LITMIR.BIZ

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Years War. The annexation of Provence in 1481 was extremely significant for French trade in the Mediterranean. Although Marseille failed to wrest the monopoly of Levantine trade from Venice, it established useful links with the ports of the Ligurian coast, Tuscany, Catalonia, Sicily, Rhodes and the Barbary coast. The chief traders were Italians who looked to the bankers of Lyon for capital. The French Atlantic and Channel ports also recovered in the late fifteenth century and traded actively with England, Spain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. As land communications were poor, harbours developed along the west coast, along navigable rivers and even far inland. As many as 200 ships might be seen at any time along the quays at Rouen. The most important port of the south-west was Bordeaux which was visited by an English wine-fleet each year.

      The expansion of trade was linked to industrial growth. Cloth-making, which was centred in northern France but becoming entrenched in other areas, notably Languedoc, was France’s chief industry. Although often named after the towns from which the cloth-merchants operated, the various kinds of cloth were produced mainly in the countryside. French cloth was, generally speaking, of ordinary quality and cheap, serving the day-to-day needs of the lower social strata. Even the best French cloth could not compete with such foreign imports as Florentine serges. The finest wool was imported from Spain, England, the Barbary coast and the Levant. An important development was the establishment of a luxury textile industry, first at Tours, then at Lyon. But France alone could not satisfy the increasingly sophisticated tastes of the court and nobility. For the finest linen she looked to the Netherlands and South Germany and for silks to Italy – velvet from Genoa, damask and satin from Florence and Lucca, and cloth of gold from Milan.

      An industry that was developing fast in France around 1500 was printing. After its importation from Germany in 1470, it spread to Lyon in 1473, Albi in 1475 and Toulouse and Angers in 1476. By 1500 there were 75 presses in Paris alone. France still lagged behind Italy in book production, but it was catching up fast. Thus between 1480 and 1482, Venice produced 156 editions and Paris 35; between 1495 and 1497, Venice produced 447, Paris 181 and Lyon 95. Whereas in 1480 only nine French towns had printing presses, by 1500 the number had risen to 40. Although French printers began by targeting academic clients, they soon branched out in pursuit of bigger profits. In addition to classical and humanistic texts, they published all kinds of religious works and also secular works, like tales of chivalry.

      French society in the late Middle Ages was far simpler structurally than it is today. It consisted mainly of peasants, who lived in the kingdom’s 30,000 villages. A village was largely self-contained: if it looked outwards at all, it was only to the neighbouring parishes or to the nearest bourg with its market and lawcourt. Yet some peasants did venture further afield. Each year, for example, thousands of Auvergnats took up seasonal work in Spain while teams of Norman peasants helped to bring in the grain harvest in Beauce and the Ile-de-France. But most peasants stayed in or near their birthplace.

      Each village had its own hierarchy. At the top was the seigneur, who was usually but not always a nobleman, for a seigneurie was purchasable like any other piece of property. It comprised a landed estate of variable size and a judicial area. The estate was usually in two parts: the demesne, which included the seigneur’s house and the tribunal as well as the lands and woods he cultivated himself; and the censives or tenures, lands which he had entrusted in the past to peasants so that they might cultivate them more or less freely in return for numerous obligations, called redevances. The main one was the cens, an annual rent, often quite light, which was paid on a fixed day. The seigneur usually retained the mill, wine-press and oven, and expected to be paid for their use. He took a proportion of any land sold, exchanged or inherited by a censitaire, and exacted champart, a kind of seigneurial tithe, at harvest time. The seigneur also had certain judicial powers. Usually he had surrendered his criminal authority to the royal courts, but he continued to act in civil cases through his bailli and other officials. His court judged cases arising among the censitaires but also between them and himself. Almost inevitably in a country as large as France, seigneuries did not exist everywhere: in the centre and south there were freehold lands (alleux) which were totally free of seigneurial dominance. By contrast, Brittany and Burgundy were oppressively seigneurial.

      The closing years of the Middle Ages witnessed two important social changes in the French countryside: a reduction in the wealth and authority of the seigneur, and the rise of a village aristocracy. During the period of agricultural recovery the seigneur had been obliged to make concessions to his tenants: new leases laid down precisely their obligations to the seigneur. By 1500 serfdom had all but disappeared. However, as the demographic rise created land hunger, the seigneurs tried to back-track on concessions, usually without success. At the same time, their authority was being eroded by the crown. A long series of royal enactments rode roughshod over local customs. The king’s judges heard appeals from decisions taken in the seigneurial courts and pardons were often granted by the crown. Another blow to seigneurial prestige was the responsibility assigned to most village communities to allocate and collect the main direct tax, the taille.

      The peasantry, too, underwent a significant transformation in the century after 1450. At the top of their social scale were the fermiers or coqs de village, who frequently acted as intermediaries between the seigneur and the rest of the peasants. With at least thirty hectares at his disposal, the fermier could produce in a year more than he needed to feed his family and pay his dues to the seigneur. The surplus enabled him to set up as a grain-merchant or cattle-breeder. He lent tools, seed and money to less fortunate peasants and offered them seasonal work or artisanal commissions. At the same time, the fermier collected leases, levied seigneurial dues and monopolized positions of influence in the village or parish. The rise of this village aristocracy did not affect the whole of France. The west, for example, was hardly touched by it; yet it was a development of great importance for the future.

      Urban society was more varied, open and mobile than rural society. For one thing, it was continually being renewed: the death rate in towns was higher than in the countryside because of overcrowding and poor standards of hygiene. Even a mild epidemic could decimate a town, so that a regular flow of immigrants was essential to maintain and increase its population. Such incomers might include apprentices, journeymen, domestic servants, wet-nurses, students and clerics. They would converge on a town each day from the rural hinterland looking for a better life and perhaps opportunities of social advancement. Beggars came expecting more effective alms-giving, and the rural poor looking for work, when the rise in population reduced the chances of employment on the land. The number of immigrants could be huge. At Nantes, for example, the population might jump in one year from 20,000 to 30,000. Most immigrants helped to swell the ranks of the urban poor which remained vulnerable to any famine.

      Contemporaries tended to divide urban society into two groups: the aisés, or well-to-do, and the menu peuple, or proletariat. The reality, however, was more complex. The well-to-do were themselves divided between merchants and office-holders. In towns like Bordeaux or Toulouse, which were important trading centres as well as having a parlement, these two groups were fairly evenly balanced, but in Lyon, where trade was all-important, merchants were pre-eminent. They lived in comfortable town houses and added to the profits of their trade the revenues from their estates in the neighbouring countryside. In towns which were primarily administrative centres, the office-holders were preponderant. They were often as rich as merchants, from whose ranks many of them had risen. The core of urban society consisted of artisans and small to middling merchants. They worked for themselves, served in the urban militia, paid taxes, participated in general assemblies of the commune, and owned enough property to guarantee their future security. Artisans were mainly of two kinds: those who employed large numbers of workmen and those who employed no labour other than their own families.

      The lower stratum of urban society – the menu peuple – consisted of manual workers, who were excluded from any share in local government and lived in constant fear of hunger. They included journeymen, who were paid in money or money and kind, manoeuvres (paid by the day) and gagne-deniers (paid by the piece).

      Whereas we tend to divide society into groups according to their place of residence, occupation or wealth, Frenchmen in the early sixteenth century used quite different criteria.

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