THE EVOLUTION OF THE PRINCELY COURT IN NORTH-WEST EUROPE, c1270–c1384

Abstract

T project, which has been supported by a two-year award to the Fac ulty of Modem History at Oxford by the Leverhulme Trust, began about twenty years ago. At that time Iwas working towards a book which eventually appeared as War and Chivalry: Waifare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (1981). Most of the work on the book was done at the University of York, where the Centre for Medieval Studies brought together medievalists of all kinds. The York B.Phil (as it then was) in Medieval Studies included a course on 'Courts and Cities in the Later Middle Ages' and I suppose it was in part through that course that the ideas which were to inform my current project began to form. So there is a relationship between teaching and research: in this case, it was teaching-led research, rather than research-led teaching. A major component was, of course, the court of Burgundy: that is the court society and culture which developed in the age of the Valois dukes of Burgundy between 1363 and 1477. Both course teaching and research demonstrated that, although we knew much about the court of Burgundy, we knew little about its predecessors in north-west Europe. There was a sense of Burgundian culture emerging almost from a vacuum its splendour solely a product of the dukes' immense wealth, its novelty exemplified by the 'new' art of the brothers Van Eyck and their contemporaries, and in some way related to the fact that the Valois house of Burgundy was a new force in European politics, increasingly independent of both France and the Holy Roman Empire. But questions remained. Whence did Burgundian culture spring? Was it merely a development and elaboration of French court culture, made possible by the power and wealth of the dukes? Was the 'Frenchness' of the Burgundian court perhaps yet another Inanifestation of French cultural 'supremacy', which also applied to other periods (e.g. the thirteenth century)? By 1384, on the other hand, the house of Burgundy had begun its rise to hegemony in the Low Countries, and questions about the effects of the absorption and integration of Netherlandish territories into the Burgundian dominions had also to be asked. To what extent were the four Valois dukes and their entourages the 'true, good and complete Frenchmen' that the Chancellor Nicholas Rolin maintained they were in 1435?