BAILLI/BAILLIAGE
. In medieval rural lordships, a familiar manorial officer known as the bailiff (Fr. bailli)
often acted as manager of an estate. When employed by the French crown in the 12th
century, the bailli was a salaried judicial officer who inspected the work of the prévot,
who farmed the revenues of the royal domain and rendered justice at a local level. In
1190, when Philip II was leaving on crusade, he established regulations covering the
duties of the baillis, who increasingly resembled the English itinerant justices.
In 1204, Philip II gained possession of Normandy, where baillis had begun to be
associated with a geographical area. Over the next fifteen years, the bailli in royal lands
gradually lost the character of an itinerant justice and became the administrator of a
district called the bailliage. Well paid, he represented the king in judicial, military, and
financial matters, receiving appeals from lesser jurisdictions. By the late 13th century, a
specialized subordinate, the “receiver,” assumed most financial duties. During the 14th
century, a system of royal judges took over some of the judicial business of the bailliage,
and because of the endemic warfare of that period the bailli concentrated increasingly on
military matters. Whereas the early 13th-century baillis were drawn mainly from the
middling nobility of the old royal domain in the Île-de-France, many of them in the late
14th century were natives of their bailliage. This district, and its southern counterpart, the
sénéchiaussée, remained the basic provincial administrative unit of late-medieval France.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: PRÉVÔT/PRÉVÔTÉ; ROYAL ADMINISTRATION AND FINANCE;
SÉNÉSCHAL]
Baldwin, John W. The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the
Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Fesler, James. “French Field Administration: The Beginnings.” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 5(1962–63): 76–111.
Lot, Ferdinand, and Robert Fawtier. Histoire des institutions françaises au moyen âge. 3 vols.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957–62, Vol 2: Institutions royales (1958).
Strayer, Joseph R. The Administration of Normandy Under Saint Louis. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1932.
Waquet, Henri. Le bailliage de Vermandois aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Paris: Champion, 1919.
BALLADE
. The ballade evolved from the courtly chanson in the late 13th century and was originally
meant to be sung. By the late 14th century, with the separation of text and music, it
became littera sine musica. As defined by Eustache Deschamps in his Art de dictier et de
fere chançons (1392), the ballade may consist of three stanzas, eight to ten lines each,
with seven to eleven syllables per line. A one-line refrain concludes each stanza; it is
syntactically joined to the preceding phrase and rhymes with one of the two preceding
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