Jan Dumolyn | Nobles, Patricians and Officers: The Making of a Regional Political Elite in Late Medieval Flanders | Journal of Social History, 40.2

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Jan Dumolyn | Nobles, Patricians and Officers: The Making of a Regional Political Elite in Late Medieval Flanders | Journal of Social History, 40.2 | The History Cooperative

NOBLES, PATRICIANS AND OFFICERS: THE MAKING OF A REGIONAL POLITICAL ELITE IN LATE MEDIEVAL FLANDERS

By Jan Dumolyn University of Ghent

In the county of Flanders the late medieval period was an era of important social mobility among the dominant classes, as a result of the formation process of the Burgundian state. I argue that in the course of the later Middle Ages, and more specifically in the period of Burgundian domination (1384–1492), a regional political elite was made, as much as it made itself, in the county of Flanders, to paraphrase E. P. Thompson .¹ Significant groups of the lower and higher nobility, the urban and rural dominant classes who did not belong to the nobility and the new social group of princely officers, itself made up of noble and non-noble elements, gradually integrated themselves in a 'power elite' on the level of the county of Flanders. They did this by forming social networks based on marriage alliances. They had common political and material interests and a common political ideology stressing the service to the state and the 'common good'. To establish empirically the early phases of such a 'political elite' from the integration of several previously distinct elite groups, I will use the following criteria. First, the careers of princely officers necessitated increased regional mobility, which led to the forging of connections between the different and previously more isolated urban and rural elite groups. This led, secondly, to a more profound social heterogeneity by means of marriages among the different elite groups. In turn this development, fuelled by the state formation process, created larger social networks encompassing patricians, nobles and non-noble rural elites. The families of mixed social origin adopted the ideology of the noble lineage, with a 'genealogical consciousness'. Thirdly, I want to show that important layers of this composite political elite developed into what could be considered a new 'state nobility' whose political ideology was to defend the bonum commune or commonwealth of the Burgundian state, abandoning the traditional autonomism of the Flemish urban political elites.	1

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