Access to Justice: Legal Aid to the Poor at Civil Law Courts in the Eighteenth-Century Low Countries

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 683-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Griet Vermeesch
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Chronically Ill ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
Legal Entitlement

Medieval and early modern rulers commonly proclaimed that protecting the legal entitlements of the personae miserabiles, who included widows, orphans, the chronically ill and “the poor,” was among their principal duties. The entitlement of the poor to legal services was not a matter of grace but was in fact their “good right.” For example, widows, orphans, and other personae miserabili had the privilege of being heard in first instance before high courts, so as to save time and costs in pursuing their legal claims. Another example of manifest commitment to legal entitlement for the poor was the refusal of Philip II of Habsburg to consent to measures that would limit the jurisdiction of his Castilian chanceries; the measures had been proposed so as to limit the chanceries’ ever-increasing workload, but, because they could also restrict indigents' access to such courts, were rejected by the monarch. At first glance, such inclusiveness appears to have been achieved, particularly in view of the large numbers of petty conflicts brought before formal law courts during the long sixteenth century, leading to a so-called “legal revolution.” Historians generally acknowledge that broad layers of early modern society made abundant use of civil adjudication in arranging their social and economic relations and interests.

Taking Forward Roger's Interest in the Relationship between the Early Modern Family, Demography, Economy and Government Policy

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Simon Szreter
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
Economic Productivity ◽  
Work Related ◽  
The Poor

This paper describes how Roger Schofield came to characterise the English social system of the early modern period as 'individualist-collectivist', in which individualism is located within a larger structure and context of collectivism. It discusses this in the context of his contributions to the book he co-edited with John Walter in 1989, entitled Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society. Roger's work related the evidence of demographic and epidemiological change not only to family structures, ideological belief systems and government policy, as saliently represented by effects of the poor laws, but also to economic productivity as a dependent variable. That was quite the opposite of the dominant orthodoxy of the post-war era, which was that demography and epidemiology were driven by economics, not vice versa. This has the implication for our own era that constructive government policy has repeatedly played an important positive role in the economic productivity of the nation and that tax-funded generous support for the poor is a central part of that, which citizens should positively support.

Catholic refuge and the printing press: Catholic exiles from England, France and the Low Countries in the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 532-561
Author(s):  
Alexander Soetaert
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
French Speaking

The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai may sound unfamiliar to modern readers. The bishopric of Cambrai dates to the sixth century but only became an archdiocese and, consequently, the centre of a church province in the sixteenth century. The elevation of the see resulted from the heavily contested reorganization of the diocesan map of the Low Countries by King Philip II in 1559. The new province included the medieval sees of Arras, Cambrai and Tournai, as well as the newly created bishoprics of Saint-Omer and Namur. Its borders were established to encompass the French-speaking Walloon provinces in the south of the Low Countries, territories that are now divided between France and Belgium.1 In the early modern period, this area was already a border and transit zone between France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles. The province’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was deeply marked by recurrent and devastating warfare between the kings of Spain and France, eventually resulting in the transfer of significant territory to France.2 However, the Province of Cambrai was also the scene of frequent cross-border mobility, and a safe haven for Catholic exiles originating from the British Isles, France and other parts of the Low Countries.

Three questions to political economy (An attempt of system introspection)

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. B. Kleiner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Linear Component ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Economic Space ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
System Paradigm

The development of the system paradigm in economic science leads to the formulation of a number of important questions to the political economy as one of the basic directions of economic theory. In this article, on the basis of system introspection, three questions are considered. The first is the relevance of the class approach to the structuring of the socio-economic space; the second is the feasibility of revising the notion of property in the modern world; the third is the validity of the notion of changing formations as the sequence of “slave-owning system — feudal system — capitalist system”. It is shown that in modern society the system approach to the structuring of socio-economic space is more relevant than the class one. Today the classical notion of “property” does not reflect the diversity of production and economic relations in society and should be replaced by the notion of “system property”, which provides a significant expansion of the concepts of “subject of property” and “object of property”. The change of social formations along with the linear component has a more influential cyclic constituent and obeys the system-wide cyclic regularity that reflects the four-cycle sequence of the dominance of one of the subsystems of the macrosystem: project, object, environment and process.

Of Fields and Forced Labor

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152
Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Economic Control ◽  
History Of

Biblical narratives about ostensibly “local” barter (Abraham’s purchase of the cave at Machpelah), protection of battle spoils (Achan’s theft and subsequent execution), and commodification of labor and bodies (Ruth gleaning for hours and offering herself to Boaz) reveal much about ideologies of economic control operative in ancient Israel. The materialist analysis of Roland Boer provides a richly detailed study of Israelite agrarian and tributary practices, offering a salutary corrective to naïve views of Israelite economic relations. Highlighting labor as the most ruthlessly exploited resource in the ancient Near East, Boer examines the class-specific benefits and sustained violence of economic formations from kinship-household relations to militarized extraction. Boer’s erudite study will compel readers to look afresh at the subjugation of the poor and plundering of the powerless as constitutive features of diverse economic practices throughout the history of ancient Israel.

War and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries.

1981 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 495
Author(s):  
Alastair Duke ◽  
Myron P. Gutmann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Low Countries
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document