manuscripts of an abbreviation exist. Villehardouin’s work was also incorporated in the
Chronique de Baudouin d’Avesnes, a 13th-century compilation that circulated widely.
Leah Shopkow
[See also: CRUSADES; HISTORIOGRAPHY; ROBERT DE CLARI]
Villehardouin, Geoffroi de. La conquête de Constantinople, ed. Edmond Faral. 2 vols. 2nd ed.
Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1937.
Joinville and Villehardouin. Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Margaret Shaw. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963.
Beer, Jeanette M.A. Villehardouin, Epic Historian. Geneva: Droz, 1968.
Dufournet, Jean. Les écrivains de la IVe croisade: Villehardouin et Clari. 2 vols. Paris: SEDES,
1973.
VILLENEUVE
. Newly founded village on reclaimed land. Although there had been earlier waves of
depopulation and resettlement in France, from ca.1000 to 1250 a great surge of village
foundation coincided with the great movements of clearance and reclamation. These new
villages in areas that had previously been forest or waste were called by such names as
villeneuves, neuvilles, neufbourgs, or sauvetés. Except for rare instances when squatters
successfully cooperated to found such villages, the villeneuves were founded by the
economic and political efforts of the lay and religious lords who were owners of wide
tracts of forest and waste. These lords founded such villages in order to increase their
rents and dues, or to extend their power into march and border areas, or to settle
previously bandit-invested stretches along pilgrimage routes. Some villeneuves were set
out along either side of a long street with holdings stretching far out behind each
farmstead (the herringbone plan); others were compact villages of farmsteads set out on a
grid with fields surrounding them. In Aquitaine, such new villages, called sauvetés, were
sited near chapels or priories protected by the Peace and Truce of God and whose
safeguard extended to crosses that enclosed and protected the new inhabitants.
Frequently, the villeneuves were founded cooperatively by lay and ecclesiastical lords,
one providing legal rights over the land, the other the laborers or the capital for startup
costs. The tendency of such lords to invest capital in such new villages, providing mills,
churches, and ovens, demonstrates not only the effort to increase political power but the
increase in rural production of this era, in which such lords wished to share. Settlers for
such villeneuves came from older, generally extremely overpopulated villages, often not
far from the new settlements. Expansion of village foundations generally improved the
condition of peasants throughout a region; since favorable terms were offered in the new
villages, lords of older settlements had to improve conditions and grant charters of
liberties in order to maintain their labor force. Such settlements on previously unoccupied
land should not be confused with later transformation of granges into bastides by the
Cistercians and others.
Constance H.Berman
[See also: BASTIDE; DÉFRICHEMENT]
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1812