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Since 2016, hobby metal-detecting is legal in Flanders (Belgium), although it was unofficially tolerated for many years before. However, research on metal-detected artefacts in Flanders is hindered by a low reporting rate. The MEDEA project aims to address this by encouraging detectorists to record their finds on an online platform. Finds experts are invited to enrich records with further information and thus instigate a rewarding feedback cycle. This paper discusses MEDEA’s ‘Human-Centred Design’ development process and the design choices underpinning the platform. MEDEA may be seen as an example of ‘Open Archaeology’ and related trends in digital humanities., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Drawing on a wide variety of published and unpublished sources, this article reconstructs a crucial episode in the relationship between the English Crown, its native subjects and the kingdom’s immigrant population during the later Middle Ages. Determined that their presence would boost the development of the local textile industries, Edward III encouraged high numbers of skilled Flemish cloth workers who had been exiled from their home county at the start of the 1350s to settle in the realm. Most of them took up residence in London, where they produced higher-quality cloth for the domestic market and, probably, for export. Soon, however, the immigrants’ activities conflicted with the privileges that had structured the capital’s economic life for centuries. Their work was contested by London’s native weavers who, since the middle of the twelfth century, had enjoyed the sole right to produce cloth in the city. Hoping that the control over the immigrants’ activities would help them to overcome the crisis in the market for lower-quality textiles they were struggling with, the natives petitioned the king to obtain the incorporation of the Flemish weavers into their guild for over twenty-five years. Yet, arguing that the Flemings’ contribution benefited the common profit of the whole kingdom in a way that transcended the interests of any particular group, the Crown rejected all their requests and avoided every attempt at discussion. Each time political communication broke down, the native weavers took out their frustrations by physically attacking their Flemish counterparts. These incidents became increasingly violent during the years leading up to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and came to a dramatic conclusion during the rebellion itself.

During most of the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the main commercial hub of north-western Europe. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, Bruges lost much of its allure as an economic metropolis. One of the most urgent challenges the urban authorities were facing was the navigability of the waterways in and around the city. While the city government made structural investments to remedy the problems, written sources constantly emphasized how important it was that Bruges remained accessible from the sea. During the same period, the earliest preserved maps of the city and its environment emerged. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this article argues that these visual representations were informed by the same commercial ideology. Despite, or exactly because of, the city's decreasing maritime accessibility, they conceived Bruges as a place that could easily be reached by trading ships and where merchants could trade in the best possible circumstances.

This article provides a comparison of long-term changes in inequality in two key areas of preindustrial Europe: Central-Northern Italy and the Low Countries. Based on new archival material, we reconstruct regional estimates of economic inequality during 1500–1800 and use them to assess the role of economic growth, social-demographic variables, proletarianization, and institutions. We argue that different explanations should be invoked to understand the early modern growth of inequality throughout Europe since several factors conspired to make for a society in which it was much easier for inequality to rise than to fall. Although long-term trends in economic inequality were apparently similar across the continent, divergence occurred in terms of inequality extraction ratios.

The history of illegitimacy has evolved since the 1970’s from pessimistic assessments that perceived single motherhood as a form of deviance among impoverished and mobile sections of the population, to recent optimistic assessments that stress the agency of single mothers, their relative local belonging and the leniency of local governments towards them. Based on a case study on illegitimacy in the eighteenth-century Dutch city of Leiden, this article argues that veracity is to be found in both readings of the fates of single mothers. A comparative analysis of single mothers who took legal recourse in paternity matters and those who did not, shows how only a limited part of single mothers exercised legal agency. The litigating mothers shared certain characteristics: they often came from families who were beneficiaries of poor relief, they baptized their children in the Dutch reformed churches and more often than not their own father was still alive. The article hypothesizes that the consistory and overseers of the poor actively encouraged legal action. The case study evidences that the barriers for single mothers to use these judicial means were considerable. These obstacles were not financial in nature, but rather related to the women’s social and cultural distance from the elites who staffed the local law courts.

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It is amazing how much and how little we know about building craftsmen. Their nominal wages are well documented in institutional accounts and have been used for decades as the point of reference for workers’ incomes and living standards. Two fundamental questions, however, need to be addressed in order to fully understand the real evolution of living standards. 1) How representative are institutional accounts for the reconstruction of building craftsmen’s wages? 2) How did building craftsmen spend their wages or adapt their consumption patterns to changing circumstances in their lives? This session wants to explore the real evolution of living standards by a systematic, comparative and longitudinal analysis of household inventories of building craftsmen. Although the evolving social and demographic bias of post-mortem inventories is well known, we are convinced that the exploration of a wide range of inventories can help, at least in part, to overcome this bias, thereby revealing a more realistic image of living standards. In our paper, we will compare post-mortem inventories preserved in the archives of the Burgerweeshuis (the Burgher’s Orphanage) in Amsterdam, the Orphan Chamber and notarial archives in Amsterdam and Antwerp with inventories of insolvencies and bankruptcies in both cities, thus capturing households in different stages of their careers and fortunes. By including labour contracts preserved in the notarial archives we will offer a more realistic image of income variations depending on the kind of works executed, levels of experience of the craftsmen and differences in labour organisation. Theoretically, the expansion of the material culture and consumption of building craftsmen should offer a good indicator of their evolving living standards. Amsterdam and Antwerp are particularly interesting cases since these commercial and industrial centres were at the vanguard of consumption changes in their respective regions. Additionally they were characterised by a divergent economic evolution during the period under consideration. The paper will test for the validity of changing consumption patterns as an indicator of changing living standards by comparing 1) inventories (and more specifically the material culture) of carpenters and masons, 2) their evolving opportunities on the labour market; 3) their evolving wealth position within the urban population. It will pay particular attention to heuristic and methodological issues related to using inventories in a comparative research over time and space: Amsterdam and Antwerp (16th-18th centuries).

The issues around settlement, belonging, and poor relief have for too long been understood largely from the perspective of England and Wales. This volume offers a pan-European survey that encompasses Switzerland, Prussia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. It explores how the conception of belonging changed over time and space from the 1500s onwards, how communities dealt with the welfare expectations of an increasingly mobile population that migrated both within and between states, the welfare rights that were attached to those who “belonged,” and how ordinary people secured access to welfare resources. What emerged was a sophisticated European settlement system, which on the one hand structured itself to limit the claims of the poor, and yet on the other was peculiarly sensitive to their demands and negotiations.

This article examines the development of the Dutch medical marketplace between 1650 and 1900 from a household’s perspective. Using debts for medical care record- ed in probate inventories, we construct the first quantitative analysis of levels of demand for medical care and the types of medical provision in small towns and villag- es across the Netherlands – locations much more representative of most of Europe than its better-studied cities. We reveal substantial growth in the sick’s reliance on commercial medical practitioners between 1650 and 1800, measured by both the fre- quency and size of debts to practitioners. We also find large differences between the commercialized maritime areas of the Netherlands and the more autarchic inland regions, where households were particularly unlikely to have used medical practition- ers circa 1650. These differences extended to the types of practitioner involved: sur- geons were most prominent in the maritime region; apothecaries in the inland region. Patterns of medical consumption converged during the nineteenth century, as did the types of practitioner used, anticipating laws restricting professional activity in medi- cine. As we show, differences in households’ uses of medical care within and between regions reflected their income, level of monetization and engagement in commercial activities and other forms of non-essential consumption. We conclude that the profound growth in commercial medicine experienced in the early modern Netherlands was linked closely to wider trends in consumer behavior.

Many historians have argued that settlement legislation was a cornerstone of poor relief administration in early modern and early industrial England and Wales. The Settlement Act of 1662 and later additions codified the criteria of local belonging inherent in the parochial system of poor relief established by the Elizabethan Poor Laws. By laying out a national scheme for parochial poor relief, financed by a compulsory tax on rateable value and administered by local overseers of the poor, the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 instilled a sense of communal responsibility towards the maintenance of the local poor. By defining criteria of belonging, settlement legislation in turn ensured that in principle every pauper belonged to a local community -- that is, his or her settlement, which was responsible for his or her maintenance in times of need. In many cases this was the place of birth or one's father's place of settlement, but transfers of settlement could be provided for under certain conditions.1 Yet, as much as settlement legislation enforced relief entitlements for those considered part of a community's 'own poor', it excluded those who did not legally belong there. Sojourners, that is, migrants residing in a place which was not their settlement, could be swiftly removed when they became chargeable, or -- at least until 1795 -- when they were merely 'likely to become chargeable'. The history of settlement and poor relief is therefore one not only of assistance and entitlement, but also of exclusion and removal.

This article tests the use of probate inventories for distinguishing wealth groups on the basis of their wealth and the composition of their estates. This method can bring new arguments in the analysis of social mobility and intergenerational wealth transfers. The pilot study compares two small sets of Antwerp inventories for respectively 1660 and 1780. The sources are analysed on two levels. The contents of marriage contracts and testaments suggests that the protection of the surviving partner and his independent management of the estate gained priority over the protection of original family estates. The assets and liabilities tend to confirm patterns of social polarisation and suggest a diminishing access to credit for the lower social groups, possibly accelerating their impoverishment.

Anthropometric evidence such as height has been considered a major indicator of the social and economic well-being of past societies. To understand differ ences in attained height, the role of several determinants has been widely discussed. Since the 1990s, the impact of disease has shown to be a promising topic. In particular, research on the effect of smallpox on the height of the population in nineteenth-century England has triggered heated debate. Voth and Leunig argue that smallpox stunted height, but their results have been called into serious question by scholars such as Oxley, Razzell, Heintel and Baten. In this article, we introduce new sources and evidence for Thielt, a small rural town in Belgium. By linking military registers with smallpox listings, our analysis allows for a nuanced study of the height of conscripts. In early nineteenth-century Thielt, height differences between smallpox survivors and those who did not fall prey to the disease appear to be largely the result of household circumstances. By taking into account individual and familial attributes, we show the importance of the father's death and father's occupation for the son's height. However, smallpox did not have a statistically significant effect on height.

The study uses examinations and other documents produced in the course of a large-scale investigation undertaken by the central authorities of the Austrian Netherlands in the 1760s on the transportation of about thirty children from Brussels to the Parisian foundling house by a Brussels shoemaker and his wife. It combines the rich archival evidence with sparse indications in the literature to demonstrate that long-distance transports of abandoned children were a common but historiographically neglected by-product of the ambiguities of foundling policies in eighteenth-century Europe and provides insight into the functioning of the associated networks and the motives of parents, doctors, midwives, transporters, and local officials involved.

Analyse diachronique consacree a l’esclavage des pays riverains et adjacents du bassin mediterraneen, des empires sumerien et egyptien a l’orient byzantin. Le modele historique propose envisage les aleas socio-politiques lies a l’esclavage, en les mettant en rapport avec le fait religieux d’une societe donnee (christianisme, islam) : ainsi, sont prises en compte les influences de l’esclavage – et du statut social et juridique d’individus non citoyens – sur l’economie servile dans ces regions mediterraneennes et dans certains de leurs arriere-pays

This article examines three important aspects of how the Dutch Republic organized warfare during the Dutch Revolt. The regulations for the billeting of soldiers, the building of fortifications and the collection of direct taxes are analysed in two garrison towns, namely, Gorinchem and Doesburg. The billeting of soldiers and the collection of taxes usually caused troubles in neighbouring countries. In comparison to more centralized neighbouring countries, the Dutch polity's decentralized nature, in which cities held positions of strong power, entailed better arrangements for billeting and higher tax compliance. Yet this decentralized nature did not hamper the emergence of central administrative bodies for co-ordinating and organizing the building of fortifications. The Dutch account of organizing warfare challenges existing views about the role of cities in state building within a context of protracted warfare.

Throughout human history luxury textiles have been used as a marker of importance, power and distinction. Yet, as the essays in this collection make clear, the term 'luxury' is one that can be fraught with difficulties for historians. Focusing upon the consumption, commercialisation and production of luxury textiles in Italy and the Low Countries during the late medieval and early modern period, this volume offers a fascinating exploration of the varied and subtle ways that luxury could be interpreted and understood in the past. Beginning with the consumption of luxury textiles, it takes the reader on a journey back from the market place, to the commercialisation of rich fabrics by an international network of traders, before arriving at the workshop to explore the Italian and Burgundian world of production of damasks, silks and tapestries. The first part of the volume deals with the consumption of luxury textiles, through an investigation of courtly purchases, as well as urban and clerical markets, before thechapters in part two move on to explore the commercialisation of luxury textiles by merchants who facilitated their trade from the cities of Lucca, Florence and Venice. The third part then focusses upon manufacture, encouraging consideration of the concept of luxury during this period through the Italian silk industry and the production of high-quality woollens in the Low Countries. Graeme Small draws the various themes of the volume together in a conclusion that suggests profitable future avenues of research into this important subject.

The article gives a business perspective on the development of transit routes during the long nineteenth century transatlantic migration from Europe to the us. It first stresses that due to the economic interests generated by transatlantic migrant transport the political economy behind early migration policies centred much more on how people moved rather than who was doing the moving. These had a lasting impact on transit routes. With nationalism on the rise and economic liberalism declining, measures to direct transmigrants to national ports and companies radicalised. Against this background and to neutralise competitive pressures shipping companies united in cartels to protect established routes. Their perspective gives new insights on how transit routes developed; on transit costs; the service it included and the quality thereof. It explains how shipping lines extended their services in port-cities and inland transport hubs to guarantee a smooth transit as an integrated part of their trade.

This study focuses on how the English crown identified and categorized French-born people in the kingdom during the preliminaries and first stage of the Hundred Years War. Unlike the treatment of alien priories and nobles holding lands on both sides of the Channel, the attitude to laypeople became more positive as the period progressed. In particular, the crown was prepared to grant wartime protections to French-born residents based on evidence of local integration. Analysis of the process reveals the flexibility with which the government considered national status before the emergence of denization at the end of the fourteenth century.

Soil micromorphology, a method that analyzes undisturbed soils and sediments in thin section using petrographic microscopes, has proven a useful tool for the study of archaeological sites. In particular, this geoarchaeological method is suitable for tackling a number of questions that are recurrent in research on early medieval towns and are often difficult to study with other methods. The starting point of the research that prompted this paper was to evaluate how micromorphology can enhance our understanding of issues such as the origins, functions and organisation of towns, and daily life and living conditions within them. This contribution explores a selection of themes to which micromorphology has effectively contributed in the research of towns of the 8th to 10th century AD, illustrated with examples from Kaupang (Norway) and Antwerp (Belgium).

On the basis of nominal data from local foreigners’ files, this article examines gender differences in the trajectories of more than 3,000 single foreign newcomers to Antwerp between 1850 and 1880. The data demonstrate an overall expansion, ruralization, and feminization of the migration field over time, attuned to the evolution of the port town’s dual labor market. Foreign single women were less specialized than their skilled male counterparts and immigrated in large numbers only toward the end of the period under study, supported by the facilitation of travel via rail. Engaged in a catch-up process as well as in the founding of new patterns of migration, single female migrants emerge from this study as both followers and pioneers. By highlighting the latter’s dual role, the results shed new light on gender stereotypes in migration research and on the oft-assumed connection between migration distance and occupational specialization.

This essay seeks to broaden the discussion of the policing of minorities to situate it within its longer history of the policing of migrants. Since theancien régime, the explicit endeavor to control migrants has been a major driving force behind the development of modern policing and the professionalization of police practices. This essay charts how, from the sixteenth century onward, the movements of migrants and traveling groups were increasingly controlled through vagrancy regulation, poor laws, and the creation of specialized policing agencies and techniques. It also considers the realities of policing and repression of vagrancy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, showing how the intensity of repression varied considerably. Finally, the essay discusses minority policing and the recruitment of minorities into the police during the post–Second World War period.

During the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the prime hub of international trade in Northwestern Europe, with the town of Sluys as its outport. Trade along the Zwin, the waterway connecting the city to the sea, was subject to a series of tolls and a set of stringent and comprehensive staple restrictions, stipulating that all goods imported had to be sold on the Bruges market. The concentration of commercial activities which these rules resulted in, allowed merchants with the necessary capital to trade more cheaply than elsewhere. For those with more modest means and ambitions, the trip along tollbooths to the heavily regulated and institutionalized staple market only jeopardized the profitability of their endeavours. During the whole fifteenth century, local traders, international shipping and commercial staff and professional smugglers have cut transaction costs by evading the staple restrictions and commercial taxation in Sluys. This article discusses the size of this informal market on the margins of Bruges' jurisdiction, analyzes the backgrounds and motivations of its visitors and reconstructs the strategies they used to escape punishment.

The importance of passenger transport companies to facilitating mass migration have generally been acknowledged. Their paradoxal role as obstructers of the same, being an integral part of our modern day border enforcement system, has received much less attention. This article analyses the use of transport companies by states to monitor and restrict migration. It focuses on the recent historiography of the role of shipping companies in regulating migratory movements during the long nineteenth century. It stresses the importance of acknowledging the influence that transport companies had on the enactment, enforcement, and evasion of human mobility controls in future research.

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newsletter of the research group CORE

This article assesses the social positions of the plaintiffs and defendants who appeared before a small claims court, namely the Peacemaker court (Vredemakers) of the city of Leiden in the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century, a low threshold law court that boasted a quick and inexpensive procedure. Analysis of the social positions of the court’s plaintiffs and defendants helps reveal the extent to which lower social groups actively made use of it. The article is based on linkage between a sample of users of the Peacemaker court during the years 1750-1754 and a census of 1749 comprising socioeconomic data for the entire Leiden population. The court clientele of the Peacemaker court was distinctively elitist. The court was thus first and foremost a forum for an inner group of more well-to-do households who were firmly established in the local community. The Peacemaker court was notably inexpensive and simple in its procedures, yet lower social groups remained markedly reticent to file complaints there, revealing a significant socio-cultural gap between these groups and the burgomasters and aldermen who staffed and maintained the courts.

The study builds on a representative sample of more than 2,500 court cases against vagrants in the Duchy of Brabant between 1767 and 1776. Individual evidence on social background and whereabouts has been quantitatively processed to provide qualitative insight into the “why” and “how” of their movements. Transcending the judicial framework and historical and historiographical biases, these “vagrants” are shown to have displayed various patterns of mobility that fit intelligibly within the wider framework of migration history and theory. By exposing the varied scope of the concept of “vagrancy” in meaning and policy practice, the article argues against its continued ubiquitous (and often dismissive) use in historiography as if it refers meaningfully to a distinct marginal social category, which not only often reiterates the biases of a distorted elite view, but also obstructs a more unified and insightful understanding of patterns of migration in history.

Wouters Koen. Een open oligarchie? De machtsstructuur in de Antwerpse magistraat tijdens de periode 1520-1555. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 82, fasc. 4, 2004. Histoire médiévale, moderne et contemporaine - Middeleeuwse. moderne en hedendaagse geschiedenis. pp. 905-934.

During the late medieval period, Sluys, in the county of Flanders, and the English town of Southampton were busy international ports and centres of princely and local taxation. Yet both places were also strongly dependent on the markets of Bruges and London, where most of the actual trade took place. This study investigates whether this lack of local commercial opportunities resulted in an increase in illicit trading activities in both outports during the fifteenth century. It analyses the number of people caught for unlawful commercial practices in Sluys and Southampton, their social and geographical backgrounds, the kinds of goods they traded in and the places they frequented, as well as the difficulties met when interpreting the sources that inform us on illicit trade.

This article looks how eighteenth century rulers shift back and forth between ecclesiastical and worldly leadership to obtain their goals. The setting is the small ecclesiastical and abbatial Principality of Stavelot-Malmédy during the election of its prince-abbot in 1787. This principality became increasingly entangled in the geopolitico-ecclesiastical rivalries between the Austrian Netherlands and the Prince-bishopric of Liège. Although this election has been studied before, little attention was given to the way leadership was influenced and how it reacted to these ecclesiastic and economic constraints. The archival sources can be found in the Archives générales du Royaume in Brussels (Conseil des Finances), Archives de l’état à Liège (États du Pays de Liège et du Comté de Looz, Abbaye de Stavelot-Malmédy, Principauté de Stavelot-Malmédy) and the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv in Vienna (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv).

Mortgage markets in developing economies, both past and present, are often confined to social networks between private individuals. The inadequate registration of ownership of and encumbrances on borrowers’ real estate has been offered as a reason for this, but it is questionable whether such registration provides either a simple or a complete explanation. This paper analyses mortgage markets between 1300 and 1800 in the Low Countries, where such registration was organised well, and England, where such registration was poorly organised. These historical cases show that registration was important for the emergence of broad mortgage markets but in the historical context successful markets took considerable time to appear. The rise of such markets also required changes in the mortgage laws and often depended on intermediaries for matching borrowers and lenders.

This article discusses a woodcut series with an elaborate iconographic representation of the Flemish city of Ghent, printed in 1524 by Pieter de Keysere. The three-sheet composition consists of a city view, an image of the allegorical Maiden of Ghent, and an extensive heraldic program with the coat of arms of prominent Ghent families and of the Ghent craft guilds. The print series’ production and consumption are unraveled and framed within the wider debate on civic religion in Renaissance Europe. The main argument is that while in this region of Northern Europe civic ideology was equally strong as in Italy, it was not the exclusive playground of the ruling elites. Pieter de Keysere’s woodcut series was aimed at a socially broad, local audience, most particularly Ghent’s corporate middle groups.

Mortgage markets in developing economies are often confined to private networks. Inadequate registration of property rights has been blamed for this, but it is questionable whether registration provides a simple and complete solution. This paper addresses this issue by analysing the Low Countries, where registration was organised well, and England, where registration was organised poorly, between 1300 and 1800. These historical cases show that registration was important but did neither provide a simple nor a complete solution for the emergence of broad mortgage markets. Successful historical markets took considerable time to appear and also addressed mortgage law and financial intermediation.