As Dordrecht and other cities in the Low Countries obtained civic rights (stadsrecht) and became densely populated in the later Middle Ages, the need arose to formalize customary rules by recording them in books and introducing new bylaws. These urban bylaws addressed multiple issues that were related to the organization of daily life, including the regulation of the environment and public health, alongside economic, social, and political affairs. As legislators, city governments, such as that of Dordrecht, thereby obtained the judicial and legislative means to police the urban environment, in a bid to shape and improve it.

In today's popular culture, as we can see in many films and books, late medieval societies are still often portrayed as superstitious and backward. From this perspective, city governments would have been incapable of establishing efficient sanitation and waste disposal systems, the absence of which would have resulted in filthy living conditions. Henk 't Jong has deconstructed these misconceptions in the context of several late medieval cities in Holland, including Dordrecht. Following Thorndike and Sabine, he has argued that, when analysing bylaws, it is important to consider the process through which customary law evolved into more formal collections of regulations. However, he maintains that there are relatively few entries concerning environmental bylaws and violations thereof in the administrative sources from Holland. Public hygiene was apparently not one of the main legislative concerns of late medieval city governments.