"Maritime Violence, Marginalization and the Formation of Markets in Late Medieval England"
Abstract
Late medieval English records contain countless references to the seizure of ships and goods, attacks on sailors and the destruction of ships and fishing nets. I examine such acts of violence, as well as the discurses used to legitimize and criminalize them, in late medieval England. Conflicts such as these are usually interpreted as a by-product of political instability and a lack of enforcement of royal power against the backdrop of the Hundred Years' War. In contrast, I understand the practices of violence and their communication as a factor of political and economic structural change by local actors. I ask about the place of such acts of violence in the context of two essential transformation processes of the late Middle Ages:
(1) processes of state-building and the formation of a political discursive landscape and language in late medieval England.
(2) the formation, hierarchization and concentration of markets in a phase of crisis-ridden contraction, i.e. in a process in which the resources available for distribution became fewer and at the same time certain actors became more central in their appropriation and distribution.
My approach is to describe and better understand macro-processes in a more nuanced way by analyzing small-scale conflicts. I argue that the “undercurrent”, i.e. the patterns of violence and contemporary discourses on economic activity and its links to violence, should be taken seriously in order to better understand these processes. Maritime communities actively shaped structural change. Violent conflict practices and the discourses through which it was negotiated who was allowed to trade what and where are an essential aspect of understanding the concentration of places of resource appropriation and distribution.