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Returning urban political elites to the research agenda: the case of the Southern Low Countries (c. 1350 – c. 1550)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2019

Frederik Buylaert ,
Jelten Baguet  and
Janna Everaert
Frederik Buylaert*
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, UFO, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Jelten Baguet
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, HOST Research Group, Pleinlaan 2, office 5C457, 1050 Brussels, Belgium/Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Dondena Centre for Research, Via Guglielmö Röntgen 1, 20136 Milan, Italy
Janna Everaert
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Building C – Room 5.457, Pleinlaan 2, BE-1050 Brussels, Belgium/Universiteit Antwerpen, Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, City Campus – Room S.SJ.216, Sint-Jacobsmarkt 13, BE-2000 Antwerpen, Belgium
*
*Corresponding author. Email: frederik.buylaert@ugent.be
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Abstract

This article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries between c. 1350 and c. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

Type
Introduction
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 568 - 588
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

†

The research for this special section is financially supported by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Belgian IAP Project ‘City and Society in the Low Countries (ca. 1200 – ca. 1850)’, the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and the ERC Starting Grant no. 677502: STATE – Lordship and the Rise of States in Western Europe, 1300–1600. The contributors thank their colleagues at their home institutions, as well as three anonymous referees for helpful critiques. Dr Erika Graham was so kind as to proofread our English.

References

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5 These studies are: Brand, H., Over macht en overwicht: Stedelijke elites in Leiden (1420–1510) (Leuven and Apeldoorn, 1996)Google Scholar; S. Lamet, ‘Men in government: the patriciate of Leiden 1550–1600’, University of Massachusetts Ph.D. thesis, 1979; Noordam, D., Geringde buffels en heren van stand: Het patriciaat van Leiden 1574–1700 (Hilversum, 1994)Google Scholar; Prak, M., Gezeten burgers: De elite in een Hollandse stad. Leiden 1700–1780 (Dieren, 1985)Google Scholar; Kan, F. Van, Sleutels tot de macht: De ontwikkeling van het Leidse patriciaat tot 1420 (Hilversum, 1988)Google Scholar.

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7 Dumolyn, J., Buylaert, F., Dupont, G., Haemers, J. and Ramandt, A., ‘Political power and social groups, c. 1300–1500’, in Brown, A. and Dumolyn, J. (eds.), Medieval Bruges, c. 850–1550 (Cambridge, 2018), 268–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The quantitative estimates on the Bruges political elite are the responsibility of F. Buylaert. For the purposes of this comparative article, these data have been expanded in collaboration with Jelten Baguet and Janna Everaert to include the first half of the sixteenth century.

8 For considerations of space, we only provide references for the information that cannot be retrieved from the three articles on Ghent, Mechelen and Antwerp that follow this comparative article.

9 Ghent also became an important centre of grain trade and a local transportation hub due to its location at the rivers Scheldt and Lys: discussed in Dambruyne, J., Mensen en centen: Het 16de-eeuwse Gent in demografisch en economisch perspectief (Ghent, 2001), 181–344Google Scholar. For Mechelen, see Van Uytven, R. (in collaboration with Installé, H.) (ed.), De geschiedenis van Mechelen: Van heerlijkheid tot stadsgewest (Tielt, 1995), 83–4, 119Google Scholar.

10 Ghent's political system has been discussed extensively in Boone, Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen, and Dambruyne, J., Corporatieve middengroepen: Aspiraties, relaties en transformaties in de 16de-eeuwse Gentse ambachtswereld (Ghent, 2002), 511–600Google Scholar.

11 See the recent synthesis: Brown and Dumolyn (eds.), Medieval Bruges.

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13 Dumolyn et al., ‘Political power and social groups’, 319–20 (Table 7.3).

14 Ghent's demographic evolution is discussed in Dambruyne, Mensen en centen, 346–9. For Bruges, see Brown and Dumolyn (eds.), Medieval Bruges, passim.

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18 For Antwerp and Mechelen, see the following contributions to this special section by Janna Everaert and Frederik Buylaert respectively. For Ghent, see Jelten Baguet, ‘“De heren van Gent.” Politieke elites en sociale verandering in de zestiende eeuw’, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Ph.D. thesis, 2018.

19 Menjot, D., ‘La classe dominante des villes de l'Occident méditerranéen au seuil de la modernité’, in Montalvo, J. Hinojosa (ed.), 1490. En el umbral de la modernidad: El Mediterraneo europeo y las cuidades en el tránsito de los siglos XV–XVI (Valencia, 1994), 181–203Google Scholar.

20 The available estimates are discussed in Contamine, P., ‘The European nobility’, in Allmand, C. (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. VII: c. 1415–1500 (Cambridge, 1998), 101–2Google Scholar. For Flanders, see Buylaert, F., ‘The late medieval “crisis of the nobility” reconsidered: the case of Flanders’, Journal of Social History, 45 (2012), 1117–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Dumolyn, J., De Brugse opstand van 1436–1438 (Kortrijk and Heule, 1997), 57–8Google Scholar.

22 For a historiographical discussion, see Fynn-Paul, J., ‘Let's talk about class: towards an institutionalist typology of class relations in the cities of pre-modern Europe (c. 1200 – c. 1800), Urban History, 41 (2014), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 The best discussion is Schreiner, K., ‘Religiöse, historische und rechtliche Legitimation spätmittelalterlicher Adelsherrschaft’, in Oexle, O. and Paravicini, W. (eds.), Nobilitas: Funktion und Repräsentation des Adels in Alteuropa (Göttingen, 1997), 376–430Google Scholar.

24 Friedrichs, C., The Early Modern City 1450–1750 (London and New York, 1995), 191–2Google Scholar.

25 Crouch, D., The English Aristocracy 1070–1272: A Social Transformation (New Haven, CT, and London, 2011), xiv–vii, 19, 37, 39, 61, 248–50Google Scholar.

26 See esp. Janssens, P., L’évolution de la noblesse belge dépuis la fin du Moyen Âge (Brussels, 1998)Google Scholar, and Buylaert, F., Dumolyn, J. and De Clercq, W., ‘Sumptuary legislation, material culture and the semiotics of “vivre noblement” in the County of Flanders (14th – 16th centuries)’, Social History, 36 (2011), 393–417CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Given-Wilson, C., The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century Political Community (London and New York, 1996), 14, 18, 69–73Google Scholar, and Keen, M., The Origins of the English Gentleman (Stroud, 2002), 104Google Scholar.

28 Buylaert, F., ‘Lordship, urbanisation and social change in late medieval Flanders’, Past and Present, 227 (2015), 66–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and De Win, P., ‘Adel en stadspatriciaat in het hertogdom Brabant in de 15de eeuw’, Spiegel Historiael, 16 (1981), 407–11Google Scholar.

29 For the Braderics, see Dumolyn et al., ‘Political power and social groups’, 328.

30 For Ghent and Mechelen, see the following contributions to this special section by Jelten Baguet and Frederik Buylaert respectively. For Antwerp, see Janna Everaert's forthcoming doctoral dissertation.

31 Buylaert, ‘Lordship, urbanisation and social change’, 46–7.

32 In total, Duke Philip spent about three years in Bruges. See Lecuppre-Desjardin, E., La ville des cérémonies: essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons (Turnhout, 2004), 381–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 A similar pattern has been observed for fifteenth-century Ypres: the population decline from c. 30,000 inhabitants to c. 8,000 inhabitants was mirrored in decreasing numbers of city dwellers who joined the nobility. Buylaert, ‘Lordship, urbanisation and social change’, 64.

34 Scott, T., The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600 (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar.

35 Informal pressures as a constituent of pre-modern politics is an issue that received considerable scrutiny since the turn of the twenty-first century: a historiographical introduction in te Brake, W., Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500–1700 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998)Google Scholar. For late medieval Flanders and Brabant, see the many joint publications of Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers on this topic.

36 For the concept of ‘origin stories’, see Geary, P.J., The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.