In 1384 the Burgundian Valois duke Philip the Bold became count of Flanders. He succeeded Count Louis de Male, whose daughter Margaret he had married, in the lands of Flanders, Franche-Comté, Rethel, Antwerp, Mechelen, Artois and Nevers.Footnote 1 Since the twelfth century the county of Flanders had become one of the most succesful economies in north-western Europe. In the thirteenth century Ghent, Bruges and Ypres were among the largest European cities outside Italy and rapidly became major centres of trade and textile industry. From an early phase in their history these towns also showed a highly developed political culture. Initially urban governmental power was in the hands of the patricians but after the ‘revolutions’ of 1280–1302, members of the craft guilds joined the patricians as aldermen in the urban governments.Footnote 2 The big cities were now very powerful and often contested the count's hegemony. Gradually, an urban-based system of representative government developed throughout the county. From the thirteenth century onwards the scabini Flandriae (the aldermen of the major cities) took part in frequent negotiations with the count. Over time, after the early fourteenth-century introduction of regular comital taxes (the beden or aides)Footnote 3 they were organized into the representative institution of the ‘Four Members of Flanders’, including Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, and the ‘Franc of Bruges’ (Brugse Vrije), the rural district (kasselrij) around Bruges.Footnote 4 Despite attempts by the Burgundian dukes to assemble the more traditional model of the Three Estates (one particularly associated with agrarian societies) as an alternative, it rarely met. The dominance of the Four Members demonstrated the wealth and power of the Flemish Cities, whilst the presence of the Franc of Bruges alongside the three major cities reflected the importance of this rich rural district.Footnote 5
Jean-Philippe Genet called the later medieval prince ‘a man of dialogue’.Footnote 6 Kings and princes had to negotiate with their subjects. They needed to express their own will, justify their actions and hear the desires of their subjects. During the negotiations with his subjects, the prince generally asked for taxes or military aid, while his subjects demanded the confirmation of privileges and the political and economic stability necessary for trade and industry to flourish. Delegations of mayors, aldermen and clerks of cities and rural districts met in different places to negotiate with each other and with representatives of the comital government. In his classic study of politics in late medieval Flanders (1384–1506) Wim Blockmans has shown that the political domains which were primarily at stake during these ‘parliamentary’ negotiations involved the accession to the throne of a new prince, his presence in the county, the appointment and control of comital officials and rural and urban magistrates, finance and taxation, the defence of the land and the coasts, the presence of foreign soldiers in the county, food supply, internal and foreign trade, industry, monetary policies and the administration of justice.Footnote 7 The Four Members of Flanders met on a regular basis and from time to time they also convened the smaller cities and rural districts for further negotiations.Footnote 8 The urban and rural delegates present at these negotiations were important representatives of the local and regional elite groups: merchants, brokers, bankers and the political elite of the craft guilds in the cities, important and petty noblemen and non-noble landowners in the countryside.Footnote 9 Gradually, these people formed a ‘political society’ (société politique) in the county.Footnote 10 They met regularly, sometimes married among each other's families and, eventually, some of them started working in the service of the prince and renounced their localist world views.Footnote 11
In this analysis of the institutionalized bargaining sessions between cities, rural districts and the duke in Flanders, it will be shown that a specific political discourse developed among the Flemish delegates.Footnote 12 Fundamentally, the representatives of the subjects emphasized respect for their privileges and customary law and asked the prince to find ‘remedies’ for the violations (often referred to as ‘novelties’) of their ‘freedom’ and privileges, and they employed metaphors of the body and formulations of the common good. Despite a few contributions which deal with Burgundian ideological discoursesFootnote 13 (discursive practices are called ‘ideological’ when they incorporate significations that sustain or restructure power relations),Footnote 14 the study of Flemish political discourse during this period is still in its infancy. Until the recent ‘linguistic turn’ in history, and even today, very little attention has been paid to practical ideological discourses in historical sources. On the one hand, scholars who study politics and socio-economic relations pay very little attention to the specific linguistic elements in their sources.Footnote 15 On the other hand, scholars of ‘political thought’ limit themselves to ‘high theory’, political discourses that are chiefly to be found in theological and legal normative works and in the genre called the ‘mirrors of princes’.Footnote 16 The latter discipline has indeed made great progress since its origins with Otto von Gierke.Footnote 17 It is not claimed here that studying this normative literature has no relevance for the question of practical medieval politics, but the theoretical subtleties of such literature had little applicability to everyday political activities and would have been lost on the average member of lay political society.Footnote 18 This does not mean, however, that these practical actions were theoretically uninformed. This article will also identify the ‘trickling down’ in common speech of some theoretical concepts, such as the bonum commune, or ideas, such as ‘mixed government’ in what could be called a ‘practical theory of political actions’, broadly inspired by ideas of kingship, justice and the law and the divine nature of the social order.Footnote 19
Method and sources
The type of texts upon which this analysis is based has made it necessary to concentrate on a series of ‘keywords’, terms of important social or political significance, in the political vocabulary.Footnote 20 The question which this article seeks to address concerns the relationship between more general political and social developments in late medieval Flanders and the discursive struggle which took place during representative assemblies, in so far as it is possible to reconstruct it indirectly.
The first question a historian of medieval political discourse must pose, of course, is the problem of sources. A representative corpus of texts from which to start the inquiry has to be constructed. For late medieval Flanders, and, indeed, for most regions in medieval Europe, this is not unproblematic. In general, political theory mostly remained silent on the role of local communities and (lay) representative institutions. One of the reasons for this was that this question did not fit into traditional theoretical discourses, or, as Quentin Skinner and John Pocock would say, the ‘political languages’,Footnote 21 of Aristotelian politics, Ciceronian rhetoric or Roman Law.Footnote 22 Accordingly, there are no systematic treatises on late medieval Flemish politics. This might seem strange at first sight, given the importance and the autonomy of the large cities which was almost comparable to that of the cities of northern and central Italy. Political concepts and civic government in the Italian cities have indeed been the object of medieval theory building and modern research, but the same does not go for the Low Countries.Footnote 23 According to Georges Holmes, Florence was the only city ‘in which there arose at the end of the Middle Ages what one might call a city ideology, that is to say a set of developed ideas as distinct from a way of living, which was particularly designed by and for city-dwellers’.Footnote 24 Florence was unique among European cities, he claims, in creating such a set of developed ideas appropriate to urban life.Footnote 25
Despite the exceptional importance of Florentine political theory, Holmes' claims were in fact unfounded. Drawing upon a series of texts created largely by Flemish subjects in an urban context, it will be shown that there was definitely something comparable to an ‘urban’ ideological discourse in late medieval Flanders. Even though many of the relevant textual fragments in this study originated from the administration of a rural district, the Franc of Bruges,Footnote 26 it is safe to assume that even the political culture of the Franc can be considered ‘urban’, given the fact that the administrative capital of this region was the city of Bruges, its elite families often lived in the city or had marriage ties to Bruges patrician families,Footnote 27 and many smaller towns were included in the district. In general, the whole county of Flanders was so densely urbanized that in most parts of it one could hardly travel 20 miles without encountering an urban centre of relative importance.Footnote 28 Moreover, the clerks who worked for the administration of the rural districts were generally recruited – and of course educated – in the towns.Footnote 29
The sources
This analysis is based upon a specific corpus of edited texts known in Flanders as the ‘Handelingen van de Leden en Staten van Vlaanderen’ (Acts of the Members and Estates of Flanders).Footnote 30 What kind of source editions are we dealing with here? There are no transcriptions or reports of the negotiations of the Flemish representative institutions. There are only indirect textual witnesses. In a titanic effort Blockmans, Prevenier and Zoete systematically excerpted all the accounts of the Flemish cities and rural districts between 1384 and 1506, conserved at the archives of Lille and Brussels and in different city archives in Flanders. These accounts were normally written in the Middle Dutch dialects of the county. Amongst other things, they generally refer to payments for travel expenses to aldermen, mayors, clerks and other officials and notable persons who took part in political or judicial negotiations of some kind.
Eight impressive volumes of account entries have thus been compiled to reconstruct as many of the political meetings as possible that took place in Flanders under Burgundian rule. These compilations formed the basis of Blockmans' study of representative institutions and politics. The passages that explained why the journeys to such meetings were undertaken often included the political statements that will be discussed in what follows. We can reasonably assume that these statements in the account books more or less echoed what was said during the assemblies and negotiations. These indirect sources are of a very fragmentary nature, but they are all we have to reconstruct the political discourse of the subjects. However, since these compilations represent excerpts from accounts which are unevenly conserved, any attempt at counting words or other exercises in quantification are superfluous. Hence, the approach used here can only be qualitative.Footnote 31
What was the role and function of political discourse in urban and rural account books? By whom and for whom was this discourse written and how was it received? The accounts were very important official documents, usually composed by the clerks of the cities or rural districts. These people had ample experience in the use of an administrative discourse heavily influenced by customary law and by the composition of public charters and other judicial documents. In the course of the fifteenth century, increasing numbers had a university training, if not just in the liberal arts, then also in law.Footnote 32 What they wrote in the accounts would obviously have had to satisfy the local treasurers, mayors, aldermen or other magistrates who were politically responsible for these documents. But it was a wider circle of people for whom these texts were meant. During the urban revolts of 1280 through to 1302, rebels typically demanded control over local finances.Footnote 33 By the fourteenth century it had become established practice in the Flemish cities and rural districts that every year the local accounts were read aloud and ‘heard’ by delegations of the city (or district) government and by other notables such as the deans of the craft guilds or the important vassals of a rural area. The ducal commissioners were also present at this ‘oral rendition’, or, as it was called in the sources, ‘audition’.Footnote 34 These solemn ceremonies took place when new benches of aldermen were installed by the commissioners of the prince. These considerations suggest that the reasons for political meetings given in the accounts had to be satisfactory, comprehensible and familiar to the delegates of the whole community. The account books spoke the political language that the community could understand and that contributed to reproducing its institutions.
Unity and brotherhood
A first group of keywords is made up by expressions such as ‘council’ (raedt),Footnote 35 ‘advice’ (avvys),Footnote 36 ‘unity’ (eendrachtichede),Footnote 37 ‘friendship’ (vrienscap),Footnote 38 ‘mutual love’ (onderlinghe minne), ‘brotherhood’ (broederlichede),Footnote 39 ‘union and promise’ (verbant ende belofte),Footnote 40 ‘aid and consolation’ (hulpe ende troost),Footnote 41 ‘agreement’ (acoort or acorde),Footnote 42 ‘treaty’ (traitiet),Footnote 43 ‘communication’ (communicacie),Footnote 44 ‘concordance’ (concordien),Footnote 45 ‘to agree’ (overeendraghene, accordeerne)Footnote 46 or ‘to negotiate’ (tratierne).Footnote 47 These ideological utterances continuously appear in the sources and represent the consensus model that the Members of Flanders pursued. The Members were enjoined to act like ‘brothers’ (ghebroeders)Footnote 48 to avoid ‘inconsideration’ (onraet)Footnote 49 and not provoke the prince's ‘indignation’ (indignacien).Footnote 50 During negotiations the delegates usually tried to find ‘friendly ways and means’ (vriendelike weghen ende middele) to solve political problems.Footnote 51 Obviously, discussions about taxes, for instance, could provoke ‘difficulties’ (difficulteten) and ‘discord’ (twidrachticheit) among the Members.Footnote 52 Other notions found in the entries in the account books that had the opposite meaning of the ideal condition of unity also included ‘dispute’ (gescil).Footnote 53
‘Unity’ was clearly a master concept. Because this gave them a greater political impact, the Members usually tried to reach agreements ‘unanimously’ (eendrachtelike),Footnote 54 but this often proved to be an illusion since Ghent, Bruges, Ypres and the Franc had many conflicting interests.Footnote 55 The Bruges merchant elite mostly defended their trade privileges while the Ghent ruling groups had to take into account the influence of the well-organized corporate middle groups of artisans in the textile industry.Footnote 56 Moreover, there were fundamental differences between town and countryside concerning food supplies and bans on export in times of scarcity.Footnote 57 Another topic of dissent was the rural textile industry, which sharply divided Bruges and the Franc in 1406–07 and other times.Footnote 58 Ghent and Bruges sometimes had conflicts about jurisdiction over their burghers.Footnote 59 Moreover, when diplomacy failed and conflicts flared, as in the two most important revolts in Flanders during the reign of Philip the Good (Bruges, 1436–38, and Ghent, 1449–53), the other Members did not support their rebellious ‘brothers’ and because of this lack of unanimity the revolts were eventually crushed.Footnote 60 But overall, the Members always aspired to unity, if politically possible, in order to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the duke.
The common good
A second group of concepts includes the elements which, according to the ideology of the Flemish subjects, constituted the ‘common good’. The term ‘Bonum commune’ and its more or less related expressions such as ‘utilitas publica’, ‘res publica’, ‘la chose publicque’ arguably constituted the most fundamental ideological categories of the Middle Ages.Footnote 61 Of course, these terms are classic examples of political clichés which could be used by either the prince or the subjects, by noblemen or towns, to legitimate and defend very different political acts and objectives.Footnote 62 Clearly, the differences in opinion between the Members of Flanders and the ducal government lay in their exact interpretation of the ‘common good’ or ‘public utility’. Because the different subjects did not succeed in finding an interpretation they could all maintain in common, Blockmans argues, the prince could gradually impose his own version.Footnote 63 The political division of the county strengthened the power of the centralizing prince.
The most frequent expressions for the common good in the Flemish account books include ‘the common utility of this city’ (den ghemeenen oorbore van dezer stede)Footnote 64 and ‘the greatest utility, usefulness and profit of the land of Flanders’ (den meesten orbore, nutscap ende proffijte van den lande van Vlaendren).Footnote 65 ‘Utility’ (orbore)Footnote 66 or ‘usefulness’ (nutscap)Footnote 67 and ‘in the benefit of the land’ (in bate van den lande)Footnote 68 are all related concepts. To paraphrase Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, they formed ‘a paradigmatic chain of equivalence’.Footnote 69 Another related key element in this political discourse is the idea of ‘profit’ or ‘advantage’, in the general sense of ‘utility’. Something could be ‘greatly to the profit of the common land’ (grotelic profijt van den ghemeenen lande).Footnote 70 But these keywords are sometimes connected to more precise political and economic concepts which, in practice, made up the common good of the county. These include expressions such as ‘trade’ (coopmanscepe)Footnote 71 and ‘peace’ (payse).Footnote 72 In late medieval European political thought, the concept of the ‘common good’ referred to benefits like sound money and fair justice, as well as the idea that the ruler should put aside his personal interests rather than favour his family or the rich and powerful.Footnote 73 In 1455, there was a rather unusual meeting of the Three Estates of Flanders (instead of the usual assemblies of the Four Members) to deliberate on ‘the welfare, peace and trade’ (welvaert, payse ende coopmanscepe) in the county.Footnote 74 The fundamental principle of the Flemish urban ideology on trade was to develop it in as many directions as possible.Footnote 75 A typical phrase is the wish ‘that all merchants might be free to go wherever they want to in the land of Flanders’, sometimes followed by the clause ‘except for the English’,Footnote 76 or ‘to have the common merchant within the land’.Footnote 77 In 1405 the delegates of the Franc of Bruges worked to conclude a commercial treaty with England swiftly, so that ‘trade might have its course’ (coopmanscepe haren cours).Footnote 78 In 1406 measures were taken for ‘the advancement of the common trade’ (de voorderinghe van der ghemeenre coopmanscepe).Footnote 79 The people of Flanders wanted ‘to get the foreign merchant inside the land and to keep him there’ (den vreimden coopman bin den lande te ghecrighene ende behoudene).Footnote 80 In 1417 the Bruges accounts even mentioned that ‘the aforesaid land [of Flanders] is founded on trade’ (de coopmanscepe daer tvorseide land up ghefondert es).
Yet another source of complaints concerning the common good was the presence of foreign troops in the county. In 1488 Flanders was filled with soldiers of the new Habsburg ruler Maximilian of Austria. In a letter to their city government, the Ypres delegates talked about ‘the great exactions, oppression, force and nuisance’ (de groote exactien, obpressen, fortssen ende overlasten) afflicting the poor people of the countryside.Footnote 81 They hoped that peace could be restored because the land had been ‘at war, in sorrow and without justice’ (in oorloghen, in verdriet ende zonder justicie). The land should be returned to ‘peace, unity and good government’ (in payse ende eendrachtichede ende teender goeder pollicie).Footnote 82 Finally, the common utility of the country was also a question of just taxation. The Roman-canonical principle of necessity, as developed by Thomas Aquinas, stated that in cases of urgent necessity, such as an attack on the realm, the prince could ask for financial aid from his subjects.Footnote 83 Furthermore, ducal taxes were considered legitimate if they supported the honour of the lord (such as the feudal aides in case of marriage, ransom, inauguration or knighting) or the common good of the land (primarily for defence against external enemies).Footnote 84 However, excessive tolls or taxes were regarded as ‘extortion’ (exactien).Footnote 85 When the comital receivers collected undue sums of money, this was clearly ‘against the utility of the common land’ (jeghen den oorbor van den ghemeenen lande).Footnote 86
Another discursive register mentions ‘reason’ (redene) and ‘unreason’ (onredene), words which can also be closely associated with the idea of the common good. For the prince, to act correctly was to govern society according to reason – the reason of the common good – which safeguarded the law in accordance with the laws of God and nature.Footnote 87 Reason connected man to natural law and to God.Footnote 88 Therefore the jurists spoke of the ratio publicae utilitatis.Footnote 89 In 1392 the Four Members sent a letter to the pope concerning ‘the great unreason which William of Vinea, bishop of Ancona (and legate of the pope), and the ecclesiastical judge of Tournai, being in Ghent, pursued and desired’.Footnote 90 During trade negotiations with England, it was said, the English made an ‘unreasonable proposition’ (tonredelic voorstel).Footnote 91 In a judicial conflict between Bruges and the Franc, the prince was to ordain a solution ‘which he thought would be reasonable’ (dat hem redenlijc dinken zoude).Footnote 92 In 1428, the Franc of Bruges complained about the ‘unreasonableness’ (onredelichede) and ‘excesses’ (overdaden) perpetrated daily by the officers of the bishop of Thérouanne.Footnote 93 These excesses, the district of Veurne added, were ‘against right and justice’ (jeghen recht ende justicie).Footnote 94 Justice should be understood in its broadest sense, including ethics, politics and economy.Footnote 95 It referred to norms such as the Ten Commandments and the classical virtues, and to the rights, honours, liberties and privileges belonging to groups or individuals.Footnote 96
On some (rare) occasions the lordship (heerlikede) of the prince was added to the formula of ‘common profit of his land’ (ghemeenen proffite van zinen lande).Footnote 97 In 1437, during the great Bruges revolt of 1436–38, the rural district of Ypres wanted to protect the honour of the prince and the unity of the land.Footnote 98 In 1410 the prince asked for soldiers, which he was granted so that ‘the honour of his land’ would be protected.Footnote 99 In 1448, it was said that the sergeants of the king of France had perpetrated acts against the ‘lordship’ (heerlijchede) of the prince.Footnote 100 The duke's ‘honour and profit’ (zijne eere ende proffite) was also important to the delegates of the Franc of Bruges.Footnote 101 Sometimes the ‘utility and profit of himself’ (the prince) was even equated with that ‘of all his aforesaid lands’.Footnote 102 This register is clearly reminiscent of the ‘feudal’ discourse which used notions such as seigniory and a more general discourse of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ found in many traditional societies. As such it is an obvious case of intertextuality.Footnote 103
Privileges and freedom
Rights to freedom were, of course, essential in medieval urban ideologies.Footnote 104 When a new count acceded to the throne, he had to pledge allegiance to the customs and privileges of the land.Footnote 105 Every time the new prince entered a Flemish city for the first time these oaths were repeated, with the result that they became part of the generally known political ideology of the county.Footnote 106 The centrality of the concept of the common good in the subjects' ideological discourse has already been demonstrated, but perhaps the most fundamental register in Flemish political discourse was the paradigmatic relationship between keywords like ‘privilege’ (previlegie or keure),Footnote 107 ‘freedom’ (vrijhede),Footnote 108 ‘rights’ (rechte),Footnote 109 ‘custom’ (costume, usagen or ouden gheweunten),Footnote 110 ‘possession’ (possessie – as in the legal possession of rights),Footnote 111 ‘laws’ (wetten or wettelijchede),Footnote 112 ‘the common law of the land’ (tghemeene landrecht),Footnote 113 ‘justice and highness’ (justicie ende oocheide)Footnote 114 on the one hand, and ‘novelty’ (nieuwichede), ‘deficiency’ (ghebrek),Footnote 115 ‘grievance’ (grief),Footnote 116 ‘obstruction’ (inderynghe)Footnote 117 and ‘prejudice’ (prejudicie – in the judicial sense of establishing a precedent disadvantageous to a privilege or law)Footnote 118 on the other. All these terms appear very frequently in the Flemish account books.Footnote 119 The meaning of these terms was imposed by ideology, belief systems and cultural use. The content of the word ‘privileges’ was created by a corporatist-localist (or ‘particularist’) ideology and a balance of power between the prince and his subjects.
In 1395, the city of Ypres complained about a new toll levied by the duke of Orléans, that was ‘opposed to the freedom, custom and possession of the land of Flanders’.Footnote 120 In customary law, the principal argument was that the situation had been like this since time immemorial, even if this was just a juridical and historical fiction, since in reality custom was always changing and, over time, legislation also became custom. Van Caenegem describes customary law as ‘what the people themselves at any given time felt and considered as such, even if it had in reality been introduced through the legislative process as privileges from the ruler or as urban statutes’.Footnote 121 In fact, the notion of consuetudo itself was developed by the civil jurists in the twelfth century. However, custom was very highly esteemed in the hierarchy of norms.Footnote 122 According to most normative political theories, the custom or unwritten law was closely related to the will of the people. What had been upheld as true and just for generations represented law that, according to Aquinas, could even override written law.Footnote 123 Aquinas favoured a ‘limited monarchy’ or ‘mixed constitution’:Footnote 124 monarchical, aristocratic and popular elements should secure the common good together. The free multitude's consent was expressed in custom, and this had more weight than the prince's authority.Footnote 125 Thus, in 1398 the Franc of Bruges asked the duke to command his officers to uphold the laws, privileges and customs ‘like they had been accustomed to since ancient times’ (also men van ouden tiden gheploghet hevet).Footnote 126 Customs always differed greatly from place to place and the expectation was that the administration of justice should be carried out ‘according to the custom of the place’ (naer der costume van der place).Footnote 127
A negative variant of this register is the ‘infringement’ (broken) of the privileges.Footnote 128 The notions for privileges and related terms often appear in negative constructions: a situation was ‘opposed’ (contrarye) to the laws or privileges.Footnote 129 Sometimes we encounter expressions such as ‘to the great disadvantage (achterdeele) of the land’,Footnote 130 ‘in reduction of the privileges’ (in vermindertheden),Footnote 131 ‘in contradiction to the freedoms and privileges of the land’ (in beieghentheden van den vryheden ende previlegen van den lande),Footnote 132 matters that ‘opposed’ (bejeghenen or contrarieren) the privileges, laws and customsFootnote 133 or officers who ‘failed’ (tecort ghedaen) the privileges of the Hanse merchants.Footnote 134 The Members asked each other's ‘assistance’ (bistandichede) when their privileges were ‘hurt’ (ghequetst).Footnote 135 The words ‘injury’ (quets)Footnote 136 or ‘to injure’, ‘to harm’, ‘to wound’ (quetsen) in the sense of ‘harming the privileges’ are particularly interesting because they carry the connotation of the political ‘body’Footnote 137 and the widespread medieval anthropomorphic or ‘organological’ world view in which the state was looked upon as a ‘body politic’. The world was a macrocosm governed by God, and the human body was a microcosm governed by the soul. The head of the political body was the prince, who established a relationship with his subjects as if they were his ‘members’. This head represented the public interest.Footnote 138 Obviously, the name of the institution of the ‘Four Members’ itself should be located within this ideology. The magistrate and the land of the Franc of Bruges was also called a ‘body’ (lechame).Footnote 139
The most striking term for an infringement of customs and privileges was ‘novelty’ (nieuwichede),Footnote 140 and it constantly appears in the sources. In the learned ideology of medieval clerics, who considered the world to be in a constant state of decline since the Fall, nothing could be more unnaceptable than a novitas.Footnote 141 The Flemish cities and rural districts were constantly complaining about novelties committed by ducal officers and institutions, local lords or ecclesiastical courts.Footnote 142 The word ‘new’ in itself was enough to imply a very negative connotation. Thus in 1398, the Franc of Bruges moaned about the ‘new tolls’ in Sluis.Footnote 143 In 1400 Bruges complained about merchants of its outport of Sluis who illegally sold cloth in the Franc of Bruges. This had happened ‘recently’ (nieuwelinx) so it was a novelty without a customary precedent.Footnote 144
Conclusion
Holmes' claim that there was no such thing as a ‘city ideology’ outside of Florence, meaning a set of developed ideas on government originating in the urban context, needs to be challenged. True enough, many of the ideological utterances treated in this article were found in the account books of rural districts and there does not seem to be a truly fundamental difference between these and those mentioned in urban archival sources. However, the creators of this discourse, the local clerks, most of whom came from patrician families, were heavily influenced by the urban political culture that was characteristic of Flanders. Moreover, Robert Fossier has emphasized how in northern France (of which Flanders was a part) there were important similarities between the privileges and liberties granted to cities and to rural communities.Footnote 145 Susan Reynolds has similarly shown that it is in fact impossible to distinguish between corporate communities such as the English boroughs and local political units such as mere villages which had been granted liberties.Footnote 146 We are thus first of all concerned with determining what such ‘corporate’ or ‘communal’ discourse might entail.
During their negotiations with each other and with the dukes of Burgundy, in this ‘institutionalized dialogue’ between the prince and his subjects, the Flemish delegates uttered a developed ideological discourse which was reflected in the account books of towns and rural districts which reported on these meetings. These account entries mirror the values of local political societies: ideologies are not just to be found in theoretical writings such as those of Leonardo Bruni or Niccolò Machiavelli. Moreover, their practical value is even greater when we encounter them in sources which reflect actual political practice. This ideological discourse was hegemonic in the local communities in which it was created, but had to compete with the state discourses of the duke and his servants on the level of (dynastic) state politics.Footnote 147 There has been little systematic research on political discourses in an urban context but Peter Blickle has observed a similar urban ideology for Basel, in which the Gemeiner Nutze (common utility) or the Stadtnutz (utility of the city) were central concepts.Footnote 148 German urban legislation was also motivated with the principles of ‘peace’, ‘common utility’ and ‘justice’.Footnote 149 Likewise, Pierre Monnet noticed how in Frankfurt a ‘conscience urbaine particulière’ developed because of the creation of urban representative institutions, the codification of laws, urban autonomy and urban leagues,Footnote 150 whilst Peter Johanek has described the medieval urban space as a Rechts- und Erinnerungsgemeinschaft, in which privileges, securing trade and internal urban peace were central values.Footnote 151
Clearly, since the ‘communal revolution’ of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there emerged a discernible political language in the towns, marked by concepts like commune, universitas and Gemeinde.Footnote 152 These towns considered themselves as corporate communities.Footnote 153 By the later Middle Ages notions of ‘the common good’, ‘the good of the commune’ and peace and concord were central in what Anthony Black calls ‘urban ideology’.Footnote 154 The Commentators considered the city as a corporation.Footnote 155 The basic purpose of the urban communities was to have their collective freedom recognized.Footnote 156 The ideology of the Flemish subjects was thus fundamentally corporatist or ‘communalist’. Peter Blickle elaorated on this concept and defined it as a principle to order both urban and rural communities with norms and values including peace, the common weal and ‘freedoms’ as central features.Footnote 157 The Flemish wanted to maintain and defend their acquired rights in a balance of power that was gradually shifting in favour of the dukes of Burgundy and their modern state.Footnote 158 They expressed their points of view in a humble but self-assured manner, and they had clear ideas as to what constituted their common interests, which were in themselves a compromise between the conflicting interests of the different towns and rural districts, dominated by the Four Members of Flanders: Ghent, Bruges, Ypres and the Franc of Bruges. The first key element in the subjects' ideology was the term ‘unity’ with all its related concepts like ‘brotherhood’ or ‘concordance’. Within their local community, and within the county as a whole, local elites pursued unity and brotherhood to strengthen their political position vis-à-vis the prince. According to their own discourse, their political motivation was the ‘common utility’ of the country, including peace as a pre-condition for the development of trade and industry, monetary stability and just taxation. The subjects also had a strong sense of justice. The economic emphasis in this civic discourse that we have found in the sources may not be exceptional on a European scale but it seems a distinctive element for the Flemish cities and reflects political sentiments which were more clearly ‘urban’ than just ‘communal’ in their stressing of favourable market conditions.
The most negative concept in the Flemish ideological discourse was that of ‘novelty’, an unacceptable infringement of privileges or a reform campaign which undermined the power base of the local communities and re-enforced the prince's programme for financial and judicial centralization. Similar examples of the negative connotation of ‘novelties’ can also be found in the legislation of the Swiss town of Freiburg, in which ‘innovacion’ leads to discord and old customs should be respected.Footnote 159
Although there had been periods in the fourteenth century (the Artevelde regime)Footnote 160 and at the end of the fifteenth century (during the struggle against Maximilian of Austria),Footnote 161 when the Flemish count stood powerless at the sidelines of politics, the cities and rural districts did not aspire to govern the county themselves. It is true that this is a significant difference between Flemish cities and Italian city states, and one which would have had an impact on the development of a civic ideology. Nevertheless, they had very clear ideas how they should be governed by their prince. Their ideological discourse stood in a constant ‘dialogical’ relation with the typical discourse that can be found in the mirrors of princes on how a prince should rule with respect to the exercise of justice and maintaining the common good. The result was an ideal of ‘mixed government’ whereby the subjects exercised considerable responsibility in running the affairs of the county, alongside the prince. There was considerable overlap between the discourse of the towns and that of the prince. The same ideological categories, like ‘bonum commune’ could be used by either side to serve very different political goals.Footnote 162 Moreover, there was no necessary opposition between civic political discourse and the ideology of princes. The German urban chronicles did not see a contradiction between urban interests and privileges and the political objectives of the Empire either.Footnote 163 Further research using both diplomatic sources and local chronicles might show more general tendencies in the development of later medieval civic ideologies in urban and rural communities and their relationship to princes and other lords.
