Chapter Inequalities in access to the food market: the city as a producer of norms in the fourteenth century (Low Countries)

Abstract

This article examines the unequal organisation of the grain market in the Low Countries in the fourteenth century. It looks in turn at the ways in which several towns compensated for their difficulties in accessing food by asserting their leadership over secondary towns and their hinterland, and at the ways in which urban legislation guaranteed specific privileges of access to certain categories of buyers or sellers. Finally, the article discusses the caution that must be exercised in attempting to relate the flowering of urban legislation in the fourteenth century to the context of repeated crises during that century.