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The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France. R. Knecht J.
Читать онлайн.Название The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France
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isbn 9780007393381
Автор произведения R. Knecht J.
Издательство HarperCollins
Of the three estates, the most clearly defined was the clergy, whose members had to be ordained or at least to have taken minor orders. It had its own hierarchy and code of discipline. At the top were the archbishops, bishops, abbots and priors. Then came the canons of cathedrals and collegiate churches, and below them the great mass of parish priests, unbeneficed clergy, monks, friars and nuns. In terms of wealth the gulf between a prelate and a humble parish priest or curé was enormous. The bishop often disposed of large temporal revenues. Thus the bishop of Langres was also a duke, the seigneur of 100 villages and he owned seven châteaux. Seigneuries were also held by cathedral chapters and collegiate churches. By contrast, the humble curé was often desperately poor. The dîme or tithe paid to him by his parishioners was so meagre that he was often obliged to run a small business on the side or to serve as the seigneur’s agent in order to make ends meet. Theoretically, under the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), bishops and abbots were elected by their chapters, but in practice the church had difficulty resisting the demands of royal patronage. When the crown did not directly dispose of major benefices, elections were often disputed and the crown had to act as arbiter. Many lesser benefices were in the gift of a patron, ecclesiastical or lay. The secular clergy may have numbered 100,000, made up of about 100 bishops, many suffragan bishops and canons, about 30,000 parish priests and a huge crowd of unbeneficed clergy. The regular clergy cannot be quantified but was obviously substantial: there were 600 Benedictine abbeys, 400 mendicant houses, more than 100 commanderies of St John and 60 charterhouses.
The second estate, or nobility, was widely envied for its prestige and life-style. The noble condition was identified with perfection, while juridically and politically it implied a special status. Heredity was essential to the concept: a nobleman was born rather than made. Many nobles flaunted pedigrees going back to ‘times immemorial’. Yet it was also possible for a nobleman to be created. The king could ennoble someone who had served him well. At first this was an exceptional favour, but in the fifteenth century the holders of certain offices (for instance royal notaries and secretaries) were automatically ennobled and the practice spread to other offices. This development was accompanied by the widespread acquisition of seigneuries by office-holders. Some nobles simply usurped their status by ‘living nobly’ (i.e. avoiding any business activity), holding a public office, fighting for the king, owning a fief or seigneurie and living in a house large enough to be a manor. But a false nobleman had to ensure that his name was dropped from the tax rolls over a long period so that, if his claim to tax exemption was challenged, he could summon witnesses who would testify that his family had lived nobly for as long as anyone could remember. It is impossible to quantify the nobility exactly, but it may have numbered between 120,000 and 200,000.
The bulk of France’s population consisted of the third estate, made up of people of widely different fortunes and occupations. Seyssel in his La Monarchie de France (1519) made a useful distinction between middling people (peuple moyen) and the lesser folk (peuple menu). The former, he explained, were merchants and officers of finance and justice. The peuple menu were people principally engaged in ‘the cultivation of the land, the mechanical arts and other inferior crafts’. Seyssel believed that such people should not be ‘in too great liberty or immeasurably rich and especially not generally trained in the use of arms’, otherwise they might be tempted to rise against their betters. The third estate had its own hierarchy defined by custom and expressed in certain honorific titles, such as noble homme or honorable homme, in notarial documents, but most Frenchmen did not qualify for such titles. As one historian has written: ‘four-fifths of Francis I’s subjects fell into anonymity’.
The government of France
At a meeting of the Estates-General in 1484 Philippe Pot, representing the Burgundian nobility, described kingship as ‘the dignity, not the property, of the prince’. The crown, according to the jurists, was handed down to the nearest male kinsman of the deceased monarch. The king was not free to give it away or to bequeath it to anyone; he was only the temporary holder of a public office. Yet the concept of the king as head of the state already existed. The word ‘state’ did not come into current usage till the mid-sixteenth century, but the idea existed under the name of ‘commonwealth’ (chose publique) or ‘republic’. Although official documents distinguished between the king and the state, the interests of both were closely identified. Thus in 1517, Chancellor Duprat said: ‘The kingdom’s interest is the king’s interest, and the king’s interest is the kingdom’s interest. For it is a mystical body of which the king is the head.’ As head of state, the king was not bound to assume the obligations entered upon by his predecessors; the debts of a king could be legitimately repudiated by his successor. A corporation or individual holding privileges from the crown needed to have them confirmed at the start of a new reign. The same rule applied to office-holders.
‘The king never dies’. This adage embodied an important principle of French constitutional law: the king succeeded from the instant of his predecessor’s death. No interregnum, however brief, was deemed possible. Nor could a lawful king be denied the full exercise of his authority for reasons of age or health. If he were a minor or unfit to rule for some other reason, his authority was exercised in his name by his council, although in practice a regent was appointed. Contemporary opinion favoured the king’s nearest adult male kinsman for this role, but in the sixteenth century it was repeatedly filled by a woman: Louise of Savoy under Francis I and Catherine de’ Medici under Charles IX.
In the sixteenth century the coronation or sacre at Reims was no longer regarded as essential to the exercise of kingship, yet it remained important as a symbol of the supernatural powers of kingship and of the close alliance between church and state. The coronation service began with the oath. Standing over the Gospels, the king promised to promote peace in Christendom, to protect Christians against injury, to dispense justice fairly and mercifully, and to expel heretics from his dominions. This was followed by the anointing, the most important part of the ceremony. Thrusting his hand through slits in the king’s garment, the archbishop of Reims anointed his body with a chrism allegedly handed down from heaven by a dove at the baptism of King Clovis in 496 and used ever since to consecrate France’s kings. The anointing set the king apart from other men, giving him a quasi-sacerdotal character. Although no French king ever claimed the right to celebrate mass, he did take communion in both kinds, a privilege enjoyed only by priests.
By virtue of his anointing the king of France, who bore the title of ‘Most Christian King’, was deemed to possess thaumaturgical powers, that is to say powers of healing the sick. The only other Christian ruler to claim this power was the king of England. In time, it became restricted to the curing of scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes on the side of the neck, a disease more repulsive than dangerous and subject to periods of remission. The king touched the victim’s sores and tumours with his bare hands, and, making the sign of the cross, said: ‘The king touches you and God cures you.’ Each victim was then given two small silver coins.
France at the end of the Middle Ages was still a largely feudal country: many towns, corporations and individuals enjoyed a degree of autonomy, regarding themselves as parties to a contract in which mutual obligations were laid down and complete submission to the king was ruled out. But a school of thought existed which advocated royal absolutism. Its chief exponents were the royal jurists, who found in Roman law the idea of absolute power vested in one man and of subjects equally subservient to him. The doctrine was backed up by the Christian concept of the king as God’s vicegerent on earth. It was claimed that he could legislate, dispense justice, revoke all lawsuits to his own court, levy taxes and create offices. He could also annul any concession detracting from his authority, and local privileges could survive only if he chose to renew them at his accession. The authority of Cicero was invoked to show that the king was entitled to sacrifice private interest to the public good.
Roman