The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France

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 us to rank them in order of size. Below Paris were four towns (Rouen, Lyon, Toulouse and Orléans) of between 40,000 and 70,000 inhabitants, then perhaps a score of towns of between 10,000 and 30,000 inhabitants, then another forty or so of between 5000 and 10,000. Finally there were many more small towns with fewer than 5000 inhabitants. The line distinguishing a small town from a large village was often difficult to draw. A town was usually walled. It also possessed certain privileges and comprised a wider variety of occupational and social types than a village.

The character of a town was determined by its main activity. Trade was important to all of them, but some were also administrative, intellectual and ecclesiastical centres. Seven had parlements; about 90 were capitals of bailliages and sénéchaussées, 15 (Paris, Toulouse, Montpellier, Orléans, Cahors, Angers, Aix, Poitiers, Valence, Caen, Nantes, Bourges, Bordeaux, Angoulême and Issoire) had universities, and about 110 were archiepiscopal or episcopal sees. Virtually the only industrial towns were Amiens, where the making of cloth kept half the population employed, and Tours, where silk was important.

By 1500 the walled towns, commonly described as ‘good towns’ (bonnes villes) to distinguish them from the large villages or villes champêtres, were active politically. In 1482, King Louis XI asked the people of Amiens to endorse a treaty, giving as his reason ‘the need to secure the consent and ratification of the men of the estates and communities of the bonnes villes of our kingdom’. The towns have been described as a fourth power in the kingdom along with the king, the church and the nobility. The crown and the towns worked together as allies, while watching each other closely.

The walls of many towns had fallen into disrepair by the thirteenth century and, consequently, many had been taken by the English during the Hundred Years War. To protect themselves, many towns by 1500 had repaired their walls at their own cost and the process continued in the sixteenth century. In order to qualify as a bonne ville a town needed not only a curtain wall, but also human and material resources with which to defend itself. In the words of Claude de Seyssel, writing in 1510: ‘a bonne ville or place forte that is well supplied, well equipped with guns and with all things necessary to sustain a siege and nourish a garrison and relief force is the safeguard of an entire kingdom.’ A recent survey has traced the remains of 1700 places-fortes in France dating from before 1500.

The topography of Paris was determined by the River Seine, which divided it into three parts: the Cité on the island in the middle of the river; the Ville on the right bank and the Université on the left bank. The city was encircled by medieval walls, but only the left bank remained within the wall built in the twelfth century by King Philip Augustus. The right bank had outstripped it long ago, and was now hemmed in by a fourteenth-century wall. Beyond the walls lay suburbs or faubourgs, the most important having grown around the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The area within the walls was small and densely built up, the inhabitants crammed into narrow houses of two or three storeys. All the streets, except a few axial ones, were narrow and virtually impassable to wheeled traffic. They also stank because of the ordure that was thrown into them. Among the few open spaces were the Cemetery of the Innocents and the Place de Grève, both on the right bank. Two bridges linked the Ville to the Cité: the Pont-au-Change, a wooden bridge built in 1296 which was lined with shops owned by goldsmiths, jewellers and money-changers, and the Pont Notre-Dame, which collapsed in 1499 and was rebuilt. Two bridges linked the Cité to the left bank – the Petit Pont and Pont Saint-Michel. In addition to being a thriving business community, the Cité was also a judicial and ecclesiastical centre. At the eastern end of the island stood the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Close by were the fortified bishop’s palace and a gated close of 37 canons’ houses. At the opposite end of the island stood the Palais or old royal palace, now occupied by the parlement, which was the highest court of law, and other sovereign courts. Its business attracted a vast number of councillors, barristers, procurators, solicitors, ushers and so on, in addition to the many litigants and people who came to shop at the stalls set up by tradesmen within the palace. Also on the island was the Hôtel-Dieu, the city’s main hospital.

The Ville was the business quarter of Paris. It comprised the markets of the Halles, expensive shops in the rue Saint-Denis and mixed commerce around the rue Saint-Martin. Many streets were organized by trades. The Place de Grève, in addition to being a port, was the place where the militia assembled and the site of civic ceremonies and public executions. On the square’s east side stood the Maison aux Piliers, the seat of the municipal government or Bureau de la Ville. Other important secular buildings in the Ville were the Louvre, a medieval fortress with a tall central keep, and the Châtelet, seat of the prévôt of Paris and his staff. The palace of the Tournelles was the only royal residence within the capital that was still used by the king and his court.

The University of Paris, which had been founded in the twelfth century, was best known for its faculties of theology and arts. It also had faculties of canon law and medicine. In the fifteenth century its reputation declined and it ceased to attract as many foreign students as in the past. While degrees were conferred by the faculties, teaching was done in fifty or so colleges. The most famous were the Sorbonne and the colleges of Navarre, Cardinal Lemoine, Sainte-Barbe and Montaigu. Not all students lived in them; many lodged in ‘digs’ some of which were run by their tutors. For physical exercise the students could use the Pré-aux-Clercs, a large meadow just outside the Porte de Nesle.

The rise in population, growth of urbanization and a general rise in the standard of living were mainly responsible for an economic boom that lasted from the 1460s until the 1520s. France was fortunate in being largely self-sufficient in respect of basic necessities. Grain was her chief product. Though she sometimes had to import foreign grain, this was only in times of famine; normally she produced enough for her own needs and exported any surplus. Wine consumption increased hugely during the sixteenth century, as shown by the rapid expansion of vineyards around Paris, Orléans, Reims and Lyon, by the yield from duties on wine and by the multiplication of taverns. Then as now, wine was produced not only for the home market, but for export. Several major vineyards were developed along the Atlantic coast around Bordeaux, La Rochelle and in the Basse-Loire. England and the Netherlands were the best customers.

Salt, like wine, was produced for markets at home and abroad. From marshes along the Mediterranean coast, it was sent up the Rhône and Saône to south-east France, Burgundy, Switzerland and Savoy. Another group of salt marshes along the Atlantic coast supplied a much wider area, including northern France, England, the Netherlands and Baltic states.

Metalware, especially of iron or steel, was not widely used in late medieval France. Agricultural and industrial tools were still usually made of wood. Apart from a few basic iron pots, the greatest demand was for nails and pins. For non-ferrous metals, France depended largely on foreign imports: copper, brass and tinplate from Germany, pewter and lead from England and steel from Italy.

As trade developed in France around the close of the Middle Ages, no fewer than 344 markets and fairs were set up under royal licence between 1483 and 1500. A fair was given privileges designed to attract foreign merchants: for example, foreign money was allowed to circulate freely, the goods of aliens were guaranteed against seizure and distraint, and the droit d’aubaine, whereby an alien’s inheritance was liable to forfeiture by the crown, was set aside. Some fairs were exempted from entry or exit dues and sometimes special judges were appointed to hear the suits of merchants, thereby sparing them the delays of ordinary justice.

By 1500 most big towns and many smaller ones had fairs. The most famous were the four annual fairs of Lyon, which drew many foreigners, especially Italians, Germans and Swiss. They were also important to the history of banking. Though banks had existed in France since the thirteenth century, they only became important as agencies of credit and exchange in the fifteenth century. They fixed themselves in Lyon because of the large amount of business transacted there, and threw out branches in other trading centres. The use of bills of exchange eliminated the need to carry large amounts of cash, and the fairs of Lyon became a regular clearing house for the settlement of accounts. At the same time, bankers took money on deposit, lent it at interest and negotiated letters of credit.

French overseas trade had recovered from the stagnation it had suffered during the Hundred 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).