Society and politics in medieval France

Abstract

The Kingdom of France emerged slowly out of the ruins of the Carolingian Empire. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the empire between the sons of Louis le Debonnaire and established a western kingdom, which would gradually reserve for itself the name ‘France’. In describing these and subsequent events, historians are dependent on the patchy survival of evidence largely produced by ecclesiastics and generally ambiguous in character; on chronicles, whose authors exaggerated and distorted for political, ideological or rhetorical effect; on royal charters, which projected an idealised image of kingship; and on legal documents presenting abstract principles of justice. Around 1000 chroniclers such as the monk Aimoin, at Fleury-sur-Loire, created a tradition identifying this Francia with Roman Gaul and described it as the rampart of Christianity. The subsequent creation of modern France, the work of centuries, would be inspired by the dream of a reconstruction of the kingdom of Charlemagne. There were many obstacles to the survival, let alone the enlargement, of any political unit. Initially poor communications and lack of information, low population densities, small revenues and the absence of salaried officials made it impossible to bind together large territorial units. Inevitably, government was decentralised. A period of political and territorial fragmentation ensued that lasted into the twelfth century. To a very substantial extent the evolution of the various lordships and principalities was determined by the results of war and the social structures shaped by organisation for war. People looked for security to local lords, and they themselves to regional princes, often – as in the case of Flanders, Burgundy and Aquitaine – the heirs of territorial commanders established by the Carolingian Charles the Bold. This fragmentation, clearly evident in the ninth century, was taken a stage further from around 900 as former royal administrators, the local counts and subsequently the castellans who had served as their deputies took advantage of rivalries between their nominal superiors to carve out for themselves increasingly autonomous power bases. At every level in society men sought protection from their more powerful neighbours, sometimes hoping to play one off against another and creating an intermixture of often conflicting obligations destructive of any sense of political hierarchy. Thus, to take an extreme example, around 1150 the Count of Champagne was the vassal of ten different seigneurs (including the King of France, Duke of Burgundy and Archbishop of Reims).