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Evil Wednesday and Good Friday: Urban Political Conflict and Liturgical Time in the Late Medieval Low Countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2026

Jan Dumolyn  and
Jelle Haemers
Jan Dumolyn*
Affiliation:
Universiteit Gent
Jelle Haemers*
Affiliation:
KU Leuven
*
jan.dumolyn@ugent.be
jelle.haemers@kuleuven.be
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Abstract

This article explores the ways that social groups represented political strife in the late medieval Low Countries, considering how these events were remembered but also how they could be recycled and manipulated. It has already been shown that late medieval politics must have been generational, with those involved in revolts actively maintaining the memories of their predecessors’ struggles. This study argues, however, that the forms of these cyclical memories were also shaped by the fundamental social and religious matrix that was Christian liturgical time, as reflected in the telling names—such as “Good Friday” or “Evil Wednesday”—that urban craftsmen gave to their uprisings. This practice of remembering political conflicts through days of the week that seem to be allusions to the Passion cycle is frequently attested, especially in fourteenth-century Flanders. The study of such name-giving, along with the performance and use of liturgical symbols in revolts, shows that late medieval citizens were not merely passive receptors of ecclesiastical categorizations of time imposed from above; they also actively reinterpreted chronological elements as they shaped and altered the representation of events, political and otherwise, with specific audiences in mind. Ways of naming important political events thus offer an indication of how social groups constructed ideology to represent common pasts within a “social time” relevant to their group identities—even if those discourses were based on a widely shared Christian conception of historical time influenced by liturgical practice.

Cet article examine la manière dont les groupes sociaux représentaient les conflits politiques dans les Pays-Bas de la fin du Moyen Âge, en étudiant non seulement comment l’on se souvenait de ces événements, mais aussi comment ils pouvaient être recyclés et manipulés. Il a déjà été démontré que la politique de la fin du Moyen Âge devait être générationnelle, les personnes impliquées dans les révoltes conservant activement la mémoire des luttes de leurs prédécesseurs. Cette étude soutient cependant que les formes de ces mémoires cycliques des révoltes passées ont été façonnées par la matrice sociale et religieuse fondamentale qu’était le temps liturgique chrétien et qui se reflétait dans des noms aussi parlants que « Vendredi saint » ou « Mauvais Mercredi », donnés par les artisans urbains à leurs soulèvements. Cette pratique consistant à se souvenir des conflits politiques par l’utilisation des jours de la semaine, qui semble être une allusion au cycle de la Passion, est fréquemment attestée, en particulier dans la Flandre du xvie siècle. L’étude de cet usage, ainsi que celle de la représentation et de l’utilisation de symboles liturgiques dans ces révoltes, montrent que les citoyens du Moyen Âge tardif n’étaient pas de simples récepteurs passifs des catégorisations ecclésiastiques du temps imposées d’en haut ; ils réinterprétaient activement les éléments chronologiques en façonnant et en modifiant la représentation des événements, politiques ou autres, en fonction des publics. Ainsi, les différentes manières de nommer les événements politiques importants témoignent de la façon dont les groupes sociaux ont forgé une représentation des passés communs au sein d’un « temps social » pertinent pour leur identité de groupe, même si ces discours étaient basés sur une conception chrétienne largement partagée du temps historique influencée par la pratique liturgique collective.

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Type
Research Article
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Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 33
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© Éditions de l’EHESS 2026

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Footnotes

This article was originally published in French as “Mauvais Mercredi et Vendredi saint. Conflits politiques urbains et temps liturgique dans les Pays-Bas du Moyen Âge tardif,” Annales HSS 75, no. 2 (2020): 249–82, doi 10.1017/ahss.2020.127.

References

1. Victor Fris, Histoire de Gand (Brussels: Librairie nationale d’Art et d’Histoire G. Van Oest Cie, 1913), 47–50; David Nicholas, The Metamorphosis of a Medieval City: Ghent in the Age of the Arteveldes, 1302–1390 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 1–16; Marc Boone, “A Medieval Metropolis,” in Ghent, a City of All Times, ed. Marc Boone and Gita Deneckere (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2010), 50–95.

2. Julius Vuylsteke and Alfons Van Werveke, eds., Gentsche stads- en Baljuwsrekeningen, vol. 1, 1280–1336 (Ghent: s.n., 1900), 132; Julius Vuylsteke, ed., Uitleggingen tot de Gentsche stads- en Baljuwsrekeningen, vol. 2, 1280–1315 (Ghent: F. Meyer-Van Loo, 1906), 185.

3. Polydore Van der Meersch, ed., Memorieboek der Stad Ghent van ’t jaar 1301 tot 1737, vol. 1 (Ghent: s.n., 1852), 29. As a genre, these “memory books,” private chronicles mostly belonging to rich burgher families, date from the fifteenth century onward: see Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, De Gentse Memorieboeken als spiegel van stedelijk historisch bewustzijn (14de tot 16de eeuw) (Ghent: Maatschappij voor geschiedenis en oudheidkunde te Gent, 1998).

4. For instance, on the Bloody Sunday of January 22, 1905, many died in Saint Petersburg when tsarist troops fired on unarmed demonstrators. Another Bloody Sunday took place on November 21, 1920, when a similar killing occurred in Dublin. The most notorious is, of course, the massacre of January 30, 1972, in Derry.

5. Stijn Streuvels, In oorlogstijd, vol. 1, 1914 (1979; Tielt: Lannoo, 2015), 109: “En de Vlaming, die voor alles gauw een naam weet, heet het: de Vliegende Maandag.” For the other examples, see Antoon Viaene, “De dagen in Vlaamse historienamen,” Biekorf 60 (1959): 88.

6. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3–6 and 105–106. Davis deconstructs the distinctions between modern/secular and medieval/theological temporalities.

7. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les rythmes au Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), covers a great variety of “rhythms” that articulated the personal and social lives of medieval men and women. Likewise, Matthew S. Champion, The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), considers the rhythms and “temporalities”—essentially the same thing—of medieval human action in a selection of towns in Flanders and Brabant.

8. Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, “Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Medieval History 31, no. 4 (2005): 369–93.

9. Jelle Haemers and Anke Demeyer, “Le cri du rebelle, le cri du criminel. Slogans, insultes et langage des ‘malfaiteurs’ dans les villes des Pays-Bas méridionaux (xive–xvie siècles),” Histoire, économie & société 37, no. 1 (2019): 15–31.

10. See his posthumously published main work: Henri Pirenne, Les villes et les institutions urbaines (Brussels: Nouvelle société d’éditions, 1939). On Pirenne’s influence, see Marc Boone, “Cities in Late Medieval Europe: The Promise and Curse of Modernity,” Urban History 39, no. 2 (2012): 329–49.

11. For overviews and bibliographical references, see Marc Boone, À la recherche d’une modernité civique. La société urbaine des anciens Pays-Bas au bas Moyen Âge (Brussels: Éd. de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2010); Véronique Lambert and Peter Stabel, eds., Golden Times: Wealth and Status in the Middle Ages in the Southern Low Countries (Tielt: Lannoo, 2016); Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone, and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, eds., City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

12. Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, “‘A Bad Chicken Was Brooding’: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders,” Past & Present 214, no. 1 (2012): 45–86; Sam K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolution in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425; Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Patrick Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities: Italy and the Southern Low Countries, 1370–1440 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

13. Franco Franceschi, “La mémoire des laboratores à Florence au début du xve siècle,” Annales ESC 45, no. 5 (1990): 1143–67; Margaret Haines, “Artisan Family Strategies: Proposals for Research on the Families of Florentine Artists,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciapelli and Patricia Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 163–75; Renato Bordone, Uno stato d’animo. Memoria del tempo e comportamenti urbani nel mondo comunale italiano (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2002), 19–32.

14. Jacques Paul, “Expression et perception du temps d’après l’enquête sur les miracles de Louis d’Anjou,” in Temps, mémoire, tradition au Moyen Âge, actes du xiiie congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1983), 19–41, here p. 29.

15. Galbert of Bruges, The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders, trans. Jeff Rider (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 3.

16. Hilda Johnstone, ed. and trans., Annals of Ghent (London: Nelson, 1951).

17. Jelle Haemers, “Social Memory and Rebellion in Fifteenth-Century Ghent,” Social History 36, no. 4 (2011): 443–63; Lisa Demets and Jan Dumolyn, “Urban Chronicle Writing in Late Medieval Flanders: The Case of Bruges During the Flemish Revolt of 1482–1490,” Urban History 43, no. 1 (2016): 28–45; Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, “L’écriture de la mémoire urbaine en Flandre et en Brabant (xive–xvie siècle),” in Villes de Flandres et d’Italie (xiiie–xvie siècle). Les enseignements d’une comparaison, ed. Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 149–64, especially p. 173.

18. Guy P. Marchal, “De la mémoire communicative à la mémoire culturelle. Le passé dans les témoignages d’Arezzo et de Sienne (1177–1180),” Annales HSS 56, no. 3 (2001): 563–89, here p. 584.

19. Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, “Political Songs and Memories of Rebellion in the Later Medieval Low Countries,” in Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture, ed. Éva Guillorel, David Hopkin, and William G. Pooley (London: Routledge, 2018), 43–63.

20. Marc Boone and Jelle Haemers, “‘The Common Good’: Governance, Discipline and Political Culture,” in Blondé, Boone, and Van Bruaene, City and Society in the Low Countries, 93–127.

21. Peter Burke, “History as Social Memory,” in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 97–113; Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40; Charles Zika, “Memory and Commemoration in Recent English-Language Historiography and Discourse,” in Jubiläum, Jubiläum… Zur Geschichte öffentlicher und privater Erinnerung, ed. Paul Münch (Essen: Klartext, 2005), 241–57. On the ways that medieval individuals and institutions used memories of conflict to construct identities, see Megan Cassidy-Welch, ed., Remembering the Crusades and Crusading (London: Routledge, 2017). Useful caveats regarding the often problematic use of this notion can be found in Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000): 127–50, and Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002): 179–97.

22. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory [1925], ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

23. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 224–26; Astrid Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung (Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2005); Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel C. Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Alain Hugon, Naples insurgée. De l’événement à la mémoire, 1647–1648 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011).

24. Cubitt, History and Memory, 16 and 216.

25. See Jürgen Straub, ed., Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness (New York: Berghahn, 2005).

26. Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28.

27. Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12. On Flanders, see Steven Vanderputten, “Individual Experience, Collective Remembrance, and the Politics of Monastic Reform in High Medieval Flanders,” Early Medieval Europe 20, no. 1 (2012): 70–89.

28. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 144–72; Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 130.

29. Philippe Joutard, La légende des Camisards. Une sensibilité au passé (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); Joutard, Histoire et mémoires, conflits et alliance (Paris: La Découverte, 2013); Philip Benedict, “Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion During the Ancien Régime,” French History 22, no. 4 (2008): 381–405; Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers, “Introduction: On the Early Modernity of Modern Memory,” in Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Erika Kuijpers et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–23; Alexandra Merle, Stéphane Jettot, and Manuel Herrero Sánchez, eds., La mémoire des révoltes en Europe à l’époque moderne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018).

30. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 75.

31. René Fédou, “Une révolte populaire à Lyon au xve siècle : la Rebeyne de 1436,” Cahiers d’histoire 3 (1958): 129–50; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Polity, 1987), 8–9.

32. Karl Von Hegel, ed., Die Chroniken der niedersächsischen Städte, vol. 1, 12: Köln (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1875), 243–57; Klaus Militzer, “Führungsschicht und Gemeinde in Köln im 14. Jahrhundert,” in Städtische Führungsgruppen und Gemeinde in der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Wilfried Ehbrecht (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1980), 1–24, particularly pp. 20–22.

33. August Lübben and Karl Schiller, Mittelniederdeutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 4 (Bremen: J. Kühtmann, 1878), 85. The uprising in Minden was also named after one of its instigators, Mathias von Hadeber, the Lange Matz, or “Tall Matthew”: see Wilfried Ehbrecht, “Form und Bedeutung innerstädtischer Kämpfe am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Minden, 1405–1535,” in Ehbrecht, Städtische Führungsgruppen, 115–52. For the other revolts, see Matthias Puhle, “Die ‘Große Schicht’ in Braunschweig,” in Die Hanse. Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, ed. Jörgen Bracker, Volker Henn, and Rainer Postel (Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 1998), 812–22; Uwe Grieme, “Die Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Bischof, Klerus und Stadt in Halberstadt im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert,” in Bischof und Bürger. Herrschaftsbeziehungen in den Kathedralstädten des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters, ed. Uwe Grieme, Nathalie Kruppa, and Stefan Pätzold (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 187–93.

34. Pierre Monnet, Villes d’Allemagne au Moyen Âge (Paris: Picard, 2004), 165–66. The Schichtbuch can be found in Karl von Hegel, ed., Die Chroniken der niedersächsischen Städte, vol. 2, 6: Braunschweig (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1880), 299–468.

35. We first argued for the study of these names in Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, “Takehan, Cokerulle, and Mutemaque: Naming Collective Action in the Later Medieval Low Countries,” in The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, ed. Justine Firnhaber-Baker (London: Routledge, 2017), 39–54.

36. Leonardo Sciascia, “Il mito dei Vespri siciliani da Amari a Verdi,” Archivio storico per la Sicilia orientale 69 (1973): 183–92.

37. John-Payne Collier et al., eds., Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (London: Percy Society, 1842), 17–22; Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), 53–56.

38. Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli During the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 89; Laura Casella, “Mémoire de la révolte et mémoires de famille. La crudel zobia grassa (1511) dans les livres de famille du xvie siècle : brève histoire des manuscrits et des éditions,” in Merle, Jettot, and Herrero Sánchez, La mémoire des révoltes, 143–69. The origin and transmissions of this name are not thoroughly discussed.

39. Adolphe Borgnet and Stanislas Bormans, eds., Chronique et Geste de Johan des Preis dit d’Outremeuse (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1887), dl. VI, p. 295.

40. Geneviève Xhayet, Réseaux de pouvoir et solidarités de parti à Liège au Moyen Âge (1250–1468) (Geneva: Droz, 1997), 164; Jean-Louis Kupper and Marylène Laffineur-Crépin, eds., 1312–2012. 700ème anniversaire du Mal Saint-Martin (Liège: Société d’art et d’histoire du diocèse de Liège, 2013).

41. For a detailed study of the events, see Markus Wenninger, “Fasching als Krisenzeit. Die ‘Böse Fasnacht’ von Basel und andere Konflikte,” in Das Königreich der Narren. Fasching im Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Grabmayer (Klagenfurt: Alpen-Adria-Univiversität Klagenfurt, 2009), 213–51. See also Peter Weidkuhn, “Fastnacht – Revolte – Revolution,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 21, no. 4 (1969): 289–306.

42. Rudolf Wackernagel, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Basel, vol. 4 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1900), 384–95.

43. August Bernoulli, ed., Basler Chroniken, vol. 5 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895), 30 and 62.

44. Ibid., 120.

45. Véronique Lambert, “De Brugse Metten: een andere lieu de mémoire van de Vlamingen,” Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis 139 (2002): 185–98; Georges Declercq, Jan Dumolyn, and Jelle Haemers, “Social Groups, Political Power and Institutions I, c. 1100–c. 1300,” in Medieval Bruges, c. 850–1550, ed. Andrew Brown and Jan Dumolyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 148–51.

46. Herman Van der Linden, Willem De Vreese, and Paul de Keyser, eds., Lodewijk Van Velthem’s Voortzetting van den Spiegel historiael, vol. 2, 1240–1316 (Brussels: Hayez, 1931), 272.

47. Thierry de Limburg-Stirum, ed., Codex Diplomaticus Flandriae inde ab anno 1296 ad usque 1325, vol. 2 (Bruges: A. de Zuttere, Imprimeur de la Société d’Émulation, 1889), 18.

48. Jos De Smet, André Vandewalle, and Carlos Wyffels, eds., De rekeningen van de stad Brugge, vol. 2, 1280–1319 (Brussels: Palais des académies, 1995), 12.

49. Henri Lemaître, ed., Chronique et Annales de Gilles Le Muisit, abbé de Saint-Martin de Tournai (1272–1352) (Paris: Librairie Renouard/H. Laurens, 1906), 65.

50. The Chronique artésienne speaks of the “Friday after mid-May, when “the churls of Bruges betrayed our people as they slept”: Frantz Funck-Brentano, ed., Chronique artésienne (1295–1304) (Paris: Picard, 1899), 35. Guillaume Guiart dates the killing (“the mortal conflict that happened in Bruges”) to “the year one thousand three hundred and two”: Jean Alexandre C. Buchon, ed., Branche des royaux lignages. Chronique métrique de Guillaume Guiart (Paris: Librairie Verdière, 1828), 221. Later chronicles such as the so-called Ancienne chronique de Flandre call it “the treason of those of Bruges”: Thierry Kervyn de Lettenhove, ed., Istore et Croniques de Flandres, vol. 1 (Brussels: Hayez, 1879), 226. A detailed study of references to the event in these and other chronicles can be found in Victor Fris, La bataille de Courtrai (Ghent: Vuylsteke, 1902).

51. In the manuscript versions of the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen composed at the end of the fifteenth century, the term “Good Friday” had already fallen out of use, even though these texts usually highlighted their town’s rebellious past with a great degree of sympathy: see Bruges, City Library, MSS 436 and 437, as well as Douai, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore Library, MS 1110.

52. See Van der Meersch, ed., Memorieboek der Stad Ghent, 1:54, which incorrectly dates it to 1343. On this period, see David Nicholas, The van Arteveldes of Ghent: The Varieties of Vendetta and the Hero in History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). On the remembrance of this rebel leader, see Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, “We Will Ask for a New Artevelde: Names, Sites, and the Memory of Revolt in the Late Medieval Low Countries,” in Merle, Jettot, and Herrero Sánchez, La mémoire des révoltes, 231–49.

53. In another late fifteenth-century Bruges version of the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen (Bruges: City Library, MS 437, fol. 170v), we find “AD 1345, on the first day of May, which was then called the Evil Monday, in Ghent the weavers fought the fullers and the small guilds” (wrongly dating the event a day earlier). The Rijmkroniek van Vlaenderen, which used the term Quaden Maendaghe, was likely the source of the later uses of “Evil Monday” in various sixteenth-century chronicles: Herman Brinkman and Janny Schenkel, eds., Het Comburgse Handschrift Stuttgart. Hs. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. poet. Et phil. 2o22, vol. 2 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997), 1439. This chronicle in verse was written around 1370–1390, and seems to have been primarily based on oral tradition: Véronique Lambert, “De kronieken van Vlaanderen 1164–1520: een overzicht, met bijzondere aandacht voor hun basis, de ‘Genealogia comitum Flandriae’ (Flandria Generosa)” (MA diss., University of Ghent, 1988), 138; Henri Pirenne, ed., “La Rijmkroniek van Vlaenderen et ses sources,” Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire 15 (1888): 346–64.

54. Georges Espinas and Henri Pirenne, eds., Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière en Flandre, vol. 2, Deymze-Hulst (Brussels: P. Imbreghts, 1909), 477–78. In Ghent’s city accounts, the conflict was also called “the discord between the fullers and the weavers.” “Good Tuesday” was also mentioned in accounts and administrative documents during the next few years: Napoléon De Pauw and Julius Vuylsteke, eds., De rekeningen der stad Gent. Tijdvak van Jacob van Artevelde, vol. 2, 1336–1349 (Ghent: Hoste, 1880), 388; charter dated March 3, 1349, in Julius Vuylsteke, “De Goede Disendach, 13 januari 1349,” Annales de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Gand 1 (1894): 41–42.

55. Espinas and Pirenne, eds., Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière en Flandre, 2:495.

56. Vuy Vuylsteke, “De Goede Disendach, 13 januari 1349,” 42.

57. Raf Verbruggen, Geweld in Vlaanderen. Macht en onderdrukking in de Vlaamse steden tijdens de veertiende eeuw (Bruges: Van de Wiele, 2005), 76.

58. Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), considers that oral transmission within groups (“communicative memory”) lasts for three generations, or about eighty to a hundred years, before it becomes “cultural memory” in the form of a chronicle, image, ritual, or monument. See also Bas Diemel and Jeroen Deploige, “United or Bound by Death? A Case-Study on Group Identity and Textual Communities within the Devotio Moderna,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 105, no. 2 (2010): 346–80.

59. Jan van Boendale, Brabantsche Yeesten, vol. 2 (Brussels: Hayez, 1843), 50: “In Brussels, it was given the name Evil Wednesday.” A century after the battle, a monastery was erected on the battlefield: see Mario Damen and Robert Stein, “Collective Memory and Personal Memoria: The Carthusian Monastery of Scheut as a Crossroads of Urban and Princely Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Brabant,” in Mémoires conflictuelles et mythes concurrents dans les pays bourguignons (ca 1380–1580), ed. Pit Péporté and Jean-Marie Cauchies (Turnhout: Centre européen d’études bourguignonnes, xive–xvie, 2012), 29–48.

60. Nicolas Despars, Cronycke van den lande ende graefscepe van Vlaenderen, 4 vols. (Bruges: Jean de Jonghe, 1839–1842), respectively 1:411 and 2:285–86.

61. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 30.

62. Nancy D. Munn, “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 93–123, here pp. 94–96; John Hassard, “Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917),” in Encyclopedia of Time, ed. Samuel Macey (New York: Garland, 1994), 170–71; Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [1912], trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11–12.

63. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “L’invention de l’anniversaire,” Annales HSS 62, no. 4 (2007): 793–835; Matthew S. Champion, “The History of Temporalities: An Introduction,” Past & Present 243, no. 1 (2019): 247–54.

64. Johanna Dale, “Royal Inauguration and the Liturgical Calendar in England, France, and the Empire, c. 1050–c. 1250,” Anglo-Norman Studies 37 (2015): 83–98.

65. Champion, The Fullness of Time.

66. Jacques Le Goff, “Au Moyen Âge : temps de l’Église et temps du marchand,” Annales HSS 15, no. 3 (1960): 417–33.

67. Champion, The Fullness of Time, passim; Peter Stabel, “Labour Time, Guild Time? Working Hours in the Cloth Industry of Medieval Flanders and Artois (Thirteenth–Fourteenth Centuries),” Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History 11, no. 4 (2014): 27–54; Mathieu Arnoux, “Relation salariale et temps du travail dans l’industrie médiévale,” Le Moyen Âge 115, no. 3/4 (2009): 557–81.

68. See, for instance, Jacoba Van Leeuwen, De Vlaamse wetsvernieuwing. Een onderzoek naar de jaarlijkse keuze en aanstelling van het stadsbestuur in Gent, Brugge en Ieper in de Middeleeuwen (Brussels: Palais des académies, 2004).

69. Arnold van Gennep, Le folklore de la Flandre et du Hainaut français (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1935); van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1937–1958); Hervé Stalpaert, Van Vastenavond tot Pasen. Oudvlaamse volksgebruiken: historie en folklore (Heule: Gmeenteadministratie, 1960). Compare with the notion of elections to civic office as markers of political time in England: Christian Liddy, Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 83–124.

70. Schmitt, Les rythmes au Moyen Âge, 666–67. The paragraphs on the “rhythms of power” (pp. 572–79) are brief and do not consider popular revolts. Nor does Champion, The Fullness of Time.

71. Charles Tilly, “How Protest Modernized in France, 1845–1855,” in The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History, ed. William O. Aydelotte, Allan G. Bogue, and Robert W. Fogel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 192–255, here p. 199. See also the critique in Samuel Cohn, “The ‘Modernity’ of Medieval Popular Revolt,” History Compass 10 (2012): 731–41.

72. Burke, “History as Social Memory,” 103. See also Yves-Marie Bercé, Fête et révolte. Des mentalités populaires du xvie au xviiie siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1976). The history of the Reformation provides additional examples of this link between unrest, carnivalesque festivities, and the religious calendar in general: see Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” Past & Present 90, no. 1 (1981): 40–70.

73. Margaret Aston, “Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt,” Past & Present 143, no. 1 (1994): 3–47, here p. 10; Chris Humphrey, The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 4–5 and 63–78; Thomas Pettitt, “‘Here Comes I, Jack Straw’: English Folk Drama and Social Revolt,” Folklore 95, no. 1 (1984): 3–20.

74. Rebekka Nöcker, Klaus Ridder, and Beatrice von Lüpke, “From Festival to Revolt: Carnival Theater During the Late Middle Ages and Early Reformation as a Threat to Urban Order,” in Power and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Theater, ed. Cora Dietl, Glenn Ehrstine, and Christoph Schanze (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2014), 153–68; Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 65–74; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans. De la Chandeleur au mercredi des Cendres, 1579–1580 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); Bercé, Fête et révolte, 75–82; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), 199–204.

75. Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 142–50; Marc Boone, “De Sint-Lievensbedevaart. Bouwsteen van de stedelijke identiteit van Gent (late middeleeuwen en vroege 16de eeuw),” Handelingen van de Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent 61 (2007): 105–22.

76. One exception is the failed attempt by the fullers of Leiden (Holland) to strike on Shrove Tuesday, 1470. See Rudolf Dekker, “Labour Conflicts and Working-Class Culture in Early Modern Holland,” International Review of Social History 35, no. 3 (1990): 377–420, here p. 388.

77. On the influence of the Easter cycle on chronology, see Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 65–67; Françoise Autrand, “Les dates, la mémoire et les juges,” in Le métier d’historien au Moyen Âge. Études sur l’historiographie médiévale, ed. Bernard Guenée (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1977), 169–71; Monique Gramain, “Mémoires paysannes. Des exemples bas-languedociens aux xiiie et xive siècles,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 83, no. 2 (1976): 315–24, here pp. 319–21.

78. Murray Melbin, “Social Time,” in Macey, Encyclopedia of Time, 566–67, here p. 566.

79. Aron Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture (London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1985), 104 and 109–112. See the case studies in Miriam Czock and Anja Rathmann-Lutz, eds., Zeitenwelten. Zur Verschränkung von Weltdeutung und Zeitwahrnehmung, 750–1350 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016).

80. Henri-Irénée Marrou, L’ambivalence du temps de l’histoire chez Saint-Augustin (Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1950); Andrew Brown, “Liturgical Memory and Civic Conflict: The Entry of Emperor Frederick III and Maximilian, King of the Romans, into Bruges on 1 August 1486,” in Péporté and Cauchies, Mémoires conflictuelles et mythes concurrents, 129–48, here p. 145.

81. Marc Bloch, La société féodale, vol. 1, La formation des liens de dépendance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1939), 118; Jacques Le Goff, La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Arthaud, 1964), 221–23.

82. Le Goff, “Au Moyen Âge : temps de l’Église et temps du marchand.”

83. Le Goff, À la recherche du temps sacré. Jacques de Voragine et la Légende Dorée (Paris: Perrin, 2011. See also Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Comment concevoir une histoire des rythmes sociaux ?” in La légitimité implicite, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris/Rome: Publications de la Sorbonne/École française de Rome, 2015), 2:7–14.

84. Camarin Porter, “Time Measurement and Chronology in Medieval Studies,” in Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms, Methods, Trends, ed. Albrecht Classen, 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 2:1350–67, here p. 1351; Denis Casey and Ken Mondschein, “Time and Timekeeping,” in Handbook of Medieval Culture: Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, vol. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 1657–79, here p. 1669.

85. Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire, 131; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 429; Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 101–37.

86. Raymond Van Uytven, “1477 in Brabant,” in 1477. Het algemene en de gewestelijke privilegiën van Maria van Bourgondië voor de Nederlanden, ed. Wim P. Blockmans (Courtrai: UGA, 1985), 253–371, here p. 257. At least if this feast of Midsummer, a time of change and reversal, was not associated with carnivalesque subversion. On the different connotations of this day, see Sandra Billington, Midsummer: A Cultural Sub-Text from Chrétien de Troyes to Jean Michel (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 19–45.

87. Georges Espinas and Henri Pirenne, eds., Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière en Flandre, vol. 3, La Gorgue-Ypres (Brussels: P. Imbreghts, 1920), 719.

88. Ibid., 728. A charter of 1311 called the events the “murder committed in Ypres on the eve of Saint Andrew”: Jean-Jacques Lambin, Verhael van den moord van eenige schepenen, raeden en andere inwooners der stad Ypre (Ypres: Lambin et fils, 1831), 43.

89. Espinas and Pirenne, Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire de l’industrie drapière, 3:740 and 743.

90. Frederik A. Stoett, Nederlandse spreekwoorden, spreekwijzen, uitdrukkingen en gezegden (Zutphen: Thieme, 1923), 95. For the Low Countries, the reference regarding chronology is Egidius Strubbe and Léon Voet, De chronologie van de middeleeuwen en de moderne tijden in de Nederlanden (Brussels: Palais des académies, 1991).

91. Charles Phytian-Adams, Local History and Folklore: A New Framework (London: Bedford Square Press, 1975), 21. See also Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 22.

92. Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 74.

93. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 615–22.

94. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 73.

95. Verbruggen, Geweld in Vlaanderen, 76; Van Bruaene, De Gentse Memorieboeken, 131–32.

96. Joseph Jean De Smet, ed., Corpus Chronicorum Flandriae, vol. 1 (Brussels: Hayez, 1837), 167.

97. Philippe Blommaert and Constant Serrure, eds., Kronyk van Vlaenderen van 580 tot 1467, vol. 1 (Ghent: Vanderhaegen-Hulin, 1839), 152–54. On the representation of political conflict in this chronicle, see Bram Caers and Lisa Demets, “Opposing Reports on Loyalty and Rebellion: Urban History Writing in Late Medieval Bruges and Mechelen,” in Urban History Writing in Northwest Europe (15th–16th Centuries), ed. Bram Caers, Lisa Demets, and Tineke Van Gassen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 137–56.

98. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, 15–19; Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire, 135–38.

99. Examples from the Low Countries can be found in Guido Marnef and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, “Civic Religion, Community, Identity and Religious Transformation,” in Blondé, Boone, and Van Bruaene, City and Society in the Low Countries, 128–61.

100. Andrew Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges, c. 1300–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 156–57. For examples of the commemoration of military victories in medieval Flanders, see Jacques Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Plon, 1963), 250–59. Another remarkable tradition was the special bread baked in the Hanseatic town of Greifswald to commemorate the victory of the urban militias against the prince of Mecklenburg’s army in 1327. See Klaus Graf, “Erinnerungsfeste in der spätmittelalterlichen Stadt,” in Memoria, communitas, civitas. Mémoire et conscience urbaines en Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Hanno Brand, Pierre Monnet, and Martial Staub (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003), 263–73.

101. Walter Simons and Paul Trio, “Achtergronden bij het ontstaan van de tuindagprocessie: bronnen en situering,” in Ieper Tuindag. Zesde eeuwfeest, ed. Romain Vinckier (Ypres: Stedelijke Culturele Raad, 1983), 107–28.

102. Lambin, Verhael van den moord, 22. The seven aldermen murdered in 1303 were buried beneath prestigious tombstones within the church, which subsequently stimulated memorial practices for them. See Stijn Bossuyt, “Media vita in morte sumus. Graven als representatie van sociale structuren,” in In de voetsporen van Jacob van Maerlant, ed. Raoul Bauer (Leuven: Universitaire pers Leuven, 2002), 301–14, here p. 310.

103. Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges, 9.

104. Jan-Frans Verbruggen, “Pierre de Coninc et Jean Breidel, tribuns brugeois au début du xive siècle,” Le Moyen Âge 76 (1970): 61–89, here pp. 81–82.

105. It is worth noting here that in 1306 the Bruges rebels sent a letter to the riotous weavers of Saint-Omer with their opinion on the 1302 conflict. As a reaction, and with the support of the French king, the local authorities of Saint-Omer organized a religious ceremony in front of the town’s main abbey, in which the citizens had to swear that they would not ally with the Flemish rebels. See Jelle Haemers, “Diffuser des lettres pour contracter des alliances. La communication des rebelles en Flandre et en Brabant au bas Moyen Âge,” Revue française d’histoire du livre 138 (2018): 131–50, here pp. 144–45; Alain Derville, Histoire de Saint-Omer (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1981), 64–71.

106. Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 48–51; Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, La ville des cérémonies. Essai sur la communication politique dans les anciens Pays-Bas bourguignons (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 284–87; Champion, The Fullness of Time, 116–24.

107. Jelle Haemers, For the Common Good: State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477–1482) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 233.

108. Éva Guillorel, “Folksongs, Conflicts and Social Protest in Early Modern France,” in Identity, Intertextuality, and Performance in Early Modern Song Culture, ed. Louis Peter Grijp, Wim van Anrooij, and Dieuwke Van der Poel (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 304–305; Guillorel, “La mémoire comme moteur de la révolte. Réflexions autour du rôle subversif des traditions orales dans l’Europe moderne,” in Merle, Jettot, and Herrero Sánchez, La mémoire des révoltes, 251–67, here pp. 261–62.

109. Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53, no. 1 (1978): 94–114; Paula Leverage, “Memory,” in Classen, Handbook of Medieval Studies, 2:1530–37, here pp. 1531–32.

110. Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, trans. Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin (Manchester: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 36–37.

111. Bart Hendrik Van’t Hooft, Honderd jaar Geldersche geschiedenis in historieliederen (Arnhem: Gouda Quint D. Brouwer, 1948), 13. These Middle Dutch songs can now be found in online databases, including dbnl.org and liederenbank.nl.

112. Cornelia Van de Graft, Middelnederlandsche historieliederen (Arnhem: Gysbers & van Loon, 1968), 136. “Als men schreef duyst vijf hondert” was often used as an opening verse in Protestant martyr songs (ibid., p. 21).

113. Herman Pleij, “Een onbekend historielied over het beleg van Poederoijen in 1507,” in Weerwerk. Opstellen aangeboden aan professor dr. Garmt Stuiveling, ed. Tom Cram et al. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973), 19–31, here pp. 21–22.

114. Christiane Deluz, “Indifférence au temps dans les récits de pèlerinage (du xiie au xive siècle) ?” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 83, no. 2 (1976): 303–13, here pp. 306–308; Gramain, “Mémoires paysannes,” 321.

115. See Paul Fredericq, Onze historische volksliederen van vóór de godsdienstige beroerten der 16de eeuw (Ghent: Vuylsteke, 1894), 22–24; Louis de Baeker, Chants historiques de la Flandre, 400–1650 (Lille: Vanackere, 1855), 179.

116. Jan Frans Willems, Oude Vlaemsche liederen (Ghent: Gyselynck, 1848), 41. Compare with Éva Guillorel, “Sources orales et mémoire historique dans la Bretagne d’Ancien Régime. La représentation des héros,” Port Acadie. Revue interdisciplinaire en études acadiennes 13/14/15 (2008–2009): 407–19.

117. David M. Hopkin, Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 256.

118. Jan Dumolyn, “The ‘Terrible Wednesday’ of Pentecost: Confronting Urban and Princely Discourses in the Bruges Rebellion of 1436–1438,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 92, no. 305 (2007): 3–20. The song is edited in Louis Peter Grijp and Dieuwke Van der Poel, eds., Het Antwerps Liedboek, vol. 2 (Tielt: Lannoo, 2004), 151–53.

119. Hervé Stalpaert, “’t Was op een Witten Donderdag,” Biekorf 60 (1959): 274–80; Magda Cafmeyer, “De oude Goede-Week in volksleven en volksgebruik,” Biekorf 69 (1968): 79–89, here p. 82.

120. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002): 149–62.

121. Ibid. See also David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). See also Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 154; Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom (London: Pearson, 2011), 144 and 152.