Law, Leverage, and Litigation in Late Medieval Bruges: Foreign Merchants in a City of Justice

Explores the interaction between law and commerce in late medieval Bruges and its impact on the concept of justice.

• Takes an interdisciplinary approach and engages in the debates of commercial history and legal history
• Draws on extensive archival material from across Europe
• Challenges the notion that a commercial city tailored its system to merchants
• Contributes to the field of customary law where scholars diverge from the previous theoretical law treaties and look to what happened in the more practical sources e.g. Litigation records
• Illustrated with examples to demonstrate key concepts and ideas

Late medieval Bruges was a commercial hub that connected Hanseatic, English, Scottish, Portuguese, Spanish, Aragonese, and Italian traders. This book focuses on the conflict resolution of the aldermen and how merchants operated within this legal framework. The key question being whether Bruges was a city of justice. Although this was sometimes claimed by travellers, a lot of merchants confronted with the practicalities of conflict resolution in Bruges, disagreed.

Fieremans analyses how customary law, institutional frameworks, and commerce intersected and were challenged by the aldermen's pursuit of justice. By clarifying the working of the aldermen, it advances our knowledge of the basic mechanisms of a late medieval law court and the evolution of the law courts of late medieval Flanders. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book focuses on the interplay between commerce and justice, explores the diverse merchant communities, and considers the potential lessons it offers for understanding both historical and modern markets. It sheds light on the pragmatic legal culture of Bruges and the legal mechanisms that partially regulate commerce.