The Business of the Leet Courts in Medieval Norwich, 1288–1391

Sagui, Samantha

doi:10.1017/9781787445680.008

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…More accurately, they reveal a variegated picture, in which artisanal involvement was greater in some towns and in some periods, depending to some extent on the preference for co-option or annual election. 37 If urban citizenship did not confer absolute equality or inclusiveness, and could not erase the social inequalities and prejudices created by differences of wealth, occupation and status, the idea that the citizenry were one corporate body was not a fiction. 38 In York, where there were three councils by the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the city's freemen took advantage of their representation in an outer council chosen from among the city's crafts to petition the inner councils of 12 and 24 (the 'good men') frequently from 1490 about the obligation of attendance.…”

Section: Attendance and Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who decides? Urban councils and consensus in the late Middle Ages

Liddy

2021

Social History

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The prosaic records of town council meetings are an essential, if problematic, source for historians of late medieval European towns. They are a window on to the concerns, fears and ambitions of urban authorities, yet they have proved especially intractable to historians interested in the social history of urban politics. They seem to present a monotonously harmonious picture of civic unity, social solidarity and political unanimity. Urban historians have increasingly looked outside the town hall for evidence of the social divisions and political discord that truly characterized town life. They have uncovered an unstable world of 'contentious politics', in which revolt was only one possible means of dissent. This article argues that historians should return to the town hall and to the council chamber, in order to reassess the value of town council minutes. Placing the rich, and still relatively little-used, civic archive of the English city of Norwich within a wider European context, it focuses on the meaning and significance of the easily overlooked records of nonattendance at council meetings. It locates official anxieties about non-attendance not within a narrowly legal or institutional framework, but within a contemporary culture of urban citizenship, which was performative and disputatious. The article identifies a form of 'consensus politics' that involved, indeed promoted, conflict.

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Section: Attendance and Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%