Policeygesetzgebung or police-ordinances can be seen as the first kind of voluntaristic laws. These norms fit between formal law and traditional statutes, customary law and social norms. These normative rules could thus come in a plurality of forms; therefore, literature regularly refers to these various types as multinormativity. To avoid confusion, we will talk about ‘normative rules’ to indicate both legislation and other forms of guidelines for society. These normative rules contain much information, which is relevant for many historical subdisciplines; but more so, these rules are an underestimated connector in history. While the texts themselves contain information on jurisdiction, location, date, government (e.g. prince), responsible institutions (e.g. authors, those present at decisive meetings), addressees, penalties; they most importantly contain information on the perceived problem at hand (topics).