A notable feature of the history of both France and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is a marked increase in public participation in war. In each country, as events in the late 1350s in France and in the late 1440s in England amply demonstrated, the conflict and its many implications, social, political, and economic, provoked reactions of deep intensity, especially in France, where the element of civil war provoked deeper feelings than in England. Questions about the war, in particular regarding its human and financial commitment, were asked quite openly. Was the cost of the commitment worth it? What advantage did it bring? Who, the nation or merely individuals, benefited from it all? The commitment of Henry IV’s four sons to the war is seen by the fact that three of them died in France in the service of the English crown. This was natural enough, since the war was regarded as a struggle between rival kings over the crown of France. According to the traditional view taken of their place in society, the nobility would have been expected to support their king in the furtherance of his claim. Yet in England noble support was not always whole-heartedly forthcoming. There is something of this in the reminder given by William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, to Henry VI in 1450, that his own father had died at the siege of Harfleur, his brother only a few weeks later at Agincourt, while two of his relatives had met their death at Jargeau in 1429. This suggests that Suffolk was proud of his family’s war record; but it also hints at the fact that the record may have been exceptional.1 What was needed was an awakening of a conscious and continuous interest in the affairs of the war among the different elements of the population.
The sustaining of public involvement was rapidly becoming part of the growing art of the management of war. Although the word ‘propaganda’ did not come into use until the mid-nineteenth century, we may none the less use it conveniently to describe a number of activities which had one aim in common, to encourage and secure the widest possible involvement of a nation in war. As we have seen, wars needed justification on legal and moral grounds. Just as diplomats provided themselves with the evidence, often of an historical nature, to sustain their demands and negotiating positions, so such material could be woven into tracts to support or rebut a claim such as that of successive English kings to the crown of France. These works, often written by the learned and well-informed for people of their own kind at the urging of their royal masters, had but a limited effect: their form (frequently legal and often pedantic) and language (all too often Latin) scarcely made them easy reading; it is likely, more often than not, that they were read by the converted, and that few were brought ‘oute of doute’ or over to their author’s point of view as a result of their reasoned arguments. Yet such tracts (of which it is probable that many more were written in France than in England), although formal in character and unlikely ever to have enjoyed more than a very limited circulation, serve to emphasise how important it was to have defenders of a cause who could justify the need to pursue or defend claims through war.
Such claims, even when pitched in legal language, were often based on history or a particular reading of past events. As the Florentines wrote their history in the fifteenth century under humanistic influence to show themselves to be the heirs of Rome, or the Habsburgs used genealogies to justify their claims to be heirs both of an historic empire and the duchy of Austria, so the late medieval kings of France sought to bolster their position by a claim to be the true heirs of Clovis and even, as some would have it, to be the claimants to the throne of England as heirs to William, duke of Normandy and king of England! Once again, such history was only for the literate, indeed for the well-educated.
There were other ways, however, of conveying a relatively simple message more directly and in a manner more likely to appeal to the unlearned and unsophisticated. From a variety of sources we learn that the door of the parish church often served as a communal notice-board. It was for display on church doors in northern France that the English prepared illustrated genealogies, accompanied by verses, to stress the right of Henry VI to be king of France, through direct descent from St Louis in both the male and female line. To an age accustomed to the use and meaning of signs and symbols, the juxtapositioning of the arms of England and France witnessed by the crowds present at Henry VI’s English coronation in 1429, and at his return to London after his French coronation early in 1432, was an easy and natural way of using the language of heraldry and armorial bearings to make a political point. In January 1450, after the reconquest of Normandy, the French council ordered the arms of England found in the castle and palace at Rouen to be removed, since they formed visible memorials of the English usurpation of the duchy. By the following May glaziers and stone masons had got to work, and the offending signs of the English presence had disappeared.
Propaganda could also be used to awaken people’s consciousness of the events of war, to publicise these (particularly when they could be interpreted favourably) in the hope of giving encouragement and lifting morale. The return of the Black Prince to London after his victory at Poitiers, bringing with him the king of France as his prisoner, was the occasion for triumphant celebrations. In October 1416, Henry V ordered the clergy of his chapel to commemorate the first anniversary of his victory at Agincourt; while in 1450 Charles VII, perhaps influenced by Italian practice, ordered the striking of a medal to record the successes recently achieved against the English. The advantages to be gained from bringing before the public mind memories of notable victories were not merely to recall success. Victories were the supreme justification of title, an expression of the divine will, the way, as the English chancellor told Parliament in 1377, that God honoured a country, as he had honoured Israel, his own heritage, a title which England could now assume.2 Following this train of thought, it is not surprising that Bishop Brinton of Rochester could remind congregations in 1375 and 1378 that God had usually been English. It was therefore right that Englishmen should fight for their country.3
But, as the bishop added, if God could honour a people, he could also withdraw his support to punish it for its waywardness. To remedy this, men and women should turn to prayer, as kings ordered the clergy to exhort their people to do in moments of special need. In one large English diocese, that of Lincoln, special prayers were requested over fifty times during the course of the Hundred Years War, and on two-thirds of these occasions the intention was linked, directly or indirectly, with war or peace.4 As all realised, the power of the pulpit was considerable, particularly when a patriotic sermon was preached in English by an effective speaker. In 1420, Bishop Fleming of Lincoln ordered that an English version of his thoughts on the theme of war should be made available, and a copy affixed to the door of every church in his diocese. Episcopal records, extant for England but, sadly, not for France, enable us to see how things were done. The faithful were specially encouraged to acts of good works, to fasting and penance, to attendance at Mass, and to participation in that communal act of religious devotion so characteristic of this period, the procession. We may be sure that the age, with its belief in divine intervention in war and in the efficacy of prayer, quickly saw how England’s fortune could advantageously be affected by the sincerity of prayer.
Requests for participation in such acts of devotion had another side to them. In an age lacking means of modern communication, the task of the priest in his pulpit was to inform, making available news about events both inside and outside the country. News was always welcome, particularly in time of war. And since good news was doubly welcome, English commanders sent home from France and elsewhere reports of their successes (when they could) for these to be circulated not only through meetings of the county courts and at markets, but also along the ecclesiastical network of church pulpits and places, such as St Paul’s Cross in London, which served as important centres of open-air preaching and, hence, of publicity. There can be no doubt that the Church had an important role to play in what has been described as ‘a rudimentary publicity system which was particularly used for spreading military news’,5 as well as for creating a sense of community feeling through the use it allowed to be made of its personnel and facilities to publicise and support a national war.
Public opinion also expressed, and was sometimes consciously encouraged to express, itself through other uses of the word, spoken and sung. The old tradition of recalling feats of arms in song and verse persisted. The Welsh, Adam of Usk reported, recounted the deeds of Sir Edmund Mortimer in song at feasts;6 while in France, as late as the reign of Louis XI, itinerant singers were encouraged for overtly political reasons. Writers who have rightfully achieved literary reputation also contributed to the creation of this kind of political literature. Many of the ballads of Eustache Deschamps, for instance, had war (or its effects) as their theme, or expressed the sense of national consciousness growing in France in the fourteenth century; while in Spain both the civil wars and those of reconquest against the Moors proved a fertile inspiration for verses and ballads of a political nature composed by minstrels serving in the army. The ‘Agincourt Carol’ had a long and honourable ancestry.
Battles, in particular, lent themselves well to accounts in dynamic language, the words playing on the glorious deeds and courage of one side and the inevitable defeat of the other. The language of political literature needs to be emphasised. It helped to justify action, to boost morale, to encourage a hostile attitude towards the enemy who, since he usually lost battles, was given the role of whipping-boy caught in a war of words, to be taunted, abused, slandered, and ridiculed through the use of a special vocabulary of emotion and of hostility. Strangely, the French (and some Scots, too) thought that the English had tails (‘Engloiz couez ’, as the Ballade contre les anglais of 1429 put it);7 they acted in ‘an arrogant manner’ (‘orgouilleuse maniere’) and had come to France falsely (‘faucement’) to take the crown of France. On the other side, the French were regarded as usurpers of that crown, a people who acted deceptively, broke truces to which they were bound, a ‘stiff-necked people’ who refused to see when the judgement of God had gone against them. The language was very different from that of an earlier age (and even that of the spirit of Froissart) in that, contrary to chivalric tradition, it gave little credit to the loser or the enemy when it was his due. Rather it was a language applied in blanket terms. Hence Englishmen had a curious propensity for killing their kings: Frenchmen were effeminate and deceitful. In this way a whole people, seen by an outsider, was condemned in a few words. Their very separateness, identity, and characteristics were recognised by others who, in their turn, had another identity imposed upon them. The way a nation was seen by another had a part in creating the sense of national consciousness of each.
Much of this propaganda literature, in particular that in verse form, must be placed in the category of ‘author unknown’. Yet the Hundred Years War saw the active encouragement in England of a group of writers who produced verse to order, much of it of a strongly nationalist character. Laurence Minot, a Yorkshireman who wrote that Edward III had attacked the French king in 1340 ‘to shac him by the berd’, was a man with the ability to use simple language to striking effect, whose lively commemorative verses reflect a deliberate attempt to whip up an emotionally satisfying feeling against the disdained enemy, Frenchman or Scot. Thomas Hoccleve, who worked in the Privy Seal office for much of his life, could make his position regarding England’s enemies quite clear: ‘I am an Englyssh-man & am thi foo.’ The Benedictine monk, John Lydgate, in the course of a long career as a writer of political and patriotic literature, composed verses for many purposes, including a dynastic poem, The Kings of England, in which he stressed the long historic link between France and successive kings of England, a prelude to the statement of their claim to that country’s crown. If Lydgate’s style was far removed from that of Minot, their intentions were not so far apart. Together with their masters, both men knew that verses had their role to play in creating an atmosphere favourable to English aspirations in time of war. As the words which the author of the Vow of the Heron put into the mouth of Edward III indicate, war was fought elsewhere than simply on the battlefield: ‘I will make war upon him [Philip VI] both in deeds and in words’ (‘Je le guerreray et en fais et en dis’).8 Propaganda was part of that war of words.
What makes a nation? What, in particular, made the French nation in the last two centuries of the Middle Ages? A glance at the wider European setting will reveal that this was an age which witnessed the death of old ‘universal’ values, whether papal or imperial, and the rise of ‘national’ ones in their place. If there were still a long road to be travelled in Italy and Germany, developments would occur more quickly in France, England, and Iberia.
In France, in particular, the idea of nation and nationhood took a notable step forward during the period. The use of a phrase such as ‘Mother France’ (‘Mère France’), as Alain Chartier used it in 1422, does not mean that the idea that all Frenchmen had a common mother was generally accepted. Historians have emphasised that the idea of nationhood grew only slowly during this period; that in legal matters local custom ruled, and that even the Parlement of Paris (France’s supreme court dispensing justice directly for the king, whose body members claimed to carry to its burial) functioned in such a way as to emphasise the very localism of French society. Legal particularism was one thing; another was the close connexion between the titles of the great feudatories, the areas from which they took them, and the exercise of real power which they enjoyed within them, facts which helped to develop a local patriotism at the expense of the national one.
Particularism was furthered by the practice of encouraging meetings of local estates, whose continued existence can be read as a recognition of the desires of most French people to see them dealing with local matters, especially taxation, which could then be employed in the furtherance of local defence. There was, too, the very size of the country and the physical location of the capital, well ‘off-centre’: Paris was a long way from Bayonne or Brest. Inevitably, distances militated against the hegemony of Paris and the court; inevitably, too, for that very reason one of the main themes of French history has long been to see the centre struggling to assert itself against the periphery in an attempt to gain political control. The process, although successful, was a slow one.
Much modern writing has stressed the significance of the conscious encouragement of provincial loyalties and the growth of autonomy in certain areas of France. The development of the Burgundian dominion was an extraordinary example of this. There were other areas, too, which were not insignificant in this respect. One factor which enabled the kings of England to win favour and exercise a measure of effective control over Normandy in the fifteenth century was their appeal to a sense of local patriotism, in this case based largely on a revival and defence of Norman institutions which had all but disappeared in the years following the conquest of the duchy by the French king in the thirteenth century. Brittany constituted an even more dramatic instance of the reluctance of a paysto allow itself to be forced into submission. At the end of the Middle Ages the sense of Breton identity was very marked. It was found in the works of local writers; in a sense of the duchy having its own roots and history and, of course, its ducal house, against which it was possible to commit treason; in its own march or frontier which, in the east, was the river Couesnon which runs into the sea near the Mont-Saint-Michel, thus marking the border of the duchy with its neighbouring one of Normandy. This was provincialism in the strictest meaning of the word. It was, at the same time, one of those factors which militated strongly against the creation of a French nation.
What factors could weaken these tendencies? Basically, they were three in number: monarchy, history, and war. Monarchy, in every sense a truly living institution, provided the country’s leadership. More than any other institution, it came to symbolise the unity of France. The thirteenth century had seen developments which were important in this respect. The reign and person of St Louis (1226–70) had done much to advance the cause of royal prestige and power. Louis’s piety and personal life, which were to lead to his canonisation in 1297, were taken as being a clear sign of divine approval of the monarchy of France, a point underlined with the placing of a reliquary containing the newly canonised monarch’s skull in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris which Louis himself had founded to receive the relics from Christ’s crown of thorns. Then, about 1300, as part of a great publicity drive associated with the reign of Philip the Fair (1285–1314) Guillaume Nogaret had written of that king’s personal piety which made him into the ‘principal pillar supporting the Roman church and the Catholic faith’, while the Dominican friar, Guillaume de Sanqueville, almost transformed Philip into a Christ-figure, or a leader for all French people.
What, in our own time, Marc Bloch was to call the religion of monarchy took off even more strongly in the reign of Charles V (1364–80). One of the motifs prominent in much of the art of these years was that of monarchy. This can be seen in manuscript illuminations of the crowned king receiving gifts, or in the king’s sceptre, a magnificent piece topped with a figure of Charlemagne, enthroned, holding his own sceptre and orb, the whole placed in an open fleur de lys, and including an inscription which begins ‘Saint Charles the Great…’ (‘Sanctus Karolus Magnus…’). The sceptre was one of the items which Charles V bequeathed to the abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, to form part of the regalia for the coronation of future French kings. The creation of a new ordo, or order of service, for Charles V’s coronation, which placed much emphasis upon both the power and the responsibilities of majesty, underlines the fact that kingship was a political theme of much importance at this time.9
We noted earlier in this chapter the importance of armorial bearings as symbols of a political claim. The age also attributed great significance to the outward symbols and trappings of monarchical authority. The royal entry (entrée royale) into towns other than Paris was a development of the second half of the fourteenth century. In October 1389 Charles VI made his formal entry into Lyon, walking under a canopy similar to that which protected the Host in Corpus Christi processions, essentially a mark of respect to him who walked beneath it. When, in November 1449, Charles VII took possession of the recently re-conquered city of Rouen, he did so in a manner intended to impress, riding a horse draped in cloth of gold worked with fleur de lys, his sword borne before him, his party preceded by a white palfrey, symbol of sovereignty. Such ceremonies were important, reflecting, as they were intended to do, the need of the king’s subjects to see their lord, the chief agent of unity within the country, and the need of the king to assert his lordship in farflung parts of his kingdom.10 The fleur de lys referred to in the Rouen entrée was the symbol of the monarchy and of France which all would have understood, especially since Charles V had taught that it had originally been sent down from heaven as a sign of divine approbation.
A further sign was the sacred banner (oriflamme) which might accompany the king to war, kept at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, which became the royal mausoleum and something of a mystical centre of royalty (St Louis had decreed that only kings, not members of their families, might be buried there, giving added significance to the burial of Bertrand du Guesclin among this royal company). Nor should we forget the claim of the king of France to be regarded not merely as a king but as an emperor: ‘the king is emperor in his kingdom’ (‘rex in regno suo est imperator’), as the much-quoted tag went. To emphasise this the figure of Charlemagne on Charles V’s sceptre (the two men, it will be noted, shared a name) wore not an open, royal, crown but a closed, imperial one, and was flanked by two imperial eagles. The cult of Charlemagne at the French court in the late fourteenth century, in which the old emperor was shown with a halo, suggests very strongly that everything was being done to hint that the king was being imbued with something of the former imperial authority.
‘There is no nation’, one of France’s leading historians has recently claimed, ‘without a national history’,11 thereby stressing the political value which could be attached to making a people aware of its history, or common experience. Not for the first time, the study of the past in the late Middle Ages became a means of expressing, channelling, and developing a sense of national consciousness, in this case an awareness of how France had arisen and developed, what she was, and where she might go. If it could be shown that France (and not simply parts of France) had a natural, indubitable, and historic past which could be recorded, then the study of that past could make a considerable contribution towards the creation of the present and the future. Paris (the man) had been the son of Priam, king of Troy: through the tribe of the Parisi he had given his name to the capital of France – or so the story went. The Trojan legend had slowly developed since the seventh century, and in the course of the Middle Ages few countries refused to be associated with it or with the figure of Brutus whose travels, after he had left Troy and gone to Greece, brought him to Gaul and then, finally, to Albion, where he founded Troja Nova, the New Troy, which became London. The Trojan origins were seized upon at different times, but the late Middle Ages used them to create an ancient and respectable stock from which nations had since descended in Germany, Wales, Scotland, Brittany, England and France. In England the Trojan origins had been dealt with by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1135; in France it was in the Historia regum francorum, written well over half a century afterwards, that the story resurfaced; it was one which was maintained well to the fore of French historical writing for a long time to come.
If one tradition was based on Troy, another was founded on Rome and, in particular, on the imperial past. This tradition, as we have seen, was not limited to France, although in France it was not the people who owed their being to the Romans (Troy had been responsible for that) but rather their rulers, who were descended from the emperors of Rome. The emphasis on descent was also to be seen in the interest which men had in genealogies and pedigrees. The Middle Ages were familiar with Christ’s genealogy as found in the Tree of Jesse of Isaiah and in the pedigrees traced in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The establishment of a line of kings gave ancestry to the most recent of monarchs, as well as providing continuity to their people. In the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, due importance was given to the 113 kings of royal stock who had ruled the Scottish nation in line unbroken by a single foreigner. In France, when the dynasty was being challenged by the English, it was essential to prove legitimacy through ancestry. As Jean Golein wrote at the end of the fourteenth century, popes and emperors were elected, but the kingdom of France belonged to her kings by inheritance through male heirs, the descendants of a holy and sacred lineage. The tracing of ancestry was not simply a family affair. In this case it was concerned with the royal office and the wider family, the nation. It had thus become a matter of state.
Legitimacy and the inheritance of an unbroken succession was one thing. The whole matter had another dimension which has been stressed in recent writing; the long Christian tradition of the country called France to which the words of St Peter, ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart’ (1 Peter 2) might be said to apply. In the Declaration of Arbroath, the Scots were able to refer to themselves as a ‘holy people’ confirmed by an apostle, Andrew. The English, in their turn, could claim that Christianity had been brought to them by Joseph of Arimathea; that the great Constantine, through his mother, Helena, was a grandson of King Coel, and that he had been born in York; and that England had more parishes than had France.12
Yet all this was nothing in comparison with the proud boast of late medieval French kings to be descended from Clovis, said to be a saint as well as the first Merovingian king; from Charlemagne, Frank, emperor and saint (he had been canonised in 1165, four years after Edward the Confessor); and from St Louis, paragon of the royal virtues, all this giving a sense of the continuity of Christian rule and holy blood going back almost one thousand years. The influence of this way of seeing matters was to be well illustrated in Louis XI’s decision, taken in 1469, to declare a feast of ‘monseigneur Saint Charles, notre predecesseur comme roi de France’, with a public holiday to commemorate it. There were other patrons, too, of whom France had a notable series: St Denis, third-century bishop of Paris, but also something of an historic, even mythical, creation; St Louis, of happy memory; and St Michael, archangel, appropriately a soldier, first brought to prominence in the fourteenth century, and finally assigned an order of chivalry by Louis XI. With such protectors, how could the nation or its dynasty fail?
The monarchy would thus have powerful reasons for ensuring that history be written and used to good purpose. The Historia regum francorum was already being composed at Saint-Denis late in the twelfth century, and this tradition continued until the end of the Middle Ages. In the mid-fourteenth century Richard Lescot, monk of the abbey, styling himself ‘historiographer royal’, wrote an historical treatise against England and another on the exclusion of the female line upon which the English claim to the crown of France was based. By the fifteenth century the Grandes chroniques de France, written with royal approval, were being cited almost as if they were the Bible itself; while it was in the same century that another monk of the abbey, Jean Chartier, was styling himself ‘historiographer of the French’, which suggests that he was producing work of a certain kind, in all likelihood to order. In this way the old Dionysian tradition of writing history favourable to the monarchy and its role as the leader and unifier of French society was continued. But this was not left to the monks alone. Members of the royal entourage were also actively encouraged to partake in this exercise. Charles V persuaded his chancellor, Pierre d’Orgemont, to write the history of both himself and his father, John II. Under Charles VII, the royal chancellery continued to provide historians, when Noël de Fribois and Nicole Gilles, both royal notaries and secretaries, each produced a successful history of France in which, granted the position of the writers and the access to documents which their work at the centre of power accorded them, they were able to make use of documentation taken from the royal archives. The virtual invention of the Salic Law occurred in the mid-fifteenth century when, on the orders of Charles VII, a search was instigated at Saint-Denis, Reims, and elsewhere for texts upon which a treatise, the Grand traité, could be composed with a view to diffusing a myth which excluded any but the existing royal line, descended, as it was, through the male, from the throne of France.
It is arguable that it was the long war with England which was the most influential single factor to contribute to the growing awareness of French nationhood in this age. With the country open to attack from the English, the needs of defence came before all others. To meet the threat, which came from a number of directions, the French crown had, in the face of strongly-held feelings of local loyalty, to create a national effort which would both depend upon and reflect a developing sense of nationhood. Yet, over a period of a century or more, this was achieved. First, it was necessary to emphasise the inclusiveness of the word ‘Francia’ to describe the whole kingdom, and not simply those areas ruled by the crown. This was already being done in the thirteenth century, and it was in that century, too, that the idea of the communis patria, the motherland with the king at its head, came to be increasingly employed. From the same inspiration, that of Roman law, there emerged the idea of the common good (res publica) embracing, in this case, all French people, with the king as their head (caput). This notion of res publica (translated variously as ‘la chose publique’, ‘le bien publique’, ‘l’utilité publique’, or ‘le bien commun’) beloved of lawyers, doubtless influenced the great canonist, Guillaume Durand (d. 1296), when he wrote that all should be ready to contribute ‘to the defence of the country and the crown’ (‘pro defensione patrie et corone’). Similarly, the popularity of the late-Roman writer, Vegetius, was partly due to the stress which he had placed upon communal responsibility for defence and the need to serve the common good.
The threat of external attack played a crucial role in obliging France to take stock of her defensive needs, in forcing her to face them in a communal way, and in creating an awareness that all French people belonged to the same nation, or patria, owing allegiance and obedience to the same king. But this was not enough. At this stage we should insist upon another factor (already studied in an earlier chapter) which formalised this new-found unity, namely the development of institutions, and principally those which emerged from war, the army and the national fiscal system. As we have seen the period witnessed the creation of a royal army, owing its existence, its pay, and its command structure to the king, but increasingly regarded as the defender of the good of France as a whole. The growth of the army as an instrument of state, its development as the effective symbol of the country’s strength, controlled and sometimes led in person by the king, marks the rise of an institution which directly reflects the growing sense of French unity. When Charles VII instituted the francs-archers in 1448, he decided that every community should provide one man who would render military service in return for exemption from certain taxes. The essential point is sometimes forgotten; through the francs-archers the French army would represent the whole nation, seen now as a geographical expression, since (in theory) every community was to be represented in it.
Complementary to the building up of the new army was the creation of a national taxation system, recognition that the army’s needs had to be met: no taxation, no army; no army, no defence. If the common good came under attack, the crown called upon necessity to justify the imposition of taxation which, after the publication of an ordinance by Charles VI in October 1383, established the principle that all, wherever they lived, were henceforth to pay aides, ignorance of the ordinance not excusing any person from its terms. Even royal decrees could be used to educate men in the needs of France as a whole.
Two further factors may also be taken into account. It was during the fourteenth century that the two great privileged bodies, nobility and clergy, came to be included (albeit slowly) in the everwidening circle of those who paid taxation and who, like other members of the larger community, became more closely subject to its practices. Secondly, we cannot ignore the influence of the need to collect the ransom of John II upon the growing sense of political unity. For the ransom had the effect of making it necessary to collect taxation with regularity over many years throughout the country, and thereby rallying the whole people around the king in his need, a symbolical and practical sign of the involvement of the nation in achieving the release of its head and leader, honourably captured in battle while seeking his country’s deliverance from enemy attacks.
What was the connexion between war, the growing sense of French nationalism, and treason? In spite of attempts by lawyers in the royal service to establish a clear-cut definition of treason which would secure condemnation before the law, ‘there was never any precise delimitation of the crime.’13 Yet one thing remains clear. Treason grew out of particular political situations, and was regarded as a political offence against both king and people. For this reason, some brief remarks must be made about it here.
Termed lèse majesté, or the injuring of majesty, treason was a concept which, in the late Middle Ages, could be used to defend the crown both in time of war and social unrest, and in a period when there might be opposition to the extension of its theoretical and practical claims. But treason was more than that. It was also seen as a crime against the common good of society as a whole, which might suffer from a stab in the back which treacherous acts such as giving information to, or plotting with, the enemy could constitute. Treason was thus an act which threatened both the king and the body politic.
The time of war against England marked the point when men began to be prosecuted for treason. In 1343 Olivier III de Clisson was tried and executed ‘pour pluseurs traïsons et autres crimes perpetrez par lui contre le roy et la coronne de France, et aliances qu’il avoit faites au roy d’Angleterre, anemi du roy et du royaume de France’ (‘for several acts of treason and other crimes carried out by him against the king and the crown of France, and alliances which he had made with the king of England, enemy of the king and the kingdom of France’).14 Three years later one Simon Pouillet met the same fate for uttering public support for the English king’s claim to be king of France. Thus began a long line of trials of those who plotted against the king. We do well to remember that the quarrel between the French and English kings was fundamentally a quarrel over a matter of succession, and that it was precisely this which had prompted Pouillet to speak the words which cost him his life. We should also note that the common good of France was being increasingly associated with the well-being of the person of the king and of the office which he exercised. An attack on him, as lord, was an attack on the people; if he prospered, so would they. It is hardly surprising that in such circumstances consorting or plotting with the ‘anciens ennemis’ would be regarded as treason.
Attitudes towards treason could be harsh. Yet it is clear that the situation resulting from the war against England allowed for much discretion in the matter. Individuals might be prosecuted and punished. But in situations in which territorial borders and spheres of political influence were subject to not infrequent change resulting from military campaigns and treaties, it was difficult to accuse the populations of whole areas of disloyalty or treason. French legal records of the period contain much evidence of the problems thus caused. Both the transfer of large areas, particularly in south-western France, from one obedience to the other by virtue of the treaty of Brétigny, and the English conquest of large parts of northern France in the fifteenth century, brought about clashes of loyalty in the minds of the people involved, creating situations in which certain acts might be regarded as treasonable. This was particularly liable to happen in areas adjacent to frontiers: the friend of one day might technically have become an enemy by the next, and allrelationship with him (or her: lovers were separated by living in opposing obediences) construed as treason. In the language of the day, France was a country of ‘war and divisions’ (‘guerre et divisions’), symbolised by those who wore the white cross, the red cross and the cross of St Andrew (Valois, English, and Burgundian supporters respectively). The element of civil conflict in the war led to feelings of great bitterness and the taking of extreme and sometimes very violent measures against those who were political, rather than national enemies, with the effect that accusations of treason were frequently hurled by one side against the other.
There were, in addition, other problems. Could all French people be certain that the English king had no legitimate claim whatever to the crown of France? God, after all, had appeared to back him by helping him to victory on the battlefield, a view which undoubtedly caused many to accept English rule, albeit with resignation. Further, there were those, Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Thomas Basin, and the anonymous ‘Bourgeois de Paris’ among them, who felt that English rule compared favourably with that of the Valois. Not surprisingly, at the end of the war, des Ursins was to urge Charles VII to take a lenient view of acts which had arisen not out of a conscious desire to betray him but rather out of circumstances which had obliged men, in a divided France, to live outside the jurisdiction of him whose claim to legitimacy, denied by the terms of the treaty of Troyes, had recently been spectacularly vindicated by the expulsion of the English. Consequently, although a large part of the population of Normandy appeared to have ‘collaborated’ with the English by living under their rule, it was not prosecuted when those who had lived in the Valois jurisdiction returned to the duchy after 1450. As if in reply to the idea that traitors were those who failed to resist the enemy (as surrendering a castle without resistance was regarded as treacherous conduct) the argument that French people had been forcibly subjected to English rule in spite of themselves was generally accepted. Now, the pursuit of the common good demanded the re-establishment of social peace as soon as possible. Besides, one of the attributes of kingship, as des Ursins more than once reminded the king, was the exercise of mercy, which the texts of letters of pardon pronounced to be preferable to the rigours of justice. The strict application of penalties for technical treason in what had been a form of civil war would have been to have taken a sledgehammer to crack the nut. At the end of the war, the cause of the common good and of the unity of France would best be furthered by a policy of reconciliation. The alternative was still further division. After so many years of ‘guerre et divisions’, none would want that.
1 On this matter see N. Saul, Knights and esquires: the Gloucestershire gentry in the fourteenth century (Oxford, 1981), ch. 2, and S. M. Wright, The Derbyshire gentry in the fifteenth century (Derbyshire Ree. Soc, VIII, 1983). pp. 8–11.
2 Rotuli parliamentorum, II, 362.
3 Sermons of Thomas Brinton, I, 47; 11, 339.
4 A. K. McHardy, ‘Liturgy and propaganda in the diocese of Lincoln during the Hundred Years’ War’, Religion and national identity, ed. S. Mews (Oxford, 1982), pp. 216–17; R. Barber, The life and campaigns of the Black Prince (Woodbridge, 1986); Hewitt, Organization of war, pp. 158–66; J. R. Maddicott, ‘The county community and the making of public opinion in fourteenth-century England’, T.R.Hist.S., fifth series, 28 (1978), 34–5, 38.
5 A. E. Prince, ‘A letter of Edward, the Black Prince, describing the battle of Najera in 1367’, E.H.R., 41 (1926), 417. Such letters were sometimes incorporated into the chronicles. See The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333–1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927; repr. 1970), p. xxxv; and A. Gransden, Historical writing in England II: c. 1307 to the early sixteenth century (London, 1982), index under ‘newsletters’.
6 Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377–1421, trans. E. M. Thompson (2nd edn, London, 1904), pp. 77, 247.
7 Ed. P. Meyer, Romania, 21 (1892), 50–2.
8 Political poems and songs relating to English history composed during the period from the accession of Edward III to that of Richard II, ed. T. Wright (R.S., London, 1859), 1, 7.
9 R. A. Jackson, ‘The Traite du sacre of Jean Golein’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 113 (1969), 305–24.
10 B. Guenée and F. Lehoux (eds.), Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515 (Paris, 1968); D. Styles and C. T. Allmand, ‘The coronations of Henry VI’, H.T., 32 (May, 1982), 28–33.
11 Guenée, States and rulers, p. 58.
12 J.-P. Genet, ‘English nationalism: Thomas Polton at the Council of Constance’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 28 (1984), 67–8.
13 S. H. Cuttler, The law of treason and treason trials in later medieval France (Cambridge, 1981), p. 1.
14 M. Langlois and Y. Lanhers (eds.), Confessions et jugements de criminels au Parlement de Paris, (1319–1350) (Paris, 1971), p. 151.