Maritime violence, marginalization and the formation of markets in late medieval England

• Applicant: Dr. Philipp Höhn
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550080022

The project analyses maritime violence in late medieval England. It examines whether and how processes of the formation of a hierarchical system of markets and the consolidation of (royal) rule can be understood through practices of violence and criminalization. The approach sees violence less as a consequence of large-scale political conflicts than as an expression and means of conflict of economic conflicts between local actors over resources, places of appropriation and distribution of goods, "Stapelrechte", trade routes and rents and a strategy to deal with ecological change (silting, erosion). However, these local maritime communities communicatively linked their conflicts with the wars of the English kings. They legitimized their violent practices as warfare through discourses related to the king and criminalized the violent practices of their opponents. In this respect, violence appears as a key driver of the conflictual negotiation of the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity, but also as a component of the factual processes of the formation of markets. This 'place' of maritime violence at the local level and in the practices of economic actors is, however, closely linked to political discourses on the 'common good' of the English realm and king. The project studies this nexus by firstly investigating the discourse inventory through which the actors negotiated maritime violence and its connection to war and economic rise and fall, but also discredited their competitors. Secondly, it attempts to identify patterns of violence from the rich English tradition. To this end, it enquires into the specific actors in the conflict, those attacked, the resources and the locations of the violence. As the applicant's preliminary work suggests, this empirical focus on practices of violence reveals patterns that counter the usual explanatory patterns according to which violence is a "by-product" of political conflicts. The identification of such conflict samples reveals yet understudied patterns of violence. This makes it possible to better understand processes of economic structural change.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Tom Johnson, Ph.D.