To fine or to punish in the late Middle Ages: a time-series analysis of justice administration in Nivelles, 1424-1536

Time-series techniques are used to analyse long-historical data on the budget of the Court of Nivelles (Belgium) in the late Middle Ages. The unidirectional causality from receipts to expenditures supports the idea that this mediaeval system was a finefocused (tax-oriented) control system. However, empirical evidence on the presence of changes in receipt collection around 1520 favours the hypothesis of the decline of the mediaeval, urban-based, tax-oriented system and its transformation into a system based on punishment.