Together with my team – two postdocs, two doctoral students, and two research assistants – I tested the hypothesis about the selective decentralization of government as a component of state formation through an empirical study of seigneurial lordship. Seigneuries were precise geographical circumscriptions in which public governance was not the prerogative of the state but the private property right of a member of the local elite. Traditionally imagined as a stumbling block for state formation, historians have long assumed that the power of seigneurial elites waned with the rise of the fiscal and military state in the Late Middle Ages, but we investigated the possibility that princes were in fact happy to respect seigneurial lordship and even to endorse the creation of new seigneuries in return for elite support for fiscal and military innovation. As a analytical framework, we selected five regions in England, France, and the Low Countries for comparative analysis, as each of these regions displayed crucially different characteristics in terms of state formation, urbanization, and so on. For England, we relied on earlier research on Warwickshire, leaving the team four other case-studies
The first postdoc, Dr Erika Graham-Goering, prioritized the interplay of royal governance and seigneurial lordship in fourteenth-century Languedoc, which led to two important articles. The second postdoc, Dr Jim van der Meulen, focused on Guelders, and also published two important articles.
The first doctoral student, Gert-Jan Van de Voorde, follows the case-study of Languedoc in the fifteenth- and early sixteenth centuries, whereas the second doctoral student, Ysaline Bourgine de Meder, studies fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Normandy. Both doctoral students suffered greatly from the closure of the archives due to the Covid19 pandemic so that they had to refrain themselves from subsidiary publications next to the dissertation. Ysaline Bourgine de Meder will contribute a chapter to the conference proceedings of the closing conference of the ERC project, whereas Gert-Jan Van de Voorde has publications on side-projects.
The PI himself, together with one doctoral student that was not funded by the ERC but by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and two research assistants, Mathijs Speecke and Sander Berghmans, tackled the most labour-intensive case-study of all, that is, Flanders between the mid-fourteenth- and mid-sixteenth century. This leads to a research monograph, authored by Frederik Buylaert and Miet Adriaens, next to a contribution to the conference proceedings of the concluding conference of STATE.
