In 1515, French society could be understood as conforming to the
secular pattern of society recognized in Italy, in which the estates were
‘the nobility, the middle people which might be called the rich people,
and the lesser folk’. There was ‘an unbelievable number of offices and
charges’, such as governorships of provinces and captaincies of towns to
sustain the old nobility, and the offices of finance and most of the offices
of justice, which belonged to ‘the middling estate’; the vocation of the
third estate was ‘the mechanical arts’. But by securing ‘grace and privi-
lege from the prince’ (and considerable expenditure) men could rise
from one estate to the next. The clergy, who could be regarded as
‘common to all the estates’, were offered many opportunities to advance
in status. The king demanded a part in the appointment of ecclesiastical
dignitaries because he took so many of his ministers from their ranks
and paid them with benefices in his gift.^85
Within the social hierarchy royal ordinances defined a tauter hier-
archy of officialdom which drew the commonwealth together terri-
torially in a way meetings of the estates general could not. In the second
half of the fifteenth century, as Valois authority was restored and
extended, parlementsat Bordeaux, Grenoble, Dijon, Rouen, and Aix-
en-Provence, each with 20 to 30 judicial councillors, were added to
those of Paris and Toulouse. In 1539 conquered Piedmont was given
a parlement. This was not, as it has sometimes been represented, a
‘decentralization of justice and administration’: it was rather a con-
comitant of the establishment of fixed centres of government and an
extension of the Parisian style of administration to the provincial
capitals of France, along with the appointment of lieutenants généraux
or governors of provinces for the king. Royal government dealt directly
with provincial estates over taxes, prohibited foreign lords to sit in the
assemblées publicquesof Provence, granted privileges to merchants of
Languedoc at the instance of the estates and to the cloth workers of
Tours ‘for the utility of the chose publicque’, and laid down the pro-
cedures to be followed in Brittany in civil and criminal justice.^86 A series
288 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^85) Claude de Seyssel, La Monarchie de France et deux autres fragments politiques, ed.
J. Poujol (Paris, 1961), 120 ff.; The Monarchy of France, tr. J. H. Hexter and M. Sherman, ed.
D. R. Kelley (Yale UP, 1981), 58–66 (part 1, caps. xiii–xix); R. 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 (1972), 298–9; Lewis, Later Medieval France,
169–70, 176–7, 319; Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, 168–9; Ladurie,
The Royal French State, 21 ff.
(^86) Ordonnances des Roys de France, xvii. 6–7, 18–20, 332–4, 402–4, xviii. 252, 268, xx.
592; Ordonnances: Règne de Francois I, viii. 112–15, 141–73, ix. 84–8, 176–83, 322–9,
333–40; F. Lot and R. Fawtier, Histoire des institutions françaises au moyen âge, ii.
Institutions royales(Paris, 1958), part iv, caps. v (‘Personnel’) and xiii (‘Grands Jours et
ParlementsNouveaux’); G. Dupont-Ferrier, ‘L’Emploi du mot ‘Province’ dans le langage
administratif’, and ‘De quelque synonymes du terme “Province’’ ’, Revue Historique, 160 and
161 (1929), 241–67 and 278–303; A. Bossuat, ‘La Formule “Le Roi est empereur en son