This paper explores the impact of the Count of Flanders ’ monetary and wage policies upon the fortunes of the Flemish woollen cloth manufacturing industry in a crucial but penultimate phase of its irredeemable decline, from 1390 to 1435, when it was beginning to yield to the growing supremacy of the now rapidly expanding English cloth industry and trade. More narrowly (leaving larger issues of industrial decline to another paper), it focuses upon the sudden imposition and enforcement of Flemish monetary reforms in the early 1390s, after a half century of inflationary coinage debasements, which greatly exacerbated other existing forces promoting deflation more generally in north-west Europe. In the view of the count, his officials, and entrepreneurs in the cloth trades, this monetary reform could work effectively only if wages were cut proportionately; and such wage-cutting policies naturally provoked bitter resentment (even though the ongoing deflation in fact raised real wages). In the Flemish cloth industry, the only wage-earning artisans who were organized into a guild, and one that resembled a modern labour union, were the fullers, exclusively male workers, whose tasks were crucial in ensuring the luxury quality of the Flemish industry’s chief exports. Their reaction to the post-Reform wage cuts of the 1390s was to go on strike (uutgangen), thus forcing the intervention of the count’s officials, who imposed compulsory wage arbitration, establishing new wage

currently in revise & resubmit status at American Journal of Sociology word count = 21,871 without footnotes; 28,371 with footnotes 1 The authors gratefully acknowledge a series of small grants from the Social Science Division of the University of Chicago, which helped in the collection of data, and a substantial grant from the Hewlett Foundation, which funds John Padgett’s and Walter Powell’s “Co-evolution of States and Markets ” program at the Santa Fe Institute. SFI is the intellectual and research home of this project; we deeply appreciate its support over numerous years. David Sallach

The authors gratefully acknowledge a series of small grants from the Social Science Division of the University of Chicago, which helped in the collection of data. The Santa Fe Institute enthusiastically gave intellectual and research support to the first author. SFI is a creative environment in which to work. David Sallach and Nick Collier, of the Social Science Research Computing Center at the University of Chicago, offered the kind gift of their services in helping to organize the data into relational data-base form. We have received helpful comments on an earlier draft of