The politics of the urban commons in Northern Atlantic Spain in the later Middle Ages

Abstract

This article examines some key issues relating to the emergence of political consciousness and political activity amongst the commons in the towns of Northern Atlantic Spain in the late medieval period. In the fifteenth century, a partnership between the urban business elite and the craft guilds successfully petitioned the monarchy on behalf of the commons, which resulted in municipal reforms. The resolution of issues achieved in the north was radically different from the situation in other cities in the kingdom of Castile, where the commons’ petitions and conflicts with urban oligarchies led to what became known as the ‘Revolt of the Comuneros’ in 1520, which marked the decline of the commons’ assemblies and the end of medieval urban rebellions in the interior of the kingdom.

Introduction: Shaping Urban Politics from Below: Citizen Participation in Late Medieval Europe

“…Before moving to Laredo, De Escalante lived in Bruges for many years -including the early 1490s, when the city rose against its lord Maximilian of Austria. 64 Similarly, Flemish weavers exiled because of their resistance to the count's fiscal policies emigrated to England in the midfourteenth century. By coincidence or not, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was especially vigorous in the regions where they had relocated.…”

Seamen’s Guilds, Labor Organizations and Social Protest in Northern Iberia in the Late Middle Ages

“…However, that binary opposition-monarchy vs. guilds-which is evinced by the proliferation of professional guilds in northern Iberia, Flanders and England, was not so simple, and there is an increasing awareness that centralizing policies worked in close conjunction with the guilds in a relationship of mutual benefit, in spite of the fact that the latter were on occasions quite conflictive (Trio 2003;Simon-Muscheid 2009). For instance, royal policy did not always take the same measures throughout the kingdom, as the Castilian case reveals, where the guilds of northern Iberia and the monarchs collaborated, while relations with the craft guilds of the major cities of the kingdom were, in general, conflictive (Solórzano-Telechea 2014c).…”