Les nobles et la ville

Thanks to a strong historiographical tradition, rooted in the politics of pre-Revolutionary France, which saw medieval nobles living almost exclusively on their country estates rather than in towns (where a bourgeoisie encouraged by the Crown became dominant), there has been little attempt by recent French historians to investigate what part nobles played in municipal life as the medieval rural world was transformed into an early modern urban one. Gathering a strong team of seventeen medievalists and early modernists to consider whether these traditionally-held stereotypes are still valid, Thierry Dutour provides a powerful steer in his introduction, in which he succinctly glosses recent literature on the medieval nobility and on towns in French-speaking regions, outlines historiographical developments from around 1700, discusses theoretical and definitional issues in the light of contemporary thinking (much of it interestingly informed by Anglo-American sociologists or anthropologists), and poses questions (ch. 1). These are then addressed in subsequent chapters, in a mix of closely-observed case-studies or more broadly-based surveys, all of which contribute fresh information or novel perspectives. This allows a revisionist consensus to emerge, one which describes a long process of osmosis between nobles and towns, with families physically moving in or out over the centuries from the eleventh to the sixteenth in response to political, economic, social or cultural factors. It is a process which takes different forms or affects different types of ‘nobles’ in particular periods within that longer narrative though a powerful driving force is seen in an emerging ‘early modern state’ from c.1300 onwards. The rewards it could offer are seen as critical in attracting nobles, both those from ancient lineages and those newly ennobled, to towns in the many princely administrations of late medieval France as well as into royal service. Thus in Chapter Two, devoted to ‘Les nobles, des rurbains?’, i.e. those with country estates but also urban offices or houses, three authors separately discuss nobles and town life in the Moselle region (Alain Marchandisse), at Clermont-Ferrand (Emmanuel Grélois) and Reims (Pierre Desportes), between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, while Florian Mazel analyses the increasing emotional investment of nobles in urban religion and piety in Angevin Provence c.1250–1350. In Chapter Three, in which towns are considered the usual place of residence for those in government service, whether church or state, for most of the period covered, Romain Telliez considers office-holding—showing, among other things, that royal ordinances decreeing that baillis and sénéchaux should not invest in property within their jurisdictions were largely ignored, with some officers building up considerable urban wealth and social contacts while others used profits from office earned in town to acquire rural estates, a pattern not restricted to French-speaking parts of Europe. The emergence of some towns as regional ‘capitals’ allows Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin in Chapter Four to study how the lords of Roubaix inserted themselves into society at Lille in the fifteenth century, while, in one of the most informative contributions, Boris Bove and Caroline Bourlet jointly analyse the changing complexion of noble presence in Paris from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. They demonstrate the gradual exclusion of early comital interest and of some knightly families, while others were absorbed by office and marriage into the upper echelons of Parisian society—where they were joined, in the later middle ages, by ‘une noblesse aulique et administrative’ created by the expansion of royal government. With a population at its medieval peak of possibly 200,000 or more around 1300, Paris was sui generis not simply within French-speaking regions, but also dwarfed its closest rivals in the two most highly developed urban areas of western Europe, the Low Countries and Northern Italy, at more than double the size of its nearest competitors. Exploiting lists of those contributing to tailles, Bove and Bourlet show that aristocratic houses and palaces, well-studied recently for the Paris of c.1400, were already very prominent in the townscape a century earlier with at least eighty major residences identified here, and some household members also identified. Then, in Chapter Five, Philippe Hamon, whose main expertise lies in the early modern period, draws some tentative but well-formulated conclusions on the impact of nobles on towns from the preceding chapters

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