The Introduction proposes the book’s thesis. During a long fifteenth century stretching from the 1380s into the 1510s, Perpignan’s residents self-consciously abandoned many of the foundational institutions and practices that had been established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They came to believe that the past’s answers could not be the present’s answers. They also came to believe that the present’s answers would not be the future’s answers, because they anticipated a future of unending, unpredictable change and ceaseless adaptation. Driving this development was a series of disorienting experiences, from depopulation to economic decline to social conflict. And even when townspeople sought to preserve their foundational institutions and practices, they could not prevent their destruction at the hands of monarchies that had grown more powerful than ever. The introduction situates Time and Governance in historiographical debates concerning periodisation, as well as the nature and chronology of late medieval state formation. It also relates the study to methodological developments in institutional history and the history of mentalities.

Focusing on the same period as the two previous chapters, Chapter 4 examines a multiplicity of collective identities shared by most residents. Municipal citizenship was based on the defence of citizens against non-citizens, most especially the regional nobility. That defence consisted primarily of the ma armada (‘armed band’), which granted to Perpignan’s consuls the right to lead punitive expeditions against those who had injured citizens. Perpignan sought to extend the ma armada as part of an aggressive campaign against the regional nobility, and it maintained the ma armada against all comers, including monarchs. At the same time, Perpignan showed a growing willingness to be Catalonian, modelling its institutions after those of other Catalonian municipalities and accepting Barcelona’s leadership. And the royal state set the stage for its later triumph through the construction of urban fortifications. Garrisoned citadels enabled royal states to project their power against municipalities in ways that had not been possible before, and that rendered townspeople royal subjects first, municipal citizens second.

Chapter 1 examines the fourteenth-century emergence of problems that drove fifteenth-century developments. When necessary, this chapter places those fourteenth-century problems in their twelfth- and thirteenth-century contexts. The problems were three. Firstly, there was the diminution of the town’s population caused by bubonic plague. Secondly, there was swelling municipal debt; its existence and the measures taken to reduce it exacerbated social antagonisms that fuelled the third problem, distrust. Between the 1340s and the 1390s, suspicion and hostility between burghers and merchants, on the one hand, and tradespeople, on the other, deepened and became dangerously acute.

Focusing on the period between the late fourteenth century and the outbreak of the Catalonian Civil War in 1462, Chapter 2 examines municipal government. Two new regimes arose during this period. The first, the Nou regiment, blended direct election with a method preferred by tradespeople, namely, the random selection of officeholders. Moreover, it gave tradespeople a numerical majority within the town’s executive magistracy, or consulate, as well as within the town council. The Nou regiment rolled back older measures enacted by burgher- and merchant-dominated governments; modestly but noticeably, it advanced tradespeople’s interests. Burghers and merchants opposed and worked to undermine the Nou regiment. In 1449, they toppled it and instituted a regime called the Nova forma. The Nova forma restored oligarchical power through a novelty of its own: the Nova forma redefined the town’s occupational groupings and thereby substituted burgher and merchant majorities for those of tradespeople within the consulate and town council.

Focusing on the same period as Chapter 2, Chapter 3 treats economic history. It engages with recent historiographical debates regarding the late medieval economy, especially as those debates pertain to Catalonia. This chapter argues for a keenly felt decline, perceived by contemporaries and corroborated by the best available quantitative evidence, in the dominant sector of Perpignan’s economy, namely, cloth manufacturing. This chapter also argues for a surprising similarity in the Nou regiment’s and the Nova forma’s economic policies. Notwithstanding their different social profiles, both regimes sought to revive production and prosperity through traditional protectionism and anti-fraud regulation. This chapter argues that the surprising similarities in the regimes’ economic policies, and their inability to match the inventiveness displayed in matters of municipal government, reflect the power of cultural assumptions so deeply rooted that the desire for newness could not prevail against them: that production and prosperity were functions of honour; and that the greatest source of dishonour was fraud, which the town aspired to stamp out.

The Conclusion recapitulates and offers an additional framing of the book’s findings. Perpignan’s history in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries had been dominated by efforts to adhere to the past, whether in the form of the town’s customs or the communal charter of 1197. Those efforts had been predicated on the assumptions that old was good, and that old was better than new. During the long fifteenth century, however, Perpignan no longer valued custom as it once had. In matters of municipal government, it no longer tried to adhere to the communal charter; as regards the ma armada, it could not prevent French and Aragonese kings from suppressing it and from taking control of the municipal government. Most importantly, townspeople began to operate according to new principles: the new was better than old, that the future could consist only of unpredictable change, and that what existed in the present would almost certainly have to be altered in the future. They became temporal relativists, and they did so before the sixteenth-century emergence of relativist thinking in European high culture.

Chapter 5 focuses on the period stretching from the Catalonian Civil War’s outbreak into the early sixteenth century. The civil war led to Perpignan’s conquest by France and three decades of nearly continuous French rule, followed by the town’s return to the Crown of Aragon. This chapter examines how these experiences affected matters treated in the preceding chapters. Although kings of France and Aragon fought each other for control of Perpignan, they pursued similar policies there during and after the civil war. They eliminated twelfth- and thirteenth-century customs and privileges on an unprecedented scale, including the foundational ma armada. And they assumed a thoroughgoing control of municipal elections, especially with King Ferdinand II’s establishment of a system that he called insaculation, and that I will call royal insaculation to differentiate it from earlier forms of insaculation. Together, the lasting suppression of the ma armada and the imposition of royal insaculation constituted the royal state’s triumph.