Forced Vocation or Not?: The Case of the Abducted Poor Clare of Wamel (1464)

In 1884 the Provincial Archives of Dutch Guelders province in Arnhem (known today as the “Guelders Archief”) obtained a collection of archival materials from the former ducal Buren castle in the so-called “Betuwe” region, between two branches of the Rhine river. At present, this batch of archival materials forms part of the large archival collection of the Counts and Dukes of Guelders. Those who want to study these materials still need to start from the handwritten provisional summary catalogue, compiled by the Dutch archivist Van Riemsdijk at the end of the nineteenth century. Due to the vicissitudes of history, the archival pieces from Buren castle are in a deplorable state.¹

The Buren castle had been a residence of the Dukes of Guelders since 1435. As such, it housed, more or less from that moment on, one of the ducal archival depots at a time when a central archive was still out of the question. In 1472, Duke Arnold of Guelders donated the property of Buren to his cousin Frederick of Egmond, and later, the same property, by then known as the County of Buren, ended up in the possession of the House of Orange-Nassau. All this time, the archival materials from the Guelders period remained at Buren castle, possibly augmented with additional archival materials formerly kept at the castle of Grave. This castle had been part of the Duchy of Guelders until 1473, and likewise came, at a later date, into the hands of the House of Orange-Nassau. From 1804 onwards, Buren castle was slowly demolished. By 1840, when the demolition process was nearly completed, the aforementioned archival materials from Buren castle came into the possession of a wholesale buyer from Culemborg. It is a small miracle that these materials survived and were shortly thereafter rescued from an antique shop.

When the archivist Van Riemsdijk compiled his provisional summary catalogue, he made a global thematic division of the surviving materials. One of these divisions pertained to “Pieces concerning the administration of justice by the Ducal Council” (Stukken betreffende de rechtspraak door den hertogenlijken raad), and contains a number of dossiers of legal processes handled by that body.²

Until now, the judicial tasks of the Ducal Council have not drawn much attention from historians. Due to this lack of scholarly attention, not much can be found in the secondary literature concerning the ways in which the Council of the Duke of Guelders functioned as a court in judicial matters.³ One problem remains the accessibility and problematical usability of the surviving source materials. Most historians start their investigations at the moment when permanent and centrally located provincial courts of justice made their appearance. The judicial practices in the period prior to that escape historical scrutiny. A more or less systematic process for the formation and maintenance of archives pertaining to the courts also starts from the moment when such provincial courts of justice are formed. In the Duchy of Guelders, that happened only after 1543. In that year Charles V of Habsburg, the new overlord of Guelders, initiated an administrative overhaul of the Duchy and also inaugurated the Court of Guelders.

Prior to such permanent courts, the exercise of justice had been in the hands of members of the Ducal Council, who convened in different locations. To reconstruct the judicial practices of this Council one needs to collect the dispersed archival sources. Such a reconstruction is not attempted here. In this article, I will limit myself to a case pertaining to a young Clarissan nun, who was kidnapped from the Observant Poor Clare monastery of Wamel in 1464.⁴

A Single Father with a Practical Problem

Raising children in the fifteenth century was not without problems. Parents in those times needed also to ensure that their children ended up well once they left the parental home. Consider in this case a single father with an ambulant profession, and you arrive at the origin of the small family drama central in this article; a drama that eventually needed to be brought to a solution...