Making Good and Breaking Bad.: Materiality and Community in Netherlandish Cities, 1380–1520

Abstract

This article discusses community formation at a neighbourhood level from a material-spatial perspective. It argues that a wholesome, safe, ‘good’ living environment required both social harmony and well-functioning material (infra-) structures. Neighbours’ conflicts, mined from the court records of five cities in the late medieval Low Countries, provide the evidence for two main themes. The first concerns making things, especially houses and their attendant facilities, and the second breaking things: acts of deliberate destruction within living environments, and by implication, breaking communal peace. Neighbours took on diverse roles, among which their more material commitments have remained especially underexplored by historians. Yet the shared use, construction and upkeep of facilities and infrastructure around domestic spaces, which were of high value, had considerable influence on power relations and social interactions. Groups of neighbours participated in legal validation processes and offered physical help to each other, but also policed local social order and bad behaviour. The latter often involved damaging material constructions. Such informal communities thus acted as links to more formalised urban structures and organisations, and as foundations from which the latter could develop. Their interactions with central urban governments were more multidirectional and contested than has often been assumed. Understanding the social-material dynamic at the neighbourhood level therefore reveals an important layer in pre-modern urban politics.