A. Maleszka, J. Możdżeń, Urban legislation as an instrument for the formation and regulation of socio-economic life in 14th-century Prussian and Irish towns

This chapter compares key ordinances and statutes issued in selected Irish (Dublin and Waterford) and Prussian (Thorn and Königsberg) cities in the fourteenth century. The authors treat these sources as ‘program texts’, that is, texts conveying the intentions of legislators who wanted to socially discipline residents in various spheres of life, that is to reinforce their own authority while shaping social attitudes towards certain matters. An analysis of parallel sources indicates that in both Prussian and Irish cities of the fourteenth century regulations concerned a wide spectrum of issues related to civic security, broadly conceived. Clusters of regulations were designed, for example, to ensuring an adequate quality of basic foodstuffs, city hygiene and fire prevention. The authors identify, within this spectrum of regulation, a number of very similar disciplinary ordinances adopted independently of each other in the two regions under study, including those controlling producers and places of sale, opposition to speculation, the labelling of products, control of weights and measures, and the regulation of animal husbandry. Regional differences mainly refer to the type of goods regulated. These close parallels are shown to demonstrate intersections between the solutions they adopted to similarly perceived problems, given both universal elements of developing fourteenth-century urban life and their parallel peripheral, colonial positions. Statutes and ordinances adopted by municipal governments expressed an intent to shape specific social attitudes mainly by means of disciplinary entries, that is, items of regulation dictating punishments for misbehaviour within the urban space. It is argued that by referring to the linked ideas of the ‘common good’ and the consent of the residents, statutes and ordinances were made a tool for legitimizing the social and political order (as defined in Section 6, above) of the community, or changes introduced to it. Therefore, tendencies to control production and trade, to discipline social behavior and to legitimize the decisions of narrow ruling groups appeared near contemporaneously in these unrelated parts of Europe. Primary sources: The main sources for Ireland shall be Dublin town books and borough customs, containing more than 130 ordinances from the fourteenth century, supplemented by similar, though less extensive, records of Waterford ‘laws and usages’. Additionally, recorded ‘acts’ by the mayor, bailiff’s and commons of Dublin (as published in CARD) shall be consulted. The main sources for Prussia shall be the surviving Koenigsberg bylaws of 1385 and 1394, and the surviving bylaws of Toruń (newtown) 1300–1350 and (oldtown) 1345–1547.