Though late medieval English and Dutch people shared many assumptions about social, economic, and political structures, immigrants from the Low Countries would have found that Londoners did some things differently. One difference was the management of interpersonal conflicts. In the Low Countries, violent quarrels and even homicides were often handled through compensation; in England, homicides in particular were under the sole purview of the royal courts and assaults were normally also dealt with through local or royal courts. One of the remarkable aspects of the hatmakers’ ordinances is that they were written as if the members of the guild still lived under the broader political and legal conditions that applied in Dutch cities, especially those in the southern Low Countries, such as Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, and Ghent. It is impossible to know whether this was intentional maintenance of home country practices or unconscious assumption that their customs were simply the way things were done everywhere.
It was common for guild ordinances in both England and the Low Countries to specify ways that conflicts between guild brethren were to be solved: as articles 8 and 9 reflect, disputes were usually to be handled in-house rather than taking them to outside authorities or formal court proceedings.
1 A couple of examples: the Upholders (1498), LMA, COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, fol. 7r; the English Weavers (1492), Frances Consitt, The London Weavers’ Company, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I, 222. If this preference for internal settlements would have seemed normal to an English observer, in other ways the hatmakers’ ordinances proceeded from assumptions that would have been surprising to their English counterparts. Some lip service was paid to the different context: Article 8 stated that its provisions were not to meddle with matters that touched the king’s highness or the liberty and right of the church. Nonetheless the ordinances that followed simply ignored the king’s jurisdiction over criminal matters, with provisions that were premised instead on the substantially different legal system in the cities of the Low Countries.
Article 10’s forbidding of ‘maliciouse, iniurose, or words of dispite’ is similar to language in English ordinances about verbal altercations,
2 E.g. Upholders (1498), Stringers (1499), and Cobblers (1501), LMA, COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, folios 6v, 17v, 32v–33r; English Weavers (1492), Consitt, London Weavers’ Company, I, 218. but both the range of disputes and the language employed in article 12 fall outside what guilds in England normally regulated:
Item, it is established and ordeyned that if any broder of the same fraternitte maliciousli drawe owt his daggar, sword, or knyf, or any other instrument defensive to hurt or wronge any man of the same fraternite, that he shall pay to the masturs and wardence at euery suche defaut ii s. iiij d. And he that drawith or castith hurt or wronge any man of the same fraternite with stonys, lovis, pottis, dishis, candilstickis, or any other thing [aboue rehersed […]. And it be a mayme, he shall pay x s. ouyer and byside that he so hurtith and wrongyth shall compownde with hym that is so hurte and wronged and recompense and satisfy him for his hurtis and wrongis aftur the discrecion of the maisturs and wardens of the same fraternite or any other iuge before whome it shall fortune hym to be callid for the same trespasse. And if any broder of the seid fraternite wilfully sle any man of the same fraternite, that thenne he shal be put owt and vtturly excludet from the seid fraternite to be.
English guild ordinances did not legislate for such violent encounters between fraternity brothers, not because they never happened, but because homicide as a felony belonged to the king and assaults were normally heard at first instance in local courts (in London, wardmote inquests or, for more serious cases, the sheriffs’ court).
3 For England, see for instance Charles Gross, ‘Modes of Trial in the Mediæval Boroughs of England’, Harvard Law Review 15 (1902), 705; Miriam Müller, ‘Social Control and the Hue and Cry in Two Fourteenth-Century Villages’, Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005), 29–53. For the Low Countries, see Joost de Damhouder, La practique et enchiridion des causes criminelles (Louvain: Jehan Bathen, 1555), pp. 139–40. Our thanks to Stephanie Brown and Quentin Verreycken for these references. Article 12, however, blithely ignores the English way of doing things. Even the language of article 12 – especially the list of items with which one might injure a person, ‘stonys, lovis,
4 To modern readers, loaves of bread may not seem an obvious offensive weapon, but hardened loaves were used as plates. In the Middle English romance Sir Tristrem, Morgan assails the hero with a ‘lof’ (871). See Neil Cartlidge, ‘Medieval Romance Mischief’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne J. Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 27–48. See also a late 14th-century London homicide involving two Dutch men, an Italian man, and a Dutch ‘frowe’, instigated by the throwing of a crust of bread. Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Quarrel over a “frowe”’, Sanctuary Seekers in England, 1394–1557 (2020) <https://sanctuaryseekers.ca/2020/07/06/frowe/>. pottis, dishis, candilstickis’ – resonated with Dutch-language formulas used in civic ordinances from the southern Low Countries, which carefully delineated different fines or compensations for different weapons, including stones, pots, and chairs.
5 Louis Maes, Vijf Eeuwen Stedelijk Strafrecht. Bijdragen tot de Rechts- en Cultuurgeschiedenis der Nederlanden (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1974), pp. 270–71, 274–76; Fernand Vanhemelryck, De Criminaliteit in de Ammanie van Brussel van de Late Middeleeuwen Tot Het Einde van Het Ancien Regime (1404–1798) (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1961), pp. 124–26. Our thanks to Chanelle Delameillieure for these references. English formulas in criminal indictments, by contrast, focused on purpose-made weapons (‘swords, staves, knives, and daggers’) rather than domestic implements. Such phrases are simply not to be found in guild records, as far as we know.Even more strikingly assumptive of a Low Countries context is Article 12’s prescription that any guild brother who maimed another ‘shall compownde with’ and ‘recompense and satisfy’ the person whom he hurt. Composition or settlement of interpersonal wrongs by money compensation, rather than state prosecution, was common in much of Europe, including in Netherlandish cities.
6 Bernard Dauven, ‘Composition et rémission au XVe siècle: Confusion, concurrence ou complémentarité? Le cas du Brabant’, and Guy Dupont, ‘Le temps des compositions: Pratiques judiciaires à Bruges et à Gand du XIVe au XVIe siècle’, in Préférant miséricorde à rigueur de justice: pratiques de la grâce (XIIIe-XVIIe siècles), ed. Bernard Dauven and Xavier Rousseaux (Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2017), pp. 31–52, 55–61. For English practice, see John G. Bellamy, The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England: Felony Before the Courts from Edward I to the Sixteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Arbitrated settlements did exist in England but were ad hoc and unlikely to be assumed as conventional in regulations.
7 Edward Powell, ‘Settlement of Disputes by Arbitration in Fifteenth-Century England’, Law and History Review 2 (1984), 21–43. In Dutch and Flemish cities composition was available for homicide as well as for less serious crimes and the hatmakers’ ordinances presumed this was also true in London. The last clause in article 12, ‘if any broder of the seid fraternite wilfully sle any man of the same fraternite, that thenne he shal be put owt and vtturly excludet from the seid fraternite’, imagined a scenario where a member had killed one of his brethren and then carried on with his trade after settling with the victim’s family. In England, guilds did not deal with such matters, as convicted slayers were executed, solving that delicate problem.
Article 12 operates with assumptions about the workings of courts and the law that are not only different from the English context but outright incompatible with English law. It is not clear whether those who drew up the ordinances were oblivious or lazy (relying, for instance, on a model set of ordinances from a Low Countries guild that was simply copied), or deliberately stuck to a legal system that seemed more ‘right’ to them than English crown prosecution. Article 12 does suggest that those who drew it up had not long been resident in London and in this, as in the general structures of artisan workshops and labour, had not fully assimilated to the host culture.