Exceptional Flanders? The First Strikes and Collective Actions of Craftsmen in North-Western Europe around the Middle of the Thirteenth Century

Summary

In 1245, an intriguing ordinance was issued by the aldermen of Douai – a Flemish town situated in the north of present-day France – prohibiting all takehans, whether done by burghers or by servants.1 The most recent inter-pretation defines takehan as collecting money among workers for a collective action, an illegal assembly, or a strike. The penalties for faire takehan were severe. An offender had to pay a fine of 60 pounds, the highest fine possible for townsmen in the thirteenth century, and would be banished from the city for one year. The prohibition on faire takehan was repeated around 1250 and in 1266, meaning that collective actions by (textile) workers disturbed urban life in Douai for an extended period around the middle of the thirteenth century. Historiography on medieval revolts often considers the takehan of 1245 as the first collective action of this kind: an intra-urban conflict of lesser workers against their employers and the urban ruling elites of merchants and entrepreneurs.

However, as is the case for every collective action, the relatively well-known example of the takehan in Douai did not stand alone. Throughout the thirteenth century, waves of uproar and unrest disturbed urban life in north-western Europe. The close interaction between the medieval cities – through travelling merchants and craftsmen – sparked the distribution of dissident ideas and the expansion of disturbances. At the heart of these uprisings was the densely urbanised region of Flanders, Artois, Brabant, and Liège, which we can consider as one economic area during the thirteenth century and, by extension, the rest of the Middle Ages. This broader region witnessed relatively early urban disturbances with a specific character. While in many cities in England, the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdom of France, urban communes were still struggling for emanci-pation from the power of kings, bishops, and other feudal lords, the uprisings in the Flemish and Brabantine towns were internal conflicts between the lesser craftsmen – manual workers, retailers, and petty entrepreneurs – and the ruling elites. Urban unrest of this kind appeared only from the fourteenth century onwards in the regions adjacent to Flanders and Brabant – in some cases even only after been initiated by Flemish migrants – or they did not take place at all.