During the first half of the sixteenth century, municipal councils across northern France issued ordinances designed to combat outbreaks of plague. The measures contained in these ordinances were extensive and formed the core of urban responses to plague throughout the early modern period. These ordinances did not appear out of a vacuum; rather, they represented the codification of stratagems adopted during the second half of the fifteenth century. This article will describe and account for the growth of the public health system developed by the magistrates of towns lying in the urban belt of northern and north-eastern France from the 1450s to the 1550s. It will concentrate on the towns and cities of Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Paris, Rouen and Tournai, all of which possess good administrative records for the period. In addition to the texts of plague ordinances, the most valuable documents for this study are the registers of municipal deliberations, which allow us to follow the decision-making process that lay behind the development of plague legislation.

Many of the more celebrated measures against pestilence originated in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, and the bulk of our knowledge regarding the ways in which urban administrations reacted to these outbreaks is based on studies of northern Italian cities, such as Florence and Venice. Although historians have expanded the geographical scope of such studies to consider municipal responses to plague in England, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and the Low Countries, little research has been done on France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.