Popular Politics in the Late Medieval City: York and Bruges

Abstract

Abstract The city of York, England’s self-titled ‘second city’ in the late middle ages, was the site of persistent political conflict from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The Flemish city of Bruges experienced a series of revolts in the same period. This article compares the patterns of popular politics in the two cities. Although dissimilar in governmental context, population size and commercial significance, their constitutional arrangements were much more comparable. The urban commons, organised and mobilised by the crafts, were at the centre of the major disturbances in each city. They had a distinctive reading of the urban constitution, which was nurtured in a guild environment among craftsmen and citizens. In York and Bruges, the crafts engaged in similar forms of collective action (petitioning, collective assembly and the occupation of public space), and revolt was the consequence of a pattern of corporate politics. The shared forms, goals and mentalities of popular protest in York and Bruges can provide an explanation of revolt which might apply not only to towns across late medieval Europe in which the political representation of the crafts was common but also, more generally, to those urban centres where a corporatist ethos flourished.