Violence Regulation in the Cities of the Low Countries (14th-17th centuries)

Urban communities have developed institutions and original methods of regulation to control aggressiveness. Medieval urban authorities have resorted to different methods of regulation of this violence: truces, measures of safeguard favouring threatened people, peace agreements,… enable to maintain peace. Beside those agreements, urban justice developed other procedures enabling violence to be framed and maintained in tolerable limits, such as the procedure of "fait mandé" (self-denunciation of the author of a physical aggression to urban justice, that allowed him to get away with the penal consequences of his deed) or fines set to sanction bodily injuries or insults. The study of urban justice in Namur between 1363 and 1555 in the framework of my PhD enabled me to better comprehend these regulation mechanisms of violence, that permit to channel it without criminalising it. Around the turn of the 16th century, central authorities, relayed by provincial courts, brought their own means of framing violence. The general phenomenon of passing from "urban sociability" to "State criminalisation" – that is passing from deviating behaviours being controlled and dealt with by urban justice, with the authors of physical aggressions or other crimes largely reintegrated into the community after paying a fine corresponding to the committed crime, to the will of developing States, to ensure the monopoly of the control over their populations under different aspects –, is now well known. However, the concrete evolutions of urban conciliation and regulation procedures and their complementarity/competition with the regulation methods set up by the prince and the central institutions have not been much studied so far.