To fine or to punish in the Late Middle Ages. A Time Series Analysis of Justice Administration in Nivelles, 1424-1536

We use recently developed times series techniques 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 the medieval system under consideration is a fine-focused (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 medieval, urban-based , tax-oriented system and its transformation into a punishment-focused system.