people in order to take part in the meeting. In Maastricht, the Statuutboeck that lists several criminal laws and the most important privileges of the town, only states that ‘everyone’ 34 See nrs 189; 290; 476; 501; 502; 567 and 779 in Ibidem, pp. 87-218. 35 Conflicts between these two guilds were by no means exceptional: in several towns in Flanders and Mechelen, the fullers and weavers often clashed as well: Jan Dumolyn, ‘Guild Politics and Political Guilds in Fourteenth-Century Flanders’, in The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe. Communication and Popular Politics, ed. by Idem et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 37-38. 36 For the politics of Tournai, see Patrick Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict. Italy & the Southern Low Countries, 1370-1440 (Oxford: OUP, 2014), pp. 131-69.

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(enygelic) was allowed to make his case to the council, or ask a friend or speaker (voerspreker) to do it for him.37 One possible explanation for this (deliberate?) vagueness could be that the composers of the norms preferred to establish some legal leeway for the urban authorities, which allowed them to interpret the text as it suited them. This way, they were able to include and exclude social groups from the assembly if they wished to do so. Another interpretation holds that it should be seen as merely the registration of a practice that was already deeply rooted in urban customary law. If this is true, there was no need to explain the qualities that made citizens fit to participate in these assemblies, since these characteristics were commonly accepted anyway.38 In any case, the guilds appear to have been closely linked with these assemblies in Maastricht, as shown by a report in 1426. ‘Public property cannot be given away’, it states, unless it was done ‘in front of the common town and with the consent of all the good guilds, or most of them’.39 Another report reads that ‘whenever the city (i.e. the common assembly) is assembled, all craft guilds can state whether they agree or disagree’.40 Thus the guilds did not only play a vital role in the common assembly, they also seemed to have structured its functioning. Interestingly, the guidelines for these meetings in the Statuutboeck repeatedly emphasize the role of the governors in the process of finding consensus between the guilds and council. First, the governors played a crucial role in the common assemblies. If the assembly had to proclaim its agreement or disagreement via the craft guilds, their leaders probably had the final say. Moreover, the Statuutboeck states that the initiative for these common assemblies did not necessarily derive from the council: the guilds’ governors also had the authority to call for a public meeting themselves.41 If there was enough time, the councillors were instructed to inform the governors of the other guilds, who then notified their fellow craft members. A few days later, the assembly would take place.42 Second, the council could also ask the guilds’ governors to speak for their guild and approve the law that was to be made. In these cases, the council report specifies that the decree was promulgated by the town, the councillors and the governors. As such, the political power of the governors is quite remarkable, since they were first and foremost appointed to ‘govern and regulate their guilds, ‘for the profit of the town and the guilds’.43 Existing scholarship has also mainly emphasized the

37 Voer den raet cnde ouch voer die stat so sal enygelic mogen syne sake ertellen ende thoynen, of eynen voerspreke, of eynen anderen synen vrunde,, so weme he wilt ende hees bidt,. doen thoynen (Crahay, Coutumes, pp. 119-20). 38 As stated by Susan Reynolds, who argued that the town assembly was ‘the fundamental institution of urban government’. See Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities (Oxford: OUP, 1997), pp. 187-88. 39 Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen, pp. 392-93 (nr 1251). 40 Ibidem, p. 113 (nr. 306). 41 ‘At the request of the governors of three or four guilds’, the Statuutboeck states, ‘the mayors and councilors are obliged to summon the assembly’. See Crahay, Coutumes, pp. 119-20. 42 Ibidem, pp. 119-20. 43 As stated by the charter of 1409: ibidem, pp. 453-54. However, the office did at least exist since 1380, as demonstrated by report 56 in Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen, p. 50.

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governors’ task to rule over internal matters, while pointing at their control over the guilds’ account books and their presiding role in the guilds’ courts.44 Based on the previous paragraph and some other findings that I will present further below, I think that historians should devote more attention to their influence on political decision-making. The council regularly asked for the guilds’ consent when making a decision. In total, 122 out of 1292 or 9,3% of all decisions were taken after consultation with the craft guilds’ governors, or following a common assembly.45 This demonstrates that under certain circumstances, the council of Maastricht intended, or felt obliged to rule with the explicit consent of its craft guilds. After examination of the decisions that were taken with such a ‘broader consent’, some interesting patterns appear. First of all, all important decisions regarding the towns’ foreign policy seem to have required some broader consent of the town’s population. This is most clearly illustrated by the town’s initial decision to remain neutral during the civil war in Liège, and then decide to side with the prince-bishop a few months later.46 The guilds also observed the use of tax money, and were summoned when public places underwent changes. Furthermore, their consent was deemed necessary when the competences of public officials were extended, or when infirm ex-officials were granted a retirement pay.47 Yet, in most cases, there seems to have been some leniency whether or not the council needed a broader consent to legislate. Some changes in monetary value were decided with the consent of the common assembly, but others were only decreed by the council.48 Even though some general guidelines seem to have been in place, the rules regarding the council’s obligations to seek the advice of the guilds or town’s population seem to have been less clear-cut than, for instance, in Liège or Sint-Truiden.49 44 Farr, Artisans in Europe, p. 159. 45 This number is based by counting the number of decisions that are taken ‘in front of the halls’, those that are ‘decreed with the consent of the good craft guilds’ and those that are decreed ‘with the common city’. Even though this last formulation might seem to indicate only a meeting of the council, the reports clearly differentiate between meetings of the council (raet), councilors (raetsluden) and the town (stat). Moreover, a report of 1391 clarifies that the decision is reached ‘in front of the cloth halls, with the common town of Maastricht assembled there’. Another report from 1385 states that ‘when the town is assembled, that all craft guilds can say in front of the cloth halls wether they agree with the decision. See Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen, pp. 113 and 180 (nrs 306 and 597). 46 Ibidem, pp. 298 (nr. 1037) and 305 (nr. 1056) for the town’s declaration for John of Bavaria. The first decision is taken with the consent of the common assembly, the second one is decreed ‘with the good craft guilds’. 47 See Van der Eerden Vonk, Raadsverdragen, pp. 227 and 412 (nrs 815 and 1281). 48 In 1391, the value of the alden grote cense is fixed on 7 vlieguiten, with the consent of the governors. The same procedure was used for an ordinance in 1415. Most of the monetary ordinances are however decreed by the council, like the extensive monetary ordinance that was promulgated a little later in 1415. See Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverslagen, pp. 176, 338 and 340 (nrs 571; 1138 and 1142). 49 In Liège, a law stated that all matters concerning fiscal or military matters needed the approval of the entire town’s population, while in Sint-Truiden, in absence of a similar norm, the praxis shows that all matters concerning taxes and the jurisdiction of the towns’ officials required the consent of the guilds. For Liège, see Stanislas Bormans, Recueil des ordonnances de la principauté de Liège, 1re sér., 974-1506 (Brussels: Gobbaerts, 1878), pp. 210-13. For Sint-Truiden, see Ben Eersels, ‘Tous les chemins

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The chart above demonstrates that the importance of the guilds’ consent in urban politics remained rather constant over the years.50 Whereas the percentage of decisions reached with the guilds’ consent constantly changed from year to year, the trend remains rather constant over the 48 studied years. On average 9,3% of the council’s decisions were taken with the advice of the guilds, but in 10 years, this number amounted to at least 20%. The temporary dip between 1409 and 1413, which also lowers the average, can be ascribed to the loss of almost all council reports issued between those years.

Finally, if we compare the amount of common assemblies with the number of times the governors’ advice was requested, two conclusions can be drawn. First, mènent au conseil. L’influence des corps de métiers sur le processus décisionnel politique à SaintTrond à la fin du Moyen Âge (ca. 1400-1500)’, in Les cultures de la décision dans l’espace bourguignon: acteurs, conflits, représentations, ed. by Alain Marchandisse, Gilles Docquier and Nils Bock (Neuchâtel: CEEB, 2017), pp. 105-17. For examples of similar practices in other towns in the Low Countries, see Raymond Van Uytven, ‘Het stedelijk leven, 11de-14de eeuw’, in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (Haarlem: Fibula –Van Dishoeck, 1982), p. 234. 50 For the calculations, see higher above.

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while the relative amount of decisions reached with the consent of the population remained rather constant over time, the absolute number of decisions reached with the consent of the governors or the town slightly decreased. This can be explained by the lower amount of meetings that are recorded throughout the years. Second, while (in absolute numbers) both the amount of public meetings and the advices of the governors shrunk over the years, the governors’ decrease of influence is more important. Hence, the council of Maastricht increasingly obtained the guilds’ advice via public meetings, instead of the guilds’ governors. Oral and written petitioning The guilds of Maastricht regularly initiated the decision-making process themselves, by handing over an oral or written request to the council. Petitioning was a widely accepted legal means to suggest policy-changes to the urban and princely authorities in all Western-European medieval countries.51 On the urban level, petitions were also used to influence governance, but it is rather rare that historians can determine how often political decisions resulted from it. Because of the lack of documents – petitions were usually either delivered orally, or destroyed shortly after they were handed over – it is usually very hard to grasp their structural importance in an urban context. However, because of the standardized ways in which the council reports of Maastricht were composed, we can determine the importance of petitioning for the legislative process in a more structural way. Even though the petition’s text itself is in most cases not copied in the report, the council’s scribes do seem to have dutifully noted if the initiative for a decision came from an ‘outsider’. As such, 47 decrees in Maastricht are recorded as the result of a guilds’ request. Two categories of requests can be distinguished: on the one hand, governors of all guilds could bring a common petition to the council, which they had composed by mutual agreement. These requests, which constitute the biggest group in Maastricht (30 out of all 47) could contain a broad scale of subjects, ranging from taxes, extraordinary mandates for public officials or adjusting penalties for certain crimes.52 The mere fact that such ‘communal requests’ appear so often is surprising, since in many towns, the governors of craft guilds were strictly forbidden to meet another without supervision of the council – since the councillors feared that such a common front could potentially be dangerous. In Maastricht, conversely, such a prohibition does not seem to have existed. The high amount of these requests might even point at the existence of a tradition

51 On medieval petitions, see Andreas Würgler, Bittschriften und Gravamina. Politik, Verwaltung und Justiz in Europa (14.-18. Jahrhundert) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005); Medieval petitions. Grace and Grievance, ed. by Mark Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), and Suppliques et requêtes. Le gouvernement par la grâce en Occident (XIIe-XVe siècle), ed. by Hélène Millet (Rome: EFR, 2003). 52 See e.g. Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverslagen, pp. 105, 117 and 206 (nrs 317, 738, 266).

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of guild governors to regularly meet, and discuss whether it was necessary to make a common stand regarding specific policy-changes. Requests composed by individual guilds usually included pleas to further regulate one’s own organization. They could for instance ask to settle labour-related issues with other guilds, to be merged to or separated from another guild.53 In case of these individual petitions, too, the governors of the guilds acted as intermediaries between the council and their colleagues. It remains difficult to assess whether this number was relatively extensive or limited, since studies with a similar approach for other towns in the Low Countries are generally lacking. The subject has received more scholarly attention at the level of the central authorities: research on the legislation issued by Philips the Good for the Duchy of Brabant showed that the duke promulgated one third of his laws upon request.54 Compared to this, the 4% of urban decrees in Maastricht issued after a petition seems very low. In this context, it should be stressed again that we only possess records of successful petitions. It is certainly possible that guilds often petitioned the council, but to no avail. There are, however, two arguments that can also explain a lesser need for petitioning in an urban context. First, as we have seen, the guilds had obtained a very prominent position in the town council after 1379. Most guilds had a reasonable chance of obtaining representation, which would grant them the opportunity to lobby for their case in the council. Second, it seems plausible that the officeholders in Maastricht were much more aware of any issue that required settlement than Philips the Good in his entire dominion. Due to the extensiveness of the Burgundian territories, Philips the Good depended on his subjects to address problems in order for him to carry out his policy.55 The council’s proximity to the inhabitants enabled the council to act more proactively than the central authorities could. Additionally, the previous section suggested that many councillors maintained good contacts with their craft guilds, so proximity between guilds and council also existed in a less literal sense. Strikes and guild disputes A third and final way in which the guilds influenced the legislation process was by means of provocation and conflict. This category includes a wide range of so-called ‘collective actions’, to use the terminology introduced by Charles Tilly.56 During the last years, medievalists have distinguished a broad scale of 53 Ibidem, pp. 63 and 87 (nr 91 and 191). 54 Philippe Godding, La législation ducale en Brabant sous le règne de Philippe le Bon (1430-1467) (Brussels: ARB, 2006). 55 In this respect Peter Blickle, has argued that ‘the state needed its subjects to become aware of its existing problems’. See the introduction of Resistance, Representation and Community, ed. by Peter Blickle (Oxford: OUP, 1997), p. 136. 56 For the framework of collective actions, see Charles Tilly, From mobilization to revolution (Reading (Mass.): Addison-Wesley, 1978)

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these peaceful, but provoking pressure methods. For one, inhabitants could go on strike, possibly by leaving the city and refusing to enter until their demands were met. Another way to increase pressure was by occupying the market place with raised banners or demonstrate on the streets. Based on a survey of chronicle literature, letters of remission and criminal acts, Samuel Cohn has argued that medieval strikes were mostly waged to protest the state, ‘more often than capitalist bosses or landlords’.57 My analysis of the source material in Maastricht, however, yielded different results. Even if not often, the council records contain traces of strikes in Maastricht, which were almost exclusively used by the fullers.58 The fullers’ demands for higher wages put them in constant conflict with the weavers’ guild, which hired the fullers as wage labourers. For a few years, the council of Maastricht refused to cede to fullers’ wishes and tried to force them to go back to work under threat of fines, pilgrimages or even banishments. The fullers persisted, however, and proved to be successful in the longer run. In 1402, the council finally decided to raise the wages of the fullers, ‘to improve the town’s reputation as textile producers’.59 In conclusion, mainly economic reasons seem to have been the reason for strikes in Maastricht, findings that have been confirmed for the County of Flanders and the town of Mechelen.60 Next to strikes, numerous conflicts between different guilds also pushed the council to act. The council records reveal 15 cases in which a decree was promulgated to solve an inner dispute between guilds. It should first be noted that this number surely underestimates the total amount of guild disputes in Maastricht, as my source material only records the conflicts that ended up being settled by the council. Presumably, this is only a minority of all guild conflicts that took place in the town, as these disputes were usually settled by the guilds’ governors, so without any interference by the council. It seems that the council deliberately chose to only intervene in case the guilds were unable to settle the matter themselves.61 This attitude is not difficult to explain when we take the council’s composition into account: since the council consisted largely of people with close ties to their guilds, it seems logical that the representatives were inclined to keep the council excluded from internal guild matters. 57 Sam Cohn, Lust for Liberty. The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge (Mass.): HUP), 2006, pp. 26-27. 58 The reports contain records of 6 strikes in total. 5 of them were waged by the fullers (once together with the weavers) to demand higher wages. The sixth strike was organized by the shoemakers, but the reason for the strike remains unclear, as the report only informs us about the conviction and the punishment. 59 Van der Eerden-Vonk, Raadsverdragen, p. 155 (nr. 502) 60 Jelle Haemers, ‘Ad petitionem burgensium. Petitions and peaceful resistance of craftsmen in Flanders and Mechelen (13th-16th centuries)’, in Los grupos populares en la ciudad medieval Europea, ed. by Jesus Solorzano Telechea, Beatriz Arizaga Bolumburu and Jelle Haemers (Logrono: IER, 2014), pp. 371-95. 61 Marc Boone, ‘Les gens de métiers à l’époque corporative à Gand et les litiges professionnels (13501450)’, in Statuts individuels, statuts corporatifs et statuts judiciaires, ed. by Idem and Maarten Prak (Leuven: Garant, 1996), pp. 23-47. The same was often the case elsewhere, see for instance Caroline Barron, London in the later Middle Ages: government and people, 1200-1500 (Oxford: OUP, 2004), p. 232.

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Conclusion In this essay, I have argued that the political decision making in Maastricht comprised many more aspects than the political affairs in the town council alone. By combining several approaches in order to observe several ways in which political power manifested itself, I hope to have offered a new way to assess the guilds’ involvement in urban politics. Institutional representation remained the guilds’ most direct and structural way to influence the legislation process to their advantage. Even though the guilds influenced politics in several other ways, I calculated that 85% of the urban decrees were composed in the council, behind closed doors. Furthermore, my enquiry has suggested that obtaining a seat in the council was indeed important for guilds if they wished to address a certain issue, since guild regulations were usually drawn up when the guild in question was represented in the council. That said, it seems that not every guild could aspire such a structural political involvement. Even though no single guild was able to fully dominate the council, there was certainly an unequal power balance in place in Maastricht’ council. Whereas the bigger craft guilds like the weavers and the drapers secured a large number of council positions, the smaller guilds remained deprived from (almost) any political representation. The power balance between the guilds was however repeatedly altered by several institutional reforms, which brought each time a new political dynasty to power. The reform of 1409 briefly enabled the smaller guilds to obtain institutional power, but their influence diminished abruptly again after the reverse of the election procedures to the status quo ante in 1413. If Maastricht was indeed a ‘guild democracy’, as it was recently termed by Paul Nève, its main political institution was first and foremost a polity that was mainly dominated by the bigger guilds.62 However, urban politics was not exclusively the occupation of the town’s councillors. Members of the craft guilds were often involved in the political process. In several cases, the craft guilds were required to consent with the decision upon approval. This consent could both be given by the guilds’ governors, who spoke for their fellow members, or in a much more direct manner, by organizing a common assembly. Whereas both forms existed in Maastricht, the council increasingly showed the tendency to make use of this second way of finding (or creating?) public support for their decisions. Slightly decreasing as their influence may have been, I have argued that the political influence of the guilds’ governors was certainly significant, and perhaps more significant than some scholarship has credited them for. Not only did they have a mandate to speak for their members when important decisions were reached, they also had the authority to demand the organization of a common assembly and discuss an important issue in public. Furthermore, the governors acted as middlemen between craftsmen and councillors by handing over petitions from their craft 62 Paul Nève, ‘Een episode uit de staatsrechtelijke geschiedenis van het tweeherig Maastricht’, in Rechtsgeschiedenis op nieuwe wegen, ed. by Dave De Ruysscher et al. (Antwerp: Maklu, 2015), pp. 19-35.

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guilds. Whereas individual guilds did ask for internal changes at times, common petitions signed by all guilds and delivered by all governors appeared more frequently. This suggests the existence of some sort of a parallel political forum next to the council, in which the guild leaders had the opportunity to discuss political matters, and decide if it was worthwhile for all craft guilds to take a stand together. The relatively low amount of decisions that were taken after a petition on the one hand, and the few traces of several forms of conflict between political actors on the other hand, seems to suggest that the council of Maastricht did a good job in mediating between the different interest groups of the town. Perhaps, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the close networks between the council and the craft guilds (as exemplified by the high amount of councillors with previous experience in guild leadership) also made petitioning less necessary since the wishes of the craft guilds reached the council in other, more informal ways. However, the fact that the system did not work equally well for all guilds is demonstrated by several strikes that were organized by the fullers between 1385 and 1402. As they were unable to push for higher wages through the institutional way, the fullers used the power of their number and their importance to the town’s economy to lay down their work until their demands were met. Even though the council persisted for a long time, they finally had to cede to the fullers’ wishes in order to maintain Maastricht’s reputation as a reliable textile producer. What, then, made the craft guilds in Maastricht politically powerful? Or what made them ‘political guilds’? Jan Dumolyn defines a political guild as an organization ‘integral to the urban political system’.63 While this is in essence certainly correct, what did it mean for guilds to be part of this ‘political system’? I maintain that all the guilds’ different political actions – institutional bargaining through delegates, consent-giving, petitions via their governors or the public assembly, strikes and mutual guild conflicts – should be seen as an inherent part of their political role. It was not solely the guilds’ place in the urban institutional framework that made them political. The guilds’ political influence was defined by power balances between mutual guilds and vis-à-vis other social groups, and their political involvement comprised all their political actions that aimed to shape urban policies. Informal aspects that were equally part of their political involvement will however always remain nearly impossible to chart. Corruption, blackmail, informal networks and lobbying remain very difficult to trace, even though they played undeniably a big role in medieval urban societies, as they still do today. But if historians acknowledge this gap in their methodology, exploring the aforementioned aspects does reveal an important part of the guilds’ structural political influence in late medieval towns.

63 Dumolyn defines political guilds rather vaguely as organizations ‘integral to the urban political system’. Dumolyn, ‘Guild Politics and Political Guilds’, p. 48. See also the discussion mentioned by De Munck, Guilds, labour, pp. 50-57.

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Craftsmen, Urban Councils, and Political Power in the Imperial Cities of Swabia (14th-15th centuries) Should the political society of late medieval German cities be considered a visionary democracy or an uncompromising oligarchy? The historiographical vision on the German cities as a political object has oscillated between these two views, in particular concerning the guild regimes that most cities in Swabia, a vast historical region in South Germany, established during the fourteenth century. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians have emphasized, sometimes to praise and sometimes to condemn this feature, the democratic aspect of these regimes, since, from the fourteenth century, delegates elected by craft guilds that brought together the entire civic population sat in the councils of these cities, alongside patricians who were often in the minority within these councils; social openness and egalitarian ambition were indeed among the major objectives set by the designers of these new systems.1 Since the post-war period it is the oligarchic, authoritarian and vertical vision of these political systems that has dominated discussions, under the misleading influence of an article by Erich Maschke.2 His attention was almost exclusively focused on the social origin of the holders of the supreme functions, and this very narrow understanding of the political field explains why he neglected the way political legitimacy was produced, in a process which integrated large parts of society. This leads him to deny the complex reality of the political systems under scrutiny here, as well as the social openness attached to them. Studying political initiatives taken ‘from below’ could fit with this oligarchic vision of the urban governments: a political elite taking advantage of their social superiority versus an anonymous mass of ordinary citizens; the latter, in the absence of effective institutional mediations, would be constrained to take initiatives to make their voices heard. However, such a vision misunderstands the essence and originality of the institutional system of these cities. After all, the patrician elite which





1 Klaus Schreiner, ‘„Kommunebewegung“ und „Zunftrevolution“. Zur Gegenwart der mittelalterlichen Stadt im historisch-politischen Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Stadtverfassung – Verfassungsstaat – Pressepolitik. Festschrift für Eberhard Naujoks, ed. by Franz Quarthal and Wilfried Setzer (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1980), pp. 139-68. See also Dominique Adrian, Les chartes constitutionnelles des villes d’Allemagne du Sud (Turnhout: Brepols, to be published in 2020). 2 Erich Maschke, ‘Verfassung und soziale Kräfte in der deutschen Stadt des späten Mittelalters vornehmlich in Oberdeutschland’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 46 (1959), pp. 289-349, 433-76. Dominique Adrian • Université de Lorraine Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 113-124.

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exclusively held the political responsibilities until then could have just brought in a few rich merchants to the council with them. On the contrary, these cities preferred to resort to a complex system by creating the so-called Zünfte or guilds. These institutions elected their masters who then sat on the City council and functioned simultaneously as intermediary bodies between the civic community and the urban government, and as holders of a popular legitimacy emanating from the community. The very existence of such mediation makes this relationship a two-way dialogue integrated into the normal functioning of institutions – with forms and conditions that, as we shall see, have limited the effectiveness of this consensual framework for the peaceful handling of protests. Especially from the last third of the fifteenth century, the mediating role of the institutions gave way to a relationship of authority which, without giving the governed an institutional way to be heard, promoted the emergence of conflicts. In what follows, we will first look at what happened in some Swabian cities during the fourteenth century, in order to explain the genesis of the Zünfte and their function in the urban political systems. Second, we will look at how these institutions intervened in urban politics. It will become clear that much of the influence guildsmen had on the making of polities was informal and, therefore, difficult to retrieve for the historian. Yet it is clear that members of the Zünfte could intervene in urban politics, although they could not overthrow the domination of the City council. Such a conclusion does not mean that the German cities were vertical oligarchies, as Maschke said. Instead, historians should consider their political system as being more diverse, in which bottom-up initiatives of guild members could influence the decision-making process. The fourteenth century The main ‘bottom-up initiative’ taken by the citizens to increase their political power in late medieval towns consisted of the establishment of new political systems.3 From the end of the thirteenth century, the political model of Freiburg and Esslingen spread to other cities, small and large, in Swabia, a region without political unity, namely that of a council dominated largely by the delegates of the Zünfte. The phenomenon lasted almost a century, until Augsburg (1368) or Pfullendorf (1383), and had few exceptions. It is all the more striking that the craft guilds most often didn’t exist before the system change: until then, the various trades were structured in various ways, mostly with very limited autonomy, and the guilds created afterwards had both political and professional functions from the outset. Zünfte cannot be considered mere pressure groups



3 A general overview can be found in Karl Otto Müller, Die oberschwäbischen Reichsstädte. Ihre Entstehung und ältere Verfassung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1912), and in Horst Rabe, Der Rat der niederschwäbischen Reichsstädte. Rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen über die Ratsverfassung der Reichsstädte Niederschwabens bis zum Ausgang der Zunftbewegungen im Rahmen der oberdeutschen Reichs- und Bischofsstädte (Köln: Böhlau, 1966).

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that obtained integration into the new institutions; rather, they should be seen as organizations created with the aim of representing large social groups previously excluded by the elite from any political participation. It is true that at least some of the urban elites participated directly in the political transition, partly because they understood that their economic interests were no longer compatible with a system that favored the economic status quo at the expense of commercial dynamism. The case of Ulrich Kunzelmann in Ulm illustrates this point.4 Kunzelmann was a patrician who in 1328 became the dominant figure of a brief episode in which the craft guilds of Ulm, which had been constituted since the end of the previous century and associated with the council, tried to obtain a more central political role. The case shows both the divisions within the traditional urban elite (the ‘patriciate’), and that the craft guilds understood that the best way to achieve their objectives was to enter into an alliance with those patricians who preferred their economic interests to the preservation of their political exclusivity. In this sense, Kunzelmann’s individual support of the craft guilds’ political movement should not be interpreted as a way for a patrician clan to take advantage of popular discontent to its own benefit. We have clear evidence of the broad social base of such initiatives, which, with a few exceptions, did not go through violent outbursts. The establishment of the political system in which craft guilds were integrated is particularly well known in Augsburg. The culmination of several decades of protest against the patrician government took place in October 1368, after a previous conflict in 1340 resulted in giving non-patricians a right to control the financial affairs of the city.5 In this case, the merchant elites of the town tried to conquer influence because they were particularly concerned about as well as competent in financial matters. Above all, they wanted to find a solution to the high urban debt that weakened their trade. The council’s concessions in 1340 are certainly a counterpart to the increased financial participation of these wealthy elites, who remained still excluded from political participation. In the absence of narrative sources, it remains difficult to know what role other social groups have played in this compromise. However, nothing seems to indicate a popular participation or any kind of popular initiative. Presumably, the craft guilds supported the merchants’ goal of a greater fiscal justice, but at this stage they clearly had no means and perhaps not even the intention of directly influencing the political debate. In 1368, the scene changed in Augsburg. On a given day in October, armed craftsmen appeared, behind their banners, to take possession of the gates of the city and to invade the town hall. It is clear that a significant portion of the urban elite





4 Christian Keitel, ‘Städtische Bevölkerung und Stadtregiment bis 1397’, in Die Ulmer Bürgerschaft auf dem Weg zur Demokratie, ed. by Hans-Eugen Specker (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1997), pp. 96-103. A similar role was played by the patrician Conrad Ilsung auf dem Stein in Augsburg in 1368 (Dominique Adrian, Augsbourg à la fin du Moyen Âge. La politique et l’espace (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2013), p. 293). 5 The charter sealing the compromise can be found in Urkundenbuch der Stadt Augsburg, ed. by Christian Meyer (Augsburg: Butsch, s. d.), I, pp. 354-56.

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supported these craftsmen, but many of the leaders mentioned in the chronicles are members of less wealthy associations.6 There are two essential aspects of our theme at work in this event. First, we have evidence in the 1360s of a shift of opinion in favor of this political change, one emanating from a patrician declaring his support to the change, the other from a craftsman who called for the establishment of a guild regime ‘as in Strasbourg’7. Second, we are well informed about the mobilization structures of the ‘rebels’. The banners mentioned in the sources are those of the Augsburg contingent on the occasion of a military expedition in 1362, where the mobilized citizens were organized by profession8. Not only had this military organization been able to encourage the formation of common solidarities and identities, but it was also the starting point for the institutionalization of professional organizations which until then had been limited.9 Guild regimes Once the guild regimes were established, the members of the civic body – the majority of the adult population in the cities or, rather, independent and secular men – had an organic relay to the political circles through the Zunft to which they belonged. The guild masters had a complex role, which made them, according to the circumstances and the periods, the spokesmen of the demands of their colleagues and electors or the communicants of the constraints imposed by the council. These are the modalities of the dialogue that I would like to discuss here, in particular the way in which these three possible incarnations of the Zunft work in this dialogue. A Zunft is at once a body politic within the municipal institutional system, the board of its elected leaders (called the Eleven, the Twelve, the Seven, etc.), and a fraction of the civic body. Each of these three levels had its own role in urban political life. When studying bottom-up initiatives on a political level, this tripartition is essential, since the political demands emanating from each of these three levels took a different form. The craft guilds in most of the Swabian cities were not just old professional associations that eventually gained a political role. Instead, they were created at once



6 See for instance the anonymous chronicle Chronik von der Gründung der Stadt Augsburg bis zum Jahr 1469, ed. by Ferdinand Frensdorff, Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte [henceforth CDS], 4 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1865), p. 309. 7 Augsburg, Stadtarchiv, Schätze 81, fol. 90d and 93d-94a (1365/1367). More information on the emergence of Zünfte in Strasbourg, which served as an example for craftsmen in other towns, can be found in the essay of Sabine von Heusinger in this book. 8 Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, 2° Cod. Aug. 51, pp. 161-91, see Adrian, Augsbourg (note 3), p. 176. 9 In previous decades, the patrician government hesitated between a system of distribution by neighbourhood or by professional group, see Adrian, Augsbourg (note 3), pp. 372-73. Of course, a comparison can be made here with late medieval Florence, where the use of flags also symbolized the dynamic between military and professional corporate identities (see Richard Trexler, ‘Follow the flag: the Ciompi revolt seen from the streets’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 46 (1984), pp. 357-92).

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when citizens felt the need to intervene in urban politics. Their appearance had a profound effect on the relationship citizens had with the municipal government and on their ability to take political initiatives. On the one hand, the inclusion of the Zünfte in the political system gave them a strong legitimacy; on the other hand, it removed part of the dynamic protest of organized craftsmen, since they had virtually no legitimacy outside this municipal framework and no specific traditions. When the regime change took place, guilds almost always appeared as new institutions, and the word which designates them, Zunft, Zünfte in plural, is in these cities every time a new word, the very appearance of which represents a decisive rupture in the structure of urban government. There is scarce evidence that some forms of professional organization had existed before and that they had fulfilled extra-professional functions, but the form they took in receiving political functions was new. The Zünfte within the same city, all appearing at once with the regime change, did not have very different privileges. They often received on this occasion their statutes, as happened for instance in Nördlingen, in Augsburg and in Memmingen10. For those who designed the new political systems, their primary function was the representation of the civic population and also its distribution. With the sole exception of the patricians, inhabitants of most Swabian cities could not obtain rights of citizenship without belonging to a Zunft,11 and every Zunft had one seat or more in the council; within most of these councils, the Zünfte held a clear numerical majority, along with a few of the patricians who, until then, possessed a political exclusivity. Naturally, the mechanisms of social distinction work here as elsewhere, and in political practice it goes without saying that the influence of the various Zünfte was unequal. The idea of equality of the Zünfte is nonetheless a fundamental legal basis for the legitimation of the system. In general, the guild delegates were elected by the general assembly of their colleagues, and this was – at least until the last third of the fifteenth century – a real election, not a proclamation of pre-nominated candidates or infinite extension of mandates. The principle of representation may give the misleading impression of rendering obsolete the question of relations between the rulers and the governed. The rulers, of course, had a coercive power over the governed, but the latter elected the governors every year. The election, especially when it took place frequently, was an occasion to make one’s wishes known. After all, the political societies of those South German cities were on a human scale, and one’s guild

10 In each of these cities, charters of this type are only preserved for a minority of trades, cf. Adrian, Chartes constitutionnelles (note 1); in Nördlingen, the establishment of a guild system did not lead to the writing of a constitutional charter, probably because the leaders considered that they did not have the legal capacity to do so, so that essential information on the participation of delegates from each guild to the council can be found only in the preserved statutes: they therefore constitute a kind of fallback, but this also suggests that the drafting of these guild statutes was coordinated by the municipal political elites, leaving a limited autonomy for the different guilds. 11 See for instance the formulation of such a stipulation for Esslingen, Urkundenbuch der Stadt Esslingen, ed. by Adolf Diehl (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1899-1905), I, p. 304 (answer to enquiries by the council of Reutlingen about the statutes of Zünfte, 1331).

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representative was anything but an abstraction.12 Unsurprisingly, we have little documentary evidence of petitions or other documents explicitly presenting autonomous demands of Zünfte to the council, at least for the Middle Ages. Political participation functioned mostly orally and indirectly, particularly the decisions taken by the councils in response to the guilds, and few traces remain of this decision-making process. Some petitions are preserved, but direct documentation of political bottom-up initiatives is singularly scarce and late in Swabia. We have evidence of petitions in a conflict between the weavers and the hat makers in Nördlingen in 1511,13 but they are known only because they are cited in the council’s charter settling the conflict. As is shown elsewhere in this book, it was common that the urban council in German cities and elsewhere would intervene in these cases, not to reduce the autonomy of the trades, but to act as an arbitration body. In addition, the social diffusion of the written word and the reinforcement within each profession of literate elites favored the use of this written procedure in later times. One might think that this increasing use of the written word to interact with the council confirms the vitality of the political interactions between the Zünfte as intermediate bodies and the municipal government. These supplications would then be viewed as a manifestation of the extension of the uses of the written word, a politically neutral fact that would not imply an evolution of political balances. However, the political context of German cities, sometimes as early as the middle of the fifteenth century, suggests the opposite. Writing was not unknown to many guild members, at least in large cities where guild books were made; if they did not resort to petitions earlier, it was certainly because they could use their personal contacts with councilors. The appearance of petitions is presumably the consequence of the growing oligarchic closure of urban councils.14 While petitions are also forms of popular initiative, accepted and somewhat institutionalized by the municipal sphere, their appearance is the corollary of a considerable paradigm shift. The fact that they become necessary indicates that guilds and their elected officials ceased to exercise the function of mediation that until then had been theirs.

12 It is important to know that the number of members of a guild remained most often limited. The Zünfte in Konstanz, for instance, had between 49 and 138 members in 1468 (Philipp Ruppert, Konstanzer geschichtliche Beiträge = Konstanzer Beiträge zur badischen Geschichte (Konstanz: Selbstverlag, 1888-1899), II, p. 51). Even in a textile city like Augsburg, the guild of the weavers did not have more than 550 members in 1475; the others did not have more than 200 members (Adrian, Augsbourg (see n. 3), p. 466). 13 Nördlinger Stadtrechte des Mittelalters, ed. by Karl Otto Müller (Munich: Kommission für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1933), pp. 263-64. 14 See for instance the seminal work of Eberhard Naujoks, Obrigkeitsgedanke, Zunftverfassung und Reformation. Studien zur Verfassungsgeschichte von Ulm, Eßlingen und Schwäbisch Gmünd (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1958).

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The guilds’ interference in economic matters What we know best about the relationship between the municipal authorities and the craft guilds is the professional and economic aspects of the guilds, such as the internal regulations that the trades often asked to be validated by the council, as well as professional conflicts within guilds: in this case, as already mentioned, the council may intervene either on its own initiative or at the call of one of the parties in the conflict. Such an intervention can be noticed, for example, in the fifteenth-century conflicts within the weaver’s guild in Augsburg, where a majority of weavers wanted to ban the langer garn, a new type of thread that had to be imported by a minority who had access to big business, which gave that wealthy minority an unacceptable hold on their colleagues.15 One of the protesters, Matthias Sandauer, did not spare his efforts to get the council to intervene to protect the craftsmen. He launched a rant against the authorities of the guild in front of the guild house, he met the mayor and he wrote a petition – which is not preserved – together with some colleagues. This conflict took place in the 1490s, at a time when social openness linked to the principle of representation was undermined by the reinforcement of a principle of authority emanating from the council and extending to the elites of the guilds. However, the elected officials of the guild, namely the guild governor and the ‘Board of Twelve’, did not give in, even though they were elected by all guild members and should have represented their interests. Sandauer claimed that he was acting for the common good, von kainem aufrůr wegen16 (that he did not ‘want to stir up disorder’), and everything shows that he had no further agenda than the settlement of this specific economic problem. The reaction of the council, however, was not what he had hoped: to them, it was unacceptable that the principle of authority embodied by the elected officials of the profession would be circumvented by a spontaneous initiative, and, in their eyes, the common good of the whole world would not have compensated for the glaring absence of political legitimacy of the protesters. Sandauer’s attempts were in vain. In less turbulent periods, it was common for the craft guilds to ask for the confirmation of their statutes by the council, but for much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had sufficient autonomy to do without the council. Even if the council confirmed their internal regulations, its role was often

15 Similar conflicts concerned the struggle against the delocalization of the textile production to neighbouring villages as, for instance, in 1411 (Augsburg, Stadtarchiv, Ratsbuch 1, p. 388, ed. CDS 34, p. 224-25), following a complaint of the weavers (des handtwercks der weber clage). In this case the council clearly acted as a juridical body. In 1444, ‘the requirements of the whole guild of the weavers, up to 26 men’ (the begeren und anruffen der gantzen zunft von webern (bis on sechsundzwaintzig man) complained about frembden wepfen in front of the council (‘foreign warp’, i.e. originating from the countryside; see Clemens Weber, CDS 34, p. 229-30). In the latter case, the council ruled a favorable decision for the majority of the Augsburg weavers (the 26 dissenters belonged probably to the wealthier part of the guild). 16 Jörg Rogge, Für den gemeinen Nutzen. Politisches Handeln und Politikverständnis von Rat und Bürgerschaft in Augsburg im Spätmittelalter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), pp. 111-14.

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limited to a declaration of conformity. In 1493, for instance, in Augsburg, the shoe-makers were divided on the number of valets that each master could have: two members of the guild, who were engaged in long-distance trade, passed over the guild’s statutes. In a first reaction, the guild masters consulted the mayor and then the city council. Finally, the two merchants were reprimanded.17 The argument with which they were overruled was basically the same as that used for Matthias Sandauer: the council supported the authorities of the guild, based on the guild’s written customs, without examining the substance of the complaint. This means that popular initiative was not forbidden, but it must have followed a hierarchical path in which the elected representatives of the professions are unavoidable – this is a serious limitation, yet attempts to contest this procedure are very rare, especially in the first decades of the guild system. In the registers of the Augsburg council, one easily finds cases where members of a guild, together supporting their guild master, came in front of the city council to make requests. The initiative was clearly theirs.18 Initiative from the guilds was possible, but on a limited range of matters, mostly those regarding only the guild itself and its constituting trades; requests on wider political matters concerning the whole city were not welcome. When the demands of the trades went beyond the framework of internal regulation, it was not rare that they would resort to something that resembled a petition. When in 1471 in Nördlingen ‘the butchers’ governor and the Six [the guild’s deputies] informed the Council’ about a decision that was taken by the guild board (hat der metzger zunftmaister und die sechser an ain rat langen lassen…) – the guild master, who was ex officio a member of the council, could have spoken directly to the other members of the council, but since this was directly concerning his guild and not the whole city, this kind of direct influence was probably not what was expected from him as a councilor.19 The subject of this request was the dubious commercial practices of some butchers. The subject went beyond the Zunft because the guilds that were responsible for the food supply of the city were particularly watched by the urban authorities, as their activities were essential for maintaining the urban peace.20 The petition of 1471 was closely related to the commercial activities of the butcher’s guild, and the demand was such that the guild could hardly have any doubt that the 17 CDS 34, p. 317-19 (the quotation can be found in Augsburg, Stadtarchiv, Zunftbuch 256, fol. 46a, 51a, etc.; Ratsbuch 8, 101r). 18 For instance in 1446 (Augsburg, Stadtarchiv, Ratsbuch 4, p. 200): a Zunft protests against a decision taken by the council following which a person was authorized to have more valets than the statutes of the guild permitted him to have. Another example can be given for 1459 (Augsburg, Stadtarchiv, Ratsbuch 6, fol. 83v): during a commercial conflict between the pot makers and a private individual, both sides were summoned before the council; a written account of the pot makers’ request was read in public, then a debate was held, and only after this procedure a decision was taken by the council. 19 Müller, Nördlinger Stadtrechte, p. 137. 20 Compare with the petition of the butchers of 1512 (ibid., p. 243-44), and the numerous conflicts between guilds, as happened between the tanners and the butchers in Esslingen in 1400, or between the weavers and the shopkeepers in the year thereafter (Diehl, Urkundenbuch, II, pp. 392-94 et 407-10).

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council would agree with its demand. In the volume in which the Nördlingen Council copies the guild statutes during the 15th century, some are granted by the Council, while others, such as that of weavers, are the products of the guild’s regulatory autonomy, ‘we, the jurors of the guild of the weavers of fustian and flax and in addition the common people, poor and rich, of the said guild’ (Wir die gesworn der zunft der parchantweber und linweber und dartzu die gemeinde arm und reiche desselben hantwerks21). This does not seem to bother the council; however, the ‘political’ articles of the initial regulation of the guild, written at the time of its establishment in 1348, relating to the election of the guild master and his assistants, were not formulated by the guild, since they are found unaltered in the regulations for shoemakers of the same period – once one leaves the professional framework, the autonomy of the professions finds its narrow limits. In some cities, however, decision-making on these matters was not the responsibility of the city council. In Konstanz, for example, the guild masters met without the rest of the council when decisions were to be made on matters regarding only the guilds.22 Those separate assemblies were forbidden in many towns, but not in Konstanz, as shown by the existence of a so-called ‘Zunftbuch’ (Book of the Guilds) containing the decisions made by the guild members of the council (sometimes in the presence of the mayor or even the whole urban community). This time, it is clearly an initiative taken at the level of each guild, but through the necessary mediation of the guild master: here again, the initiative is only possible if it respects the rules. The fact that this happens on such assemblies and not during council meetings is typical for Konstanz, where the council is nothing else than a mediation, not always successful, between patricians and guilds. Influencing urban politics? In several cases of popular mobilization, the guilds appear at the origin of the troubles. This is the picture given by the chronicles: In Ulm in 1396, ‘five Zünfte forced the other craftsmen to help them to capture the patricians’ (funff zunfften [haben] gezwungen die andern zunfftnmayster inen hilfflich zu die die den burgern gefennckhlich anzunemmen).23 In Augsburg in 1466, chronicler Burkard Zink recounts how a large number of Zünfte refused to endorse the council’s policy.24 When a mediation commission was set up to solve the conflict between the

21 Müller, Nördlinger Stadtrechte, p. 200. 22 Klaus Bechtold, Zunftbürgertum und Patriziat. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Konstanz im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1981), pp. 56-57. The register containing the decisions of the guild assemblees are published by Friedrich Horsch, Die Konstanzer Zünfte in der Zeit der Zunftbewegung bis 1430. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zunftbuches und der Zunftbriefe (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1979), pp. 77-101. 23 Wilhelm Seuffer, ‘Anonyme Chronik vom Ulm (1473)’, Verhandlungen des Historischen Vereins für Kunst und Altertum in Ulm und Oberschwaben, 3 (1871), pp. 29-36 (at p. 30). 24 CDS 5, pp. 118-19.

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city council and the deputies of the Zünfte, five of them refused to participate. It was not an internal guild policy, but rather the government of the city as a whole that was at stake, namely the distribution of the tax burden. Neither the anonymous chronicler of Ulm nor Zink resorts to describing the protesters with a vocabulary of social inferiority, but they emphasize the resolute action of some Zünfte. Zunft, here, has a collective, even collegial, sense: It was the guild members, in combination with their governors whom they elected, in socially homogeneous guilds. A later story of the same episode described the initiative taken by some guild councilors at an important meeting of the Grand Council, where it had to give its consent to the tax rate of the main civic tax (Steuer) for the year.25 As in many other Swabian cities, the Grand Council of Augsburg consisted of the guild governors of all the Zünfte (their masters and ‘the Twelve’26), along with a patrician delegation; it was therefore a wide body of more than two hundred members, with many members who were very far from belonging to any kind of elite, and they constituted a mass that could hardly be manipulated, a fortiori during the annual session in which tax matters were discussed. The debate between the supporters of a progressive tax and the advocates of taxes on consumption – the latter weighing more heavily on the budget of the poor – were heated in those South German cities as it still is in our time. At this meeting, some of the guild representatives challenged the weigh of those indirect taxes, and this is somehow a revolutionary initiative: these taxes had not to be discussed at the meeting, but the Grand Council appeared to be an ideal forum for their protest. The challenged taxes were not abolished as they wished, but the municipal elite was forced to rethink the expenses and revenues of the city, with the establishment of a reform commission that was composed equally from a member of each guild, as well as a patrician. Also in Augsburg, an anonymous chronicler informs us about another tax dispute in 1397, which describes in detail the process of mobilization within the guilds. As the urban council perceived that the people were murmuring, it asked the masters of the various guilds to reunite their flocks, in an attempt to extract consent from them for its policy. All the trades agreed, except five of them: the weavers, bakers, shoemakers, coopers and blacksmiths. The chronicler continues: uz den fünf hantwerken niemant die irrung antraib wann pös unnütz folk, daz der stat ungelück gern gesechen hett. (…) die erbern von den purgern und von der gemaind mochten sich an die andern hantwerk nit wol gelazzen (“Among the five trades, no one pushed this quarrel except for useless people who would have gladly seen the misfortune of the city (…). The honorable people among the burghers [= patricians] and among the commoners could not have confidence in the other trades”)27. Furthermore, the five trades armed themselves, and the council was forced to meet in the refectory of the Franciscans to escape the attention of 25 Chronicle of the weaver Clemens Jäger (1545), CDS 34, pp. 231-32. This chronicle contains many cases in which the Zünfte solicited the city council with the aim of resolving internal conflicts. 26 In some smaller guilds, the board of ‘the Twelve’ consisted only out of 7 or 8 members. 27 CDS 4, pp. 109-10.

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the protesters; it yielded by canceling the new taxes it had just created. A gap thus appears between the commoners and the wealthy elite, but also within the guilds. This case shows that the authority of the guild masters was limited. A similar ambiguity of the Zunft’s authority structures, switching between collegial solidarity and vertical authority, was at work in the conflict between the bakers and the Esslingen council in 1414, shown by the repressive charter of the council that put an end to it. One of the measures taken by the council after the conflict was the abolition of the Trinkhaus, the inn of the guild that had been used as a rallying point for their mobilization.28 Most of the Twelve surrounding the guild master were heavily sanctioned, while the master himself, and presumably his immediate assistants, were not; the dividing line between the protesters and the members respectful of the authority of the council, therefore, divided the guild board into two. There was a similar friction in 1389 in Konstanz, when the trades gathered behind their banners, not against the council or the patricians, but against ‘some in the trades who arrogated to themselves a great power in the council and in the city, and the other guild masters had to suffer this for fear’ (etlichen von den zünften, die sich vil gewalt annament in dem rat und in der statt, und muestent das die anderen zunftmeister vertragen von forcht)29. This is a drawback of the representative principles of the guild system: when the institutional structure of a city fails to represent a certain social group, the craft guilds become the main vehicle through which critics were uttered. Since the chronicle cites the carpenters and the butchers as leaders of the movement, there is no doubt about the popular origin of discontent, nor about its strictly political character. Therefore, we can speak of an initiative coming from below, since a popular demand was taken into account by the institutions responsible for making the decision. However, if we mean by ‘initiative’ a legal form of political intervention in the manner of the Swiss referendum or the German ‘Bürgerbegehren’ of today, which are initiated by popular petitions, far from it. Admittedly, the guilds as legitimate intermediary bodies had a real capacity for political participation that gave a voice to a larger fraction of urban society than in more oligarchic urban political systems, preventing discontent from taking on more radical forms. Yet, this was not a standard practice integrated into the daily functioning of the civic institutions. This is different from the political process in Munich in 1377, where delegates of the council and the commoners agreed on a series of peticiones, presented to the dukes of Bavaria, who accepted a part of them.30 Due to the massive character of the popular movement, the council agreed to bring points to the dukes that were not in its own interest. There were no Zünfte in Munich, nor

28 Diehl, Urkundenbuch, II, p. 487. 29 Philipp Ruppert, Das alte Konstanz in Schrift und Stift. Die Chroniken der Stadt Konstanz (Konstanz: Münsterbau-Verein, 1891), p. 111. See also another chronicle mentioning this episode: Franz Joseph Mone, Quellensammlung der badischen Landesgeschichte (Karlsruhe: Macklot, 1848-67), I, p. 326. 30 See the main documents about the events: Die Denkmäler des Münchner Stadtrechts, ed. by Pius Dirr (Munich: Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1934-36), I, p. 594-603.

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other types of institutional participation of large social groups, and the absence of institutional relays gave this protest movement its strength. This could be seen as a common initiative from below from the commoners and from the council towards the legitimate authority of the dukes, and the word peticiones seems to indicate this, but the princes acted as mediators in this case. Certainly, their intervention in the conflict prevented the council being overwhelmed by the citizens, but it was less an act of authority than a mediation. Such mediation by a higher power was not an effective political reality in cities with a guild regime. The sovereign could intervene, and he did so on some occasions,31 but usually he did not take part in the daily political life in the Swabian cities, and the popular groups were not the best equipped to have access to this remedy. In most cases, conflicts were resolved within the urban community, in which the guilds were an essential part. Conclusion The conclusions drawn from this necessarily summary journey in the Swabian cities may initially seem disappointing in regards to the laudable ambition of this book: the popular initiative in these cities appears singularly rare. However, a closer look at the small numbers of cases of petitioning from the commoners demonstrates that the paucity of cases is due to more nuanced reasons, namely the political effectiveness of the guild regime. In these cities, most inhabitants were full members of the civic community, and the Bürgerrecht (citizenship right) had a strong integrative function: the commoners had the means to make their voices heard, through the electoral process, through the inclusion of a large number of craftsmen in the big council, and through the practices of consultation and mediation within the urban council. Of course, all this does not always work, and the example of the 1389 troubles in Konstanz is striking. Therefore, we should not underestimate the weight of coercion in the daily operation of the system, yet the oligarchic turn that is detectable in the Swabian cities in the second half of the fifteenth century32 shows by contrast that this representative system did not work so badly in previous decades. It is only at that point, when the urban government is constructed as an ultimate authority on what is right, that the initiatives coming from below appear to us. In the late medieval period, the Zünfte functioned as a filter, as a barrier to any desire for political intervention too far removed from the usual frameworks. In short, the late medieval history of the Zünfte is a clear sign of their mediating effectiveness.

31 For example, in Konstanz in 1430, where King Sigismund intervened at the request of the patricians against the political domination of the guilds, which was deemed contrary to the common good (Ruppert, Das alte Konstanz, pp. 361-68); it is the involvement of the guilds in the general policy of the city that was targeted by the intervention of the sovereign rather than their institutional structure. 32 See on this process Naujoks, Obrigkeitsgedanke (note 14).

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Giving Artisans a Voice The Political Participation of Guilds in German Towns During the fourteenth century, artisans and merchants gained their own political voice in many German towns. For the first time, they claimed political participation and representation. The guilds’ demands led to far-reaching changes in towns that had previously been ruled by a town lord, sometimes in cooperation with the patricians. The guilds’ protests culminated frequently in adjustments to the towns’ constitutions. One of the first putsches by artisans and merchants took place at Strasbourg in 1332. Traditionally, the bishop of Strasbourg was lord of the town, although the communal movement had been eroding his power from the thirteenth century.1 Over the course of the fourteenth century, the guilds overthrew the political establishment on several occasions. They became members of the city council and gained access to the highest office in Strasbourg several decades later. After 1332, the town became a role model for neighboring cities such as Zurich, which copied entire passages of its constitution. In the same decade, formerly excluded social groups in Mainz and Basel fought for more power as well, and in the following decades, Speyer, Frankfurt and Worms followed.2 Extensive research has revealed more than 200 similar cases of social groups competing for power in German towns between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.3





1 Knut Schulz, ʻDenn sie lieben die Freiheit so sehr…’. Kommunale Aufstände und Entstehung des europäischen Bürgertums im Hochmittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2. ed., 1995), pp. 21-99; he gives the examples of Milan, Laon, Cambrai, Worms and Cologne already for the 11th century. 2 Bernd Kannowski, Bürgerkämpfe und Friedebriefe: Rechtliche Streitbeilegung in spätmittelalterlichen Städten, Forschungen zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte 19 (Köln: Böhlau, 2001); Heidrun Ochs, ʻDie Mainzer Geschlechter und „ihre“ Stadt: Patrizische Familien in den innerstädtischen Unruhen des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Mainz im Mittelalter, ed. by Mechthild Dreyer and Jörg Rogge (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2009), pp. 199-213; still of interest: Karl Czok, ʻDie Bürgerkämpfe in Süd- und Westdeutschland im 14. Jahrhundert’, Esslinger Studien, 12/13 (1966/67), pp. 40-72. 3 Peter Johanek, ʻBürgerkämpfe und Verfassung in den mittelalterlichen deutschen Städten’, in Einwohner und Bürger auf dem Weg zur Demokratie. Von den antiken Stadtrepubliken zur modernen Kommunalverfassung, ed. by Hans Eugen Specker (Ulm: Kohlhammer, 1997), pp. 45-73, esp. p. 57, with footnote 37; Alfred Haverkamp, ʻ„Innerstädtische Auseinandersetzungen“ und überlokale Zusammenhänge in deutschen Städten während der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts’, in Stadtadel und Bürgertum in den italienischen und deutschen Städten des Mittelalters, ed. by Reinhard Elze and Gina Fasoli (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), pp. 89-126, esp. pp. 89-97. See also the essay of Dominique Adrian in this book. Sabine von Heusinger • Universität zu Köln Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 125-138.

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DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.119794

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By means of several constitutional changes, the Strasbourg guilds eventually won vast power over the entire community! This meant political participation, representation and even leadership by guildsmen rather than patricians. Who were the artisans and merchants who contended for power at the end of the Middle Ages? In number, they were the largest social group in medieval towns. They included male and female masters, male journeymen and male and female apprentices, as well as day-labourers. The journeymen were young men fit for work and military service, a group relied upon by every properly functioning community. The entire economic system depended on artisans and merchants since they were the producers and dealers. Commercial guilds organized the work environment, including education and quality control, among other duties. Guild fraternities took care of religious and social needs, from funerals to the care of widows and orphans. And in many towns, including Strasbourg, Zurich and Frankfurt, guilds organized sentry duties as well as military responsibilities.4 This contribution investigates constitutional reforms in Strasbourg, as an example. At first, I will focus on the political genesis of the craft guilds in this important town on the Rhine River. Analysis of the circumstances surrounding the craftsmen’s rebellion will demonstrate how and why they obtained political power in the fourteenth century – with reference to similar phenomena happening elsewhere. The second section, an in-depth analysis of the 1349 troubles in Strasbourg and elsewhere, will show that the city’s political constellation changed constantly, due to the shifting economic and social context. In the third section, I will briefly examine the social composition of the guilds and its late-fourteenth-century changes to reveal that the leading craftsmen joined the political elite in the end. While the fourteenth century clearly witnessed the emergence of a new political elite, the fifteenth century might be labeled the century of oligarchisation; these leading craftsmen became a part of the urban elite that would govern the cities for centuries to come. The transformation of 1332/33 The year 1332 was a turning point in Strasbourg’s history. Two elite families, the Zorn and the Müllenheim, had been fighting for decades over which would dominate the town.5 In 1332 the conflict escalated into a deadly quarrel, which spread to involve the entire town. The elected council was overthrown, and guildsmen became part of the council for the first time. The overthrow of the old council can only be understood by looking back at Strasbourg’s history at



4 For more details see Sabine von Heusinger, Die Zunft im Mittelalter. Zur Verflechtung von Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in Straßburg, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte – Beihefte, 206 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2009), pp. 85-113, 160-63, 280-92, 316-32. 5 For the following see Sabine von Heusinger, ʻ“Old Boys’ Networks” – Die Verfassungswechsel in Straßburg im 14. Jahrhundert’, in Neue Forschungen zur elsässischen Geschichte, ed. by Laurence Buchholzer-Remy et al. (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2012), pp. 153-75 (at pp. 154-56).

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the end of the thirteenth century, when tensions began and continued to erupt repeatedly over the abuse of power by council members. At that time, the council consisted of twenty-four men from the upper level of the patriciate, who every year chose their successors by cooptation. Four men, the so-called ʻStettmeister’ (ʻmasters of the town’), alternately presided over the council, each for one quarter of the year. A council seat on the council was considered to belong to a family, who might ʻloan’ it to a trusted confidant for one year before it returned to the family. The tendency towards isolation and oligarchy among the leading families lead to social conflicts over the years. In 1302, selling a council seat was forbidden, and statutes in the following year set the minimum age for a councilor at thirty and a burgomaster (burgermeister) at thirty-five and ordered everyone to accept the results of the vote for council membership.6 In 1308, conflict broke out in Strasbourg, killing sixteen, according to city chroniclers.7 The older chronicler, Fritsche Closener, reported that there was a conflict between the higher patriciate and rest of the residents, which the elite group won. The younger chronicler, Jakob Twinger von Königshofen, restricted the participants in the dispute to the higher patriciate and the guilds. According to him, the guilds unleashed their pent-up anger at well-known Nicolaus Zorn. Over his career, Zorn had held many city offices, from councilor to Stettmeister, from mayor (ʻSchultheiß’) to mint master, and perhaps he was even burgrave for a time.8 According to the later chronicle, the dispute started in the guildhall ʻzum Hohensteg’ where the Zorn family and their followers socialized. There, sixteen guildsmen were killed, and the remaining participants fled town or were banished. The 1308 conflict established the front line of future quarrels over political power in the town: the guilds and the lower patricians in a coalition against the higher patricians. In 1332, the continuing struggle between the Zorn and Müllenheim families reached its climax; Strasbourg experienced a massacre that involved the entire town. It ended only when the inhabitants overpowered and disarmed members of the higher patriciate, occupied the town gates and took control of the town’s key, seal and banner. In a flash, the guilds and lower patricians dismissed the existing city council and installed a new one comprised of higher patricians, lower patricians and guild members for the first time. In the end, the guilds and

6 See Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straßburg, ed. by Wilhelm Wiegand et al., 7 vols in 9 subvols, Urkunden und Akten der Stadt Straßburg, Abt. 1 (Straßburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1879-1900), IV, 2, no. 1 § 12, pp. 21-22; in 1332, the ban of selling seats was repeated, see no. 3, § 2d, p. 57; the enforcement of accepting the vote, see no. 1 § 13, p. 22. 7 For the following see Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert, ed. by Carl Hegel et al. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1862-1968), VIII, pp. 121-22 (the older chronicler Fritsche Closener) and IX, p. 774 (the younger chronicler Jacob Twinger of Königshofen). In Strasbourg, the patriciate (Constofler) consisted of two different groups: a higher patriciate (die Edlen) and a lower patriciate (die Burger). 8 For the problem of distinguishing different individuals with the name ʻNicolaus Zorn’ see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, p. 178; and Georges Weill, ʻArt. “Zorn”’, in Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne, ed. by Christian Baechler and Jean-Pierre Kintz (Strasbourg, 2006), IX, no. 42, pp. 439699, esp. paragraph ʻClaus II’, p. 4398; Weill complains about the problem of confusing the father with his two sons (all named the same), too.

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lower patricians took advantage of the crisis between the two leading families. The new council of 1332 consisted of twenty-five patricians and twenty-five guildsmen. The higher and lower patricians named twenty-one councilors and the four leaders, the Stettmeister.9 At first glance, this appears as a huge success for the guilds; they held half the seats on the city council thanks to their coup. However, if we look closer, two disturbing facts become apparent.10 First, the dominant position of the Stettmeister remained in the hands of the patricians. Secondly, these leaders were experienced politicians with ample experience in different offices. The knight Rulman Swaber is a good example. He had already been a member of the council in 1326 and 1330, and belonged to the important circle of ten jurors (ʻSchöffen’) in 1324 and 1326. These carefully selected men carried out executive functions in the commune. In 1332, he became Stettmeister and stayed in this position until 1334 when he died. His successor was his brother, who remained Stettmeister until 1346. The brother himself had been councilor in 1322 and 1324 and Stettmeister in 1329. Obviously, this change in officeholders happened within this family’s network. We can assume that the patronage system within the leading families, the object of the guild’s opposition, still existed after 1332. Since the knight Rulman Swarber’s brother held the office of Stettmeister from 1334 to 1346, the Swarber brothers held this office continuously from 1332 to 1346. The other Stettmeister from 1332 were chosen in the same pattern. They had already served as council members several times and gained experience as Stettmeister. A putsch in 1332 led to a new constitution in 1333.11 Twenty-five guildsmen would still serve as councilors, but from now on, the lower patricians (ʻBurger’) would nominate fourteen men with active electoral rights to the council and higher patricians (ʻEdle’) would nominate eight men with only passive electoral rights. Since 1271, the list of councilors’ names had included four Stettmeister every year, but in 1333, they were reduced to two, and a new ruling office was initiated – the ʻAmmeister’. It became the most important municipal office in Strasbourg. The new system kept the existing even parity among social groups; the council consisted of twenty-five guildsmen and twenty-five patricians (fourteen plus eight patricians as councilors, two Stettmeister and one Ammeister). The social group that controlled the office of the Ammeister was the most powerful group in the town. In 1333, the lower patriciate held this newly created office in

9 ‘Notae historicae Argentinenses’, in Fontes rerum Germanicarum III, ed. by Johann Friedrich Böhmer (Stuttgart 1853, repr. Aalen: Scientia-Verlag 1969), pp. 113-20, the text claims at p. 119 52 councilors (instead of 50) (eciam quinquagintaduo consules). See for the following Yuko Egawa, Stadtherrschaft und Gemeinde in Straßburg vom Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts bis zum Schwarzen Tod (1349) (Trier: Kliomedia, 2007), pp. 210-22. 10 See Urkundenbuch, III Ratsverzeichnis no. 45, 48, 50, 53, 54 and Urkundenbuch, VII Ratsliste no. 56-70; Die Chroniken, IX, pp. 780-81; for 1324 Urkundenbuch, III 1049; 1113. For the following see also von Heusinger, ʻ“Old Boys’ Networks”’, pp. 156-57. 11 Die Chroniken, VIII, p. 124 and footnote 3 (Closener); Die Chroniken, IX, p. 778 (Königshofen); for a detailed survey of the lower patricians who entered the council see Egawa, pp. 210-13.

Giving Artisa ns a Voice

its hands. The constitution of 1333 was sealed by Strasbourg’s confederate cities, Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Basel and Freiburg im Breisgau. How were artisans and merchants chosen to become councilors? The first change was that the commercial guilds had to merge into political guilds. Several commercial guilds jointly formed a collective guild. For some guilds, this was an easy step: The commercial bakers’ guild and butchers’ guild, as well as other crafts and trades, were identical with the corresponding political guilds. In other cases, the process was more complicated. The stone carvers, for example, affiliated themselves with the masons and shared one council seat as a single political guild. In another case, the three commercial guilds of the rope makers, chandlers and menders of old clothes formed one political guild and shared a seat. According to the official list with the names of the office-holders, these twenty-five political guilds had won a seat on the Strasbourg city council: grocers, bakers, butchers, furriers, salt merchants, wool cleaners, tailors, carpenters, stone carvers, coopers, gardeners, tanners, smiths, shoemakers, barrel porters, metal painters, millers, weavers, barbers, ship carpenters, shippers, wine measurers, corn merchants, fishermen and wine merchants.12 Coalitions between commercial guilds to form a single political guild were flexible rather than fixed; whenever the constitution changed, the composition of the political guilds could change. The different guilds dealing with wine offer a good example. Two different commercial guilds, ʻWeinmesser und Weinrufer’, checked the quality of wine and announced wine prices. In 1332, they unified into a single political guild and shared a seat on the council.13 However, Strasbourg also had a wine testers’ guild whose members sold wine on commission. They formed a political guild with the ship carpenters after 1334. These examples show no clear pattern to the combinations of commercial guilds that formed political guilds. Sometimes the crafts were closely related, in other cases they were not. After 1332, more commercial guilds, such as the makers of helmets, knifes, spurs and bells, and the tinsmiths, as well as blacksmiths, belonged to this collective guild under the name of the painters and sign painters (ʻMaler und Schilter’)! At least in this case all the artisans involved used metal and shared their raw material in common. In other cases, we do not know why different commercial guilds combined into a political guild.

12 The list with the council members is recorded in Urkundenbuch, VII, Ratsliste 1332, no. 56, p. 886; the guilds were listed in the order given above, in German: 1. Krämer, 2. Brotbäcker, 3. Metzger, 4. Kürschner, 5. Salzmütter, 6. Wollschläger, 7. Schneider, 8. Zimmerleute, 9. Steinmetze, 10. Küfer, 11. Gärtner, 12. Gerber, 13. Schmiede, 14. Schuhmacher, 15. Fasszieher, 16. Schilter, 17. Müller, 18. Weber, 19. Scherer und Bader, 20. Schiffzimmerleute, 21. Schiffleute, 22. Weinrufer und Weinmesser, 23. Kornleute, 24. Fischer, 25. Weinleute. A detailed explanation of the single guilds can be found in von Heusinger, Die Zunft, chapter 8.2 ʻGlossar’. 13 In 1462, the number of seats on the city council was reduced, the carriers of barrels joined these two wine guilds and the three commercial guilds had to share one seat; in 1485, a similar process unified the wine testers and ship carpenters with the political guild of carpenters, when another reform reduced again the seats in the council, see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, pp. 208-11.

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In Strasbourg, the 1332 putsch led in 1333 to a new constitution, giving the guilds a decisive participatory role. Later revisions to the constitution continued to incorporate their political participation. This continuation was not predetermined, as the case of Constance shows. In 1342, groups that were previously excluded from power fought for a new constitution, and political guilds were invented. A new leading office was created, the supreme guild master (ʻoberster Zunftmeister’). However, just two years later in 1344, the old elites reclaimed complete power. They discontinued the position of supreme guild master, took control over all council seats, placed all guilds under the control of the (strict patrician) council and canceled the independent jurisdiction of the guilds. It was not until 1371, with the help of another putsch, that the guilds again achieved even parity with the patricians on the city council of Constance.14 It is no easy task to uncover the motivation of the artisans and merchants who staged a coup in 1332 against Strasbourg’s leading patrician families. Since we have no sources written by artisans and merchants themselves, we must use the information provided by the chroniclers. The younger chronicler, Jakob Twinger von Königshofen, opened with this title: ʻPower over the city came to the commercial guilds’.15 According to him, the guildsmen were fighting against patrician infringements and biased jurisdiction. He reported that whenever an artisan or shopkeeper – as a poor man – filed a justifiable claim against a superior, the wealthy, elite man paid only when it was convenient for him to do so.16 If that social superior refused to pay, the artisan or shopkeeper had no right of appeal. During the fourteenth century, complaints about abuse of power and poor administration, as well as corrupt justice, were also filed in other towns, such as Basel, Nordhausen, Augsburg, Speyer, Münster and Erfurt.17 As soon as guildsmen were allowed on the council, the guilds needed men capable of acting as politicians. The guilds developed different strategies to address the need for office holders. Strasbourg guilds with limited political power appointed and reappointed the same men to office. For example, the tailors voted ten times to place Claus Snider in the council.18 Until the end of the fifteenth century, he remained the only tailor ever to be elected Ammeister, in 1351 and 1358. Several donations founding prebends reveal that he and his wife Anna were rather wealthy. Clearly, he was no poor ʻlittle tailor’. The gardeners elected the

14 Andreas Bihrer, ʻDer erste Bürgerkampf. Zur Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Konstanz in der Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 153 (2005), pp. 181-220. 15 Die Chroniken, IX, p. 777: Der stette gewalt kam an die antwerke […] Sus kam der gewalt us der herren hant an die antwerke, das den antwerken ein grosse notdurft was, wan die herren begingent grossen gewalt und übermuot an den antwerken. 16 Die Chroniken, IX, p. 777: so gedurfte in der arme man nüt derumb bekünbern in gerihtes wise. 17 Kannowski, Bürgerkämpfe und Friedebriefe, pp. 26-30. 18 In Strasbourg, the office of the ʻAmmeister’ provides a guide to compare the political influence of various guilds. From 1349 onwards, only the guildsmen had access to this dominant office. Therefore, which guild held the office and how often are crucial. I gave lists with the office holders and a first analysis in von Heusinger, Die Zunft, pp. 152-59. For Claus Snider see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 3219.

Giving Artisa ns a Voice

same person, Wolfhelm Philippes, to the council ten times as well.19 The same pattern holds true for other guilds with little political influence, such as the barbers, wine measurers and sign painters.20 These less influential guilds, whose members were poorer, likely had only a few men who were able and willing to hold office. What Max Weber called the ʻAbkömmlichkeit’ was a precondition for political involvement; only a guild master who no longer had to be physically present in his workshop or behind his market stall every day was in a position to serve as councilor for more than one term. He needed financial autonomy as well. Although councilors earned a ʻratsgeld’, this financial compensation was largely symbolic and provided little income.21 The more powerful guilds followed two different patterns: Salt merchants, coopers and butchers relied on continuity, and their masters were rather financially independent (or ʻabkömmlich’). Master Gerlin the cooper was elected councilor six times and played a major role during the constitutional change in 1349 discussed below.22 Jeckelin the salt merchant and William the butcher served five times representing their guilds.23 The opposite also occurred; some dominant guilds, such as the grocers and bakers, replaced their council representatives soon after 1332, perhaps for individual reasons. The grocers elected Claus Mosung as representative in 1332 and 1335, but he may not have lived beyond that date.24 Burkard Biller represented the bakers twice on the council.25 He had a notable reputation in Strasbourg. In 1334, he was a juror (ʻSchöffe’), and between 1334 and 1360 he served as supervisor of the hospital (ʻPfleger’), together with members of the urban elites. While it is unclear if holding a supervisory office prevented him from later returning as a councilor, this may have been the reason why he did not hold that office after 1335. After their admission to the council in 1332, nine of the twenty-five political guilds appointed to the council a representative who then served for a long time. The nine guilds were the furriers, millers, boatmen, grain traders, fishermen, ship

19 Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 2597; the entry ʻPhilippes, councilor of the gardeners’ guild, might refer to different individuals in the lists. 20 The following guild members represented their guilds four times each: Conrad zum Überhang for the barbers’ guild; Isinger for the wine measurers and Ulrich Baldes for the sign painters; see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 128, 1512, 3562. 21 The compensation was adjusted during the Middle Ages, see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, pp. 144-46; see also Johanek, ʻBürgerkämpfe und Verfassung’, p. 73; Kannowski, Bürgerkämpfe und Friedebriefe, pp. 174-75. 22 See for master Gerlin der Küfer von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 2165. 23 For Jeckelin Salzmütter and Wilhelm der Metzger, see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 2234, 2873. 24 Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 2234, 2873; Urkundenbuch, V 22, siehe auch Martin Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht. Zünfte und Patriziat in Straßburg im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zu Verfassung, Wirtschaftsgefüge und Sozialstruktur (Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1988), I, p. 133. Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 2311; for an update of the entry on Claus Mosung, see von Heusinger, ʻ“Old Boys’ Networks”’. 25 Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 283; und Urkundenbuch, VII, 69. He served as curator with knight Reimbold von Kageneck, Reimbold Knobloch and Wetzel Marsilius.

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carpenters, wool cleaners, weavers and carriers of barrels.26 In conclusion, it is clear that most guilds repeatedly selected the same men to represent them on the council. Thus, the 1332 constitutional change caused an immediate oligarchization process. Re-election of the same men built a network of information and power. It created continuity in urban politics, in which experienced politicians were the main decision-makers of policy in Strasbourg. The preconditions to entering these circles were wealth and ʻAbkömmlichkeit’ – and this was true for guildsmen as well as patricians. The turmoil of 1349 In the middle of the fourteenth century, the southwestern region of the German Empire was shaken by upheaval. There were pogroms against the Jews, flagellants traversed the Upper Rhine region, and the Black Death ran rampant. Beginning in 1336, the region was engulfed by the so-called ʻArmlederbewegung’, violent demonstrations against Jews which spread from Franconia to Alsace.27 As persecution of Jews intensified in 1338, Strasbourg granted a privilege to the Jewish population, protecting them for five years.28 In 1347, Jews were persecuted in the neighbouring imperial towns of Colmar, Hagenau, Kaysersberg, Mülhausen, Münster, Oberehnheim, Rosheim, Schlettstadt and Türkheim.29 Rumors that the Jews had poisoned the wells spread in Strasbourg after 1348, stimulating demands to burn the Jews. In the beginning of 1349, the population addressed the town council directly, demanding persecution of Strasbourg Jews. But the council refused, a reaction shared by other cities, such as Cologne, at the time. As a result, there were accusations that Jews had bribed the Strasbourg town council. In the midst of this tumult, on February 10, the guilds demanded more political power, and the ruling council was overthrown. Only four days later, on February 14, there was a pogrom against the Jews in Strasbourg, led first and foremost by the guilds.30

26 See Urkundenbuch, VII, Ratsliste, no. 56, p. 886. 27 Still relevant: Klaus Arnold, ʻDie Armledererhebung in Franken 1336’, Mainfränkisches Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Kunst, 26 (1974), pp. 35-62; and Christoph Cluse, ʻBlut ist im Schuh. Ein Exempel zur Judenverfolgung des “Rex Armleder”’, in Liber amicorum necnon et amicarum für Alfred Heit. Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte und geschichtlichen Landeskunde, ed. by Friedhelm Burgard et al. (Trier: Kliomedia, 1996), pp. 371-92; Dirk Jäckel, ʻJudenmord – Geißler – Pest: Das Beispiel Straßburg 1349’, in Pest. Die Geschichte eines Menschheitstraumas, ed. by Mischa Meier (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005), pp. 162-78. 28 Urkundenbuch, V 88; Die Chroniken, VIII, p. 103 (Closener); Die Chroniken, IX, p. 759 (Königshofen). 29 Gerd Mentgen, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im mittelalterlichen Elsaß (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1995), esp. pp. 125-36, 184-90, 361-85. 30 Die Chroniken, VIII, p. 104, pp. 127-28 (Closener); Die Chroniken, IX, pp. 761-64 (Königshofen); Alfred Haverkamp, ʻDie Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes im Gesellschaftsgefüge deutscher Städte’, in Zur Geschichte der Juden im Deutschland des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Alfred Haverkamp (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981), pp. 27-93, esp. p. 52, pp. 63-64. For the simultaneousness of pogroms and Black Death see also Egawa, pp. 223-37; Kay Peter

Giving Artisa ns a Voice

The guilds’ claim for more political power in early 1349 could only mean access to the top office of ʻAmmeister’, since guildsmen already held half of the council seats as a result of the 1332 putsch. The guilds overthrew the city council again in 1349. This time, the guilds formed an alliance with the upper patricians, thus displacing the lower patricians.31 The guilds put themselves under the command of two knights who belonged to upper patrician group. Those two forced the sitting Ammeister to surrender the written constitution (ʻSchwörbrief ’) and seized the town seal from the Stettmeister. According to the chronicler and eye-witness Fritsche Closener, the acting Ammeister Peter Swarber was hated since he was so supercilious.32 Closener also claims that Swarber had secretly forced the guilds to swear an oath; he unfortunately fails to add anything about the nature of this oath. He concludes that Swarber was lucky on the night of the putsch, February 10, because the guilds were unable to find him; otherwise he would have been in danger. Later they chased him out of the town and distributed his estate among his children and the councilors. The new regime forbade the two former Stettmeister from holding any municipal office for the next ten years. Actually, they never again became councilors, although soon after the new government entrusted them with leading delegations from Strasbourg, and they rapidly regained their former reputations. The most important change in the new constitution affected the office of Ammeister. The guilds took over control of this office, displacing the lower patricians. According to the new constitution, guildsmen were also eligible to become one of the four (formerly two) Stettmeister, as well as upper and lower patricians, but in actuality, patricians were the only ones to hold this office. The new 1349 council consisted of eleven higher and seventeen lower patricians, for a total of twenty-eight. Among themselves they selected four Stettmeister, with each one active for one quarter of the year. These twenty-eight patricians were counterbalanced by twenty-eight guild members. Thus, the council size increased from fifty to fifty-six, and over it presided the Ammeister, afterwards always a guildsman. The first guildsman to become Ammeister was the butcher, Johans Betschold Senior (ʻder Alte’). He was an experienced politician who had served as councilor five times between 1335 and 1346 and again in 1352.33 The constitution of 1349 included a new provision that the three social groups, the upper and lower patricians and the guilds, were each allowed to name four men

Jankrift, ʻ“Das große sterbote”. Seuchen am Oberrhein in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit’, Das Markgräflerland, 2 (2007), pp. 72-84. A different point of view in Samuel J. Cohn Jr., ‘The Black Death and the Burning of Jews’, Past and Present, 196 (2007), pp. 3-36. 31 Die Chroniken, IX, pp. 761-62 (Königshofen). 32 Die Chroniken, VIII, pp. 128-30 (Closener); Die Chroniken, IX, pp. 761-62 (Königshofen). Bernhard Metz, ʻArt. “Schwarber (Swarber)”’, in Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne, ed. by Christian Baechler and Jean-Pierre Kintz (Strasbourg 2000), VII, no. 34, p. 3571; Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht, I, p. 136, 287. 33 Urkundenbuch, VII, p. 903; von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 266.

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to act as ʻGaranten’ and seal the charter, i.e. to act as distinguished witnesses.34 Only the most powerful figures in each group were appointed witnesses. The guilds named the tailor Claus Snider, who, as discussed above, was the first tailor to make it onto the council in 1332 and was reelected ten times. In 1349, he did not yet know that he would become ʻAmmeister’ in 1351 and 1358, the only tailor to hold this office until 1482. The second ʻGarant’ of the guilds was also one we have seen before, Master Gerlin the Cooper, who had served on the council in 1332 and represented his guild six times. The third person in this illustrious circle was the baker Hermann in the Kirchgasse. He had held a council seat three times beginning in 1339 and held it five more times under the new constitution before his last term in 1363. In 1352, he became the first Ammeister from the bakers’ guild, and he was sent as an envoy to the Reichstag of Nuremberg in 1355. The final ʻGarant’, Gerlach of Steinbach, representing the stone carvers, served first on the council in 1341 and was later re-elected every second year; by 1370 he had been a councilor twelve times. He was the supervisory master of the masons’ guild at Strasbourg’s cathedral (ʻWerkmeister des Frauenwerks’), another important municipal office, from 1342 to 1366. The four ʻGaranten’ of the guilds were all experienced politicians who were leaders of their guilds and exercised significant roles in the community. Who were the guildsmen elected to the council after the 1349 putsch? Since 1332, the guilds had built up larger cadre of men who could assume a seat in the city council. Most of the post-1349 councilors had previously acquired political experience. The guilds continued to elect the same politicians to the council. The sign painters elected Dietsche Sattler twelve times; he was also a juror (ʻSchöffe’) in 1343 and 1358. Hans Meiger represented the shippers at least seven times after 1336; the salt merchants nominated John ( Johans von den Salzmüttern) for the first time in 1346, and he held the office six times up to 1361.35 The shipbuilders chose Peter Ebelin of Mundolsheim six times; in 1359 he served as Ammeister, the first and only coming from this guild. The wagon builders elected a certain man named Schotte in 1349 and reelected him four more times until his final term in 1362. Other guilds, the barbers, wine measurers and fishermen, elected the same individual twice in the period after 1349. Although many guilds sent the same person to the city council several times, there is another notable pattern. After 1349, many councilors disappear from the records, and later someone crossed out the names of seven councilors from the list for 1349.36 This is evidence for the assumption that the Black Death led to replacement of councilors out of sheer necessity after 1349. Fritsche Closener 34 Urkundenbuch, V 199; VII 389, 1218; von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, Hermann in Kirchgasse no. 1673, Gerlin der Küfer no. 2165, Nicolaus / Claus der Schneider vor dem Münster no. 3219, Gerlach von Steinbach no. 3341; see also Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht, I, p. 256, 288. 35 For the guild members see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, Dietsche Sattler no. 2886; Meiger no. 2119; Johans von den Salzmüttern no. 1533; Peter Ebelin von Mundolsheim no. 710; Schotte no. 3011; and Urkundenbuch, VII 352, 876. For further references on other guilds, see von Heusinger, ʻ“Old Boys’ Networks”’, pp. 169-70. 36 Urkundenbuch, VII Ratsliste no. 73, p. 903.

Giving Artisa ns a Voice

writes that after the putsch in June 1349, flagellants arrived in Strasbourg, and only thereafter did ʻthe great mortality in Strasbourg’ (das große sterben zu Strosburg) begin.37 A remarkable number of well-established councilors vanished from the sources, e.g. Johans Molsheim, councilor eight times for the chandlers’ guild, and Lutz of Waiblingen, six times elected by the weavers. The shoemaker Johans Staufer, the carpenter Heinz Berwart and the gardener Jacob Innheim had all served five terms of office; the barrel carrier Heinzman Smit had served four; and the grain trader Nicolaus Müller, the tanner Fritsche of Eckendorf and the wine maker Hüseler had also served three.38 The group of men who disappear from the sources after 1349 is even larger if we include those elected right before 1349 and those who had been elected twice to the council. The butchers, wool cleaners and furriers suffered losses in these categories. In 1349, the grocers, oil merchants, millers and smiths had appointed councilors who served only one time. After 1349, none of these men appear again in the sources! In summary, only eight of the twenty-eight councilors on the guilds’ side were newcomers in 1349; twenty men had been elected to the council before. Eighteen of the twenty-eight councilors are not found in the sources after 1349, and ten of them were crossed off the list. The 1349 epidemic cost the lives of most of the experienced politicians. As a consequence, the Black Death lead to a bigger change in urban politics than any constitutional reform before or after! The Strasbourg guilds had to build up a new cohort of men who would be eligible for official duties. Social differentiation in 1362 The process of social differentiation of Strasbourg’s influential groups, which had been progressing throughout the fourteenth century, was marked by a decisive event in 1362, when an order forced clarification of who belonged to the patricians and who belonged to the guilds. The council ordered that certain artisans, who had belonged to the patricians before this point, had to enter a guild.39 The text names goldsmiths, cloth cutters, armorers, pewters, coopers for wooden jars and parchment makers; those craftsmen had to enter a guild or remain patricians. If they chose the patricians, they had to give up manual work and live off their earnings (for example, on interest income). In the future, any craftsman who came to Strasbourg had to join the guild most closely related

37 Die Chroniken, VIII, p. 130. 38 For further references and information, see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 255, 719, 1452, 1507, 2280, 2335, 3204, 3331, 3686; for more examples of men not mentioned in the sources after 1349, see von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 109, 374, 756, 1073, 2239, 2325, 3216. 39 For the edition, see Franz Joseph Mone, ʻZunftordnungen des 14. und 16. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 3 (1852), pp. 150-66, esp. Anlage 2, pp. 160-61. I have no further reference on coopers for wooden jars and parchment makers; it seems that these guilds had only a very small number of members.

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to his craft. The chronicler Fritsche Closener explained this decision by referencing the need to keep the number of political guilds stable.40 Otherwise, the proportional representation of social groups on the council would have to be negotiated anew. The results of the 1362 council order had an immediate result for the goldsmiths’ guild. In 1363, the goldsmith drew up and recorded guild regulations and established their first guild book.41 Craftsmen who had formerly belonged to the patricians now entered the guilds – and these were mainly men with reputation and wealth. Not surprisingly they quickly gained influence in their political guilds and were appointed to city offices. To show this mechanism in more detail, a good example are the goldsmiths. In 1362, they had to form a commercial guild and joined the political guild of the painters and sign painters (ʻMaler und Schilter’) with whom they shared one council seat. The goldsmith John of Mundolsheim ( Johans/Henselin von Mundolsheim) is a typical example of the elite men who had been forced into political guilds.42 He had been councilor for the patricians in 1355 and 1360. After he was obliged to switch to the guilds, he became Ammeister, i.e. the political leader of Strasbourg, in 1363. If he had stayed in the patricians, he would have never had access to this position which was reserved for the guilds! In the following year, 1364, he performed official tasks as a former Ammeister (ʻAlt-Ammeister’). He served as councilor five times between 1365 and 1376; in 1373, he was a governor of the cathedral workshop (ʻPfleger der Dombauhütte’), along with eminent fellow-citizens, the knight John of Müllenheim, and John of Trübel. John of Mundolsheim probably died in 1377.43 He was not exceptional; the goldsmith Henselin Stephan (also called Stephanshenselin) was councilor in 1364, 1386 and 1395. He may have been the same man as Hans Steffan, who held the office of ʻthe three in the Pfennig’s tower’ (ʻDreier auf dem Pfennigturm’) in 1397.44 These three were responsible for the town’s financial administration – only very trustworthy men held this office, which was still related to the additional income of the office holders at that time. Rapid social advancement appears even among artisans who came from outside the town. The first armorer chosen for the council in 1362 was Cunz zum Eber. He had moved from Nuremberg – a center of high-quality metal working – to Strasbourg. Immediately assigned to the smiths political guild, he held a council seat eight times between 1365 and

40 Die Chroniken, VIII, p. 141; for Königshofen see Die Chroniken, IX, p. 787. 41 The guild regulation of October 11, 1363, was edited in Urkundenbuch, V 378; also by Mone, ʻZunftordnungen’, Anlage 1, pp. 157-60; Hans Meyer, Die Strassburger Goldschmiedezunft von ihrem Entstehen bis 1681 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1881), mentions only the guild regulation of 1363 in no. 2, p. 2; but Meyer edited the ʻErste Buch der Goldschmiede’ in no. 3, pp. 3-9. 42 Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 2385; Urkundenbuch, V 584. 43 Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 2385; Urkundenbuch, VII 1570; for his death, see Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht, I, p. 348, esp. footnote 1 (= Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht, II, pp. 674-75). 44 Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 3367. Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht, II, Anhang 16, esp. p. 548; for more details on the office, see p. 71.

Giving Artisa ns a Voice

1388.45 Other artisans forced to change from the patricians to the guilds in 1362 enjoyed similar careers.46 Those ʻhomines novi’ took over important positions in the guilds and thus in urban society. Strasbourg’s 1362 transformation was not an isolated example. In that time period, other cities in the southwest German Empire forced a reorganization of social groups as well. Augsburg formed political guilds in 1368 after an riot of artisans.47 The first constitution (ʻZunft-Brief ’) of that year established seventeen political guilds; a second constitution in the same year raised the number of political guilds to eighteen. Guild members gained access to the council for the first time. The patricians (ʻehrbare Geschlechter’) were required to enter the newly founded masters guild (ʻHerren-Zunft’), but many leading families refused to accept this reform. While some patricians did enter the merchants’ guild, many left the town. The 1368 reform in Augsburg had two side effects: the town began a needed tax reform, and Emperor Charles IV, in his role as Augsburg’s town lord, accepted the constitution. His acceptance was a significant political success for this imperial city, since he had banned guild constitutions for Nuremberg in 1349 and Frankfurt in 1366. In fourteenth-century Strasbourg, the guilds had been successful in gaining access to political participation, dominating the high office of Ammeister and even forcing formerly ʻpatrician’ artisans, such as the goldsmiths, into the guild structure. In 1372, they invented a new term of office: ten years rather than just one for the four Stettmeister and the Ammeister. The sources offer no reasonable explanation for this surprising change. The chronicler Königshofen writes a vague allusion: that the previous term of office ended before the officials understood their duties well.48 In 1372, they elected the wine merchant Henry Arge for ten years as Ammeister. However, he was expelled from office in 1378, and, again, we know very little about his removal. Three men took control and bullied the townspeople.49 In 1385, the three were taken to court. Two of them were banished

45 Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht, II, Anhang 16, esp. p. 548. See von Heusinger, Die Zunft, pp. 147-48 with further references; and Alioth, Gruppen an der Macht, I, pp. 117-63. Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, Anhang 8.6 Personendatei, no. 1311; Urkundenbuch, VII 1096. 46 For more examples, see von Heusinger, ʻ“Old Boys’ Networks”’, pp. 171-73. 47 Rolf Kießling, ʻAugsburg im Aufstand: Ein systematischer Vergleich von Unruhen des 14./16. mit denen des 17./18. Jahrhunderts’, in Streik im Revier. Unruhe, Protest und Ausstand vom 8. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Angelika Westermann and Ekkehard Westermann (St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 2007), pp. 153-75, esp. pp. 156-58; Jörg Rogge, ʻIr freye wale zu haben. Möglichkeiten, Probleme und Grenzen der politischen Partizipation in Augsburg zur Zeit der Zunftverfassung (1368-1548)’, in Stadtregiment und Bürgerfreiheit. Handlungsspielräume in deutschen und italienischen Städten des späten Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Schreiner and Ulrich Meier, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. 244-77; and Maximilian Gloor, Politisches Handeln im spätmittelalterlichen Augsburg , Basel und Straßburg (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010), pp. 253-64, Gloor even uses the term ʻZunftaristokratie’ for Augsburg, see p. 264. 48 Die Chroniken, IX, p. 781. 49 For a very detailed analysis of the three men (Walter Wahsicher, Hans Philippes, Johans Cantzler) and their family networks, see Sabine von Heusinger, ʻAmt – Familie – Netzwerk: Zur Gestaltung politischen Handelns im 14. Jahrhundert’, in Beziehungen, Vernetzungen, Konflikte: Perspektiven

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for ten years, and the leader was banished forever from Strasbourg. The city then went back to the previous one-year term limits. Conclusion Among towns in the fourteenth-century German Empire, Strasbourg was one of the first where artisans and merchants won representation and power in political institutions through repeated rebellion. While the level of violence varied, the guilds managed to gain more power with every change. My research reveals that those men who gained political power were already experienced and also ʻabkömmlich’, i.e. sufficiently independent economically to absent themselves from their workshops and market stalls for long periods of time. Gaining a seat on the city council was often only their first step. Further offices followed, e.g. becoming an envoy for the town, leading the financial administration, or serving as a supervisor of a clerical institution. In many cases, several commercial guilds had to form one political guild and share one seat in the city council. Because Strasbourg had the dominant office of ʻAmmeister’, it is possible to evaluate the political influence of various guilds by their access to this office. Economically inferior guilds usually had no access at all. Between 1349 and 1482, only sixteen of twenty-five (after 1349: twenty-eight) political guilds ever appointed someone to this top position, and only ten of twenty-five (or twenty-eight) kept the office longer than one or two years.50 These ten trade guilds were politically as well as economically successful; the shippers, grocers, wine merchants, butchers and grain merchants dominated town politics. When political power shifted from the city council to the so-called secret chambers (ʻGeheime Stuben’) during the fifteenth century, the former office holders (ʻAlt-Ammeister’) even became more powerful than the active holders!51 In short, this case study shows that in Strasbourg, as in other German towns, the fourteenth-century can be seen as the time when artisans and merchants obtained their own political voice. For the first time, they won the right to participate in urban politics and even to lead the government. Hence in the fifteenth century, their foremost representatives had become part of the establishment they had once opposed.

Historischer Verwandtschafts–forschung, ed. by Christine Fertig and Margareth Lanzinger (Köln: Böhlau, 2016), pp. 23-35. 50 Von Heusinger, Die Zunft, pp. 154-55, esp. table 2; I have chosen the time period according to constitutional changes in Strasbourg: In 1349, the guilds gained access to the office of ʻAmmeister’; in 1482, a final change was made and I closed my investigation; for the changing number of seats see table 7, p. 211. 51 Olivier Richard, ʻDie verlorene Ehre der Patrizier. Reformen in oberrheinischen Städten im 15. Jahrhundert’, in Reformverlierer 1000-1800. Zum Umgang mit Niederlagen in der europäischen Vormoderne, ed. by Andreas Bihrer and Dietmar Schiersner (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2016), pp. 159-78; von Heusinger, Die Zunft, pp. 195-212.

Part III

Discourse, Ideology, and Conflict

Jelle Haemers  

Injury and Remedy The Language of Contention in the Southern Low Countries, 13th-16th Centuries Social upheaval is described mostly in biased terms. Historians usually speak about ‘riot’, ‘revolt’ or ‘rebellion’, terms which refer to the ‘warlike’ behavior of ‘rebels’ or the fact that they agitated against the authorities. For instance, the etymological origins of ‘rebellion’ (which is derived from the Latin re + bellus) present the actions to which the word refers as a ‘war against’ adversaries. Therefore, it can hardly be labeled as a ‘neutral’ term. The term also does not say anything about the reasons why the events have taken place. Of course, an uprising could have the characteristics of war, and political conflict sometimes ended up in military action, though often citizens did not use violence when resisting a policy. However, princely and urban authorities mostly referred to the violence (if used) or the disobedience of subjects when naming such a conflict. For instance, in 1443 Duke Philip the Good forgave the townsmen of Luxembourg their grands malefices, rebellions et desobeissances.1 The citizens and other subjects of the eponymous duchy had refused to accept the authority of Philip as duke because they did not consider Philip to be the rightful heir to the throne. Philip, however, ignored the protest and invaded the duchy and the town. With the aim of preventing future turmoil, he forbade the citizens to use the raethuus as a city hall any longer. Henceforth, the building would house the headquarters of the ducal officers.2 Likewise, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century rulers called their subjects ‘rebellious’ and ‘disorderly’ when the subjects refused to obey orders. For instance, the weavers of Bruges in 1360 and the inhabitants of the city of Limbourg (near Liège) in 1446 were described by the Count of Flanders and the Duke of Limbourg, respectively, as ‘rebels’ (rebellen) and ‘unruly people’ (wederspennige) who had committed acts of ‘uproar, disobedience, and insurrection’.3 Describing protest as harmful riots of wrongdoers is, of course, a

1 Cartulaire ou recueil des documents politiques et administratifs de la ville de Luxembourg de 1244 à 1795, ed. by François-Xavier Würth-Paquet and Nicolas Van Werveke (Luxembourg: Buck, 1881), pp. 84-85. 2 Robert Petit, ‘Le Luxembourg et le recul du pouvoir central après la mort de Charles le Téméraire’, in 1477. Het algemene en de gewestelijke privilegiën van Maria van Bourgondië voor de Nederlanden, ed. by Wim Blockmans (Kortrijk: UGA, 1985), pp. 388-90. 3 Van dat zy te kennene ghaven zeker upset dat ghemaect was … bi wevers ende bi andren rebellen (Louis Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire des archives de la ville de Bruges (Bruges: Gailliard, 1877), III, p. 233); wederspennige and beruerte, ongehoirsamheit ende hanteringe (Philippe Godding, Ordonnances Jelle Haemers • KU Leuven Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 141-161.

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common strategy to undermine their legality and, at the same time, a successful means of propaganda for the punishment of the instigators of the movement. Historians are aware of this, and it remains a difficult question if the replacement of terms such as ‘revolt’ and other colourful names from the past by more ‘neutral terms’ can ever avoid partiality and anachronism. Yet if we consider terms such as ‘uproar’ and ‘rebellion’ as a part of scientific discourse, deprived of bias, one can still use these words for naming political conflict. In this chapter, however, I make a plea for the use of other words to describe such protest, such as ‘contention’. It refers to the disagreement that results from opposing arguments, and the conflicting opinions about government. This chapter therefore argues that historians should consider the terms used by citizens when studying turmoil in the history and literature of the Middle Ages. To paraphrase the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), naming and classifying social upheaval is always a struggle between groups who are unequally equipped to attain absolute vision. The symbolic power of naming creates social and even legal power; it either maintains the social order or subverts it.4 Considered from this theoretical framework, the discursive struggles between medieval citizens and the authorities about the description of a collective action was also a conflict about political recognition and dominance. Therefore, naming conflicts can be considered an essential feature of late medieval popular politics. As a result, names and words referring to collective actions were not chosen arbitrarily. Terms were coloured by the opinion and beliefs of the people participating in the protest or the authorities suppressing it. Historians have already pleaded for a study of the rhetoric, discourses and language of medieval politics because it has become axiomatic that an understanding of the language of politics is integral to an understanding of politics itself.5 Uncritically transferring the historical terminology chosen by medieval authorities to present-day studies minimises the ideas of the protesters and their motivations to take up arms.6 It would, therefore, be useful to take the sociological work done by Charles Tilly (1929-2008) into account. In his later work Tilly labels ‘collective action’ as ‘contentious politics’, a concept giving agency to the protestors themselves. He considers their actions not as warlike ‘rebellions’ but as collective claim-making by people with shared interests.7 However, Tilly’s school has not yet scrutinized



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de Philippe le Bon pour les duchés de Brabant et de Limbourg et les pays d’Outre-Meuse, 1430-1467 (Brussels: FOD Justice, 2005), pp. 254 and 257). Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The social space and the genesis of groups’, Theory and Society, 14 (1985), pp. 732-33. See also his Language and symbolic power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 229-51. John Watts, The making of polities. Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), p. 130; Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘Pouvoir symbolique, légitimation et genèse de l’Etat moderne’, in La légitimité implicite, ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris: Sorbonne, 2015), I, 9-47; Frank Rexroth, ‘Politische Rituale und die Sprache des Politischen in der historischen Mittelalterforschung’, in Revolten und politische Verbrechen zwischen dem 12. und 19. Jahrhundert: rechtliche Reaktionen und juristisch-politische Diskurse, ed. by Angela de Benedictis (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 2013), pp. 71-90. Thomas Kohl et al., ‘Aufruhr! Zur epochenübergreifenden Beschreibung beschleunigten sozialen Wandels in Krisenzeiten’, Historische Zeitschrift, 301 (2015), pp. 31-62. Charles Tilly, Contentious performances (Cambridge Mass.: HUP, 2008).

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the historical patterns of nomenclature used to describe protest. This chapter fills this lacuna, but also compares elite and popular discourses on ‘contention’ because it will be shown that a significant overlap existed between the rhetorical registers used by elites and by the populace. An analysis of the medieval words of protest used by insurgents will show that they are as biased as those used by the authorities. Citizens used words like ‘gathering’ or ‘assembly’, terms that ignored the violence used during conflicts and justified the uprising by referring to custom and urban law giving citizens the right to gather. Furthermore, protesters usually argued that they were obeying the law and acting in the name of what was right. Therefore, they used a similar discourse to that employed by the authorities when describing the practices against which they protested. In petitions, slogans and shouts, ‘unruly’ citizens complained about the harmful policies of the urban governors. The decisions in question were described as being against the common good of the town and the general welfare of the land. In what follows, an analysis of this remarkable discursive strategy will demonstrate that citizens referred mostly to medical terminology, well-known moral (or biblical) discourse, urban legislation and common law in an attempt to present their actions as justified and in order to avoid punishment. By doing so, they wished to transmit a biased view of the protest with the desire of influencing both coeval perceptions and the ‘memorial afterlife’ of contention. Furthermore, an inquiry into the nomenclature of medieval upheaval will give us some insight into the motivation of the protesters, and the ideology they used during the struggle. As a result, this chapter will not only give us an idea about what these people were fighting against, but also the alternative that they proposed. The geographical and chronological focus of this paper will be the late medieval principalities of the southern Low Countries, namely the counties of Flanders, Namur, Loon, and Hainault, the duchies of Luxembourg, Brabant and Limbourg, the prince-bishopric of Liège, and the enclaves of Tournai and Mechelen. For reasons of coherence, this chapter focuses on urban centres, without ignoring research done on rural communities. Scholars have shown that, especially in the principalities of the Low Countries political change mainly happened in the densely populated cities.8 Citizens in these regions rose many times against their lords and/or against local authorities. They also maintained a lively memorial culture of contention; they sang songs, told stories and wrote poems and even chronicle fragments on past revolts.9 This ‘counter-memory’ of





8 Wim Blockmans, ‘Constructing a sense of community in rapidly growing European cities in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries’, Historical Research, 83 (2010), pp. 575-87; Marc Boone and Jelle Haemers, ‘The common good. Governance, discipline and political culture’, City and society in the Low Countries, 1100-1600, ed. by Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), pp. 93-127. 9 Jelle Haemers, ‘Social memory and rebellion in fifteenth-century Ghent’, Social History, 36 (2011), pp. 443-63; Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘“We will ask for a new Artevelde”. Names, sites and the memory of revolt in the late medieval Low Countries’, in La mémoire des révoltes en Europe à l’époque moderne, ed. by Alexandra Merle, Stéphane Jettot and Manuel Herrero Sanchez (Paris: Garnier, 2018), pp. 231-49.

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political subversion was used to legitimize contention, define group solidarity and encourage people to identify with subversive heroes. It is important for historians to study these memories because they have influenced our opinion of these movements until today. This chapter will focus both on violent protest and the collective actions considered by the authorities as illegal, as well as on the peaceful assemblies of citizens and the ‘legal’ utterance of grievances (such as petitioning). The distinction between such categories is somewhat artificial because both unlawful and authorized protest formed part of the same process of claim-making, which sometimes was recognised by the authorities as justified but sometimes was not. While dissenters and petitioners themselves usually were convinced about the appropriateness of their claims, the authorities mostly judged the complaints as unfair and injurious.10 To conclude: in order to be included in this small-scale study, the protest should be collective and designed to bring about at least minor changes in the policies of those who claimed to represent the urban commonalty. Gathering and petitioning An alternative view on political protest can be read in the documents written by ‘rebels’ themselves, such as petitions, letters and chronicles composed by citizens. Letters written by urban protestors in the medieval Low Countries are rare, as I have shown elsewhere,11 and only some of such chronicle fragments have survived – I will discuss one example in detail further on. We do dispose however of a number of petitions. As many chapters in this book show, petitioning was a ubiquitous practice in late medieval Europe. It functioned as a platform for negotiation between the authorities and their subjects. In many cities, petitioning was the first stage of voicing complaint, and it was rarely followed by a violent clash between the urban governors and the citizens if the petition was not approved.12 Of course, the balance of power determined to what extent the complaints were heeded, as well as whether or not they would be labelled ‘rebellious’ afterwards. Most of the petitions, as well as the authorities’ official responses to them, were composed by lawyers or specialists of common law,

10 A similar point of view can be found in Sam Cohn, Popular protest in late medieval English towns (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), pp. 27-33; Patrick Lantschner, ‘Revolts and the political order of cities in the late Middle Ages’, Past and Present, 225 (2014), pp. 3-46; Christian Liddy, ‘Urban enclosure riots: risings of the commons in English towns, 1480-1525’, Past and Present, 226 (2015), pp. 41-77. 11 Jelle Haemers, ‘Diffuser des lettres pour contracter des alliances. La communication des rebelles en Flandre et en Brabant au bas Moyen Age’, Revue Française d’Histoire du Livre, 138 (2018), pp. 131-50. 12 Lille was such a city, see Patrick Lantschner, ‘Voices of the people in a city without revolts: Lille in the later Middle Ages’, in The voices of the people in late medieval Europe. Communication and popular politics, ed. by Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 73-88. About petitioning, see the literature mentioned in the introduction of this volume, and in particular Gwilym Dodd and Sophie Petit-Renaud, ‘Grace and favour: the petition and its mechanisms’, in Government and Political Life in England and France, c. 1300-c. 1500, ed. Christopher Fletcher et al. (Cambridge: CUP, 2015), pp. 240-78.

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making it unsurprising that many of them operated within a similar discursive register. It is difficult, however, to uncover the exact authorship of these documents. In a rare case, namely in Bruges, in February 1488, a document mentions that Jan Roegiers, a jurist and city clerk, has ‘put several points and complaints of the nine members of the town (i.e. the institutional body that united the craft guilds) in a report’. The Ghent petition of 1297 informs us that it has been composed by the procureur dou commun de Gant.13 And in Avesnes (Hainaut), 1413, after a violent conflict between the craftsmen and the urban authorities, a clerk was punished by the latter because ‘he had composed the writings’ of those who were ought to be responsible for the violence used.14 These mentions demonstrate that the petitioners made use of the services of professional writers and jurists. As a result, it remains very difficult to know to what extent these intermediaries changed the voices of the craftsmen. The analysis of the role played by jurists in the production of petitions in the early modern period – a role more difficult to study for the Middle Ages because of the lack of necessary sources – has shown that these professional clerks have decisively influenced the choice of the words of these texts, but less the ideas, not to mention the demands and their agenda, of those for whom they wrote them.15 Furthermore, research on the authorship of fourteenth-century English petitions has shown that historians should be wary of attempting to build up a picture of the ‘typical petitionary scribe’, because authors came from a variety of locations and professional backgrounds.16 Of course, more research is needed on these aspects and the education of these writers in the Low Countries in order to understand the exact language used in their documents. Petitions considered the mobilization and gatherings of artisans as peaceful actions that were permitted by common law. Logically, the vocabulary used to describe meetings and rallies referred to customs and rights tha­t townsmen had

13 See, respectively, City Archives of Bruges, city accounts, February-September 1488, fol. 142v ( Jan Roegiers is payed for diverssche pointen van doleancen van den neghen leden weghe in ghescrift ghestelt thebben), and Julius Vuylsteke, Uitleggingen tot de Gentsche stads- en baljuwsrekeningen, 1280-1315 (Ghent: Vuylsteke, 1906), p. 78. 14 ‘Therefore’, the document (a file containing a list of the punishment of the Avesnois protestors) continues, ‘he was the one who knew most about their bad things’ (celui qui plus scet de toutes les dictes mauvoistiez, car il estoit de touz et faisoit leurs escriptures). It was published by Jules Finot, Une émeute à Avesnes en 1413 (Lille: L. Danel, 1895), at p. 56. 15 Peter Blickle, Steven Ellis and Eva Österberg, ‘The Commons and the state: representation, influence, and the legislative process’, in Resistance, Representation and Community, ed. by Peter Blickle (Oxford: OUP, 1997), pp. 132-50; Andreas Würgler, ‘Voices from among the “silent masses”: humble petitions and social conflicts in early modern central Europe’, International Review of Social History, 46 (2001), pp. 11-34; Griet Vermeesch, ‘Professional lobbying in eighteenth-century Brussels: the role of agents in petitioning the central government institutions in the Habsburg Netherlands’, Journal of Early Modern History, 16 (2012), pp. 95-119. 16 Helen Killick, ‘The scribes of petitions in late medieval England’, in Petitions and strategies of persuasion in the Middle Ages. The English crown and the church, c.1200-c.1500, ed. by Thomas Smith and Helen Killick (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2018), p. 81; Gwilym Dodd, ‘Writing wrongs. The drafting of supplications to the crown in later fourteenth-century England’, Medium Aevum, 80 (2011), p. 45.

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obtained through earlier actions. ‘To assemble’ was, therefore, the most common term to describe insurgency. For instance, a charter that sealed the unity of the craft guilds of Leuven in 1360 during a revolt against the urban governors used the word ‘gathering’ [verghaderinghe] to speak of the recent collective actions of the craftsmen. They had met in their guild houses, and afterwards they had occupied the market place and the city hall.17 In other towns, vergadering ende (be)raming were words used to describe the meetings of protesting craftsmen, such as in Ghent in 1381.18 In a petition of 1539, the craftsmen of Oudenaarde asked for mercy for those who had ‘said something wrong’ during their meeting [vergaderinghe] in the market square, organized to protest heavy taxation.19 By using such terms, the leaders of the movement stressed that the artisans had met peacefully and without using violence against the town’s councilors. When legitimating assemblies, craftsmen therefore pointed at the lack of violence used and at the common consent and the unity they displayed during them. Guildsmen everywhere in Europe used a similar language to justify the political rights that they had obtained during the later Middle Ages, in order to stress their right to assemble freely.20 The mobilisation of craftsmen was also described by terms focusing on the non-violent organisation of marches, gatherings and even armaments. In Aardenburg in 1311, the craftsmen decided to strike in an attempt to undo some fiscal measures of the town council. ‘They left their work’ [Vord so lietsi al werc staen], and they assembled on the market square without using violence, as they stated.21 Such strikes were generally called leeghanc [going idle] in Middle Dutch, as the Corebrief of Mechelen illustrates. In 1310, this urban charter granted by the lord of the town tried to prevent craftsmen from leaving their work by fining everybody who decided to make such a strike.22 Another peaceful though forceful method to put pressure on the urban governors was the uutganc, literally a ‘walkout’ or collective exit from the city. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, for instance, such walkouts were organized by the fullers in Mechelen

17 Jelle Haemers, ‘Governing and gathering about the common welfare of the town. The petitions of the craft guilds of Leuven, 1378’, in La comunidad medieval como esfera publica, ed. by Rafael Oliva Herrer et al. (Sevilla: SUP, 2014), pp. 153-69. 18 Napoléon De Pauw, De voorgeboden der stad Gent in de XIVe eeuw, 1337-1382 (Ghent: AnnootBraeckman, 1885), p. 158. 19 Omme eenighe seghwoorden gheseyt by the ‘upsetters ofte beghinders van deser vergaderinghe’ (DésiréJoseph Vander Meersch, ‘Verhael van den opstand der gemeente van Audenaerde tegen hare wettige overheid ten jare 1539 gedurende de Gentsche onlusten van hetzelfde jaer’, Annales de la Société royale des Beaux-Arts et de la Littérature de Gand, 18 (1859-61), p. 53). 20 See for instance Bert De Munck, Guilds, labor and the urban body politic. Fabricating community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300-1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 73-75; Maarten Prak, Citizens without nations. Urban citizenship in Europe and the World, c. 1000-1789 (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), pp. 68-75; and several essays in Political representation. Communities, ideas, and institutions in Europe (c. 1200-c. 1690), ed by Mario Damen, Jelle Haemers and Alastair Mann (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 21 Raf Verbruggen, Geweld in Vlaanderen. Macht en onderdrukking in de Vlaamse steden tijdens de veertiende eeuw (Bruges: Van de Wiele, 2005), p. 146. 22 Louis-Théo Maes, Vijf eeuwen stedelijk strafrecht. Bijdrage tot de rechts- en cultuurgeschiedenis der Nederlanden (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1947), p. 705.

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and Hasselt because of the introduction of the fulling mill in these towns. In Mechelen, the fullers assembled in taverns outside the city to speak about further plans.23 Yet such strikes also are known to have occurred during the early days of guild action in the southern Low Countries. Particularly famous are the takehans (taquehein, taskehan) in Douai of 1245 and 1281, secret meetings and collective gatherings at which the craft members collectively decided to stop working until the authorities gave into their demands.24 Similar actions in Ypres and Bruges in 1280 received colorful names, the cockerulle and the moerlemaye respectively. These terms are middle Dutch expressions referring to the murmur of the crowd, uttered during collective actions in public places. Perhaps these names received a pejorative connotation after the uprising, though they were originally used to denote the contentious speech acts of larger masses who assembled in order to criticize urban politics.25 Words referring to movement taking place during revolts were also used to categorize these actions. The Ghent weaver Jan De Rouck, for instance, wrote a small chronicle fragment about the revolt of his father in 1477, in which he spoke about the glorious times when the weavers ‘lay in their houses’ and ran to the market square.26 A similar text of 1360, called a ‘memory book’, that circulated widely in late medieval Ghent also spoke about guilds who ‘held the watch’ [wake houden] during such meetings.27 The Dutch term auweet, derived from the French au guet, a shout or expression to describe the armament of troops, was also used in Ghent to refer to episodes in the turbulent history of the town in which craftsmen had assembled in arms.28 A collective gathering on a central square in the city was also called an ‘armament’ [wapening], in which craftsmen assembled under their banners after a signal, such as bell ringing; in Germanspeaking cities this was called a wapenlop or bannerlauf.29 For instance, in Ypres in 1380, the guilds ‘came with unfurled banners on the market square’ [quamen 23 Gérard Willemsen, ‘La grève des foulons et des tisserands en 1524-1525, et le règlement général de la draperie Malinoise de 1544’, Bulletin du Cercle Archéologique, Littéraire et Artistique de Malines, 20 (1910), p. 118; Joseph Gessler, ‘Die Pierts. Topografische, taal- en geschiedkundige aanteekeningen over en om het Peertshuis in de Peertsdemerstraat te Hasselt’, Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde (1922), p. 150. 24 Georges Espinas, La vie urbaine de Douai au Moyen Age (Paris: Picard, 1913), I, pp. 226-69. 25 I elaborate on this with Jan Dumolyn in ‘Takehan, Cockerulle, and Mutemaque. Naming collective action in the later medieval Low Countries’, in The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt, ed. by Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 39-54. See also our ‘A bad chicken was brooding. Subversive speech in late medieval Flanders’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), pp. 45-86. 26 Jelle Haemers, ‘Geletterd verzet. Diplomatiek, politiek en herinneringscultuur van opstandelingen in de laatmiddeleeuwse en vroegmoderne stad (casus: Brugge en Gent)’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 176 (2010), p. 44. 27 Victor Fris, ‘Les origines de la réforme constitutionnelle de Gand de 1360-1369’, Annales du XXe congrès de la fédération archéologique et historique de la Belgique, 3 (1907), p. 445. 28 For instance in 1346: Ten aweyten ende ten wapeninghen (Napoléon De Pauw and Julius Vuylsteke, De rekeningen der stad Gent: tijdvak van Jacob van Artevelde, 1336-1349 (Ghent: Hoste, 1885), III, p. 120). 29 Cornelia Hess, ‘Nigra crux, mala crux: a comparative perspective on urban conflict in Gdansk in 1411 and 1416’, Urban History, 41 (2014), p. 578. See also Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Uplop – Seditio. Innerstädtische Unruhen des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts im engeren Reichsgebiet (Hamburg: Kovac, 2012).

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met opener banieren ter maerct] in order to complain about some repressive measures taken by the authorities.30 Other authors, too many to mention here, have already shown that bells, flags and noise were important features of popular protest in the late medieval world. It seems thus that these symbolic actions have also lent their name to the whole conflict.31 Consequently, the authorities targeted their repression on these aspects of contention in order to deprive the craft guilds of their means of mobilising the guild members. In 1417, John of Bavaria, the Prince-Bishop of Liège, promulgated an ordinance for Sint-Truiden and Herk-de-Stad in which he ordered the inhabitants of both cities not to ‘ring the bell nor to unfurl the banner on the market square […] with the aim to incite the people neither to call them for arms’.32 Likewise, ten years earlier, Duke John the Fearless stipulated that the artisans of Bruges had to surrender their banners if they decided to meet without the consent of the authorities.33 Such a measure was not just symbolic; the duke had attempted to curtail actions that were essential to political mobilisation and to the naming of the conflict. Complaining for the common good Regularly, subjects presented their doleances et complaintes, as they were called in a petition of the craft guild of the weavers in Lille in 1415, to the authorities in order to remedy the situation considered unjust. In the Lille case, the aldermen approved the measures proposed by the weavers with the motivation that they governed the city pour oster les dites deffaultes et pour le bien commun (‘to get rid of the faults, and for the common good’).34 It is striking that most of the petitions discussed in this chapter refer to the discourse of ‘the welfare of the land’, presumably in order to enhance their chances of being approved. In 1430, for instance, when arguing against the use of urban funds for private purposes, the guild of the smiths in Liège invoked this discourse. The guild stated that the

30 Verbruggen, Geweld in Vlaanderen, p. 114. 31 Other ‘pars-pro-toto’-names given in the Empire were uppstot, tohopelop, upzat, uplop, samenung, schicht, twidracht, unrat, stöss, irrung, klag, bewegnuss, sache, beschwerung , spenn, unfriden, bruch, geschrei…, see Pierre Monnet, ‘Les révoltes urbaines en Allemagne aux XIVe siècle: un état de la question’, in Rivolte urbane e rivolte contadine nell’Europa del Trecento: un confronto, ed. by Monique Bourin et al. (Florence: FUP, 2008), p. 111. See also Regula Schmid, Reden, rufen, Zeichen setzen: politisches Handeln während des Berner Twingherrenstreits, 1469-1471 (Zürich: Chronos, 1995), passim. 32 Dat nyemant […] en sall mogen slaen, noch luijden die clock, noch banire dragen op die merckt, noch oic anders wair in derselver onser stat, om dat volck te beruerene, noch oic te wapenen roepen (Stanislas Bormans, Recueil des ordonnances de la principauté de Liège (Brussels, 1878), I, pp. 510 and 523). 33 Aucune coursse ou mouvement d’armes, esmeute de peuple ou aliance quelconque contre nous […] s’il se faisoit par maniere d’assemblee de mestier ( Jean-Marie Cauchies, Ordonnances de Jean sans Peur, 14051419 (Brussels: FOD Justice, 2001), pp. 77-78). See also Marc Boone, ‘Armes, coursses, assemblees et commocions: les gens de métiers et l’usage de la violence dans la société urbaine flamande à la fin du Moyen Age’, Revue du Nord, 87 (2005), pp. 1-33. 34 Georges Espinas, Les origines du droit d’association dans les villes de l’Artois et de la Flandre française jusqu’au début du XVIe siècle (Lille: Raoust, 1941-2), II, p. 371.

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urban governors should gardeir le utiliteit et le bin common (‘protect the utility and the common good’) because the well-being of all citizens belonged to it. The petition claimed that those who had stolen money from the city should be ‘corrected’ and their names cried out at the peron, the monument on which laws were promulgated. As a result, everyone would know that the person in question had harmed the city and its citizens.35 Indeed, references to the vague ‘common good’ ideology were used to justify both the creation of petitions and the authorities’ refusal to implement them.36 The regular use of such a common language may show, once again, that the authors of these documents (lawyers, notaries, and clerics trained at universities) made use of a ‘predictable’ language register in order to make the petition approvable. As a result of these shared conceptual frameworks, the justification of protest resembled the discourse used by authorities when punishing rioters. For instance, when Philip the Good promulgated an ordinance in 1459 forbidding the inhabitants of Hainaut from bearing arms publicly because several people were wounded during factional conflicts at feasts, he proclaimed that the common good of everybody was involved. The count claimed that he had to remedy this situation because otherwise the ‘poor people, workers, and others would be held in great fear and oppression’.37 An ordinance forbidding the wearing of arms in 1432 also claimed to restore order and was thus presented as being a corrective measure in the same way that the citizens claimed their petitions were. In the document, the count claimed that he wanted to have ‘our subjects in good justice, peace, unity and concord, one with another’.38 Sometimes the authorities followed almost literally the ‘medical logic’ of the petitioners when they approved proposed remedies. In such a case, the rulers healed the unfortunate patient (the city) by curing the abuse. For instance, in 1407 the citizens of Luxembourg composed a long list of complaints about abuses of power committed by their main judge, Gillis von Kattenheim. The list was presented to the regent of the duke (Louis d’Orléans), who did not turn a deaf ear to them. He condoned the movement by stating that it had made an end to the ‘mischief and discord in the city of Luxembourg because of things that 35 De quoy toutes personnes doit vivre, s’il ne le gardent loyalment et prendrent faulx lowier et argent, en prejudice et encombrement de bin common, comment ilhe doit estre corregiez et crieis a peron de leur meffais (Emile Fairon, Régestes de la cité de Liège (Liège, 1938), III, p. 262). 36 Vincent Challet, ‘Bien commun à l’épreuve de la pratique: discours monarchique et réinterprétation consulaire en Languedoc à la fin du Moyen Age’, Revue Française d’Histoire des Idées Politiques, 32 (2010), pp. 311-24; De Bono Communi. The discourse and practice of the common good in the European city, 13th-16th centuries, ed. by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 37 Li povre peuple du pays, laboureurs et autres estoient tenuz en grant crainte et subjection se pourveu n’y est esté ( Jean-Marie Cauchies, Ordonnances de Philippe le Bon pour le comté de Hainaut, 1425-1467 (Brussels: FOD Justice, 2010), p. 328). 38 Nos subgiés en bonne justice, paix, union et concorde l’un avoecq l’autre’ and this because ‘desirans tousjours tenir et garder … nostre droit et seignerie volloir entretenir, maintenir et garder, et pour le bien, pourfit et utilité du dit pays de Haynnau (ibidem, p. 81). Similar examples in Jonas Braekevelt and Jan Dumolyn, ‘Diplomatique et discours politiques. Une analyse lexicographique qualitative et quantitative des ordonnances de Philippe le Bon pour la Flandre (1419-67)’, Revue Historique 662 (2012), pp. 323-56.

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were unreasonable’. A further argument in the revolt’s favour was that both the inhabitants of the city and its rulers were in agreement about the facts.39 Again, unity and peace within the city legitimated the revolt in the eyes of the regent and prompted him to listen to their complaints. Is it, therefore, a coincidence that the craftsmen of Tournai stated in 1428 that their actions were favorable to the ‘augmentation of justice, which is the sovereign good that produces peace, union, and concord’?40 The statement echoed princely discourse, as can be seen in the ordinance of Philip the Good for Hainaut mentioned above. Just as lords, princes and urban governors proclaimed that they ruled lands and cities for their common good, utility and harmony, citizens explained that their contentious claims were making the city healthier, more virtuous and a better place to live in. Scholars of English towns have observed that collective complaint was also voiced in a semi-juridical terminology presenting the request as in the common interests of the entire urban population.41 The same can be said of the Low Countries. In February 1488, for instance, the craft guilds of Bruges presented ‘complaints and wishes’ [doleanchen ende begheerten] to the urban authorities.42 These were concrete demands for remedying the (alleged) abuse of power by the urban authorities in previous years. The craft guilds claimed that the latter had violated some of the guilds’ privileges and that they had made unilateral decisions on fiscal matters when custom obliged the aldermen to involve representatives of the artisans in such affairs. The document lent weight to their request by stressing its common character. It said that it was approved by all craft guilds that had determined its content collectively. A similar document presented by them to the Count of Flanders some months later also concluded that it was composed by ‘the common advice and concord of each other’.43 Likewise in Lille in 1430, a petition of the craft guild of the shoemakers proclaimed that it was a ‘humble petition from the biggest and wisest part of the craft guild’.44 The stress put on the collective and legitimate character of the petition is striking in Lille, as it is in the following case. Namely, in the petition of the inhabitants of Mons

39 Missel und zweyunge in der stat zu Lucemburg umb sachin die onredelichin waren and der wart die gantz gemeynde eyns ynd kussin eyn deil der burger by dat gericht und scheffin und wurden gemeynlichen eyndrechtich van allen sachin (Wurth-Paquet and Van Werveke, Cartulaire ou recueil, p. 60). 40 Augmentation du fait de justice qui est le souverain bien par lequel vient et procede paix, union et concord; see Lantschner, ‘Revolts and the political order’, p. 43. 41 Mark Ormrod, ‘Murmur, clamour and noise: voicing complaint and remedy in petitions to the English crown, c. 1300-c. 1460’, in Medieval petitions: grace and grievance, ed. by Mark Ormrod et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), pp. 135-55; Christopher Fletcher, ‘De la communauté du royaume au common weal: les requêtes anglaises et leurs stratégies au XIVe siècle’, Revue Française d’Histoire des Idées Politiques, 32 (2010), pp. 359-72. 42 Octave Delepierre, ‘Analectes brugeoises. Marie de Bourgogne et Maximilien’, Annales de la Société d’Emulation de Bruges, 4 (1842), p. 230. See also Jan Dumolyn, ‘“Our land is only founded on trade and industry”: economic discourses in fifteenth-century Bruges’, Journal of Medieval History, 36 (2010), pp. 375-77; Christian Liddy and Jelle Haemers, ‘Popular politics in the late medieval town: York and Bruges’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 771-805. 43 Bij ghemeene advise ende overeendraghene van elcandren (Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire des chartes, VI, p. 306). 44 L’umble supplication de la greigneur et plus saine partie des cordouanniers de notre ville de Lille (Espinas, Les origines du droit, II, pp. 371 and 383).

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(Hainault) in 1424, ‘the people’ (li peuples) formulated the complaints together. Among others, the citizens complained about the fact that the aldermen of the town had ignored preceding petitions, and therefore they considered that the city was ‘badly governed’ (li ville est mal gouvernee). As a result, they spread the message that taking the petitions of citizens into account was a duty of those who governed the town.45 In the neighbouring city of Tournai, the citizens also collectively handed over a list of concrete wishes to the urban government in August 1428. In this case, as in Mons some years earlier, it was a petition of the whole community, le bon peuple et communaulté de la ville et cité de Tournay that was approved and read aloud on the balcony on which governmental ordinances were customarily announced. The petition contained precise measures on how commerce in the city, such as the production of beer and sale of cloth, should be regulated.46 General phrases referring to the common consent of all citizens were designed to convince the authorities that the claim was made in conformity with urban and other legislation because concord was an important condition for a petition to be approved. In the city of Liège, for instance, petitioning and orally asking for favours at the urban council was permitted to the craft guilds by the Peace Treaty of Fexhe (1316), as long as the collective demand came from at least two or three guilds that had presented it to the whole commonality of the town.47 Therefore, the petition of the craft guild of the smiths of Liège of 1430, quoted above, said that it was not only in the interests of the smiths, but that it was also presented ‘in name of the whole city’ [en nom de tout le citeit generalment].48 The concern to compose and present petitions collectively could also be dictated by the fear that the support for the petition could crumble during its creation in meetings of the craftsmen or that some groups of citizens would ask for a favour that would be detrimental to others. For instance, in Oudenaarde in 1539, ‘the good commoners and the members of the craft guilds of the town’ collectively asked that petitions in the future should be composed and presented ‘with one voice’ [by eenen voyse], as they had been on this particular occasion.49 This would prevent measures from being taken by the authorities without the consent of all the commoners and craftsmen of the town. In the eyes of the citizens, a collective claim was a legitimate one.

45 Valeria Van Camp and Jelle Haemers, ‘“Li ville est mal gouvernee”. Les registres du conseil de la ville de Mons, la crise politique de 1424-1428, son impact sur l’audition des comptes communaux’, Histoire Urbaine, 52 (2018), pp. 137-66, quotations at p. 165. 46 Henri Vandenbroeck, Extraits analytiques des anciens registres des consaux de la ville de Tournai (14311476) (Tournai: Malo et Levasseur, 1863), II, pp. 274-75. The context in Patrick Lantschner, The logic of political conflict in medieval cities. Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370-1440 (Oxford: OUP, 2015), pp. 43-44. 47 Christophe Masson, ‘La Paix de Fexhe, de sa rédaction à la fin de la principauté de Liège’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances de Belgique, 47 (2006), pp. 263-64. 48 Fairon, Régestes de la cité, III, p. 254. 49 Item dat men van nu voortan zoe wanneer dat men de ghemeente deser stede by der neeringhen sal doen garen dat deselve ghemeente zullen tsamen communiquieren ende alsdan haer ghebesoigneerde tsamen ende by eenen voyze der wet te vertooghene (Vander Meersch, ‘Verhael van den opstand’, pp. 53-54).

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In addition, not only within towns, but also on a country-wide level, subjects stressed the rights of gathering and assembling when asking for favors from the central authorities. For instance, the privilege granted by Mary of Burgundy to the county of Namur in 1477, which restored ancient rights that the Namurois had lost during the reign of her father, was nothing more than a charter that was composed during a meeting of the Estates of the county. Of course, Mary was obliged to give in if she wanted to have the support of the Estates in the war against France. However, the charter justified its existence not by referring to this precarious situation but by the fact that it had been discussed collectively and agreed upon by all the Estates of Namur. As a consequence, it was presented as a legal proposal to remedy misgovernment, composed after careful deliberation for ‘the common welfare and utility’ of the county.50 Likewise, when the cities of Brabant united in a city league, as they have done several times during the fourteenth century in order to organize opposition against measures taken by the Duke of Brabant or his court officers, they used a similar discourse to legitimize the league’s existence. In 1372, for instance, the cities of Leuven, Brussels, Bois-le-Duc and 41 other towns and villages of the duchy formed a powerful union when Duke Wenceslas was imprisoned by the Duke of Jülich after the battle of Baesweiler. They were afraid that high taxes would be levied by the ducal court with the aim of paying a ransom to the latter. In the charter that sealed their league, the towns proclaimed that the treaty was motivated by the ‘necessity, interest and profit of themselves, the land and the good men together, rich and poor’.51 As the Estates of Namur would do more than a century later, the Brabantine towns presented themselves as united communities working hand in hand to keep the peace in their own communities and throughout the land. The use of such discourse among town elites or members of Estates was a well-known rhetorical strategy in Western-Europe in order to justify their meetings or the creation of a league in general, and to stress the peaceful character of their words and deeds in particular.52 Harming and restoring order The language used by citizens to justify their actions fell back on a discursive register that referred to the correction of injustice. Petitioners claimed that they wanted to restore the order that was harmed by untrustworthy governors.

50 Entre eulx avisez, conceuz et deliberez pour le commun bien, prouffit et utilité d’eulx et de nostre dit pays de Namur (Cécile Douxchamps-Lefevre, ‘Le privilège de Marie de Bourgogne pour le comté de Namur (mai 1477)’, in 1477, p. 236). 51 Omme noet, orber ende profijt haerselfs, haers ghemeinds lands, haerre goeder liede, arme ende rike ghemeinlec, see Jelle Haemers, ‘“L’union fait la force”. Ideology and the social history of urban leagues in Brabant (13th-14th centuries)’, in Städtebünde und städtische Aussenpolitik. Träger, Instrumentarien, und Konflikte während des hohen und späten Mittelalters, ed. by Roland Deigendesch and Christian Jörg (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2019), p. 301. 52 Michel Hébert, La voix du peuple. Une histoire des assemblées au Moyen Âge (Paris: Puf, 2018), pp. 278-79.

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According to this ‘medical logic’, abuses of officeholders and corrupt decisions of administrators had wounded the city. Therefore, town-dwellers wanted to cure it by removing the causes of the disease and proposing concrete remedies. For instance, in 1477, the inhabitants of many cities in the duchy of Brabant used the sudden death of Duke Charles the Bold as an opportunity to undo decisions taken by local officers; they proclaimed that they were remonstrating the bad practices of rulers that had to be remedied. In Antwerp and Tienen, the insurgents stated that they rose against the ‘sober and bad regiment and the factionalism’ of the authorities [soberen ende quaden regimente ende partiscape]. ‘The way of justice was hindered by corruption’, the Brussels craftsmen stated, showing that their actions had been motivated by the concern of punishing corruption. Therefore, responsibility for the protest was put into the hands of the ruling factions whose ‘misgovernment’ should be corrected (if we follow the citizens’ logic). Likewise in Zoutleeuw, a smaller city towards the east of the duchy, citizens let it be known that the urban authorities ‘had governed the city for their own interest’.53 In Liège, albeit forty years earlier, the smiths asked in their petition of 1430 that those who acted contre le pays, le profit et les franchiesez should be corrected.54 Removing the ‘virus’ or the ‘arrow’ that harmed the city was proposed as the remedy which should restore the health of the body politic. Of course this ‘medical logic’ referred to the common belief that cities can be compared with a human body, a well-established metaphor in the medieval world.55 Also in other regions, citizens made a claim for such a ‘good and healthy government’ when taking up the pen or their arms against the authorities. Several examples demonstrate that the language of ‘injury and remedy’ was widespread, and it was as old as the urban petition itself. In Ghent in 1338, artisans wanted to ‘correct the bad’ during an uprising [quade corrigeren56], while in 1297 their ancestors had argued to the count that they refused to obey the orders of their aldermen because the latter had harmed the commoners in many ways. In the 1297 case, a petition stated that ‘the 39 [aldermen] of Ghent and those who help them are doing wrong against you [the count] and against the commoners of Ghent for many reasons’.57 Again in thirteenth-century petitions, the citizens of Bruges said that ‘discord was in the town’ because of the alleged misuse

53 De wech van justitien met corruptien belet; dieselve onse stat geregeert hebben tot huns selfs prouffyt (Raymond Van Uytven, ‘1477 in Brabant’, in 1477, p. 261). 54 Ceaulx qui ce feroient doient y estre corrigiés (Fairon, Régestes de la cité, III, p. 259). 55 Among others, John of Salisbury wrote on this, see Tilman Struve, ‘The importance of the organism in the political theory of John of Salisbury’, in The world of John of Salisbury, ed. by Michael Wilks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 309-10; Yves Sassier, ‘La communauté politique dans le Policraticus de Jean de Salisbury’, in Dieu, le prince et le peuple au Moyen Age, VIe-XVe siècles (Paris: ICES, 2012), pp. 89-90. 56 Verbruggen, Geweld in Vlaanderen, p. 85. 57 Li XXXIX de Gant et leur aidant sont mesfaissant envers vous et envers le commun de Gant par mout de raissons (Vuylsteke, Uitleggingen tot de Gentsche stads- en baljuwsrekeningen, p. 78).

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of urban finances [discort aldus es in die poert58], while in 1254, the Abbot of Sint-Truiden complained about the abuse of power by Duke Henry III of Brabant by comparing his rule with an ‘injury’ done to the abbey and the people [injurie quas facit nobis dux59]. Many more examples can be given of similar thirteenth-century petitions that explained ‘unruliness’ as a cry for justice and a long-awaited remedy for enduring corruption. Also in villages, port-towns and the countryside, inhabitants presented the misrule of local officers as the main reason for their protest. For instance, in Warneton (between Ypres and Lille) in 1250 and in Damme (close to Bruges) in 1280 and in 1299, the alleged misbehavior of urban governors and princely officers justified demands by the commoners for greater political participation.60 The insurgents, therefore, had a clear sense of what justice meant to them. As has been shown for Italian protest movements, the argument of ‘injustice’ empowered contentious citizens, or it could provide the justification for empowering them, to act in the name of justice and even, when necessary, to bring down regimes.61 In most cases, the petitioners tried to prove that the authorities had not fulfilled their duty because they had damaged the economy and the daily traffic of goods. For example, in 1322 the united cities of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres opposed the succession of Count Robert de Béthune by his second son, Robert of Cassel. They preferred Louis of Nevers, the grandson of the deceased count, as his successor because they claimed that Robert of Cassel had misbehaved in the county in previous years. In a petition sent to the French King Charles IV, the cities claimed that Robert of Cassel had done much ‘harm’ [leed] and ‘great cost and great damage’ [groten cost ende grote schade] to the county, while he and his accomplices had ‘harmed the trade and the land in order only to fulfill his will for his own profit’.62 Violent actions undertaken by the troops of Robert of Cassel, who wanted to wage war against the king of France, were called ‘the great

58 Carlos Wyffels, ‘Nieuwe gegevens betreffende de 13de eeuwse ‘demokratische’ stedelijke opstand: de Brugse ‘Moerlemaye’ (1280-1281)’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 132 (1966), p. 105. 59 Jean-Jacques Hoebanx, ‘Injurie ducis. Contribution à l’histoire de l’abbaye de Nivelles au 13e siècle’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 113 (1948), p. 41. 60 Carlos Wyffels, ‘Getuigenverhoor betreffende de ambtsmisbruiken van de baljuw van de heerlijkheid Waasten (27 februari 1250)’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances de Belgique, 20 (1962), pp. 319-59; Antoine De Smet, ‘De klacht van de ‘Ghemeente’ van Damme in 1280’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 115 (1950): 1-15; Henri Nowé, Les baillis comtaux de Flandre. Des origines a la fin du XIVe siècle (Brussels: Lamertin, 1929), pp. 434-35. 61 Patrick Lantschner, ‘Justice contested and affirmed: jurisdiction and conflict in late medieval Italian cities’, in Legalism: community and justice, ed. by Fernanda Pirie and Judith Scheele (Oxford: OUP, 2014), pp. 77-96; Angela de Benedictis, Neither disobedients nor rebels. Lawful resistance in early modern Italy (Rome: Viella, 2018), pp. 111-25. See also Otto Gerhard Oexle, ‘Die Kultur der Rebellion: Schwureinung und Verschwörung im früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Okzident’, in Ordnung und Aufruhr im Mittelalter. Historische und juristische Studien zur Rebellion, ed. by Marie Theres Fögen (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1995), 119-137. 62 Ende ghemeenlike die coopmanscepe ende tland der mede te verscalkene omme allene zinen wille te vulcomene in ghiericheiden (Thierry Kervyn de Lettenhove, ‘Robert de Cassel. Document inédit du XIVe siècle’, Annales de la Société d’Emulation pour l’étude de l’histoire et des antiquités de la Flandre, 9 (1851-4), pp. 370-71). Some years later Robert of Cassel lead a rebellion against the French king, see

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injustice’ [tgrote onrecht] by the city of Ghent. The latter wanted to maintain the peace with the king as stipulated in treaties of 1316 and 1320, and so Robert’s behaviour was considered unjust.63 As a result, he was considered an unsuitable candidate for the throne. Such arguments remind us of the claims made by E. P. Thompson in a seminal article on the ‘moral economy of the crowd’, stating that subjects had a certain sense of ‘good government’.64 A similar notion to the ‘doctrine of fair prices’, as he called the elementary moral precept held by the people, can be read in the 1322 complaint of the Flemish cities.65 Their requirement that the authorities secure food supply and guarantee the safety of travelers and traders can be considered one of these moral precepts. Leading citizens were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights, and they saw themselves as representing the wider consensus of the community when they opposed the lords and nobles who endangered trade and the lives of people. Therefore, as Thompson says, they felt that their resistance was legitimate. Discussions about right and wrong However, evidence suggests that the petitioners’ claims and wishes were more sophisticated than that. Four arguments demonstrate that the juridical and political beliefs of citizens inspired these moral notions. First, it was common sense in the late medieval world that princes should govern their people justly. Many ‘mirrors of princes’ can be quoted stating that princes should love their subjects. More concretely, this kind of amor or caritas meant that princes should give fair and honest justice and that they should shape favourable conditions for the welfare of the people.66 Likewise, urban treatises containing principles of governance paid attention to these values. Texts called ‘How a city should

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Jacques Sabbe, ‘De opstand van Brugge tegen Graaf Robrecht van Bethune en zijn zoon Robrecht van Kassel in 1321-1322. Het laatste politieke optreden van de volksleiders Pieter de Coninc en Jan Breidel’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 107 (1970), pp. 236-47. Julius Vuylsteke, Gentsche stads- en baljuwsrekeningen, 1280-1336 (Ghent: Annoot-Braeckman, 1900), I, p. 151. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English crowd in the 18th century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76-136. See also John Stevenson, ‘The “Moral Economy” of the English crowd: myth and reality’, in Order and disorder in early modern England, ed. by Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), pp. 218-38; Mark Hailwood and Brodie Waddell, ‘Plebeian cultures in early modern England: thirty-five years after E.P. Thompson’, Social History, 34 (2009), pp. 472-75. It was a widespread discourse in the fourteenth-century Low Countries, see Raoul De Kerf, ‘“Au nom de Dieu et du profit”. Le profit équitable selon Jan van Boendale’, Le Moyen Age, 120 (2014), pp. 611-30. Laurent Smagghe, Les émotions du prince. Émotion et discours politique dans l’espace bourguignon (Paris: Garnier, 2012), pp. 182-91. See also Cary Nederman, ‘The opposite of love: royal virtue, economic prosperity and popular discontent in fourteenth-century political thought’, in Princely virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200-1500, ed. by Istvan Bejczy and Cary Nederman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 177-99.

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be governed’ widely circulated in the Holy Roman Empire;67 most of the cities under scrutiny here (except for the county of Flanders and the city of Tournai) belonged to that Empire. For instance, the Antwerp city clerk Jan van Boendale also devoted several paragraphs in his Der leken spiegel (written between 1325 and 1330) on moral principles urban governors should obey. He claimed that aldermen should not be corrupt and that they had to govern the city for ‘the common good’ [gemeyn oerboer], taking the interests of their citizens into account. Some of the phrases written by Boendale on this were even painted in the meeting room of the Brussels city council.68 Petitioners clearly referred to such notions when claiming that citizens mainly wanted to restore ‘great injustices’ done by their superiors.69 Perhaps they also had their eye on a pardon for their insurgency, as forgiveness was also one of the main characteristics good princes should have. Therefore, it seems that petitioners not only had a moral notion of what good governance ought to be (as Thompson said), but that they were also aware of the duties princes were expected to fulfill. Second, the notion of ‘injury’ clearly referred to a widespread juridical discourse. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Flemish jurist Philip Wielant defined injurien [injuries] as harm, damage and injustice.70 Wielant wrote a learned treatise with practical advice for judges, but it was known by the people because he based his writings on an analysis of local custom, urban law and governmental practices. According to Wielant, injury could be done to others by means of words, writings or facts committed by a third party. In a similar treatise, his Brabantine colleague William van der Tannerijen stated that ‘injury is a deed which has been done by injustice’.71 Therefore, both authors advise authorities to punish the wrongdoers who had violated the law by harming others. Likewise, when using a similar discourse during a conflict, insurgents clearly referred to such juridical arguments. The sentences of enemies and the retributive acts of citizens were legitimised by a language that was used by their opponents. Furthermore, customs and local law had some compassion for mutineers if their actions were judged to have been inspired by a sense of honesty. For instance, Philip Wielant advised rulers to moderate the punishment of ‘mutiny of the people against 67 Heike Bierschwale and Jacoba van Leeuwen, Wie man eine Stadt regieren soll. Deutsche und niederländische Stadtregimentslehren des Mittelalters (Frankfurt-am-Main: Lang, 2005); Dominique Adrian, ‘Penser la politique dans les villes allemandes à la fin du Moyen Age. Traités de gouvernement et réalités urbaines’, Histoire Urbaine, 38 (2013), pp. 175-94. 68 Claire Billen, ‘Dire le bien commun dans l’espace public: Matérialité épigraphique et monumentale du bien commun dans les villes des Pays-Bas à la fin du moyen âge’, in De Bono Communi, pp. 86-87. About Boendale’s text, see Robert Stein, ‘The Antwerp clerk Jan van Boendale and the creation of a Brabantine ideology’, in Political representation, pp. 205-24, and Minne De Boodt, ‘“How one shall govern a city”: the polyphony of urban political thought in the fourteenth-century duchy of Brabant’, Urban History, 46 (2019), pp. 578-96. 69 As is shown for petitions of individual criminals in the Low Countries by Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier, Honor, vengeance, and social trouble. Pardon letters in the Burgundian Low Countries (Ithaca: Cornell, 2015), pp. 4-6. 70 Filips Wielant, Corte instructie in materie criminele, ed. Jos Monballyu (Brussels: KVAB, 1995), p. 267. 71 Injurie is een daet die met onrecht geschiet (Willem Van der Tanerijen, Boec der loopender practijken der raidtcameren van Brabant, ed. Egidius Strubbe (Brussels: KVAB, 1952), p. 128).

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the governors’ if it was caused by the ‘failure of justice of the governors’.72 So the discourse of contentious citizens cleverly stressed that their actions were corrective and a defensive reaction against injustice.73 It is, therefore, likely that they charged their governors with corruption and ‘injuries’ because they knew that these allegations could serve as a mitigating circumstance for their actions. Third, such considerations remind us of another juridical argument citizens used when explaining protest against authorities, namely the violation of custom and privileges. In preindustrial Europe, ancient rights and common law were often invoked by commoners when justifying opposition against governmental decisions.74 In such a case, the message given was one of legal resistance against unfair oppressors who, in the eyes of the subordinated people, had misgoverned their land. Particularly revealing here is the case of the complaint of the association of the nine craft guilds of Dinant in 1461. This association, called the ‘member of the common craft guilds’ [membre des communs métiers], governed the city together with two other ‘members’, namely the guild of the leather workers and that of the merchant elite. All decisions taken by the mayor and the aldermen of Dinant were expected to be discussed by a common council uniting representatives of the three members, a decision-making process which the city described in a letter to a nobleman as a ‘thing that was observed and maintained because there is no memory to the contrary’.75 In 1461, however, this custom was violated by the member of the leather workers, according to a complaint of the craftsmen. The latter argued to arbiters sent by the Prince-Bishop of Liège (to whom Dinant owed loyalty) that the membre of the batterie, as it was called, had ‘greatly oppressed the nine craft guilds’ because it had not brought matters to the city council as it ought to have done. Decisions involving the total community had been taken by the leather workers without the consultation of the craft guilds, who considered that the leather workers had assumed a ‘singular authority against the two other members’.76 In other words, the leather workers had usurped power in spite of the old customs of the town. In the end, the arbiters, with the aim of restoring bonne paix et amour in the city, agreed with the craft guilds that such actions 72 Als de mueyterie van den volcke es jeghen de gouverneurs, zo heeft de juge zeere te merckene hoe die commocie of beroerte ghespruut es, ende of de gouverners by ghebreecke van justicien of anderssins de cause danof zyn. Ende in dat cas behoort hy de pugnicie daernaer te modererene (Wielant, Corte instructie, p. 188). 73 Similar examples for France and Italy can be found in Christoph Mauntel, Gewalt in Wort und Tat. Praktiken und Narrative in spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2014), pp. 23137, and in De Benedictis, Neither disobedients nor rebels, pp. 87-110. The latter book shows that a sophisticated learned discourse about the harm done to communities by ‘corrupt governors’ also existed in late medieval and early modern Italy. 74 See for instance Andy Wood, ‘“Some banglyng about the customes”: popular memory and the experience of defeat in a Sussex village, 1549-1640’, Rural History, 25 (2014), pp. 1-14. 75 Laquelle chose a esté observee et maintenue de si loing temps que point n’est memore du contraire (Stanislas Bormans, Cartulaire de la commune de Dinant (Namur: Wesmael-Charlier, 1881), II, p. 88). About Dinant’s institutions: Henri Pirenne, Histoire de la constitution de la ville de Dinant au Moyen Age (Ghent: Clemm, 1889), pp. 50-52. 76 Lesdis IX bons mestiers se disoient tres grandement estre oppressez; une singuliere auctorité contre les deux aultres membres (Bormans, Cartulaire de la ville, II, pp. 78, 80, and 82 for the following).

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should not be allowed to occur again in the near future. As a result, the complaint of the craft guilds was not considered a ‘revolt’ because the reference to custom legitimated their resistance. So one can notice that memories about justice and custom could both motivate and justify popular insurrection. Fourth, a more deeply rooted feudal discourse was also useful for insurgents in such cases. According to the petitioners, lords and local governors had to obey a contract with their subjects because the authorities had sworn an oath to govern rightly. If they did not, another person should be sought to replace the oath-breaker. These ‘constitutional’ notions can be linked to the ‘contractualism’ that is typical of feudal societies, but also to the urban world of trade and commerce. Such thoughts would lead to violent clashes in the Low Countries, such as in 1128 in Flanders and in 1421 in Brabant, when Count William Clito and Duke John IV, respectively, were ‘left’ by the citizens, and a new person was chosen to take their place. Their opponents argued that they had oppressed their people because they had not treated the people lawfully.77 The language of ‘damage and failure’ was, therefore, a strong argument to prove that feudal oaths of loyalty were broken and that resistance was rightful. Another revealing example of this is the removal of Prince-Bishop John of Bavaria in 1406 by a coalition of the so-called Hédrois of Liège, a group of ‘rebels’ originating from the county of Loon and the Hesbaye region. They claimed that they had chosen a new prince-bishop (Thierry of Perwez) instead of John because they had read in old chronicles that they had the right to replace a prince-bishop who failed to defend his subjects properly. John of Bavaria had fled from his palace in Liège to the city of Maastricht (down on the river Meuse), and as result, the Hédrois argued, they were free to choose a new sovereign. Moreover, they claimed that ‘no country can govern itself during peace or war without a lord or sovereign, no less than the body can exist without a head’, as ‘was told in chronicles’.78 Contenders thus justified their takeover of power by referring to feudal contracts, customary law and historical precedents. One may add that they were also inspired by biblical notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and religious 77 See, respectively, Dirk Heirbaut, ‘Galbert of Bruges on the Flemish 1127-1128 crisis: an early experiment in constitutionalism, parliamentarism and popular sovereignty inspired by feudal law’, in Constitutionalism before 1789: constitutional arrangements from the High Middle Ages to the French Revolution, ed. by Jorn Sunde (Oslo: Pax, 2014), pp. 49-59; and Valerie Vrancken, ‘United in revolt, common discourse: urban and noble perceptions of ‘bad government’ in fifteenth-century Brabant, 1420-1421’, Journal of Medieval History, 43 (2017), pp. 579-99. See also Avant le contrat social. Le contrat politique dans l’Occident médiéval, XIIIe-XVe siècle, ed. by François Foronda (Paris: Sorbonne, 2011); Law, governance, and justice. New views on medieval constitutionalism, ed. by Richard Kaeuper (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 78 Pour lequelle a sorcour nous tous dessus nommés, par tres meure conselhe et avis plusieurs foiz sor chu delibereis, en ensuivant les ancheinnes poissances racontees par les cronikes, il appert comment d’anchienneteit a pueple dependoit la election de leur prelas affin que nous ne deplorons plus longhement nous y estre senz teste et senz defenseur relenquis, avons eslut et elisons à signeur et paistre de la dignité episcopale de Liege hault et poissant damoyseal Thieri de Perweiz (Fairon, Régestes de la cité, III, p. 93). The fragment is also quoted by Lantschner, The logic of political conflict, pp. 31-32. For the context, see also Geneviève Xhayet, Réseaux de pouvoir et solidarités de parti à Liège au Moyen Age (1250-1468) (Geneva: Droz, 1997), pp. 378-84.

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ideas of fair rule. Spiritual beliefs on the wrongness of oppression and grievances related to the use of violence against subjects certainly motivated the discourse of protest used by subjects. For instance, slogans and shouts of crowds, insults of individuals that accused aldermen of corruption, and references to ‘greedy governors’ in petitions can be linked easily to the sin of avaricia.79 From that point of view, the rhetoric of the craft guilds was thus similar to that of the urban aldermen. It referred to a widespread discourse on justice and (un)lawful behaviour. A good argument for this is the evidence taken from the discourse that was used by guild governors (usually, these were the leaders of the protest) who punished the misbehavior of their troops. In 1379 and in 1381, the weavers of Mechelen and Bruges respectively called their apprentices to order because of the disobedience exhibited by certain ‘wrongdoers’ within the guild. Apparently, they had committed violence during the gatherings of the craft guilds, which were submitting petitions to the authorities in both cities. The document speaks about the ‘bad grievances, uproar and unrest of the criminals and wrongdoers of the craft guilds who needed to be punished severely’.80 In short, the repression of unruly artisans by their fellows was justified using a juridical discourse similar to that with which the actions of the craft guilds as a whole were condemned by the authorities. Likewise, when the artisans of Antwerp were warned not to contest the decisions taken with common consent by a united front of the assembled craft guilds in 1477, the leaders of the union warned that any disobedient fellows who would ‘rebel’ against their agreements would be punished severely.81 An analogous discourse can be found in several statutes of corporate associations in the southern Low Countries. For instance, in 1443, the board of the shooting guild of Lille had proclaimed that every guild member had to obey the statutes. Actions by ‘rebels’ violating law and custom would not be tolerated.82 Likewise, the governors of the guild of tapestry weavers of Oudenaarde, leading the protest of the craft guilds in 1539, issued an ordinance in which they threatened to punish ‘rebels, delinquents and disobedient people’. Members of the craft guild were not permitted to disobey orders of the governors of the guild; those who breached these regulations

79 Laurence Verdon, La voix des dominés. Communautés et seigneurie en Provence au bas Moyen Age (Rennes: PUR, 2012), pp. 54-56; Chris Fletcher, ‘Morality and office in late medieval England and France’, Fourteenth Century England, 5 (2008), pp. 178-90; Jelle Haemers, ‘Filthy and indecent words. Insults, defamation, and urban politics in the southern Low Countries, 1300-1550’, in The voices of the people, pp. 247-67. 80 Zware grieve, beroerte ende onrusten die de mesdadighe ende quaeddoenres van haren ambochte (Georges Espinas and Henri Pirenne, Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière en Flandre (Brussels: Kiessling et Imbreghts, 1909), II, p. 596). For Mechelen, see Henry Joossen, ‘Receuil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière à Malines (des origines à 1384)’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 101 (1935), pp. 455-61. 81 Oploopen oft rebellicheyt of individual craftsmen would not be tolerated by the guild union (Paul Génard, De gebroeders Van der Voort en de volksopstand van 1477-1478 (Antwerp: Kockx, 1879), pp. 53-54). 82 Punishment would follow se il avenoit que aucuns des dites confreries fussent ou estoyent refusans ou rebelles de entretenir les ordonnances (Espinas, Les origines, II, p. 397).

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would be ‘corrected’ and fined.83 The language used to describe the punishment of ‘unruly’ fellow craftsmen thus resembled that used by other authorities in town to denounce disorderly elements. Indeed, urban and guild governors had a common discursive register at their disposal to describe unruliness and to signify their approval or disapproval of the actions of fellow citizens. Both groups criminalized actions that they judged to be harmful to their interests, and at the same time they strategically named political protests in an effort to influence how these conflicts were perceived and remembered by later generations of citizens. Conclusion This essay demonstrates that it is difficult to make a distinction between an ‘elite language’ of governance on one side and a ‘rebellious discourse’ on the other. Both urban rulers and their adversaries used similar words and ideas to legitimize revolt and repression. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that lawyers and procurers were hired by both the urban authorities as well as the guild governors to write down their complaints and policies. Regardless of the influence of legal personnel, many of the protestors were literate people well aware of the ongoing juridical arguments used to describe and justify political matters and decisions. Obviously, descriptions and memories of medieval conflicts are coloured by the opinions and beliefs of those who witnessed, participated in and suppressed them. Yet both the authorities and the insurgents challenging their power used a common discursive register to delegitimize the political actions of rivals. Craftsmen could label a decision taken by the urban governors as ‘harmful’ for the common welfare of all citizens, while their own collective actions were denounced with similar words by the authorities. Of course, it is difficult to retrieve the exact words used by protestors to voice their grievances. Most documents written by them – and petitions in the first place – contain a discourse that was influenced, or even created, by a jurist or a clerk who held the pen. This essay suggests however that the instigators of urban protest were very familiar with this discourse. Perhaps craftsmen used phrases and words of it in daily life, for instance when they were arguing on the market place why they should resist certain policies. Anyway, during a conflict, the prophetic words of Philippe de Mézières of 1389 became reality. In his comment on the reign of the French King Charles VI, he showed true insight into the politics of urban Flanders when he let Flemish citizens answer the allegorical queen Vérité who reproached them for their anciennes et nouvelles rebellions, de leur propre volunté et de leur murmuracion contre Dieu et leur seigneur natural. The Flemings, however, answered, Dame, veuillez monstrer a noz seigneurs que en vraye justice et sans avarice ilz nous doient gouverner. They also said that they were quite happy to be ruled by a lord but that 83 Dat men de rebellen ende delincanten ofte inobedyenten danof corrygiere (Vander Meersch, ‘Verhael van den opstand’, p. 70).

inj ury a nd remedy

his lordship should be ‘regulated’.84 In this quotation, the Flemish citizens did not consider themselves wrongdoers or ‘rebels’ but as dutiful subjects who had the right to ask for remedy if something went wrong. In that case, a weak answer on the part of the authorities could stir them to collective action, peaceful in its origins but perhaps ending with violence. When confronted with this resistance, the authorities could give in, or they could respond with ‘legal’ aggression. If they chose the latter option, they justified repression using a familiar discursive register. For instance, in January 1324 Count Louis of Nevers of Flanders claimed that he would bring peace after the collective violence of peasants and townsmen from the west of Flanders. After some violence had erupted in some villages, he instructed his officers to ‘keep the land in peace and tranquility’ (faire le pays tenir en pais et en transquilité). To restore peace, however, the count, his officers and his lord (the King of France) would use extreme violence to punish their opponents some years later. Among others, the Bruges Mayor Willem De Deken who had supported his fellow citizens during the contention was beheaded on the scaffold in Paris.85 Both the subjects and the lord had different standards of what ‘making peace’ and ‘bringing rest’ meant. Contention is not only about collective actions or armed confrontations; it is also a conflict over discourse and memory.

84 Que ilz estoient assez contemps d’avoir seigneur sur eulx auquel ilz obeissent mais que sa seigneurie fust regulee (Philippe de Mézières, chancellor of Cyprus. Le songe du vieil pèlerin, ed. George William Coopland (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), I, pp. 404-05). On this text and its context, see Gisela Naegle, ‘À la recherche d’une parenté difficile: miroirs des princes et écrits de réforme (France médiévale et Empire)’, in Le prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’Antiquité aux Lumières, ed. by Frédérique Lachaud and Lydwinne Scordia (Rouen: PURH, 2007), pp. 259-76. 85 Quotation from a letter of the count, published by Henri Pirenne, Le soulèvement de la Flandre maritime de 1323-1328 (Brussels: Kiessling, 1900), p. 164.

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Discourse and Collective Actions of Popular Groups in Castilian Towns before the ‘Revolt of the Comuneros’ The Case of Valladolid Between the spring of 1520 and 1521, the Revolt of the Comuneros took place in Castile. As in other territories inherited by Emperor Charles V, uprisings in this kingdom occurred during the new dynasty’s ascent to the throne, similar to the uprisings in the Kingdom of Valencia and in the Holy Roman Empire1. In the case of the Revolt of the Comuneros, conflicts of diverse nature that had been developing for decades or even centuries converged, including conflicts between aristocratic factions, local quarrels with political and or economic interests and complaints about the wool exports that prevented the development of a Castilian textile industry. This encouraged the widespread rejection of the arrival of Charles V and his ‘Flemish’ household, as councilors coming from the Low Countries had occupied Castilian government posts since 1517. As a result, the revolt was a multifaceted conflict, able to be studied from different points of view. This study will examine the revolt as the end point of a conflict carried out by the commons of Castilian cities which, led by their elite (business people, merchants, and rich artisans), fought against the oligarchy in order to obtain direct representation in local councils. This fight achieved its greatest expression during the revolt when popular groups put into practice a more participatory model of government than the closed council (the regimiento2), thanks to experience obtained in previous years. When the revolt broke out in 1520, the commons were clear about the articulation of citizenship based on districts (cuadrillas) as social and political frameworks, and on a conception of local government that was based on the participation of all social sectors.



1 Ricardo García Cárcel, ‘Comunidades y Germanías. Algunas reflexiones’, in En torno a las Comunidades de Castilla, ed. by Fernando Martínez Gil (Toledo: University of Castilla La Mancha, 2000), pp. 209-30; Eva Ortlieb, ‘El Juicio Sangriento de Wiener Neustadt (1522). Revuelta estamental contra Carlos V y Fernando I como archiduques de Austria’, in press. I am grateful to Professor Ortlieb (University of Graz) for providing me with her paper. 2 Between 1345 and the last years of the reign of Alfonso XI, the regimiento was introduced as the local government system in the Castilian towns under the control of the Crown. This political reform replaced the more participatory system of ‘open councils’ by these new ‘closed councils’, confirming the intervention of the monarchy in urban governments and its support to the urban oligarchies lineages who monopolized the offices of councillors (regidores), most of them being inheritable at the end of the fifteenth century. Beatriz Majo Tomé • Universidad de Valladolid Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 163-179.

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DOI 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.119796

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In short, the aim of this paper is to analyze the political wishes, discourses, and ideas of the comuneros (‘commoners’) preceding the main revolt of the 1520s. I will explore how the commons developed their political ideas in these years and why they participated in the urban conflicts of the later Middle Ages. One of my main conclusions will be that the new conception of citizenship that arose during the Revolt of the Comuneros – namely, one that dissolved the traditional boundaries between the three medieval estates – was preceded by a long struggle by the urban commons for political participation. One of the results of that struggle was that the comuneros had a fully elaborated political program and a sophisticated political discourse at their disposal on the eve of the revolt. I will start with a brief analysis of the conflict between the commons and the local oligarchies in the Castilian cities at the end of the Middle Ages and finish with the study of a specific case, the political resistance that was organized in the city of Valladolid, which was the seat of the most important governmental administrations, including the High Court of Justice, and the headquarters of the revolutionary government during the final months of the revolt. The commons versus the oligarchy in late medieval Castile The introduction of regimientos in Castilian cities and towns in the middle and late fourteenth century led to the gradual monopolization of local government by the urban oligarchies. The monarchy, eager to strengthen monarchical authority, had imposed municipal reforms since the twelfth century including the implementation of the regimientos, and non-privileged groups in the urban society were excluded from the closed political system3. In cities in which there were some regidurias (political offices) reserved for representatives of the commons, the posts fell under the control of the oligarchy, as wealthy citizens would appoint people from their own social networks4. Nevertheless, popular groups exhibited political consciousness, and we can observe the political awakening of non-privileged citizens beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century. This awakening was associated with the gradual end of the economic crisis in the fourteenth century and with the economic growth in Castilian cities at the end of the Middle Ages. The most evident manifestation of this awakening was the demand for rights of participation in the municipal government, a common request in Castilian





3 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, urban oligarchies were ‘a multifaceted and complex social group’, composed by urban lower nobility and knights who had been benefited by the implementation of the regimientos. María Asenjo González, ‘Urban Systems as an Oligarchy Structuring Process in Fifteenth-century Castilian Society’, in Oligarchy and Patronage in Late Medieval Spanish Urban Society, ed. by Idem (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), p. 36. 4 This aspect was analysed by Monsalvo Antón, who highlighted the lack of this kind of regidurías (the posts) in Castilian regimientos, with the exception of some cases such as Sepúlveda, Segovia and Palencia. José María Monsalvo Antón, ‘La participación política de los pecheros en los municipios castellanos de la Baja Edad Media. Aspectos organizativos’, Studia Historica, Historia Medieval, 7 (1989), pp. 48-55.

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cities at the end of the fifteenth century5. The objective of the commons was to remedy what they considered to be the deficiencies of the regidores government. In this confrontation between the commons and the oligarchy, the elite of non-privileged economic sectors played a leading role. To achieve their goals, this elite adopted different strategies during the fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth century. First, during crisis periods such as the civil wars of the second half of the fifteenth century between the king and certain factions of the nobility, the commons and their leaders took advantage of the situation to strengthen themselves. They adopted different types of organization, both local and between different cities. For instance, they retook the Hermandades, institutions that assembled representatives from several towns, in order to defend local autonomy, to ensure their self-government, to protect the roads and to counteract the interferences of the high nobility. The Hermandades, which had played an important role in the relationship between the central and local governments in the twelfth and thirteenth century, were now controlled to a great extent by the commons6. The commons also advanced a new framework of urban institutions. The economic growth experienced in the fifteenth century had rendered obsolete the old frameworks of social integration, such as parishes. Therefore, new institutions such as cofradías (guilds) and cuadrillas (districts) originated, based on new tax collection necessities7. Through these frameworks, members of the popular





5 About this political awakening of the non-privileged in Castile: María Asenjo González, ‘El pueblo urbano: el común’, Medievalismo, 13-14 (2004), pp. 181-94; Idem, ‘Acerca de los linajes urbanos y su conflictividad en las ciudades castellanas a fines de la Edad Media’, Clío y Crimen, 6 (2009), pp. 52-84; José Ramón Díaz de Durana and José Antonio Fernández de Larrea, ‘Acceso al poder y discurso político en las villas cantábricas al final de la Edad Media’, Edad Media: Revista de Historia, 14 (2013), pp. 63-80; Asunción Esteban Recio, ‘La conflictividad social en Palencia desde 1421 hasta la guerra de las Comunidades’, Hispania, 75 (2015), pp. 467-504; José María Monsalvo Antón, ‘Ideario sociopolítico y valores estamentales de los pecheros abulenses y salmantino (ss. XIII-XV)’, Hispania, 71 (2011), pp. 325-62; Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘¿Qué tiene de común el ‘común’? La construcción de la identidad política en Castilla a fines de la Edad Media’, in Los grupos populares en la ciudad medieval europea, ed. by Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, Beatriz Arízaga Bolumburu and Jelle Haemers (Logroño: IER, 2014), pp. 241-70; Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, ‘The Politics of the Urban Commons in Northern Atlantic Spain in the Later Middle Ages’, Urban History, 41 (2014), pp. 183-203; Idem, ‘Por bien y utilidad de los dichos maestres, pescadores y navegantes. Trabajo, solidaridad y acción política en las cofradías de las gentes de la mar en la España atlántica medieval’, Medievalismo, 26 (2016), pp. 329-56; María Isabel del Val Valdivieso, ‘Oligarquía versus común. (Consecuencias sociopolíticas del triunfo del regimiento en las ciudades castellanas)’, Medievalismo, 14 (1994), pp. 41-58; Idem, ‘Ascenso social y lucha por el poder en las ciudades castellanas del siglo XV’, En la España Medieval, 17 (1994), pp. 157-84. 6 José María Sánchez Benito, ‘Observaciones sobre la Hermana castellana en tiempos e Enrique IV y los Reyes Católicos’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IIII, Historia Medieval, 15 (2002), pp. 209-43; María Asenjo González, ‘Ciudades y Hermandades en la Corona de Castilla. Aproximación sociopolítica’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 27 (1997), pp. 103-46. 7 María Asenjo González, ‘Sociedad y vida política en las ciudades de la Corona de Castilla. Reflexiones sobre un debate’, Medievalismo, 5 (1995), p. 116. About Valladolid: Adeline Rucquoi, ‘Valladolid, del concejo a la Comunidad’, En la España Medieval, 9 (1986), p. 762; Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid en el siglo de Oro, Valladolid: Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, 1983), pp. 387-92. About districts and wards (collaciones, barrios and cuadrillas) in Castilian towns and cities during the Middle Ages: María Asenjo González, ‘Espacio urbano y sociedad: de las ‘collaciones’ a los barrios en las ciudades

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group strengthened their capacity for action in local issues, being more decisive than the cofradías in the northern port towns, and the cuadrillas in inland cities8. Second, the better-off members of the commons, eager to participate in local councils, tried to integrate themselves into the oligarchic lineages through their inclusion in the patronage and family networks of the oligarchy9. Due to the access of these new members, the oligarchy feared losing their privileged power position and initiated the gradual closure of the lineages bands. This increased the discontent of the leaders of the commons, who were deprived of this way to achieve political participation. In addition, although the well-off members of this growing social group were able to join in the lineages, they rarely succeeded in advancing enough in the social hierarchy to obtain government offices, and ultimately the lineages could not act as a channel for the common’s political aspirations. Thus, the commons tried to guarantee their participation in the regimientos by means of direct representatives. After the civil war and the ascent to the throne of the Catholic Kings, the monopoly of the local councils was again in the hands of the oligarchy, to the displeasure of the commons. To alleviate tensions, the Catholic Kings decided in the 1490s to institutionalize the figure of the procurador del común, an office that had existed for decades in some localities, but which now appeared regulated, being present in most regimientos10. The procuradores acted as political representatives of the districts within the regimientos, although they had ‘no voice nor vote’.11 Therefore, as the reign of the Catholic Kings advanced, the commons increasingly demanded more rights of direct political participation. This attitude came in response to a sharp criticism of the regimiento as a government model and the oligarchy who controlled it. First, the local oligarchy was accused of colluding with the high nobility, as they were part of their client networks. Second, the commons argued that such collusion disadvantaged the towns, since the regidores ruled based on the interests of these figures, relegating the common interests to the background. Therefore, as long as the regimiento



8

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castellanas (siglos XII al XV)’, in Morphologie et identité sociale dans la ville médiévale hispanique, ed. by Cristian Guilleré (Chambéry: Université, 2012), pp. 129-72; Idem, ‘El pueblo urbano: el común’, pp. 181-94. In the case of Valladolid, a town that we will analyze in the next section, the origin of the cuadrillas was linked to the military organization and the tax collection. Each of the fourteen cuadrillas of the town had a church as their meeting place. Beatriz Majo Tomé, Valladolid Comunera. Sociedad y conflictos en Valladolid en el tránsito de la Edad Media a la Moderna (Valladolid: Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, 2017), pp. 159-67. About cofradías as organizational framework in northern port towns: Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, ‘Las ordenanzas de la Cofradía de Mareantes de San Vicente de la Barquera: un ejemplo temprano de institución para la acción colectiva en la Costa Cantábrica en la Edad Media’, Anuario de historia del derecho español, 81 (2011), pp. 1029-50. See the essays in Oligarchy and Patronage. About the office of procurador del común: María Isabel del Val Valdivieso, ‘Aspiraciones y actitudes sociopolíticas. Una aproximación a la sociedad urbana de la Castilla bajomedieval’, in La ciudad medieval. Aspectos de la vida urbana en la Castilla bajomedieval, ed. by Juan Antonio Bonachía Hernando (Valladolid: University of Valladolid, 1996), pp. 213-54. This office could have different denominations, such as procurador, mayor or jurado.

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was monopolized by the oligarchy, it could not guarantee the ‘common good’ without the presence of the popular groups in local governments. The political crisis that began after the death of Queen Isabel I in 1504 and the succession problem that confronted the supporters of Philip of Habsburg and Ferdinand of Aragon (called ‘the Catholic’) intensified the opposition between the commons and the oligarchy. One of these cities was Valladolid, where the conflict during these years provided the commons with the experience necessary to put the wishes of political participation at a local level into practice after the outbreak of the Comuneros revolt in 1520. Confronting the authorities in Valladolid Although the political history of each city has its peculiarities, most of the great Castilian towns and cities witnessed similar conflicts between the oligarchy and the commons. This is certainly the case for Valladolid, a town with political importance, as it often quartered the kings and the Royal Council, as well as the Royal Chancery, being the High Court of Justice for the central and northern areas of Castile. Valladolid, located in the center of the North Plateau, had experienced a huge economic, demographic, and political development since the fourteenth century. Important political and juridical institutions such as those mentioned above were set up, attracting the high nobility, who built palaces and settled in the town. Therefore, among the neighbors of the town we find illustrious families such as Pimentel, Enríquez, Acuña, and Estúñiga. In turn, the presence of important noble families stimulated the local commerce, giving birth to businesses related to luxury goods. Thus, at the beginning of sixteenth century, Valladolid was one of the main Castilian towns, with a significant influence on surroundings localities and a heterogeneous social network, though not one without tensions.12 The struggle of the commons to access local government was especially marked by the confrontation between the commons and the members of the regimiento, who belonged to the local oligarchy, and by the confrontation between the commons of Valladolid and the Count of Benavente, a neighbor of the town and lord of many places in the nearby area. Through these two conflicts, the commons of Valladolid configured a discourse, an organization and instruments of action, which would serve as the basis for their actions during the revolt. One of main mobilization structures of the commons was the cuadrillas, the geographical districts in which they were organized. After a period of strengthening during the civil war of the fifteenth century, there were fourteen cuadrillas in sixteenth-century Valladolid whose members held their meetings and debates in the main churches of the town. However, unlike in other the main cities of Castile, these districts did not have representatives in the local

12 Majo Tomé, Valladolid Comunera, pp. 242-59.

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council. The posts of procuradores del común (representatives of the districts in the regimiento) were nonexistent in the town and became a cornerstone of the demands of the commons13. The sense of grievance caused by the absence of direct representatives increased during the first two decades of the sixteenth century due to injuries from different institutions and personalities. During these decades, the commons of Valladolid suffered the imposition of new taxes by the regimiento, the attempt of the Regent, Cardenal Cisneros, to create a permanent army at the service of the Crown and the pressures of the Count of Benavente to control the town. All these measures aggravated the unrest. Empowered by economic opportunities, the commons actively defended their interests through the local government. Furthermore, we can observe that 1516 and 1517 were a turning point, bringing several unfavourable measures for the inhabitants of Valladolid, who reacted forcefully. The events of those years led to the total rupture between the cuadrillas and the regimiento, which was progressively weakened by pressure from the commons. In 1516, the regimiento approved a wine tax in order to fund the construction of a fountain. The tax generated the discontent of many social sectors of the town, including the ecclesiastical elite and the university, who were not exempt from payment. For this reason, the prior and the Chapter excommunicated the local council, took the case to Rome and entered into a litigation that finished in the Royal Council14. The commons also expressed their discontent about this new tax. In June, 37 neighbors self-proclaimed they spoke for the ‘community’ and gave a letter of representation to the Merino Mayor and regidor Alonso Niño de Castro, the lawyer Francisco Fernández de Alderete and the silversmith Francisco de Andino, with the demand to handle the complaints of the tax15. When the juez de residencia16 refused to accept the election of these three men as representatives of the commons, considering it invalid, Alonso Niño exercised his leadership and wrote complaints to the Royal Council.

13 According to the explanation of Adeline Rucquoi, the lineage bands of Valladolid had avoided the creation of a third political faction composed by the commons’ elite or by the disaggregation of the two traditional lineage band (Reoyo and Tovar), see Adeline Rucquoi, ‘Las oligarquías urbanas y las primeras burguesías en Castilla’, in El Tratado de Tordesillas y su época, ed. by Luis Antonio Ribot García et al. (Valladolid: Universtity of Valladolid, 1993), I, pp. 345-70. In 1513, the pressure of the cuadrillas forced the local council to request these posts to the central institutions. A.M.V., Chancillería, 45-33; María de los Ángeles Martín Romera, Redes de poder. Las relaciones sociales de la oligarquía de Valladolid (1450-1520) (Madrid: CSIC, 2019). 14 Archivo General de Simancas (A.G.S.), CCA, Pueblos, Leg. 21, Docs 160 y 148. 15 Alonso Niño would had done ayuntamiento particular a boz de pueblo con çiertos oficiales e personas de baxa suerte de la dicha villa, de sus allegados que heran fasta treinta e cinco o quarenta personas who otorgated him a letter of representation, and also, they would have approved bolsa e rrepartimiento de dinero. A.G.S., CCA, Pueblos, Leg. 21, Doc. 104. The letter of representation: A.G.S., CCA, Personas, Leg. 19. Alonso Niño. 16 The regimiento was composed by regidores and others officials (notaries and doormen) and was presided by the corregidor, who represented the Royal sovereignty and its interests. Each four years, the government activity of corregidores was evaluated by jueces de residencia who substituted the functions of the corregidor during that period.

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His requests were not limited to the issue of the tax. Taking advantage of the negotiations and the growing hostility towards the local government, Alonso proposed that the commons could meet with the justice officials of the town17. Shortly afterwards, on 9 July, Alonso Niño wrote a new letter to the Royal Council explaining the grievance generated by the tax and requesting that the commons have political representatives in the regimiento, in order to counteract the monopoly of the regidores and to avoid the wastefulness of public money18. This letter contains numerous contradictions, considering that Alonso was a regidor. In this context, Alonso Niño appears as a regidor at the service of the commons, distancing himself from the other regidores, with whom he had had tense relations in the previous decades19. In addition, it is likely that Alonso Niño considered the installation of the post of procurador del común as an opportunity to create a future ally in the sessions of the regimiento. Meanwhile, the other regidores, afraid of the reaction of the popular groups, raised their complaints to the Royal Council, arguing that these neighbors had incurred penalties for electing representatives and demanding the existence of this post in the local council20. Undoubtedly, they were aware that their political monopoly was not only being questioned, but could actually be undermined. If the wine tax roused the spirit of the commons, the promulgation and subsequent recruitment of militias, called Gente de Ordenanza, by Cardinal Cisneros exploded the tensions in Valladolid. In January 1516, Fernando the Catholic died, starting the regency of the Cardinal who held the post until the arrival of the young prince Charles in the autumn of 1517. Following the reform of the army initiated by King Fernando, the Cardinal ordered the creation of urban infantry militias, stationed in different Castilian cities, guaranteeing a military force of 30,000 men at the service of the Crown21. However, the 17 For cosas cumplideras al bien público and otorgar poder para seguir más sus pleitos. 18 Por ser commo es en tanto agrabyo e prejuysio de la dicha communydad especialmente siendo contra los rregidores porque estos por la mayor parte son los que ocupan lo público o toman los vienes de la villa que han pagado los comunes, e sy no se pudiesen juntar con la justicia por licencia de vuestra Alteza como agora lo hizieron, es magnifiesto e notorio agrabyo e contra lo que se tiene en todas las çibdades, villas e lugares de vuestros rreynos donde no solamente non solo se probee de procurador quando semejantes casos se ofresçen, pero de contyno le ay e quadrilleros e sesmeros que miran el bien público, de otra manera la comunidad sería muy agraviada, lo público se ocuparía y lo que peor es que los maravedís que muchas vezes se rreparten que lo pagan los pobres e comunidad, se quedase con los dichos rregidores por no tener los dichos mis partes para prestar poder, no lo aviendo perdido por ninguna causa ni hecho cosa (A.G.S., CCA, Personas, 19. Alonso Niño de Castro). 19 Majo Tomé, Valladolid Comunera, pp. 282-98. 20 A.G.S., CCA, Pueblos, Leg. 21, Doc. 104. 21 Fearing an imminent war with France, Fernando had initiated a series of reforms in the army with the objective to professionalize it and to establish troops in Castile to prevent an attack. The Cardinal continued with this plan, encouraged by the tensions between the high nobility. The creation of such militias would not only serve to counteract the French attack, but also to dissuade the nobility from intervening against the regent. Renè Quatrefages, ‘La organización militar en los siglos XV-XVI’, in Actas de las II Jornadas Nacionales de Historia Militar (Málaga: University of Cádiz, 1993), pp. 11-13; María Asenjo González, ‘Las ciudades castellanas al inicio del reinado de Carlos V’, Studia Hisorica. Historia Moderna, 21 (1999), p. 106; Joseph Pérez, La Revolución de las Comunidades de Castilla (1520-1521) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1999), p. 87. José García Oro, El Cardenal Cisneros (Madrid:

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­ easure was rejected by numerous localities, especially those of the Duero basin, m highlighting the opposition of Valladolid, whose attitude served as an example for surrounding towns22. At the same time, the recruitment damaged the public purse, as the weapons would be funded by the cities. In case of insufficient money, the regimientos had permission to approve new taxes. The capacity of the nobility for action was reduced due to these local militias at the service of the Crown23. Additionally, the commons saw a threat in this measure: besides financing the militia, they could also be the target of the recruitment. Indeed, although the enlistment guaranteed certain tax exemptions to the recruited, this only increased the contribution among the other members of the citizens. As a result, a general discontent arose in the city. On 16 May 1516, the recruitment was approved, and, in the following months, the provisions of how it should be carried out began to arrive at the local councils. In Valladolid, Captain Tapia, who was in charge of recruiting the militia in the locality, presented the provision on 25 August, and it was debated in that session24. The regidores, being aware of the unpopularity of the measure, tried to refute it, but all efforts were in vain, and on 13 October, Captain Tapia initiated the recruitment of 600 citizens. The Admiral of Castile, Fadrique Enríquez, and his brother, the bishop of Osma, both habitual residents of Valladolid, encouraged the population to oppose the recruitment, joining other nobles such as the Count of Benavente. The popular clamor forced the captain to take refuge in the convent of San Francisco from where he fled at night to Madrid. The sources emphasize the active participation of the citizens of the Frenería and the Costanilla quarters, two of the most significant streets of the Valladolid artisans25. The Cardinal, aware of the events, tried to calm citizens by stressing the benefits of the recruitment, but when his words had no effect, he decided to crush the riot by force of arms. When the inhabitants of the town were informed

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Biblioteca de autores cristianos, 1992), I, p. 356; María Sabina Álvarez Bezos and Agustín Carreras Zalama, Valladolid en época de los Reyes Católicos según el alarde de 1503, (Valladolid: Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, 1998), pp. 17-18. Asenjo González, ‘Las ciudades castellanas’, p. 106. In the notary Varacaldo’s letter on 11 December it is recorded: Las çibdades son señoras y la justicia muy faborecida, y los grandes, que siempre quieren chupar la sangre al Rey, bebelle la sangre y ponelle en necesidad. Vicente de La Fuente, Cartas de los secretarios del cardenal D. FR Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (Madrid: Aguado, 1876), I, p. 71. Manuel Bachiller summarized: Animaban a Valladolid algunos de los caballeros, porque decían que no era bien que los pueblos estuviesen armados ni fuertes, porque entonces los caballeros no tendrían fuerzas para defender los agravios que les hiciesen. Manuel Bachiller, ‘Antigüedades y sucesos memorables sucedidos en esta muy noble y antigua villa de Simancas’, in Colección de Doc. Inéditos para la Historia de España (Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda de Calero, 1842), I, p. 530. A.G.S., CCA, Pueblos, Valladolid, Leg. 21, Doc. 96. Another complaint of the local government due to the possibility that the recruited ones bear arms can be found in: A.G.S., CCA, Pueblos, Leg. 21, Docs 97 y 158. Matías Sangrador Vitores, Historia de la muy noble y leal ciudad de Valladolid (Valladolid: Grupo Pinciano, 1851), I, p. 154; Juan Antolínez de Burgos, Historia de Valladolid (Valladolid: Imprenta y Librería Nacional y Extranjera de Hijos de Rodríguez, 1887), p. 154.

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of this, they organized themselves into a militia of about 3,000 men, secured the gates and the wall, formed rounds and guarded the roads26. Disobedience went further, and the cuadrillas, together with the bishop of Osma and other members of the Chapter of the Major Church, organized an assembly that held its meetings in San Llorente’s chapel in the Major Church. The corregidor, unable to avoid its constitution, granted permission to a notary of the regimiento and four regidores to be present in the assembly and to serve as intermediaries between the meetings and the local government. These four regidores were Pedro de Tovar, Gonzalo Franco de Guzmán, Alonso de Saravia and Cristobal de Santisteban, who played all an important role during the Revolt of the Comuneros27. The constitution of this assembly demonstrates the growing antagonism between the cuadrillas and the regimiento. The cuadrillas, accusing the local government of neglecting its duties to guarantee the ‘common good’, took advantage of the situation to complain of their lack of recognition and support to the regimiento. Strengthened by the circumstances and the support of the ecclesiastic elite, the commons considered this moment opportune to join the new organization to defend their interests. From that point of view, the presence of regidores in the assembly was unclear: they were part of the governing body, but they were also closely related to the protesters. Therefore, their function consisted of maintaining a connection and dialogue with the mutineers in order to reach agreements and avoid more tensions. The ‘revolutionary’ assembly continued during the first months of 1517, insisting on the necessity of Prince Charles’ coming to the peninsular kingdoms. The commoners hoped that the military recruitment would be cancelled and that a royal pardon letter would be given to the town (affirming that there would be no reprisal for the riot). Ultimately, the commons were relatively successful. The recruitment was modified from mandatory to voluntary, and few people enlisted. However, the royal pardon did not come as quickly as the commons had hoped. On 22, 23 and 25 January, during the meeting of the regimiento, several letters from Charles’ ambassadors were read, namely from La Chaulx and the bishop of Tortosa and from the dean of Leuven, Adrian of Utrecht; they ordered the laying down of arms and the destruction of the city’s

26 Juan Maldonado, La revolución comunera: el movimiento de España, o sea historia de la revolución conocida con el nombre de las Comunidades de Castilla, ed. by José Quevedo (Madrid: Aguado, 1840), p. 35. 27 About the role of these regidores during the Revolt of the Communeros: Majo Tomé, Valladolid Comunera, pp. 561-70. It highlighted the absence of the regidor, Alonso Niño, who months ago had carried out a strong defense of the interests of the commons when opposing the wine tax and the payment exemption of certain social sectors. The lack of the local government’s Minutes Book on 1516 makes interpretation difficult, but we believe that his lack of support to the assembly is due to the rejection of the cuadrillas to the recruitment of the Cardinal’s militias. Alonso Niño, as Merino Mayor, would have been in charge of the Valladolid militia, which offered him an armed support, more or less loyal if we consider his connection with certain neighbors, and which reinforced his position among the other regidores. A.G.S., CCA, Pueblos, Leg. 21, Doc. 104.

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fortifications28. Afterwards, the members of the regimiento went to the assembly where they discussed the response to the ambassadors with the representatives of the cuadrillas. The reply reflects the conviction of the commons of having acted correctly. In addition, they highlighted the wide support received from the different ecclesiastical orders and priests (San Benito, Santo Domingo, San Agustín, San Francisco, Trinidad, and la Merced), who from their pulpits and through their sermons and proclamations encouraged the people to continue in their resistance29. In fact, the active participation of ecclesiastical institutions and, in particular, of the Major Church Chapter is remarkable. Moreover, some of the Church officers were members of the rebel assembly. To explain that, it is necessary to remember the confrontation between them and the regimiento on account of the wine tax. In addition, the bishop of Osma, one of the main instigators of the uprising and an active member in the assembly, was the brother of the Admiral of Castile, a firm opponent to the recruitment of the militias. However, we know little about the motivation of the prior and the Major Church Chapter to join the league beyond opposition to the wine tax, but their support was fundamental for the cuadrillas to achieve political representatives. It is noteworthy, then, that the letter sent to the regent, Cardinal Cisneros, was written by the prior and the university officers and signed by all the members of the cuadrillas. In the document, they claimed the right of the commons to elect political representatives. Furthermore, they requested that these delegates would control public expenditure in order to avoid the introduction of new extraordinary taxes such as the wine tax30. Finally, the members of the cuadrillas expressed the need for these representatives to guarantee the ‘common good’ and a ‘good governance’, arguing that other cities already had representatives of the commons among the urban governors. The election system of Burgos, an important commercial city near Valladolid, acted

28 Más que todo lo rrepongáys en aquel punto y estado que estaba antes en el tiempo que la dicha infantería se mandase hazer hasta en tanto quel rrey, nuestro sennor, mande ver en su consejo la dicha ynformaçión (…) y entre tanto, por la presente, en nombre de su Alteza, suspendemos el hazer de la dicha gente; Archivo Municipal de Valladolid (A.M.V.), Libro de Actas. Años 1517-1520, 1ª Parte, fols 14-15; 2ª Parte, fols 342-44. 29 Más asy mismo con autoridad paresçer e consejo e monestaçiones e predicaciones de todos los rreligiosos e predicadores e personas de grant vida e enxenplo e autoridad de todas las hórdenes que ay en esta villa asy de Sant Benito commo de Santo Domingo e Sant Agustín e Sant Francisco e de la Trenidad e de la Merçed, los quales asy en los púlpitos en sus sermones e predicaciones, commo en los ayuntamientos que sobre esto ha fecho e faze esta dicha villa, con mucha ynstançia e amonestaciones, nos han esortado e encargado que prosygamos nuestro propósito como cosa que debemos e somos obligados a hazer e prosegir en servicio de Dios e de su alteza, e en conserbaçión del derecho e libertades e previllejos (…) en esto mismo se an conformado el prior e cabildo e toda la clerecía desta villa y el rrector e doctores e diputados de la Universidad e estudio della e de todas las otras personas de qualquier condición que sean que están en esta dicha villa, asy los naturales della como los estantes pues donde tanta conformidad ay tenemos por cierto que nuestro propósito ha sido y es justo, santo y bueno (…); A.M.V., Libro de Actas. Años 1517-1520, 1ª Parte, fols 15v-16. 30 Juan Agapito y Revilla, Los privilegios de Valladolid (Valladolid: La nueva Pintia), pp. 222-23 (original document: Archivo Histórico Nacional (A.H.N.); Consejos, Leg. 29934, nº 2). The document with the signatures: A.G.S., PTR, Leg. 70, Doc. 41.

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as an example31. In short, the pressures exerted by the popular groups during those months and the support received from other social sectors and institutions were so energetic that finally the Cardinal granted the privilege to the cuadrillas to elect two representatives who were present in the regimiento. On 20 August, Cisneros signed the privilege in Aranda de Duero, near Valladolid; four days later, representatives were elected by the cuadrillas, and, on 26 August, both were received by the regidores, though not without opposition32. During the next three years, until the outbreak of the Revolt of the Comuneros, the representatives of the commons – called procuradores mayores in Valladolid – played an important role defending the interests of the cuadrillas, and, therefore, of the commons. Although theoretically they could neither debate nor vote in the meetings of the local government, the representatives carried out an active participation in the sessions preventing the approval of new taxes and tributes,33 and protecting the interests of the urban community against the interference of the Count of Benavente. So, the protest of the commons was successful to a certain extent: they had gained access to the main political institution in the town. The commons had not overthrown the oligarchy – this was never their intention –, but henceforth they made an integral part of the body politic of Valladolid. The actions and the discourse of the commons in Valladolid The opposition of the commons’ representatives to the intervention of the Count – their most significant labor during these years – allows us to explore some of the key elements of their political agenda and the discourse used to motivate their actions. The Count of Benavente, Alonso Pimentel, neighbor of Valladolid, was lord of numerous places near the town. Under his jurisdiction, for instance, were Cigales and Portillo, both imposing fortresses, as well as Villalón, a village that together with Valladolid and Medina del Campo composed the

31 A.G.S., PTR, Leg. 70, Doc. 41: Los caballeros e quadrilleros e vecinos de la quadrilla [each one put its name] de la muy noble e leal villa de Valladolid, besamos las rreales manos de vuestra alteza, la qual sepa que a cabsa que esta villa noble villa no tiene procuradores que miren el bien e pro común della segund e como los tienen todas las çibdades, villas e lugares destos sus rreynos, esta dicha villa resçibe mucho dapnno e pérdida e los vecinos e moradores della, por que las hordenanças antiguas desta dicha villa que hablan cerca de la buena governaçión e bien e pro común della, no se guardan e por otras muchas causas que cunplen al servicio e rreal estado de vuestra alteza por ende a vuestra alteza humillmente como leales vasallos segunt que lo han seydo nuestros antepasados e muy deseosos del bien e aumentación de vuestra Corona rreal pedimos e suplicamos le plega conceder e hazer merçed a esta dicha villa e comunidad della que en ella aya dos procuradores del pueblo segund e commo los ha e tiene e elixe la çibdad de Burgos o como fuere más servicio de vuestra alteza e pro común desta su leal villa, en lo qual vuestra alteza administrará justiçia e a Dios nuestro sennor hará señalado servicio e a esta dicha villa e vecinos della bien e merçed. 32 A.G.S., RGS, 1517-8, Doc. 15; A.H.N., Consejo, Leg. 29934, nº 2. About the election of these representatives: Majo Tomé, Valladolid Comunera, pp. 183-92. 33 A.M.V., Libro de Actas. Años 1517-1520, 1ª Parte, fol 104v; 2ª Parte, fol 478r.

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most important fair circuit in the kingdom34. In this context, the Count used his social network and political ties with the oligarchy of Valladolid to benefit his Villalón fairs. Already in January 1491, the previous Count of Benavente, Alonso’s father, had reached an agreement with the regimiento of Valladolid to cancel the celebration of the Lent fair that year. This would have been beneficial to the fair of Villalón, which was held on the same dates. However, the agreement, which was made in secret with the regimiento, came to the population’s notice, and they felt betrayed by the local government. The citizens took to the streets, crying out for the celebration of the fairs and began to set up stalls in the Main Square as a sign of protest35. The pressure from the commons was so powerful that the regimiento was forced to break its pact with the count and initiated a litigation against him in defense of the fairs. Afterwards, the Count of Benavente was seen as a threat by the cuadrillas of Valladolid. In this way, after the appointment of the procuradores del común in 1517, the defense of the fairs and the opposition to the Count became two of the main axes of their policy. The most striking example of this opposition was the actions of these two representatives against the construction of a palace in Valladolid by the Count, also initiated in 1517. This building, near the Major Bridge, which was one of the main entrances of the town, was understood by the cuadrillas as a threat to the autonomy of the town. Its size and thick walls gave it the appearance of a fortress, explaining why the commons feared that the count could take a militia to the town in order to control Valladolid. In 1518, taking advantage of the displacement of the local council to a nearby town due to an outbreak of plague, the two representatives of the commons halted the construction and initiated a litigation to cancel it. In other words, the displacement of the regimiento had left more capacity for action to the cuadrillas. In a brief written by the representatives of the common, they registered their fears: Porque la dicha casa es fuerte, según los cimientos y andamios de ella y los materiales que lleva, mayormente siendo como el dicho señor ha sido y es en la comarca y cerca de ella, tiene casi todo su señorío, y de tal manera que tiene la dicha villa cercada de lugares de su señorío. (…)36. To the fear of the construction of the palace they joined criticism of the regidores, as they considered them indulgent with the count. The representatives of the commons argued that many of the regidores were relatives or belonged to the

34 María Isabel del Val Valdivieso, ‘Valladolid y las villas de su entorno en el tránsito de la Edad Media a la Moderna’, in Valladolid, historia de una ciudad. Congreso Internacional. La ciudad y el arte: Valladolid villa (época medieval) (Valladolid: Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, 1999), I, pp. 217-42. 35 A.G.S., RGS, 1491-1, Doc. 121; A.G.S., CCA, Pueblos, Leg. 21, Doc. 8. 36 Felipe Ruiz Martín, ‘Disensiones en Valladolid en vísperas de las Comunidades. El palacio del conde de Benavente, ¿Fortaleza o mansion?’, Cuadernos de Investigación Histórica, Seminario Cisneros, 2 (1978), p. 445. A.G.S., CCA, Memoriales, Leg. 132, Doc. 30, fol. 3.

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client networks of the count, and they worried the regidores would defend the count’s interests instead of the town’s:37 En Valladolid ha tenido y tiene muchos caballeros, regidores y otras personas principales que le sirven y siguen y llevan su acostamiento, y otros muchos que le son incondicionales y han de hacer sus mandato38. After the return of the local government in 1519, they restarted building, which irritated the cuadrillas, but only the uprising of the revolt in 1520 halted the construction, which would finally be completed in the 1520s. During the events that took place in these decades, one can notice the main elements that formed the discourse of the commons, manifested through their actions and the few writings that have come down to us. These elements, although studied from a local perspective and conditioned by specific events, do not differ from those in other localities, as demonstrated by the similarity of claims and actions carried out by members of the popular groups in the different localities during the Revolt of the Comuneros39. Neither did they differ from those used by the commons in other European territories where the term of the ‘common good’, the idea of ‘justice’ linked with the defense of the public interests, and the demands for political participation were some of the main components of the urban discourse40. As already mentioned, the commons’ political discourse focused on criticism of the regidores, whom they accused of defending their own interests as members of the oligarchy and of collusion with the high nobility, especially with the 37 In fact, one of the regidores, Bernalino Pimentel, was his cousin. 38 Felipe Ruiz Martín, ‘Disensiones en Valladolid’, p. 445. A.G.S., CCA, Memoriales, Leg. 132, Doc. 30, fol. 3. In another paragraph, the representative of the commons, insisted on the bonds between the Count and other regidores: (the regidores) no son partes para votar en lo susodicho ni para haser sobre ello avto alguno salvo que los procuradores de las catorze quadrillas e yo en su nombre que encomençamos el pleito cada uno de nosotros como uno del pueblo; porque los dichos regidores questán presentes, que han votado lo susodicho, son partes formales en este pleito, porque viben todos los que están presentes o los más con el sennor conde de Benavente y asy lo tenemos probado en el proçeso desta cabsa, e otros questán ausentes; e asy ellos como los otros han de haser e seguir lo quel dicho sennor conde les mandare como hasta aquí lo han fecho e hazen; e como biven públicamente con el dicho sennor conde, procuran que se acabe la dicha casa fuerte la más fuerte que ay en estos reynos por ser los dichos regidores con la dicha casa faboresçidos ellos y toda su parçialidad, lo qual agora no son ni serán no se acabando la dicha casa fuerte; y sy se acabase el señor conde y ellos serán señores desta villa, session on 31 January 1519. A.M.V., Libro de Actas. Años 1517-1520, 1ª Parte, fol. 189. Felipe Ruiz Martín, ‘Disensiones en Valladolid’, p. 455. 39 Máximo Diago Hernando, ‘Transformaciones en las instituciones de gobierno local de las ciudades castellanas durante la Revuelta Comunera (1520-1521)’, Hispania, 63/2, 214 (2003), pp. 623-56; José Joaquín Jerez, Pensamiento político y reforma institucional durante la Guerra de las Comunidades de Castilla (1520-1521), (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2007). 40 These elements had been noted in different works: Jelle Haemers, For the Common Good. State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy, 1477-1482 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Christian Liddy and Jelle Haemers, ‘Popular politics in the Late Medieval city: York and Bruges’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 771-805; Samuel Cohn, Lust for Liberty: the Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge: HUP, 2006); The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe. Communication and Popular Politics, ed. by Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); De Bono Communi: the Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th-16th), ed. by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).

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Count of Benavente. This discredited the regidores, as they could not guarantee the defense of the ‘common good’, and it made necessary the participation of representatives of the cuadrillas, who would protect the town’s interests. Therefore, the cuadrillas are presented as guarantors of the ‘common good’, the proper government and true defenders of the kingdom’s interests, against the selfish pretensions of the oligarchy and the nobility. Secondly, the discourse of the commons is reinforced and legitimized by the support received from other sectors, especially from the ecclesiastical elite and the governors of the university. To the backing given by these congregations during the events of 1516 and 1517 can be added the sermons of preachers during the following years before the revolt, which stressed the need for the commons to participate actively in political life41. Finally, during these events the commons strengthened the organization of the cuadrillas, articulated its leadership with direct representatives and participated in the creation of an assembly, along with other social sectors. These social bonds and political networks would form the basis of their political organisation. This preexisting structure would be fundamental to understand the transformations carried out by the comuneros in the local government during the revolt. The revolt of the Comuneros The Revolt of the Comuneros, which started in June 1520 in Segovia and Toledo, soon spread to other localities, triggered as it was by the new tax charges approved in the Cortes, which took place in Santiago and La Coruña. The revolt was a complex conflict involving confrontations of a horizontal and vertical character and economic, political and social issues. Nevertheless, the objective here is to analyze in brief the political transformations imposed by the comuneros in Valladolid, taking into account what had happened in the previous conflicts and some of the elements that constituted the political discourse of the rebels. As we will see, the Comuneros revolt took place at the same time as the climax of the commons’ political power, as well its eventual extinction. The defiance of Valladolid came to an end on 22 August 1520, with the royal attack on the neighboring town, Medina del Campo. At the time, the citizens of Valladolid occupied the streets in the name of community, crying for justice. Only a day later, on 23 August, the regimiento was replaced by a new governing institution, the ‘Board of the Community’ (Junta de la Comunidad), which from then on was responsible for political, administrative and government affairs, while the War Board was in charge of war matters. This ‘Board of the Community’ was an institutional innovation during the revolt at the local level, in a similar way to what happened in other localities. On 24 August, the first session of

41 Joseph Pérez, ‘Moines frondeurs et sermon subversifs en Castille pendant le premier séjour de Charles-Quint en Espagne’, Bulletin Hispanique, 67 (1965), p. 15.

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the board was held,42 and it was agreed that the board would be composed of representatives of the cuadrillas (two representatives for each one), two from the Major Church Chapter, and two from the state of the nobility, Don Pedro de Bazán and Bernaldino Pimentel43. A month later, on 6 October, the Board approved a request from Gonzalo Franco de Guzmán and Juan Rodríguez de Baeza for the participation of other neighbors, especially for qualified ones, to discuss specific matters44. The regidores were included in this board. As a result, the new local government was assumed by this new institution, with a much more representative and participative base than the restrictive regimiento, allowing not only the participation of regidores and other nobles but also that of the Major Church Chapter, which can be understood as repayment for the help they gave to the cuadrillas in 1517. Thus, this new board is reminiscent of the assembly constituted in 1516 in which the representatives of the commons, the Chapter, and even some regidores organized their opposition to the Cardinal’s militias and in which they had raised their political demands. Remarkably, the board did not meet in the regimiento’s house but in the main chapel of the Major Church, near the chapel of San Llorente where the last assembly had met years ago. The Major Church had become a symbol of the opposition to the traditional government, besides becoming a solid support thanks to the prior and the Chapter. In this context, the office of the procurador del común had become useless because the cuadrillas now had more direct representation with two representatives for each one, reaching the majority in the new local council. In addition, the two representatives of the commons chosen at the beginning of 1520 were not a significant support for the rebels. We have no knowledge of Francisco de Saldaña, but Pedro Hernández del Portillo refused to take the leadership of the insurrection on 22 August, subsequently suffering the wrath of the population45. This might have resulted in the elimination of these two mandates, but the commons were not willing to lose what had been the cornerstone of their demands in the previous years. To maintain these offices, the Board of the Community asked Cardinal Adriano, governor of Castile after the king’s departure, for permission to elect new two procuradores del común,46 mandates finally assumed by Velasco

42 Unlike in Burgos, León, Soria and Palencia, where the ‘regimiento’ was maintained but expanding its participatory basis, in Valladolid it was eliminated and replaced by a Board of the Community. About the constitution of revolutionary governments during the revolt: Máximo Diago Hernando, ‘Transformaciones en las instituciones de gobierno local’, Hispania, 63 (2003), pp. 640-46. 43 A.G.S., PTR, Leg. 4, Doc. 54, fol. 568r. 44 A.G.S., PTR, Leg. 4, Doc. 54, fol. 570v para que recibiesen parte del trabajo en la provisión del bien común della. A.G.S., PTR, Leg. 4, Doc. 54, fol. 571. 45 Pedro Hernández del Portillo not only refused to exercise the leadership, but also discredited the uprising and insult the rebels: alborotadores y ladrones, que andaban a robar. Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de la vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos V (Madrid: Atlas, 1955), I, p. 253; Juan Ortega Rubio, ‘Las comunidades de Castilla en Valladolid’, Investigaciones acerca de la Historia de Valladolid (Valladolid: Rodríguez, 1887), p. 129. 46 A.G.S., RGS, 1520-09.

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de Cueto and Pedro de Mayorga47. However, both were rarely mentioned in the documentation, which suggests that these offices were empty of meaning but maintained for symbolism. If the right of direct political participation of the commons had been a constant in its discourse during the decades before the revolt, so too was its opposition to the Count of Benavente. Despite the fact that the count tried to avoid the incorporation of Valladolid into the rebel movement, through diplomatic channels and the kind tone of his requirements, most people rejected compromise. When in November of 1520 the most radical part of the comuneros took control over the town and its institutions, the cuadrillas intensified their antiseigneurial character. This was manifested in their writings to the governors and in the request that they made to the comunero captain Juan de Padilla to destroy the fortress of the count in Cigales48. However, the story does not have a happy ending. The final defeat of the comuneros on the battlefield on 23 April 1521 in Villalar (near Valladolid) finished their attempt to transform the urban government. After the defeat, the regimientos were replaced in all the localities, and the oligarchies regained their monopoly thanks the support of the king. From then on, the popular groups would again be dismissed from decision-making. Final considerations The comuneros’ military and political defeat marked the end of a long process of conflicts, which began with the closing of local councils and was intensified by the economic recovery of the fifteenth century. During this period, the commons of Castilian cities took advantage of changing circumstances to strengthen their position and to demand a greater participation in local affairs. It was, above all, its elite who belonged to the wealthy sectors of the non-privileged group, who adopted different means to gain access to local governments and obtain a direct participation outside the oligarchic organizations. Therefore, the figure of the procurador del común became an important instrument of access of this elite to the councils. However, the success of their demands was due not only to their solid organization, but also to the support received from other social sectors and institutions, including local clerical institutions and the university, who believed in the need to guarantee the ‘common good’. The regidores lost, then, their position of exclusive defenders of the interests of the whole community, a role which they had to hand over to the commons.

47 A.G.S., PTR, Leg. 4, Doc. 53, f. 434v. 48 Letters between the governors and Valladolid: Manuel Dánvila, ‘Historia crítica y documentada de las Comunidades de Castilla’, in Memorial histórico español: colección de documentos, opúsculos y antigüedades que publica la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid: Tello,1898), III, pp. 89-91, 91-94; Prudencio de Sandoval: Historia de la vida y hechos, pp. 288-389. A.G.S, PTR., Comunidades de Castilla. Leg. 4, Doc. 49, fols 218-219r; Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, Ms 1779. The request to Padilla: A.G.S., PTR, Leg. 4, Doc. 54, fol. 579v.

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Therefore, the struggle took place not only in the political sphere, but also in the construction of a discourse that supported the opening of political participation at the local level. On the one hand, the commons contested the position of the oligarchy as guarantor of the ‘common good’, highlighting its collusion with the high nobility and its selfish governance, while, on the other hand, the clergy legitimized this discourse through their direct support of the commons and in preaching the correctness of their fight. As a result, this powerful alliance that took place not only in words, but also in deeds, could rightfully claim that it represented the ‘common good’ of the city. In addition, during the struggle against the local oligarchy in the preceding years of the revolt, the popular group obtained the necessary experience to put into practice its political ideals during the Revolt of the Comuneros. This enabled the commons of Valladolid to implement a conception of political participation that they had been developing for a long time, in which the cuadrillas and the commons took a leading role, an implementation supported by a discourse articulated around a new interpretation of ‘community’. ‘Community’ was understood as a new form of citizenship that sought to overcome the traditional division into estates through the coordinated defense of the interests of the whole urban community instead of the particular interests of the group. Therefore, the cuadrillas presented themselves as the main guarantors of this coordinated defense, ensuring a majority with respect to the other groups that participated in the Board of the Community. This new idea of ‘community’ was shared by the other rebel localities, where local governments were assumed by representatives of different social sectors. Nevertheless, the comuneros’ defeat ended the revolutionary experience and postponed this new conception of citizenship for several centuries. Consequently, it facilitated the social, political, and economic domination of the nobility during the following decades, which resulted in the construction of the new, so-called ‘modern’ state.

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Ideologies and Political Participation of the Commons in Urban Life of Northern Atlantic Spain during the Late Middle Ages Medieval political history has undergone a historiographic renovation in the past two decades, leading to a breaking of ties with rigid legal studies and focusing the enquiry onto the construction of discourses and the political practices of social actors.1 Furthermore, this ‘new medieval political history’ increasingly acknowledges the role of underprivileged groups in the governance of kingdoms and towns and these groups’ relationships with the monarchy.2 Social historians have also pondered the nature of these relationships and endeavoured to resolve questions such as the emergence of public opinion, the development of a civil society, the concept of citizenship, and the ability of a society to develop its forms of political participation.3 Mostly, this historiography focuses on urban ideologies and the political discourse used by urban elites. In this essay, however, I will study the political ideology of the 1 This chapter is the result of the research project: ‘Politics, institutions and Governance of the townports and seaports of Atlantic Europe in the Later Middle Ages: a transnational comparative analysis’, funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain (HAR2017-83801-P). 2 Mark Ormrod, Political life in Late Medieval England, 1300-1450 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Gwilym Dodd, Justice and grace. Private petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). John Watts, ‘Community and Contract in Late Medieval England’, in Avant le contrat social. Le contrat politique dans l’Occident médiéval. XIIIe–XVe siècle, ed. by François Foronda (Paris: Sorbonne, 2011), pp. 349-56. La gobernanza de la ciudad medieval europea, ed. by Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, Beatriz Arízaga Bolumburu (Logroño: IER, 2011). Christian Liddy and Jelle Haemers, ‘Popular politics in the late medieval town: York and Bruges’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 771-805. Los grupos populares en la Europa medieval, ed. by Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, Beatriz Arízaga Bolumburu and Jelle Haemers (Logroño: IER, 2014). Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘The politics of the urban commons in Northern Atlantic Spain in the later Middle Ages’, Urban history, 41 (2014), pp. 183-203. 3 La sociedad política a fines del siglo XV en los reinos ibéricos y en Europa ¿Élites, pueblo, súbditos? ed. by Vincent Challet et al. (Paris: Sorbonne, 2007). Building legitimacy. Political discourses and forms of legitimation in Medieval Societies, ed. by Isabel Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy and Julio Escalona (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Sociedades urbanas y culturas políticas en la Baja Edad Media castellana ed. by José Maria Monsalvo Antón (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2013). Pacto y consenso en la cultura política peninsular. Siglo XI al XV, ed. by José Manuel Nieto Soria and Oscar Villarroel González (Madrid: Sílex, 2013). Isabelle Val Valdivieso, ‘Aspiraciones y actitudes socio-políticas. Una aproximación a la sociedad urbana de la Castilla bajomedieval’, in La ciudad medieval, ed. by Juan Antonio Bonachía Hernando (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1996), pp. 213-54. Maria Asenjo González, ‘Ambición política y discurso. El ‘común’ en Segovia y Valladolid (1480-1520)’, in La comunidad medieval como esfera pública, ed. by Rafael Oliva Herrer et al. (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2014), pp. 73-106. Almut Höfert, ‘States, cities, and citizens in the later Middle Ages’, in States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects, ed. by Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), pp. 63-75. John Watts, The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300-1500 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009).

Jesús Ángel Solórzano-Telechea • Universidad de Cantabria Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 181-194.

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‘middling sort of people’ in Spanish towns (in Cantabria and the Basque Country in particular). It will show that the political language used by ‘the commons’, as they called themselves, had many similarities to the ‘elite discourses’. However, several differences can be noted, especially when it comes to the interpretation and the exact meaning of the discourse used by these ‘common people’. The ideology of the commons in Castilian cities and their political participation Political culture and language transformed during the Late Middle Ages, along with an increasingly complex political community and its adoption of new political functions. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a new political vocabulary in the vernacular language emerged as a consequence of translations from Latin and other European languages and the influence of Aristotelian thought, all of which contributed to the political awareness of the commons.4 The Late Middle Ages saw a proliferation of political writing, already expressed in vernacular languages and characterised by a growing independence from the moral language. The emergence of these translations dates back to the reign of Alfonso X, who used the work of classical prose writers and poets such as Suetonius, Justinian, Lucan, Ovid, Cato, Orosius, Josephus, Eusebius, Saint Isidore of Seville, among others.5 For instance, we know that the treaties of Seneca had been translated in the thirteenth century and promoted by court and episcopal centres;6 the political works of Aristotle spread widely among Castilian intellectuals through Leonardo Bruni’s translation.7







4 Ana Isabel Carrasco Manchado, ‘El sueño de Alain Chartier. Patria, República y Bien Común, aspiraciones utópicas en Francia y en Castilla (siglo XV)’, in Medievo utópico: Sueños, ideales y utopías en el imaginario medieval, ed. by Martin Alvira Cabrer and Jorge Díaz Ibáñez (Madrid: Sílex, 2011), pp. 173-97. Olivier Bertrand, ‘Histoire du lexique politique français: émergence des corpus aristotélicien et augustinien à la fin du Moyen Âge’, in The Languages of Political society, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet and Andrea Zorzi (Roma: Viella, 2011), pp. 167-88. 5 Francisco Crosas López, De enanos y gigantes. Tradición clásica en la cultura medieval hispánica (Madrid: Universidad Carlos III, 2010), p. 113. Miguel Rodríguez Pantoja, ‘Traductores y traducciones’, in Los humanistas españoles y el humanismo europeo (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1990), p. 91. Karl Blüher, Séneca en España (Madrid: Gredos, 1983). 6 Ángel Gómez Moreno, España y la Italia de los humanistas (Madrid: Gredos, 1994). Tomás González Rolán, Antonio Moreno Hernández and Pilar Saquero Suárez-Somonte, Humanismo y Teoría de la Traducción en España e Italia en la primera mitad del siglo XV (Madrid: Ediciones clásicas, 2000). Peter Russell, Traducciones y traductores en la Península Ibérica (1400-1550) (Barcelona: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 1985). Fernando Rubio, ‘Don Juan II de Castilla y el movimiento humanístico de su reinado’, in La ciudad de Dios, 168 (1995), pp. 55-100. Montserrat Jiménez San Cristóbal, ‘La versión castellana del ‘Isagogicon moralis disciplinae’ de Leonardo Bruni conservada en el incunable 1.704 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid’, Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios Latinos, 22/1 (2002), pp. 87-175. Jeremy Lawrence, ‘Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula’, in The Impact of humanism on Western Europe, ed. by Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay (London: Longman, 1990), p. 223. Jesús Solórzano Telechea, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo. Tratado sobre la división del reino y cuándo es lícita la primogenitura (Logroño: IER, 2011). 7 José Manuel Nieto Soria, ‘El conflicto como representación: expresiones de la cultura política Trastámara’, in El conflicto en escenas. La pugna política como representación en la Castilla bajomedieval (Madrid: Sílex, 2010), p. 48.

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The royal court encouraged the spread of this political language to the urban middling sort of people. In 1476, King Fernando addressed the commons of the town of Vitoria in the following manner: A esto vos respondo, que en vos haber partido de los dichos linajes y parcialidades, e bandos, y haber fecho sobre ello lo que agora ficisteis, habeis fecho bien, y lo que debeis, e lo que buenos, e leales naturales deben facer por el bien comun de su patria.8 (To this I respond, that you, having abandoned those lineages and partialities, and factions, and having done what you now do, you have done well, and what you must, and what good and loyal naturals must do for the common good of their fatherland.) This represents a clear sanction of the initiative of the commons to dissociate from the urban nobility and their internecine feuds, leaving no doubt about the Crown’s approval of their claims and its intention of extending institutional reform to all towns of northern Iberia, whose underprivileged groups had voiced their complaints to the monarchs from the early fifteenth century onward.9 Por el bien común de la patria (For the common good of the fatherland) became part of the political discourse for the ideological justification that underpins the actions of the commons in Vitoria. In this case, the term patria (fatherland) could refer to both the communis patria and the propria patria. In the former, the term can embody the political sense given in Antiquity, referring to the natal town; in the latter sense, it could have the late medieval meaning of kingdom, which was the common nation. Hence, King Fernando invoked the patriotic sentiment of the citizens to dissociate from the interests of urban nobility. Thus, it is the king who assumes the leadership of the process of political transformation. Over half a century ago, Ernst Kantorowicz drew attention to the importance of the concept of patria in the construction of monarchical states.10 The defence of the fatherland legitimised the waging of a just war in case of necessity. The concept – Pro patria mori – was derived from Roman Law and was well established in medieval Castile as a part of the Visigoth legislative and thirteenth century Castilian canonist heritage. In this manner, King Fernando justified and sanctioned the actions of the commons of Vitoria in view of his understanding that their defence 8 Vicente de Echávarri, Alaveses ilustres (Vitoria: Excma. Diputaciòn de Álava, 1900), II, p. 23. 9 Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘La aparición y consolidación de la acción política del Común en las villas portuarias del Cantábrico en la Baja Edad Media’, in Gentes de mar en la ciudad atlántica medieval ed. by Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, Michel Bochaca and Amelia Andrade (Logroño: IER, 2012), pp. 295-312. 10 Ernst Kantorowicz, ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’, The American Historical Review, 56 (1951), pp. 472-92. Alain Boureau, Kantorowicz, stories of a historian (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 2001). See also several essays in De Bono Communi. The discourse and practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th-16th c.), ed. by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Ariel Guiancé, ‘To die for country, land or faith in Castilian medieval thought’, Journal of medieval history, 24 (1998), pp. 313-90. Jelle Haemers, ‘Révolte et requête. Les gens de métiers et les conflits sociaux dans les villes de Flandre (XIIIe-XVe siècles)’, Revue Historique, 677 (2016), pp. 27-55.

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was the duty of the loyal naturals of the kingdom. The loyalty of man was no longer exclusively bound to Church and Christian religion but also to town and kingdom. The common good of the fatherland, the public utility, was the highest purpose for all to safeguard. The monarch, as judge supreme of the kingdom, was to safeguard the upholding of law, order, and peace, virtues which were the supreme good of all. The satisfaction of the general interests – the common good- of the community granted importance to popular groups given that they represented the largest population group of the towns.11 This communitarian political model permeated all political petitionary discourses of the commons in northern Iberia during the fifteenth century. Consequently, it is necessary to elucidate key concepts. Who were the commons in towns such as Bilbao and Vitoria? The terms commons and people, comprising all underprivileged groups, were used in general in reference to the political collective of town dwellers or lawful citizens.12 Town dwellers acting as representatives of the community in late medieval Northern Spain were involved in trade and were individuals of great social recognition among their own. Town dwellers viewed citizenship (neighbourhood) as active political participation in the decision-making process of their town. Thus, the commons demanded political changes that amounted to all resolutions being made by common agreement between all estates.13 These matters lead us to ponder the ability of the commons to raise their voices in the general context of political exclusion as was common during the fifteenth century. Analysis of the political processes shows a high degree of politicisation of popular groups in the Late Middle Ages. The relationships between monarchs and the commons, as evidenced by various sources of documentation, inform us about the ideology of the commons and the political goals they built around their criticism of the political regime, making them communities with shared interests that received attention from the different spheres of power. The commons developed an intense political activity, sustained by non-violent activities, to raise their voice to the governing bodies of medieval urban centres and the regal court.14 This peaceful political discourse with the governing elites

11 Peter Blickle, Kommunalismus. Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Ordnungsform (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000). 12 Of course, the meaning of ‘commons’ could vary greatly in Europe, see John Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: the Changing Meaning of ‘the Commons’, 1381-1549’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. by Huw Pryce and John Watts (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 242-60. Claire Judde de Larivière and Rosa Salzberg, ‘Le peuple est la cité. L’idée de popolo et la condition des popolani à Venise (XV e-XVIe siècles)’, Annales ESC, 68 (2013), pp. 1113-40. Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea and J. Haemers, ‘Los grupos populares en las ciudades de la Europa medieval: reflexiones en torno a un concepto de historia social’, in Los grupos populares, pp. 17-49. Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘¿Qué es la comunidad? Reflexiones acerca de un concepto político y sus implicaciones en Castilla a fines de la Edad Media’, Medievalismo, 24 (2014), pp. 281-306. Gisela Naegle and Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘Geschlechter und Zünfte, prinçipales und común. Städtische Konflikte in Kastilien und dem spätmittelalterlichen Reich’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 41 (2014), pp. 561-618. 13 Andrea Ruddick, English Identity and Political Culture in the 14th Century (Cambridge: CUP, 2013). 14 Resistance, Representation, and Community, ed. by Peter Blickle, (Oxford: OUP, 1997).

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progressed determinedly and was, to a certain extent, successful. In a world where culture was essentially oral, whatever was thought or said had enormous repercussions. The commons’ opinions on political issues would spread rapidly both within the town and between the urban centres themselves. In fact, all information could propagate and be known publicly.15 For this reason, communication between central institutions, local institutions, and town dwellers was paramount in urban governance.16 Monarchs took the public opinion of the commons into account, especially given the difficult times faced during the centralisation of the political apparatus of monarchic states. The discourses of the commons and kings converged in their search for justice and the common good.17 The ascendant theory of power suggested that the people constituted the community and that the monarch, as administrator of the kingdom, must govern in favour of the general interests. Thus, the common good and the balance between the social states was not restricted to urban areas, but also constituted the foundations of the monarchic state. The commons were perceived as a fundamental building-block of the monarchic state. The commons of northern Iberia developed their own political discourse and formulated a discourse on good governance which questioned their exclusion from the urban community. Collective actions of the commons were expressed through the guilds and the representatives of the people.18 Not only was the commons’ discourse aimed at claiming rights and denouncing mismanagement, corruption and fraud, but it was also directed at gaining adepts to their cause. The formulation of a counter-discourse by the commons targeted the discourse of the

15 John Watts, ‘The pressure of the public on Later Medieval Politics’, in The Fifteenth Century IV, ed. by Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 159-80. Mark Ormrod, ‘Murmur, Clamour and Noise: Voicing Complaint and Remedy in Petitions to the English Crown, c. 1300-c. 1460’, in Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance, ed. by Idem, Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (York: Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 135-55. María Asenjo González, ‘Political Dissent Through Complaints and Petitions to the Royal Power in the Towns and Cities of Castile-León (13th–14th Centuries)’, in Disciplined Dissent. Strategies of Non-Confrontational Protest in Europe from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, ed. by Fabrizio Titone (Roma: Viella, 2016), pp. 67-89. 16 Hannes Lowagie, ‘The Political Functions of Oral Networks in the Later Medieval Low Countries’, in The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 205-13. 17 Jan Dumolyn, ‘Urban Ideologies in Later Medieval Flanders. Towards an Analytical Framework’, in The Languages of Political society, pp. 69-96. Political society in Later Medieval England. A Festschrift for Christine Carpenter, ed. by Benjamin Thompson and John Watts (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015). 18 Bert de Munck, Guilds, Labour and the Urban Body Politic. Fabricating Community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300-1800 (London: Routledge, 2018). Steven Epstein, ‘Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship and Technological change in Preindustrial Europe’, The Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), pp. 684-713. Alfred Kieser, ‘Organizational, institucional and societal evolution: Medieval craft guilds and the genesis of formal organizations’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 34 (1989), pp. 540-64. Paul Trio, ‘Les confréries comme expression de solidarité et de conscience urbaine aux Pays-Bas à la fin du Moyen Âge’, in Memoria, communitas, civitas. Mémoire et conscience urbaines en Occident à la fin du Moyen Age, ed. by Hanno Brand, Pierre Monnet and Martial Staub (Ostfildem: Jan Thorbecke, 2003), pp. 131-41. Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘Por bien y utilidad de los dichos maestres, pescadores y navegantes’: trabajo, solidaridad y acción política en las cofradías de las gentes de la mar en la España atlántica medieval’, Medievalismo, 26 (2016), pp. 329-56.

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urban nobility, the lineages. This legitimating discourse, as we shall see, evolved around three main axes: egalitarianism, public utility and the common good.19 This general ideological context impelled the commons to escalate their protests to the monarchs in search of regal justice and their mediating role as supreme judges of the kingdom. The institution of the Regiment in the towns of the peninsular North, with some particularities setting it apart from the lifelong offices instituted in the rest of Castile, generated two types of conflict: on one hand, the exclusion of the commons by the urban nobility from the urban government and, on the other, the violence generated by the annual distribution of council positions. This violence intensified the discourse of the popular groups and justified their claims before the monarchs and their demand for a government of the commons. As is also shown elsewhere in this book, letters of petitions of the commons – or their representatives – are the best means for historians to study the expression of the political ideology and the demands of this important social group, as they were the main means of communication between the monarchy and urban communities. In what follows, I will discuss some of these petitions, and the manner in which the urban citizens formulated their complaints. From representation to political control of urban centres The prerogative to hold annual elections of council officials was one of the more ancient and better consolidated privileges in the towns of the peninsular North, and analyzing this privilege allows us to gauge the evolution of political participation of urban populations. This entitlement was included in the fueros francos (Frank charters) of Logroño (1157) and Vitoria (1181),20 and spread throughout the Cantabrian coast, based on the fuero of Logroño, to those of Plencia (1299), Bilbao (1300), Portugalete (1322) and Villaro (1338): ayades buestros alcaldes e jurados y preboste y escrivano publico e sayon vuestros vezinos e non otros.21 (have your mayors and judges and provosts and notary and be they your neighbours and none other) Equally, the prerogative of annual elections of council authorities is documented in other towns of the peninsular North in the regions of Jaca and Estella. For

19 Jesús Á. Solórzano Telechea, ‘Linaje, comunidad y poder: desarrollo y consolidación de identidades urbanas contrapuestas en la Castilla bajomedieval’, in Familia y sociedad en la Edad Media (siglos XII-XV) (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2007), pp. 71-93. 20 César González Mínguez, Documentos de Pedro I y Enrique II en el Archivo Municipal de Vitoria (San Sebastián: Eusko Ikaskuntza, 1994), doc. II. 21 Colección documental de la villa de Plencia (1299-1516), ed. by Javier Enríquez Fernández et al. (San Sebastián: Sociedad de Estudios Vascos, 1998), doc. I; Colección documental del Archivo Histórico de Bilbao (1300-1473), ed. by idem (San Sebastián: Sociedad de Estudios Vascos, 1999), doc. I.

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example, the charter of San Sebastián (c. 1180) established that the prepositus and the mayor would be elected at the beginning of the year: que hayades e pongades en la dicha villa alcalde e preboste e jurado e escribano e otros oficiales cualesquier de cada año los que entendieredes que cumplen e fueren menester en la dicha villa, e que usedes e usen en los dichos oficiales e concejo e hombres buenos de la dicha villa de la instancia e jurisdiccion civil e criminal por vos mismos.22 (that you have and elect in this town mayor and provost and judge and notary and any other officials every year whom you believe to be worthy and necessary in this town, and use through these officers and council and lawful men of the town the petitions and civil and criminal jurisdiction for yourselves). This provision is also found in Fuenterrabía (1203), Guetaria (1204 ó 1209), San Vicente de la Barquera (1210),23 Zarauz (1237), Motrico (1256), Rentería (1320), Zumaya (1347), Gerricaiz (1366), Orio (1379) and Usúrbil (1371). While the abovementioned charter provisions established that the privilege of election belonged to the town dwellers, from the third quarter of the fourteenth century we find that this privilege was restricted to a select group of the commons by means of the imposition of two methods of election – suertes (drawing lots) and voces (voices) – established by council ordinances. In Asturias, in the last third of the fourteenth century, the adelantado mayor (Elder Justice of the Peace), Pedro Suárez de Quiñones, introduced the system of suertes as a means of appeasing the Asturian towns, granting equality to hijosdalgo and pecheros (nobility and tax-paying citizens),24 although, it is not possible to generalize, since in other cities we observe the early introduction of a mixed system of cooptation along with the introduction of the craft guilds’ representatives. We refer to the case of Oviedo, whose town council established an ordinance in 1262, which set the way to elect annually the judges, mayors and officials, according to which the group of electors of the incoming town councilors was composed of outgoing officers, together with four good men, appointed by these, and two good men from each craft guild of the city up to twenty-four electors. This system was still maintained in Oviedo at the end of the Middle Ages, as documented in the book of agreements of the city of 1499.25 Another way of electoral procedure of council officials was the boses (voices). In the town of Laredo, officials were elected annually to represent the wealthiest 22 José Luis Banús y Aguirre, El fuero de San Sebastián (San Sebastián: Ayuntamiento de San Sebastián, 1963), p. 251. 23 Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘Elites urbanas y construcción el poder concejil en las Cuatro Villas de la Costa de la Mar (siglos XIII-XV)’, in Ciudades y villas portuarias del Atlántico en la Edad Media (Logroño: IER, 2005), pp. 187-230. 24 Marqués de Alcedo y de San Carlos, Los merinos mayores de Asturias y su descendencia. Documentos (Madrid: Blass, S.A.1925), II, p. 18. 25 Jaime Fernández San Felices, Libro de acuerdos del concejo de Oviedo (1499) (Oviedo: RIEA, 2008), p. 89.

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citizens, some sixty pecheros quantiados (wealthy tax-payers). In a ceremony, which took place in the town cemetery, these illustrious citizens would utter out loud the names or boses of the candidates to sit in the council, two by two, in the presence of the members of the outgoing council and the elders of the confraternity of San Martín. Subsequently, the voices were tallied in the church of Santa María; those candidates obtaining the most voices were proclaimed winners.26 Nonetheless, from the end of the fourteenth century, these rights of the commons were questioned by the urban nobility, which was divided into factions. This was followed by the first council reforms, enforced by the monarchs, resulting from the protests raised by the commons. The petitions of justice addressed to the king, protesting the mismanagement, violence and corruption of urban nobles, represented the most significant political factors in the claims of the commons. They criticised every aspect of urban governance, anything that could detract legitimacy from the lineages; this included fiscal excesses, mismanagement of public funds and absence of justice, prevarication, corruption, usurpation.27 However, the main bone of contention was the political participation of the commons. The strategy employed by the lineages to gain control over urban governance is attested to in several towns of the peninsular North through the electoral ordinances or judicial procedures: Asturian towns in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, Deba in 1394, Bilbao in 1399, Laredo in 1405, Santander in 1414 and Vitoria in 1423. The first electoral ordinances are those of the town of Deba, drafted in 1394 and renewed in 1434. As was the custom, council offices were elected annually, a conçejo, (by assembly), for the feast of Saint Michael. However, there were vociferous persons who elected and appointed officials outside the customary procedure, causing conflict between the inhabitants. To prevent this, the council ruled that solely those elections held in the presence of la mayor parte de los vezinos de la dicha villa (the majority of the dwellers of the town) would be valid and established further conditions to be electable for office.28 The complaints of the commons denounce the aspiration of urban nobility to gain absolute control of urban government. In Bilbao in 1399, the Leguizamón faction gained a privilege from Henry III allowing them to share the government of the town with the Basurto and Zurbarán factions, the justification being a desire to placate the town. This privilege was denounced by the council and the good men who claimed before the monarch that council officials had been elected

26 Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘De ‘Todos los más del pueblo’ a la ‘República e comunidad’: el desarrollo y la consolidación de la identidad del común de Laredo en los siglos XIV y XV’, AMEA. Anales de historia medieval de la Europa atlántica, 1 (2006), pp. 61-106. 27 Frank Rexroth, Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London (Cambridge, CUP, 2007). 28 Victoriano Herrero and Elena Barrena, Archivo municipal de Deba I (San Sebastián: Sociedad de Estudios Vascos, 2005), p. 101.

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by them a century earlier, that is, dating back to the foundation of the town in 1300. The king ruled in their favour by virtue of the fairness of their petition.29 An identical process to that of Bilbao took place in the town of Laredo between 1405 and 1406. The Pelegrines and Villota lineages petitioned to Enrique III by protesting their exclusion from the urban governance by the council and the good men two years earlier and requesting a return to the previous state of affairs, to which the king conceded. The council opposed this and explained to the king how council offices were elected annually, pro común de la dicha villa (by the commons of the town), by the sixty or seventy voices of the wealthiest taxpayers, having made no liga (league) nor aliança (alliance).30 Despite this, Enrique III settled in favour of the factions and decreed the banishment of the omes buenos del común (good men of the commons) from the town council. As we can see, the commons reacted vigorously, albeit peacefully, to the attempts of exclusion by the factions as manifested in the letters of petition of justice sent to the king, in which they protested the situation and requested his intervention.31 In Santander, three reforms of the electoral procedure were initiated by consensus between the factions, the council and the commons.32 We know from the response from King Juan II, dated 20 March 1414, that he had received a petition from la mayor parte del pueblo e común de esa dicha villa33 (the majority of the dwellers and the commons of that town). In it, they complained that the lineages of Santander had sent ordinances to the king, presented by Sancho Fernández Calderón, with the purported intention of serving the people and the lineages, and requested that the lineages should be abolished. The tactic employed by the lineages to banish representatives of the commons from the council was equivalent to the one used previously in Bilbao and Laredo. However, the monarch sanctioned the larger part of the chapters of the ordinances, ordering the amendment of two of them. Firstly, the commons protested the alvoroços, e escándalos, e males (turmoil, and scandals, and evils) caused by the omes poderosos (powerful men), which caused much harm to the town, the people and the king. Indeed, the violence of these powerful men had been occurring since at least the end of the fourteenth century. In 1403, several town dwellers came before the council meeting in the monastery of Saint Francis, accusing the brothers Ruy Díaz de Arce and Pero Díaz de Arce, Lope de Liaño and their men and their squires of having murdered and affronted, for five years, the inhabitants of the town. The council admitted the complaint and sentenced Ruy Díaz de Arce to imprisonment. However, since he was a powerful man in the entire region of Santander, his men set out to liberate him and confront the corregidor 29 Enríquez, Colección documental del Archivo Histórico de Bilbao, pp. 137-45. 30 Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, Documentación medieval en la Biblioteca Municipal de Santander. Manuscritos originales (945-1519) (Santander: ACEM, 2007), doc. 23. 31 Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘La prisión del rey: voces subalternas e indicios de la existencia de una identidad política en la Castilla del siglo XV’, Hispania. Revista Española de Historia, 238 (2011), pp. 363-87. 32 See several essays in Consensus et représentation, ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet, Dominique Le Page and Olivier Mattéoni (Paris: Sorbonne, 2017). 33 Solórzano Telechea, Patrimonio documental de Santander, doc. 46.

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(chief magistrate) of the Asturian towns of Santillana, Campoo, Trasmiera and mayor of Santander and San Vicente de la Barquera, Gómez Arias. This led to the latter sentencing Ruy Díaz de Arce to death by drowning in a town well, to the confiscation of half his properties and the destruction of his tower as an exemplary punishment.34 In spite of these measures, the powerful men continued the harassment of the town dwellers, leading to Juan II’s order of banishment from the town, under penalty of death and confiscation of their properties. Secondly, the commons and people denounced the misappropriation by council officials of communal and council taxes and accused them of governing solely for their own interest, to the detriment of the interests of all. Juan II decreed that the commons and the people should elect an attorney to represent them in the council meetings and excluded the approval of any financial agreements without the signature of that attorney. The election of the attorney was to be done by consenso e consentimiento de todos ellos e de la mayor parte (consensus and consent of all and of the majority) or by three good men of each street and in agreement with the council. The commons expressed their disagreement with the ordinances sanctioned by Juan II because their representation was limited to one attorney, forcing the monarch in 1418 to enact new ordinances, where he established that four out of six officials were to belong to the Puebla Nueva (New district) and two to the Puebla Vieja (Old district). Puebla Nueva was the merchant quarter, controlled in its majority by the commons, whilst Puebla Vieja was the residential quarter of the lineages. Thus, with this reform, the commons managed to control council offices. However, this led to a surge of clashes between the commons and the urban nobility. On this occasion, the lineages petitioned the king for his mediation in the conflict and his dictum for an agreement between the parties. The adelantado (governor) Pedro Manrique was appointed to mediate in the conflict in 1431, qualified for the task by his experience in a similar process that occurred in Vitoria in 1423.35 In September 1431, Gonzalo Gutiérrez de la Calleja and Ruy Gutiérrez de Escalante, en vos e en nombre de los parientes, amigos, vesinos y moradores de la Puebla Vieja (in his name and in the name of parents, friends, neighbours and dwellers of Puebla Vieja) on one side, and Juan Fernández de Liencres, attorney of Puebla Nueva, on the other, requested of Pedro Manrique that he quell the disputes over the appointment and election of council officials.36 Urban nobility, represented by the Calleja and Escalante lineages, claimed possession of meytad de los ofiçios por privillejo e uso antiguo e costumbre (half the offices by privilege and ancient use and custom) and by a letter submitted to the monarch in Córdoba on 9 May 1431. On behalf of Puebla

34 Solórzano Telechea, Patrimonio documental de Santander, doc. 42. 35 José Ramón Díaz de Durana, ‘La lucha de bandos en Vitoria y sus repercusiones en el concejo (13521476)’, in Vitoria en la Edad Media (Vitoria: Ayuntamiento de Vitoria, 1982), pp. 477-500. Idem and Jon Andoni Fernández de Larrea, ‘Acceso al poder y discurso político en las villas cantábricas al final de la Edad Media’, Edad Media. Revista de historia, 14 (2013), pp. 63-80. 36 Solórzano Telechea, documental de Santander, doc. 32.

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Nueva, their representative supported their rights with the ordinances of 1414 and 1418. The adelantado ruled in the following manner: elections were to be held annually during Christmas; the attorney was to be chosen in accordance with the 1414 charter, with the candidate alternating annually between an inhabitant of Puebla Nueva and Puebla Vieja; the six officers were to be appointed according to the charter of 1418, four in representation of Puebla Nueva and two of Puebla Vieja; there would be two mayors, belonging to each of the Pueblas; and likewise two bailiffs. The election of the officers was to be done by three dwellers of each street. This process excluded the participation of clerics of the major orders and any outgoing officials, as these were prevented from holding council positions in the three years following their leave from office. The Calleja and Escalante factions were banned from electing officials in any of the two Pueblas and from being elected during the following ten years, for the paz e sosiego (peace and calm) of the town. Council meetings were to be held alternately, twice in the monastery of San Francisco, located in Puebla Nueva, and once in the chapel of the Holy Spirit of San Emeterio y Celedonio collegiate church in Puebla Vieja. The arbitral award of the adelantado, accepted by all parties, secured the return of the commons to the council and buttressed the monarch as a guarantor of the common good and the equality between the inhabitants of Santander since, as was expressed in the document, all this was done so que mejor se pueda faser el serviçio del dicho sennor Rey e provecho común de la dicha villa, e entre los vesinos e moradores de ella aya buena ygualdad (as to favour the service of the sovereign King and the general advantage of the town, and there be equality among neighbours and dwellers). The consolidation of this agreement necessitated the presence of the regal delegates in the town. Thus, between 1431 and 1436, peace reigned in the town as a result of the direct intervention of the king through his corregidores in the merindades (counties) of Asturias, Trasmiera and Campoo, the first of these being Pedro Álvarez de Córdoba and his lieutenant Juan Sánchez de Cuenca and, later, Juan Chacón, who presided in the council from 1436 through his lieutenant, the bachiller, García González de Hermosa.37 The next important urban centre in the peninsular North where King Juan II was to intervene was Vitoria, when, in 1423, the artisan guilds, facing their exclusion from the council, presented the ordinances before Alvar González de León, high corregidor and judicial commissioner of Juan II. They contested the arbitral award given by Pedro Manrique granting the control of the urban government to the Calleja and Ayala factions. That same year, Alvar González de León was charged with mediating in the conflict between the council of artisans and the Calleja lineage; the former protested the weakness of justice, faction feuds, fraud and their own scarce participation in urban government as a result of the arbitral award. Similar arguments were expressed by the commons of

37 Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, Santander en la Edad Media: patrimonio, parentesco y poder (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2002).

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Deba, Laredo and Santander. The monarch reacted by drafting new ordinances that were approved in general assembly.38 The town of Bilbao was not untouched by the reforms of Juan II. The Bilbao ordinances were of a more radical nature, since their purpose was the eradication of the factions. The burgesses of Bilbao did not belong to the family network of the urban nobility, which it considered the main cause of the problems of the town.39 As had occurred in other towns, the council and leading men sent a letter of petition to Juan II recounting the problems the town had endured, particularly the gente común (common people), during more than two decades under the stranglehold of the factions. In 1435, the monarch commissioned the corregidor of Vizcaya, Pedro González de Santo Domingo, to enquire into the factions and ordered the town council to draft new ordinances for their good governance. The text explains how the usurpation of council offices harmed the common people: porque por causa de los dichos bandos se apoderan en poner a los dichos alcaldes se diminia (sic) la gente comun que bien quieren bibir, e muchas presonas se aplicaban a los dichos bandos e se metian en sus treguas por aber parte en los dichos ofiçios e ser sostenidos por los dichos bandos.40 (because such factions engage in placing such majors in office, harming the common people who wish to live well, and many people would join these factions and get involved in their alliances to gain these positions and the support of the factions). Thus, a truce was enforced between the factions. Problems emerged especially during the election of council officials, since the factions would prevent the conçejo e común della (council and commons) from choosing freely. To sidestep this, it was established that the mayor should be a commoner who did not belong to any of the factions. Furthermore, the election process was modified, and a sortition process between those dwellers proposed by the outgoing council was instituted. In this manner, on the day of the election, the outgoing council would choose three personas buenas de la comunidad (…) ricos, e abonados e de buena fama e de buena conbersaçión y que non sean de treguas (honourable men of the community (…) wealthy, and trustworthy and of good reputation and learned and free from alliances), by writing their names on pieces of parchment. The parchment was then dipped in wax, rolled into small balls and placed in a cloth. The person whose name was drawn was proclaimed mayor for a yearlong term. Other positions were chosen by agreement between outgoing officers, provided the candidates were wealthy men and did not belong to the nobility.41

38 Echávarri, Alaveses ilustres, II, p. 37. 39 Ernesto García Fernández, Gobernar la ciudad en la Edad Media: oligarquías y élites urbanas en el País Vasco (Vitoria: Diputación de Álava, 2004), p. 254. 40 Enríquez, Colección documental del Archivo Histórico de Bilbao, pp. 137-45. 41 Ibidem, doc. 68.

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Thus, the new system favoured the economic and merchant elite instead of the urban nobility. Factions challenged the reforms of Juan II and, in most towns, the commons were ousted from urban governments. However, both the claims contained in their letters of petitions and the regal support they received through arbitral awards and ordinances remained in the memory of the commons. This set the foundations of the new political edifice constructed during the reign of Fernando and Isabel. Concurrent with the difficulties of the early years of their reign, from 1476 onward, the Catholic Monarchs reformed the electoral system of the majority of towns in the peninsular North at the behest of the urban communities themselves, with the aim of appeasing the urban centres with a new political system, placing the commons as the main players. In doing so, on the one hand, the monarchs attempted to attract the support of the commons and, on the other, to avert a generalised revolt of the commons in the North arising from their discontent. Therefore, in 1483, when Bilbao was granted the ordinances of Vitoria, it was done in benefit of the paz e bien común e sosiego (peace and common good and calm) of the town and the entire County of Biscay.42 The petitions of the commons and the new ordinances allow us to gain insight into the political discourse of the commons in the fourteenth century. These records not only reproduce the clashes between urban nobility and popular groups but also reveal the motive of their struggle, the power they longed for. Thus, an alternative to the factional social organisation emerges, based on peace, equality and the common good. Their first claim was the introduction of a new electoral procedure for council officers with the aim of removing factions from urban government. This was effected by the adoption of an annual sortition method for the elections. Furthermore, access was restricted to those members of the commons who fulfilled the following requisites: they were to be laymen, wealthy, virtuous, instructed, married, with a good reputation and free from the patronage of the factions. One of the towns offering greatest resistance was Bilbao.43 As stated above, the commons of the town had achieved their goal of removing factions from urban government in 1435, but the state of unrest caused by the Castilian civil war offered this group the opportunity to recover control over council affairs. As had occurred in Vitoria in 1476, King Fernando was to confirm the privilege granted by Juan II. This was the result of the protests over troubles experienced in the town during the election of council officials, the factions controlling the process with the collusion of members of the commons.44 In their letter, the commons requested of the king that the mayor be a member of the commons, wealthy and reputable. King Fernando granted their requests, but factions disregarded this directive, and in 1478 the rebel factionalists, Tristán de 42 Colección documental del Archivo Histórico de Bilbao, doc. 160. 43 Jesús A. Solórzano Telechea, ‘Protestas del común y cambio político en las villas portuarias de la España atlántica a finales de la Edad Media’, in La comunidad medieval como esfera pública, pp. 45-72. 44 Colección documental del Archivo Histórico de Bilbao, doc. 114.

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Leguizamón, Ochoa Pérez de Arbolancha, Juan de Arana and others swore not to obey the regal mandate.45 The feuds between the factions over the control of the urban government continued, compelling the council of Bilbao to appeal for the same ordinances as those of Vitoria in 1476.46 The monarchs dispatched a royal advisor, García López de Chinchilla, to pacify the town. He drew up ordinances, inspired by those of Vitoria and the sortition system, granted on 29 November 1483 and ratified by the Catholic Monarchs on February 28 the following year.47 The ordinances were intended to impede the interference of factions in the annual elections. However, these ordinances did not fulfil their purpose, and the monarchs commissioned him to enquire into the governance of not only Bilbao, but also of all the towns of Biscay.48 The enquiry resulted in the granting of the ordinances of Chinchilla, described as leys e hordenanças de la comunidad (laws and ordinances of the community), in June 1487, with jurisdiction over the majority of urban centres of the County of Biscay.49 By way of an epilogue, one could say that, to consolidate this long process, monarchs decreed the withdrawal of all factional structures in all cities and towns of the northern Iberian Peninsula, following the Royal Pragmatic sanction of 1501.50 Following over a century of protests, the commons emerged victorious, supported by the monarchs, with these strengthening their authority by virtue of their role as arbiters of the kingdom. This alliance between the commons of urban centres of the peninsular North and the monarchy held firm even during the worst moments of the War of the Communities in 1520-21.51 However, the participation of the commons in the governance of urban centres in the peninsular North was not destined for lasting success and was unable to survive the Revolt of the Communities, when the Regiment eventually prevailed over them all. The new agenda of the urban oligarchies did not include the preservation of the voices of the commons in the councils, but rather saw the defence of public order as an excuse for the abrogation of the rights of the commons. As expressed by the council of Tolosa in the 1532 ordinances, the ayuntamiento de muchos (town hall of the many) was a source of conflict between the town dwellers and an impediment to the decision-making process.52 45 García Fernández, Gobernar la ciudad, p. 256. 46 Colección documental del Archivo Histórico de Bilbao, docs 160 and 163. 47 El triunfo de las elites urbanas: nuevos textos para el estudio del gobierno de las villas y de la Provincia (1412-1539), ed. by José Angel Lema Pueyo et al. (San Sebastián: Diputación Foral de Guipúzcoa, 2002). 48 Archivo General de Simancas, Registro General del Sello, 1486, fol. 59. 49 Estanislao Jaime Labayru y Goicoechea, Historia general del señorío de Bizcaya (Bilbao: Biblioteca de la Gran Enciclopedia vasca, 1968), III, pp. 377-83 and 424-37. 50 Novísima recopilación de la Leyes de España. Vol. V, Títle XII, Law VIII (Madrid: Boletín Oficial del Estado, 1992), pp. 344-45. 51 Solórzano Telechea, ‘The politics of the urban commons’, p. 83. See also Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘Interpreting Large-Scale Revolts. Some Evidence from the War of the Communities of Castile’, in The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt, ed. by Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 330-48. 52 Susana Truchuelo García, Tolosa en la Edad Moderna. Organización y gobierno de una villa guipuzcoana (Siglos XVI-XVII) (Tolosa: Lizardi Kultur Elkartea, 2006), p. 47.

Eliza Hartrich  

The Politics of Record-Keeping in Fifteenth-Century English Towns Since the 1990s urban archives have taken centre stage in studies of late medieval and early modern politics; they are no longer seen solely as receptacles for information but as objects of historical study in their own right.1 According to historians following in the postmodernist tradition of Derrida, record-keeping acted as a tool through which urban governments could communicate particular political messages and assert dominance over other groups within the town.2 Civic governments determined which information was (and was not) recorded and to whom certain documents were accessible, and through such mechanisms they could both silence voices of discontent in the populace and mould historical memory within the city. Their purpose could be benign – as in Brigitte Bedos-Rezak’s medieval northern French towns, in which urban authorities used processes of documentation and archiving to encourage diverse urban populations to think of the city as a unified body with a shared history – or more sinister, such as in Filippo de Vivo’s Renaissance Venice, where the Council of Ten used their municipal records to conceal information from the greater public and to prevent them from hearing about rifts occurring between the councillors.3 Or they could be a mixture of the two, as Sheila Lindenbaum argues for early fifteenth-century London custumal compiler John Carpenter, whose Liber Albus, a collection of London history, customs, and laws, emerges as both an heroic effort to heal the city following a crisis and as a calculated device to prevent alternative voices from challenging pronouncements made by the civic government.4 Nevertheless, in





1 These tendencies are both apparent and discussed at length in The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham (Past & Present supplement 11, 230, 2016); Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy I, ed. by Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); and Archival Transformations in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Filippo de Vivo, Andrea Guidi and Alessandro Silvestri (European History Quarterly special issue, 46, 2016). 2 For postmodern ideas of the archive, see Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: Une Impression Freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995). 3 Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, ‘Civic Liturgies and Urban Records in Northern France, 1100-1400’, in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. by Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis: UMP, 1994), pp. 34-55; Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: OUP, 2009). Andrew Butcher, ‘The Functions of Script in the Speech Community of a Late Medieval Town, c. 1300-1550’, in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700, ed. by Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), p. 170, goes so far as to write that ‘The relationship between the clerk/text and the persons for whom and of whom these texts are produced is, in significant part, a relationship of social control’. 4 Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, Volume I, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), pp. 293-300. Eliza Hartrich • University of East Anglia Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 195-212.

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all of these examples, it is very much a small coterie of councillors and scribes who are in control of civic record-keeping and manipulating it to accomplish their objectives, whether these were laudable or not.5 Such a vision of urban writing and archiving as the instruments of urban oligarchs, however, sits awkwardly within recent historiography that has stressed the political agency of those outside the mercantile and governing classes in the late medieval city. The work of Christian Liddy on fifteenth-century English towns and Jelle Haemers and Jan Dumolyn on Flemish towns has illustrated that artisans and other subalterns were critically important in generating the values that dominated urban politics and in holding those who violated these values to account.6 Indeed, Liddy has argued that the whole citizen body in English towns participated in the construction of written constitutions that set out the framework of civic government and which officeholders were bound to observe.7 The question of who determined the content of urban records and what purposes they sought to enact in doing so, then, stands at the heart of a larger debate about the nature of urban politics in late medieval and early modern England. To what degree did towns of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries witness the gradual monopolization of sanctioned political activity by mercantile elites?8 Or did a socially diverse citizenry continue to craft the structures and content of urban politics according to their own interests?9 5 A similar theme runs through Helen Carrel, ‘Food, Drink and Public Order in the London Liber Albus’, Urban History, 33 (2006), pp. 176-94; Peter Fleming, ‘Making History: Culture, Politics and The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar’, in Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. by Douglas Biggs, Sharon Michalove, and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 289-316; Paul Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and Authority in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century London’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 925-51; Robert Tittler, ‘Reformation, Civic Culture and Collective Memory in English Provincial Towns’, Urban History, 24 (1997), pp. 283-300 (at pp. 292-300); Andy Wood, ‘Tales from the “Yarmouth Hutch”: Civic Identities and Hidden Histories in an Urban Archive’, Past & Present, 230 (2016), pp. 213-30; and Esther Liberman Cuenca, ‘Towns Clerks and the Authorship of Custumals in Medieval England’, Urban History, 46 (2019), pp. 180-201. 6 Christian D. Liddy, Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250-1530 (Oxford: OUP, 2017); Idem, ‘Urban Enclosure Riots: Risings of the Commons in English Towns, 1480-1525’, Past & Present, 226 (2015), pp. 41-77; Idem, ‘“Sir Ye Be Not Kyng”: Citizenship and Speech in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal, 60 (2017), pp. 571-96; Idem, ‘“Bee war of gyle in borugh”. Taxation and Political Discourse in Late Medieval English Towns’, in The Languages of Political Society, Western Europe, 14th-17th Centuries, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi (Rome: Viella, 2011), pp. 461-85; Idem and Jelle Haemers, ‘Popular Politics in the Late Medieval City: York and Bruges’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), pp. 771-805; Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘“A Bad Chicken was Brooding”: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders’, Past & Present, 214 (2012), pp. 45-86. 7 Liddy, Contesting the City, pp. 165-205. 8 Among those arguing for an increase in urban ‘oligarchy’ at various points over this period are Heather Swanson, ‘The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns’, Past & Present, 121 (1988), pp. 29-48; Stephen Rigby, ‘Urban “Oligarchy” in Late Medieval England’, in Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by John Thomson (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), pp. 73-81; James Lee, ‘Urban Policy and Urban Political Culture: Henry VII and his Towns’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), pp. 493-510; and Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 9 Christian D. Liddy, ‘Urban Politics and Material Culture at the End of the Middle Ages: The Coventry Tapestry in St Mary’s Hall’, Urban History, 39 (2012), pp. 203-24; Peter Fleming, ‘Telling Tales of Oligarchy in the Late Medieval Town’, in The Fifteenth Century II: Revolution and Consumption in



The Politics of Record- Keeping

Neither civic record-keeping nor urban politics, however, fits into a binary of oligarchy vs democracy, closure vs openness. The documentation produced by civic governments did not operate uniformly either to advance the aims of officials or to circumscribe and monitor their activities. Civic governments kept a multitude of different types of record: custumals, financial accounts, cartularies, common assembly minute books, aldermanic council minute books, etc.10 Each type of record had its own complex set of power dynamics attached to it: who needed to witness the creation of that record? Who was allowed access to the record after its creation, and under what conditions? Was there a strict formula for the recording of information, or were the rules for composition somewhat looser? While certain ‘public’ records of civic government could be monitored by non-officeholding citizens – and so be used to enshrine the privileges of lesser citizens and to hold mayors and aldermen to account – other records were composed chiefly by a town clerk and hidden from the scrutiny of the wider citizenry. Different types of records, therefore, served the agendas of different urban political actors. The multiplicity of forms in which civic matters could be recorded added texture to urban political conflict. Citizens needed to consider not only what actions they should take, but also where and how those actions were written down. One of the essential power struggles in urban life occurred at the point when records were produced, archived, and consulted. When ordinances, decisions, and activities were recorded in routine, formulaic, and publicly supervised records it reflected the power of non-officeholding groups to influence the terms of urban political life; when such matters appeared in council minute books composed and kept away from the eye of the larger commonalty, then it indicated that officeholders (and the wealthy merchants who very often dominated officeholding)11 were controlling the narrative of political events. Taking into account where information was recorded and well as what was recorded also serves to question existing assumptions about what constituted effective popular participation in late medieval urban politics. Liddy, Dumolyn, and Haemers, alongside Samuel Cohn and Patrick Lantschner, have often looked to rebellions and seditious speech when seeking to locate examples of Late Medieval England, ed. by Michael Hicks (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 177-93; Christopher Fletcher, ‘News, Noise, and the Nature of Politics in Late Medieval English Provincial Towns’, Journal of British Studies, 56 (2017), pp. 250-72 (at pp. 254-55, 261). 10 There are, of course, several excellent studies of individual types of urban record. See, e.g., D. J. S. O’Brien, ‘“The Veray Register of All Trouthe”: The Content, Function, and Character of the Civic Registers of London and York c. 1274-c. 1482’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of York, 1999); Justin Croft, ‘The Custumals of the Cinque Ports c. 1290-c. 1500: Studies in the Cultural Production of the Urban Record’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1997); Graeme Small, ‘Municipal Registers of Deliberations in the Late Middle Ages: Cross-Channel Comparisons’, in Les idées passent-elles La Manche? Savoirs, représentations, pratiques (France-Angleterre, Xe-XXe siècles), ed. by Jean-Philippe Genet and François-Joseph Ruggiu (Paris: Sorbonne, 2007), pp. 37-66; Liberman Cuenca, ‘Town Clerks’, pp. 1-22. 11 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Commercial Dominance of a Medieval Provincial Oligarchy: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century’, in The English Medieval Town: A Reader in English Urban History 1200-1540, ed. by Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 184-215.

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non-elite citizens asserting themselves in urban political life; this tendency is understandable, as both fields of action offer colourful examples of violence, swearing, and open defiance.12 But unless these activities were recorded in the types of urban records open to public scrutiny (and, as we shall see, they often were not), the perpetrators had limited ability to determine whether and in what ways their actions would be represented to future citizens consulting the laws and customs of the town. Effective and long-lasting ‘bottom-up’ power in late medieval towns may have lain less in acts of open protest, and more in the dullest and most mundane acts of record-keeping – for it was financial accounts, custumals, and other highly stereotyped documents that were most likely to be witnessed by the commons and to represent their interests in a civic ‘constitution’ for future generations. Before determining which records represent ‘bottom-up’ urban politics and which ‘top-down’, however, it is necessary to outline which types of people comprised the elites and non-elites of urban politics. This task is more difficult than it may first appear. Those who did not hold office in civic government often appeared in municipal records as ‘the commons’, and not as named individuals. Jelle Haemers and Christian Liddy have argued persuasively that the ‘commons’ in late medieval European towns were citizens, and thus men who practised a trade and had the economic wherewithal to contribute to taxation, military musters, and other duties required of freemen of a town. They were thus a kind of political ‘middle class’ of men who were not members of governing councils and typically were not long-distance merchants, but who did have the right to vote in elections and consent to civic policies regarding land, tax collecting, and other public town affairs. They were often (but not always) artisans who used their craft guilds as a means of mobilizing for collective action. Haemers and Liddy also suggest that ‘the commons’ in late medieval towns had their own political agenda that required the accountability of civic officials, the preservation of civic autonomy, and the maintenance of the town’s common lands; the actions taken by ‘the commons’ in this regard were said to represent the ‘common profit’ or ‘common weal’ of the town as a whole.13 It should be noted, though, that craft guilds were not the only vehicle through which the ‘commons’ expressed

12 Urban rebellion and seditious speech have been the subject of many studies in recent decades, including: Dumolyn and Haemers, ‘“A Bad Chicken was Brooding”’, pp. 45-86; Liddy, ‘“Sir Ye Be Not Kyng”’, pp. 571-96; Idem, ‘Cultures of Surveillance in Late Medieval English Towns: The Monitoring of Speech and the Fear of Revolt’, in The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, ed. by Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 311-29; S. K. Cohn, Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns (Cambridge: CUP, 2015); Patrick Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities: Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370-1440 (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Jelle Haemers, ‘Filthy and Indecent Words. Insults, Defamation, and Urban Politics in the Southern Low Countries, 1300-1550’, in The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe: Communication and Popular Politics, ed. by Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 247-67; Hannes Lowagie, ‘The Political Functions of Oral Networks in the Later Medieval Low Countries’, in Voices of the People, pp. 210-13; Fletcher, ‘News, Noise’, pp. 258-61. 13 Liddy and Haemers, ‘Popular Politics’, pp. 771-805. See also Jan Dumolyn, ‘Guild Politics and Political Guilds in Fourteenth-Century Flanders’, in Voices of the People, pp. 15-48.

The Politics of Record- Keeping

themselves; there could also be ‘commons’ of a neighbourhood or ward. In 1426, the ‘comens’ and ‘pore neighbours’ of the ward of Cross Cheaping in Coventry petitioned the mayor and council to complain that John Stafford had taken water from the public conduit to ‘gret hyndryng of the comen people’14. The ‘comens of Croschepyng’ got their way: not only was Stafford fined 40d., but a new ordinance was enacted as a result of the petition which forbade residents of Coventry from diverting water from the town conduit on pain of 40s.15 The ‘commons’ were, in essence, a group that was involved in political processes but was not part of the government establishment, as it were. Over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, many English civic governments began to incorporate the ‘commons’ more formally into the apparatuses of civic government as ‘common councils’. While an elite council of twelve or twenty-four would be responsible for advising the mayor and would form the pool of candidates from which the mayor was chosen, forty-eight or sixty representatives of the ‘commons’ would act as a subsidiary council (usually called a common council or common assembly). Typically this body, rather than counselling the mayor and thus being involved in the process of decision-making, would be asked to confirm or reject decisions already made by the mayor and upper council. These ‘common councils’ were part of the civic government hierarchy, but did not usually have a defined role in making policy (as the mayor and aldermanic or ‘upper’ council did) or executing it (as did petty officials such as the serjeants, constables, and tax collectors).16 While it is difficult to determine the social status or economic prosperity of those who claimed to be part of the ‘commons’, it is easier to classify them as citizens who were not part of the executive or bureaucratic arms of civic government and thus not regarded as complicit in decisions taken by it (even if they were sometimes required to give formal consent). The urban ‘commons’ possessed rights of supervision over certain types of municipal record, giving them a role in the composition of these records supplementary to that exercised by the mayor, aldermen, or common clerk. This role stemmed from the commons’ function as monitors of the activities of civic government. It was customary for mayors, sheriffs, and other civic officials to swear their oaths of office before the full assembly of citizens of the town.17 14 Please note that the Middle English letter þ (or thorn) has been rendered as ‘th’ in this text for the sake of clarity. 15 The Coventry Leet Book, or Mayor’s Register […], ed. by Mary Dormer Harris (Early English Text Society, Original Series, 134, 135, 138, 146, 1907-13), pp. 104-05. 16 There are too many individual examples to cite, but the powers and composition of urban upper councils and common councils are discussed in Eliza Hartrich, ‘Locality, Polity and the Politics of Counsel: Royal and Urban Councils in England, 1420-1429’, in The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland 1286-1707, ed. by Jacqueline Rose (London: British Academy, 2016), pp. 101-16; Caroline Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200-1500 (Oxford: OUP, 2004), pp. 129-46; Rigby, ‘Urban Oligarchy’, pp. 67-81; Liddy, ‘Bee war of gyle’, pp. 467-73; and Bertie Wilkinson, The Mediaeval Council of Exeter (Manchester: MUP, 1931). 17 Liddy, Contesting the City, pp. 112-21; James Lee, ‘“Ye Shall Disturbe Noe Mans Right”: Oath-Taking and Oath-Breaking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bristol’, Urban History, 34 (2007), pp. 27-38.

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Norwich was far from alone among English towns in requiring its treasurers to declare annually before an assembly of citizens any debts owed by the civic government; the commons would then determine if the debt was a reasonable one for which the town would take responsibility, or if the treasurer should be required to pay the debt with money from his own pocket.18 The financial accounts of Shrewsbury’s civic government were inspected by a smaller group of six representatives from the commons, but measures put in place in 1433 ensured that these six auditors were acting in the interests of the commons and not of the bailiffs (Shrewsbury’s equivalent of a mayor) and council. The auditors were to be elected at an assembly in which all citizens were present and it was forbidden for the bailiff and councillors to influence the election in favour of their own candidates ‘in disceit of the said Comyns’.19 In Coventry, the mayor was typically counselled by a select council of forty-eight, but it appears that when matters pertaining to the financial resources of the town – such as grants of loans or taxation to the king, or decisions regarding land held by the town as a corporation – came up for discussion, a much wider group of citizens, numbering over 200 at times, was assembled at a ‘hall’ to provide or withhold consent.20 In this way, it could be ensured that the financial resources of the town were not being squandered for private purposes by a small elite. There was, then, a general principle in place that when civic governments took decisions pertaining to the lands and financial resources of the town, their activities should be monitored formally by the wider ‘commons’ of the town. A 1415 agreement in Norwich made this point explicit; anything to do with ‘the profit of alle the Cite’ was to be placed for approval before an assembly of all citizens, and not just the mayor, councils, and officials of the civic government.21 To keep civic officers in check and to keep track of the maintenance of civic resources, the ‘commons’ needed to have access to the financial accounts, civic ordinances, and other forms of documentation kept by the civic government. Municipal record-keeping was a process in which the ‘commons’ were stakeholders. In few towns would the ‘commons’ allow civic archives to become tools for the uncontested expression of the political programme of a small group of mayors, councillors, and bureaucrats. By a 1392 ordinance (confirmed in 1421), the city of Lincoln determined that the common seal, which authenticated written decisions made by the civic government, could be used only in the presence of 18 The Records of the City of Norwich, ed. by William Hudson and John Cottingham Tingey, 2 vols (Norwich: Jarrold, 1906-10), I, p. 102. See also Liddy, Contesting the City, p. 120. 19 Rotuli Parliamentorum 1278-1503, 6 vols (London: Record Commission, 1832), IV, p. 478; Hugh Owen and John Blakeway, A History of Shrewsbury, 2 vols (London: Harding, Lepard, and Co., 1825), I, p. 207. 20 Coventry Leet Book, pp. 42, 44. Some examples of ‘halls’ that numbered more than forty-eight men include Coventry Leet Book, pp. 60-62 (sixty-nine persons in 1423 decide on arrangements for securing repayment of loans); 142-43 (seventy-three persons in 1432 concerning the building of the town wall); 350-52 (216 persons in 1469 agree to treaty made between civic government and Prior of Coventry concerning enclosures); 376-77 (154 persons in 1472 consulted on town’s prosecution of William Bristowe for matters concerning common lands). 21 Records of the City of Norwich, I, p. 102.

The Politics of Record- Keeping

ten representatives of the ‘commons’, elected by the full assembly of citizens. Any written act sealed by the mayor and council of twenty-four without the presence of these ‘commoners’ would be deemed void.22 In Shrewsbury, the common seal, together with the civic financial accounts and charters, were kept in a locked common coffer (or chest); the keys to this chest, however, were in the possession not of the bailiffs and elite council of twenty-four, but of four ‘worthy men of the seid town, by the seid Comyns chosen’.23 By these types of urban ordinances, the ‘commons’ were established as essential witnesses to the creation of new written records and as guardians of existing municipal writings. Of course, it can be argued easily enough that these procedures were examples of empty bureaucracy – did large assemblies of people really listen to the accounts being read out to them, or did they ever challenge the land transactions authenticated by the common seal? Were these regulations simply gestures that civic governments used to show that they were operating with the consent of the ‘commons’, while granting them no concrete power? Unsurprisingly, there were attempts by elite groups within towns to enter items into the written record without receiving the assent of the commons. The ‘commons’, however, had enough access to municipal records to discover such covert attempts to include items in the written laws, customs, and ordinances of the town that diminished their rights. A set of grievances submitted in 1414 by the commons of Norwich against ‘those who are called the more venerable citizens of the said City’ complained that the leading citizens of Norwich secretly had obtained a charter from King Richard II in 1380 which granted the bailiffs (although from 1404 Norwich was ruled by a mayor) and council of 24 the right to pass ordinances pertaining to the common profit of the city, without reference to the need for the commons to approve such ordinances.24 The bailiffs and council of twenty-four managed to get away with this omission for a number of years, but certainly by 1414, the commons discovered their formal exclusion from the process of drafting and approving civic legislation.25 Clearly, the commons of Norwich had access – however intermittent – to the city’s charters (which they quoted directly in their 1414 articles of grievance), and made their opinions known when these documents diverged from their own interpretation of the city’s history and customs. Fifty years later, the commons of Hull followed their lead. During the mayoral election of 1469, two citizens of Hull, William Humbleton and John of the Hay, ‘openly with a high voyce’ demanded that before the elections could be allowed to proceed the charters and ordinances of the town must be ‘sene and Redd’ by the commons of the town. Humbleton and Hay then appointed twelve commoners to examine the civic records; the mayor and aldermen conceded that

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Francis Hill, Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge: CUP, 1948), pp. 259, 261, 276, 279. Rotuli Parliamentorum, IV, p. 479; Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, I, p. 208. The grievances are printed and summarized in Records of the City of Norwich, I, pp. 66-67. Records of the City of Norwich, I, pp. 67-70. See also Ben McRee, ‘Peacemaking and its Limits in Late Medieval Norwich’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), pp. 831-66 (at pp. 840-44), and Liddy, Contesting the City, pp. 154-55, 197-98.

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‘the said xij at any tyme within this moneth next after shuld haue the Register at theyr will to see […] and the said ordinauncez and Custumes’.26 Efforts were also made to ensure that, when the commons did see municipal records, they were able to understand their contents fully. In January 1470, it was decreed that the records of all acts passed by Sandwich’s common assembly and of all municipal financial accounts should no longer be written in Latin but instead ‘made and entred in englissh’.27 Acts and accounts written in Latin would restrict the number of people who were capable of checking the accuracy of the civic government’s recording of ordinances and financial activity. Perhaps even more significantly, civic records in Latin enshrined acts in municipal custom that did not reflect the exact language used by the commons, since their deliberations in the assembly would have taken place in English. Not only did the commons of Sandwich want to be able to read and check municipal records, but they wanted to make sure that what they determined in assemblies was being rendered in writing as accurately as possible. In addition, many citizens encountered urban records in a more casual manner, as part of everyday transactions. The Great Red Book of Bristol routinely interspersed wills and private property deeds with regulations for crafts, pronouncements from the mayor, ordinances related to the conduct of civic officials, and other more ‘political’ matters.28 The editor of the Great Red Book suggests that the volume began in the late fourteenth century as an official repository for enrollments of agreements concerning lands and tenements within the town, available for consultation should citizens’ private legal arrangements ever be challenged. From the fifteenth century, however, ‘political’ material pertaining to the conduct of Bristol’s councils began to appear alongside the legal enrollments, possibly because space had run out in other civic registers.29 Whatever the reason, though, citizens examining the Great Red Book to check up on property transactions or testaments may have had the opportunity to view the other entries in the text and thus to monitor informally the ways in which civic business was recorded. Furthermore, Debbie Cannon has shown that the customs and laws of the city of London compiled by the city’s fourteenth-century chamberlain Andrew Horn were copied by citizens into manuscripts held in private, personal collections. While these private manuscripts recording London’s laws were often quite lavishly decorated, indicating ownership by a wealthy reader, they nevertheless demonstrate that several citizens had access to the London civic records outside formal consultative processes and were

26 Hull History Centre [hereafter, HHC], Bench Book 1, 1445-1552, C BRB/1, fol. 113v. 27 Kent History and Library Centre [hereafter, KHLC], Old Black Book of Sandwich, Sa/AC 1, fol. 193. 28 Printed in The Great Red Book of Bristol, ed. by Edward Veale, 5 vols (Bristol: Bristol Record Soc., 2, 4, 8, 16, 18, 1931-53). For wills and property transactions, see Great Red Book of Bristol, II, pp. 113-14, 19294, 197-205, 208-53; III, 162-74, 179-80, 204-13; IV, 56-64, 103-13, 124-68, 171-81; V, 1-3, 9, 30-34, 108-21. 29 Great Red Book of Bristol, II, pp. 1-3.

The Politics of Record- Keeping

able to obtain copies of the city’s written records for their private use.30 Both through formal and informal mechanisms, therefore, citizens of late medieval English towns were able to scrutinize the ways in which civic finances were handled and to review ordinances enacted by past assemblies. The example of Humbleton and Hay in Hull shows that some citizens did, indeed, take up this opportunity, but it was perhaps the possibility of the urban citizenry accessing civic records that mattered more than whether or not they actually did so. The potential for citizens to review municipal pronouncements and to measure the activities of current officeholders against the town’s historic laws and ordinances was probably a powerful deterrent, preventing civic elites from manipulating records in their favour or from violating codes of conduct. The examples cited here indicate that civic governments did not have a monopoly on the process of recording civic business. The ‘commons’ – citizens not holding office within the ruling council and its associated bureaucracy – expected to witness the creation of municipal records and to inspect them in subsequent years. We cannot, therefore, view civic record collections as propaganda initiatives inevitably representing the interests of urban elites. In many towns, it would have been difficult for municipal governments to write down laws or customs that did not meet with the approval of the commons. Furthermore, if such an elite-driven agenda did make its way into the civic archives, there were ample opportunities for the commons to question and amend narratives that did not accord with their own recollection of events. The commons had their own opinions about what should feature in the official documents of the town and had the means to ensure that they were included. Civic custumals, financial accounts, and other formal, standardized municipal registers functioned in this way much like the custumals and surveys for rural manors recently investigated by Jean Birrell. Birrell notes that, although manorial custumals in thirteenthand fourteenth-century England were written by the lord’s official, they were negotiated, composed, and scrutinized in public by the tenantry of the manor. As such, the customary tenants on the manor were able to use these documents for their own ends, ensuring that their protests against seigneurial policy were recorded and that new services were not entered into the record surreptitiously.31 But there were clear limits to the degree to which municipal records represented ‘bottom-up’ interests. Firstly, it is not entirely clear whether the word ‘commons’ should be used to represent a socially defined group below the civic elite. As John Watts has written, the word ‘commons’ operated on multiple levels in late medieval England. It was sometimes taken as a label indicating class or social status, but was used more often to designate a political

30 Debbie Cannon, ‘London Pride: Citizenship and the Fourteenth-Century Custumals of the City of London’, in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. by Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 189-96. 31 Jean Birrell, ‘Manorial Custumals Reconsidered’, Past & Present, 224 (2014), pp. 3-37.

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community.32 As such, ‘commons’ was a term that afforded legitimacy to the claims of the group so described. Therefore, it is unsurprising that conflicts could erupt over which people could proclaim to act as the ‘commons’ of a town, and civic governments sometimes attempted to manipulate who could exercise the functions in government attributed to this body. Most famously, in 1442 the London civic government decreed that the ‘commons’ electing the mayor would consist solely of those who had been summoned explicitly to do so, and not of all citizens who wished to attend the election. This declaration sparked a riot at the assembly.33 While this example shows perhaps a more sinister attempt to remould the shape of the ‘commons’ to prevent the election of a candidate who did not represent the interests of the merchants on London’s aldermanic bench, the Coventry Leet Book illustrates that variations in the size and identity of the ‘commons’ was a normal part of the political process. Unusually, the Coventry Leet Book sometimes lists those who were present at ‘halls’ to witness the use of the common seal for public business. As we have already seen, the numbers mentioned vary considerably.34 These variations could represent the ebb-and-flow of public interest – with some matters for debate commanding a greater number of onlookers than others – but the language of the records implies that the civic government summoned varying numbers of people to be ‘commoners’ at public ‘halls’. In 1432, John Clarke had declared before thirty named individuals that the civic government of Coventry should be allowed to construct the town’s wall along his land. When Clarke withdrew his consent, the mayor of Coventry convened a hall to confirm that the wall should be built as planned. In this case, the hall seems to represent a summons of specific persons rather than a general assembly; the Leet Book records that the mayor ‘callyd afore hym thes persons folowyng’, and then lists seventy-three names.35 Therefore, as we have seen, the ‘commons’ often had a designated role in monitoring the composition, keeping, and consultation of particular types of urban records, but it is not certain that these records referred to a stable and discrete social group when using this label. Who the ‘commons’ were and the number of people they constituted could vary according to the political priorities of officeholders. The ability of different groups to take the name of the ‘commons’ and assume its functions in civic record-keeping was a point of tension in urban politics. This phenomenon is demonstrated vividly by the struggles that occurred in Norwich regarding possession of the common seal, the device used to authenticate decisions approved by the ‘commons’. Ongoing disputes throughout the 1430s 32 John Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: The Changing Meaning of “The Commons”, 1381-1549’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. by Huw Pryce and John Watts (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 242-60. Watts’s argument pertains to both urban and national political communities. 33 London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter, LMA], Journal of the Court of Common Council, COL/ CC/01/01/003, fol. 156v. For discussion, see Liddy, Contesting the City, pp. 102-03, and Caroline Barron, ‘Ralph Holland and the London Radicals, 1438-1444’, in English Medieval Town, p. 171. 34 See above, p. 200. 35 Coventry Leet Book, pp. 142-43.

The Politics of Record- Keeping

and 1440s in the city between citizens allied with local religious houses, on the one hand, and citizens opposing those houses’ jurisdictional claims, on the other, often centred on the use, abuse, and custody of the common seal.36 Each group claimed that the other had appropriated the common seal, employing it to certify civic approval for recorded decisions that had not, in fact, involved consultation of the ‘commons’. During a contested 1433 mayoral election, the group in Norwich opposed to the assertion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the city claimed that their adversary, Thomas Wetherby, had illegally attempted to secure the election of William Grey as mayor, against the wishes of the ‘commons’ of Norwich. According to Wetherby’s opponents, Wetherby eventually consented that Grey should not be declared mayor, and in his place Richard Purdaunce assumed the office. Wetherby contested, however, that Purdaunce’s election occurred only after Purdaunce’s partisans went to the Guildhall and threatened the keepers of the keys to the common chest. In a later law suit, Wetherby and his party alleged that the citizens supporting Purdaunce ‘broken three dores by forne they myght come to the seid Chiste, and then thei brake vppe the seid Chiste [where] the seid Commone seale was inne’ and used the seal to certify the election of Purdaunce as mayor. This faction then supposedly kept the common seal in their own possession and continued to use it to record and authenticate decisions antithetical to Wetherby.37 Purdaunce’s supporters countered by saying that they represented the ‘commons’ of Norwich and that the common seal belonged to them ‘of ryght’; the common seal had thus been used appropriately when certifying Purdaunce’s election. In justification of their position, Purdaunce and his supporters claimed that they had re-affirmed in 1433 that the common seal should be kept by ‘iiij Substanciall Commoners’ and that it should not be used except ‘openly in a Commone Sembly’.38 When the disputed election of 1433 and other conflicts in Norwich were put to the earl of Suffolk for arbitration in 1437, the issue of the alleged wrongful use of the common seal was the first point raised.39 The common seal would come to the fore of Norwich politics again in 1443, when many citizens of Norwich claimed that Wetherby, then mayor of Norwich, had used the common seal without the knowledge of the commons to ratify an indenture with Norwich priory in 1429 that was believed to be contrary to the city’s interests. In protest, and to prevent Wetherby’s men from reaching similar agreements in future, a group of citizens again stormed the Guildhall and took ‘a wey the Comon Seall’.40

36 For details of this lengthy and complex dispute, see Philippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422-1442 (Oxford: OUP, 1992), pp. 175-205, and McRee, ‘Peacemaking and its Limits’, pp. 853-65. 37 Norfolk Record Office [hereafter NRO], Norwich City Records, case 9c/1/3: ‘broke three doors before they might come to the said Chest, and then they broke open the said Chest [where] the said Common seal was in’. 38 NRO, Norwich City Records, case 9c/1/2. 39 NRO, Norwich City Records, case 16d/1, fols 5v-6. See also Records of the City of Norwich, I, p. 336. 40 Records of the City of Norwich, I, pp. 350-51. See discussion in Liddy, Contesting the City, pp. 155-57.

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The discord in Norwich indicates that the power to create and monitor municipal records was highly prized and that the vital role of the ‘commons’ in urban record-keeping was widely acknowledged. Nevertheless, the mantle of the ‘commons’ was not a politically neutral one and could be taken up for partisan purposes to lend legitimacy to controversial actions. As a result, groups wishing to accomplish particular political aims manipulated the way in which ‘the commons’ was defined or constituted. Ordinances issued in the name of the ‘commons’, or provisions for the ‘commons’ to control access to municipal records, should not be taken at face value as evidence that non-elite citizens had a consistent role in the operation of urban politics. The ‘commons’ certainly maintained ownership over the more public varieties of urban records, but we can never be entirely sure who comprised this ill-defined and amorphous body at any given time. Secondly, while the ‘commons’ did have the opportunity to scrutinize records of the town’s customary practices, financial accounts, land transactions, and ordinances of the larger common council or common assembly – the ‘public’ business of urban government – they did not influence the way in which meetings of smaller, select aldermanic councils were recorded. There was a profusion of these types of ‘minute books’ for aldermanic councils in the fifteenth century: records of meetings of London’s mayor and aldermen begin in 1416 (though confusingly labelled as the ‘Journals of the Common Council’), a minute book for meetings of Beverley’s twelve governors begins in 1436, and the ‘Bench Book’ recording meetings of Hull’s mayor and twelve aldermen begins in 1445.41 Therefore, in the fifteenth century new opportunities emerged for those in civic government to control record-making and record-keeping, circumventing the supervisory processes required for other types of urban record. These new ‘minute books’ for aldermanic councils supplemented existing records of the actions taken by mayors, sheriffs, or aldermanic councils in their capacity as the presiding authorities over courts of law; records that stemmed from this function, such as the Exeter Mayor’s Court Rolls, also seem to have been composed without any procedures for their formal supervision or review by the commons.42 It is in precisely these types of records – the aldermanic council minute books and civic court rolls, records not monitored by the commons – that we typically find examples of punishment for seditious speech. Hull’s record of the customs, ordinances, and rules of the town makes no mention of instances of improper speech against civic officeholders, while the ‘Bench Book’ of the council of aldermen (the document not open to public audit) contains several examples of men being punished for being ‘defectyue in langage’ against municipal

41 LMA, Journal of the Court of Common Council, COL/CC/01/01/001; East Riding Archives and Local Studies [hereafter, ERALS], Minute Book of the Governors and Beverley Corporation, 143670, BC/II/7/1; HHC, C BRB/1. See also Small, ‘Municipal Registers’, pp. 50, 52, and Sarah Rees Jones, ‘Emotions, Speech, and the Art of Politics in Fifteenth-Century York: House Books, Mystery Plays, and Richard Duke of Gloucester’, Urban History, 44 (2017), pp. 586-603 (at pp. 588-95). 42 Devon Record Office [hereafter, DRO], Exeter City Records, Mayor’s Court Rolls.

The Politics of Record- Keeping

officers.43 In the 1460s alone, Hull’s Bench Book records that John Weston, Richard Wansford, Robert Gylliott, William Baron, and Robert Morland were punished for this offence.44 Sarah Rees Jones has noticed a similar trend in the nearby city of York; the advent of the House Books, recording the deliberations of the mayor and the elite councils of twelve and twenty-four, around the year 1461 brought with it an increase in known prosecutions for slanderous speech.45 The sources that historians often consult when seeking to find the voice of the ‘common man’ or ‘common woman’, therefore, are actually some of the municipal documents whose construction was least affected by popular scrutiny and most likely to represent the interests of elite writers.46 These are, certainly, often the most colourful expressions of popular political discontent, and they also record the name and profession of the man or woman who has uttered the offending words, creating opportunities for historians to retrieve the voices of subaltern individuals (such as artisans and women) from the anonymous crowd of ‘shouters’ to which elite chroniclers often relegated them.47 Sometimes, these records even go so far as to reveal the offending words uttered by a particular individual. For example, the Exeter Mayor’s Court Roll records that on 31 October 1446, a brewer named John Cole was brought before the court for complaining about the ways in which the civic government assessed beer. The record then goes on to mention that Cole verbally abused the mayor and stewards of the town by saying the words, which were written down in English in the otherwise Latin court roll, ‘go pike the Mayer and his Stywardis al the pak of ham and lete ham go to the deuell [be]for they haveth of an nother of my godys nother rule ne gouernaunce ne none shall haue for hit perteyneth noght to ham’.48 While such an example is highly informative, it is testimony to Cole’s subjugation rather than his empowerment – nor did that subjugation consist solely in the fact that Cole was imprisoned for his verba obprobriosa et inhonesta (‘opprobrious and dishonest words’).49 The fact that Cole’s name and profession is recorded is, in and of itself, an indication of failed political agency rather than successful intervention. As discussed above, it was when non-officeholders adopted the collective title of the ‘commons’ that they could exercise power – the naming

43 44 45 46

The former is HHC, C BRE/1/2, and the latter is HHC, C BRB/1. HHC, C BRB/1, fols 94v, 104v, 105v, 110, 112v, 113v. Rees Jones, ‘Emotions, Speech, and the Art of Politics’, pp. 593, 602-03. Note that many of the examples cited in Liddy, ‘“Sir Ye Be Not King”’, pp. 581-88, come from the minute books of meetings of London’s aldermanic council. 47 Dumolyn and Haemers, ‘“A Bad Chicken was Brooding”’, pp. 78-86; Jelle Haemers and Chanelle Delameillieure, ‘Women and Contentious Speech in Fifteenth-Century Brabant’, Continuity and Change, 32 (2017), pp. 323-47; Jan Dumolyn, ‘“Criers and Shouters”. The Discourse on Radical Urban Rebels in Late Medieval Flanders’, Journal of Social History, 42 (2008), pp. 111-35; Haemers, ‘Filthy and Indecent Words’, pp. 246-67; John Watts, ‘Popular Voices in England’s Wars of the Roses, c. 1445c. 1485’, in Voices of the People, pp. 116-22. 48 DRO, Exeter City Records, Mayor’s Court Roll, 25-26 Henry VI, m. 6: ‘go pike the Mayor and his Stewards, all the pack of them, and let them go to the devil before they have any more of my goods; nor shall any have rule or governance over the goods, for it pertains not to them’ 49 DRO, Exeter City Records, Mayor’s Court Roll, 25-26 Henry VI, m. 6.

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of an individual was a way of discrediting him or her, of indicating that his or her actions had not been sanctioned by the community and did not employ legitimate political discourse.50 Also, while custumals and even records of the ordinances passed by a town’s common assembly or common council tend to be very stereotyped in their content and presentation, aldermanic council minute books and mayor’s court rolls are much more haphazard. The handwriting is typically more informal and difficult to read in these types of records than in custumals, financial accounts, and common assembly rolls.51 Moreover, aldermanic council minute books and mayor’s court rolls have no set formula for recording incidents of seditious speech. For instance, sometimes the very same town clerk would write down the offensive words spoken in English, and sometimes would translate the words into Latin; the two languages are used for this purpose with equal frequency in the Exeter Mayor’s Court Roll.52 While some speakers probably had a close approximation of their words recorded in the town’s muniments, others undoubtedly had the original meaning of their language distorted through the process of translation. Similarly, within the same record there would be both entries that detailed the speaker’s specific words uttered against the urban elite or his grievances against particular civic officers, and entries that mentioned only that the speaker had maledixit (‘abused’), reprobavit (‘condemned’), or redarguit (‘rebuked’) the town’s governors, without specifying what was actually said.53 In contrast to the detail in which John Cole of Exeter’s words were recorded, the Exeter Mayor’s Court Roll reports merely that Henry Crochard said verbis dishonestis (‘dishonest words’) against Richard Orenge in November 1458.54 No person, therefore, could guarantee that his particular grievances, accusations, or curses against the town’s officials would be accorded a place on the written record – it was, essentially, up to the whim of the scribe and those who directed what he wrote. The very fact that these instances of rebellious speech were recorded in a

50 See above, p. 198. For the political role of the collective ‘commons’, see Liddy, ‘Urban Enclosure Riots’, pp. 46-77; Idem and Haemers, ‘Popular Politics’, pp. 781-805; and Watts, ‘Public or Plebs’, pp. 242-60. A more conservative interpretation, but one that still recognizes the power of the label ‘commons’, can be found in Michael Bush, ‘The Risings of the Commons in England, 1381-1549’, in Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. by Jeffrey Denton (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 109-25. 51 A contrast apparent, for example, between the hands of the London ‘Common Council’ journals (actually records of meetings of the aldermanic council, found in LMA, COL/CC/01/01) and those in the London Letter-Books (LMA, COL/AD/01). 52 As a sampling, DRO, Exeter City Archives, Mayor’s Court Roll, 9-10 Henry VI, m. 6d; 25-26 Henry VI, m. 6; 26-27 Henry VI, m. 8d; 34-35 Henry VI, m. 20d; and 1-2 Edward IV, m. 36d record offensive words towards councillors in English. DRO, Exeter City Archives, Mayor’s Court Roll, 9-10 Henry VI, mm. 9d, 42d; 13-14 Henry VI, m. 33d; 33-34 Henry VI, m. 63d; 37-38 Henry VI, m. 31d; and 4-5 Edward IV, m. 49d translate the words into Latin. 53 For these Latin verbs, and the variable contexts in which they could be employed, see the New Romney Assessment Book (KHLC, Assessment Book, 1385-1446, NR/FAc2, fols 60, 80v, 85v, 139v, 142v, 144), and the Beverley Minute Book of the Governors and Corporation (ERALS, BC/II/7/1, fols 75v, 78, 79v, 101v, 166v-67v, 208, 227, 230). 54 DRO, Exeter City Archives, Mayor’s Court Roll, 37-38 Henry VI, m. 9d.

The Politics of Record- Keeping

document that was not scrutinized by the greater commonalty represented a defeat for the individual concerned – the offence was punished, but was not accorded the dignity of being entered into the more public, communal record as part of the town’s accepted history, nor could those outside the elite have any control over the way in which the offence was depicted. Rees Jones has argued that the increased recording of slanderous words in registers like the York House Books may have been designed as a measure to punish and discourage the expression of dissent, but that the ‘very act of recording dissidence eventually increased its impact in the public government of the City and formalized, even empowered, its role within civic discourse, enabling a politics of opposition’.55 Certainly, seditious speech recorded in a publicly scrutinized municipal document served to legitimate the words spoken and accord them a place within civic memory; in court rolls or in the minute books of aldermanic councils, however, entries concerning words spoken against the mayor, aldermen, and other civic elites were kept out of the public domain and sequestered from the prying eyes or the political influence of the ‘commons’. Therefore, historians seeking to analyse ‘popular politics’ and non-elite political agency in medieval English towns need to look instead to the more mundane, standardised municipal records – custumals, financial accounts, records of common assemblies. These records do not name individuals very often, they are highly repetitive, and they contain little of the colour and drama contained in minute books or court rolls. Political power for the commons stemmed from the very regularity and ordinariness of the custumal or common assembly roll. Historians looking for ‘popular politics’ need to read civic records against the grain – it is in the boring ones that we are most likely to find examples of successful political agency by urban non-elites, and not in the more exciting records of rebellious speech. It is in this context that fifteenth-century townspeople engaged in a ‘politics of record-keeping’. The line between illicit and licit political activity was determined to a significant degree by the type of civic record in which the activity appeared. A proposal that was written down in a custumal or common assembly roll, and thus open to public inspection, had achieved a place in the permanent history of the town, however damaging that proposal or action might have been to the ruling civic government at the time; actions recorded in council minute books were, if not condemned to oblivion, certainly left outside the mainstream communal narrative. Moreover, those who were not urban officeholders had some ability, however circumscribed, to influence the ways in which their actions were depicted in publicly scrutinized records; on the other hand, less publicly available records remained the preserve of common clerks, mayors, and aldermen, able to depict events in their towns as they saw fit without fear of revision, revulsion, or rejection by the wider populace.

55 Rees Jones, ‘Emotions, Speech, and the Art of Politics’, p. 602.

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This ‘politics of record-keeping’ – the ways in which different types of municipal record served to legitimate or denigrate political actions and political speech – can be observed in action in the East Yorkshire town of Beverley during the mid-fifteenth century. Beverley’s archive consisted of several types of document. These included annual financial accounts; a ‘chartulary’ compiled in the first half of the fifteenth century, containing copies of charters granted to the town and a list of its customs; a ‘Great Guild Book’ that detailed regulations pertaining to the craft guilds of the town; and, from 1436, a minute book describing business that came before the council held by the twelve ‘governors’ or ‘keepers’ of the town.56 The first three types of document were subject to public scrutiny, while the last was accessible only to the governors and the town clerk. In 1457 on the day in which the governors of Beverley were elected, the communes burgenses (‘common burgesses’) of the town demanded that financial contributions from the craft guilds to the civic government should be made according to the custom written in Registro arcium dicte ville (‘in the Register of the crafts of the said town’), and they also sought guarantees that these financial accounts would be audited annually by the aldermen and stewards of every craft, with those who defaulted to pay £10 prout in communi libro de papiro specificatur (‘as is specified in the common book made of paper’).57 This incident demonstrates that the citizens of the town had the opportunity to access and scrutinize three of the four principal types of record produced by the civic government: financial accounts, the Great Guild Book (the ‘Register of the crafts of the said town’), and the town chartulary (‘the common book made of paper’). There is no indication that the minute book of the governors’ meetings was similarly available for consultation by the wider community. It is revealing that incidents of protest or seditious speech in Beverley which were recorded in the publicly scrutinized Great Guild Book are presented as politically significant (if sometimes regrettable) actions, while those recorded in the minute book are not accorded the same respect. It is written in the Great Guild Book that in 1435 the governors of Beverley prosecuted John Howell for speaking ill of the governors, on that grounds that Howell had maliciose et sine causa racionabili (‘maliciously and without reasonable cause’) told John Marshall and other persons that the governors of Beverley had been hearing lawsuits that should have appeared before the Archbishop of York.58 Earlier in 1435, the Great

56 These records can be found in ERALS, BC/II/6 (account rolls), BC/II/2/1 (Town Chartulary, c. 1400-1542), BC/II/3/1 (Great Guild Book, c. 1409-1598), and BC/II/7/1 (Minute Book of the Governors and Corporation, 1436-1470). Extensive extracts from these documents are printed in George Poulson, Beverlac; or the Antiquities of the Town of Beverley, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1829); Beverley Town Documents, ed. by Arthur Leach (London: B. Quaritch, 1900); and Historical Manuscripts Commission: Report on the Manuscripts of the Corporation of Beverley (London: Record Commission, 1900). 57 ERALS, BC/II/3/1, fol. 21; printed in Beverley Town Documents, p. 50. See Jennifer Kermode, ‘The Merchants of York, Beverley, and Hull in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, 1990), I, p. 296, for a brief discussion. 58 ERALS, BC/II/3/1, fol. 18v; printed in Beverley Town Documents, pp. 48-49.

The Politics of Record- Keeping

Guild Book recalls that John Wheatley, tailor, was to be punished for saying diversa verba contumeliosa et inobediencia (‘many insulting and disobedient words’) to the governors as part of a wider protest against recent regulations that the civic assembly had passed pertaining to the operation of the tailors’ guild.59 In both cases, not only are the incidents recorded in a publicly scrutinized record, but the reasons behind the malicious utterances are explained. In cases of seditious speech reported in the minute book of the governors, however, we are rarely told why the incident occurred. The form of words varies by entry, as does the length of detail with which the punishment was described, but typically the entry states merely that the offender reprobavit (‘condemned’) one or more of the governors and does not mention the measures that may have provoked these words.60 It may be that the improper speech recorded in the minute book was less politically charged than the incidents of 1435, but it may also be the case that the commons of Beverley were able to monitor the compilation of the Great Guild Book more closely than the minute book and ensured that appropriate mention was made of the speakers’ political grievances. The latter may be inferred from the contrasting ways in which the demands of Beverley’s burgesses in 1457, mentioned above, were reported in the Great Guild Book and the minute book. In the Great Guild Book, it is recorded that the ‘common burgesses’ assembled peacefully during the governors’ election of 1457 and sought the observance of written custom, the annual auditing of accounts, and the holding of mayoral elections according to the form listed in their magna carta (‘great charter’) of 1359.61 In the Great Guild Book, the citizens at the election are acting within their rights as burgesses, and the measures they request are accepted as legitimate by the community of assembled citizens. The minute book of the governors presents a different story. No account of the citizens’ demands is given; instead, it is recorded that in the days surrounding the governors’ election of 1457 John Redysham and William Atkynson were disenfranchised pro rebellione (‘for rebellion’) against the governors.62 Actions presented as licit and part of Beverley’s communal history in the Great Guild Book were designated as illegitimate in the minute book; it can be no accident that the former was a record visible to the commons of Beverley while the latter was not. In viewing these two records side-by-side, it becomes possible to see a struggle between the citizens of Beverley and their governors that was played out not just in the Guildhall but also in the very process of documenting and archiving. The version of events in the Great Guild Book was that approved by the citizens of Beverley, who would not permit the record they scrutinized to 59 ERALS, BC/II/3/1, fol. 18v; printed in Beverley Town Documents, pp. 49-50. 60 See, e.g., ERALS, BC/II/7/1, fols 62, 63, 69, 74v, 75v, 77v-78, 79v, 101v. 61 ERALS, BC/II/3/1, fol. 21; printed in Beverley Town Documents, pp. 50-51. See also Kermode, ‘Merchants of York, Beverley, and Hull’, p. 294; Eadem, ‘Obvious Observations on the Formation of Oligarchies in Late Medieval English Towns’, in Towns and Townspeople, pp. 94, 100; and Rosemary Horrox, ‘Medieval Beverley’, in Victoria County History: A History of the County of York East Riding, ed. by K. J. Allison, 9 vols (Oxford: OUP, 1969), VI, p. 24. 62 ERALS, BC/II/7/1, fol. 142v.

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describe the events of 1457 as a ‘rebellion’ in the way that the less public minute book of the governors had labelled it. The ability of the ‘common burgesses’ of Beverley to inscribe their narrative into the Great Guild Book also had wider repercussions for the historical presentation of the incident. Jennifer Kermode and Rosemary Horrox, the two modern historians who devote the most attention to fifteenth-century Beverley, both draw their accounts of the 1457 governors’ election from the Great Guild Book, neglecting to mention the punishment for Redysham and Atkynson’s ‘rebellion’ reported in the minute book.63 In this instance, then, the ‘common burgesses’ had won the battle for civic memory, and it was their interpretation of the 1457 governors’ election – as a peaceful, collective, and successful demonstration for the maintenance of existing customs – that has been remembered and presented to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers. As the events at Beverley’s 1457 governors’ election testify, politics was played out not purely, or even primarily, in violent demonstrations, but also in the bureaucratic manoeuvrings that determined where and how actions would be recorded. While some types of municipal records (such as custumals) inserted the political priorities of the ‘commons’ into the communal memory of the town, others (such as minute books for aldermanic councils) were manipulated more easily by elites. Inclusion in the latter could also ensure that the incident described remained both outside public scrutiny and outside the town’s historic narrative. Records were, themselves, a site of struggle, and the process of record-keeping a means of making or resisting political claims. In this light, it is impossible to regard municipal records purely as a tool through which urban officeholding elites accomplished their objectives; the ‘commons’ of a town had access to custumals, common assembly rolls, and financial accounts, and exercised their right to protest when they believed that mayors, aldermen, or common clerks had either not observed the tenets laid out in these records or had inserted material in secrecy or in error. Archiving and record-keeping can thus testify to the continued power of non-officeholders in urban politics, validating the claims made by Christian Liddy about the vital role of the urban ‘commons’ throughout the later Middle Ages.64 Over the course of the fifteenth century, however, the advent of aldermanic minute books in many English towns altered the balance of power. The supervisory role of the commons in record-keeping was confined to ‘old-fashioned’ types of registers, and in the new minute books of elite council meetings urban officeholders had no incentive to ensure that the commons’ priorities were represented since these documents were not subject to public scrutiny. Minute books of aldermanic council meetings are testimony to a narrowing of political power in late medieval English towns and the unsuccessful attempts by citizens to resist it. The minute books themselves also were the very instruments through which this narrowing was enacted.

63 Kermode, ‘Obvious Observations’, pp. 94, 100; Horrox, ‘Medieval Beverley’, p. 24. 64 As presented in Liddy, Contesting the City.

Jan Du molyn  

Conclusion: Urban Revolts and Communal Politics in the Middle Ages Problems and Perspectives This volume of well-documented case studies provides an opportunity for reflection on the state of a flourishing field within medieval history: the study of urban ‘revolts’, ‘rebellions’, ‘collective action’ or ‘contentious politics’, and, in a broader sense, research into the political participation in the medieval city of larger groups of the population than only the elites. Even if, surely, factions of the urban upper classes also could and often did play a role in medieval rebellions, these phenomena are now sometimes dealt with collectively under the term ‘popular politics’, implying that the middle and lower groups were always a force to be reckoned with.1 Yet this is a recent phenomenon; for a long time the general scholarly consensus used to be that the popular classes in medieval towns were mostly powerless and could only act politically when they violently revolted. In ‘normal’ periods, they had almost no influence, and it was the ‘patrician’ elite of merchants and landowners who ruled the medieval town. As the introduction to this volume emphasizes, this picture of the political reality of medieval urban space is no longer tenable. Classical and recent historiography A growing interest in the communal movement of the central Middle Ages, and also into the struggles between artisans and patricians during the later Middle Ages, first arose within national traditions of medieval urban historiography, most of all in France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany.2 To the background of the



1 For the notion of ‘popular politics’, see Jane Whittle and Stephen H. Rigby, ‘England: popular politics and social conflict’, in A companion to Britain in the later Middle Ages, ed. by Stephen H. Rigby (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 65-86. On revolts as belonging to the category of ‘collective action’, see Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978). Tilly later preferred the term ‘contentious politics’: Charles Tilly and Sidney G. Tarrow, Contentious politics (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006). As the relevant bibliography for what follows is enormous, all footnotes in this chapter will be exemplary rather than exhaustive. In the introduction to this book by Eersels and Haemers, many other relevant references can be found as well. 2 The following short overview of historiographical developments may also be read alongside a similar attempt by J. Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Introduction: medieval revolt in context’, in The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt, ed. by Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaerts (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1-15, who lays more emphasis on ‘revolts against the state’, whereas in what follows I tend to focus on ‘internal revolts’ against the urban elites itself. Jan Dumolyn • Ghent University Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Eersels & Jelle Haemers, SEUH 48 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 213-224.

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rise of the nation state, the developing labour movement, the processes of democratization, and the global revolutionary struggles of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, a number of ‘iconic’ urban revolts began to receive attention, including the 1378 Ciompi rebellion of Florence, the rising of Paris under Etienne Marcel in 1356, and the Flemish guild struggles of 1302, as well as rural revolts such as the Jacquerie, the so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, or the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25.3 Gradually, historians realized that there were many other cases of popular rebellion, and the theme became more popular. The first real peak of the research into medieval revolts, however, came in the wake of the protests of ‘May 1968’, with the important overview of Mollat and Wolff, who worked within the paradigm of the Annales School and were also inspired by Marxism to some degree. They situated revolts within the structural economic, demographic and social contradictions and movements of society, as well as within processes of state formation and growing fiscal pressure. Mollat and Wolff ’s views were often implicitly sympathetic to the rebels and their demands, but they were followed by conservative reactions by Fourquin and Heers. These scholars stressed the agency of elites organized into political factions within the city, while downplaying any possible independent political agenda of the popular classes.4 Even if their views were often excessively ideologically informed, the merit of their work was to point attention to the logic of factionalism and vertical solidarities, other important aspects of the social and political constellation of medieval towns, next to class divisions and exploitation. In the 1980s and 90s, it was the state formation paradigm and especially the historical sociology of Charles Tilly, based upon the interplay of war and taxes, that exerted an increasing influence on the study of politics in medieval towns. Later medieval and early modern collective actions were primarily considered as forms of resistance against the rise of state power, and internal social and political contradictions within cities and other communities were studied to the





3 Examples of these national traditions: in Belgium Henri Pirenne, Belgian democracy. Its early history (London: Longman, 1915); Hans Van Werveke, Gand: esquisse d’histoire sociale (Brussels: La Renaissance du livre, 1946); in France for instance Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Les communes françaises, caractères et évolution des origines au XVIIe siècle (Paris: A. Michel, 1947); in Italy an early example of the study of urban struggles is Gaetano Salvemini, Studi storici (Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1901); in Western Germany there is for instance the classic article by Erich Maschke, ‘Verfassung und soziale Kräfte in der deutschen Stadt des Mittelalters, vornehmlich in Oberdeutschland’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 46 (1959), pp. 289-349, 433-76; in Eastern Germany the fundamental work by Karl Czok, Städtische Volksbewegungen im deutschen Spätmittelalter. Ein Beitrag zu Bürgerkämpfen und innerstädtischen Bewegungen während der frühbürgerlichen Revolution, Leipzig, 1963; British historiography, and certainly Marxist history writing, always focused more on peasant revolts, see notably Rodney H. Hilton, Bond men made free: Medieval peasant movements and the English rising of 1381 (London: Routledge, 1977). 4 Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, Ongles bleus, Jacques et Ciompi: les révolutions populaires en Europe aux XIV e et XV e siècles (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1970); Guy Fourquin, Les soulèvements populaires au Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972); Jacques Heers, Parties and political life in the medieval West (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1977).

Con clusion : Ur b an Revolts a nd Communa l Politics

background of this process.5 Princely fiscality, but also taxation imposed by urban governments, was regarded as an indicator of social and political power structures and resisting taxes as a prime motive for popular revolt.6 In the meantime, the ‘history from below’ that had come into being since the 1970s was gradually again abandoned, and in the political climate after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the prosopographical study of urban elites came to replace interest in the working classes.7 Craft guilds, another traditional topic often dealt with by urban historians of the Middle Ages in terms of struggles between the rich and the poor, were now less and less studied from a social and political point of view. Guilds have recently been mostly considered within the paradigm of ‘new institutional economics’, for which the main question is if they either stimulate or hold back economic growth in terms of ‘transaction costs’. However, this approach often completely neglects social and political aspects of the artisans as a group in urban society.8 During the same period, a fruitful cultural perspective was added to the study of medieval popular movements in the wake of innovative studies by Edward Palmer Thompson and Nathalie Zemon Davis; the scholarship was influenced by a general wave of microstoria or historical anthropology in which, however, historians of the early modern period played a more leading role than medievalists.9 Especially since the 1990s, under the influence of the ‘linguistic’ and ‘performative turns’, the focus of historians of medieval popular uprisings shifted towards the utterances and performances of rebels and the forms of communication they deployed. Thus, during the first decades of the twenty-first century, the study of ‘ritual’ or ‘symbolic’ communication gradually became more widespread.10 Closely related to this cultural turn in the study of revolts,

5 For instance Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800, ed. by Wim Blockmans and Charles Tilly (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994). 6 See for instance Marc Boone and Maarten Prak, ‘Rulers, patricians and burghers: the Great and the Little traditions of urban revolt in the Low Countries’, in A miracle mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European perspective, ed. by Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 99-134. 7 For instance Les élites urbaines au Moyen Âge: XXVIIe Congrès de la SHMES: Rome, mai 1996, ed. by Claude Gauvard (Paris: Sorbonne, 1997). 8 A key publication inspired by New Institutional Economics was Stephan Epstein, ‘Craft guilds, apprenticeship and technological change in pre-modern Europe’, The Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), 684-713. A historian like Knut Schulz, ‘Die politische Zunft. Eine die spätmittelalterliche Stadt prägende Institution?’, in Verwaltung und Politik in Städten Mitteleuropas. Beiträge zu Verfassungsnorm und Verfassungswirklichkeit in altständischer Zeit, ed. by Wilfried Ehbrecht (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), pp. 1-20, however, continues to emphasize the political dimension of craft guilds with his concept of the ‘political guild’, while Gervase Rosser, The art of solidarity in the middle ages: guilds in England 1250-1550 (Oxford: OUP, 2015) essentially focuses on their social and religious aspects inspired by a Durkheimian approach, and Hugo Soly, ‘The political economy of European craft guilds: power relations and economic strategies of merchants and master artisans in the medieval and early modern textile industries’, International Review of Social History, 53 (2008), pp. 45-71 defends a more classic Marxist position. 9 Edward P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (London: Penguin, 1963); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and culture in early modern France: eight essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977). 10 For instance the work of Richard Trexler, Public life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980) inspiring Peter Arnade, Realms of ritual: Burgundian ceremony and civic life in late medieval Ghent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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memorial practices and the concept of ‘social memory’ are now also at the centre of scholarly attention. Again, the incentive came from specialists of early modern and also modern history, better-documented periods to enable answers to such questions.11 Another innovative perspective on popular politics in medieval cities was spatiality. Slowly but steadily, the socio-topographical differences within the study became a focal point for scholars of revolts and social tensions. Medieval urban politics was always also a spatial politics, as is demonstrated during the occupation of urban places by rebels or in strike actions in the form of collective leaving town in order to withhold labour from the community.12 Far less attention has been given to links with popular devotion and religion. This might be explained by the fact that the study of ‘heresy’ has largely been separated from the study of popular revolts. Scholars dealing with heretical movements have always formed a separate research tradition, which, especially in recent decades, has communicated little with that of ‘secular’ collective actions. This is perhaps due to earlier, unconvincing attempts by scholars like Norman Cohn, who reduced all revolts to an alleged ‘pursuit of the Millennium’, but also to dogmatic Marxist-Leninists, who in their turn reduced all heretical movements to class struggle.13 John Arnold recently suggested a possible approach of reconciling the two lines of research.14 And another topic that deserves more attention is the role of women in medieval revolts. Gender perspectives are starting to be formulated, but tentatively, as much basic empirical research still needs to be carried out.15 There are yet other blind spots. Although scholars like Peter Blickle have been arguing for decades that there are few fundamental differences between urban and rural communities (or ‘communes’ in the more political sense of the word), the study of collective action and popular politics in town and countryside still form two essentially separate historiographical traditions.16 Economic historians now tend to relativize the stereotypical picture of two different worlds, and students of medieval revolts know that urban and peasant rebels often joined forces, as was the case in the so-called English Peasants’ Revolt, which had many cities participating (and the same goes for ‘peasant revolts’ in Germany and Flanders). Urban and rural communities 11 For instance Judith Pollman, Catholic identity and the revolt of the Netherlands: 1520-1635 (Oxford: OUP, 2011). 12 A pioneering work was Samuel K. Cohn, The laboring classes in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), followed by for instance Alessandro Stella, La révolte des Ciompi: les hommes, les lieux, le travail (Paris: EHESS, 1993) and The power of space in late medieval and early modern Europe: The cities of Italy, Northern France and the Low Countries, ed. by Marc Boone and Martha Howell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 13 Norman Cohn, The pursuit of the millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957); and in the GDR for instance Martin Erbstösser and Ernst Werner, Ideologische Probleme des mittelalterlichen Plebejertums: die freigeistige Häresie und ihre sozialen Wurzeln (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966). 14 John Arnold, ‘Religion and Popular Rebellion, from the Capuciati to Niklashausen’, Cultural and Social History, 6 (2009), pp. 149-70. 15 One recent example is Chanelle Delameillieure and Jelle Haemers, ‘Women and contentious speech in fifteenth-century Brabant’, Continuity and Change, 32 (2017), pp. 323-47. 16 Peter Blickle, Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform (Munich: Oldenbourg), 2000.

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seem to have defended their privileges according to the same political logic and ideological discourses. However, we still lack more integrated approaches comparing medieval revolts in town and countryside. Finally, another recent historiographical trend needs to be discussed. Since about a decade and a half, a new, more explicitly politically focus on medieval revolts was formulated into an important overview by Samuel Cohn. Working with a large quantitative sample of various types of collective actions, he demonstrated that revolts were not exceptional but, rather, integral to the political climate of many medieval cities. In most cases, they were not directed by factions of the elite; the popular classes displayed their own political agency.17 Patrick Lantschner followed by emphasizing the necessity for urban rebels to form inter-class coalitions in order to be successful in the polycentric political order of the medieval city.18 Most recently, Christian Liddy investigated the role of burghership as a central stake within urban conflicts.19 Meanwhile, scholars like Vincent Challet, Jelle Haemers, Rafael Oliva Herrer, Claire Judde de Larivière, and myself have emphasized processes of communication, the drawing up of petitions and letters of complaint, and ‘the politics of the spoken word’ within medieval communities in general.20 These approaches differ in their focus, but over the last fifteen years a consensus seems to have developed that ‘open revolts’ were merely the continuation of ‘normal’ politics. Medieval cities were the theatre of a constant struggle for political participation, for the right to legally express one’s views and influence decision making. In most cases, this struggle was not expressed in open conflict at all. Thus, in recent historiography there has been a tendency to downgrade the use of force and stress symbolic violence instead. An exception is Hannah Skoda, who has focused on the violent aspects of medieval revolts by considering rebellious bloodshed as merely one form of ‘communicative’ violence.21 Indeed, even if the image of outbursts of violence by irrational crowds is often a stereotypical one imposed by both medieval elite sources hostile to any popular action and the bourgeois prejudices of modern historians, we should also be wary of entirely neglecting the role of violence, or the menace of violence in popular politics, including intimidation and ‘ritual’ or ‘symbolic’ violence. Neither should the recent emphasis on alliances, participation, peaceful petitioning and ideological discourses shared between various social groups lead us to dilute the real

17 Samuel K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (Cambridge Mass.: HUP, 2009). 18 Patrick Lantschner, The logic of political conflict in medieval cities: Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370-1440 (Oxford: OUP, 2015). 19 Christian Liddy, Contesting the city: the politics of citizenship in English towns, 1250-1530 (Oxford: OUP, 2017). 20 Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘“A Bad Chicken was Brooding”: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), pp. 45-86; Claire Judde de Larivière, La révolte des boules de neige. Murano face à Venise, 1511 (Paris: Fayard, 2014); The voices of the people in late medieval Europe: communication and popular politics, ed. by Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). 21 Hannah Skoda, Medieval violence: physical brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

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‘contentious politics’ in the regular and daily political processes within the medieval city: open strikes and armed rebellion. The city remained a divided space of oppressors and oppressed. Structural violence was, of course, ubiquitous in medieval society, in the form of class domination or in the form of exclusion from power. And violence always causes new violence. Bringing class and the economy back in From the above it has become clear that the recent emphasis on the purely political logic of medieval urban revolts, combined with a growing awareness of cultural and discursive forms, has changed our views over the last few decades. Yet these new focal points have also left us with what is perhaps the most conspicuous blind spot in today’s approaches to the problem: the absence of any interest in economic structures and conjunctures and, hence, of anything that resembles a ‘class analysis’. Historians of medieval revolts now rarely start with sketching the economic and social layout of the town they study, as if this were an outdated question or one that is too easily taken for granted. As alluded to above, until some decades ago, popular revolts, and especially those of the tumultuous fourteenth century, were usually explained in terms of economic oppression, misery, or poverty. Historians inspired by classical liberal or Marxist paradigms considered political conflict in pre-industrial towns both as crucial steps in the emergence of more ‘democratic’ political institutions and as the manifestation of socio-economic contradictions. Between the 1950s and 70s, Annales historians of the medieval and early modern periods clearly distinguished between socio-economic triggers and political motivations. Making use of structuralist quantitative social history, they focused on the ways in which changes in the material conditions of life determined the occurrence of revolt. Studying wages and prices to determine standards of living, they looked for connections between dearth or famine, disease, poverty or unemployment, and social unrest.22 Mollat and Wolff thus argued that many of the fourteenth-century revolts were caused by ‘misery’ and ‘poverty’.23 Also in the neo-Malthusian framework that remained very influential until the 1980s and was especially popular with more conservative historians, revolts were seen as a cyclical phenomenon, determined by medium-term shifts in the balance between population and resources. Fourquin distinguished a typology of soulèvements liés à la conjuncture. These revolts were part of a pre-industrial world where the limits to growth were never far off, and a temporary imbalance could cause cyclical problems and their concomitant political and social tensions.24

22 For instance Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Dalloz, 1933); George Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century. Studies in Popular Protest (London: Collins, 1970). 23 Mollat and Wolff, Ongles bleus, p. 93. 24 Fourquin, Les soulèvements.

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Hence, what scholars working in different paradigms used to explicitly agree upon was that outbreaks of popular rebellion were often caused by conjunctural hunger or periods of economic crisis but also had to considered within the structural framework of opposing interests between, for instance, merchants and entrepreneurs and the labourers they employed. Artisans stood up against an oligarchy of merchants who not only denied them access to the political realm, but also exploited them economically. Any explanation of contentious politics in later medieval Europe thus had to comprise both socio-economic and political elements. Yet all this seems to have been mostly forgotten now.25 Let us again look at a recent and interesting book to elaborate on this point. To some degree also informed by recent political theory, in his already mentioned Logic of Political Conflict Lantschner in fact took up earlier leads formulated by scholars as diverse as the East-German historical materialist Karl Czok – who was the first to systematically draw attention to the central role of alliances of various social groups within städtische Volksbewegungen, a kind of ‘popular fronts’ – and the US medievalist Rhiman Rotz, who also expressed similar ideas but from a non-Marxist point of view.26 However, typical for the historiographical trends outlined above (to which the undersigned also belongs, so this is not to be taken as harsh criticism) Lantschner did not systematically integrate socio-economic contradictions within his model to explain differences in configurations of alliances between different cities. Yet in many cases, the sources show that rebels often also clearly asked for economic measures to be taken or policies to be changed. There seems to be a tendency to reduce such demands too rapidly to the realm of the political alone. Even a historian inspired by Marxism like Sam Cohn seems to explicitly or implicitly argue that even revolts against monetary policies, taxes or government measures dealing with the import or export of grain and other foodstuffs, which at first sight appear to be ‘economic’ in nature, were in fact primarily formulated as ‘political’ demands. Even if rebels often defended ideals of equality, brotherhood, or liberty, he states, in practice the lower strata of society rather sought political inclusion, citizen rights, and self-organization in guilds, rather than challenging labour relations. And when in power, ‘revolutionary governments’ such as the Ciompi in Florence or the city councils involving guilds in Flanders did propose some measures to improve the living standards of the lower classes, but they could never challenge the dominant power relations, let alone the prevailing modes of production.27

25 In the recent Routledge Handbook of Medieval Studies, for instance, the attention for socio-economic factors in the chapters dealing with urban revolts is minimal. This is not a reproach to any of my colleagues, as this observation includes my own recent work, including a chapter co-authored with my longtime friend and ally Jelle Haemers in that very book, as well. 26 Karl Czok, ‘Zunftkämpfe, Zunftrevolutionen oder Bürgerkämpfe’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der KarlMarx-Universität Leipzig, 8 (1958/59), pp. 129-43; Rhiman Rotz, ‘“Social Struggles” or the Price of Power? German urban uprisings in the late middle ages’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 76 (1985), pp. 64-95. 27 Cohn, Lust for Liberty, pp. 56-74, 108-10.

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There is certainly more than a grain of truth in all this, but does this mean that ‘class’ (in a broad sense) does not matter at all anymore? I argue that any medieval urban revolt, as well as the specific coalitions or political fault lines it produced, were always to a degree conditioned by the class constellation of the town. Class does not have to be presented as a simple picture. Sometimes a more or less clear bipolar opposition between li riches and li povres or between the popolo grosso and the popolo minuto existed in the more economically developed medieval cities. Yet that does not imply that these were the only two social classes in society, nor that there was no upwards social mobility possible. Clearly, a ‘pure’ class struggle, opposing those possessing the means of production on the one hand and the workers selling their labour power on the other, was a rare phenomenon in medieval communal political struggles, and any vulgar Marxist approach to the problem has already been abandoned by even the medieval historians from the Stalinist GDR since the 1960s.28 But in fact, medievalists inspired by historical materialism have thus far only contributed little to a theoretical understanding of the social configurations of the later medieval town. They have usually preferred rural uprisings, as it seemed easier to frame these within a clear-cut image of the ‘feudal mode of production’. As Maurice Dobb and especially Rodney Hilton pointed out, rural revolts often had a more obvious class character when peasants opposed extra-economic surplus extraction (which, again, is not to say they can be reduced to only class).29 In fact, the later medieval city is not that easily framed in a feudal mode of production; as a social formation it could be characterized by a variety of socio-economic relations, including those between landowners, rentiers and merchants, between merchants and small producers, between master guildsmen and their journeymen and apprentices, between retailers and artisans working for the local markets and artisans in the larger export industries such as cloth production, etc. Moreover, even during the later Middle Ages in smaller and more agriculturally oriented towns, local lords or an urban nobility could still exert much influence. In short, when it comes to their socio-economic structure, geographical and chronological variations between medieval towns were very considerable, as were relations between urban autonomy and princely power. But again, the absence of a simple dichotomist class antagonism (if there ever existed one in history) does, of course, not imply that no analysis grounded in classical political economy needs to be undertaken. Surely, if we want to understand why at certain moments in certain towns certain alliances between diverging social groups could be formed, considering their relations to production processes and markets is still the way forward, or at least a necessary starting point. In the large industrial towns of Flanders, for instance, there seems to have been an objective alliance between entrepreneurs (the ‘clothiers’ or ‘drapers’), small producers, and wage workers (journeymen 28 This was notably the case for Czok, Städtische Volksbewegungen. 29 Maurice Dobb, Studies in the development of capitalism (London: Routledge, 1946); Rodney H. Hilton, Class conflict and the crisis of feudalism: essays in medieval social history (London: Hambledon, 1985).

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and apprentice boys) in the weavers’ guild. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the major rebellions of Ghent and Bruges, these ‘productive classes’ clearly opposed the ‘commercial classes’ of the merchants and brokers.30 The same observation can in fact be made for a number of German cities like Cologne or Augsburg. Yet the commercial elites could at some point also form an objective coalition with the fullers, who often belonged to the most downtrodden layers in society and were wage workers of the drapers. The artisans of the luxury guild and the retailers might shift allegiances between the productive classes of the export industries and the commercial elites, depending on the economic and political situation of the moment. In smaller towns, differences between the various kinds of guilds would perhaps not matter that much, as a relatively weaker group of artisans would stand no chance if they were divided vis à vis the merchants. Princes, nobles, and prelates or monasteries might also enter this game of shifting alliances. And so did rival factions of the merchant class. Towards an integrated model of struggle and participation One challenge for historians of medieval urban revolts, and of medieval ‘urban politics’ in general, is to reintegrate social and economic history into the dominant political-cultural frame of today. The contributions in the present volume show that, in spite of the diversity in socio-economic paths of development and also of precise types of municipal institutions between various parts of medieval Europe, there were striking resemblances. Themes treated in this books such as ‘institutional bargaining’, the social groups involved and their interactions, and discourse and political thought should be more systematically integrated within a broader narrative from a more materialist point of view. We lack any kind of general synthesis on medieval popular participation in urban governments, or even any attempt of an overview of urban institutions, but a very schematic outline – swiftly passing over any geographical and chronological details – of the institutions of government and the struggle for popular participation in European towns might result in the following picture. The earliest communes, whether in Italy, the Rhineland, France, or Flanders, all had forms of popular assemblies in which the adult men who had sworn the communal oath could participate. We must beware, though, not to present a Romantic picture of egalitarianism in the medieval communes.31 These earliest councils, about which we are only superficially informed due to a lack of sources, were undoubtedly dominated by elites known as the sapientiores, probi viri, prudentiores or seniores. In Italian communes, a tendency to form oligarchies soon led to consules – and later a podestà coming from the outside. The same

30 A point of view developed by Soly, ‘The political economy’. 31 My point of view has been inspired by Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

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went, for instance, for princely appointed scabini in France or in a region like Flanders, which replaced or undermined these primeval institutions. During the twelfth and thirteenth century, cities in Western Europe and the Mediterranean saw their fastest economic and demographic growth, as well as a rapidly increasing social polarization (central, eastern and northern Europe lagging somewhat behind in urban development). This marked the beginning of a disequilibrium between, on the one hand, patrician oligarchic rule and the institutions it made use of and, on the other hand, the yearning of rising social groups for political recognition, inclusion in the body politic of the city – both in physical urban space and in the form of full burgher rights – and participation in government and urban finances. In Italy, the popolo movement included broader layers of middle and popular classes, with intellectuals like notaries also involved in this struggle for a new, more representative type of government. Ruling classes, who had the tendency to close themselves off and form a ‘patriciate’, now had to concede to these demographically more important and socially and politically more conscious new ‘middle classes’ or homines novi. They had to grant them more access to communal space, the right to speak out, to control, to participate. In short, especially from the thirteenth century onwards, new or rising social groups struggled to be part of political institutions, overcoming inequalities in representation or taxation and often also in individual legal statutes such as burghership and an autonomous guild organization. Especially in many Mediterranean cities but also elsewhere, neighbourhoods and parishes formed basic units of some degree of political participation for the popular classes, even if they were only limited to an advisory role. In a number of towns in the Rhineland, Italy, and the Low Countries, it would be the craft guilds who took up this role of representing corporate parts of the city. And generally in towns throughout medieval Europe, this function was also fulfilled by various types of ‘broad’ or ‘large’ councils, which in one form or another tended to appear in cities and towns across Europe, mostly from the fourteenth century onwards. A highly developed city such as Florence ultimately reached a complex institutional equilibrium with various types of councils of the commune, the popolo, the Guelf party, guilds etc. In the towns of England, artisans had less power, but even there they fought for new, more representative institutions to govern the city. Even in a very top-down type of urban political constellation like Venice, there were various institutions with advisory power. I am far too sketchy and inexact here but the articles in this volume both testify to the great diversity in form and demonstrate the considerable similarities in political functions and social background these types of councils possessed, even in parts of Europe like Scandinavia that were rather insignificant from an urban perspective. Let us not be too overly optimistic, however. On the one hand, the medieval urban ‘public sphere’ (or ‘publicity’) was not completely totalitarian – the ruling elites usually lacked the material power to enforce this – but, on the other, the possibility for participating in broader city councils or in guild and neighbourhood meetings, or to formulate demands in petitions, usually remained a limited one.

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Few of these institutions gave a voice to the real working classes, to the most excluded groups of urban society, let alone to women or the youth. What they often did do, however, was bringing about a wider social participation outside of the commercial and landowning patricians who almost invariably governed medieval towns. Communal and guild institutions also became at some point vehicles for the reproduction of power relations, including the ideological legitimation of class dominance and disciplining the labour force. Indeed, craft guilds, once participating in political power, also had the tendency to develop their own internal elites who often no longer defended the interests of the rank and file they were meant to represent, although they sometimes were forced to because of mobilizations. Perhaps the real question in ‘popular’ or ‘contentious’ politics is to what degree the lowest classes in medieval society could develop a proper political agency, one which is not easily revealed by the sources. Even the records produced by guilds or broader communal assemblies silence the voices of the most humble layers in society, ‘those in the darkness’, as Bertold Brecht had it. It seems that it is difficult to escape Roberto Michels’s ‘Iron law of oligarchy’ and the dialectics it gave rise to in the medieval city. Politics were often cyclical in nature, with institutions opening for new groups, closing themselves off again, or being replaced by new ones. Interacting with various possible socio-economic paths of development, medieval ‘urban politics’ might also be understood as the confrontation of two political principles or types of logic.32 Even if, in the formation of political alliance, other players could be present on the political field – local lords and bishops and, later, the princely state and its representatives – we may distinguish, on the one hand, an elite or ‘patrician’ ideal type of political logic and, on the other, a ‘communal’ and in the later Middle Ages, ‘corporatist’ type. A town’s political elite could also be divided along factional lines, or it might have oligarchic features in which a number of families closed off the political arena for newcomers who might be just as rich, since the logic of elite urban politics was materially based upon landed property (inside but also outside of the town) and on merchant capital, including the financial sector. The property and honour of lineages were its driving forces. The political logic of the early city communes and later the popolo or craft guild type of regimes, then, was one founded on the value of labour within the community and on the social position and identity of small commodity producers and their modest means of production; it was not based on the logic of the extended family but, rather, upon the nuclear household, which was in many cases also the basic unit for production for subsistence or petty accumulation, as well as on common men swearing oaths of mutual aid and brotherly love, and on an idea that governments, guilds, and other corporate types of organization had to secure a livelihood for all and justice for everyone. The elites had the

32 I am obviously inspired here by John M. Najemy, Corporatism and consensus in Florentine electoral politics, 1280-1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

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power of money and property, but the common people had the force of numbers. The essence of communal / corporate politics thus included being or trying to become a member of the body politic of the city and, if possible, seeking to belong to the maior et sanior pars of the town, in a council or any other institution. The ideological objective was to be able to speak out in the name of the entire community – in other words of the common utility or the common good – and, if possible, making one’s ideology a hegemonic one of the sanior pars. These are but schematic historical-sociological observations, but perhaps they might serve in finding a new balance in our field of study. It has rapidly changed since the last decades. Cultural and political analysis have now come to the forefront. The roles of ritual, language, and gender have also been highlighted, but I maintain that some of the most interesting features of earlier phases in this historiography are now unduly being neglected. In sum, as Hegel already knew, das Wahre ist das Ganze: only a total analysis, the combination – often the re-combination – of all these factors in careful empirical work involved seems at this stage of the research to form a way forward.