heiress of Vendôme, and this county passed to the couple’s younger son, Louis (d. 1446),
whose descendant would inherit the French throne as Henry IV in 1589.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: ANNE OF BEAUJEU; LOUIS XI; VENDÔME]
Leguai, André. Le Bourbonnais pendant la guerre de cent ans. Moulins: Imprimeries Réunies,
1969.
BOURGEOISIE
. As urban life gradually revived in France between the late 10th and the 12th centuries,
one widespread development was the settlement of mercantile communities adjacent to
fortified places, such as a walled cité. These settlements often were known as bourgs, and
their inhabitants became known as bourgeois (Lat. burgenses). These bourgeois generally
took the lead in pursuing urban self-government, obtaining charters restricting seigneurial
authority, and in some circumstances forming communes.
As their communities became larger and their rights and privileges better defined,
bourgeoisie came to signify more than just a collective noun for bourgeois. It implied
citizenship in a particular community possessing specific rights. These rights varied from
one place to another, as did the conditions one had to meet in order to acquire bourgeois
status. A common requirement was residence in the community for a year and a day, but
the period might be as long as ten years. Some towns required a substantial payment for
admission to bourgeois status. In others, it could be obtained by marrying into a
bourgeois family.
There were legal and economic advantages to having the status of bourgeois in a town
with extensive privileges, and the bourgeois of royal towns could claim to be subject to
the king’s jurisdiction when they were in other parts of the kingdom. During the mid-13th
century, when royal officials found pretexts for expanding the king’s jurisdiction, the
government began to offer “letters of bourgeoisie,” which declared the recipient a
bourgeois of a royal town even when not a resident of it. In principle, this privilege could
not apply to people living in the lands of a territorial lord with high justice, but the
presence of significant numbers of so-called bourgeois-le-roi in nonroyal lands could
lead to interventions by royal officials that might seriously undermine seigneurial
jurisdiction.
Predictably, letters of bourgeoisie aroused opposition, and in 1287 Philip IV issued an
ordinance intended to curb abuses and regulate the droit de bourgeoisie. For a man to be
admitted as a bourgeois of a particular town, he had to buy or build a domicile of a
certain value and either he or his wife had to reside there from November through June. If
he or his wife owned property in nonroyal lands, that property was subject to the
jurisdiction of the local lord with high justice.
This ordinance, and another one issued thirty years later by Philip V, reduced the
attractiveness of letters of bourgeoisie, and they seem not to have become as widespread
as some 19th-century historians believed. They did not disappear, however, and the
crown employed them as a device for extending protection to, or extracting “protection
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 264