Medieval Violence in Northern France

MEDIEVAL VIOLENCE

OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS

E d i t o r s _{p . c l a v i n l . g o l d m a n j . i n n e s} _{r . s e r v i c e p . a . s l a c k} _{b . w a r d - p e r k i n s j . l . w a t t s}

Medieval Violence

Physical Brutality in Northern France,

1270–1330

HANNAH SKODA

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MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn For all victims of violence and for those who grow up believing violence to be acceptable or inevitable.

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Contents

viii Contents

This book aims to explore the meanings, functions, and place of violence in northern French society before the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War. It begins from the premise that the very presence of violence is socially contingent, and explores the ways in which it was used and the responses it provoked. A number of methodological approaches are used, in part suggested by the nature of the surviving evidence: from legal material, legislative documents, letters, and sermons, to the literary offer- ings of poets and early vernacular playwrights. Historiographical interest in violence has risen dramatically in recent years, and is often focused upon the relationship between violence and the development of states. This book focuses not upon military or judicial violence, but upon the quotidian brawls and brutality which, in many ways, made up the fabric of everyday life. It aims to show just how ‘normal’ violence could become, whilst at the same time provoking horror and outrage. And it aims not to lose sight of the very real suffering engendered by these actions. Studying violence is an important counterpoint to an often romanticized view of the period, but equally a closer look reveals that a gloomy portrait of a brutal and incessantly cruel Middle Ages is also misleading: violence provoked ambivalent and troubled reactions, and was never passed over in silence.

The book aims at a broad readership. It is hoped that those interested in the France of the later Middle Ages will ﬁnd something of interest or at least provocation here, but it is also hoped that those studying construc- tions of deviance from an interdisciplinary perspective will respond to some of the ideas and that their relevance may extend beyond northern France 1270–1330.

Many people have been more than generous with their time and comments on this work. Unfortunately I cannot name them all here, but none have been forgotten. In particular though, I would like to acknowledge the ever-kind support and inspirational guidance of my D.Phil. supervisors, Dr Malcolm Vale and Dr Gervase Rosser, and of Dr Matthew Kempshall. My D.Phil. examiners Professor David D’Avray and Dr Jean Dunbabin provided crucial criticism and comment. More widely, members of the History Faculty at Oxford have been always ready to offer ideas and encouragement, notably Professor Chris Wickham and Dr Patrick Lantschner. Versions of chapters of this book have been presented at numerous seminars, and the comments received there have x Preface all helped to develop lines of research: I would particularly like to thank those who commented at the Oxford Medieval History Seminar, the Oxford Late Medieval History Seminar, the Oxford Medieval French Seminar, the Seminar in Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, the Oxford Medieval Church and Culture Seminar, and all who attended my presentations at various conferences. Very special thanks go to Dr John Watts for his inﬁnite patience, very careful reading, and wonderfully insightful comments: his intellectual generosity has been very inspiring.

Much of the material here is bound to be provocative, and I am afraid that there must remain many mistakes: these are clearly all my own! The book has been made possible by generous support during my

D.Phil. from the AHRC, Wadham College, Oxford History Faculty, and Zaharoff Research Fund. Subsequently, a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, and research support at my current college, St John’s, have provided stimulating opportunities to continue work on this.

Finally, I would like to thank my lovely husband, son, parents, grand- mother, brother, wider family (particularly Richard, Nick and Malcolm), and friends, without all of whom my life would be immeasurably poorer. You are all a constant inspiration.

1. Map showing north-eastern French towns under consideration

2. Model of Arras, 1716, by engineer Ladevèze, now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Arras

3. Types of violence in ﬁve Artois towns

4. Types of violence in Artois

5. Types of violence in Paris

ADPC Archives départementales du Pas-de-Calais, Arras ADN Archives départementales du Nord, Lille AMA Archives Municipales d’Abbeville AN Archives Nationales, Paris

Beaumanoir Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes du Beauvaisis, ed.

A. Salmon, 3 vols. (Paris, 1899, repr. 1970) BL British Library BN Bibliothèque Nationale Boutaric, Actes

E. Boutaric (ed.), Actes du Parlement de Paris, 1254– 1328, 2 vols. (Paris, 1863–7) CUP

H. Deniﬂe and E. Châtelain (eds.), Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 vols. (Paris, 1889–97) Delmaire

B. Delmaire, Le Compte Général d’Artois pour 1303– 1304 (Brussels, 1977) Etablissements P. Viollet (ed.), Les Etablissements de Saint Louis, 4 vols. (Paris, 1881–6)

Furgeot and Dillay, Actes H. Furgeot and Dillay, M. (eds.), Actes du Parlement

de Paris: Deuxième série de l’an 1328 à l’an 1350. Jugés

(lettres, arrêts, jugés), 3 vols. (Paris, 1920–75) NRCF N. van den Boogaard and W. Noomen (eds.), Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, 10 vols. (Assen, 1983–96)

Olim

A. Beugnot (ed.), Les Olim, ou Registres des arrêts rendus par la cour du roi, 3 vols. (Paris, 1839–48) Ordonnances

E. de Laurières (ed.), Ordonnances des Rois de France, 22 vols. (Paris, 1849)

RHGF Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols

(Paris, 1738–1904) RR

A. Strubel (ed.), Le Roman de Renart (Paris, 1999)

Tanon L. Tanon, Histoire des justices des anciennes églises et

Abbreviations xiii

THEMA Thesaurus Exemplorum Medii Aevii at

Names are cited in the form and language in which they appear in the documents (though the ‘s’ for cas sujet has been removed in the interests of clarity, except in cases where such an ‘s’ survives in the modern form of the name—e.g. Gilles).

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Je ne suis pas marry que nous remerquons l’horreur barbaresque

qu’il y a en une telle action, mais ouy bien dequoy jugeans à point de

₁ leurs fautes, nous soyons si aveugles aux nostres.

Our vision of the Middle Ages is haunted by the spectre of extreme violence, and there is a smugly self-congratulatory tinge to modern char-

acterizations of this brutal and cruel period. But the image needs revisit- ing. Partly because violence continues, in multiple ways, to be common. And partly because it is a label applied to the medieval period often thoughtlessly. Attitudes towards violence in the Middle Ages were, in fact, sophisticated, and interacted in complex ways with the actual perpetration of violence which forms the subject of this book: I aim to uncover the multiple levels of meaning behind such gestures and yet the disap- proval and even shock which they engendered.

Physical brutality and the instrumentalization of its threat, still mes- merize collective mentalities. Moreover, the frightening connotations of cruelty are often also insidiously used to label and marginalize unwanted

groups. It is all too easy to dismiss violence as a merely dysfunctional product of deviant behaviour, wilfully turning a blind eye to its centrality in power structures and even in quotidian social relations. Paradoxically at once arresting and fascinating, and yet elusive in meaning and signiﬁ- cance, violence is not culturally aberrant, but embedded in the very frameworks of meaning promoted by society itself. This is not to claim ₁

‘I am not averse to us noticing the barbaric horror of such an action, but rather to us

judging their faults so harshly whilst blind to our own’: Michel de Montaigne, ‘Des

Cannibales’, from Les Essais, I. xxx. 216, ed. J. Balsamo, M. Magnien, and C. Magnien-

Simonin (Paris, 2007). ₂ e.g. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 5 vols. (London, new edn. 1994), iii. 1068: ‘I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion’. ₃ Tennenhouse distinguishes two kinds of violence ‘that which is “out there” in the

world, as opposed to that which is exercised through words upon things in the world, often

2 Introduction that it is unchanging, but contingent upon the structures of everyday life and the shifting norms of societies. We need to ask ourselves why violence provokes such enduring fascination alongside such persistent eagerness by society to abnegate responsibility for it.

At ﬁrst sight, fourteenth-century sources seem to conﬁrm the brutality of the Middle Ages. For example, in Dante Alighieri’s masterly exposition of this life and the afterlife in the Inferno, violence is omnipresent and a structuring principle: he shows physical brutality to be systemic, complex,

and adaptive. Dante stands above his time, but was also rooted in its historical realities and attitudes, underlining the centrality of violence in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century society. It both formed an integral part of social relations and provoked broader discussion. But Dante, while placing violence at centre-stage, also expressed heartfelt condemnation of its excesses and cruelty. And in this respect, he was perhaps even more typical of his time. Violence was not accepted as inevitable or its presence straightforwardly condoned. Rather, the period is characterized by ex- tremely nuanced attitudes towards violence, and by a deep-rooted ambivalence concerning its role. This ambivalence questioned the functions of violence and the relationship between violence and the law; challenged its social centrality and hesitated regarding the interpersonal or collective implications of physical brutality. This was an age where people thought carefully and problematically about violence and its implications. The aim of this book, then, is to consider the complexity of those attitudes, as revealed in discussions about, and representations of, physical violence, as well as to examine the perpetration of violent acts in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris and Artois.

The term ‘violence’ encompasses an enormous range of phenomena, from subtle structural exclusion or moulding of particular groups, to verbal manipulation, to physical damage done by one human being to another. It is this latter sense which is the subject of study here, with particular focus on violence by the populace, or ‘popular violence’, violence which was widely characterized as illegitimate, and is still often considered to repre-

sent merely the irrational, excessive display of physical force. This is ₄ Dante Alighieri, Inferno, in Commedia, ed. and tr. J. Sinclair, 3 vols. (Oxford, new edn.

1981), i. ₅

Introduction

3 indeed the sense of the Old French term ‘violence’: physical gestures lacking ofﬁcially instituted systematic frameworks of authority and mean-

ing, condemned by legal processes and the rhetoric of authorities. Chiv- alric violence, military exploits, judicial punishment, and religious persecution, perpetrated as they were by hegemonic groups, will not be explicitly discussed. Yet although these phenomena were not encompassed by the medieval French ‘violence’, they were part of a common phenomenon of physical brutality and contributed to the same discursive frame- work: the borrowing of such gestures by perpetrators of illicit violence and the deliberate resonances evoked by popular brawlers or urban rebels was a powerful way of gaining attention. And whilst nobles also carried out illicit brutality of staggering cruelty, it is the blows struck by the ordinary townsmen and women and subaltern rural dwellers (and their rich paral- lels with noble violence) which capture our attention here.

This book examines the functions and motivations of the supposedly ubiquitous interpersonal violence of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Violence was both a means of spectacular communication, and a way of achieving concrete goals: both performing and performative. Its mechanisms were rooted in cultural paradigms which shaped its perpetration, and its motivations were deeply embedded in socio-cultural context, even when overlaid with economic needs. This is not to deny that physical brutality could be perpetrated by psychopathic individuals without further motivation, but it is to claim that even when enraged, or drunk, or over-excited, the perpetrators of interpersonal violence were, even at an unconscious level, influenced by the norms of their society. The relationship between the functions of violence, and attitudes towards it, was, of course, reciprocal: contemporary responses to violence, as expressed in sermons, popular literature, oral accounts, moral treatises, and legal discourse were shaped by the practice of violence, but also influenced its perpetration, and demand study in their own right if we wish to understand the role of violence in this society. Indeed, the more fundamental question of definition lies at the heart of medieval ambivalence about physical violence: the term ‘violentia’ referred to disordering brutality, and the term ‘vis’ tended to indicate the physical force deemed to reinforce social order. However the distinction was not only unclear, but the subject of repeated debate, rendering this a particularly fruitful period for exploring the multiple overlapping roles of violence, its multi- faceted appearances in society, and its persistence. ₆ Le Robert Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1992), ii. 2261.

4 Introduction This book considers a hitherto understudied period of interpersonal violence in northern France, and examines, one by one, a range of kinds of popular violence rarely studied together despite their overlaps and resonances: street violence; violence in the tavern; student violence; urban rebellions; and domestic violence. Street violence comprised interpersonal brawls, vengeance killings and public humiliation, whereas violence in the tavern was more self-consciously frivolous. Students were notoriously brutal, but their deviance was as much a label applied to them as it was a reality, and one of which they were acutely aware. The laughter which often accompanied tavern brawls and student ﬁghts was, perhaps surpris- ingly, still evident in the playfulness of many urban uprisings, although the political goal of this type of violence was much more clearly articu- lated. And whilst the ordering function of violence may have been most prominent in the perpetration of violence against one’s wife, it was here in the home that ambivalence about the justiﬁability of violence seems to have caused the most anxiety. Setting these forms of violence side-by-side deepens our interpretive insights into the complexities and self-referenti- ality of the medieval use of physical brutality. These types are visibly distinguished and shaped by considerations of space, from the intimate setting of the home to the public and politically loaded arena of the town square. But they also indicate the wide range of contemporary thinking and ambivalence surrounding the subject and evoke provocative issues of communication, publicity, identity, stereotypes and expectations, and

moral, political, and legal justiﬁability. It is by uncovering the many layers of medieval ambivalence concerning interpersonal violence—its interpersonal or collective implications; its ordering or disordering effects; its ﬂuid relationship with the law—that we can hope to rectify both stereotypical demonizations of the Middle Ages, and determinist claims about the inescapable rootedness of violence in human nature.

Discussion of violence can hardly be conﬁned to a single paradigm: rather the subject invites a multiplicity of perspectives. Fundamentally, scholars from various different disciplines have been fascinated by the question of why mankind is so prone to physical violence: whether it is an intrinsic ₇

‘Space’ here is used in the sense elaborated by H. Lef èbvre, Writings on Cities, tr. and

ed. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford, 1996), 100–3: space both creates and is created by

Introduction

5 element of life, a deﬁning feature of our humanity, the remnants of the attempt to establish human society in the face of the divine, or an integral

feature of power. But, whilst violence is clearly not just a social construct, nor is it merely an instinctive and innate human characteristic. Studying violence requires a close reading of the gestures used and awareness that violence is a kind of exchange or transaction between perpetrator, victim, and spectator; more fundamentally, violence itself is a subjective concept,

readily used as a derogatory label in the exercise of power. Violence has interested philosophers, social scientists, and historians alike, and the insights afforded by a range of disciplines have profoundly nuanced understandings of the role of violence in society as integral to ﬂuid social

10 relationships.

Physical force is certainly an ever-present building block of social and political structures, and provides a visible or more insidious embodiment of hierarchies and exclusions; most notably, violence has been posited as a

deﬁning feature of the emergent state. Echoing medieval ambivalence about violence, scholars searching for the function of violence have repeatedly encountered the problem of the tension between violence as ordering and disordering, used to reinforce hierarchies, but equally

capable of subverting them. And violence can be expressive or instrumental, symbolic or practical, emotional or strategic, or more often, but

more problematically, all at once. Violent gestures are driven by indi-

14 vidual emotion and social concern, and by the conﬂuence of the two. ₈ K. Lorenz, On Aggression (London, 1967); R. Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris,

1972); W. Burkert, Homo Necans, tr. P. Bing (Berkeley, Calif., 1983); W. Sofsky, Violence:

Terrorism, Genocide, War, tr. A. Bell (London, 2003). ₉ D. Riches, ‘The Phenomenon of Violence’, in D. Riches (ed.), The Anthropology of Violence (Oxford, 1986), 8, 11. ₁₀ One of the most important texts in this respect is Y. Castan on 18th-cent. Languedoc:

Honnêté et relations sociales en Languedoc (Paris, 1974). Such has been the basis of anthro-

pological attempts to typologize violence: e.g. J. Black-Michaud, Cohesive Force: Feud in the

Mediterranean and the Middle East (Oxford, 1975), particularly 1–32. ₁₁ e.g. M. Weber, Economy and Society, tr. G. Roth and C. Wittich (New York, 1968);

P. Ricoeur, État et violence: Troisième conference annuelle du foyer John Knox (Geneva, 1957).

Hannah Arendt, though, famously questioned the assumption that violence straightfor-

wardly produces power: On Violence (New York, 1970). The relationship between violence

and the law was explored by Walter Benjamin (‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, Archiv für

Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47 (1920/1), 809–32), and the notion that law could

ever disassociate itself from the practice of violence, controversially, by Jacques Derrida

(Force de loi, Paris, 1994). ₁₂ ₁₃ e.g. P. Stewart and A. Strathern, Violence: Theory and Ethnography (London, 2002), 1.

Ibid. 6–7, 12; B. Schmidt and I. Schröder (eds.), Anthropology of Violence and Conﬂict

6 Introduction The value and mechanisms of symbolic action are highlighted in the explorations of cultural anthropology, with attention paid to a careful

balance of function and dysfunction. Such models can have mislead- ingly static implications, and the post-structuralist emphasis on ‘process’ is salutary. In particular, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ shifts attention to the processual, adaptive quality of interpretative frameworks of

violent social action in practice. Violence as process is as much about representation and mediation as it is about the actual gestures involved, and the representation of violence depends most strikingly upon its

17 deﬁnition by those with the power to delineate it.

Although violence is notoriously difﬁcult to historicize (principally because of the shifting nature of the source material), attempts to demon-

strate its contingent nature have been obliged to try. The most straight- forward response to this question has been to seek long-term trends in the decline of violence; more subtly, some historians have focused on its changing features and societal functions, and repression or instrumentalization either by nascent states, or through subtler shifting psychological

structures. Medievalists have been amongst the ﬁrst to critique these teleological accounts, sometimes via the careful use of statistical evidence, sometimes via close attention to the complex cultural resonances of ₁₅

e.g. V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY, 1974); C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). ₁₆ ₁₇ P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, tr. G. Raymond (Cambridge, 1991), 50–3. ₁₈ See F. Brookman, Understanding Homicide (London, 2005), 2.

See e.g. M. Braun and C. Herbereichs, ‘Einleitung’ in Braun and Herbereichs (eds.),

Gewalt im Mittelalter: Realitäten—Imaginationen (Munich, 2005), 7–39; M. Kintzinger

and J. Rogge, ‘Einleitung’, in Kintzinger and Rogge (eds.), Königliche Gewalt—Gewalt

gegen Könige (Berlin, 2004), 1–8. ₁₉ N. Elias, The Civilising Process, tr. E. Jephcott (Oxford, new edn. 2000); latterly,

nuancing but fundamentally agreeing with the position of Elias, P. Spierenburg, ‘Faces of

Violence: Homicide Trends and Cultural Meanings: Amsterdam, 1431–1816’, Journal of

Social History, 27/4 (1994), 701–16. Such statistical analysis is summarised by T. Gurr,

‘Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence’, Crime and Justice:

an Annual Review of Research, 3 (1981), 295–350; M. Eisner, ‘Long-Term Historical

Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice, 30 (2003), 83–142. It has led to virulent

debates: see e.g. the articles of Monkkonen and Graff (respectively, ‘Systematic Criminal

Justice History: Some Suggestions’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9/3 (1979), 451–64;

‘A Reply’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9/3 (1979), 465–71; and E. Johnson and

E. Monkkonen, The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle

Ages (Urbana, Ill., 1996)); and the debate about the English case in Past and Present:

L. Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300–1980’, Past and Present, 101

(1983), 22–33; J. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent’,

1560–1986’, Past and Present, 130 (1991), 70–106; J. Sharpe, ‘Debate: The History of

Violence in England: Some Observations’, Past and Present, 108 (1985), 206–15; L. Stone,

Introduction

medieval violence. In recent years, the historiography of medieval violence has undergone rapid expansion, though thirteenth-century French popular violence remains a lacuna, with attention focused on early medi-

eval, and late medieval or early modern, crime and violence. Attention has been attracted for the central Middle Ages primarily to chivalric violence, or to popular violence in England where the legal sources are

much denser. Historians have been concerned to indicate the groups most affected by popular violence and to explore its timing and socially

integral role. Drawing upon sociological models, the pervasiveness of violence in medieval culture has tended to be explained by its crucial role as an accepted mechanism for regulating and adjusting social structures

and relations. More recently, Claude Gauvard has focused upon the socio-economic contingency of particular forms of violence, concomi- tantly exploring the relationship between the development of proscriptive ₂₀ G. Schwerhoff, ‘Zivilisationsprozess und Geschichtswissenschaft: Norbert Elias’ For-

schungsparadigma in historisches Sicht’, Historische Zeitschrift, 266 (1998), 561–607;

H. Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham: Der Mythos vom Zivilisationprozess (Frankfurt, 1988); see

also the discussion in S. Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence

(London, 2007), 16; M. Schussler, ‘German Crime in the Later Middle Ages:

A Statistical Analysis of the Nuremberg Outlawry Books, 1285–1400’, Criminal Justice

History, 13 (1992), 11–60; V. Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the

Middle Ages, tr. P. Selwyn (New York, 2004); H. Boockmann, ‘Das grausame Mittelalter:

Über ein Stereotyp in Geschichte’, Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 38 (1987), 1–9; G. Althoff,

‘Schranken der Gewalt: Wie gewalttätig war das “fristere Mittelalter”?’, in H. Brunner (ed.),

Der Krieg im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 1999), 1–23. ₂₁ e.g. M. Greenshields, An Economy of Violence in Early Modern France (Pennsylvania,

1994); R. Muchembled, Violence et société: Comportements et mentalités populaires en Artois

(1400–1660) (Paris, 1985); J. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1996);

G. Halsall, Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998). The most

recent synoptic study of medieval violence leaves popular violence in the late 13th and early

14th cents. largely undiscussed: W. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (Harlow, 2011).

₂₂ e.g. A. Cowell, The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance and the

Sacred (Woodbridge, 2007); R. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Society in Medieval Europe (Oxford,

1999); B. Hanawalt, Crime and Conﬂict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge,

Mass., 1979); J. Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford,

Calif., 1977); E. Cohen, ‘Patterns of Crime in Late Fourteenth-Century Paris’, French

Historical Studies, 11/3 (1980), 307–27; and J. Misraki, ‘Criminalité et pauvreté’, in

M. Mollatt (ed.), Études sur l’histoire de la pauvreté, 2 vols. (Paris, 1974), i. 535–76; an

exception is A. Finch, ‘The Nature of Violence in the Middle Ages: An Alternative

Perspective’, Historical Research 70/173 (1997), 249–68, which focuses on early 14th-

cent. violence as prosecuted in the ecclesiastical court of Cérisy in Normandy. ₂₃ e.g. B. Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, tr. J. Birrell (Cam-

bridge, 1987); P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford,

1992); T. Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe (London, 2001); M. Meyerson, D. Thiery, and

O. Falk (eds.), ‘A Great Effusion of Blood?’ Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto, 2004),

particularly 4–9. ₂₄

8 Introduction

attitudes towards violence and developing state structures. Indeed, legalistic attitudes towards interpersonal violence have proved an ideal way to explore and to problematize the development of the implementa-

26 tion of state power through legal mechanisms.

The cultural implications of violence have drawn historians of an anthropological persuasion to study its ritual elements, at once afﬁrming,

dynamic, and oppositional. Honour is a central motif and has been rendered key to many explanatory frameworks of patterns and economies

of violence; further work has stressed the sensitive, dialogic, and adaptive

qualities of medieval aggression. Most effectively, historians have returned to the question of what constituted ‘violence’ as such in particular historical circumstances, a question which invites reﬂection upon political attempts to wrest the perpetration of legitimate force from private individuals into the hands of the law, where the term ‘violence’ was no

longer considered apposite. The study of the law in relation to interpersonal violence has exponentially increased our understanding of the role

of, and attitudes towards, brutality in later medieval France. Legal discourse and the practice of violence are no longer studied in isolation, as both are seen to be central to the conﬂicts which shaped everyday life in

32 the Middle Ages. ₂₅ ‘Au quatorzième et quinzième siècles, en France, le discours sur la violence devient un

élément de la construction de l’État’: C. Gauvard, Violence et ordre public au Moyen Age

(Paris, 2005), 11. See also N. Gonthier, Cris de haine et rites d’unité: La Violence dans les

_{e e} villes, XIII ₂₆ –XVI siècle (Turnhout, 1992), particularly 215–17.

See, most recently, J. Firnhaber-Baker, ‘From God’s Peace to the King’s Order:

Late Medieval Limitations on Non-Royal Warfare’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 23 (2006),

19–30, and T. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth-Century: Power, Lordship and the Origins

of European Government (Princeton, 2008). ₂₇ e.g. E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans (Paris, 1979); Y. Bercé, Fête et révolte: _{e e} Des mentalités populaires du XVI au XVIII siècles (Paris, 1976). ₂₈ e.g. W. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland

(Chicago, 1990). In medieval France, the notion of ‘renommée’ was key: see Gauvard,

Violence, 13–16. ₂₉ e.g. B. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1998). ₃₀ Such studies focus principally on the struggle to contain noble violence and private

wars. See particularly J. Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial War and Royal Power in Later

Medieval Southern France’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), 37–76. The demonization of

particular groups has been linked to this rise of central power: e.g. F. Rexroth, Das Milieu

der Nacht (Göttingen, 1999), 333–47. ₃₁ C. Gauvard, De grace especial: Crime, état et société en France à la ﬁn du Moyen Age

(Paris, 1991); L. de Carbonnières, La Procédure devant la chambre criminelle du parlement de

_e Paris au XIV siècle (Paris, 2004). ₃₂

Introduction

This book turns to hitherto understudied regions in this respect, tempted by the richness of the source material and the intrinsic interest of areas of rapidly changing social structures and developing civic ideologies: Paris

and Artois (see Figure 1). Artois was enjoying a period of economic prosperity and mercantile expansion: it was a centre notably of cloth production and banking, as well as an important trading centre for wool

and even wine. Paris likewise was prosperous, with a thriving commercial scene and a busy and skilled artisanate, as attested to by the Parisian

35 Provost, Étienne Boileau in his Livre des métiers. The town was self-

important as the centre of an increasingly powerful monarchy and admin-

istration, and the seat of an internationally renowned university. An anonymous writer, with evident exaggeration, but resonant pride, punned on Paris and Paradisus, and Jehan de Jandun praised its people, moderate

in all things. The images of everyday life in Paris, placed under the bridges of scenes from the Vie de Saint Denis from the early fourteenth century, evoke a Paris of social diversity with lepers sounding their clappers, physicians examining urine, and young people ﬁshing and swimming in the Seine: in this portrayal, it is a hive of bustling activity,

of learning and leisure, commerce and religious devotion. However romanticized this vision, much recent scholarship has clearly illustrated that medieval cities were not subject to rigorous social zoning, and rich ₃₃ R. Muchembled, La Violence au village: Sociabilité et comportements populaire en Artois _{e e} du XV au XVII siècle (Turnhout, 1989). ₃₄ Cf. R. Fossier, La Terre et les hommes en Picardie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), ii. 570–98;

R. Berlow, ‘The Development of Business Techniques Used at the Fairs of Champagne

from the End of the Twelfth Century to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century’, Studies in

Medieval and Renaissance History, 8 (1971), 28–35; J. Lestocquoy, Patriciens du Moyen Age:

_{e e} au XV siècle (Arras, 1945). Les Dynasties bourgeoises d’Arras du XI ₃₅ Étienne Boileau, Les Métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, ed. R. de Lespinasse and

F. Bonnardot (Paris, 1879).

36 Cf. R. Cazelles, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: De la ﬁn du règne de Philippe Auguste à la mort de Charles V, 1223–1380 (Paris, 1982).

₃₇ Anon., Recommendatio Civitatis Parisiensis, in Le Roux de Lincy and L. Tisserand _{e e} et XV

(eds.), Paris et ses historiens au XIV siècles (Paris, 1867), 22–9; Jehan de Jandun,

Tractatus de laudibus Parisius, ibid. 54. ₃₈ The Vie de Saint Denis was presented to Philip V in 1317 by his chaplain Gilles,

Abbot of Saint Denis: see W. Egbert, On the Bridges of Medieval Paris: A Record of Early

Fourteenth-Century Life (Princeton, 1974), 3–23. The manuscript is BN Ms fr. 2090–

2092, and a presumed third part is Ms lat. 13836; there is also a mid-14th-cent. copy, Ms

lat. 5286. For the money changer, goldsmith, beggar, ﬁshermen, lepers, singing clerics, and

_{v r r r r r}

physicians, see respectively Ms fr. 2091, fos. 105 , 111 , 97 , 129 , 99 , 125 ; for musicians,

10 Introduction

Saint Omer Hesdin

Aubigny

Arras

Poix Saint Riquier Bapaume Abbeville

Péronne Saint Quentin Laon Beauvais _{W E} _N S

50 Paris Kilometers Fig. 1. Map showing north-eastern French towns under consideration

and poor encountered each other regularly, providing opportunities for a rich variety of social interactions.

Both regions were, by contemporary standards, highly urbanized. Nevertheless, Artois still had a large rural population, and the kind of social and geographic mobility which we tend to associate with urbanized areas was not yet a regular characteristic. Paris was obviously much larger, and formed by a constant inﬂux of immigrants who swelled its population

enormously in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Yet it also retained close ties with the surrounding countryside, with many inhabit-

40 ants moving between the two, and social networks spanning the divide. ₃₉ ₄₀ S. Roux, Paris in the Middle Ages, tr. J. McNamara (Pennsylvania, 2009).

Introduction

Fig. 2. Model of Arras, 1716, by the engineer Ladevèze, now in the Musée des

Beaux Arts in Arras. The layout of the town was largely unchanged from the

thirteenth century. Author’s photograph.

This book’s study of Paris encompasses this more rural hinterland, following the remit of many of the sources, the nebulousness of the line between the city and its region, and the similar commercial patterns and social structures in both.

Despite their growth and the enthusiasm of a Jean de Jandun or the satirical poet who took as his premise that a downbeat God would choose

to come to Arras to cheer himself up, both Paris and Artois were beset with tension: rapid growth was accompanied by intensiﬁed economic,

social, and political grievances. The sting in the tail of Guillaume de Breton’s early thirteenth-century eulogy of Arras, the principal town in Artois, is telling: ‘Atrebatum potens, urbs antiquissima, plena/Divitiis,

the Early Fourteenth Century (London, 1997), 179, 210; D. Nicholas, The Later Medieval

City, 1300–1500 (London, 1997), 72. ₄₁ R. Berger, Littérature et société arrageoise: Les Chansons et dits artésiens (Arras, 1982),

12 Introduction

43 Wealth brought with it questionable

inhians lucris et foenore gaudens.’ morality and grasping behaviour. And the dire warning sounded by Bernard of Clairvaux to potential students in the late twelfth century presented Paris not as the heavenly city, Jandun’s paradise, but as the

earthly Babylon, den of vice and pride. By the end of the century, both areas were undergoing processes of profound upheaval. As Paris grew in size and political and commercial importance, life became increasingly precarious for many, and the wealth of the few was offset against the poverty and marginalization of the many, excluded because of economic

disadvantage, physical difference, or as the result of an accident. In Artois, the ascendancy of commerce was marked by obsessive references

46 to the wheel of fortune and the precariousness of economic success.

Structures of power were debated, as guilds came to share power with older oligarchies, both competing against a monarchy anxious to expand

control. Textile production created its own tensions, and was no longer adequate to deal with the demographic saturation of many of the towns in

48 this area, engendering an edgy dependence upon international trade.

Moreover, the geographical position of Artois as a frontier region laid it open to damage from war in neighbouring Flanders: local inhabitants were obliged to offer service under the count of Artois, himself killed at the battle of Courtrai in 1302, and the records refer again and again to the

49 Quite apart ‘dégastement’ (‘laying waste’) of the region caused by war. ₄₃ ‘Powerful Arras, very ancient city, ﬁlled with wealth, grasping for proﬁt and rejoicing

in reward’: Œuvres de Rigord et Guillaume le Breton, ed. H.-F. Delaborde (Paris, 1882), ll.

97 and 94–5. ₄₄ See particularly S. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and their

Critics, 1120–1215 (Stanford, Calif., 1985). In many ways, the paradigm is that of

Augustine’s ‘two cities’: see Augustine, De Civitate Dei, ed. M. Dods (London, Modern

Medieval Violence in Northern France