Games, Gambling, and Social Order in Netherlandish Villages, C. 1250–1600

Crosschecking iconographic and textual evidence, this article explores how games were regulated in the countryside of Flanders, Zeeland, and Holland between c. 1250 and c. 1600. A corpus of village regulations and pardon letters that inform us on gambling, children’s games, archery contests, and so on, is used to engage with established scholarship on these topics, which is exclusively focused on towns. Apart from crosschecking urban and rural regulations of games in relation to contemporary concepts of public order and age-appropriate behaviour, the article also explores current debates on how leisure was shaped by the rise of capitalism and the state. Both Flanders and Holland saw progressive commercialisation, albeit in different ways, and attitudes towards gambling partly mirror this socio-economic differentiation.