This book was prompted by the publication in 1991 of Towns in the Viking Age by Helen Clarke and Björn Ambrosiani. The fact that that book scarcely mentions the towns in the southern Low Countries and is chronologically restricted to the Viking Age – however broadly based, from the seventh to the ninth centuries – led to the realization that, apart from a number of valuable contributions in the old (1950) and new (1981/2) Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, there is no recent work which provides a clear view of the urban history of the southern Low Countries from the late Roman period to the first burgeoning of the towns in the twelfth century.

Though they still have the capacity to fascinate, the works of Pirenne in this area are outdated, as is the work of Edith Ennen, Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt (1953), which deals with the southern Low Countries at some considerable length. Since then, and especially since the major overview in the form of an article by Franz Petri, Die Anfänge des mittelalterlichen Städtewesens in den Niederlanden und dem angrenzenden Frankreich (1958), much research has been carried out into the urban history of the whole of the southern Netherlands and into the emergence and earliest history of many individual towns in this area. I recently compiled and reprinted a collection of the most important of these studies in Anfänge des Städtewesens an Schelde, Maas und Rhein bis zum Jahre 1000, which appeared in the series Städteforschung, vol. A/40, produced by the Institut für vergleichende Städtegeschichte in Münster (1996). It can serve as a sort of reader for the work under consideration here.