LITMIR.BIZ

       ONE France in 1500

      At the beginning of the sixteenth century France was still only partially developed as a nation. She still lacked well-defined borders, a common language and a unified legal system. The eastern frontier, in so far as it existed at all, followed roughly the rivers Scheldt, Meuse, Saône and Rhône from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. People living west of this line were vassals of the French king; those to the east owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. French suzerainty over Artois and Flanders was purely nominal, effective control of these areas having passed to the house of Burgundy. Further east, the frontier cut across the duchy of Bar whose ruler, the duke of Lorraine, did homage for half the territory to the king of France and for the other half to the emperor. In the south, Dauphiné and Provence, being east of the Rhône, were still not regarded as integral parts of the French kingdom: the king was obeyed as ‘Dauphin’ in the one, and as count in the other. The south-west border more or less followed the Pyrenees, avoiding Roussillon, which belonged to the kingdom of Aragon, and the small kingdom of Navarre, ruled by the house of Albret. Within France, there were three foreign enclaves: Calais belonged to England, the Comtat-Venaissin to the Holy See and the principality of Orange to the house of Chalon. Some great fiefs also survived, including the duchies of Brittany and Bourbon.

      France also lacked a common language. Modern French is descended from langue d’oïl, a dialect spoken in northern France during the medieval period; in the south, langue d’oc or occitan was used. The linguistic frontier ran from the Bec d’Ambès in the west to the col du Lautaret in the east, passing through Limoges, the Cantal and Annonay. South of this line, even educated people used the local idiom or Latin; langue d’oïl was spoken by feudal magnates when addressing the king. After 1450, as the French crown asserted its authority following the expulsion of the English, langue d’oïl began to make deep inroads in the south-west. The parlements of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Aix used it, and noblemen from the south who took up offices at court adopted it. They continued to speak it when they returned home, passing the habit to their servants. By 1500 the southward expansion of langue d’oïl was gathering pace, at least among the upper classes, but the linguistic unity of France still lay far in the future. Nor was the divide simply between north and south. Within each linguistic half there were whole families of provincial patois, not to mention such peripheral languages as Breton, Basque or Flemish.

      The law was another area lacking national unity. Each province, each pays and often each locality had its own set of customs. Broadly speaking, Roman law prevailed in the south while customary law existed in the north, but patches of customary law existed in the south, while Roman law penetrated the north to a limited extent. For a long time customs were fixed only by practice, which made for flexibility but also uncertainty; so from the twelfth century onwards charters were drawn up listing the customs of individual lordships or towns. The first serious attempt to codify customs was made by Charles VII, but no real progress was made till Charles VIII set up a commission in 1495. It was under Louis XII, however, that codification really got under way.

      The surface area of France in 1500 was far smaller than it is today: 459,000 square kilometres as against 550,986. Yet it must have seemed enormous to people living at the time, given the slowness of their communications. The speed of road travel may be assessed by consulting the guidebook published by Charles Estienne in 1553. One could cover 15 or 16 leagues in a day where the terrain was flat, 14 where it rose gently and only 11 to 13 where it rose steeply. Thus it took normally two days to travel from Paris to Amiens, six from Paris to Limoges, seven and a half from Paris to Bordeaux, six to eight from Paris to Lyon and ten to fourteen from Paris to Marseille.

      The social and political implications of distance were far-reaching. Fernand Braudel has suggested that it made for a fragmented society in which villages, towns, pays, even provinces ‘existed in sheltered cocoons, having almost no contact with one another’. Yet the immobility of French life in the late Middle Ages should not be exaggerated. In spite of the distances involved, people were continually moving in and out of towns. ‘We would be wrong to imagine’, Bernard Chevalier has written, ‘our ancestors as immobile beings, riveted to their fields or workshops.’

      By 1500, France had largely rid herself of the two great scourges of plague and war which had proved so devastating between 1340 and 1450. Outbreaks of plague did still take place, but there were no pandemics of the kind that had swept across the kingdom between 1348 and 1440. Epidemics were limited to one or two provinces at most, and destructive ones were less frequent. War had also largely receded: except for certain border areas, there was little fighting within France between the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453 and the start of the Wars of Religion in 1562. Large companies of disbanded soldiers and brigands continued to terrorize the countryside from time to time, but in general the fear and uncertainty that had discouraged agricultural enterprise before 1450 were removed. Nor was there any major grain famine between 1440 and 1520.

      The recession of plague, war and famine served to stimulate a recovery of France’s population after 1450. In the absence of a general census for this period it is impossible to give precise figures. We have to rely on evidence supplied by a relatively few parish registers, mainly relating to Provence and the north-west, which are often in poor condition, do not provide complete baptismal lists, seldom record burials and mention marriages only occasionally. But certain general conclusions may be drawn. It is unlikely that France’s population exceeded 15 million around 1500, but it was growing. Having been reduced by half between 1330 and 1450, it seems to have doubled between 1450 and 1560. In other words, the numerical effects of the Black Death and Hundred Years War were largely made up in the century after 1450. The rise was by no means uniform across the kingdom: some villages, even regions, maintained a high annual growth rate over a long period, while others made more modest advances.

      The need to feed more mouths stimulated agricultural production after 1450. This was achieved by means of land clearance and reclamation rather than by improved farming techniques. The reconstruction began in earnest about 1470 and lasted till about 1540. The initiative rested with individual seigneurs, who had to overcome enormous obstacles. On countless estates nothing was visible except ‘thorns, thickets and other encumbrances’; the old boundaries had vanished and people no longer knew where their patrimonies lay. The compilation of new censiers and terriers was costly and time-consuming. Labour was also in short supply to begin with, forcing lords to offer substantial concessions to attract settlers on their lands.

      Reclamation, like the resettlement of the countryside, was subject to many regional variations. It began sooner in the Paris region and the south-west than in the Midi, where it took up almost the entire first quarter of the sixteenth century. Pastoral farming was often damaged in the process, as many village communities, anxious to maximize their arable production, tried to restrict grazing. Peasants were forbidden to own more than a specified number of animals, but the need for manure precluded a complete ban on livestock. In mountain areas, where arable farming was less important, steps were taken to protect pastures from excessive land-clearance.

      The rise of France’s population after 1450 was reflected in urban growth. Although evidence for this is often selective (like tax returns) or incomplete, all of it points upwards. Thus at Périgueux the population rose gently between 1450 and 1480, then steeply, reaching a peak in 1490. Using the base index of 100 for the number of known families, this had fallen to 29 in 1450, before rising to 87 in 1490 and levelling off at 79 in 1500. Paris, which was by far the largest town in France, had some 200,000 inhabitants by 1500. A document of 1538 distributing the cost of 20,000 infantry among the cities in accordance with their ability to pay enables

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