Pour nous servir en l’armée: Le gouvernement et le pardon des gens de guerre sous Charles le Téméraire, duc de Bourgogne (1467–1477), by Quentin Verreycken

Abstract

Part of the implied contract by which European rulers extracted ever greater resources from their subjects for the maintenance of increasingly large and permanent armed forces seems to have been that those rulers would make serious efforts to regulate the conduct of their soldiers towards the civilian population. Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, was among the great elaborators of military institutions and military ordinances in his age—not that it did him much good, as his armies crumbled repeatedly before the Swiss and their allies. He also had a high view of his own judicial supremacy over the composite polity he ruled, so his efforts to control his soldiery tested him not only as a lord of war but also as a prince of justice. In the absence of archives of military tribunals, remission letters are the best means available to test the effectiveness of his regulatory efforts. A third of those surviving from his reign from the Chambre des Comptes at Lille concern war, one in five was issued to a past or present soldier, one in ten to someone serving in arms at the time of their offence, and one in fifty to civilians killing soldiers. In this book, Quentin Verreycken sets his analysis of these letters deftly in the context of a range of relevant models of the operation of law, violence and social regulation, drawing in Foucault, Elias and others without letting them entirely take the helm. He also relates it to the work of the numerous historians of later medieval and early modern France and its satellites who have found such letters a profitable source, though he does miss David Potter’s 1997 study of murder in Picardy, much of it among soldiers, in the period just after his own.