Preliminary Programme

In the last decades, historians have developed renewed interest in the municipal records of towns in Late Medieval Europe, with the aim of studying town magistrates and everyday politics of urban commoners. This research, however, remains too limited both in number and in geographical scope, since mainly English and French towns have been studied and the raison d’être of these records remains unclear. In this paper, I address these two issues by discussing the fifteenth-century municipal records of Sint-Truiden, one of the mayor towns of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège (Low Countries). I discuss the councilors’ motives to start preserving records of their assemblies from 1417 on, which topics they discussed during the meetings, how they reached decisions, who was allowed to attend the meetings and how the agenda of the assemblies could be influenced by non-elected people as well. For I argue that even though decisions were made by only a small group of urban elites, it was also possible for other townsmen to influence urban government. (Show less)

Late medieval records of town council meetings mostly offer us an idealized view on the decision making process in urban communities. For instance, the fifteenth-century registers of the medium-sized town of Mons (in the county of Hainaut) present us a peaceful image of political deliberation: decisions were taken unanimously, animosities are not recorded, and obstruction to the governors’ policies never seems to have taken place. Though Mons clearly witnessed less political conflict than the main towns in neighbouring regions (such as Brussels, Ghent and Bruges), it is obvious that the registers under scrutiny offer us a one-sided view of the political reality. In this paper we want to study the discursive strategies used by the urban governors with the aim of propagating such a view. A case-study on the reports of the 1420s – a period of tumult and political conflict in the county – will demonstrate which language was used to create an image of unanimity in these years. What do we know about the author of the registers and the social context in which they were written? Which social motives inspired the urban governors to influence political memories? In short, this case-study of fifteenth-century Mons will not only inform us on the particular circumstances in which these registers were created but also on the political functionality of record keeping in the late medieval town.
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State secrecy was a constant obsession on the part of town councils everywhere. In England, as in other parts of Europe, town councillors took an oath of confidentiality. Those elected to the common council in Norwich swore that all that ‘is seyd in ye comoun counsel and owght for to be kept counsell’ should not be betrayed, and in Bristol common councillors similarly declared that they would keep private all the things that ought to be hidden. In London, in 1428, those serving on the common council were advised, on pain of £20 and the forfeiture of their citizenship, that should they not let slip its secrets.
This paper explores the reasons for this official culture of arcana imperii (or, more accurately, arcana civitatis), and examines its archival and, most of all, political consequences. Why did councillors have to preserve council secrets? And at what cost? The central argument is that silence produced speculation and suspicion among ordinary citizens. It generated the very noise that councillors sought to quieten. (Show less)

Petitioning was a usual practice throughout late medieval Cantabria. The commons used the formal recourse to complain about their economical, social and political exclusion, called “carta de petiçiones” (letter of petitions). Commons’ petitions were sent to the kings and urban councillors. The kings of Castile played an exceptional role in the political history of the Atlantic cities in Northern Spain, as the monarchy supported the common’s petitions. Kings, allied with commons , gave them rights and privileges that they did not have given in other European and even Spanish cities. In general, in Western Europe, with the exception of Northern Italy, royal power diminished the political participation of the commons. Although, Castilian kings traditionally supported commons’ complaints in Cantabria from the end of the 14th century onwards, which ended in an important political reform of the town councils in favour of the upper middle group. This oral paper will examine some key issues relating to the practice of petitioning and the causes and consequences of the alliance between the monarchy and the commons in late medieval Cantabria. (Show less)