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The city of Goerlitz presents a different picture to the cities in the south and west of the Holy Roman Empire that have been studied so far. Those cities were characterized by an overarching political consensus, and their councils legitimized their rule by administering justice to the burghers. In Goerlitz, an elitist city council governed the town without any guild participation and without any direct responsibility towards the burghers. As a consequence, it did not adapt its legal norms to create flexible and efficient instruments of social control but preserved the formalistic procedures of archaic Saxon law. A result was the inefficient control of violence: As the criminal records show, everyday conflicts among the burghers were less ritualized and more openly violent than in other cities. This in turn highlights the fact that honour conflicts among the burghers could generally not be contained on an informal level but created the demand for formal social control on the part of urban communities.