The Regional Provisioning of Meat
The Regional Provisioning of Meat
In Germany, the sixteenth century ushered in the great age of what was known as good police, when governments for the first time began actively to intervene in economic and commercial affairs for reasons other than the purely fiscal (the raising of taxes). At imperial and territorial level, the authorities began to tackle issues such as monopolies, price-rigging, and forestalling, as well as seeking to regulate and secure supplies of essential commodities. Issues of welfare were also part of good police, as princes and magistrates struggled to come to grips with the plague of the age — vagrancy and begging by the poor, the homeless, and unemployed or discharged mercenaries. In relatively self-contained territories such as Bavaria or Württemberg, edicts to enforce good police flowed unimpeded from princely chanceries. Throughout the sixteenth century, the police assemblies of the Rappen league in the Upper Rhine addressed two fundamental issues — the provisioning and price regulation of meat and grain — which were of existential importance in an age of rising population and gathering inflation.
Keywords: Upper Rhine, Germany, good police, monopolies, forestalling, commodities, provisioning, price regulation, meat, Rappen league
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
