Mortal Enmity and the Feud in the Late Medieval German Town: Nordhausen, Strasbourg and Augsburg

Abstract This article takes the Rebstock-Rosheim Feud (Strasbourg, 1374–1379), the Berchter-Feud (Nordhausen, 1432–1443) and the Erlbach-Augsburg Feud (Augsburg, 1459–1469) as an opportunity to reconsider ways of thinking about not only German burghers’ practice of the late medieval feud (Fehde) but also the role of violence in the feud itself. Despite a decade of scholarship highlighting urban participation in the late medieval German economy of feuding and warfare, burghers continue to be portrayed as a feud-adverse group that preferred less direct and less violent means of conflict resolution than town governments, nobles or peasants. This article argues that this conception of burgher feuds results from two factors: a subtle reprise of nineteenth-century interpretive models stressing a dichotomy between urban townsmen and rural nobility; and a misunderstanding of three dimensions of late medieval German urbanism that shaped the burgher’s approach to feuding: an asymmetry of feuding infrastructure between burgher and town, urban judicial privileges, and the inimical intimacy of urban life. By reading these case studies in light of these aspects, the article shows burghers to have embraced rather than eschewed the feud’s vindicatory violence. This article also uses the unrestrained lethal violence of these feuds to rethink how historians of the German feud have understood violence. By introducing the concept of ‘mortal enmity’ as a means to interpret this violence, it shows that the feud-as-legal-institution approach needs to find ways to integrate the more heterogeneous, dynamic and lethal field of violence that has been neglected in the modern German-language historiography of the feud.