County Of Flanders Research Articles

Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in Fourteenth-Century Flanders

In the thirteenth century the county of Flanders was the leading commercial and industrial region of Western Europe. It had easy access by water and overland routes to the German Rhineland and to the fairs of Champagne. As the Italians from the later thirteenth century began to use a direct maritime link with the North, Bruges, on the North Sea, became the major clearing house for goods coming from Italy and the Hanse towns of northern Germany. Flanders originally had a large wool production; this led to its early preeminence in textile manufacturing. Although the growing urbanization of thecounty soon severely curtailed facilities for grazing, Flanders easily obtained English wool, which was simultaneously of a higher calibre and a cheaper price than the native product. At a time when the towns of northern Italy were still very largely finishers of cloth brought from outside, the towns of Flanders, and particularly the five great towns of Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Lille, and Douai, had prosperous industries in textiles of varying types, but specialized in luxury cloths designed for export.