Medieval violence in northern france

MEDIEVAL VIOLENCE


OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS
Editors
p. clavin l. goldman j. innes
r. servi ce p .a. slack
b. ward -perkins j. l. watts


Medieval Violence
Physical Brutality in Northern France,
1270–1330
HANNAH SKODA

1


3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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# Hannah Skoda 2013
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First Edition published in 2013
Impression: 1

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For all victims of violence and for those who grow up
believing violence to be acceptable or inevitable.


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Contents
Preface
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations

Introduction
1. What was Violence?

2. Scholarly Approaches to Violence
3. The Region and the Period
4. The Sources

ix
xi
xii

1
2
4
9
14

1. Grammars of Violence:
1. Frameworks of Meaning
2. Violence as Communication
3. The Violence of the Law
4. Who Was to Read Violence?
5. Conclusion

18
19
23
38
44
48

2. Violence on the Street in Paris and Artois:
1. The Space of the Street

2. The Role of Street Violence
3. The Perpetrators of Street Violence
4. Types of Violence
5. The Contingency of Street Violence
6. Social Memory
7. Conclusion

50
51
56
62
69
74
81
87

3. ‘Oés comme il fierent grans caus!’: Tavern Violence in
Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Paris and Artois:
1. Tavern Violence and the Authorities
2. Tavern Violence in North-East France
3. Tavern Violence in Paris and the Ile-de-France
4. Conclusion

88
92
96
108
118

4. Student Violence in Thirteenth- and Early

Fourteenth-Century Paris:
1. Stereotypes
2. Student Misbehaviour
3. Conclusion

119
124
136
157


Contents

viii

5. Urban Uprisings:
1. Theatre
2. Forms of Legitimate Violence
3. Civic Ceremonial
4. Liturgical Processions
5. Carnivals and Contestations
6. Conclusion

159
164
169
173
178
183
190

6. Domestic Violence in Paris and Artois:
1. Legal Prescription
2. The Practice of Domestic Violence
3. The Prosecution of Domestic Violence
4. Conclusion

193
197
210
218
231

Conclusion
1. Violence as Communication
2. Indeterminacies
3. Emotional Reactions
4. Ambivalence
Select Bibliography
Index

232
232
234
238
242
245
277

Preface
This book aims to explore the meanings, functions, and place of violence
in northern French society before the outbreak of the Hundred Years’
War. It begins from the premise that the very presence of violence is
socially contingent, and explores the ways in which it was used and the
responses it provoked. A number of methodological approaches are used,
in part suggested by the nature of the surviving evidence: from legal
material, legislative documents, letters, and sermons, to the literary offerings of poets and early vernacular playwrights. Historiographical interest
in violence has risen dramatically in recent years, and is often focused
upon the relationship between violence and the development of states.
This book focuses not upon military or judicial violence, but upon the
quotidian brawls and brutality which, in many ways, made up the fabric of
everyday life. It aims to show just how ‘normal’ violence could become,
whilst at the same time provoking horror and outrage. And it aims not to
lose sight of the very real suffering engendered by these actions. Studying
violence is an important counterpoint to an often romanticized view of the
period, but equally a closer look reveals that a gloomy portrait of a brutal
and incessantly cruel Middle Ages is also misleading: violence provoked
ambivalent and troubled reactions, and was never passed over in silence.
The book aims at a broad readership. It is hoped that those interested in
the France of the later Middle Ages will find something of interest or at
least provocation here, but it is also hoped that those studying constructions of deviance from an interdisciplinary perspective will respond to
some of the ideas and that their relevance may extend beyond northern
France 1270–1330.
Many people have been more than generous with their time and
comments on this work. Unfortunately I cannot name them all here,
but none have been forgotten. In particular though, I would like
to acknowledge the ever-kind support and inspirational guidance of my
D.Phil. supervisors, Dr Malcolm Vale and Dr Gervase Rosser, and of
Dr Matthew Kempshall. My D.Phil. examiners Professor David D’Avray

and Dr Jean Dunbabin provided crucial criticism and comment. More
widely, members of the History Faculty at Oxford have been always ready
to offer ideas and encouragement, notably Professor Chris Wickham and
Dr Patrick Lantschner. Versions of chapters of this book have been
presented at numerous seminars, and the comments received there have


x

Preface

all helped to develop lines of research: I would particularly like to thank
those who commented at the Oxford Medieval History Seminar, the
Oxford Late Medieval History Seminar, the Oxford Medieval French
Seminar, the Seminar in Medieval History at the Institute of Historical
Research, the Oxford Medieval Church and Culture Seminar, and all who
attended my presentations at various conferences. Very special thanks go
to Dr John Watts for his infinite patience, very careful reading, and
wonderfully insightful comments: his intellectual generosity has been
very inspiring.
Much of the material here is bound to be provocative, and I am afraid
that there must remain many mistakes: these are clearly all my own!
The book has been made possible by generous support during my
D.Phil. from the AHRC, Wadham College, Oxford History Faculty,
and Zaharoff Research Fund. Subsequently, a Junior Research Fellowship
at Merton College, Oxford, and research support at my current college,
St John’s, have provided stimulating opportunities to continue work
on this.
Finally, I would like to thank my lovely husband, son, parents, grandmother, brother, wider family (particularly Richard, Nick and Malcolm),
and friends, without all of whom my life would be immeasurably poorer.

You are all a constant inspiration.


List of Illustrations
1. Map showing north-eastern French towns under
consideration
2. Model of Arras, 1716, by engineer Ladevèze, now in the Musée
des Beaux Arts in Arras
3. Types of violence in five Artois towns
4. Types of violence in Artois
5. Types of violence in Paris

10
11
76
82
82


Abbreviations
ADPC
ADN
AMA
AN

Archives départementales du Pas-de-Calais, Arras
Archives départementales du Nord, Lille
Archives Municipales d’Abbeville
Archives Nationales, Paris

Beaumanoir

Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes du Beauvaisis, ed.
A. Salmon, 3 vols. (Paris, 1899, repr. 1970)
British Library
Bibliothèque Nationale
E. Boutaric (ed.), Actes du Parlement de Paris, 1254–
1328, 2 vols. (Paris, 1863–7)

BL
BN
Boutaric, Actes
CUP

H. Denifle and E. Châtelain (eds.), Chartularium
Universitatis Parisiensis, 4 vols. (Paris, 1889–97)

Delmaire

B. Delmaire, Le Compte Général d’Artois pour 1303–
1304 (Brussels, 1977)

Etablissements

P. Viollet (ed.), Les Etablissements de Saint Louis, 4
vols. (Paris, 1881–6)

Furgeot and Dillay, Actes H. Furgeot and Dillay, M. (eds.), Actes du Parlement
de Paris: Deuxième série de l’an 1328 à l’an 1350. Jugés
(lettres, arrêts, jugés), 3 vols. (Paris, 1920–75)

NRCF

N. van den Boogaard and W. Noomen (eds.),
Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, 10 vols. (Assen,
1983–96)

Olim

A. Beugnot (ed.), Les Olim, ou Registres des arrêts
rendus par la cour du roi, 3 vols. (Paris, 1839–48)
E. de Laurières (ed.), Ordonnances des Rois de France,
22 vols. (Paris, 1849)

Ordonnances
RHGF
RR
Tanon

Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols
(Paris, 1738–1904)
A. Strubel (ed.), Le Roman de Renart (Paris, 1999)
L. Tanon, Histoire des justices des anciennes églises et
communautés monastiques de Paris (Paris, 1883)


Abbreviations
THEMA

xiii

Thesaurus Exemplorum Medii Aevii at http://gahom.
ehess.fr/thema/index.php

Names are cited in the form and language in which they appear in the
documents (though the ‘s’ for cas sujet has been removed in the interests of
clarity, except in cases where such an ‘s’ survives in the modern form of the
name—e.g. Gilles).


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Introduction
Je ne suis pas marry que nous remerquons l’horreur barbaresque
qu’il y a en une telle action, mais ouy bien dequoy jugeans à point de
leurs fautes, nous soyons si aveugles aux nostres.1

Our vision of the Middle Ages is haunted by the spectre of extreme
violence, and there is a smugly self-congratulatory tinge to modern characterizations of this brutal and cruel period.2 But the image needs revisiting. Partly because violence continues, in multiple ways, to be common.
And partly because it is a label applied to the medieval period often
thoughtlessly. Attitudes towards violence in the Middle Ages were, in
fact, sophisticated, and interacted in complex ways with the actual perpetration of violence which forms the subject of this book: I aim to uncover
the multiple levels of meaning behind such gestures and yet the disapproval and even shock which they engendered.
Physical brutality and the instrumentalization of its threat, still mesmerize collective mentalities. Moreover, the frightening connotations of
cruelty are often also insidiously used to label and marginalize unwanted
groups.3 It is all too easy to dismiss violence as a merely dysfunctional
product of deviant behaviour, wilfully turning a blind eye to its centrality
in power structures and even in quotidian social relations. Paradoxically at
once arresting and fascinating, and yet elusive in meaning and significance, violence is not culturally aberrant, but embedded in the very
frameworks of meaning promoted by society itself. This is not to claim

1 ‘I am not averse to us noticing the barbaric horror of such an action, but rather to us
judging their faults so harshly whilst blind to our own’: Michel de Montaigne, ‘Des
Cannibales’, from Les Essais, I. xxx. 216, ed. J. Balsamo, M. Magnien, and C. MagnienSimonin (Paris, 2007).
2 e.g. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 5 vols. (London, new edn.
1994), iii. 1068: ‘I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion’.
3 Tennenhouse distinguishes two kinds of violence ‘that which is “out there” in the
world, as opposed to that which is exercised through words upon things in the world, often
by attributing violence to them’: N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse (eds.), The Violence of
Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London, 1989), 9.


2

Introduction

that it is unchanging, but contingent upon the structures of everyday life
and the shifting norms of societies. We need to ask ourselves why violence
provokes such enduring fascination alongside such persistent eagerness by
society to abnegate responsibility for it.
At first sight, fourteenth-century sources seem to confirm the brutality
of the Middle Ages. For example, in Dante Alighieri’s masterly exposition
of this life and the afterlife in the Inferno, violence is omnipresent and a
structuring principle: he shows physical brutality to be systemic, complex,
and adaptive.4 Dante stands above his time, but was also rooted in its
historical realities and attitudes, underlining the centrality of violence in
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century society. It both formed an integral part
of social relations and provoked broader discussion. But Dante, while
placing violence at centre-stage, also expressed heartfelt condemnation of
its excesses and cruelty. And in this respect, he was perhaps even more

typical of his time. Violence was not accepted as inevitable or its presence
straightforwardly condoned. Rather, the period is characterized by extremely nuanced attitudes towards violence, and by a deep-rooted ambivalence concerning its role. This ambivalence questioned the functions of
violence and the relationship between violence and the law; challenged its
social centrality and hesitated regarding the interpersonal or collective
implications of physical brutality. This was an age where people thought
carefully and problematically about violence and its implications. The aim
of this book, then, is to consider the complexity of those attitudes, as
revealed in discussions about, and representations of, physical violence, as
well as to examine the perpetration of violent acts in late thirteenth- and
early fourteenth-century Paris and Artois.

1. WHAT WAS VIOLENCE?
The term ‘violence’ encompasses an enormous range of phenomena, from
subtle structural exclusion or moulding of particular groups, to verbal
manipulation, to physical damage done by one human being to another. It
is this latter sense which is the subject of study here, with particular focus
on violence by the populace, or ‘popular violence’, violence which was
widely characterized as illegitimate, and is still often considered to represent merely the irrational, excessive display of physical force.5 This is
4 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, in Commedia, ed. and tr. J. Sinclair, 3 vols. (Oxford, new edn.
1981), i.
5 On definitions of ‘popular’, see A. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture (Cambridge,
1990), 1–35, 224.


Introduction

3

indeed the sense of the Old French term ‘violence’: physical gestures
lacking officially instituted systematic frameworks of authority and meaning, condemned by legal processes and the rhetoric of authorities.6 Chivalric violence, military exploits, judicial punishment, and religious

persecution, perpetrated as they were by hegemonic groups, will not be
explicitly discussed. Yet although these phenomena were not encompassed
by the medieval French ‘violence’, they were part of a common phenomenon of physical brutality and contributed to the same discursive framework: the borrowing of such gestures by perpetrators of illicit violence and
the deliberate resonances evoked by popular brawlers or urban rebels was a
powerful way of gaining attention. And whilst nobles also carried out illicit
brutality of staggering cruelty, it is the blows struck by the ordinary
townsmen and women and subaltern rural dwellers (and their rich parallels with noble violence) which capture our attention here.
This book examines the functions and motivations of the supposedly
ubiquitous interpersonal violence of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Violence was both a means of spectacular communication, and a way of achieving concrete goals: both performing and
performative. Its mechanisms were rooted in cultural paradigms which
shaped its perpetration, and its motivations were deeply embedded in
socio-cultural context, even when overlaid with economic needs. This is
not to deny that physical brutality could be perpetrated by psychopathic
individuals without further motivation, but it is to claim that even when
enraged, or drunk, or over-excited, the perpetrators of interpersonal
violence were, even at an unconscious level, influenced by the norms of
their society. The relationship between the functions of violence, and
attitudes towards it, was, of course, reciprocal: contemporary responses to
violence, as expressed in sermons, popular literature, oral accounts, moral
treatises, and legal discourse were shaped by the practice of violence, but
also influenced its perpetration, and demand study in their own right if we
wish to understand the role of violence in this society. Indeed, the more
fundamental question of definition lies at the heart of medieval ambivalence about physical violence: the term ‘violentia’ referred to disordering
brutality, and the term ‘vis’ tended to indicate the physical force deemed
to reinforce social order. However the distinction was not only unclear,
but the subject of repeated debate, rendering this a particularly fruitful
period for exploring the multiple overlapping roles of violence, its multifaceted appearances in society, and its persistence.
6 Le Robert Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1992), ii. 2261.
NB: This book will not, therefore, focus upon military or judicial violence, though motifs
drawn from these spheres are shown to have influenced other manifestations of violence.

4

Introduction

This book considers a hitherto understudied period of interpersonal
violence in northern France, and examines, one by one, a range of kinds of
popular violence rarely studied together despite their overlaps and resonances: street violence; violence in the tavern; student violence; urban
rebellions; and domestic violence. Street violence comprised interpersonal
brawls, vengeance killings and public humiliation, whereas violence in the
tavern was more self-consciously frivolous. Students were notoriously
brutal, but their deviance was as much a label applied to them as it was
a reality, and one of which they were acutely aware. The laughter which
often accompanied tavern brawls and student fights was, perhaps surprisingly, still evident in the playfulness of many urban uprisings, although
the political goal of this type of violence was much more clearly articulated. And whilst the ordering function of violence may have been most
prominent in the perpetration of violence against one’s wife, it was here in
the home that ambivalence about the justifiability of violence seems to
have caused the most anxiety. Setting these forms of violence side-by-side
deepens our interpretive insights into the complexities and self-referentiality of the medieval use of physical brutality. These types are visibly
distinguished and shaped by considerations of space, from the intimate
setting of the home to the public and politically loaded arena of the town
square. But they also indicate the wide range of contemporary thinking
and ambivalence surrounding the subject and evoke provocative issues of
communication, publicity, identity, stereotypes and expectations, and
moral, political, and legal justifiability.7 It is by uncovering the many
layers of medieval ambivalence concerning interpersonal violence—its
interpersonal or collective implications; its ordering or disordering effects;
its fluid relationship with the law—that we can hope to rectify both
stereotypical demonizations of the Middle Ages, and determinist claims

about the inescapable rootedness of violence in human nature.

2. SCHOLARLY APPROACHES TO VIOLENCE
Discussion of violence can hardly be confined to a single paradigm: rather
the subject invites a multiplicity of perspectives. Fundamentally, scholars
from various different disciplines have been fascinated by the question of
why mankind is so prone to physical violence: whether it is an intrinsic
7 ‘Space’ here is used in the sense elaborated by H. Lef èbvre, Writings on Cities, tr. and
ed. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford, 1996), 100–3: space both creates and is created by
social interchange; it is not a vacuum waiting to be filled, but a meaningful concept actively
constructed and produced by the societies who inhabit it.


Introduction

5

element of life, a defining feature of our humanity, the remnants of the
attempt to establish human society in the face of the divine, or an integral
feature of power.8 But, whilst violence is clearly not just a social construct,
nor is it merely an instinctive and innate human characteristic. Studying
violence requires a close reading of the gestures used and awareness that
violence is a kind of exchange or transaction between perpetrator, victim,
and spectator; more fundamentally, violence itself is a subjective concept,
readily used as a derogatory label in the exercise of power.9 Violence has
interested philosophers, social scientists, and historians alike, and the
insights afforded by a range of disciplines have profoundly nuanced
understandings of the role of violence in society as integral to fluid social
relationships.10
Physical force is certainly an ever-present building block of social and

political structures, and provides a visible or more insidious embodiment
of hierarchies and exclusions; most notably, violence has been posited as a
defining feature of the emergent state.11 Echoing medieval ambivalence
about violence, scholars searching for the function of violence have
repeatedly encountered the problem of the tension between violence as
ordering and disordering, used to reinforce hierarchies, but equally
capable of subverting them.12 And violence can be expressive or instrumental, symbolic or practical, emotional or strategic, or more often, but
more problematically, all at once.13 Violent gestures are driven by individual emotion and social concern, and by the confluence of the two.14

8 K. Lorenz, On Aggression (London, 1967); R. Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris,
1972); W. Burkert, Homo Necans, tr. P. Bing (Berkeley, Calif., 1983); W. Sofsky, Violence:
Terrorism, Genocide, War, tr. A. Bell (London, 2003).
9 D. Riches, ‘The Phenomenon of Violence’, in D. Riches (ed.), The Anthropology of
Violence (Oxford, 1986), 8, 11.
10 One of the most important texts in this respect is Y. Castan on 18th-cent. Languedoc:
Honnêté et relations sociales en Languedoc (Paris, 1974). Such has been the basis of anthropological attempts to typologize violence: e.g. J. Black-Michaud, Cohesive Force: Feud in the
Mediterranean and the Middle East (Oxford, 1975), particularly 1–32.
11 e.g. M. Weber, Economy and Society, tr. G. Roth and C. Wittich (New York, 1968);
P. Ricoeur, État et violence: Troisième conference annuelle du foyer John Knox (Geneva, 1957).
Hannah Arendt, though, famously questioned the assumption that violence straightforwardly produces power: On Violence (New York, 1970). The relationship between violence
and the law was explored by Walter Benjamin (‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47 (1920/1), 809–32), and the notion that law could
ever disassociate itself from the practice of violence, controversially, by Jacques Derrida
(Force de loi, Paris, 1994).
12 e.g. P. Stewart and A. Strathern, Violence: Theory and Ethnography (London, 2002), 1.
13 Ibid. 6–7, 12; B. Schmidt and I. Schröder (eds.), Anthropology of Violence and Conflict
(London, 2001), 8–10.
14 Stewart and Strathern, Violence, 108–12.

6

Introduction

The value and mechanisms of symbolic action are highlighted in the
explorations of cultural anthropology, with attention paid to a careful
balance of function and dysfunction.15 Such models can have misleadingly static implications, and the post-structuralist emphasis on ‘process’ is
salutary. In particular, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ shifts attention to the processual, adaptive quality of interpretative frameworks of
violent social action in practice.16 Violence as process is as much about
representation and mediation as it is about the actual gestures involved,
and the representation of violence depends most strikingly upon its
definition by those with the power to delineate it.17
Although violence is notoriously difficult to historicize (principally
because of the shifting nature of the source material), attempts to demonstrate its contingent nature have been obliged to try.18 The most straightforward response to this question has been to seek long-term trends in the
decline of violence; more subtly, some historians have focused on its
changing features and societal functions, and repression or instrumentalization either by nascent states, or through subtler shifting psychological
structures.19 Medievalists have been amongst the first to critique these
teleological accounts, sometimes via the careful use of statistical evidence,
sometimes via close attention to the complex cultural resonances of

15 e.g. V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society
(Ithaca, NY, 1974); C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).
16 P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, tr. G. Raymond (Cambridge, 1991), 50–3.
17 See F. Brookman, Understanding Homicide (London, 2005), 2.
18 See e.g. M. Braun and C. Herbereichs, ‘Einleitung’ in Braun and Herbereichs (eds.),
Gewalt im Mittelalter: Realitäten—Imaginationen (Munich, 2005), 7–39; M. Kintzinger
and J. Rogge, ‘Einleitung’, in Kintzinger and Rogge (eds.), Königliche Gewalt—Gewalt
gegen Könige (Berlin, 2004), 1–8.
19 N. Elias, The Civilising Process, tr. E. Jephcott (Oxford, new edn. 2000); latterly,
nuancing but fundamentally agreeing with the position of Elias, P. Spierenburg, ‘Faces of

Violence: Homicide Trends and Cultural Meanings: Amsterdam, 1431–1816’, Journal of
Social History, 27/4 (1994), 701–16. Such statistical analysis is summarised by T. Gurr,
‘Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence’, Crime and Justice:
an Annual Review of Research, 3 (1981), 295–350; M. Eisner, ‘Long-Term Historical
Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice, 30 (2003), 83–142. It has led to virulent
debates: see e.g. the articles of Monkkonen and Graff (respectively, ‘Systematic Criminal
Justice History: Some Suggestions’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9/3 (1979), 451–64;
‘A Reply’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9/3 (1979), 465–71; and E. Johnson and
E. Monkkonen, The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle
Ages (Urbana, Ill., 1996)); and the debate about the English case in Past and Present:
L. Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300–1980’, Past and Present, 101
(1983), 22–33; J. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent’,
1560–1986’, Past and Present, 130 (1991), 70–106; J. Sharpe, ‘Debate: The History of
Violence in England: Some Observations’, Past and Present, 108 (1985), 206–15; L. Stone,
‘The History of Violence in England: Some Observations—A Rejoinder’, Past and Present,
108 (1985), 216–24.


Introduction

7

medieval violence.20 In recent years, the historiography of medieval violence has undergone rapid expansion, though thirteenth-century French
popular violence remains a lacuna, with attention focused on early medieval, and late medieval or early modern, crime and violence.21 Attention
has been attracted for the central Middle Ages primarily to chivalric
violence, or to popular violence in England where the legal sources are
much denser.22 Historians have been concerned to indicate the groups
most affected by popular violence and to explore its timing and socially
integral role.23 Drawing upon sociological models, the pervasiveness of
violence in medieval culture has tended to be explained by its crucial role

as an accepted mechanism for regulating and adjusting social structures
and relations.24 More recently, Claude Gauvard has focused upon the
socio-economic contingency of particular forms of violence, concomitantly exploring the relationship between the development of proscriptive

20 G. Schwerhoff, ‘Zivilisationsprozess und Geschichtswissenschaft: Norbert Elias’ Forschungsparadigma in historisches Sicht’, Historische Zeitschrift, 266 (1998), 561–607;
H. Duerr, Nacktheit und Scham: Der Mythos vom Zivilisationprozess (Frankfurt, 1988); see
also the discussion in S. Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence
(London, 2007), 16; M. Schussler, ‘German Crime in the Later Middle Ages:
A Statistical Analysis of the Nuremberg Outlawry Books, 1285–1400’, Criminal Justice
History, 13 (1992), 11–60; V. Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the
Middle Ages, tr. P. Selwyn (New York, 2004); H. Boockmann, ‘Das grausame Mittelalter:
Über ein Stereotyp in Geschichte’, Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 38 (1987), 1–9; G. Althoff,
‘Schranken der Gewalt: Wie gewalttätig war das “fristere Mittelalter”?’, in H. Brunner (ed.),
Der Krieg im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 1999), 1–23.
21 e.g. M. Greenshields, An Economy of Violence in Early Modern France (Pennsylvania,
1994); R. Muchembled, Violence et société: Comportements et mentalités populaires en Artois
(1400–1660) (Paris, 1985); J. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1996);
G. Halsall, Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998). The most
recent synoptic study of medieval violence leaves popular violence in the late 13th and early
14th cents. largely undiscussed: W. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (Harlow, 2011).
22 e.g. A. Cowell, The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance and the
Sacred (Woodbridge, 2007); R. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Society in Medieval Europe (Oxford,
1999); B. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1979); J. Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford,
Calif., 1977); E. Cohen, ‘Patterns of Crime in Late Fourteenth-Century Paris’, French
Historical Studies, 11/3 (1980), 307–27; and J. Misraki, ‘Criminalité et pauvreté’, in
M. Mollatt (ed.), Études sur l’histoire de la pauvreté, 2 vols. (Paris, 1974), i. 535–76; an
exception is A. Finch, ‘The Nature of Violence in the Middle Ages: An Alternative
Perspective’, Historical Research 70/173 (1997), 249–68, which focuses on early 14thcent. violence as prosecuted in the ecclesiastical court of Cérisy in Normandy.
23 e.g. B. Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, tr. J. Birrell (Cambridge, 1987); P. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford,

1992); T. Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe (London, 2001); M. Meyerson, D. Thiery, and
O. Falk (eds.), ‘A Great Effusion of Blood?’ Interpreting Medieval Violence (Toronto, 2004),
particularly 4–9.
24 e.g. D. Kagay and L. Villalon, The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society
in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. xv–xx.


8

Introduction

attitudes towards violence and developing state structures.25 Indeed,
legalistic attitudes towards interpersonal violence have proved an ideal
way to explore and to problematize the development of the implementation of state power through legal mechanisms.26
The cultural implications of violence have drawn historians of an
anthropological persuasion to study its ritual elements, at once affirming,
dynamic, and oppositional.27 Honour is a central motif and has been
rendered key to many explanatory frameworks of patterns and economies
of violence;28 further work has stressed the sensitive, dialogic, and adaptive
qualities of medieval aggression.29 Most effectively, historians have
returned to the question of what constituted ‘violence’ as such in particular historical circumstances, a question which invites reflection upon
political attempts to wrest the perpetration of legitimate force from private
individuals into the hands of the law, where the term ‘violence’ was no
longer considered apposite.30 The study of the law in relation to interpersonal violence has exponentially increased our understanding of the role
of, and attitudes towards, brutality in later medieval France.31 Legal
discourse and the practice of violence are no longer studied in isolation,
as both are seen to be central to the conflicts which shaped everyday life in
the Middle Ages.32

25 ‘Au quatorzième et quinzième siècles, en France, le discours sur la violence devient un

élément de la construction de l’État’: C. Gauvard, Violence et ordre public au Moyen Age
(Paris, 2005), 11. See also N. Gonthier, Cris de haine et rites d’unité: La Violence dans les
villes, XIIIe–XVIe siècle (Turnhout, 1992), particularly 215–17.
26 See, most recently, J. Firnhaber-Baker, ‘From God’s Peace to the King’s Order:
Late Medieval Limitations on Non-Royal Warfare’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 23 (2006),
19–30, and T. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth-Century: Power, Lordship and the Origins
of European Government (Princeton, 2008).
27 e.g. E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans (Paris, 1979); Y. Bercé, Fête et révolte:
Des mentalités populaires du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1976).
28 e.g. W. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland
(Chicago, 1990). In medieval France, the notion of ‘renommée’ was key: see Gauvard,
Violence, 13–16.
29 e.g. B. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca, NY, 1998).
30 Such studies focus principally on the struggle to contain noble violence and private
wars. See particularly J. Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Seigneurial War and Royal Power in Later
Medieval Southern France’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), 37–76. The demonization of
particular groups has been linked to this rise of central power: e.g. F. Rexroth, Das Milieu
der Nacht (Göttingen, 1999), 333–47.
31 C. Gauvard, De grace especial: Crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Age
(Paris, 1991); L. de Carbonnières, La Procédure devant la chambre criminelle du parlement de
Paris au XIVe siècle (Paris, 2004).
32 See notably, D. Smail, ‘Hatred as a Social Institution in Late Medieval Society’,
Speculum, 76/1 (2001), 90–126.


Introduction

9

3. THE REGION AND THE PERIOD
This book turns to hitherto understudied regions in this respect, tempted
by the richness of the source material and the intrinsic interest of areas of
rapidly changing social structures and developing civic ideologies: Paris
and Artois (see Figure 1).33 Artois was enjoying a period of economic
prosperity and mercantile expansion: it was a centre notably of cloth
production and banking, as well as an important trading centre for wool
and even wine.34 Paris likewise was prosperous, with a thriving commercial scene and a busy and skilled artisanate, as attested to by the Parisian
Provost, Étienne Boileau in his Livre des métiers.35 The town was selfimportant as the centre of an increasingly powerful monarchy and administration, and the seat of an internationally renowned university.36 An
anonymous writer, with evident exaggeration, but resonant pride, punned
on Paris and Paradisus, and Jehan de Jandun praised its people, moderate
in all things.37 The images of everyday life in Paris, placed under the
bridges of scenes from the Vie de Saint Denis from the early fourteenth
century, evoke a Paris of social diversity with lepers sounding their
clappers, physicians examining urine, and young people fishing and
swimming in the Seine: in this portrayal, it is a hive of bustling activity,
of learning and leisure, commerce and religious devotion.38 However
romanticized this vision, much recent scholarship has clearly illustrated
that medieval cities were not subject to rigorous social zoning, and rich
33 R. Muchembled, La Violence au village: Sociabilité et comportements populaire en Artois
du XVe au XVIIe siècle (Turnhout, 1989).
34 Cf. R. Fossier, La Terre et les hommes en Picardie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), ii. 570–98;
R. Berlow, ‘The Development of Business Techniques Used at the Fairs of Champagne
from the End of the Twelfth Century to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century’, Studies in
Medieval and Renaissance History, 8 (1971), 28–35; J. Lestocquoy, Patriciens du Moyen Age:
Les Dynasties bourgeoises d’Arras du XIe au XVe siècle (Arras, 1945).
35 Étienne Boileau, Les Métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris, ed. R. de Lespinasse and
F. Bonnardot (Paris, 1879).
36 Cf. R. Cazelles, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: De la fin du règne de Philippe Auguste à la
mort de Charles V, 1223–1380 (Paris, 1982).

37 Anon., Recommendatio Civitatis Parisiensis, in Le Roux de Lincy and L. Tisserand
(eds.), Paris et ses historiens au XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1867), 22–9; Jehan de Jandun,
Tractatus de laudibus Parisius, ibid. 54.
38 The Vie de Saint Denis was presented to Philip V in 1317 by his chaplain Gilles,
Abbot of Saint Denis: see W. Egbert, On the Bridges of Medieval Paris: A Record of Early
Fourteenth-Century Life (Princeton, 1974), 3–23. The manuscript is BN Ms fr. 2090–
2092, and a presumed third part is Ms lat. 13836; there is also a mid-14th-cent. copy, Ms
lat. 5286. For the money changer, goldsmith, beggar, fishermen, lepers, singing clerics, and
physicians, see respectively Ms fr. 2091, fos. 105v, 111r, 97r, 129r, 99r, 125r; for musicians,
swimmers, and livestock sellers from the surrounding countryside, see respectively Ms fr.
2092, fos. 8v, 10v, 18v.


Introduction

10

Saint Omer

Hesdin

Abbeville

Aubigny
Arras

Saint Riquier

Poix

Bapaume
Péronne
Saint Quentin

Laon
Beauvais

N
W

E
S

Paris

0

25

50

Kilometers

Fig. 1. Map showing north-eastern French towns under consideration

and poor encountered each other regularly, providing opportunities for a
rich variety of social interactions.
Both regions were, by contemporary standards, highly urbanized.
Nevertheless, Artois still had a large rural population, and the kind of
social and geographic mobility which we tend to associate with urbanized

areas was not yet a regular characteristic. Paris was obviously much larger,
and formed by a constant influx of immigrants who swelled its population
enormously in the latter part of the thirteenth century.39 Yet it also
retained close ties with the surrounding countryside, with many inhabitants moving between the two, and social networks spanning the divide.40
39

S. Roux, Paris in the Middle Ages, tr. J. McNamara (Pennsylvania, 2009).
G. Fourquin, Les Campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris,
1964), 219–20. Cf. D. Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City: From Late Antiquity to
40