During the Middle Ages and early modern period, numerous lordships existed across the Low Countries. A lordship was a territory where a local lord held various privileges—administrative, judicial, and economic. Biologist Margreet Brandsma and historian Jim Van der Meulen (UGent) studied the spatial distribution of lordships and their relationship with geophysical factors such as soil fertility, relief, and proximity to waterways. By comparing Gelre and Hainaut, they demonstrated that lordships primarily emerged in economically attractive areas with fertile soils and favorable trade routes. In Gelre, waterways played a crucial role in the concentration of elite power structures, whereas in Hainaut, relief was a determining factor. Using historical maps and GIS analysis, the study introduces an innovative methodological approach to visualizing and quantifying power structures in premodern landscapes. The results confirm that natural environmental factors significantly influenced the spatial organization of feudal power relations in the medieval Low Countries. To achieve these insights, the authors also utilized soil data from the LOKSTAT database.
Article:
Margreet Brandsma, Jim Van der Meulen. “The Lordscape: Seigneurial Jurisdictions in the Late-Medieval Low Countries”, in Journal of Historical Geography, 86(2024), 1, 355-371.
DETAILS
Database used: LOKSTAT
Date: January 2025
Category: Scientific publication