1

Vilain: What the Jurists Say

In the Middles Ages, vilain had been a recognizable category of person in French customary

law. The vilain (or villanus in Latin) was an inhabitant of a manorial villa, eventually known

as a seigneurie in French. The word vilain, moreover, outcompeted rival terms to become the

pre-eminent (and often defamatory) label for the peasantry en masse, whilst retaining precise

technical meanings in legal documents.1 The medieval French vilain, like his English

counterpart the villein,2 was originally classed as a man held in bondage, and was initially

barely indistinguishable from the serf. Gradually, however, in contradistinction to serfs,

vilains began to acquire the legal status of ‘franche condition’ whilst they worked on lands

belonging to their lord and remained under his jurisdiction. For better or worse, vilains and

their overlords were yoked together in an intricate set of interdependent relations that

characterized the feudal period of the Middle Ages. The vilain was leased a small portion of

the lord’s lands; he paid dues and services3 to his lord en vilenage, as well as supplying a vital

source of agricultural labour.4

As early as the thirteenth century, this system of relations was starting to break down;

and by the late sixteenth century it had markedly evolved. Vilains were no longer a clearly

recognizeable category of person to the late Renaissance jurist – and yet, curiously, they still

attracted considerable attention. This paper explores how that interest was sustained, in a

period of significant changes within French legal culture. On an academic level, the sixteenth

1 Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, 2 vols (Paris, 1968), II, pp.48-9: in law the vilain was a tenant en

vilenage, and also (in Old French) a masoyer or masuir (from the Latin mansuarius, manionarius), a possessor

of a whole or part of a manse (agricultural smallholding and dwelling). 2 One should not necessarily conflate French vilains with English villeins, especially in legal terms. For

Boutruche (op. cit., p.49 n.24), vilenage was a better defined system of manorial relations in medieval England

than in France during the same period. ‘Villeinage’ in England was in strict technical terms a narrower and more

legalistic form of serfdom that emerged during the course of the twelfth-century as a by-product of the

development of the common law. In England, manorial organisation led to the sharp distinction between persons

in the power of the lord and out of it; in France, everything depended on the changing equilibrium of local

forces and circumstances. See Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage

to Freedom (Woodbridge, 2014), p.4; Paul Freedman and Monique Bourin (eds.), Forms of Servitude in

Northern and Central Europe: Decline, Resistance, and Expansion (Brepols, 2005); J. Hatcher, ‘English

Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards a Reassessment’, Past and Present, 90 (1981), 3-39; Paul Hyams, King, Lords

and Peasants in Medieval England: The Common Law of Villeinage in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

(Oxford, 1980); Paul Vinogradoff, Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History (1892; reprinted

Oxford, 1968), ch.4. 3 Vils or vilains services, vils corvées were menial labours performed at the discretion of the lord, and to which

nobles were not subject. 4 The usual practice of fiefdom was that the seigneur would reserve a part of his territory for himself and then

cede the rest either in arrière-fief or in censive for a certain number of dues paid in money or kind which

symbolized his propriété éminente. The seigneur had civil and criminal jurisdiction over those living on his

territory, more visibly in the south and west of France than in the centre and the north. See Fernand Braudel and

Ernest Labrousse (eds.), Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 4 vols (Paris, 1970-82), I, p.63.

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century witnessed the rise of the mos gallicus: the school of law which fostered historical

enquiry designed to bolster the claims of local customary law against those of the Roman

Corpus Juris Civilis.5 Although Roman law was a useful standard by which to measure

French custom, its practice was perceived as a threat to the indigenous institutions of the

French nation. Customary law was the mainstay of the legal practitioner of northern France;

it underwent significant reform in the course of the sixteenth century with the extensive

redrafting of medieval coutumes.6 These highly politicized reforms specifically targeted

ancient seigneurial rights considered an obstacle to monarchical authority. They coincided

with the social and economic betterment of large numbers of leading lawyers and magistrates.

Acceding to substantial property and office, many sought ennoblement and a new culture of

‘living nobly’ revolving around an intellectual republic of letters. As is well known, the social

mobility of the new office-holding elites met with momentous and sometimes vitriolic

opposition from the ancient hereditary nobility, whose values reposed primarily on military

valour and prowess. Affluent jurists of the late Renaissance often found themselves

embroiled in legal, social and ideological debates over questions and proofs of nobility. So

why, then, did they bother with vilains, those who had traditionally inhabited a menial world

of harsh labour, far removed from venal offices, insignia, property and riches?

Case studies of four jurists – Antoine Loisel, Louis Le Caron, Etienne Pasquier, and

Charles Loyseau – will argue that jurists engaging in questions of legal tradition and of socio-

cultural identity more broadly were apt to consider the status of vilains and other commoners

as an oblique counterpart to that of the elites. As more streamlined, distilled versions of

medieval customary law came into being in the early seventeenth century, the position of the

vilain was not neglected (I.I). But when the history and identity of non-nobles was analysed

more broadly, in contradistinction to that of the old nobility, significant questions began to be

asked over the precise social rank of vilain – and, indeed, of the meaning of the term itself

(I.II). By the 1600s, such questions of rank and terminology would inform more rigorous

attempts at social stratification. Was it therefore possible to conceive of vilains as distinct not

only from nobles, but also from bourgeois and from various other sorts of lowborn – viles

personnes? The final section (I.III) considers jurist reflection on such matters, together with

ensuing moral concerns about dignity and baseness.

I.I Preserving, reforming, distilling the coutumes

The humanist jurists examined in this paper all interacted with French customary law in their

professional capacity as legal practictioners. As such, their understanding of vilains was

shaped to a large extent by their working knowledge of the traditions of ancient local custom.

5 For an overview of the different academic legal contexts of Renaissance France, see Ian Maclean,

Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge, 1992), ch.1. Maclean

summarises the indispensable scholarship of Donald Kelley on the relationship between history and law in the

Renaissance, most extensively displayed in Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law,

and History in the French Renaissance (New York and London, 1970). 6 Many thorough studies exist on sixteenth-century reform of French customary law. See notably Martine

Grinberg, Ecrire les coutumes: les droits seigneuriaux en France, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2006); Marie

Seong-Hak Kim, ‘Custom, Community, and the Crown: Lawyers and the Reordering of French Customary

Law’, in Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World

(Lanham and Plymouth, 2006), pp.169-86; Donald Kelley, ‘“Second Nature”: The Idea of Custom’, in The

Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, eds. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia, 1998),

pp.131-72; René Filhol, ‘La Rédaction des coutumes en France aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, in La Rédaction des

coutumes dans le passé et dans le présent, ed. John Gilissen (Brussels, 1962), pp.63-85.

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For these jurists, the many and disparate medieval coutmes7 served as anchors for reflection

on legal categories of person (nobles, roturiers, bourgeois, vilains etc.) in their own day.

Nevertheless, by the late sixteenth century, the sprawling, heterogeneous coutumes of old

were no longer fit for practicable use. Faced with multiple and frequently contradictory

precedents and rules in customary law, judges and lawyers set themselves the Herculean task

of synthesizing and reconciling the vast array of France’s local customs. In this they drew on

their extensive academic knowledge of legal principle and precedent, shaped in many

respects by Roman law. As Donald Kelley has pervasively argued, this monumental process

of reform was much more than an attempt to streamline legal practice: it was, fundamentally,

an act of historical consciousness, in which legal humanists sought nothing less than to

elucidate the universal ‘spirit’ of French private law from the preservation of ancient custom

in writing.8 This process of reflection had a deeply political dimension. As they revised and

redrafted cumbersome coutumes of the Middle Ages, late Renaissance jurists were charged

with reforming and excising those customs which, in the eyes of the common people,

legitimated various forms of seigneurial oppression. Although this ‘reformation’ of

customary law put seigneurial rights under and an increasingly critical eye, it did not drive at

the heart of the feudal system: much of feudal law and its categories of person continued to

be integrated into the text of reformed coutumes.9 Nevertheless, the process of redaction and

reform, overseen by royal representatives, allowed particular models such as the Paris

coutume to become dominant points of reference for juridical interpretation of legal

customs.10 Jurist endeavour to create a common customary law coincided with growing

attempts by crown to promote the unity of the kingdom.11

Antoine Loisel

The vilain who emerges through juridical reflection on customary law thus forms part of a

wider preoccupation with distillation, preservation and reform of French customs. Arguably

the clearest example of this positioning can be found in the Institutes coustumieres (1607) of

Antoine Loisel (1536–1617). An erudite disciple of the great Antiquarian legal scholar,

Jacques Cujas (1522–1590), Loisel acceded to a distinguished career in the Parlement de

Paris and Royal Treasury,12 during which his interest in reforming customary law was

7 In a legal context, the word coutume was imprecise: it designated legal texts applicable to relations between

private individuals within a certain territory, notably those those regions said to be governed de coutume as

opposed to those which were de droit écrit, where Roman law was more directly implemented. The word

coutume also designated customs which determined the status of towns and communities, often attested by

charter. In the sixteenth century, coutumes governed the legal regime of fiefs, goods, successions, matrimonial

property, and the protection of minors. See Michel Reulos, Comment transcrire et interpréter les références

juridiques: droit romain, droit canonique et droit coutumier contenues dans les ouvrages du XVIe siècle

(Geneva, 1985), ch.3. 8 See Kelley, ‘“Second Nature”’.

9 Grinberg’s study helpfully illuminates the manoeuvring through which reform was sought without wholly

annulling ancient seigneurial rights: ‘les décisions prises a l’issue des assemblées de la rédaction sont variées,

nuancées; elles laissent, dans l’ensemble, leur autonomie et leurs droits aux seigneurs, mais tendent à faire de

cette autonomie une particularité que l’on pourrait assimiler, en forçant le trait, du moins au plan de droit, à une

marginalité, voire a une éviction’ (Ecrire les coutumes, p.106). 10

See Grinberg, Ecrire les coutumes, p.93. 11

Kim, ‘Custom, Community and the Crown’, p.178. 12

On Loisel’s legal and historical scholarship, see Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical

Scholarship, esp. ch.9. On Loisel and his of circle of lawyers (which notably included Etienne Pasquier) see

Kelley, op. cit, ch.9; On the Institutes specifically: Michel Reulos, ode

des Institutes coutumières ’An n L (Paris, 1935).

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piqued.13 The eventual fruits of his labours, the Institutes coustumieres, would achieve a

considerable following in the seventeenth century.14 It purported to distil the burgeoning,

unwieldy canon of French customary law books, ‘remarquer en nos Coustumes et usage ce

qui avoit apparence de reigle ou sentence’ and, importantly, ‘les arranger en quelque meilleur

ordre’.15 Rationalizing the wisdom of the best juridical minds, Loisel furnished a wider jurist

public with a remarkably pithy digest of France’s ancient customary laws. Beyond its

practical applicability in settling points of law, Loisel’s treatise represented, in the words of

Kelley, an anthropology of law suggesting the priority of the jurist as popular mind-reader.16

The Institutes coustumieres purported to voice the spirit of France’s refined yet undying legal

customs, sourced not only in legal texts but in proverbial wisdom; as such it aimed to bridge

written law with oral tradition and folk wisdom.

For Loisel, vilains are a preservable category of rural non-noble persons (roturiers).

Nonetheless, the Institutes coustumieres situate vilains distinctly in relation to the past.

Vilains are to be understood as the lowest order of free persons, and a clear remnant of the

feudal system: they are those who possess héritages vilains, or are those held in vilenage – in

other words they owe rentes or champarts to a local lord.17 They are outranked by other

roturiers, those who qualify as urban bourgeois; but the extent of their lowliness was most

fully demonstrated in former times, through their early feudal relations with the rural nobility.

Loisel hints at the erstwhile restrictions on the vilain’s official freedom. The vilain, we are

told, ‘estoit semond du matin au soir, ou du soir au matin’ (Institutes coustumieres, p.3): he

was constantly at the beck and call of the local seigneur. This was a relationship based on

obligation, but one which over time fell short of total dependence. In early forms of feudal

tenure, all free vassals owed ‘hommage et honneur’ to their overlord, in other words, loyalty,

utmost respect and military service.18 Gradually, however, this relationship took on a more

contractual character, centring on the vilain’s payment of rentes (p.3).19 These legal

obligations, Loisel acknowledges, say little about the cultural disposition of the local seigneur

towards the vilains under his jurisdiction. A more telling source, in this respect, is the ancient

proverb ‘Oignez vilain il vous poindra. Poignez vilain, il vous oindra’ (p.3). Loisel allows

this widespread adage to speak for itself and remains silent on its origins and meaning;

posthumous commentary on the Institutes coustumieres attributes it to a deep-seated strain of

seigneurial malice, whereby lords are to keep suspicious vigilance over their vilains and treat

them as a readily exploitable workforce.20 Parallel suspicion of the untrustworthy vilain was

13

Along with Christophe de Thou, Loisel had been a leading figure in the redaction and subsequent domination

of the Parisian custom: see Roelker, One King, One Faith, p.66. 14

It features prominently in later landmarks of reference such as Laurent Bouchel’s Bibliothèque ou thresor du

droit François (1667) and Julien Brodeau’s Coustume de la prévoté et vicomté de Paris commentée (1669). By

the late seventeenth century, legal historians such as Eusebe de Laurière and François de Launay had appendend

learned commentary to the sparse Institutes coustumieres, much of which would survive to the nineteenth

century. 15

Quotations are from the third edition: Loisel, Institutes coustumieres ou manuel de plusieurs et diverses

reigles, sentences, et proverbes... du Droict Coustumier et plus ordinaire de la France (Paris, 1611). My

reading is informed by the 1846 edition (M. Dupin and E. Laboulaye), which preserves and augments Laurière’s

commentatry; and by Reulos’s seminal 1935 study on Loisel. 16

Kelley, ‘Civil Science in the Renaissance: The Problem of Interpretation’, in The Languages of Political

Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1990), pp.57-78 (73) 17

Loisel, Institutes coutumières, ed. Dupin and Laboulaye, 2 vols (Paris, 1846), I, p.42. 18

See Dupin and Laboulaye, Institutes coutumières, I, pp.67-8. 19

This concurs with Grinberg’s thesis that with the rising influence of the Parisian jurisconsult Charles Du

Moulin in the late sixteenth century, French jurists leaned increasingly towards a contractual view of certain

seigneurial rights (Ecrire les coutumes, p.110). 20

Laurière provides a cross reference to Rabelais’s Gargantua ch.32 in which the proverb is mentioned. Dupin

and Laboulaye (Institutions coutumières, I, pp.70-1) seize upon it as an index of unjust, lawless inequality

maintained by the nobility ‘On a peine à croire que dans le même pays il ait pu exister deux races différentes,

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widespread across medieval French literature, yet counter-examples, voicing the grievances

of vilains oppressed by their overlords could also be found.21 Nevertheless, as Loisel makes

clear, in the courts the word of the commoner counted little against that of the noble: ‘Le

vilain ne pouvoit fausser le Iugement de son Baron, mais par l’establissement de la Cour de

Paris, à Paris toutes appellations s’y peuvent relever’ (p.82). Only by successfully raising his

cause through the sovereign court could the vilain appeal against his lord. Loisel, it seems,

refuses to comment outright on this balance of justice; but he nonetheless insists here and

elsewhere that ancient cultural prejudice towards the vilain should be noted by the

Renaissance jurist as integral to the spirit of French customary law.

In matters of criminal justice, there seems to have been an equally slim margin for

equality. Turning to ‘crimes qui meritent la mort’, Loisel notes that vilains are hung whereas

nobles are decapitated (p.79). 22 As this stands, social inequality is preserved, distinguishing

the humiliating fate of the common criminal from the allegedly more honourable death

reserved for the noble traitor. However, ‘où le noble seroit convaincu d’un vilain cas,23 il sera

puny comme vilain’ (p.79). Nobles and vilains alike may be sent to the gallows for

particularly degrading crimes.24 Nonetheless, the general tenor of French customs is that in

criminal convictions, the vilain suffers greater corporal punishment and a different kind of

shame from that which is visited upon the noble. Typically, the noble is stripped of his

honour and of his right to witness in court, whereas the vilain loses a limb or indeed his life

altogether (p.79). The noble is more likely to be kept alive so as to prolong publically his fall

from grace and to accentuate the dishonour brought upon his house; the vilain is humiliated

through physical torture. The customary tradition mediated by Loisel thus presents a cluster

of local social and judicial cultures which preserve a hierarchy of noble over vilain, and

stratify punishments accordingly, in all but the most extreme acts of criminality.

Despite this apparently monolithic conservatism, a modicum of social mobility is

equally present in the Institutes coustumieres. The vilain, we learn, is occasionally able to

distance himself from seigneurial authority. There are, according to Loisel, two routes out of

vilenage. The first is through an exceptional act of sovereign grace. In rare instances,

customary law envisaged monarchs exercising their exclusive privilege to knight members of

the lower orders. As Loisel remarks: ‘D’un vilain, autre que le Roy ne peut faire Chevalier’

(Institutes coustumieres, p.3). Here the king raises the vilain to a status for which, according

to folk wisdom, he is wholly unprepared (‘Car vilain ne sçait que valent esperons’). The

second (and more probable) route out of vilenage concerns a geographical displacement: the

vilain moves from a rural to an urban environment and eventually joins the bourgeoisie,

thereby escaping the jurisdiction of the rural seigneur. Loisel is at pains to affirm that the

status of bourgeois is not instantaneously acquired but rather a mark of hard-earned

distinction and betterment: ‘Droict de bourgeoisie s’acquiert par demeure par an et iour, ou

l’une conquise, l’autre conquérante, l’une laborieuse, économe; l’autre dépouillant le travailleur du peu qu’il

avait pu amasser, lui prenant à la fois son temps, sa liberté, son argent, prodigue d’un avoir qui n’était pas le

sien, et faisant du nom même de vilain une injure pour flétrir l’ordre et l’économie.’ 21

For instance, Le Roman de Rou, v.5983ff. 22

Cf. Bartholus, ‘Nobiles ex consuetudine non suspenduntur, nec patiuntur viles poenas’ (ad. Leg. 28, Dig. De

poenis). On hanging and decapitation, see generally Nicole Gonthier, Le Châtiment du crime au moyen âge

(Rennes, 1998), esp. pp.146-56 23

Though not a precise technical expression, ‘vilain cas’ was used by medieval jurists such as Philippe de

Beaumanoir to indicate crimes of exceptional wickedness. Here the expression likely corresponds to the legal

category of ‘crimes et enormes excès’ including ‘violence publique, vol, rapine, sacrilège’: see Gonthier, Le

Châtiment du crime au moyen âge, p.17. Vilains serments, or blasphemies, as Gonthier remarks (p.141) were

punishable by mutilation of the tongue. 24

Dupin and Laboulaye list various sources, Institutes coustumières, II, p.219.

6

par adveu, és lieux où il y a droict de parcours et entrecours’ (pp.2-3).25 The passage from

lowly vilain to honourable burgher with full rights of citizenship is acquired slowly and only

in a limited number of municipalities. Yet, as Loisel’s pithy Institutes obliquely hints, in the

eyes of the law vilains at least have the potential to become something other – something

better – than impoverished non-noble roturiers by the early seventeenth century. The final

pointer to the non-noble’s betterment is essentially economic: ‘auiourd’huy, toute personne

peut tenir fiefs: aussi n’annoblissent-ils point: s’il n’y avoient titre de grand dignité’ (p.2).

This maxim is a gesture to a long since noted trend by French jurisconsults: fief ownership, if

not a mark of full nobility,26 has for many generations been open to wealthy roturiers whose

family origins may well have been in vilenage.27 Such persons are well placed, as other jurists

would discuss, to embark upon the complicated socio-legal process of annoblissement: the

securing of nobiliary titles, together with land-ownership and a retirement from all

commercial activity.

Piecing together Loisel’s fragments on non-nobles, we thus uncover the latent

implication that the principle of social mobility has been profoundly subsumed into French

legal custom since the late Middle Ages. Resuming these longue durée trends, Loisel’s

Institutes coustumieres succinctly summarize the legal scope – albeit in most cases severely

limited – for lowly vilains to ascend the social ladder. Though disjointed, fragmentary and

often rudimentary in his coverage, Loisel sketches out key lines of enquiry that would be

developed more fully by his fellow legal humanists. Contemporary jurists would share

Loisel’s concern to establish the positioning of vilains vis-à-vis bourgeois, annoblis and

nobles based on the traditions of French customary law. Reflecting more deeply on these

traditions, however, led to a critical awareness of the historical development of prejudice

towards the vilain from above – with ambivalent levels of detachment from such prejudice.

I.II Historicizing vilain – noble oppositions

Beyond Loisel’s Institutes coustumieres, extant discourse on vilains in French legal

humanism tends not to be found in carefully distilled fragments and aphorisms. Instead, it

must be extracted from legal treatises and historical records concerned with the development

of particular social strata according to the French customary tradition. Usually the primary

focus is the French nobility, its n ’ê , its privileges, and its relationship with lower

social orders: oppositions between the noble and the non-noble are carefully scrutinized, and

defended in many cases – but not uncritically. This is particularly noticeable in discussions of

nobles vis-à-vis vilains. As we have seen, Loisel would perceive in this opposition the

baseline distinction between ‘personnes franches’ in French legal custom from feudal times

onwards; others, such as the historian Louis Le Roy writing at a high level of erudition,

would consider the noble–vilain opposition as one of a number of universal pairs of

contraries that balance political life.28 Yet not all French legal humanists found this pairing so

stable: indeed some would argue that when the historical development of the noblesse is

25

For contemporary accounts of restrictions on bourgeois citizenship in particular citites, see Jean Bodin,

République (1576) I.6; Charles Loyseau, Des Ordres (1610), ch.8; Etienne Pasquier, Les Recherches de la

France (ed.1665), t.IV, chs.5-6. On the legal status of the bourgeois see generally F.B.H. Beaune, Droit

coutumier français, pp.117—65. 26

See for instance Jean Bacquet’s T ’ nn b n , ch.20. 27

See for example Charles Du Moulin, In consuetudines antiq. Parisienses §9, glossa 3 no.3. 28

Le Roy, D L V v n ’ n v (Paris, 1575), f.5v. This text suggests that the

noble-vilain opposition was analogous to the pairs of contraries identified by Arlette Jouanna as mental

opposites which structured Renaissance moral philosophy: mâle-femelle; Dieu-nature; ciel-terre; forme-matière;

vertu-vice (Ordre social: mythes et h rarchies dans la France d V , Paris, 1977, p.109).

7

measured from the present, the category of vilain sits problematically alongside that of noble.

Such difficulties, we shall see, were illustrated most tellingly by Louis Le Caron and Etienne

Pasquier. In markedly different ways, both writers gesture towards the undesirability of

vilains as a conceptual counterfoil to nobles in French legal humanistic thought.

Louis Le Caron

A staunch Gallican, and a legal humanist of some renown, Louis Charondas Le Caron (1536–

1613) was to become an important government official in Clermont en Beauvaisis. A student

of François Baudouin (1520–1573), Le Caron’s academic interests were, like those of his

teacher, oriented towards legal history and the relationship between Roman and French civil

law. Le Caron’s major outputs included a multi-volume Pandectes ou digestes du droict

françois (1587) in which he developed expansive reflections on French customary tradition,

sharpened by philological techniques. Despite its overtly Latinized title, this work did not set

out to demonstrate how French customary law smoothly derived from Roman civic traditions

documented in the Justinian code; on the contrary, Le Caron sought to understand the internal

character and idiosyncrasies of French legal history, through a precise study of vernacular

and vulgar Latin terms. Literary erudition, moreover, garnishes the legal scholarship of Le

Caron’s Pandectes: an aspiring amateur poet, Le Caron may not have had the dazzling talent

of Ronsard,29 but his investigation of legal terminology is, we shall discover, informed by an

unusual poetic bent displaying his Greek ancestry.30

In his Pandectes,31 Le Caron has little time for vilains – but his brief remarks

thereupon are revealing of the philological methods employed by legal humanists to

investigate the history of the French nobility and bourgeoisie. As the origins of the terms

noble and bourgeois were researched by humanists, so the history of the term vilain had

become unsettled. Two competing etymologies were in circulation by the late sixteenth

century. The first, put forward by none other than Jean Bodin in his 1576 République ran

thus:

Iaçoit que par nos coustumes, et par les anciens edicts le mot bourgeois signifie roturier, que

les Nobles appelent vilain, pour estre habitant de ville […].32

In this view, the etymological roots of ‘vilain’ are in ‘ville’; and as such the bourgeoisie are

still dubbed vilains by the rural nobility, insofar as the latter distinguish themselves from

urban-dwellers. For Le Caron, however, such a view is philologically and legally wrong-

headed, if one goes by the writings of ‘les anciens practiciens françois instruicts des

ordonnances, coustumes et moeurs’, including famous coutumes such as the Somme rurale of

Jean Boutellier33 and the Conseil of Pierre de Fontaines. Indeed, one discovers that the term

29

In the florescence of antiquarian scholarship of the late sixteenth century, érudits du roi such as Le Caron,

Loisel and Etienne Pasquier formed, in the words of Kelley, a ‘scholarly Pléiade’ which overlapped in various

ways with Ronsard’s elite circle of poets. Not only did the likes of Pasquier and Le Caron dabble in poetry, but

they could also claim affiliation to the ‘brigade’ which militated for vernacular culture in the 1550s. See Kelley,

Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, pp.245-6. 30

Le Caron was proud of his Greek heritage: his paternal ancestors were Greeks who came to France in the

fifteenth century and successfully established themselves in the Paris region. On Le Caron’s background and

career, see Roelker, One King, One Faith, pp.32-3. 31

Edition consulted: Pandectes ou digestes du droit françois, par Loys Charondas Le Caron (Lyon, 1593). 32

Bodin, République, ed. Christiane Frémont, Marie-Dominique Couzinet and Henri Rochais, 6 vols (Paris,

1986), I, p.118. The insistence that this distinction is one made specifically by gentilshommes is also made by

jurists such as François Ragueau and, as will be shown, Etienne Pasquier. 33

Le Caron produced a 1611 edition of this work.

8

vilain derives from the vulgar Latin term villanus frequently used by the clerks of old to

denote inhabitants of the villa – which, in vernacular terms, amounted to ‘roturiers estans de

condition vilaine, c’est à dire sujects des seigneurs, és terres desquels ils sont couchans et

levans’ (p.165). Le Caron is at pains to stress that medieval compilers of customs

differentiated vilains, as hitherto defined, from unfree serfs. Above the latter, vilains figured

among free persons of different ‘qualitez et conditions’: they were the lowliest group of

freemen, behind other miscellaneous ‘francs hommes’, ‘francs bourgeois’, and finally,

‘Gentilshommes’ (p.165). Frustratingly, for Le Caron, such gradation has long since become

obscured by the false etymology that mistakenly makes vilain a derivative of ville (p.161). In

Le Caron’s view, this would suggest that vilains originally designated inhabitants of urban

settlements – a notion wholly unsubstantiated in French coutumes. Vilain is thus not a marker

of urban origin, as some have clumsily suggested (‘mal et ineptement’);34 it is rather a sign of

low rural station, ‘vilenage, ou de loy vilaine’ (p.165). Only once the vilain is affluent enough

to purchase a fief can he be said to be exempt from vilenage;35 but this in no sense ennobles

him and is at most a sign of his increased independence (pp.165-6).

Given these confusions surrounding the lower orders, Le Caron thinks it best to

abandon the term vilain when contrasting them with the nobility. Whilst he seems to share Le

Roy’s belief that the noble–non-noble opposition is a universal constant of civilized societies,

Le Caron is unwilling to use vilain as a catch-all epithet for anyone who does not belong to

the noblesse. French legal history shows him otherwise: in customary law, vilain pertains

only to rustics bound by the antiquated feudal system of vilenage. An urban bourgeois is

certainly not a vilain, in the eyes of the law; but despite allowing for various possible

differentiations of rank, French customary tradition has invariably recognized all those of

non-noble condition – bourgeois and vilains alike – as a single entity to be contrasted with

the nobility. An alternative term must be found to provide a general designation of non-

nobles valid across France’s legal history. The word Le Caron selects for this purpose is

ignobles: a word which is, he concedes, undesirably close to its Latin origins.36 Yet on this

matter Le Caron baldly states that he is not going to be a philological purist: ‘I’ayme mieux

emprunter ce mot du Latin, que dire vilains’ (p.163). Methodologically, Le Caron bases his

historical overview of the lower social orders on a noble–non-noble opposition which runs

much deeper than the strict legal category of vilain would allow. Ignoble is the preferred

term, since morphologically it suggests the eventual inverse of all that is noble.37 For Le

Caron, the concepts of noble and ignoble imply both similarity and difference; divergent

fortunes from a primordial point origin preceeding social gradation of ‘estat’ and ‘condition’

(p.163). Here Le Caron brings ideological considerations to the fore: how to justify and

universalize the social and moral superiority of the nobility over the plebs in French culture –

in other words, how to make social differences correlate with disparities of innate aptitudes.38

34

Le Caron does not directly name Bodin – ostensibly the target here. 35

Here Le Caron cites ‘un Guido le plus vieil de tous’ (p.165), potentially the thirteenth-century Italian jurist

Guido da Suzzara (c.1225-1292). 36

Ignobiles was one of many Latin terms used by medieval jurists to connote the free non-noble population;

others included franci homines, laici, liberi homines. See Beaune, Introduction à l'étude historique du droit

coutumier français, p.360. 37

For a parallel example of such inversion of nobility, retaining vilain, see Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Les Mimes,

enseignements et proverbes (1576), ed. Jean Vignes (Geneva, 1992), p.245: ‘vilains de race’. 38

Elsewhere Le Caron maintains that one need not speak of social gradation: philosophical reasoning and

examples are sufficient to demonstrate that human diversity stems from the ‘nature’, or ‘premiere condition’

into which individuals are born (Questions diverses, 1579). On ideologies of innate superiority, maintained by

Renaissance nobles de race, see Jouanna, Ordre social, esp. ch.1; more generally, see her earlier work, L’ ée

de race en France au XVIe siecle et au début du XVIIe (Montpellier, 1981), and André Devyver, Le Sang épuré:

les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l'Ancien Régime, 1560-1720 (Brussels, 1973).

9

This, Le Caron soon admits, is a thorny philosophical debate into which he would

rather not venture too deep. Thus he opts for a standard, classically based theory of natural

inequality: ‘nature’ has made some (‘nobles’) to command and others (‘ignobles’) to obey;

and this natural order of difference became foundational to human society through ‘l’utiltié

ou necessité publique’ (p.163). These arguments derive from Plato (Republic 3.414b-415e)

and Aristotle (Politics 1 1253b-1255b).39 Greek philosophy, Le Caron implies, can rightly

illuminate the history of nobles and non-nobles in French legal custom. At this point Le

Caron adduces arguments derived (as he acknowledges in marginal notes) from Johannes

Stobaeus’s extensive anthology, and latterly, from the pseudo-Plutarchan treatise Pro

nobilitate.40 In any society, he claims, those who originally obtained the title of ‘Noble’ were

so named on account of their ‘prouesse’ and ‘vertus’; or simply because they were ‘les plus

renommez et mieux cogneus’ among the founders of ‘citez’ and ‘republiques’ (p.163).

Whatever their initial advantages, it is clear to Le Caron that they consolidated their noblesse

in two ways: lineage and action. Paraphrasing Euripides in French,41 Le Caron intimates that

Excellente est la marque entre les hommes, d’estre

De bonne souche né,

Et dignes fait paroistre

De Noblesse le nom, augmentant leur succez. (p.163)

On the one hand, nobles are equipped for greatness by their outstanding forbears. On this

point Le Caron alludes to the Homeric example of Ulysses transmitting his aptitudes through

his semen to his son Telemachus, ‘la vertu du pere decoullée en l’enfant’ (p.163).42

Those of

high birth are certainty worthy of the title noble; but better still is the highborn who actively

exercises his ancestral virtues transmitted biologically from father to son. As this pattern is

repeated over time, each new generation reinforces and augments the moral and social

excellence of the family. Nobility, therefore, is at once a matter of being and doing.

This typological reasoning lies at the crux of Le Caron’s thinking on the terms noble

and ignoble. Just as the noble is advantaged by successive generations of distinguished

ancestors, so the ignoble enters life with a formidable ancestral setback accreted over

centuries (p.163). Le Caron outlines how the ignoble person’s forefathers were destined for

39

The Platonic myth of the ‘noble lie’ in Republic 3 tells of the presence of divinely forged metals in the souls

of citizens. The metals vary: gold, silver, iron, and bronze (415a). This inequality of metals is used to justify

inequality of souls (as opposed to bodies): each person accepts that the quality of their soul requires

acquiescence about their place in the social hierarchy. According to Jouanna, this myth was adduced frequently

in late Renaissance France as an authoritative argument in favour of natural inequality (Ordre social, p.32). In

Politics 1 1253b-1255b, Aristotle considers the political relations of ruling and being ruled as consequences of

nature, examining different forms of rule (including despotic rule of the master over the slave). For a discussion

of Aristotle’s ensuing justification of slavery in terms of property and nature, see Fred Miller, ‘Naturalism’, in

The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, eds. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield

(Cambridge, 2000), pp.321-43. 40

This treatise was largely the work of Arnoldus Ferronus, Plutarchi Chaeronei Pro Nobilitate Libri

Fragmentum (Lyon, Gryphius 1556), one of several additions to the edition of Plutarch’s works in Latin

translations by various hands published by Gryphius. Ferronus, as David Blank has shown, was not so much

seeking to advance the cause of the hereditary nobility directly, as convince them that debates on vera nobilitas

should be grounded in philosophical considerations: See Blank, ‘“Plutarch” and the Sophistry of “Noble

Lineage”’, in Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature, ed. Javier Martínez (Madrid, 2011), pp.33-61. 41

The immediate source is Stobaeus, widely available from the mid sixteenth century in bilingual Greek and

Latin editions such as those by Conrad Gesner: see for instance Joannis Stobei sententiae ex thesauris

graecorum (Zurich, 1543), Sermo LXXXVI, f.441r. One should note that Euripidean tragic characters test a

range of positions on nobility, questioning whether high birth is necessary condition of virtue. On questions of

inherited equality / inequality, in classical Athenian Tragedy, see Paul Woodruff, First Democracy: The

Challenge of an Ancient Idea (New York and Oxford, 2005), pp.127-43. 42

Ps-Plutarch (Ferronus), Plutarchi chaeronei pro nobilitate libri fragmentum, p.8.

10

baseness in one of two ways. Firstly, in the civic sphere, they esteemed mediocrity, shunning

‘entreprises excellentes et memorables’ and contenting themselves with ‘plus basses

vacations’. 43

Consequently, their name made no impression on the historical record, and

their families slipped into obscurity.44

Secondly, the vagaries of war left them in bondage, or

else some ‘autre infortune et calamité’ – Le Caron is briskly vague as to what this might

entail – confined them to a low social condition thereafter. Le Caron does not at this point

enter into a detailed discussion of servitude. Instead, inspired again by Greek tragedy (this

time Sophocles) he ultimately attibutes social inequality to the inscrutable workings of Fate.45

This universalizing reflection is not left in tragic suspense, however, as Le Caron endeavours

to ground it in a historicizing philological claim about the various non-noble persons who

would eventually populate France over the Middle Ages. The history of French ignobles is

traceable though the word roturiers: the term roturier points to those whose ‘vacation’ has

for centuries been agricultural labour or ‘arts qu’on appelle mecaniques’ (p.163).46

Le Caron

elaborates with little subtlety on the theme of combined social and moral vileness among the

artisanal classes, in contrast (as we shall see) to future jurists such as Charles Loyseau.

Instead, his concern is to underscore how a priori postulates about ignobility deriving from

Greek philosophy and literature translate into the social and political particulars of France’s

non-noble classes. For Le Caron, the vilain is but one category of ‘viles personnes’. The term

vilain is, in his view, too narrow, too restricted to rural peasants of France’s feudal past for it

to be serviceable in the jurist’s efforts to discern a general categorization of France’s lower

orders in the late sixteenth century. For Le Caron, the vilain is but a footnote in the history of

France’s ignoble ‘roturiers’ or ‘plebeiens’; a historty which culminates, he briefly remarks, in

their formation of a political body – the ‘tiers estat’ – which subsumes all of these other

categories (p.163).

Louis Le Caron’s attitude to vilains is that of the academic legal historian and

philologist temporarily distracted from a more major intellectual quarry: reflections on the

non-noble and the socio-legal conditions of his ennoblement. Le Caron’s Pandectes argue

that historically, the division between ignobles and nobles is a fundamental tenet of French

customary law and an organizing principle of French society; yet social mobility, from roture

to noblesse is by no means legally impossible. In an age of fierce debate over legitimate

criteria of nobility and of ennoblement, the Pandectes state that those ennobled by royal

parchment, verified in the Chambre des Comptes, are bona fide nobles in the eyes of the law.

For in Le Caron’s view, the ritual of royal ‘anoblissement’ is much more than an official rite

of passage; it has a quasi-sacerdotal character. It cleanses the anobli of ‘toute la tache et

macule de la condition roturiere’ (p.163); henceforth, the ennobled can consider himself as if

he had never been of ignoble status.47

Drawing on the theological language of pollution and

43

In a Panégyrique dedicated to Charles IX (1566), Le Caron makes a more overt correspondence between

innate aptitudes and social function: some are born for ‘chevalerie’ whereas others are naturally inclined

towards agriculture, artisanal trades, commerce etc: see Jouanna, Ordre social, p.22. 44

Compare with François de l’Alouëte: ‘gens inconnus, sans gloire et sans honneur, et en un mot, Ignobles, afin

que la gloire et lumière des Nobles soit d’autant plus renommée et remarquée d’honneur, dignité et excellence’.

Traité des nobles et des vertus dont ils sont formés: leur charge, vocation, rang et degree (Paris, 1577), f.20r. 45

Sourced from Stobaeus: Joannis Stobei sententiae ex thesauris graecorum, ed. Gesner, ‘Sermo LXXXIII’,

f.438r. 46

As William Sewell has shown, the mechanical arts in the Ancien Régime comprised all trades and crafts

which pertained more to the hand than to the mind – and were judged to be morally as well as socially vile

occupations. See Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848

(Cambridge, 1980), pp.22-3. 47

Here Le Caron draws on the Roman civic practice of restituere natablibus (restoring to original state), as

formulated by the jurisconsult Marcian in the Digest: ‘Interdum et servi nati, ex post facto Juris interventu,

ingenui fiunt. Ut ecce, si libertinus a Principe natalibus suis restitutus fuerit. Illis enim utique natalibus

restituitur, in quibus initio omnes homines fuerunt; non in quibus ipse nascitur, quum servus natus esset’.

11

cleansing, of original sin and rebirth, Le Caron thus speaks reverentially of the anobli granted

letters of nobility which raise him – legally at least – to the rank of a gentilhomme. But in

order to qualify for ennoblement at all, one must have no trace of ‘viles personnes’, nor of

‘servile condition’, in one’s ancestral documents (p.164). In short, to those roturiers seeking

betterment, proof of dissociation from all persons considered vile – artisans, peasants, serfs –

was a practical necessity as much as an ideological bent. As will become apparent, Le Caron

was not alone in these matters. They would come to the attention Etienne Pasquier, arguably

the most thorough sixteenth-century legal humanist investigating the origins of France’s

various social classes.

Etienne Pasquier

One of the most celebrated magistrates of his day, Etienne Pasquier (1529–1615) inhabited

the same professional circles as Le Caron and Loisel, with whom he was well acquainted.48

Pasquier’s legal cursus was exemplary: he had studied under several masters, including

Baudouin, François Hotman, Cujas, and Andrea Alciato; by 1549 he had begun a legal career

in the Parlement de Paris that took him to the high office of avocat-général in the Chambre

des Comptes. Before he tasted success as a practising lawyer, Pasquier had already attracted

some renown as a man of letters and learning, associating with the likes of Ronsard and

Montaigne. However, it was neither poetry nor essaying that distinguished Pasquier as a

writer; it was in the field of historical scholarship that he made his mark. His towering output,

Les Rercherches de la France, published between 1560 and 1621, pioneered one of the most

original and ambitious intellectual projects of the French Renaissance.49

Almost sixty years in

the making, Pasquier’s history book could not be confined to the genre of history: it was, in

the words of Donald Kelley, to become a compendium of monographs on all facets of French

culture.50

Nestled within this compendious work one discovers diverse contributions on French

legal history and its relationship to the origins of France’s social hierarchy. The figure of the

vilain does not delay Pasquier for long in these investigations of legal and social customs;

nevertheless, his laconic observations, like those of Le Caron and Loisel, are similarly

revealing of quandaries over the category of vilain emerging in late Renaissance thought. As

we have seen, Loisel and Le Caron both situated their material on vilains within a broad,

universalizing enquiry into spirit of French legal customs since medieval times. Pasquier does

likewise, save that his ultimate quarry is even broader: French culture and language of the

past at large. For Pasquier, the history of words had to be handled with extreme caution.

Language, like positive law, was in his view not the product of reason but of vagrant human

Titulus XI ‘De natalibus restituendis’, Pandectae Justinianeae, 24 vols, ed. R. Pothier (Paris, 1818-23), II,

p.887. Other humanists and jurists such as Guillaume Budé and Charles Loyseau would scrutinize this practice

in their reflections on ennoblement. 48

Many studies exist on Pasquier’s social circle and his Recherches. Of general relevance to the present study

are: George Huppert, ‘A Matter of Quality: The Pasquier Family Between Bourgeoisie and Noblesse’,

Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques, 27 (2001), 183-99; Étienne Pasquier et ses Recherches de la

France [11 studies published as Cahiers V.L. Saulnier 8] (Paris, 1991); Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History:

Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana IL and London, 1970); Kelley,

Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, ch.10; Paul Bouteiller, Un historien du XVIe siècle: Étienne

Pasquier (Abbeville, 1945). 49

All references are to the modern critical edition, Les Recherches de la France, by Marie-Madelaine

Fragonard, François Roudaut, and others, 3 vols (Paris, 1996). This edition is based on the 1665 text, and

incorporates variants of earlier editions. 50

Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, p.271.

12

opinion, capable of generating misunderstandings and conflicts on a formidable scale.51

The

term vilain is a case in point. Like Le Caron, Pasquier insists on a philological approach – but

his findings, we shall see, display a very different kind of historical consciousness vis-à-vis

Le Caron’s Pandectes. For Pasquier, the history of French socio-legal language is far less

settled than Le Caron’s analysis would admit. In particular, the pairings noble–roturier, and,

conspicuously, noble–vilain appear fraught with ideological baggage which the jurist-

historian must handle with care.

In his wide-ranging investigation of ‘Nobles’, ‘Gens-d’armes’, ‘Roturiers’, ‘Vilains’,

and ‘Chevaliers’ (Recherches, I, bk.2 ch.17), Pasquier considers the term vilain to have

currency in the present – insofar as it sheds light on the defensive mentalities of the

traditional French nobility. The noblesse, his research shows, has been under pressure for

many centuries. The feudal structures on which their privileges rested – namely possession of

fiefs in recompense for military service – have been profoundly eroded over the ‘mutations’

of time (Recherches, I, bk.2 ch.16). The vassal descendents of the ancient nobility now

include ‘gens roturiers’ who possess fiefs in their own right: fief holding is no longer a legal

criterion of noble distinction. Other criteria, Pasquier acknowledges, have taken precedence:

these notably include exemption from the taille and its corollary, nonparticipation in

commerce or artisanal trade. Nevertheless, it is the ancient obligation of military service to

the crown which Pasquier signals as the central tenet of cultural superiority stubbornly

defended by the n b ’ . The military life has been upheld ‘religieusement’ for

centuries by large sections of the nobility, notes Pasquier with a twinge of irony.52

Such

reverence for arms bearing, he claims, resulted in a critical demographic shift whereby

ancient noble families began to establish country residences (Recherches, I, bk.2 ch.17).

These isolated rural seats had a twofold appeal: firstly they distanced the noble from the vile

commercial activities of the towns he so despised; and secondly, they provided a setting in

which soldierly virtues, courage, boldness and valour, could be tested through a range of

physical disciplines and blood sports.

This turn toward a quasi-military ‘vie champestre’ had, in Pasquier’s account, a

profound impact on French perception of noble–non-noble identities. For Pasquier, the

divisions that emerged with the social class of gentilshommes des champs were not only

social, but linguistic and ideological:

Ainsi noz Gentilshommes, qui establissent le principal point de leur Noblesse sur les armes,

s’endurcissans aux champs, au travail, appellerent Villains ceux, qui habitoient mollement dedans les

villes, dont s’est depuis faite une distinction generalle des Estats entre nous. Les uns estans appelez

Gentils hommes, qui sont les Nobles, et les autres Villains qui sont de condition Roturiere. (I, p.481)

Here Pasquier propounds a substantially different etymology of noble and vilain from that of

fellow legal humanists such as Le Caron. Proffering a similar yet more expansive etymology

to the one adumbrated by the likes of Bodin and Ragueau, Pasquier appears to accept what Le

Caron could not: namely that the origin of vilain is intrinsically linked to the word ville. In

51

See generally Kelley, ‘Legal Humanism and the Sense of History’, Studies in the Renaissance, 13 (1966),

184-99. 52

The rareficiation of knighthood from the fourteenth century has been characterized as a demilitarisation of the

noblesse by historians such as John Bell Henneman and March Bloch. Nevertheless, more recent studies suggest

that in certain regions, particularly Upper Normandy and Brittany, the noblesse remained highly militarized in

1470. See Gareth Prosser, ‘The Later medieval French noblesse’, in France in the Later Middle Ages 1200-

1500, ed. David Potter (Oxford, 2003), pp.182-209. As historians such as Ellery Schalk has shown, nobility was

still widely held as a profession or function in the sixteenth-century: to be noble one has to fight. See Schalk,

From Valor to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton,

1986).

13

this view, vilain, is not, as Le Caron argued, a legal category of person in a declining system

of feudal relations; rather it a social term which continues to have lively pejorative moral

connotations in the sixteenth century. We should note that the ‘villains’ reportedly derided by

the rural nobility are urban commoners, not rustic lowborns elsewhere designated as vilains

under the feudal system. This is not altogether surprising: as Arlette Jouanna has shown,

Renaissance rural nobles despised the menial work of the lowest urban artisans more than the

agricultural labours of peasants. Gentilshommes des champs tended to recognize that the

peasant farmer exercised an essential if vile function on their country estates; such an affinity

did not extend to the lowborn workers of towns and cities.53

Yet the real targets of derision

here, Pasquier hints, are not to be found among the lowest urban orders. Their impoverished

existence is hardly the soft lifestyle of ‘delice’ and ‘oysivete’ (I, p.481) which compares

unfavourably with the purportedly austere but disciplined lives of the gentilshommes des

champs. The ‘villains’ scoffed at by the latter are, Pasquier deduces, in fact men of his own

class: cultured lawyers and judges leading an urbane, lettered existence far removed from the

physical exertions of country nobles. Seeing himself as a potential object of ridicule – a faint-

hearted city ‘villain’ – Pasquier swiftly adopts a critical stance:

Quant à moy je ne me suis point icy proposé de vilipender les Estats de ceux qui suivent la robbe

longue, n’y generalement de ceux qui se sont habituez és villes clauses: Car en ce faisant serois-je

traistre et prevaricateur contre moy-mesme. (I, p.481)

The magistrate cuts to the chase. Dissociating himself from the gentilshommes des champs,

Pasquier refuses to condone any ideological and linguistic manoeuvres that would vilify

urban-dwellers en masse – and men of the long robe in particular. Pasquier’s desire not to

betray his sense of urban pride may be further illustrated by consulting his published

correspondence, his Lettres familieres (1586). In this rich volume showcasing his nuanced

and varied epistolary style, we find him urging a wealthy friend to spend more time in the

city. The correspondent in question, Guilluame de Marillac, Sieur de Ferrières,54

is, we

gather, little inclined to venture outside of his pleasant estates: Pasquier imagines him

alienated from cities and towns on account of their abundant ‘vice’ and ‘envie’. Yet, in

Pasquier’s view, there is still much to recommend urban life. The city is a hive of activity:

En villes affluent les grandes traffiques, non seulement des marchandises, ains des esprits; ès villes

sejourne le mechanique industrieux; ès villes heberge le grand Magistrat, qui est la bride et retenail de

tout le peuple; ès villes les bonnes lettres et disciplines par lesquelles nous nous rendons excellents par

dessus tout le commun peuple […].55

Perorating with controlled verve, Pasquier resumes the economic and intellectual advantages

of vita urbana over vita rustica for the affluent jurist humanist. With an unapologetic sense of

superiority he gestures to the learned and civilized world of the urban elites – the circles of

aspiring lawyers and magistrates within which he moved. Pasquier was a member of the

‘scholarly Pléiade’ of jurists that included the likes of Loisel, Le Caron, Pierre Pithou and

Claude Fauchet; he also interacted in several elite cenacles, including the Palace Academy of

53

See Jouanna, Ordre social, pp.62-3. 54

Marillac (d.1573) held the high office of contrôleur général des finances, and was also a distinguished knight

who fought notably in the Battle of Moncontour (1569) in the third War of Religion. 55

Pasquier, Lettres familieres, ed. D. Thickett (Geneva, 1974): ‘Lettre à Monsieur de Marillac, Sieur de

Ferrieres, Conseiller du Roy et maistre en sa Chambre des Comptes de Paris’, pp.35-6.

14

Henri III,56

the literary salons the De Thous in and the Du Puys in Paris,57

and that of

Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches in Poitiers. 58

These, he informs us, are worlds where

excellence and status centre on a shared culture of classical ‘bonnes lettres’, from which the

plebs are excluded. The merchant and the industrious artisan, though integral to urban

prosperity, are like the rural ‘laboureur’ too busy scraping a living to aspire to excellence in

the Republic of Letters at the same level as men of Pasquier’s condition. Yet those educated

professionals who have retired to their country estates also risk isolating and excluding

themselves from the flourishing city gatherings of érudits, warns Pasquier. Rejecting classical

tropes of pastoral tranquillity,59

he urges landowners such as Marillac not to lose touch with

those urban circles which are the vanguard of intellectual freedom. For Pasquier, the country

life is certainly not to be shunned entirely; indeed the occasional country break affords a

salutary ‘parenthese’ from the frenetic pace of the city. Nevertheless, he frankly admits his

fears that those who become too attached to their rural seats allow all too often neglect to

cultivate their minds.

In his Lettres familieres, Pasquier presents himself as a scholarly lawyer whose sense

of intellectual and social preeminence is rooted in the urbs. Returning to his Recherches, we

discover that such inclinations feed into wider debates on the essence of nobility, vera

nobilitas, in late sixteenth-century France. The conceptual asymmetry of urban and rural life

which in Pasquier’s view has irrevocably coloured the word pair of noble and vilain is deeply

objectionable to an urban jurist, as it implies that ‘estre Noble’ and ‘faire sa ressance és

villes’ are ‘chose incompatibles’ (Recherches, I, p.481). It smacks of a particular interest

group, the n b ’ , seeking to manipulate ordinary language – and thereby common

opinion – for their own exclusive ends. As such, this is, for Pasquier, a salient instance of the

old elites endeavouring to protect, as their ancestors had done, their noble status from

outsiders seeking entry – namely men of ‘la robbe longue’ such as himself. Reacting against

this trend, Pasquier adopts a provocative stance: ‘tout homme en tout estat, qui fait profession

de vertu et de vie sans reproche, est Noble, sans exception’ (I, p.481). Nobility, he opines, is

essentially a moral quality enacted in the present, not a biologically inherited disposition to

virtue. True nobility exists irrespectively of socio-legal status; it depends neither one’s own

present condition, nor on that of one’s ancestors.60

Yet Pasquier immediately tempers his

apparent radicalism: it is morally and indeed politically expedient, he avers, to acknowledge

‘degrez des ordres’ in public, in the interests of good governance. French society, he insists,

requires a gradation of ‘degrez’, a juridically defined hierarchy of social orders; however, it

should also recognize moral excellence.61

Pasquier’s civic ideal is a meritocracy in which any

injustice originating in past inequality is effaced from present cultural memory by exemplary

citizenship. Men who show themselves to be ‘plus meritoires’, and whose conduct inspires

others ‘à bien faire’, are those for whom ‘le tiltre de Noble’ should be reserved (I, p.481).

56

On Pasquier’s participation in the Palace Academy of 1574-6, see Robert Sealy, The Palace Academy of

Henry III (Geneva, 1981); more generally see Frances Yates, The French Academies of The Sixteenth-Century

(London, 1947). 57

See Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, pp.245-7. 58

On Pasquier’s visit to the salon of the Des Roches during the 1579 grands jours of Poitiers, see Anne Larsen,

‘The French Humanist Scholars’, in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina Wilson

(Athens GA, 1987), pp.232-59. 59

Here Pasquier goes against a prominent literary-philosophical inclination of many of his jursist peers (for

example Guy du Faur de Pibrac, Nicolas Rapin and René Choppin) who praised the salubriousness of country

life and labours often along Horatian and Virgilian lines. 60

This line of argument, Jouanna has shown, was adapted to suit a range of positions on superiority of the

noblesse de race: see both Ordre social and L’ dée de race. 61

See Jouanna, ‘Mythes d’origine et ordre social dans Les Recherches de la France’, in Étienne Pasquier et ses

Recherches de la France, pp. 105-19 (116).

15

But who are such men? One should tread cautiously here, as Pasquier’s text raises as

many questions as it provides answers. At first Pasquier seems to defer outright to

distinguished warriors (I, p.481), suggesting that ‘ceux qui exposent leur vie pour le salut de

nous tous’ in armed combat are more deserving of the title of noble than anyone else. In

particular, he stresses the latter qualify ahead of men of the long robe who languish about the

law courts and sharpen their quills on mundane ‘affaires de justice’ (I, pp.481-2). Why does

Pasquier at this point take a sideswipe at the legal profession when, we recall, his earlier

stated aim was not to vilify himself and fellow jurists? Instead, we now have to explain why

he now opens up a series of ironic oppositions which praise the military through mocking the

custodians of the law (I, p.482). Whilst the former are summoned to battle by clarion call, the

latter are roused to action by ‘la clameur d’un Huissier’; the soldier expends his energy amid

canon and artillery, whilst lawyers ‘s’estoquent à coups de canons et de Loix’. Soldiers enjoy

the spoils of war, but the lawyer sinisterly exploits much more dubious and lucrative sources

of wealth, ‘le plus du temps tirées de la ruine des pauvres sujets du Roy’. Work done by

Arlette Jouanna suggests that these comic parallels are developed largely from traditional

sources contrasting the jurisconsult unfavourably with the army commander.62

Whilst avarice

was an age-old complaint against the legal professions, similarities with contemporary late

Renaissance texts may also be observed.63

Pasquier’s denunciation of the iniquitous greed

that ostensibly ravaged his profession is echoed by his friend and fellow inside critic, Michel

de Montaigne. Reacting vehemently against the chicanery he perceived among officeholders

in the judiciary, Montaigne denounced

une nation, où par legitime coustume la charge de juger se vende, et les jugements soyent payez à purs

deniers contans, et où legitimement la justice soit refusée à qui n'a dequoy la payer, et aye cette

marchandise si grand credit, qu’il se face en une policeun quatriesme estat, de gens maniants les

procés, pour le joindre aux trois anciens, de l’Eglise, de la Noblesse et du Peuple; lequel estat, ayant la

charge des loix et souveraine authorité des biens et des vies, face un corps à part de celuy de la

noblesse. (Essais I.23, p.117-18A)

Pasquier’s Recherches cast similar doubts on the moral legitimacy of this increasingly potent

‘Fourth Estate’ of venal officiers, seeking to become a separatist noblesse de robe64 to rival

the established Second Estate of n b ’ . However, Pasquier’s epideictic rhetoric is

perhaps less one-sided than that of Montaigne in Essais I.23.65 In contrast to the essayist,

Pasquier is prepared to suggest that both warriors and jurists are motivated by a sense of

‘honneur’ – but the latter all too often deviate from professional probity during careers that

provide ‘infinies richesses’ through corruption (p.482). Jurisprudence, for Pasquier, is not

intrinsically evil; but jurist are likely to be (morally speaking) vile than in any sense noble.

62

For instance, Cicero, Pro Murena 22; more generally, see Jouanna, L’ . 63

For a discussion of these continuities, see Patterson, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France

(Oxford, forthcoming 2015), ch.4. Pasquier himself waged war on venality of office in his later career, as

evinced by his Lettres historiques pour les années 1556-1594, ed. Dorothy Thickett (Gevena, 1966), pp.247,

261. See also Lucien Karpik, French Lawyers: A Study in Collective Action, 1274 to 1994, trans. Nora Scott

(Oxford, 1999). 64

The indexes of the 1607 edition of Les Recherches de la France present the first recorded usage of the term

noblesse de robe. Some would argue that the concept of a robe nobility dates back to the late fifteenth century,

when ennoblement of lawyers first began to have a visible social impact: see Françoise Autrand, N n ’ n

g n ’E : g n P n P , 1345-1454 (Paris, 1981), esp. pp.167, 248-61.

Neverthless, the concept of noblesse de robe was still in its infancy in the late sixteenth century, let alone (as

Pasquier suggests) the notion that it entailed a prestige on a par with n b ’ ; hence my reluctance to

speak of a two-stream nobility in the late Renaissance, as would develop in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries. 65

On Pasquier’s reading of Montaigne, see generally Catherine Magnien, ‘Etienne Pasquier, lecteur de

Montaigne’, in Montaigne et Henri IV (1595-1995), ed. Claude-Gilbert Dubois (Biarritz, 1996), pp.65-85.

16

Yet, curiously, in Pasquier’s account, this does not work fully to the advantage of those

claiming to be nobility of the sword. Jouanna arguably overstates Pasquier’s deference to the

n b ’ in her otherwise astute analysis of this passage (Ordre social, pp.60-1).

Although Pasquier attributes the military with a heroic moral superiority, he also insinuates

that it conspicuously lags behind the legal professions in other respects – particularly in

economic matters. The soldier thinks only of a transcendent, glorious death, whereas the

lawyer steadily works to consolidate his mundane power. The soldier’s life is one of ‘maux’

and ‘rudesses’, with few material rewards compared with the jurist; yet those of military

vocation make light of their troubles if only their deeds are deemed honourable and noble.

With ambivalent irony, Pasquier remarks, ‘c’est le moins qu’ils puissent faire durant leur vie,

que de se flatter de cette opinion de Noblesse, par dessus le reste du peuple’ (Recherches, I,

p.482). Military virtue, Pasquier seems to imply, is inseparable from praise thereof;66 but

commendation of the n b ’ rests only on the unsolid foundations of ‘opinion’,

private and public. This ephemerality, furthermore, contrasts sardonically with the tangible

lucre that rolls into the jurist’s coffers. The lawyer, as it were, may humour warriors in their

search of titles and esteem – he has plenty of pecuniary recompense that speaks for itself

without needing further signa exteriora of honour.67 As such (and Pasquier now addresses his

jurist peers directly), ‘nous ne devons point envier au gendarme, qu’il se donne quelque

prerogative de Noblesse, moyennant qu’il ne se laisse point piper d’une folle imagination

fondée en la memoire de ses ancestres’ (I, p.483). For Pasquier, nobility is not about race and

action, as Le Caron had argued in his Pandectes. Rather, noblesse only has public credibility

as military valour exemplified in the present. Memories of ancestral greatness count for

nothing unless there is a demonstrable effort to surpass or at least equal one’s noble

forefathers (I, p.483).68

Pasquier’s study of nobles vis-à-vis vilains in his Recherches thus proves to be highly

equivocal, with no guileless articulation of his political and social allegiances. Instead, his

text operates in ludic fashion, caricaturing and debasing the notion of a long-robed, jurist

nobility, and, latterly, the idea of an irreproachable noblesse ’ . Pasquier shows much

less interest than his peers Loisel and Le Caron in the legal categorization of different social

orders one may glean from coutumess of the past. In his history of nobles, vilains, and

roturiers, his chief concerns are to demonstrate how long-established lingusitc and cultural

trends connect with ulterior debates over vera nobilitas in the present – issues which would

be of close personal interest. Over the sixty years of writing his Recherches, Pasquier himself

began to pursue ennoblement: in 1574 he acceded to the status of anobli by royal lettres

patentes. Yet, as George Huppert has argued, this accession is conspicuously absent in

Pasquier’s articulation of his own status: judging by his Recherches and his correspondence,

he construed his estat neither by lineage, nor by his lettres patentes, but by the less tangible

ideals of classical erudition shared among an urban Republic of Letters. 69

Etienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France is a particularly striking example of the

philological fascinations of late Renaissance jurists for the noble–vilain word pair and its

66

On the intrinsic link between epideictic rhetoric and the practice of virtues in Renaissance thought, see Ullrich

Langer, V v : L V n n

(Geneva, 1999). 67

On signs and tokens of honour, and their contestation, see Jouanna, ‘Recherches sur la notion d'honneur au

XVIème siècle’, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 15 (1968), 597-623; more generally, see Kristen

Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1989). 68

For the great majority of the French elite who served as officers, military activity was a rite de passage; well

into the seventeenth century it remained a crucial element in defining their subsequent social status. See David

Parrott, Richelieu's Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624-1642 (Cambridge, 2001), p.317. 69

See Huppert, ‘A Matter of Quality’; id., ‘Pasquier Philosophe’, in Étienne Pasquier et ses Recherches de la

France, 121-7.

17

historical development from medieval feudal times. Pasquier was unusually sensitive to the

increasing opaqueness of words such as noble and vilain, and their ever more patent lack of

stable referents in late sixteenth-century France. Vilain, in particular, has in Pasquier’s

assessment become a disorientated, unfocused term. On the one hand, he concludes, it has

become vaguely synonymous with roturier, as a generic designation of a non-noble. More

tellingly, however, he shows how those seeking an exclusive claim on the title of noble

endeavour to manoeuvre the word vilain away from persons of low social class, and towards

his own peer-group – a powerful caste of urban magistrates seeking a dignity that resides

neither in legal certificates of noblesse, nor in an hereditary rural culture of arms-bearing.

Such linguistic misdirection, for Pasquier, makes any ‘distinction generalle des Estats’ based

on a twofold division of noble and non-noble appear at best antiquated – and, more probably,

a sign of confusion, prejudice and aggressive name-calling in the struggle for pre-eminence

that was starting to emerge among France’s elites.

I.III Reordering the Social Hierarchy: vilains and viles peronnes

By the early seventeenth century, the vilain had become an unexpectedly problematic

category of non-noble to French legal humanists as a result of their philological and historical

investigations in the latter half of the previous century. Deciding precisely who and what was

signified by the term vilain – and whether such a term was still meaningful in a contemporary

socio-legal context – proved to be no straightforward task. Indeed, the disagreements that

surrounded these questions were symptomatic of a much more vexing quandary: the concept

of non-noble could not be reduced to a single, unifying verbal category. A number of terms

such as vilain, roturier and ignoble were circulating with various levels of ideological

colouring; and all of these fell short as summary labels for France’s non-noble, secular

masses who supposedly comprised a sole political entity – the Populace or Tiers Estat. In

reality, France’s Third Estate regrouped an ever more heterogenous array of ranks,

professions, trades and occupations; and such disparateness was by no means lost on late

Renaissance jurists. They were more than aware that the jobbing journeyman, the peasant

tenant farmer, the artisan, the merchant and the lawyer, considered en masse, had little

political and cultural common ground, and range of different legal rights and privileges. The

jurist response to this heterogeneity was mixed. Some, such as Antoine Loisel, held that the

best strategy was to simplify: to preserve the ancient custom of dividing roturier into

bourgeois and vilain without further subcategorization.70 For others, however, such an

approach was less and less suited to settling points of private law, and could not easily be

integrated into a coherent, global perspective on French society in the present. The final

section of this paper looks at new, holistic approaches to France’s lower social orders in the

early seventeenth century. With the advent of Charles Loyseau came a new emphasis on

gradation, not only with regard to the elites, as is well known, but also, in relation to the

lowly viles personnes – society’s least desireables – of whom vilains were a singular sub-

species.

Charles Loyseau

A jurisconsult of a retiring temperament, Charles Loyseau (1564–1627) is a nonetheless

familiar figure to the modern historian. Celebrated for his contributions to legal, political, and

70

Other similiary schematic classifications were put forward: see for example Antoine de Montchrestien’s

division of the Third Estate into laboureurs, artisans and marchands, in his Oeconomie politique (Paris, 1615).

18

social history,71 Loyseau has been adduced to support radically divergent interpretations of

the ancien régime and its types of hierarchy. My purpose is not to replay these important

debates, on which there is an already substantial scholarly literature.72 Instead I shall journey

to a less well visited corner of Loyseau’s oeuvre: his brief, but telling writings on France’s

non-noble population amid much lengthier discussions on higher social strata in his

celebrated Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (1610). Contrary to prevailing opinion, this

treatise is not entirely dismissive of France’s large plebeian population, which he termed viles

personnes (the vernacularized version of the category of viles personae inherited from

Roman law).73 Loyseau was not disinterested in all those below the rank of bourgeois; he

does not simply refer his readers to earlier treatises such as Barthélemy de Chasseneuz’s

Catalogus gloriae mundi (1528) for information about vilains and other viles personnes.74

Vile or otherwise, the plebs occupy a far from insignificant place in Loyseau’s overarching

vision of French society.

In keeping with the jurists hitherto studied, Antoine Loisel, Louis Le Caron and

Etienne Pasquier, Loyseau was first and foremost a conscientious scholar and practitioner of

law. Following a university education and qualifications in civil and canon law he went on to

successful career as a provincial and Parisian magistrate. During his career he published what

would become highly influential treatises on rural justice, rentes, seigneurial property, office-

holding, and, latterly, socio-legal status. He approached these subjects, one should

acknowledge, from the position of a privileged, affluent legal humanist with a historicizing

bent. This keen and critical sense of history, as Howell Lloyd has argued,75 enabled Loyseau

to draw on Roman and medieval sources to illuminate his understanding of contemporary

French institutions; but it also led him to pinpoint how changing times, conditions and

language were modifying those very same institutions in their early seventeenth century

forms. As such, Loyseau’s three major treatises, Des Seigneuries (1608), Cinq livres du droit

des offices (1609), especially Des Ordres, read as a thought process unfolding and

solidifying, a judgment in the making, rather than the staid rehearsing of long-established

legal dogma. These treatises provide an ‘insider’s view’ on French society, but not a rigid

anatomy of its many composite parts as Roland Mousnier and his disciples have sometimes

71

Scholarship attempting to integrate each of these aspects of Loyseau’s work is surprisingly scarce. See

notably Howell Lloyd’s introductory essay to his English translation of Loyseau’s Traité des ordres et simples

dignitez (A Treatise of Orders and Plain Dignities, Cambridge, 1994), xi-xxv; see also Lloyd, ‘The Political

Theory of Charles Loyseau’, European Studies Review, 11 (1981), 53-76. As Lloyd discusses here, legal

historians such as Myron Gilmore have investigated Loyseau’s romanizing theory of office, whilst others such

as W. F. Church have focused on legal arguments for royal prerogative in Loyseay’s thought. Much work,

moreover, has been done on the scope of Loyseau’s social enterprise, on whether he aimed to dissect the whole

of French society (Roland Mousnier), or whether his primary concerns lay with justifying the aspirations of a

‘privileged French bourgeoisie’ against hostility from the traditional n b ’ e (Boris Porchnev). For

Lloyd, however, questions of office, authority, property and the social order across Loyseau’s work are to be

taken as ‘staging posts’ of a broader humanistic discussion on orderliness, grounded in logical, metaphysical and

ethical concepts derived from classical philosophy. 72

An excellent survey of this literature and its methodological clashes over ‘class’ and ‘order’ may be found in

Peter Burke, ‘The Language of Orders in Early Modern Europe’, M.L. Bush (ed.), in Social Orders and Social

Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London, 1992), pp.1-12. 73

In the Middle Ages, the term passed into canon law and customary law. For example, in the Carolingian

Empire, some capitularies limit the legal rights of socially inferior groups: ‘worthless persons’ (viles personae)

seem to have been prohibited from making accusations by the Admonitio generalis, while the Council of Tours

in 813 banned them from giving testimony. See Rachel Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian

Empire (Cambridge, 2012), p.162. 74

Chasseneuz discusses different sorts of plebeians and mechanical arts in the eleventh part of this work. 75

See Lloyd, ‘The Political Theory of Charles Loyseau’.

19

implied.76 Loyseau, I shall argue, was acutely aware of the limits of his re-ordering enterprise:

he did not claim to have accomplished the task in any finality, but instead focused primarily

on reducing the confusion that surrounded political office and land-ownership, and their

relationship to social status. Yet this latter phenomenon, he would realise in Des Ordres, was

beguilingly elusive, especially with regard to those who inhabited a world far removed from

great money, property and office. As we shall see, the various kinds of ‘viles personnes’ he

identifies– notably vilains – do not neatly illustrate his broader theories of order and dignity

adumbrated across Des Ordres.

In composing his Traité des ordres,77 Loyseau was not aiming to produce an abstract

work of social theory. Far from it. In Loyseau’s view, the work was a necessary response to

decades of protracted civil war, in which his country had shown itself to be a kingdom of

‘confusion’ and ‘desordre’. The late sixteenth century was not only a period of chronic civil

strife; it had also been marred (in Loyseau’s view) by a frenzied ‘archomanie’ for venal

offices among his professional peers;78 and by flagrant abuses of justice in the provinces,

concerning which the minor rural nobility were particularly at fault.79 A rigorous juridical

response was required to re-establish order in society: to illustrate who was illegally

assuming power and status,80 and where the lines of social order were to be redrawn, in a

kingdom ever receding from its past feudal infrastructure.81 Establishing a juridical method

based on humanist practical logic in his opening chapter of Des Ordres,82 Loyseau defines

‘order’ as ‘une espece de Dignité, ou qualité honourable, qui d’une mesme sorte, et d’un

mesme nom, appartient à plusieurs personnes’ (p.4). The term ordre, Loyseau insists, does

not of itself ascribe any individual a specific public power; it does, however, denote the

capacity of individuals to attain positions of authority and status in relation to others. Ordre is

to be defined as ‘Dignité, avec aptitude à la puissance publique’; it anticipates office, taken

as ‘Dignité avec function publique’, and seigneurie, understood as ‘Dignité avec puissance

publique en proprieté’ (p.4). In this tripartite framework, dignity is the common denominator;

it is fundamental to the outworking of ordre, in which a person’s ‘rang d’honneur’, or estat is

displayed in office-holding and property ownership.

As Loyseau begins to deploy this notion of ordre to stratify different groups of French

people, he soon runs into difficulties. He cannot quite harmonize his theory with the

longstanding socio-political edifice of the Three Estates (Church, Nobility, Populace).

Although both the First and Second Estates afford a relatively unproblematic display of

various grades of ‘dignité avec aptitude à la puissance publique’, the Third Estate does not.

For Loyseau, those at the high end of the Third Estate, senior members of the judiciary,

manifest a parallel dignity to pre-eminent ecclesiastics and nobles, since they have the

76

See especially Mousnier, ‘Les Concepts d’«ordres», d’«états», de «fidélité» et de «monarchie absolue» en

France de la fin du XVe siècle à la fin du XVIIIe’, Revue Historique, 247 (1982), 289-312; Mousnier,

Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue: 1598-1789, 2 vols (Paris, 1974-80) I (1974); Mousnier

(ed.), Problèmes de stratification sociale: castes, ordres et classes (Paris, 1968). 77

French edition consulted: Loyseau, Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (Paris, 1610). 78

Like Pasquier, Montaigne and other late Renaissance magistrates, Loyseau was a stern critic of venal office-

holding in the judiciary, and his avowed disapprobation is writ large across his Cinq livres du droit des offices. 79

See particulary a treatise preceeding his three major works, a D ’ b j v g

(1603). 80

On these questions, see Davis Bitton, The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560-1640 (Stanford CA, 1969), and

George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France

(Chicago, 1977), ch.1. 81

See notably Des Seigneuries and Des Offices, in which Loyseau sets out a model of political and judicial

power based on office rather than on the old seigneurial system. 82

Loyseau’s thesis revolves is grounded upon principles which Aristotle, Cicero and Boethius in turn had

adumbrated in their discussions of ‘topics’: see Lloyd, ‘Introduction’, A Treatise of Orders and Plain Dignities,

xviii.

20

aptitude to obtain prestigious ‘offices de Iudicature’ (p.4). But what of the many mercantile

professions and trades, and beneath them, the vast numbers of artisans and peasants, manual

laboureurs and unemployed destitutes, in short, the menu peuple, whose prospects of office-

holding and titles were minuscule? Do any groups within these masses have an ostensible

dignity? Loyseau is reluctant to go this far. In his eighth chapter, he concedes that ‘entant que

l’Ordre est une espece de Dignité, le Tiers Estat de France, n’est pas proprement un Ordre’

(p.95). Nevertheless, he insists, by adjusting the sense of ordre to mean ‘condition ou

vacation, ou bien une espece distincte de personnes’, then the Third Estate is indeed to be

judged a ordre (albeit an inferior one): although its members, for the most part, fall well short

of the dignity embodied by a high-ranking noble or churchman, this does not mean they are

entirely without worth. Although they do not accede to distinguished public office, some at

least exercise important functions in the commonweal.

Nevertheless, as Loyseau ventures down beneath the bourgeoisie to the very lowest

ranks of the Third Estate, his pronouncements on the value of commoners become hesitant

and tantalizingly incomplete. When he reaches the lowest rural ‘vacations’, he appears torn

between generalizing and subcategorizing tendencies. On one level he wishes to differentiate

between sorts of country-dweller (tenant farmers and gens de journée, day journeymen). But

elsewhere he is equally content to regroup all rustics under the umbrella term vilain, itself

understood as one of the many species of ‘personnes viles’ – both rural and urban – eking out

an existence on the social floor.

Loyseau’s interest in the term vilain is largely philological, and, like Louis Le Caron

and Etienne Pasquier, he is irresistibly drawn to the word’s controversial history: ‘de fait le

mot de villain […] vient de villa et villicus, non pas de ville’ (p.102). Here Loyseau rakes

over a familiar etymological quarrel. He situates himself on the side of Le Caron against the

view propounded openly by the likes of Jean Bodin (and equivocally, as we have seen, by

Pasquier), that the word vilain carries urban connotations. For Loyseau, vilain has more in

common with village than with ville:83 it points back to late Antiquity, to an age predating

cities and townships, an age of rural settlements organized around the villa, whose inhabitants

were known as villici. Citing the great early sixteenth-century humanist and legal scholar,

Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), as his authority in these matters, Loyseau’s ulterior aim, it

would appear, is to raise the question of whether philology affords or obscures historical

insight on servitude. In his Annotations on the Pandects (1508), a somewhat hastily compiled

set of notes on the first twenty-four books of the Roman Digest,84 Budé recognizes vestiges of

semantic continuity between the ancient colonus of Roman times and the villanus of

subsequent eras: in the past, both terms were used of those legally enrolled to labour on a

rural estate (villici adscripticii).85 For Budé, the medieval feudal vocabulary of villanus and

its vernacular derivative vilain offered potential evidence that persons in villeinage are

descended from slaves, or at least live in similar conditions; yet there is no necessary

etymological link to equate the villanus with worthless baseness, as is often implied in the

vernacular word vilain.86

Following a similar philological trajectory, Loyseau suggests that both the Latin term

villicus and its vernacular relative vilain point back to ancient practices of subordinating

83

Loyseau specifies earlier in chapter 8 that ville originally signified a ‘maison des champs’ akin to the Latin

villa: traces of this ancient usage could still be seen in rural areas, such the Beauce, where many villages

retained the suffix ville following the name of their ancient local seigneu (p.96). In Anglo-Norman dialects,

vil(l)e originally denoted a manorial estate or farmstead: see William Rothwell and others, Anglo-Norman

Dictionary, 7 fasc (London, 1992), VII, p.870. 84

On Budé and his Annotations, see principally Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, ch.3. 85

Budé, Annotationes Gulielmi Budeai [ ...] In quatuor et viginti Pandectarum libros (Paris,1532), f.33v. 86

‘villanum enim et vilem vernacular simplicitas confundit’ (Annotationes, f.33v).

21

‘gens de village’. He likewise identifies an ancient state of subjugation, or demi-servitude, of

Roman devising, whereby individuals were assessed or enrolled according to their strength to

labour on rural estates (censiti seu adscripticii), or were husbandmen bound to land-plots

(coloni seu glebae addicti) (p.42).87 These conditions of demi-servitude, Loyseau claims,

clearly outlasted the Roman Empire, since they are connoted in archaic French legal

vocabulary used in medieval coutumes of the lowest villagers (gens de pôte, gens de

mainmorte, gens de suite): people historically required to pay a levy (cens) for occupying the

lord’s land, and from whom extraordinary levies could be extracted (p.42).88 For Loyseau,

these juridical categories of person denoted individuals also described as vilains in the

Middle Ages; and such categories indirectly have an important bearing on the plight of early

seventeenth-century French peasants still known as vilains. It is worth noting with Pierre

Goubert that in some provinces (particularly Franche-Comté which was annexed to France in

1678) there were still some peasants subject to mainmorte: such persons were so closely

bound tied to seigneurial territory that they were unable to depart without abandoning their

possessions and forfeiting their rights.89 The central thrust of Loyseau’s gloss of ‘villains’,

therefore, is to show that such vocabulary induces a far-reaching, retrospective political

judgement: it points the jurist back to Roman times, in which ‘free’ commoners complained

of onerous debts, excessive tributes and injuries inflicted by nobles, which in practice left

them little better off than slaves. Here Loyseau quotes Caesar (De bello Gallico, VI.xiii)

directly: ‘il y a un beau tesmoignage dans Cesar au 6. Livre De bello gallico. Plerique è

plebe, dit-il, dum aere alieno, aut magnitudine tributorum, aut inuria potentiorum premuntur,

sese in servitutem dicant Nobilibus: in hos eadem omnia sunt iura, quae dominis in

servos’.90A philological approach to medieval French legal records, together with Roman

historical testimony, moreover, brings the current standing of country commoners into sharp

focus:

En la police de France, nous les avons tant rabaissez, voire opprimez, et par tailles, et par la tyrannie

des Gentils-hommes, qu’il y a subject de s’emerveiller, comment ils peuvent subsister, et comment il se

trouve des laboureurs pour nous nourrir. (p.102)

87

Definitions of servitude and ‘semi-free’ status were problematic in Roman and medieval canon law, as Jean

Allain has lucidly shown. The medieval glossa ordinaria recognized a large class of coloni, originarii, or

adscripticii: men and women who were technically free but who were ‘bound to the soil’ and its

cultivation.They could be ‘reclaimed’ by the owner of the land on which they toiled if they deserted their duties

and sought freedom elsewhere. Herein, it is thought, lay the origins of medieval serfdom. Men and women

classed as nativi or villani or rustici seem also to have been similarly obligated to service and to the soil. See

Allain, The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford, 2012), esp.

ch.2. 88

On these terms see also Loyseau, Des Seigneuries (1608), p.13. Marc Bloch identified three major types of

tax imposed on medieval peasants: chevage (an annual tax), formariage (levied on those who married outside of

the lord’s jurisdiction) and mainmorte (a succession tax). Other local taxes were also imposed: see Bloch,

Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manyon, 2 vols (London, 1989, 1st edn 1961), I, p.263. For further discussion of

these and other seigneurial taxes somewhat arbitrarily imposed (including taille à merci, ‘viles charges’), see

Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, II, pp.67-78. In the Renaissance peridod, the local seigneur still

excercised their droits casuels to impose levies known as lods et ventes: the right to exact what was sometimes

as much as the quint et requint, a fifth plus a fifth of a fifth (theoretically twenty-four percent), although

sometimes reduced to half this amount. Some sixteenth-century jurists, notably Charles Du Moulin, fiercely

opposed this practice, but it persisted throughout the seventeenth century: see Grinberg, Ecrire les coutumes,

pp.109-10; more generally, Pierre Goubert, La Vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle (Paris,

1982), ch.2. 89

See Goubert, La Vie quotidienne des paysans, ch.1. 90

‘The common people for the most part declare themselves to be in servitude to the nobles as long as they are

oppressed by debt, or by weight of tribute, or by injuries at the hands of the more powerful: the same laws apply

to them as to slaves in relation to their Lords’ (trans. Lloyd).

22

Here Loyseau is not using the term laboureur in a technical sense to denote the moderately

prosperous stratum of wealthier peasants, who were historically better off than other rural

dwellers.91 Instead he deploys ‘laboureurs’ as a catch-all term (like vilain) for husbandmen,

‘ceux qui ont pour vacation ordinaire de labourer pour autruy comme fermiers’ (p.102).92

This generalization affords a brief but tellingly politicized statement on the controversial

topic of peasant taxes, and on the wider – and equally inflammatory – subject of noble

tyranny. Both topics merit further unpacking. Firstly, concerning taxation, Loyseau treads

carefully, alluding only in passing to ‘tailles’ imposed on the peasantry. All in positions of

authority including his own professional milieu (‘nous’) are said to be at fault. Ever the

prudent royalist, Loyseau is careful not to inculpate the monarchy directly in his invective; he

had, after all, conceded in Des Seigneuries that contemporary monarchs should have the right

to levy impositions at their own discretion.93 Here, in Des Ordres, the monarchy is inculpated

only as part of a general failing of governmental institutions to alleviate onerous tax burdens

on the provinces during recent decades.94 For Loyseau, the chief perpetrator of injustice

against peasants was not the crown; rather it was the large number of rural gentilshommes des

champs acting independently of the crown in tyrannical fashion for their own gain – a casus

belli already aired at length in earlier treatise. In his D ’ b j e village

(1603), a treatise planned as the tenth chapter of Des Seigneuries (1608), Loyseau fulminates

at length against the tyranny of rural suzerains:

le gentil-homme […] usurpe hardiment et impunement sur ses subiects, soit les bannalitez, soit

l’augmentation de ses cens, soit la haute taxe de ses rachats à tant par arpent, soit les fruicts de pure

perte, soit les biens des mineurs, soubs pretexte de desherence et autres pretextes, soit des peages, soit

des corvées, soit des subsides et levées de deniers, soit des amendes en toutes causes, dont les pauures

subiects ne se ausent plaindre […]95

Across his works, Loyseau channels a wider criticism of government into a specific attack on

the old nobility and their misapplication of ancient seigneurial rights.96 This type of offensive

manoeuvre was not new. It was redolent of a distinguished predecessor, the great Parisian

jurisconsult Charles Du Moulin (1500–1566), who held that, ultimately, the only legitimate

bound relationship was that between king and subject. For Du Moulin, any lord requiring

homage, together with excessive levies, fines and services from those within his jurisdiction

behaves like a tyrant: improperly subjecting those who in law have a free relation with him,

and abusing the power that he holds only by virtue of the king, who holds the entire kingdom

91

In the corn-growing regions of France (the north, east, and Paris basin), a laboureur typically possessed a

large plough, two to three pairs of strong horses, together with enough land to support them. Laboureurs were

sometimes property holders, and significantly better equipped than other rural dwellers (shepherds, vignerons,

manoeuvriers): see Goubert, La Vie quotidienne des paysans, ch.8; Henry Heller, Labour, Science and

Technology in France, 1500-1620 (Cambridge, 2002), pp.31-2. 92

A not uncommon definition. In literature and everyday speech the term laboureur was also used generically to

refer to peasant farmers in many regions of France, especially in the Midi: see Goubert, La Vie quotidienne des

paysans, ch.8. 93

See Loyseau, Des Seigneuries (1608), ch.3. Although Loyseau characteristically insisted that the right to tax

without consent of the Estates did not give the Prince private seigneury over the goods of his subjects any more

than public seigneury gave him the rights to enslave them, he argued in effect that because the French king, like

other sovereigns had so often imposed extraordinary taxes without consent, his right to do so had become part of

the king's bundle of sovereign rights. See Thomas Kaiser, ‘Property, Sovereignty, the Declaration of the Rights

of Man, and the Tradition of French Jurisprudence’, in Dale Van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The

Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford CA, 1997), pp.300-39. 94

For an overview of fiscal failures in the late sixteenth century, see Richard Bonney, T K ng’ b : f n n

and politics in France 1589-1661 (Oxford, 1981), ch.1. 95

Loyseau, D ’ b j v g (Paris, 1603), ff.55v-56r 96

For further examples of Loyseau’s tactical slights, see Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes.

23

in dominium directum (while magistrates and lords hold only dominium utile).97 Building on

Du Moulin, Loyseau adds to an ever growing unease among late Renaissance jurists over the

inadequacies of seigneurial justice – a system which not only left vilains vulnerable, but one

which suggested deep-seated limitation of royal authority over the rural noblesse.

In Des Ordres, Loyseau’s sympathies for husbandmen are not only politicized

remarks over the specific injustices of overtaxation and noble tyranny. They also emerge as

part of a wider complaint that agricultural labour is under-valued, morally, and even

intellectually, by contemporary landowners. Firstly, as we have seen, Loyseau draws

attention to the fact that few bother to distinguish different grades of peasant farmer –

landowners simply refer to them vaguely en masse as ‘vilains’ or ‘gens de village’. Such

generalizations may well have rankled Loyseau on a personal level. His paternal grandfather

had been a middling farmer (a laboureur) in the district of Nogent-le-Roi near Dreux. Yet

however mindful he was of his roots, Charles was unlikely to have considered himself a

spokesman of the rural smallholder. In two generations the Loyseau family had risen in

wealth and status via noble patronage and office-holding in the judiciary; and by his death in

1627 Charles had accumulated substantial property in Paris and the environs of Dreux.98

Establishing himself as a propriétaire of considerable means, Loyseau was typical of the

comfortable magistrate stratum to which he belonged.

Aspirations to landownership within this milieu, moreover, were frequently

accompanied by an idealization of agriculture nourished by classical literature (Cicero,

Columella, Horace, Varro, Virgil and Xenophon), and by contemporary writers such as

Charles Estienne, Jean Liébault, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, Nicolas Rapin, and Olivier de

Serres.99 Loyseau, it seems, partakes in this trend, at least on an intellectual and moral level.

Whatever his experience of direct cultivation, he manifests a sober respect for the soil and its

workers: ‘il n’y a pointe de vie plus innocente ni de guain plus selon nature, que celuy de

labourage, que partant les Philosophes ont preferé à toute autre vacation’ (Des Ordres,

p.102). Such a claim was not uncommon,100 if not universally accepted (as we saw previously

in Etienne Pasquier’s Lettres familieres). Aristotle, remarks Loyseau, even prefers the farmer

to merchants, whom he ranks among the honorouble in his Politics (if not elsewhere).101

Endorsing widespread philosophical opinion since ancient times, Loyseau thus intimates that

husbandmen – although commonly ranked by jurirsts as lowly vilains or viles personnes in

their socio-legal discourse – have something approaching a dignity by dint of their honest,

orderly toil.

Moving towards a classical appreciation of the husbandmen, Loyseau is perhaps

closest to his learned jurist peer René Choppin (1537–1606). In his treatise De privilegiis

rusticorum (1575), Choppin interpolates philosophical reflection with a jurisprudential

examination of specific cases in which the rights of rustics have been legally upheld in

97

See Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the

Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2012), pp.43-4. 98

As Lloyd reminds us, Loyseau in his maturity could afford to live in the manner of an affluent gentleman,

subsisting on the rents of his considerable properties (A Treatise of Ordres, xiv). 99

This trend is now well documented: see especially, Loris Petris, ‘La Philosophie morale aux champs: ethica,

œconomica et politica dans Les Plaisirs de la vie rustique de Pibrac’, Revue de l'histoire littéraire de la France,

107 (2007), 3-18; more generally, George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes. 100

Compare with Serres, T ’ g n g (Paris, 1600), where agriculture is

praised as ‘la plus sainte et naturelle, comme estant seule commandee de la bouche de Dieu, à nos premiers

peres’ (preface, sig.*iijr.). 101

Aristotle, Politics 1290b-1291b.

24

Roman and French law.102 Loyseau does not go as far as to discuss possible legal protection

of peasant farmers given their vulnerability to exploitation; but like Choppin he readily

admits that the ordinary rustic is in his everyday functions, far from morally or

philosophically vile.103

The crux of Loyseau’s analysis of husbandmen is to compare them in detail to other

kinds of viles personnes resident across France’s rural and urban landscapes. Herein lies his

originality. Loyseau intimates that the peasant farmer outranks other types of lowborn

(p.102). However, such a preference, he maintains, is both personal and provisional, hedged

with modalizing expressions (‘à mon avis’, ‘quoy que ce soit’). Contrary to previous

scholarship,104 we should view Loyseau’s method not so much as a ranking of the lowliest of

the low in a league table, as a critical assay of common patterns of vileness exhibited among

different types of lowborns. In Loyseau’s assessment, the commonalities between such

people are as marked as their differences.

France’s rural husbandmen he demonstrates, have intriguing parallels with the

kingdom’s large poluation of urban artisans. Artisans are nowhere termed vilains in Des

Ordres; but they share the category of viles personnes with country peasant farmers (pp.102-

3). As with the latter, vileness is difficult to ascertain with precision. France’s numerous

artisans give rise to surprisingly divergent perspectives when viewed through different

interpretative lenses. A neoclassical perspective, Loyseau infers, would insist upon a division

between various sorts of craftsmanship involving practical knowledge (‘les arts

mechaniques’) and a range of superior intellectual pursuits (‘les arts liberaux’). This

distinction stretches back to Ancient Greece, where the liberal arts were so named as they

were preserve of freemen; and where the ‘mechanical’ arts consisted of menial, degrading, or

physically demanding tasks, and as such were the activities of slaves.105 Loyseau

acknowledges as much, remarking that mechanical arts currently practised by French artisans

were historically exercised by ‘serfs et esclaves’ (p.102). This tendency, moreover, was

absorbed into common parlance, where ‘mecanique’ is collocated to ‘ce qui est vil et abiect’.

Nonetheless, Loyseau is acutely aware that, over centuries, French artisans have tended to

exceed these negative social connotations surrounding the arts mecaniques: they have

exhibited a high level of practical aptitude (‘industrie’), now recognized in technical

qualifications (‘maistrises’) which have become a sign of considerable merit.106 In Loyseau’s

view, artisans, like husbandmen, have a distinctive ‘vacation’ and the makings of dignity; and

similarly, he underscores the extent to which their occupation is undervalued in ordinary

language. Just as the word ‘villain’ ineluctably summons thoughts of baseness, given its

102

Choppin’s treatise is mostly taken up with analysis of contractual obligations, exemptions from duties,

remission of criminal sentences etc.; but he nonetheless includes sections on the philosophical advantages of

country life, for instance II.iii., ch3: ‘De Commoda philosophandi in agris ratione’. 103

See also Chasseneuz, Catalogus gloriae mundi, XI.37: ‘De laude agricolarum, quorum plures sunt species, et

de privilegiis eorum.’ 104

See Mousnier, Les Hiérarchies sociales de 1450 à nos jours (Paris, 1969), p.62. 105

See for instance Aristotle, Politics 1337b3. The division between liberal and illiberal arts has been revised

and debated from ancient to modern times. The studia humanitatis, a well-defined cycle of liberal arts studies

that was the cornerstone of Renaissance humanist education, included grammatica, rhetorica, poetica, historia

and philosophia moralis; but unlike the liberal arts of the Middle Ages, Renaissance humanities did not include

logic or the quadrivium (arithmetica, geometria, astronomia and musica). See Paul Kristeller, ‘Humanism’, in

Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1988),

pp.113-137 (113). More generally, see Bruce Kimball, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History

(Lanham MD, 2010). 106

Artisanal masterships, awarded upon public proof of a f ’ v , were recognized in the ordinances of

Villers-Cotterêts (1539), art.189; and of Orleans (1561), art.98. See F-A. Isambert (ed.), Recueil général des

anciennes lois françaises, 29 vols (Paris, 1821-33), XII, p.639; XIV, p.88.

25

historic proximity to ‘serf’, so the term ‘artisan’ cannot shed the longstanding servile stigma

surrounding the arts mecaniques.

Nonetheless, insists the jurist, one must resist such prejudice even more strongly than

in the case of those dubbed vilains. There are, he acknowledges, types of artisan whose

occupation is not strictly artisanal, and encompasses aspects of commerce: ‘Apoticaires’,

‘Orfevres’, ‘Iovalliers’,‘Merciers’, ‘Grossiers’, ‘Drapiers Chaussetiers’ and suchlike, as

specified in legal ordinances.107 Determining the status of such persons is especially

problematic. Although they work with raw materials (a sign of ‘mechanic’ baseness), they

equally exhibit a range of skills to fashion and sell an array of products to those much higher

up the social hierarchy, from military equipment to luxury commodities. Previous

jurisconsults, such as Pierre Rebuffi, had argued that all skilled sellers and manufacturers of

luxury goods, notably drapers, exercised a worthy and economically beneficial trade.108

Similarly, Loyseau suggests that these kinds of artisan-traders, insofar as they partake in

commercial activities, are not to be ranked ‘au nombre des viles personnes’ (p.103). On the

contrary, in a technical jurisprudential sense their status rises through the exercising of their

mercantile functions, which are to be viewed a digniori parte (‘on the honourable side’).109 In

other words, as they sell their wares they acquire a dignity echoing that of more distinguished

merchants: those established burghers above the ordinary townsmen, who have acquired the

legal title of bourgeois and all its concomitant rights and privileges (p.96).110 Here again,

then, Loyseau’s understanding of what makes a person vile is distinctly ambivalent. He

demonstrates that a sizeable number of artisan-traders, by their very occupation, belie efforts

to establish a strict jurisprudential distinction between that which is bourgeois and that which

is vil. In keeping with Roman jurisprudential tradition,111 Loyseau thus considers small

merchants and artisan-traders worthy of a modest share of the ‘credit’ and ‘respect’ that

generally accompanies the urban mercantile classes, whose ordinary wealth-creating

enterprise is of undeniable public utility (p.101).112

If Loyseau somewhat downplays the vileness of certain groups of viles personnes, he

by no means puts himself forward as a champion of lowly commoners.113 On the contrary, we

have seen that he maintains an ambivalent attitude towards the low end of the Third Estate.

Indeed he is strongly disdainful of those viles personnes who are neither artisans nor vilain

husbandmen, but something baser. There is an entire swathe of unskilled, itinerant workers

whose living depends entirely on their physical labour, ‘le travail de leurs bras’, making

them, in Loyseau’s view, ‘les plus vils’ of all the working masses (p.103).114 For Loyseau,

‘mercenaires’, ‘crocheteurs’, and other assorted ‘gens de iournée’ are in no sense dignified,

since, in contrast to artisans and to husbandmen, they have no stable, clearly defined vocation

(p.103). And yet, for all his disdain, Loyseau cannot bring himself to declare these

journeymen as unanimously morally base as they are socially vile. Contrary to William

107

See for example Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race (22 vols, Paris, 1723-1849), XXI,

pp.364, 561. 108

See Mousnier, ‘Les Concepts d’«ordres», d’«états», de «fidélité» et de «monarchie absolue»’, 301. 109

The translation is Lloyd’s, A Treatise of Orders, p.180. 110

See my earlier analysis of Loisel’s Institutes coustumieres. 111

Here Loyseau quotes Callistratus, from Digest 50.2.12: ‘non debet haberi inter viles persones, nec ab

honoribus omnino arcendi sunt’ (Des Ordres, p.101). 112

For a further treatment of merchant honour in the pre-modern world, see Martha Howell, Commerce Before

Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge, 2010). 113

Herbet Applebaum goes further than I am willing, suggesting that Loyseau categorically denied that consider

husbandmen and artisans were to be considered vile persons: see Applebaum, The Concept of Work: Ancient,

Medieval, and Modern (Albany NY, 1992), p.372. 114

A neo-Roman division of manual labour and artisanal trade: Loyseau quotes from Cicero (De officiis I.xlii)

to that the baser (viliores) are those who earn wages for their physical toil rather than for any craftsmanship.

26

Sewell’s assessment, the labour of gens de bras is not, in Loyseau’s view, a social and moral

nullity.115 For Loyseau, those who sweat out such a meagre living do so ‘selon le

commandement de Dieu’: in other words their harsh toil is, ultimately, the outworking of the

Curse of the Fall (Genesis 3).116 But even if their work is cursed, theologically speaking, this

does not make them worthless. Provided that their labours are honest, they comprise a

workforce of notable utility to the state, he argues, and should be kept in their employment –

in sharp contrast to ‘tant de mendiants valides, dont nostre France est à present toute remplie’

(p.103).

In Loyseau’s assessment of France’s poorest people, only beggars are truly vile in

both a moral and social sense. Destitute and disorderly, they constitute a subaltern ‘racaille’

beneath even the ‘gens de iournee’. Anxiety towards unproductive and duplicitous beggars

and vagabonds, especially those deemed able-bodied, was a recurrent phenomenon across

early modern Europe, as a number of studies have shown.117 Fears of robbery by vagrants on

France’s highways had featured prominently at the Assembly of the Etats-Généraux in

Orleans (1560), and would remain a concern at later assemblies at Blois (1576).118 Tapping

into this deep cultural vein of anti-mendicity, Loyseau returns to attack fiscal excesses:

vagrancy, he claims is on the rise because the poor would rather beg than suffer the brunt of

‘leur taille’ (p.103). Again, the monarch is not directly targeted in these politicized comments

on over-taxation; but the fiscal machinery of the state is viewed as gravely malfunctioning,

unable to stay the ‘multiplication enorme’ of France’s mendicant rabble. Alluding darkly to

the dangers posed to homes and highways when ordinary peasants are reduced to begging,

Loyseau arguably gestures towards recent insurrections that had swept through several

regions of France in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The most harrowing of these

uprisings of the rural poor, 119 unable to pay their taxes, were those of the Croquants (1593–

1595) in the south-west.120 For the first readers of Des Ordres, these events were, in all

likelihood, an all too recent memory, advertising, in the words of Mark Greengrass, the fact

that direct taxation had a clear limit beyond which it became unendurable given the limits of

production in the peasant economy.121

Anticipating deserted fields and future violence unless immediate action is taken

against vagrancy, Loyseau ends his coverage of the Third Estate on an abrupt and ominous

note. Instead of a conclusion, or a summary return to the theme of ordre, we are left,

ironically, to ponder the disorderliness festering in the foundations of France’s social pyramid

and threatening at any moment to spread upwards. Loyseau’s survey of the kingdom’s

115

See Sewell’s discussion of manual labour as formless, marred by original sin, in Work and Revolution in

France, pp.22-4. 116

A pan-european folk tradition, popular in the Middle Ages and still prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, held that those in menial or servile labour were descended from Noah’s cursed son, Ham (Genesis

9:18-28): see David Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for

Slavery (Farnham, 2009). 117

See especially Christian Paultre De la répression de la mendicité et du vagabondage en France sous

’ancien régime (Paris, 1906, reprint Geneva 1975); Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Poor Relief, Humanism and

Heresy’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, 1975), pp.17-64; more

generally, see Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana ILL,

2001). 118

See Georges Picot, Histoire des États Généraux considérés au point de vue de leur influence sur le

gouvernement de la France de 1355 à 1614 (Paris, 1872), pp.195-6. 119

Other uprisings included the Razats in Provence (1578), the Ligue des Villains in the Rhône valley (1579),

and the Gaultiers around Caen. 120

Scholarship on the Croquants is extensive. See notably Yves-Marie Bercé, Histoire des croquants: étude des

soulèvements populaires au XVIIe siècle dans le sud-ouest de la France (Geneva, 1974); Mark Greengrass,

France in the Age of Henri IV: The Struggle for Stability (London, 1984), pp.168-72. 121

Greengrass, France in the Age of Henri IV, p.172.

27

various groups of viles personnes leads him to believe that disorder lurks just around the

corner – even in those whose lowly vocation manifests inklings of dignité. Often, claims

Loyseau, the blame lies elsewhere, with those in authority. The ‘bel ordre’ of master-

craftsmanship, developed over centuries, is latterly under threat, as recent kings have

indiscriminately granted letters of retainer for each trade in towns with a predominace of

sworn gilds (villes jurés).122 Consequently, Loyseau bemoans, there are simply too many

maistrises de lettres and not enough artisans to accept them in the smaller towns. Entire

vocations also stand on the brink of debasement in the rural environs. Here the incursion from

above brings about a much more brutal avilissement: tenant farmers and day labourers are not

simply disparaged as disreputable vilains by their masters – the latter subject them to a toxic

combination of taxes and tyranny. Those whose ordinary agricultural work is morally sound

and economically productive, Loyseau infers, are swelling the vagrant population at an

unsustainable rate, with potentially dire consequences across the kingdom.

Charles Loyseau’s Des Ordres, we discover, offers no rigid hiearchization of

lowborns. Instead, it provides a jurist’s assay on the most overlooked and undervalued

‘vocations’ in early seventeenth-century France. The jurist’s task, according to Des Ordres, is

to acknowledge but also critically expose the linguistic and cultural prejudices which

surround the legal category of viles personnes. For Loyseau, vileness and debasement are

mobile phenomena, eluding predictable gradation by social rank. Debasement of status –

social, moral and economic – is distinct possibility for France’s various types of viles

personnes, just as it threatens persons of much higher rank and dignity. However, unlike

many of his contemporaries, Loyseau resists depicting the lowly as a singular, vast,

disorderly monolith. In Loyseau’s view, the lowly may belie the ordinary language of

baseness used to describe them (‘mecaniques’, ‘vils’, ‘vilains’), through their practical

aptitudes or at least their productivity. Alternatively, in a kingdom still experiencing the

aftershocks of civil war, they may be dragged down to unexpected and unprecedented

degrees of vileness.

Conclusions

This paper began as an investigation of what jurists said about vilains in late Renaissance

France. The scope of their discussions, our case studies have shown, was by no means limited

to legal technicalities pertaining to the status and rights of a particular type of lowborn

individual. The late Renaissance jurist engaged with the vilain as part of a much broader

socio-legal agenda concerning the relationship of non-nobles to the nobility. Determining

who exactly were vilains in the social hierarchy was no straightforward undertaking: it

necessitated careful reflection on whether the term vilain was itself an accurate enough

descriptor of social rank to make it serviceable in legal discourse. For the likes of Antoine

Loisel, the category of vilain was too deeply etched into French customary law to be merit

erasure. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the vilain, Loisel maintained, was a

functioning element in a system of ancient system of seigneurial relations and justice

122

Villes jurés had an ancient pedigree in the ancien regime, according to the eighteenth-century Dictionnaire

universel de commerce (Paris, 1741), col.1762. Royal lettres de maistrise became a regular administrative

device for mitigating the exclusiveness of the sworn guilds, whilst at the same time raising convenient revenue

for the supply of royal necessities. The edict of Henri III in 1581 and the supplementary ordinance of Henri IV

in 1597 gave to the same principle a still more universal application. See George Unwin, Industrial

Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1957), pp.136-7.

28

undergoing substantial reform, but in essence enduring.123 Loisel’s views, we should

remember, were dutifully preserved by the following generations of jurists including Julien

Brodeau (dates) and Laurent Bouchel. Nevertheless, Loisel’s contemporaries saw matters

very differently. Louis Le Caron, Etienne Pasquier, and Charles Loyseau in their different

ways put themselves at critical distance from the term vilain in socio-legal discourse. The

decline of feudal property relations and – moreover – the rise of ideological prejudice

emanating particularly from the rural nobility made them cast serious doubt on the usefulness

of vilain as a precise marker of social rank. By the time of Loyseau, such prejudice was one

more undesireable obstacle to a much needed re-ordering of France’s social hierarchy.

Nevertheless, the word vilain itself was of intrinsic interest. The focus of a somewhat

pedantic etymological spat, the term vilain became a surprisingly acute tool with which to

probe at much weightier subjects: the complex story of France’s oppressed paysans, past and

present; and the abiding question of vera nobilitas. If the jurist was concerned to determine

who was a vilain among other viles personnes, he was equally exercised to demonstate that

he was not one of them, before eventually returning his attention to vexing criteria of

nobility.

123

As Grinberg explains, the late sixteenth-century redrafting of coutumes did not drive at the very heart of

feudal law, the majority of which continued to be integrated into the text of the reformed coutume. Nonetheless,

the juridical reforming process, increasingly linked to the consolidation of royal power, acted as a shockwave

throughout the seigneurial regime, culminating in its eventual demise during the Revolution. See Grinberg,

Ecrire les coutumes, pp.112, 122.