Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris and leading pro-
ponent of reform in the estates-general, French kings never trusted
general assemblies and rarely called them.^54
In his marrying of Aristotelian theory with experience for the use
of Valois France, Oresme assumes a policie in which a king has
sovereignty, and ‘political’ rule is what subordinate princes exercise in
the provinces. But he also takes it for granted that the king holds a
‘noble public office’ and governs like other ‘public persons’ for the
common good and guided by ‘political science’. Royal power is limited
by no superior organ of government but always by the laws of the com-
munity, and it is more necessary to be governed by good laws than by
a good prince. ‘Policies’ are corrupted both by unjust laws and by the
princes’ substitution of their will and power for laws. Discipline, teach-
ing, and good laws are needed to restore a policy to health: laws which
are written down, but are neither the Roman law invoked by tyrannical
kings nor rulers’ self-made edicts. The ‘laws and statutes’ Oresme
describes as convenient for a policy sound like contemporary French
ordinances: those that discouraged excessive eating and drinking and
fostered useful labour, honest service, and skill in arms. And they would
be made by the advice of councillors not accustomed to lie, and the
consent of the people who used them.^55
Oresme writes that the ‘reformation and correction’ of the laws made
by ecclesiastical authority, which is also a ‘princey’, ‘belong to the
multitude’ speaking through a council of the church. All constitutions
that are good because they work for the common profit, not least the
good form of monarchy which he calls royalme, are in some sense
mixed and give all the citizens a part in ruling. Glossing Aristotle on the
different sorts of constitution, he explains that the type of ‘ordering of
authority’ (ordre de princey) in a country is decided by the variety and
relative weight of the ‘estates, offices or occupations’. Constitutions are
as variable as mariners’ wind directions—south-west, north-east etc.
They may also be characterized by the harmony of their parts: the music
of tyranny and oligarchy is too harsh, that of democracy is too
emollient, and it is royalmeand aristocracy which move to a well-
tempered music. But in any polity aristocracy, timocracy (rule by a
272 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^54) Cazelles, ibid. 224–6, 427–9; id., Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le Bon
et Charles V, 318–37, 491, 536; P. S. Lewis, ‘The Failure of the French Medieval Estates’, Past
and Present, 23 (1962): repr. in his Essays in Later Medieval French History(London, 1985).
(^55) Maistre Nicole Oresme Le Livre de Politiques D’Aristote, ed. A. D. Menut, TAmPhilSoc
60, part 6 (1970), 153 (fo. 113a), 158–60 (fos. 118d–123b), 196 (fo. 157c), 243–4, 257 (fo.
217b), 310–11 (fos. 268b–269a), 322–9 (fos. 279a–285c), 365–6 (policiein the index of
terms); Susan M. Babbitt, Oresme’s Livre de Politiques and the France of Charles V,
TAmPhilSoc, 75, part 1 (1985), 76–9, 84–5, 91–3; Blythe, Ideal Government, 203–40;
Cazelle, Société politique... sous Jean le Bon et Charles V, 507–8; Krynen, L’Empire du roi,
115, 118–19.