This article examines the impact of the Feudal Court, a princely court overseeing seigneurial justice, on local courts in fifteenth-century Brabant. Following Brabant’s incorporation into the Burgundian Netherlands, princely courts were institutionalised to supervise feudal and seigneurial matters, theoretically allowing subjects to appeal decisions from seigneurial courts. Drawing on court registers and case files, the article argues that the Feudal Court operated according to the principle of subsidiarity. While most seigneurial courts never experienced an appeal against their decisions, the Feudal Court did hear cases when seigneurial subjects sought an alternative forum. The reasons why subjects pursued such alternatives are difficult to determine, yet the study highlights a paradox: most appeals originated from the courts of the most powerful lords. These lords, who controlled multiple seigneuries, were rarely directly involved in proceedings before the princely court, and some evidently exhibited little interest. This case illuminates the coexistence of local and central authority in pre-modern Europe, demonstrating how hierarchical judicial structures could function without fundamentally undermining the autonomy of local seigneurial justice.
The following article provides a reinterpretation of English vagrancy between c .1200 and 1600. It argues for a history defined by long-term continuities rather than ruptures. Scholarship has traditionally fragmented vagrancy into discrete moments, from the post-plague labour crisis to development of the Poor Laws in the sixteenth century. In contrast, this study demonstrates that a stable conceptual logic underpinned legal and literary treatments of mobile people across four centuries. By analysing statutes, chancery commissions and contemporary literature, it reveals how wandering figures consistently embodied anxieties about labour discipline, confederacy, political loyalty, and moral or religious disorder. This article argues that the Black Death intensified existing concerns without creating new ones, that during the fifteenth century vagrant imagery and rhetoric migrated into political and heretical contexts, and that the early modern rogue developed from rather than replaced medieval precedents. Reframing vagrancy as a continuous category provides a fuller understanding of how English society conceptualised and regulated mobility, and challenges periodisation models which obscure deeper patterns of governance and social imagination.
This article discusses how seigneurial milling and baking monopolies in the southern Low Countries were shaped by negotiations over a period of 400 years. Local legislation from the county of Hainaut reveals how seigneurial monopolies were a topic of interplay between peasants and lords, both before and after the demographic and social-economic turmoil caused by the Black Death from 1349 onwards. Historical literature usually focusses on the oppressive nature of seigneurial ovens and mills, which peasants were forced to use in exchange for payment of part of their produce. However, seigneurial subjects (or at least the most prosperous part of the population) were also active stakeholders, demanding and often obtaining favourable conditions for the use of resources which were necessary for the production of their daily bread. While levels of detail increased significantly, topics of negotiation remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After the mid-fourteenth century, neither the issues causing friction nor the nature of solutions shifted dramatically. Rather than centring on levels of seigneurial surplus extraction, conflicts focussed on day-to-day problems in the operation of ovens and mills, often resulting in mutual concessions. In the long run, seigneurial monopolies survived only as long as they benefitted both subjects and lords.
