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Honouring Saint Louis in a small town
Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004) 263–277 www.elsevier.com/locate/jmedhist
Honouring Saint Louis in a small town William Chester Jordan Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1017, USA
Abstract The cult of Saint Louis of France has traditionally been regarded as largely limited to royal shrines and aristocratic patronage, but two documents published here provide some tentative evidence that patronage may have been wider. Evidence of this sort may be rare not because non-aristocratic patronage was rare but because so few records of parish church endowments have survived. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Louis IX; Martyrdom; Saint-Florentin; Amortisation; Jean de Joinville
This is a study of the endowment in 1317 and 1320 of an altar dedicated to King Louis IX of France (r. 1226–1270) at the parish church of Saint-Martin in the bourg of Saint-Florentin, a small town not too far distant from the cathedral cities of Auxerre and Sens and precisely midway (155 km in each direction) between Paris and Dijon, the capital of the duchy of Burgundy. The man responsible for the endowment was Jean le Voyer, a burgher of Saint-Florentin. Three principal questions animate the study. What was provided for in the endowment? What do we know about this man, Jean, who made it? And what can be suggested about Louis’s cult outside of royal and aristocratic circles on the basis of it? But let us begin with a preliminary inquiry into the sources for answering these questions. The principal documents, two deeds of gift, form a remarkable pair, scarcely known to scholars now but summarised and edited with a few easily correctable errors in 1889 by Francis Molard, the archivist of the de´partement of the Yonne.1 They are reprinted, with the errors corrected and modernisations suppressed, as an appendix to this essay. Earlier the archives of the parish church of Saint-Martin, of E-mail address: [email protected] (W.C. Jordan). Francis Molard, ‘Du culte de saint Louis dans le de´partement de l’Yonne’, Annuaire statistique du de´partement de l’Yonne, 53 (1889), section 3, 168–77. 1
0304-4181/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2004.06.001
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which these documents formed a part, as well as other records of the bourg of SaintFlorentin were removed to a more secure and professional repository. But Molard discovered that the two documents of interest here were accidentally left behind at the town hall to languish in obscurity.2 Despite his competent paraphrase of their interesting content and the excellent job of editing, they continued to languish after 1889, largely because Molard published them in the Annuaire statistique du de´partement de l’Yonne, the local administrative journal that recorded yearly data on regional mortality and disease; employment and income; migration and population; crime and punishment; education; agricultural and industrial production; ordinances and legislation; excavations; natural disasters; road, bridge, railroad and canal building and upkeep; etc., etc., etc. The idea for such departmental journals went back to the Revolution and the Enlightenment passion for collecting statistical information. Every one of the yearly issues of Yonne’s journal also had a short section, the third, with its own separate pagination, devoted to ‘historical’ research. Often enough the articles in this diminutive section of the Annuaire are the delightfully quaint antiquarian productions of local retirees, men almost universally, who returned from bureaucratic or military careers elsewhere in France or in the colonies to their beloved home towns to live out their remaining days. Having undertaken, often with inadequate training, to keep intellectually active by perusing the medieval and early modern documents relevant to their towns or to important local families, they fashioned sometimes quite imaginative histories. Typically, these were read at local history association meetings and then published, unless they were simply too embarrassing, in local journals like the Annuaire. Occasionally, though far less often, the articles in Yonne’s Annuaire constitute firstrate scholarship, especially those authored by Molard or by Mathieu-Maximilien Quantin, each an able director of the departmental archives. But unless the articles were later reprinted or referred to in these authors’ better distributed publications, it is fair to say that they have remained entombed in the Annuaire. The earlier document of Molard’s pair, a vidimus or authentic copy dated Monday after the Feast of All Saints (5 November) 1319, retranscribes an original grant made on Thursday after the Feast of Mary Magdalen (28 July) 1317. According to the record, in 1317 Archbishop Guillaume of Sens approved Jean le Voyer’s endowment for the saying of three masses per week at an altar dedicated to the most blessed Saint Stephen Protomartyr and the most glorious Saint Louis Confessor, the late king of France (‘in honore sanctissimi prothomartiris Stephani et gloriosissimi confessoris Ludovici, quondam franchorum regis’) in the parish church of Saint-Martin of Saint-Florentin. Jean, a burgher of Saint-Florentin, was a discerning man (discretus), full of foresight (providus) in offering a gift to the church for his, his parents and his other ancestors’ souls. The archbishop noted that Jean appeared before him personally and made an oral declaration of his intent (‘viva voce nobis exposuit’). The burgher described in detail the properties from which the requisite money to support the services was to 2
Molard, ‘Du culte de saint Louis’, 168.
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come. These included shares he owned in three vineyards, one of which abutted the leper house of Saint-Florentin. The combined size of these properties came to approximately two arpents, about two acres or less than a hectare in modern surface measures. Jean also declared his gift of twenty shillings tournois of annual rent which he drew from four arpents of meadowland he possessed. Sixty more shillings were to go the church yearly, three gifts of twenty shillings each, drawn from Jean’s own properties, from those of a kinsman, Gilles (or Little Gilles, Giletus) le Voyer, and from two brothers, Jean and Colin Augustin, kinsmen too, it appears, through their mother (‘occasione sue matris’). Judging from prices recoverable for other vineyards in the region, the total value of this endowment was approximately one hundred shillings or five pounds tournois, the ordinary money of account in France.3 This was a sufficient sum to pay a day’s wages for fully one hundred troops, at the rank of sergeant, in the royal army of the time or to pay the wages of a single bowman for one hundred and fifty days of service.4 Another comparison might be helpful. One hundred shillings was a sum sixteen times greater than the average amount of alms, five shillings parisis (six shillings and three pence tournois), offered to contemporary pilgrims who came to receive the ‘king’s touch’ for the scrofula they were suffering.5 Although Jean le Voyer’s endowment would pale before those that nobles or men close to the king, and who made salaries of hundreds of pounds per year, were capable of making, it stood out in a region where typical non-aristocratic endowments of anniversary masses might be no more than two shillings and where a man, woman or family could buy their freedom from serfdom for an annual levy of a few shillings.6 The burgher was nothing if not a stickler for detail. He specified the days and times on which the priests were to celebrate the masses, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. He specified what masses they would celebrate and on what days. Monday mornings he earmarked for the mass of the Trinity or the Angels. Wednesday mornings were for the mass of the Holy Spirit or the Virgin Mary. Friday mornings were reserved for the mass of the Holy Cross or the Dead. Nor were the priests to cease celebrating the masses they ordinarily celebrated on these days. The masses Jean endowed were, in modern parlance, ‘add-ons’. And he did 3
For a representative selection of values of vineyards in the region, see William Jordan, From servitude to freedom: manumission in the Se´nonais in the thirteenth century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 74–7. 4 John Henneman, Royal taxation in fourteenth century France: the development of war financing, 1322– 1356 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 21 (sergeants’ wages); Comptes royaux, ed. Robert Fawtier, 3 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1953–1956), I, no. 5636 (wages for an arcuarius of eight pence per day). 5 Robert Fawtier, ‘Un compte de menues de´penses de l’hoˆtel du roi Philippe VI le Valois pour le premier semestre de l’anne´e 1337’, Bulletin philologique et historique, 1928–1929 (1931), 7–40 (occasionally pilgrims from greater distances received twice this sum, 10 shillings; even so, Jean’s endowment exceeded each of these by a factor of 10). 6 On these figures, cf. Joseph Strayer, The reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 112 (high royal officials), and Jordan, From servitude to freedom, 67, 78 (endowments for anniversary masses in the region of Saint-Florentin and levies for manumission in the same region).
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not stop there. The endowment was intended to honour the souls of his departed ancestors and possible future benefactors to the altar; so, Jean directed that at each and every celebration some special notice be taken to remember the departed (‘et in qualibet missa fieret specialis memoria de defunctis’). He instructed the priests to delay for one day saying one of his prescribed masses if a body was in the church awaiting burial (‘esset in dicta ecclesia corpus aliquod inhumandum’). To assure and guarantee the permanence of the gift, Jean le Voyer promised to arrange for compliance with all the laws and ordinances governing gifts to the church, that is, gifts into the dead hand, amortizations. In other words, he was agreeing to assume any and all costs incurred in guarding against the revocation of the gift, the seizure of the property, or the imposition of punitive fines, the last being a fairly frequent consequence for improperly or incompletely obtaining licence to make gifts of real property or leases (chattels real) to the church. Fear of improper amortizations and their consequences was a perennial characteristic among donors, who attributed the rules governing these endowments to Louis IX, although many kings contributed to the body of legislation governing grants to the church.7 The closing clauses of the document make up the conventional promises of all concerned—Jean, the principal donor, other parties whose property rights were affected, and the parish priest accepting the gift on the church’s behalf—not to challenge the validity of the endowment or any element of it in the future. Besides its substantial size by regional standards, there is another revealing quality of this grant. It is well documented that Louis IX believed or said that he believed that crusaders who fell in the holy wars were martyrs.8 How he would have characterised the deaths of those who succumbed to disease, as he himself did during the siege of Tunis in 1270, is unknown. For a few thinkers, of course, martyrdom was limited to the passive acceptance of death at an enemy’s hands even when force might legitimately be employed to prevent it. Martyrdom was not constituted by soldierly death, violently in battle or peacefully, as, for example, while waiting out or maintaining a siege. Or, as Jonathan Riley-Smith has put it, ‘the Church could never be completely at ease with [crusaders as martyrs] and their names never appeared in calendars of saints because of their [supposed] martyrdom alone’.9 But for a very long time, a broader definition of martyrdom, which did extend the category to warriors who met their end in just and holy wars, prevailed in Christendom, and ‘propaganda often described crusaders who died on campaign 7 On the attribution of the primary legislation to Louis IX in contemporary regional documents (dated 1316), see Inventaire-Sommaire des Archives De´partementales ante´rieurs a` 1790: Yonne, archives eccle´siastiques, se´rie G, ed. Mathieu-Maximilien Quantin (Auxerre: Albert Gallot, 1873), 389 G 2236, ‘qu’il ne povoient tenir sans nostre consentement pour les ordonnancs dou saint Roy Loys’. For another king’s contributions to the legislation, however, see Charles-Victor Langlois, Re`gne de Philippe III le Hardi (Paris: Hachette, 1887), app. 2, ‘pie`ces justificatives’, nos. 5–6. 8 Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 883. 9 Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘The state of mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300’, The Oxford illustrated history of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79.
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as martyrs’.10 The canonisation of Louis IX, a king whose claim to sanctity was backed by the most powerful family and realm in Europe, a religious zealot, an obedient and loyal son of mother church, and a militant pilgrim, who died on his last campaign, provided the perfect opportunity for churchmen to give official sanction to this popular view of, and propaganda for, crusader martyrdom. Nevertheless, the church chose to admit the king not to the ranks of the martyrs but to those of the confessors, believers who died especially earnest in the faith, believers who were spiritually prepared to die for the faith, but who did not die in the proper circumstances so as to constitute their deaths as martyrdoms. The most poignant expression of the disappointment this decision precipitated in royal circles is Jean de Joinville’s famous lament. I cannot but think that it was an injustice to him not to include him in the roll of the martyrs, when you consider the great hardships he suffered as a pilgrim and Crusader during the six years that I served with him; in particular because it was even to the Cross that he followed Our Lord—for if God died on the cross, so did St Louis; for when he died at Tunis it was the Cross of the Crusade that he bore.11 It does not seem implausible that Jean le Voyer’s endowment reflects a rather more widespread displeasure with the church’s action, in that he chose to link his honouring of Louis IX with that of the archetype of Christian martyrs, the deacon Stephen, stoned to death for defending the messiahship of Jesus (Acts 6.9–7.60). No other reason for this association springs to mind, as it might, if, say, the donor’s name was the French form of Stephen, Etienne, or if explicit references were made to one or more of his ancestors with that name. This is by no means conclusive proof that the donor intended the association of Louis IX and Stephen the Protomartyr as a critical comment on the church’s reluctance to canonise the saint as a martyr, but it should encourage scholars to re-examine carefully other documents generated from outside the royal circle for popular responses to the canonisation. The word ‘popular’, used in the preceding sentence, raises a more general issue. There is considerable evidence that many individuals greeted the possibility and reality of Louis IX’s canonisation with real delight. A clever scholar of the time, also called Louis, thought his name took on special significance from the king’s blessedness and in a pleasant little jeu d’esprit interpreted the letters that made up his name in Latin, LVDOVICVS, as a litany of the royal saint’s virtues, which, it is implied somewhat immodestly, he himself shared. 10
James Brundage, Medieval canon law and the Crusader (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 21–3; Colin Morris, ‘Martyrs on the field of battle before and during the First Crusade’, Studies in Church History, 30 (1993), 93–104. The quotation is from Riley-Smith, ‘State of mind’, 79. 11 I am quoting the very literal translation of Rene´ Hague; Jean de Joinville, The life of St Louis (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), chap. 1.
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Laude, Virens, Deicus, Opifex, Vitiis, Inimicus, Constans, Veridicus, Sapiens, notat haec Ludovicus.12 ‘Abloom with praise, God’s labourer, foe of vices, man of constancy, speaker of truth, a sage—Ludovicus denotes all these’. In its own way, the case of Jean le Voyer contributes to our recognition of the extent of sentiments like these, which is to say, of the public’s response to the king’s canonisation. But what class of people, what part of the public, is Jean most likely to be representative of, if he is representative at all? His original endowment recorded in the vidimus of 1319 identifies his estate; Jean was a burgensis. This indicates both his formal legal status as a burgher of Saint-Florentin, with the local customary rights pertaining to citizenship, and probably, although not necessarily, the fact of his contemporary residence in the bourg of Saint-Florentin. But we know something more. Jean issued a vidimus, dated 1314, of the testament of one Marguerite of Saint-Florentin, the testament itself being dated 1299.13 This vidimus refers to Jean as guard of the seal of the pre´voˆte´ of Saint-Florentin. Pre´voˆte´s were subdivisions of the large administrative districts, bailliages, into which northern France was divided.14 Saint-Florentin was a pre´voˆte´ of the bailliage of Troyes, and its pre´voˆt came under the disciplinary jurisdiction of the bailli of Troyes.15 The guards of the seals were the chief clerical officials in the pre´voˆte´s.16 The business done in the pre´voˆte´s was extremely varied.17 Pre´voˆts, the crownappointed administrative heads of the districts, shared police authority in the towns and banlieux they administered with municipal officials whom the burghers chose.18 They held courts and served their superiors in the royal administration, the baillis, when the latter held their assize courts in their districts.19 The pre´voˆts 12
Histoire litte´raire de la France, 30 (1888), 598. Mathieu-Maximilien Quantin, Inventaire-Sommaire des Archives De´partementales ante´rieurs a` 1790: Yonne, archives eccle´siastiques, se´rie H, III, 2nd part (Auxerre: Albert Gallot, 1882), 334 H 1408. 14 William Jordan, Louis IX and the challenge of the Crusade: a study in rulership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 46–7, 161–2. 15 Auxerre, Archives De´partementales [AD] de l’Yonne, H 1444, various manuscripts refer to and exemplify this disciplinary jurisdiction. 16 Henri Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts royaux du XIe au XIVe sie`cle’, Nouvelle revue de droit franc¸ais et e´tranger, 27 (1903), 808–11. 17 Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 558–63. 18 Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 665–72. 19 Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 650–4. For specific references to the holding of the bailli of Troyes assize court on occasion in Saint-Florentin, see the MSS in Auxerre, AD: Yonne, H 1444. 13
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also saw to the expeditious collection of royal revenues, both public and private (from royal estates), although the public/private distinction is somewhat of an anachronism, and they sometimes distributed royal alms and paid the wages of lesser officials.20 It also fell to the pre´voˆts to register transfers of real property involving the amortization of land in order to guard against injury of the king’s rights and to protect other royal rights and interests.21 To keep records of official business of the sort just described, to provide a service whereby citizens could confidently and securely register their important private acts and transactions, like testaments and deeds of gift, under the official seals of the pre´voˆte´s, and to do other civil tasks requiring literacy and clerical experience, the pre´voˆts employed administrative adjuncts, keepers of the seal.22 If the office carried considerable responsibility, it also conferred considerable prestige. Most important from our point of view is the fact that Jean le Voyer was a royal employee, no ‘ordinary’ citizen, but one whose livelihood depended on the crown. It should not be surprising that such a man might feel an obligation to and affinity for the memory of Saint Louis, either because of pride in or out of guilt for the manner in which he executed his office, for the king was idealised for imposing high standards on officials in the royal administration. As an angry Pope John XXII put it in a missive to King Philip V the Tall (1316– 1322) at just about this time: it behoved the ruler of France to assure that his officials behaved honestly and decently, in this case towards ecclesiastics, just as his ancestor Louis IX had worked so hard to assure.23 If Jean le Voyer’s enthusiasm for the royal cult can be called popular, it can be done so only in a very particular way. It illuminates one thin slice of popular responses to the cult; yet, this at least adds to our overall picture, just as clever Louis the scholar’s jeu d’esprit does. This picture has recently been enriched further through the work of Sharon Farmer on the social status of recipients of the miracles attributed to the king.24 What Farmer has shown is that there is a spatial differentiation in the miracles which neatly maps onto the social cleavages among the recipients of the miracles. Farmer focuses on the cult’s heartland, Paris/Saint-Denis.25 She notes that the
20
Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 560–2. For examples of this sort of activity in pre´voˆte´s in the general region, see William Jordan, Unceasing strife unending fear: Jacques de The´rines and the freedom of the church in the age of the last Capetians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 60–61. 22 I do not mean to imply that the keepers of the seal were the only officials who carried out these sorts of tasks, especially the registering of private transactions, in Saint-Florentin. The town (pre´voˆte´, castellany) also had a notariate in this period; Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. Martin Bouquet, et al., 24 vols (Paris: V. Palme´, 1840–1904), XXIV, 167. 23 Lettres secre`tes et curiales du Pape Jean XXII (1316–1334), relatives a` la France, I, ed. Auguste Coulon (Paris: Fontemoing, 1913), cols. 868–70 no. 1015. 24 Sharon Farmer, Surviving poverty in medieval Paris: gender, ideology, and the daily lives of the poor (Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 2002). 25 For background and context of the cult at Saint-Denis, see Elizabeth Brown, ‘The chapels and cult of Saint Louis at Saint-Denis’, Mediaevalia, 10 (1984), 279–331. 21
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miracles attributed to the king, those which occurred away from the tomb, tended to be ones involving high status recipients, people close to the king in his lifetime or who lived and worked in courtly and aristocratic circles. On the contrary, the miracle stories that describe the recipients as making pilgrimages to the king’s tomb at Saint-Denis usually concern lower class and destitute supplicants. Put starkly, though with a bit of exaggeration, the saint had to visit the elite; the poor had to visit the saint.26 The environs of the tomb at Saint-Denis constituted the ‘popular’ cult site, never fully appreciated as such by historians until Farmer’s work. Within and outside the Paris/Saint-Denis cult centre, there were a few other shrines, like the Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cite´, the Franciscan nunnery of Longchamp founded by Louis IX’s sister on the outskirts of the capital, and the slightly more distant sanctuary to the northwest at Poissy, where the king was baptised and which Philip the Fair (1285–1314) endowed in his honour.27 It has always been assumed that these other shrines, whether we are talking about miracles or not, were sites of aristocratic rather than non-aristocratic devotion. Whether this assumption will stand the test of future research remains to be seen. What the documents discussed in the present essay suggest, however, is that at least for some groups, if Jean le Voyer represents a type of enthusiast, the cult had a wider appeal than heretofore stressed. Louis IX never became a wildly popular saint, of course, but it now seems defensible to argue that devotees of his cult, at least in the first few decades after his death and in both the Parisian heartland and the provinces, were far more diverse than once thought and were certainly not narrowly limited to the aristocracy and the royal court. Within three years of his original endowment Jean augmented his gift. He was unhappy or unsatisfied with what the clergy of the church of Saint-Martin were delivering or intended to deliver for his original gift. Instead of low masses (submissa voce) without chanting, he desired high masses (alta voce).28 Undoubtedly, other accoutrements were implied in the latter phrase as well—additional candles, bell ringing, perhaps pittances or monetary contributions to the celebrants
26
Farmer, Surviving poverty, 52. On these and other cult sites, see Colette Beaune, La naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 159–64; Elizabeth Hallam, ‘Philip the Fair and the cult of Saint Louis’, Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), 205–8; Pierre Morel, ‘Le culte de saint Louis’, Itine´raires, no. 147 (November 1970), 130–2 (I wish to extend my warm gratitude to Professor Paul Freedman of Yale University who secured a copy of this article for me). As to the cult at Longchamp, there is useful evidence of images, lives and artifacts associated with the king now published in, Ein Franziskanerinnenkloster in 15. Jahrhundert: Edition und Analyse von Besitzinventaren aus der Abtei Longchamp, ed. Gertrud Mlynarczyk (Bonn: Ludwig Ro¨hrscheid Verlag, 1987), 290, 294, 298, 310, 329, 333. See also the list and description of Cistercian devotions to Saint Louis assembled by Anselme Dimier, Saint Louis et Cıˆteaux (Paris: Letouzey et Ane´, 1954), 135–40. 28 On the distinctions between high and low mass in the Middle Ages, see Joseph Jungmann, The mass of the Roman rite: its origin and development, trans. Francis Brunner, rev. Charles Riepe (New York and elsewhere: Benziger Brothers, 1959), 80, 165. 27
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and deacons for meals as well as donations to the poor.29 To this end Jean supplemented the endowment with additional revenues. The new gift included income from three shares of a house he possessed behind the public market and from a stall or booth he had rights to in the market itself. The house may have doubled as a storage facility, (ware)house, but it also had residential quarters.30 Jean permitted Jeanette (Johanetta), his serving woman, to occupy the house, and he stipulated that she could live in it after his death as long as she desired to do so and if she paid twelve pence (one shilling) annually on the anniversary of his death to Saint-Martin’s. He required her to keep the house in fairly good repair, specifying the roof, walls and the major timbering (‘tenebitur. . . in bono statu tenere de coopertura, parietibus et grosso merrano’). Also, while occupying the tenement, she was obliged to pay the crown what was due from the property, twenty shillings and six pence. The six pence constituted a quit rent, the ‘symbolic’ token of the king’s overlordship.31 The rather more substantial sum of twenty shillings reflected, I believe, the commercial value of the property as a warehouse. Jean recognised that Jeanette might someday want to give up the property, and he took care to stipulate that if she did give it up, it would go to the church of Saint-Martin, and that all her obligations to keep the house in repair ceased upon her moving out (‘nec amplius tenebitur dicta Johanneta ad reparacionem dicte domus’). Because this stipulation involved the conveyance of the property into the dead hand of the church, he again pledged, as he had in his original grant, to obtain and pay for the amortization (‘ipse dictam domum procurabit admortizari suis propriis custibus et expensis’). With his experience as keeper of the seal of the pre´voˆte´ and thus as the registrar of similar conveyances, he was quite aware of the importance of fulfilling this pledge. The new charter closed with the usual formulas providing for the perpetual enforcement of the endowment’s provisions by all concerned. There were thousands upon thousands of parish churches like Saint-Martin’s in northern France. No precise figure is recoverable, partly because of the inadequacy of record evidence, but also partly because ‘northern France’ is itself a vague concept and depends on the arbitrary drawing of a line. But if one does draw an imaginary line from the southern marches of Poitou to the southern marches of
29 For the emergence of the anniversary mass as the standard gift to ecclesiastical institutions, see Richard Keyser, ‘La transformation de l’e´change des dons pieux: Montier-la-Celle, Champagne, 1100–1350’, Revue historique, no. 628 (October 2003), 793–816. For typical stipulations by donors in this region, including payments for clergy, charity and the ringing of bells, see Le Livre des reliques de l’abbaye de Saint-Pierre-leVif de Sens par Geoffroy de Courlon, ed. Gustave Julliot and Maurice Prou (Sens: C. Duchemin, 1887), 167, 188–9, 194, 208, etc. On the various meanings of pittance in records of this sort (though from England), see David Postles, ‘Pittances and pittancers’, Thirteenth-Century England, 9 (2003), 175–86. 30 On such storage facilities, usually referred to merely as domus, see Jordan, Unceasing strife unending fear, 68. 31 Cf. Larry Sullivan, ‘The exploitation of land in medieval Paris: the abbey of Sainte-Genevie`ve’, Mediaevalia, 10 (1984), 82.
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Burgundy as a boundary limit, with everything north of the line as northern France, this region roughly constitutes 100,000 square miles (about 260,000 square kilometres). England, a kingdom half as large, but one with richer surviving ecclesiastical records had 9,000 parishes.32 If northern France, as I have defined it, twice as large as England, had twice as many parishes and, therefore, twice as many parish churches, 18,000, it would not be surprising. Additional evidence suggests that this is not a wild guess or irrational estimate. One scholarly study posits that all of France, defined by its modern boundaries, had slightly more than 38,000 titular or parish churches.33 Our arbitrary unit, northern France, about 40% of the surface area of the modern country and probably of the total population in the high Middle Ages, would then possess about 15,000 parishes. A good regional count has also been done in the case of medieval Normandy, or rather the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, one of the six geographically gigantic ecclesiastical provinces or archdioceses in northern France (Reims, Sens, Tours, and the huge northern extents of Bourges and Lyons). Medieval Normandy counted over 2,200 parishes.34 If the other five provinces in the north had similar numbers, it would mean that we are talking about a total number of parishes somewhat exceeding 13,000. The point is not to insist on either the high (18,000), the middle (15,000), or the low (13,000) figure. After all, medieval French administrators had no consensus on the subject.35 But we must nevertheless recognise that the kind of records that survive fortuitously for the endowment of the altar to Saint Louis Confessor and Saint Stephen Protomartyr at the parish church of Saint-Martin in the bourg of Saint-Florentin, are minuscule in number compared to what must once have existed. This is a sobering reminder of how little we know and perhaps can know about orthodox religious practice in medieval France. (Thanks to the congeries of investigations known collectively as the Inquisition, we may have far more intimate knowledge and simply far more knowledge about the lived religion of heretical minorities in some thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century regions than of the vastly larger orthodox majority.) Three times a week, every single week, every year, for centuries presumably, the parish priests and deacons at Saint-Martin sang high masses and read lessons in honour of Louis IX in the presence of devout parishioners. By doing so, they contributed to keeping alive vestigial memories of the saint-king’s life, work and miracles in provincial France, long before Jean de Joinville’s History of Saint Louis became a widely distributed, let alone a school, text
32
Gervase Rosser, ‘Sanctuary and social negotiation in medieval England’, The cloister and the world: essays in medieval history in honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 70. 33 Morel, ‘Culte de Saint Louis’, 128. 34 More precisely, 2232; Damien Jeanne, ‘Les le´preux et les le´proseries en Normandie moyenne et occidentale au moyen aˆge: orientations de recherches’, Cahiers Le´opold Delisle, 46 (1997), 19. 35 Cf. David Potter, ‘Introduction’, France in the later Middle Ages 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3: ‘there were many current myths about the number of parishes in the kingdom’.
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and the principal vehicle for disseminating knowledge about the king.36 To the extent that the royal cult achieved any popularity at all in the later Middle Ages, it was largely because of endowments like that of the burgher Jean le Voyer and because of unknown numbers of similar ones in the rural and small town parishes of medieval France.
Appendix From: Francis Molard, ‘Du culte de saint Louis dans le de´partement de l’Yonne’, Annuaire statistique du de´partement de l’Yonne, 53 (1889), section 3, 168– 77, reprinted here with errors corrected and modernisations suppressed. I Universis presentes litteras inspecturis: officialis curie Briennonis, Senonensis dyocesis, salutem in domino: Noverint universi quod in nostra presencia, personaliter constitutus, vir venerabilis et discretus, dominus Nicholaus de Charniaco, rector ecclesie parrochialis de Sancto Florentino, senonensis dyocesis, confessus fuit bona et hereditagia que discretus vir et providus vir dictus Li Voyers de Sancto Florentino, Burgensis, devotissime, et in augmentacionem cultus divini ampliacionemque bonorum presbiteralium ecclesie parrochialis predicte, in honore sanctissimi prothomartiris Stephani et gloriosissimi confessoris Ludovici, quondam franchorum regis, ad fondacionem et perpetuam dotacionem cuiusdam altaris in ecclesia sua beati Martini predicti, pro tribus missis in dicto altari, qualibet ebdomada a dicto curato, vel eius capellano, et successoribus, perpetuo, domino concedente, celebrandis, donavit, concessit et perpetuo quittavit, prout hec dicta bona et hereditagia et plura alia, in litteris reverendi in Christo patris ac Domini, domini Guillelmi, divina providencia archiepiscopi senonensis, super fundacione et dotacione dicti altaris confectis, plenius continetur. Et quorum litterarum tenor talis est: Universis presentes litteras inspecturis, Guillelmus, misericordia divina, archiepiscopus Senonensis, eternam in Domino salutem. Gaudet omnis chorus celestium, et rex precipue super omnes altissimus, celum, terramque regens, et cuncta prospiciens, cuius ineffabile gaudium magnificat quando christi regis, eiusdem filii, ad suam sedentis dexteram, precioso sanguine redemptorum fidelium, crescit in tantum devotio, quod iidem, ut leti, perpetuis pociantur premiis, ad divine magestatis obsequium aspirantes, propriis eorum bonis terrenis se gratanter exuunt et denudant, ac pro locis eccle36 Joinville’s work was not well-distributed until its sixteenth-century publication, and it became a standard school text only in the nineteenth century. From the moment of its publication it was pillaged by biographers and latter-day apologists in a cascading succession of epic poems, scholarly studies, plays, novels, and political propaganda; see William Jordan, ‘Saint Louis in French epic and drama’, Studies in Medievalism, 8 (1996), 174–94 (reprinted in Ideology and royal power in medieval France: Kingship, Crusades and the Jews [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2001], essay 6); and Adam Knobler, ‘Saint Louis and French political culture’, Studies in Medievalism, 8 (1996), 156–73.
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siaticis fundandis noviter, et dotandis, ad divini cultus augmentum, voluntarie conferunt, dedicant et convertant. Nuper siquidem ad nostram accedens presenciam, dilectus in Christo filius, Johannes dictur Li Voyers de Sancto Florentino, nostre dyocesis, viva voce nobis exposuit, quod pro sui et parentum suorum, atque predecessorum animarum salute, quoddam altare, in ecclesia beati Martini de Sancto Florentino, in honore sanctissimi prothomartiris Stephani et gloriosissimi confessoris, Sancti Ludovici, quondam regis Francorum, constituere, et suis propriis rebus et facultatibus, dotare, cupiebat, ad augmentationem cultus divini, et ampliacionem bonorum presbiteralium, si ad hec nostrum impertiri dignaremur beneplacitum, pariter et assensum, offerens se daturum ad opus ipsius altaris, pro divino officio de cetero peragendo, res et bona que sequuntur, videlicet: unam peciam vinee, sitam es bayches, contiguam leprosis, ex una parte, et vinee curati dicti loci ex altera; item, unam aliam peciam vinee, sitam subtus Sanctum Martinum una cum sauceyo, contiguam Odino Grocier, ex una parte, et vinee que fuit Roberti Bertholoti, ex altera; item, unam peciam alteram vinee, sitam apud fontem aus moinnes, contiguam monachis, ex una parte, et vinee vicecomitis de Sancto-Florentino, ex altera. Que omnes vinearum pecie continent circa dua arpenta; item, vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus super quatuor arpentis pratorum, que fuerunt defuncte Odine de Bait, sitorum in finagio Sancti Florentini, in loco qui dicitur es roiches; item vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus quos Johannes dictus Li Voyers debet assedere super omnibus bonis suis; item vinginti solidos alios annui redditus, quos Giletus Li Voyers debet assedere super omnibus bonis suis; item vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus quos Johannes Augustini et Colinus eius frater, debent assedere super omnibus bonis suis, occasione sue matris, de quibus redditibus assedendis, obligaverunt se, et omnia bona sua, prout in litteris aliis, inde confectis, plenius continetur; petens humiliter et requirens, ut ad ipsum altare, forent per curatum dicte ville, seu eius vicarium, tres misse, singulis ebdomadis, celebrate, una cum missis aliis, ad quas dictus curatus, ex sue cure debito, cothidie tenetur, pro predicto Johanne, et eius parentibus, antecessoribus, atque benefactoribus dicti altaris, videlicet quolibet die lune, in mane, una de trinitate, vel de angelis; die mercurii, in mane, de sancto spiritu, seu de Virgine Maria; die veneris, in mane, de sancta cruce, sive de defunctis; et in qualibet missa fieret specialis memoria de defunctis. Et si forte contingeret, quod dictis diebus, esset in dicta ecclesia corpus aliquod inhumandum, propter quod ipsa die, dictus curatus, missam predictam reddere non voleret in altari predicto, sibi sufficeret, si missam predictam, die crastina celebraret, seu faceret celebrari. Nos itaque, qui prout nostro incombit officio pastorali, ex intimis utilitatem et commodum universarum nostre dyocesis ecclesiarum et singularum, affetamus, habita super premissis deliberatione diligenti, accersito nicholominus Nicholao curato ecclesie sancti Martini prescripte, recepto prius ab eadem corporaliter juramento, compertoque per eum in hoc, utilitatem predicte ecclesie evidencius subiacere; attentaque quod sit pia et salubris cogitatio pro defunctis exorare, prefati Johannis supplicationem exaudivimus, et eam duximus ad effectum, atque ex ipsius curati voluntate et
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beneplacito, predictam sancti Martini ecclesiam, oneravimus de predictis tribus missis ebdomada qualibet de cetera celebrandis, in altari predicto. Et predictus Johannes omnes res hereditarias superius nominatas et contentas, cum aliis redditibus suprascriptis, in nostra personali presencia constitutus, pro dicta altari fundando et dotando, contulit, concessit et donavit ecclesie Sancti Martini superius nominate, et eas admortuare promisit, suis propriis sumptibus et expensis, sub suorum, omni obligacione bonorum, promittens insuper bona fide quod omnes res superius nominatas et ecclesie predicte concessas, garantizabit et defendet, ipsi ecclesie erga omnes, et quod contra concessionem, donationem predictas, per se vel per alium non veniet quomodolibet in futurum, renuncians quoad hec, omnibus exceptionibus facti et juris canonici et civilis, doli mali, fraudis, erroris, circonvencionis et lesionis quarumlibet, et generaliter et specialiter omnibus exceptionibus que contra predictas litteras possent obici in posterum, vel opponi. Et dictus curatus promisit similiter bona fide se decetero teneri efficaciter obligatum, et ecclesiam suam predictam ad prefatas, tres missas, per se aut alium, celebrandas qualibet ebdomada in altari predicto, percipiendo omnes et singulas res superius nominatas, se et ecclesiam suam, ad hec nostro primitus interveniente consensu, specialiter obligando, et his omnibus quorum interest, tenore presencium intimamus. In cuius rei testimonium, sigillum nostrum litteris presentibus, duximus apponendum. Datum et actum apud sanctum Florentinum, anno domini millesimo trecentesimo decimo septima, die Jovis post festum sancte Marie Magdalene. Hec dictus vero dominus Nicholaus, se, ut curatus dicte parochialis ecclesie, ac suo proprio et dicte ecclesie sue nomine, et pro ipso recognovit recepuisse et habuisse, et penes ipsum et ecclesiam suam predictam, ob causam predictam appropriasse, una cum duobus iornatis terre arabilis sitis in finagio de Germignyaco, contiguis dicti Beuve de porta, ex una parte, et Symonis Margeri ex altera, quos Johannes Augustini, et Colinus, eius frater, cesserant, siue assederant dicto curato, ad opus fundationis dicti altaris, ex legato deffuncte matris ipsorum, que ad opus fundacionis dicti altaris, vinginti solidos turonensium, quolibet anno imperpetuum legaverat, prout in litteris cessionis dictorum jornatorum terre a dictis fratribus dicto curato super his factis, plenius continetur; quas litteras idem curatus recognovit a dictis fratribus recepisse et penes se habere, seque de predictis bonis et hereditagiis tenuit integre pro pagato et contento, hoc salvo ipsis curato quod dictus Johannes Li Voyers debet assedere super omnibus bonis suis vinginti solidos annui redditus, et Gilo Vaerii similiter vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus super omnibus bonis suis, prout in dictis litteris reverendi patris domini archiepiscopi Senonensis, plenius continetur; confessus fuit eciam dictus curatus, se et successores suos imperpetuum teneri, et esse obligatos ad dictas tres missas, perpetuo, tribus diebus in ebdomada, ad dictum altare, secundum quod in litteris domini archiepiscopi Senonensis est expressum, celebrandas, et cum nota, et pro certa causa, licet in dictis litteris domini Senonensis, non habeatur expressum quod dicte tres misse debeant celebrari, et ad eas cum nota celebrandas, forma et modo in dictis litteris reverendi patris, domini archiepiscopi Senonensis, declaratis, se et successores suos, coram nobis specialiter obligavit, et cel-
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ebraturum, per se, vel per alium, sub obligacione bonorum predictorum, aliorumque et ceterorum, ob hec dicto altari legatorum et legandorum, et al.orum bonorum suorum et ecclesie sue, corporali juramenta prestito, imperpetuum promisit, et renunciavit in hoc facto, omnibus exceptionibus, deceptionibus, lesio- nibus, et fraudi juris et facti, que contra premissa, vel aliqua premissorum possentin futurum obici, sive dici, etc. In quorum rerum testimonium, sigillum curie Briennonis, presentibus litteris, duximus apponendum. Actum et datum, anno domini millesimo trecentesimo decimo nono, die lune post festum omnium sanctorum.—Per Jo. Bonis collacio fit.—Per Behem collacio facta est. II Datum per copiam sub sigillo decani christianitatis sancti Florentini Senonensis dyocesis. Omnibus presentes litteras inspecturis, officialis curie Briennonis, Senonensis dyocesis, salutem in domino: Noverint universi quod coram speciali mandato nostro, domino drocone, presbitero, curato ecclesie de Bleigniaco, cui quantum ad hoc, et maiora fidem plenariam adhibeamus, propter hoc personaliter constitutus, Johannes Vaerii de Sancto Florentino, cupiens sue anime et parentum suorum providere saluti, considerans et actendens, quod qui in benedictionibus seminat, de benedictionibus metet, ad augmentum cultus divini, nec non ad laudem et gloriam nostri Salvatoris, qui sibi famulantibus, remunerat centupliciter, et largitur sponte et provide, donavit, legavit et quitavit ex nunc altari in honore sacratissimi prothomartyris Stephani et beatissimi Ludovici confessoris, in ecclesia Sancti Martini de Sancto Florentino predicto, fundati et edificati, tres partes cuiusdem domus site ante halam de Sancto Florentino predicto, una cum stallo et pertinenciis dicte domus, contigue domibus Bononis de porta ex utraque parte, absque vinginti solidis turonensium annui redditus quos debet dicto altari super aliis bonis suis signare et assignare pro eo. . ., videlicet quod curatus dicti loci qui ex nunc dicto altari deservit et deserviri facit, celebrari faciet tres missas, jamque ad dictum altare institutas et fundatas, cum nota, alta voce, ut ibidem dominus maiori devocione et affectuosissima a suis fidelibus honoretur; quas tres missas dictus curatus, aut ibidem pro ipso deservientibus celebrare submissa voce antea tenebantur; ita tamen quod Johanneta ancilla ipsius Johannis dictas tres partes dicte domus, tenebit quamdiu vivet, si eidem Johannete placuerit, mediantibus duodecim denariis turonensium ab eadem Johaneta eidem curato, aut pro ipso deservientibus, reddendis et solvendis quolibet anno, die anniversaria obitus ipsius Johannis: quas tres partes dicte domus tenebitur substentare et in bono statu tenere de coopertura, parietibus et grosso merrano, quamdiu eam tenuerit, quando et quociens fuerit opportunum. Tenebitur eciam dicta Johanneta quamdiu dictam dominum tenuerit, vinginti solidos turonensium cum sex denariis censualibus, domino regi, quolibet anno debitos ac eciam situatos. Si vero dicta Johanneta dictam domum tenere noluerit, idem Johannes voluit dicto curato et eius. . . successoribus ex tunc penitus remanere, nee amplius tenebitur dicta Johanneta ad reparacionem dicte domus, nec eandem facere substentari. Preterea promisit idem Johannes sub
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ypotheca omnium bonorum suorum mobilium et immobilium, quod ipse dictam domum procurabit admortizari suis propriis custibus et expensis. Ad que omnia et singula premissa, dominus Nicholaus de Charniaco, curatus ecclesie Sancti Martini de Sancto Florentino predicto, coram dicto mandato nostro personnaliter constitutus, nomine ecclesie sue predicte, consensit et eciam obligavit, promittens bona fide suprascripta, nomine quo supra inviolabiliter observare, et in contrarium non venire. Pro premissis vero complendis et firmiter observandis, obligavit dictus Johannes omnia bona sua mobilia et immobilia presencia et futura, ubicumque sunt et poterunt invenire, promittens bona fide, quod contra predicta donum et legatum, per se, vel per alium de cetero non veniret in futurum. Renunciavit insuper dictus Johannes quantum ad hec, omnibus exceptionibus facti et juris canonici et civilis, doli mali, erroris, lesionis, et generaliter nec non specialiter omnibus aliis exceptionibus que contra presentes litteras possunt obici, sive dici. In cuius rei testimonium, sigillum nostrum ad relatum dicti presbiteri, presentibus litteris duximus apponendum. Datum die mercurii post festum beate Marie Magdalene, anno domini millesimo trecentesimo vicesimo.— [Signed] G. Kordon [with the authentication] ita est. William Chester Jordan is Professor of History at Princeton University and is the author of Europe in the high Middle Ages (2001) in the Penguin series on the history of Europe and of the forthcoming, Unceasing strife, unending fear: Jacques de The´rines and the freedom of the church in the age of the last Capetians (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Honouring Saint Louis in a small town William Chester Jordan Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1017, USA
Abstract The cult of Saint Louis of France has traditionally been regarded as largely limited to royal shrines and aristocratic patronage, but two documents published here provide some tentative evidence that patronage may have been wider. Evidence of this sort may be rare not because non-aristocratic patronage was rare but because so few records of parish church endowments have survived. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Louis IX; Martyrdom; Saint-Florentin; Amortisation; Jean de Joinville
This is a study of the endowment in 1317 and 1320 of an altar dedicated to King Louis IX of France (r. 1226–1270) at the parish church of Saint-Martin in the bourg of Saint-Florentin, a small town not too far distant from the cathedral cities of Auxerre and Sens and precisely midway (155 km in each direction) between Paris and Dijon, the capital of the duchy of Burgundy. The man responsible for the endowment was Jean le Voyer, a burgher of Saint-Florentin. Three principal questions animate the study. What was provided for in the endowment? What do we know about this man, Jean, who made it? And what can be suggested about Louis’s cult outside of royal and aristocratic circles on the basis of it? But let us begin with a preliminary inquiry into the sources for answering these questions. The principal documents, two deeds of gift, form a remarkable pair, scarcely known to scholars now but summarised and edited with a few easily correctable errors in 1889 by Francis Molard, the archivist of the de´partement of the Yonne.1 They are reprinted, with the errors corrected and modernisations suppressed, as an appendix to this essay. Earlier the archives of the parish church of Saint-Martin, of E-mail address: [email protected] (W.C. Jordan). Francis Molard, ‘Du culte de saint Louis dans le de´partement de l’Yonne’, Annuaire statistique du de´partement de l’Yonne, 53 (1889), section 3, 168–77. 1
0304-4181/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2004.06.001
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which these documents formed a part, as well as other records of the bourg of SaintFlorentin were removed to a more secure and professional repository. But Molard discovered that the two documents of interest here were accidentally left behind at the town hall to languish in obscurity.2 Despite his competent paraphrase of their interesting content and the excellent job of editing, they continued to languish after 1889, largely because Molard published them in the Annuaire statistique du de´partement de l’Yonne, the local administrative journal that recorded yearly data on regional mortality and disease; employment and income; migration and population; crime and punishment; education; agricultural and industrial production; ordinances and legislation; excavations; natural disasters; road, bridge, railroad and canal building and upkeep; etc., etc., etc. The idea for such departmental journals went back to the Revolution and the Enlightenment passion for collecting statistical information. Every one of the yearly issues of Yonne’s journal also had a short section, the third, with its own separate pagination, devoted to ‘historical’ research. Often enough the articles in this diminutive section of the Annuaire are the delightfully quaint antiquarian productions of local retirees, men almost universally, who returned from bureaucratic or military careers elsewhere in France or in the colonies to their beloved home towns to live out their remaining days. Having undertaken, often with inadequate training, to keep intellectually active by perusing the medieval and early modern documents relevant to their towns or to important local families, they fashioned sometimes quite imaginative histories. Typically, these were read at local history association meetings and then published, unless they were simply too embarrassing, in local journals like the Annuaire. Occasionally, though far less often, the articles in Yonne’s Annuaire constitute firstrate scholarship, especially those authored by Molard or by Mathieu-Maximilien Quantin, each an able director of the departmental archives. But unless the articles were later reprinted or referred to in these authors’ better distributed publications, it is fair to say that they have remained entombed in the Annuaire. The earlier document of Molard’s pair, a vidimus or authentic copy dated Monday after the Feast of All Saints (5 November) 1319, retranscribes an original grant made on Thursday after the Feast of Mary Magdalen (28 July) 1317. According to the record, in 1317 Archbishop Guillaume of Sens approved Jean le Voyer’s endowment for the saying of three masses per week at an altar dedicated to the most blessed Saint Stephen Protomartyr and the most glorious Saint Louis Confessor, the late king of France (‘in honore sanctissimi prothomartiris Stephani et gloriosissimi confessoris Ludovici, quondam franchorum regis’) in the parish church of Saint-Martin of Saint-Florentin. Jean, a burgher of Saint-Florentin, was a discerning man (discretus), full of foresight (providus) in offering a gift to the church for his, his parents and his other ancestors’ souls. The archbishop noted that Jean appeared before him personally and made an oral declaration of his intent (‘viva voce nobis exposuit’). The burgher described in detail the properties from which the requisite money to support the services was to 2
Molard, ‘Du culte de saint Louis’, 168.
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come. These included shares he owned in three vineyards, one of which abutted the leper house of Saint-Florentin. The combined size of these properties came to approximately two arpents, about two acres or less than a hectare in modern surface measures. Jean also declared his gift of twenty shillings tournois of annual rent which he drew from four arpents of meadowland he possessed. Sixty more shillings were to go the church yearly, three gifts of twenty shillings each, drawn from Jean’s own properties, from those of a kinsman, Gilles (or Little Gilles, Giletus) le Voyer, and from two brothers, Jean and Colin Augustin, kinsmen too, it appears, through their mother (‘occasione sue matris’). Judging from prices recoverable for other vineyards in the region, the total value of this endowment was approximately one hundred shillings or five pounds tournois, the ordinary money of account in France.3 This was a sufficient sum to pay a day’s wages for fully one hundred troops, at the rank of sergeant, in the royal army of the time or to pay the wages of a single bowman for one hundred and fifty days of service.4 Another comparison might be helpful. One hundred shillings was a sum sixteen times greater than the average amount of alms, five shillings parisis (six shillings and three pence tournois), offered to contemporary pilgrims who came to receive the ‘king’s touch’ for the scrofula they were suffering.5 Although Jean le Voyer’s endowment would pale before those that nobles or men close to the king, and who made salaries of hundreds of pounds per year, were capable of making, it stood out in a region where typical non-aristocratic endowments of anniversary masses might be no more than two shillings and where a man, woman or family could buy their freedom from serfdom for an annual levy of a few shillings.6 The burgher was nothing if not a stickler for detail. He specified the days and times on which the priests were to celebrate the masses, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. He specified what masses they would celebrate and on what days. Monday mornings he earmarked for the mass of the Trinity or the Angels. Wednesday mornings were for the mass of the Holy Spirit or the Virgin Mary. Friday mornings were reserved for the mass of the Holy Cross or the Dead. Nor were the priests to cease celebrating the masses they ordinarily celebrated on these days. The masses Jean endowed were, in modern parlance, ‘add-ons’. And he did 3
For a representative selection of values of vineyards in the region, see William Jordan, From servitude to freedom: manumission in the Se´nonais in the thirteenth century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 74–7. 4 John Henneman, Royal taxation in fourteenth century France: the development of war financing, 1322– 1356 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 21 (sergeants’ wages); Comptes royaux, ed. Robert Fawtier, 3 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1953–1956), I, no. 5636 (wages for an arcuarius of eight pence per day). 5 Robert Fawtier, ‘Un compte de menues de´penses de l’hoˆtel du roi Philippe VI le Valois pour le premier semestre de l’anne´e 1337’, Bulletin philologique et historique, 1928–1929 (1931), 7–40 (occasionally pilgrims from greater distances received twice this sum, 10 shillings; even so, Jean’s endowment exceeded each of these by a factor of 10). 6 On these figures, cf. Joseph Strayer, The reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 112 (high royal officials), and Jordan, From servitude to freedom, 67, 78 (endowments for anniversary masses in the region of Saint-Florentin and levies for manumission in the same region).
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not stop there. The endowment was intended to honour the souls of his departed ancestors and possible future benefactors to the altar; so, Jean directed that at each and every celebration some special notice be taken to remember the departed (‘et in qualibet missa fieret specialis memoria de defunctis’). He instructed the priests to delay for one day saying one of his prescribed masses if a body was in the church awaiting burial (‘esset in dicta ecclesia corpus aliquod inhumandum’). To assure and guarantee the permanence of the gift, Jean le Voyer promised to arrange for compliance with all the laws and ordinances governing gifts to the church, that is, gifts into the dead hand, amortizations. In other words, he was agreeing to assume any and all costs incurred in guarding against the revocation of the gift, the seizure of the property, or the imposition of punitive fines, the last being a fairly frequent consequence for improperly or incompletely obtaining licence to make gifts of real property or leases (chattels real) to the church. Fear of improper amortizations and their consequences was a perennial characteristic among donors, who attributed the rules governing these endowments to Louis IX, although many kings contributed to the body of legislation governing grants to the church.7 The closing clauses of the document make up the conventional promises of all concerned—Jean, the principal donor, other parties whose property rights were affected, and the parish priest accepting the gift on the church’s behalf—not to challenge the validity of the endowment or any element of it in the future. Besides its substantial size by regional standards, there is another revealing quality of this grant. It is well documented that Louis IX believed or said that he believed that crusaders who fell in the holy wars were martyrs.8 How he would have characterised the deaths of those who succumbed to disease, as he himself did during the siege of Tunis in 1270, is unknown. For a few thinkers, of course, martyrdom was limited to the passive acceptance of death at an enemy’s hands even when force might legitimately be employed to prevent it. Martyrdom was not constituted by soldierly death, violently in battle or peacefully, as, for example, while waiting out or maintaining a siege. Or, as Jonathan Riley-Smith has put it, ‘the Church could never be completely at ease with [crusaders as martyrs] and their names never appeared in calendars of saints because of their [supposed] martyrdom alone’.9 But for a very long time, a broader definition of martyrdom, which did extend the category to warriors who met their end in just and holy wars, prevailed in Christendom, and ‘propaganda often described crusaders who died on campaign 7 On the attribution of the primary legislation to Louis IX in contemporary regional documents (dated 1316), see Inventaire-Sommaire des Archives De´partementales ante´rieurs a` 1790: Yonne, archives eccle´siastiques, se´rie G, ed. Mathieu-Maximilien Quantin (Auxerre: Albert Gallot, 1873), 389 G 2236, ‘qu’il ne povoient tenir sans nostre consentement pour les ordonnancs dou saint Roy Loys’. For another king’s contributions to the legislation, however, see Charles-Victor Langlois, Re`gne de Philippe III le Hardi (Paris: Hachette, 1887), app. 2, ‘pie`ces justificatives’, nos. 5–6. 8 Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 883. 9 Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘The state of mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300’, The Oxford illustrated history of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79.
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as martyrs’.10 The canonisation of Louis IX, a king whose claim to sanctity was backed by the most powerful family and realm in Europe, a religious zealot, an obedient and loyal son of mother church, and a militant pilgrim, who died on his last campaign, provided the perfect opportunity for churchmen to give official sanction to this popular view of, and propaganda for, crusader martyrdom. Nevertheless, the church chose to admit the king not to the ranks of the martyrs but to those of the confessors, believers who died especially earnest in the faith, believers who were spiritually prepared to die for the faith, but who did not die in the proper circumstances so as to constitute their deaths as martyrdoms. The most poignant expression of the disappointment this decision precipitated in royal circles is Jean de Joinville’s famous lament. I cannot but think that it was an injustice to him not to include him in the roll of the martyrs, when you consider the great hardships he suffered as a pilgrim and Crusader during the six years that I served with him; in particular because it was even to the Cross that he followed Our Lord—for if God died on the cross, so did St Louis; for when he died at Tunis it was the Cross of the Crusade that he bore.11 It does not seem implausible that Jean le Voyer’s endowment reflects a rather more widespread displeasure with the church’s action, in that he chose to link his honouring of Louis IX with that of the archetype of Christian martyrs, the deacon Stephen, stoned to death for defending the messiahship of Jesus (Acts 6.9–7.60). No other reason for this association springs to mind, as it might, if, say, the donor’s name was the French form of Stephen, Etienne, or if explicit references were made to one or more of his ancestors with that name. This is by no means conclusive proof that the donor intended the association of Louis IX and Stephen the Protomartyr as a critical comment on the church’s reluctance to canonise the saint as a martyr, but it should encourage scholars to re-examine carefully other documents generated from outside the royal circle for popular responses to the canonisation. The word ‘popular’, used in the preceding sentence, raises a more general issue. There is considerable evidence that many individuals greeted the possibility and reality of Louis IX’s canonisation with real delight. A clever scholar of the time, also called Louis, thought his name took on special significance from the king’s blessedness and in a pleasant little jeu d’esprit interpreted the letters that made up his name in Latin, LVDOVICVS, as a litany of the royal saint’s virtues, which, it is implied somewhat immodestly, he himself shared. 10
James Brundage, Medieval canon law and the Crusader (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 21–3; Colin Morris, ‘Martyrs on the field of battle before and during the First Crusade’, Studies in Church History, 30 (1993), 93–104. The quotation is from Riley-Smith, ‘State of mind’, 79. 11 I am quoting the very literal translation of Rene´ Hague; Jean de Joinville, The life of St Louis (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), chap. 1.
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Laude, Virens, Deicus, Opifex, Vitiis, Inimicus, Constans, Veridicus, Sapiens, notat haec Ludovicus.12 ‘Abloom with praise, God’s labourer, foe of vices, man of constancy, speaker of truth, a sage—Ludovicus denotes all these’. In its own way, the case of Jean le Voyer contributes to our recognition of the extent of sentiments like these, which is to say, of the public’s response to the king’s canonisation. But what class of people, what part of the public, is Jean most likely to be representative of, if he is representative at all? His original endowment recorded in the vidimus of 1319 identifies his estate; Jean was a burgensis. This indicates both his formal legal status as a burgher of Saint-Florentin, with the local customary rights pertaining to citizenship, and probably, although not necessarily, the fact of his contemporary residence in the bourg of Saint-Florentin. But we know something more. Jean issued a vidimus, dated 1314, of the testament of one Marguerite of Saint-Florentin, the testament itself being dated 1299.13 This vidimus refers to Jean as guard of the seal of the pre´voˆte´ of Saint-Florentin. Pre´voˆte´s were subdivisions of the large administrative districts, bailliages, into which northern France was divided.14 Saint-Florentin was a pre´voˆte´ of the bailliage of Troyes, and its pre´voˆt came under the disciplinary jurisdiction of the bailli of Troyes.15 The guards of the seals were the chief clerical officials in the pre´voˆte´s.16 The business done in the pre´voˆte´s was extremely varied.17 Pre´voˆts, the crownappointed administrative heads of the districts, shared police authority in the towns and banlieux they administered with municipal officials whom the burghers chose.18 They held courts and served their superiors in the royal administration, the baillis, when the latter held their assize courts in their districts.19 The pre´voˆts 12
Histoire litte´raire de la France, 30 (1888), 598. Mathieu-Maximilien Quantin, Inventaire-Sommaire des Archives De´partementales ante´rieurs a` 1790: Yonne, archives eccle´siastiques, se´rie H, III, 2nd part (Auxerre: Albert Gallot, 1882), 334 H 1408. 14 William Jordan, Louis IX and the challenge of the Crusade: a study in rulership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 46–7, 161–2. 15 Auxerre, Archives De´partementales [AD] de l’Yonne, H 1444, various manuscripts refer to and exemplify this disciplinary jurisdiction. 16 Henri Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts royaux du XIe au XIVe sie`cle’, Nouvelle revue de droit franc¸ais et e´tranger, 27 (1903), 808–11. 17 Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 558–63. 18 Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 665–72. 19 Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 650–4. For specific references to the holding of the bailli of Troyes assize court on occasion in Saint-Florentin, see the MSS in Auxerre, AD: Yonne, H 1444. 13
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also saw to the expeditious collection of royal revenues, both public and private (from royal estates), although the public/private distinction is somewhat of an anachronism, and they sometimes distributed royal alms and paid the wages of lesser officials.20 It also fell to the pre´voˆts to register transfers of real property involving the amortization of land in order to guard against injury of the king’s rights and to protect other royal rights and interests.21 To keep records of official business of the sort just described, to provide a service whereby citizens could confidently and securely register their important private acts and transactions, like testaments and deeds of gift, under the official seals of the pre´voˆte´s, and to do other civil tasks requiring literacy and clerical experience, the pre´voˆts employed administrative adjuncts, keepers of the seal.22 If the office carried considerable responsibility, it also conferred considerable prestige. Most important from our point of view is the fact that Jean le Voyer was a royal employee, no ‘ordinary’ citizen, but one whose livelihood depended on the crown. It should not be surprising that such a man might feel an obligation to and affinity for the memory of Saint Louis, either because of pride in or out of guilt for the manner in which he executed his office, for the king was idealised for imposing high standards on officials in the royal administration. As an angry Pope John XXII put it in a missive to King Philip V the Tall (1316– 1322) at just about this time: it behoved the ruler of France to assure that his officials behaved honestly and decently, in this case towards ecclesiastics, just as his ancestor Louis IX had worked so hard to assure.23 If Jean le Voyer’s enthusiasm for the royal cult can be called popular, it can be done so only in a very particular way. It illuminates one thin slice of popular responses to the cult; yet, this at least adds to our overall picture, just as clever Louis the scholar’s jeu d’esprit does. This picture has recently been enriched further through the work of Sharon Farmer on the social status of recipients of the miracles attributed to the king.24 What Farmer has shown is that there is a spatial differentiation in the miracles which neatly maps onto the social cleavages among the recipients of the miracles. Farmer focuses on the cult’s heartland, Paris/Saint-Denis.25 She notes that the
20
Gravier, ‘Essai sur les pre´voˆts’, 560–2. For examples of this sort of activity in pre´voˆte´s in the general region, see William Jordan, Unceasing strife unending fear: Jacques de The´rines and the freedom of the church in the age of the last Capetians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 60–61. 22 I do not mean to imply that the keepers of the seal were the only officials who carried out these sorts of tasks, especially the registering of private transactions, in Saint-Florentin. The town (pre´voˆte´, castellany) also had a notariate in this period; Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. Martin Bouquet, et al., 24 vols (Paris: V. Palme´, 1840–1904), XXIV, 167. 23 Lettres secre`tes et curiales du Pape Jean XXII (1316–1334), relatives a` la France, I, ed. Auguste Coulon (Paris: Fontemoing, 1913), cols. 868–70 no. 1015. 24 Sharon Farmer, Surviving poverty in medieval Paris: gender, ideology, and the daily lives of the poor (Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 2002). 25 For background and context of the cult at Saint-Denis, see Elizabeth Brown, ‘The chapels and cult of Saint Louis at Saint-Denis’, Mediaevalia, 10 (1984), 279–331. 21
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miracles attributed to the king, those which occurred away from the tomb, tended to be ones involving high status recipients, people close to the king in his lifetime or who lived and worked in courtly and aristocratic circles. On the contrary, the miracle stories that describe the recipients as making pilgrimages to the king’s tomb at Saint-Denis usually concern lower class and destitute supplicants. Put starkly, though with a bit of exaggeration, the saint had to visit the elite; the poor had to visit the saint.26 The environs of the tomb at Saint-Denis constituted the ‘popular’ cult site, never fully appreciated as such by historians until Farmer’s work. Within and outside the Paris/Saint-Denis cult centre, there were a few other shrines, like the Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cite´, the Franciscan nunnery of Longchamp founded by Louis IX’s sister on the outskirts of the capital, and the slightly more distant sanctuary to the northwest at Poissy, where the king was baptised and which Philip the Fair (1285–1314) endowed in his honour.27 It has always been assumed that these other shrines, whether we are talking about miracles or not, were sites of aristocratic rather than non-aristocratic devotion. Whether this assumption will stand the test of future research remains to be seen. What the documents discussed in the present essay suggest, however, is that at least for some groups, if Jean le Voyer represents a type of enthusiast, the cult had a wider appeal than heretofore stressed. Louis IX never became a wildly popular saint, of course, but it now seems defensible to argue that devotees of his cult, at least in the first few decades after his death and in both the Parisian heartland and the provinces, were far more diverse than once thought and were certainly not narrowly limited to the aristocracy and the royal court. Within three years of his original endowment Jean augmented his gift. He was unhappy or unsatisfied with what the clergy of the church of Saint-Martin were delivering or intended to deliver for his original gift. Instead of low masses (submissa voce) without chanting, he desired high masses (alta voce).28 Undoubtedly, other accoutrements were implied in the latter phrase as well—additional candles, bell ringing, perhaps pittances or monetary contributions to the celebrants
26
Farmer, Surviving poverty, 52. On these and other cult sites, see Colette Beaune, La naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 159–64; Elizabeth Hallam, ‘Philip the Fair and the cult of Saint Louis’, Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), 205–8; Pierre Morel, ‘Le culte de saint Louis’, Itine´raires, no. 147 (November 1970), 130–2 (I wish to extend my warm gratitude to Professor Paul Freedman of Yale University who secured a copy of this article for me). As to the cult at Longchamp, there is useful evidence of images, lives and artifacts associated with the king now published in, Ein Franziskanerinnenkloster in 15. Jahrhundert: Edition und Analyse von Besitzinventaren aus der Abtei Longchamp, ed. Gertrud Mlynarczyk (Bonn: Ludwig Ro¨hrscheid Verlag, 1987), 290, 294, 298, 310, 329, 333. See also the list and description of Cistercian devotions to Saint Louis assembled by Anselme Dimier, Saint Louis et Cıˆteaux (Paris: Letouzey et Ane´, 1954), 135–40. 28 On the distinctions between high and low mass in the Middle Ages, see Joseph Jungmann, The mass of the Roman rite: its origin and development, trans. Francis Brunner, rev. Charles Riepe (New York and elsewhere: Benziger Brothers, 1959), 80, 165. 27
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and deacons for meals as well as donations to the poor.29 To this end Jean supplemented the endowment with additional revenues. The new gift included income from three shares of a house he possessed behind the public market and from a stall or booth he had rights to in the market itself. The house may have doubled as a storage facility, (ware)house, but it also had residential quarters.30 Jean permitted Jeanette (Johanetta), his serving woman, to occupy the house, and he stipulated that she could live in it after his death as long as she desired to do so and if she paid twelve pence (one shilling) annually on the anniversary of his death to Saint-Martin’s. He required her to keep the house in fairly good repair, specifying the roof, walls and the major timbering (‘tenebitur. . . in bono statu tenere de coopertura, parietibus et grosso merrano’). Also, while occupying the tenement, she was obliged to pay the crown what was due from the property, twenty shillings and six pence. The six pence constituted a quit rent, the ‘symbolic’ token of the king’s overlordship.31 The rather more substantial sum of twenty shillings reflected, I believe, the commercial value of the property as a warehouse. Jean recognised that Jeanette might someday want to give up the property, and he took care to stipulate that if she did give it up, it would go to the church of Saint-Martin, and that all her obligations to keep the house in repair ceased upon her moving out (‘nec amplius tenebitur dicta Johanneta ad reparacionem dicte domus’). Because this stipulation involved the conveyance of the property into the dead hand of the church, he again pledged, as he had in his original grant, to obtain and pay for the amortization (‘ipse dictam domum procurabit admortizari suis propriis custibus et expensis’). With his experience as keeper of the seal of the pre´voˆte´ and thus as the registrar of similar conveyances, he was quite aware of the importance of fulfilling this pledge. The new charter closed with the usual formulas providing for the perpetual enforcement of the endowment’s provisions by all concerned. There were thousands upon thousands of parish churches like Saint-Martin’s in northern France. No precise figure is recoverable, partly because of the inadequacy of record evidence, but also partly because ‘northern France’ is itself a vague concept and depends on the arbitrary drawing of a line. But if one does draw an imaginary line from the southern marches of Poitou to the southern marches of
29 For the emergence of the anniversary mass as the standard gift to ecclesiastical institutions, see Richard Keyser, ‘La transformation de l’e´change des dons pieux: Montier-la-Celle, Champagne, 1100–1350’, Revue historique, no. 628 (October 2003), 793–816. For typical stipulations by donors in this region, including payments for clergy, charity and the ringing of bells, see Le Livre des reliques de l’abbaye de Saint-Pierre-leVif de Sens par Geoffroy de Courlon, ed. Gustave Julliot and Maurice Prou (Sens: C. Duchemin, 1887), 167, 188–9, 194, 208, etc. On the various meanings of pittance in records of this sort (though from England), see David Postles, ‘Pittances and pittancers’, Thirteenth-Century England, 9 (2003), 175–86. 30 On such storage facilities, usually referred to merely as domus, see Jordan, Unceasing strife unending fear, 68. 31 Cf. Larry Sullivan, ‘The exploitation of land in medieval Paris: the abbey of Sainte-Genevie`ve’, Mediaevalia, 10 (1984), 82.
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Burgundy as a boundary limit, with everything north of the line as northern France, this region roughly constitutes 100,000 square miles (about 260,000 square kilometres). England, a kingdom half as large, but one with richer surviving ecclesiastical records had 9,000 parishes.32 If northern France, as I have defined it, twice as large as England, had twice as many parishes and, therefore, twice as many parish churches, 18,000, it would not be surprising. Additional evidence suggests that this is not a wild guess or irrational estimate. One scholarly study posits that all of France, defined by its modern boundaries, had slightly more than 38,000 titular or parish churches.33 Our arbitrary unit, northern France, about 40% of the surface area of the modern country and probably of the total population in the high Middle Ages, would then possess about 15,000 parishes. A good regional count has also been done in the case of medieval Normandy, or rather the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, one of the six geographically gigantic ecclesiastical provinces or archdioceses in northern France (Reims, Sens, Tours, and the huge northern extents of Bourges and Lyons). Medieval Normandy counted over 2,200 parishes.34 If the other five provinces in the north had similar numbers, it would mean that we are talking about a total number of parishes somewhat exceeding 13,000. The point is not to insist on either the high (18,000), the middle (15,000), or the low (13,000) figure. After all, medieval French administrators had no consensus on the subject.35 But we must nevertheless recognise that the kind of records that survive fortuitously for the endowment of the altar to Saint Louis Confessor and Saint Stephen Protomartyr at the parish church of Saint-Martin in the bourg of Saint-Florentin, are minuscule in number compared to what must once have existed. This is a sobering reminder of how little we know and perhaps can know about orthodox religious practice in medieval France. (Thanks to the congeries of investigations known collectively as the Inquisition, we may have far more intimate knowledge and simply far more knowledge about the lived religion of heretical minorities in some thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century regions than of the vastly larger orthodox majority.) Three times a week, every single week, every year, for centuries presumably, the parish priests and deacons at Saint-Martin sang high masses and read lessons in honour of Louis IX in the presence of devout parishioners. By doing so, they contributed to keeping alive vestigial memories of the saint-king’s life, work and miracles in provincial France, long before Jean de Joinville’s History of Saint Louis became a widely distributed, let alone a school, text
32
Gervase Rosser, ‘Sanctuary and social negotiation in medieval England’, The cloister and the world: essays in medieval history in honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 70. 33 Morel, ‘Culte de Saint Louis’, 128. 34 More precisely, 2232; Damien Jeanne, ‘Les le´preux et les le´proseries en Normandie moyenne et occidentale au moyen aˆge: orientations de recherches’, Cahiers Le´opold Delisle, 46 (1997), 19. 35 Cf. David Potter, ‘Introduction’, France in the later Middle Ages 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3: ‘there were many current myths about the number of parishes in the kingdom’.
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and the principal vehicle for disseminating knowledge about the king.36 To the extent that the royal cult achieved any popularity at all in the later Middle Ages, it was largely because of endowments like that of the burgher Jean le Voyer and because of unknown numbers of similar ones in the rural and small town parishes of medieval France.
Appendix From: Francis Molard, ‘Du culte de saint Louis dans le de´partement de l’Yonne’, Annuaire statistique du de´partement de l’Yonne, 53 (1889), section 3, 168– 77, reprinted here with errors corrected and modernisations suppressed. I Universis presentes litteras inspecturis: officialis curie Briennonis, Senonensis dyocesis, salutem in domino: Noverint universi quod in nostra presencia, personaliter constitutus, vir venerabilis et discretus, dominus Nicholaus de Charniaco, rector ecclesie parrochialis de Sancto Florentino, senonensis dyocesis, confessus fuit bona et hereditagia que discretus vir et providus vir dictus Li Voyers de Sancto Florentino, Burgensis, devotissime, et in augmentacionem cultus divini ampliacionemque bonorum presbiteralium ecclesie parrochialis predicte, in honore sanctissimi prothomartiris Stephani et gloriosissimi confessoris Ludovici, quondam franchorum regis, ad fondacionem et perpetuam dotacionem cuiusdam altaris in ecclesia sua beati Martini predicti, pro tribus missis in dicto altari, qualibet ebdomada a dicto curato, vel eius capellano, et successoribus, perpetuo, domino concedente, celebrandis, donavit, concessit et perpetuo quittavit, prout hec dicta bona et hereditagia et plura alia, in litteris reverendi in Christo patris ac Domini, domini Guillelmi, divina providencia archiepiscopi senonensis, super fundacione et dotacione dicti altaris confectis, plenius continetur. Et quorum litterarum tenor talis est: Universis presentes litteras inspecturis, Guillelmus, misericordia divina, archiepiscopus Senonensis, eternam in Domino salutem. Gaudet omnis chorus celestium, et rex precipue super omnes altissimus, celum, terramque regens, et cuncta prospiciens, cuius ineffabile gaudium magnificat quando christi regis, eiusdem filii, ad suam sedentis dexteram, precioso sanguine redemptorum fidelium, crescit in tantum devotio, quod iidem, ut leti, perpetuis pociantur premiis, ad divine magestatis obsequium aspirantes, propriis eorum bonis terrenis se gratanter exuunt et denudant, ac pro locis eccle36 Joinville’s work was not well-distributed until its sixteenth-century publication, and it became a standard school text only in the nineteenth century. From the moment of its publication it was pillaged by biographers and latter-day apologists in a cascading succession of epic poems, scholarly studies, plays, novels, and political propaganda; see William Jordan, ‘Saint Louis in French epic and drama’, Studies in Medievalism, 8 (1996), 174–94 (reprinted in Ideology and royal power in medieval France: Kingship, Crusades and the Jews [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2001], essay 6); and Adam Knobler, ‘Saint Louis and French political culture’, Studies in Medievalism, 8 (1996), 156–73.
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siaticis fundandis noviter, et dotandis, ad divini cultus augmentum, voluntarie conferunt, dedicant et convertant. Nuper siquidem ad nostram accedens presenciam, dilectus in Christo filius, Johannes dictur Li Voyers de Sancto Florentino, nostre dyocesis, viva voce nobis exposuit, quod pro sui et parentum suorum, atque predecessorum animarum salute, quoddam altare, in ecclesia beati Martini de Sancto Florentino, in honore sanctissimi prothomartiris Stephani et gloriosissimi confessoris, Sancti Ludovici, quondam regis Francorum, constituere, et suis propriis rebus et facultatibus, dotare, cupiebat, ad augmentationem cultus divini, et ampliacionem bonorum presbiteralium, si ad hec nostrum impertiri dignaremur beneplacitum, pariter et assensum, offerens se daturum ad opus ipsius altaris, pro divino officio de cetero peragendo, res et bona que sequuntur, videlicet: unam peciam vinee, sitam es bayches, contiguam leprosis, ex una parte, et vinee curati dicti loci ex altera; item, unam aliam peciam vinee, sitam subtus Sanctum Martinum una cum sauceyo, contiguam Odino Grocier, ex una parte, et vinee que fuit Roberti Bertholoti, ex altera; item, unam peciam alteram vinee, sitam apud fontem aus moinnes, contiguam monachis, ex una parte, et vinee vicecomitis de Sancto-Florentino, ex altera. Que omnes vinearum pecie continent circa dua arpenta; item, vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus super quatuor arpentis pratorum, que fuerunt defuncte Odine de Bait, sitorum in finagio Sancti Florentini, in loco qui dicitur es roiches; item vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus quos Johannes dictus Li Voyers debet assedere super omnibus bonis suis; item vinginti solidos alios annui redditus, quos Giletus Li Voyers debet assedere super omnibus bonis suis; item vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus quos Johannes Augustini et Colinus eius frater, debent assedere super omnibus bonis suis, occasione sue matris, de quibus redditibus assedendis, obligaverunt se, et omnia bona sua, prout in litteris aliis, inde confectis, plenius continetur; petens humiliter et requirens, ut ad ipsum altare, forent per curatum dicte ville, seu eius vicarium, tres misse, singulis ebdomadis, celebrate, una cum missis aliis, ad quas dictus curatus, ex sue cure debito, cothidie tenetur, pro predicto Johanne, et eius parentibus, antecessoribus, atque benefactoribus dicti altaris, videlicet quolibet die lune, in mane, una de trinitate, vel de angelis; die mercurii, in mane, de sancto spiritu, seu de Virgine Maria; die veneris, in mane, de sancta cruce, sive de defunctis; et in qualibet missa fieret specialis memoria de defunctis. Et si forte contingeret, quod dictis diebus, esset in dicta ecclesia corpus aliquod inhumandum, propter quod ipsa die, dictus curatus, missam predictam reddere non voleret in altari predicto, sibi sufficeret, si missam predictam, die crastina celebraret, seu faceret celebrari. Nos itaque, qui prout nostro incombit officio pastorali, ex intimis utilitatem et commodum universarum nostre dyocesis ecclesiarum et singularum, affetamus, habita super premissis deliberatione diligenti, accersito nicholominus Nicholao curato ecclesie sancti Martini prescripte, recepto prius ab eadem corporaliter juramento, compertoque per eum in hoc, utilitatem predicte ecclesie evidencius subiacere; attentaque quod sit pia et salubris cogitatio pro defunctis exorare, prefati Johannis supplicationem exaudivimus, et eam duximus ad effectum, atque ex ipsius curati voluntate et
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beneplacito, predictam sancti Martini ecclesiam, oneravimus de predictis tribus missis ebdomada qualibet de cetera celebrandis, in altari predicto. Et predictus Johannes omnes res hereditarias superius nominatas et contentas, cum aliis redditibus suprascriptis, in nostra personali presencia constitutus, pro dicta altari fundando et dotando, contulit, concessit et donavit ecclesie Sancti Martini superius nominate, et eas admortuare promisit, suis propriis sumptibus et expensis, sub suorum, omni obligacione bonorum, promittens insuper bona fide quod omnes res superius nominatas et ecclesie predicte concessas, garantizabit et defendet, ipsi ecclesie erga omnes, et quod contra concessionem, donationem predictas, per se vel per alium non veniet quomodolibet in futurum, renuncians quoad hec, omnibus exceptionibus facti et juris canonici et civilis, doli mali, fraudis, erroris, circonvencionis et lesionis quarumlibet, et generaliter et specialiter omnibus exceptionibus que contra predictas litteras possent obici in posterum, vel opponi. Et dictus curatus promisit similiter bona fide se decetero teneri efficaciter obligatum, et ecclesiam suam predictam ad prefatas, tres missas, per se aut alium, celebrandas qualibet ebdomada in altari predicto, percipiendo omnes et singulas res superius nominatas, se et ecclesiam suam, ad hec nostro primitus interveniente consensu, specialiter obligando, et his omnibus quorum interest, tenore presencium intimamus. In cuius rei testimonium, sigillum nostrum litteris presentibus, duximus apponendum. Datum et actum apud sanctum Florentinum, anno domini millesimo trecentesimo decimo septima, die Jovis post festum sancte Marie Magdalene. Hec dictus vero dominus Nicholaus, se, ut curatus dicte parochialis ecclesie, ac suo proprio et dicte ecclesie sue nomine, et pro ipso recognovit recepuisse et habuisse, et penes ipsum et ecclesiam suam predictam, ob causam predictam appropriasse, una cum duobus iornatis terre arabilis sitis in finagio de Germignyaco, contiguis dicti Beuve de porta, ex una parte, et Symonis Margeri ex altera, quos Johannes Augustini, et Colinus, eius frater, cesserant, siue assederant dicto curato, ad opus fundationis dicti altaris, ex legato deffuncte matris ipsorum, que ad opus fundacionis dicti altaris, vinginti solidos turonensium, quolibet anno imperpetuum legaverat, prout in litteris cessionis dictorum jornatorum terre a dictis fratribus dicto curato super his factis, plenius continetur; quas litteras idem curatus recognovit a dictis fratribus recepisse et penes se habere, seque de predictis bonis et hereditagiis tenuit integre pro pagato et contento, hoc salvo ipsis curato quod dictus Johannes Li Voyers debet assedere super omnibus bonis suis vinginti solidos annui redditus, et Gilo Vaerii similiter vinginti solidos turonensium annui redditus super omnibus bonis suis, prout in dictis litteris reverendi patris domini archiepiscopi Senonensis, plenius continetur; confessus fuit eciam dictus curatus, se et successores suos imperpetuum teneri, et esse obligatos ad dictas tres missas, perpetuo, tribus diebus in ebdomada, ad dictum altare, secundum quod in litteris domini archiepiscopi Senonensis est expressum, celebrandas, et cum nota, et pro certa causa, licet in dictis litteris domini Senonensis, non habeatur expressum quod dicte tres misse debeant celebrari, et ad eas cum nota celebrandas, forma et modo in dictis litteris reverendi patris, domini archiepiscopi Senonensis, declaratis, se et successores suos, coram nobis specialiter obligavit, et cel-
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ebraturum, per se, vel per alium, sub obligacione bonorum predictorum, aliorumque et ceterorum, ob hec dicto altari legatorum et legandorum, et al.orum bonorum suorum et ecclesie sue, corporali juramenta prestito, imperpetuum promisit, et renunciavit in hoc facto, omnibus exceptionibus, deceptionibus, lesio- nibus, et fraudi juris et facti, que contra premissa, vel aliqua premissorum possentin futurum obici, sive dici, etc. In quorum rerum testimonium, sigillum curie Briennonis, presentibus litteris, duximus apponendum. Actum et datum, anno domini millesimo trecentesimo decimo nono, die lune post festum omnium sanctorum.—Per Jo. Bonis collacio fit.—Per Behem collacio facta est. II Datum per copiam sub sigillo decani christianitatis sancti Florentini Senonensis dyocesis. Omnibus presentes litteras inspecturis, officialis curie Briennonis, Senonensis dyocesis, salutem in domino: Noverint universi quod coram speciali mandato nostro, domino drocone, presbitero, curato ecclesie de Bleigniaco, cui quantum ad hoc, et maiora fidem plenariam adhibeamus, propter hoc personaliter constitutus, Johannes Vaerii de Sancto Florentino, cupiens sue anime et parentum suorum providere saluti, considerans et actendens, quod qui in benedictionibus seminat, de benedictionibus metet, ad augmentum cultus divini, nec non ad laudem et gloriam nostri Salvatoris, qui sibi famulantibus, remunerat centupliciter, et largitur sponte et provide, donavit, legavit et quitavit ex nunc altari in honore sacratissimi prothomartyris Stephani et beatissimi Ludovici confessoris, in ecclesia Sancti Martini de Sancto Florentino predicto, fundati et edificati, tres partes cuiusdem domus site ante halam de Sancto Florentino predicto, una cum stallo et pertinenciis dicte domus, contigue domibus Bononis de porta ex utraque parte, absque vinginti solidis turonensium annui redditus quos debet dicto altari super aliis bonis suis signare et assignare pro eo. . ., videlicet quod curatus dicti loci qui ex nunc dicto altari deservit et deserviri facit, celebrari faciet tres missas, jamque ad dictum altare institutas et fundatas, cum nota, alta voce, ut ibidem dominus maiori devocione et affectuosissima a suis fidelibus honoretur; quas tres missas dictus curatus, aut ibidem pro ipso deservientibus celebrare submissa voce antea tenebantur; ita tamen quod Johanneta ancilla ipsius Johannis dictas tres partes dicte domus, tenebit quamdiu vivet, si eidem Johannete placuerit, mediantibus duodecim denariis turonensium ab eadem Johaneta eidem curato, aut pro ipso deservientibus, reddendis et solvendis quolibet anno, die anniversaria obitus ipsius Johannis: quas tres partes dicte domus tenebitur substentare et in bono statu tenere de coopertura, parietibus et grosso merrano, quamdiu eam tenuerit, quando et quociens fuerit opportunum. Tenebitur eciam dicta Johanneta quamdiu dictam dominum tenuerit, vinginti solidos turonensium cum sex denariis censualibus, domino regi, quolibet anno debitos ac eciam situatos. Si vero dicta Johanneta dictam domum tenere noluerit, idem Johannes voluit dicto curato et eius. . . successoribus ex tunc penitus remanere, nee amplius tenebitur dicta Johanneta ad reparacionem dicte domus, nec eandem facere substentari. Preterea promisit idem Johannes sub
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ypotheca omnium bonorum suorum mobilium et immobilium, quod ipse dictam domum procurabit admortizari suis propriis custibus et expensis. Ad que omnia et singula premissa, dominus Nicholaus de Charniaco, curatus ecclesie Sancti Martini de Sancto Florentino predicto, coram dicto mandato nostro personnaliter constitutus, nomine ecclesie sue predicte, consensit et eciam obligavit, promittens bona fide suprascripta, nomine quo supra inviolabiliter observare, et in contrarium non venire. Pro premissis vero complendis et firmiter observandis, obligavit dictus Johannes omnia bona sua mobilia et immobilia presencia et futura, ubicumque sunt et poterunt invenire, promittens bona fide, quod contra predicta donum et legatum, per se, vel per alium de cetero non veniret in futurum. Renunciavit insuper dictus Johannes quantum ad hec, omnibus exceptionibus facti et juris canonici et civilis, doli mali, erroris, lesionis, et generaliter nec non specialiter omnibus aliis exceptionibus que contra presentes litteras possunt obici, sive dici. In cuius rei testimonium, sigillum nostrum ad relatum dicti presbiteri, presentibus litteris duximus apponendum. Datum die mercurii post festum beate Marie Magdalene, anno domini millesimo trecentesimo vicesimo.— [Signed] G. Kordon [with the authentication] ita est. William Chester Jordan is Professor of History at Princeton University and is the author of Europe in the high Middle Ages (2001) in the Penguin series on the history of Europe and of the forthcoming, Unceasing strife, unending fear: Jacques de The´rines and the freedom of the church in the age of the last Capetians (Princeton: Princeton University Press).