Essay: Cities, Laws and Borders

My work is on urban law and spaces and the continued importance of enclaves in the shaping of early modern cities in the southern Low Countries. It emphasizes both the fluid nature of states on their borders but also the composite nature of cities within those states. Since Peter Sahlins published Boundaries: the making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees in 1989, historians have acknowledged the importance of territoriality and the creation of boundaries in the formation of early modern states and empires—the edges were sites where the larger polity was stitched together.[1] Contributing to this focus on delimited space, my larger project investigates the history of urban walls and competing enclosures in the wealthy Flemish city of Lille over a three-hundred year period, from 1384 to 1667, to argue that cities, their enclaves and their territorial ambitions were a much more crucial part of that change than scholars to date have recognized.

Lille, like many cities in this period, resembled a jumble of patchwork pieces rather than a harmonious whole cloth. [2] Enclaves had certain powers; they could produce and sell cloth, slaughter animals, brew beer, and arrest, judge, imprison and fine miscreants. Their gardens, convents and houses provided safe havens for those escaping from municipal regulation while their residents sold tax-free beer and cloth. Even the city defenses were neither entirely built nor fully maintained by the city corporation and became a source of increasing tension among these groups. [3] Moreover, there was not one system or principle of law on which all agreed served as the basis of jurisdiction. Not only did enclaves have their own customs, judicial procedures and relationships to the counts of Flanders, but also the customs and privileges carefully guarded by Lille’s city laws were themselves an amalgam derived from the various regimes to which they had been subject, and relied on both territorial and personal principles of law and could appeal to a bewildering number of courts, from the parlement of Paris to the Council of Flanders in Ghent or the Great Council in Mechelen.[4] Despite the images of communal good projected by urban institutions and residents, therefore, Lille’s medieval walls hardly reflected the unity or cooperation of the community that they enclosed and protected.

This patchwork of privilege and law was the norm in Lille and many cities in the region, but it changed in the early modern period. In Lille, enclaves did not disappear completely, but they lost a number of important privileges both within the walls and to a lesser extent, in its suburbs. Overall, from fifty plus ecclesiastical and secular enclaves not subject to city laws or only partially so in the mid fifteenth century, only two enclaves continued to maintain their completely separate status two centuries later. [5] At the same time, the nature of urban jurisdiction was slowly shifting, from laws that privileged the mobility of citizens and their goods to ones that applied primarily to all who lived within the bounds of city territory. It was only in this period that the city walls, a key marker of urban identity, came to symbolize the uniformity of jurisdiction, and therefore political power, within them.

What I am exploring, through an examination of disputes among Lille’s enclaves, the échevinage and other regional authorities over powers of government and control of spaces from fortifications to convents, is how and why these changes happened, particularly during this crucial period of state formation and political instability. Briefly, my research leads to two conclusions. First, the tensions among all these groups were not just residual elements of the medieval past or a sign of dysfunction rectified by new state procedures, but in fact were signs of creative uses of the law and productive of new notions of territorial control. Without enclaves, we cannot understand the way urban politics and urban identity developed in this period. Second, the centralized courts of Habsburg rulers—Emperor Charles V, King Philip II and Archdukes Albert and Isabella—supported Lille’s city corporation in ways their predecessors the Burgundians dukes had not. This extension of échevinal control over urban spaces in Lille would not have happened without the cooperation of state institutions similarly concerned with defining territorial limits and fixing people in place within them. The city was in collaboration with the state not just to maintain privileges gained earlier but to transform them and survive in a world in which power was increasingly understood as power over space that was bounded, enclosed and uniform.

Such a story in Lille allows us to reconsider how cities, states and a new political construct of territory developed together, although it clearly calls for more research on other cities in the Low Countries and elsewhere in northern Europe. Lille was a longtime favorite of Flemish comital authority and rebelled during the Dutch Revolt only briefly, and the Habsburgs increasingly let its officers control their spaces. This was not what happened in Ghent, whose persistent resistance to overlordship meant its walls were altered in 1540 by Charles V, or nearby Valenciennes, where a declaration of an independent Calvinist republic in 1566 led to the revocation of its beloved privileges by King Philip II.[6] In other cities, royal or princely authority dictated the renovation of the urban landscape, although always less than they hoped.[7] Lille’s spatial changes were, however, similar to those found in Brussels, where, as one scholar put it, the city authorities had gained authority over its city walls without anyone knowing quite how it happened.[8] While this variety of experience is to be expected, the example of Lille suggests that the role of urban space as a political tool in early modern cities bears greater examination.

Henri Lefebvre, the theorist who first brought attention to the idea of the city as a particular kind of space, one, in his view, structured in service of capital accumulation, believed that by the end of the sixteenth century, the power produced there had moved into another kind of space, that of the state. The urban maps so popular in the period expressed a dying form, a kind of remembrance of good times past rather than a reflection of vital economic and political activity.[9] My research instead suggests that the new territorial ideas of political control so successfully attached to states in this period did not represent the death knell of urban power but rather provided a kind of strategy of survival for the city corporation—both within an emerging territorial state and against local rivals who threatened to undermine its political authority and identity.

Notes:

1. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Marybeth Carlson, and Laura Cruz, eds., Boundaries and Their Meanings in the History of the Netherlands, vol. 48, Studies in Central European Histories (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Lauren A. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Antonio Stopani, La Production Des Frontières: Etat et communautés en Toscane (Ecole Française de Rome, 2008).

2. Histories of Lille for this period include Louis Trenard, ed., Histoire de Lille, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Lille: Giard, 1970); Eric Bussière, ed., Le Grand Lille (Antwerp: Mercator, 2000); Denis Clauzel, Finances et Politique aà Lille pendant la peÏriode bourguignonne (Dunkerque: Editions des Beffrois, 1982); Robert S. DuPlessis, Lille and the Dutch Revolt: Urban Stability in an Era of Revolution, 1500-1582 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Philippe Guignet, Vivre à Lille sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Perrin, 1999).

3. For the importance of urban enclaves as competing authorities or havens for the accused see Shannon McSheffrey, “Sanctuary and the Legal Topography of Pre-Reformation London,” Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 483–514; Shannon McSheffrey, “Stranger Artisans and the London Sanctuary of St. Martin Le Grand,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, no. 3 (2013): 545–71; Kathryn Reyerson, “Medieval Walled Space: Urban Development vs. Defense,” in City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective, ed. James D. Tracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 88–116; ChloeÏ Deligne and Claire Billen, eds., Voisinages, Coexistences, Appropriations: groupes sociaux et territoires urbains (Moyen Age—16e SieÃcle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).

4. Jacques Foucart, La gouvernance du souverain bailliage de Lille-Douai-Orchies (1326-1790) (Lille: Douriez-Bataille, 1937).

5. Clauzel, Finances et politique aà Lille pendant la peÏriode bourguignonne, 46. The collegiate church of St. Peter of Lille remained a separate (and powerful) enclave until the eve of the French Revolution. The Motte Madame, fief of Lille’s castellan, also retained its separate status, although the échevins won important concessions about policing the industries that were housed there when Louis XIV took over the city. In the eighteenth century, the fief became a possession of the French monarchy; Louix XVI was the last castellan of Lille.

6. Peter J. Arnade, “Privileges and the Political Imagination in the Ghent Revolt of 1539,” in Charles V in Context. The Making of a European Identity, ed. Marc Boone and Marysa Demoor (Ghent: Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, 2003), 103–24; Philippe Guignet, Nouvelle Histoire de Valenciennes, Histoire des villes (Toulouse: Privat, 2006), 58–59.

7. Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe, 1500-1700 (London: Arnold, 1998), 123–149.

8. Philippe Godding, Le Droit Foncier À Bruxelles Au Moyen Âge, Études D’histoire et D’ethnologie Juridiques (Brussels: Université libre de Bruxelles, Institut de sociologie Solvay, 1960), 349.

9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 271–274.