Doing the Dirty Work: Ribalds, Armies and Public Health in the Southern Low Countries, 1100–1500

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, so-called ribalds performed crucial tasks in civic-military communities, labouring as porters, haulers and engineers in siege warfare. They did the dirty work of looting and insulting the enemy on campaign and removing waste in the city. Civic-military festivals played with the double-edged reputation of these poor, migrant workers, shaming the ribalds in order to reaffirm civic honour. This chapter argues the ambivalent policies towards these ribalds constituted a form of vital politics, a term used to understand how governments manage the ‘quality of citizens’. Pejorative images of the ribalds, as non-citizens, thereby served to mirror urban self-representations of the city’s clergy and burghers as hygienic, disciplined, virtuous members of the community. In the course of the fifteenth century, the tasks performed by ribalds increasingly were institutionalised, and ribalds shunned from the city.