fluctuated between six and ten. After 1318, parial status lost its strict attachment to a
major fief, and some peers secured parial condition for almost all of the lands they held
from the crown. The peers also secured the exemption of all of their parial lands from the
jurisdiction of all courts save the Grand’Chambre of the Parlement de Paris sitting as a
“Court of Peers,” so that parities constituted vast immunities within the structure of royal
administration.
D’A.Jonathan D.Boulton
[See also: NOBILITY]
Boulton, D’A.J.D. Grants of Honour: The Origins of the System of Nobiliary Dignities of
Traditional France, ca. 1100–1515. Forthcoming.
Feuchère, Pierre. “Pairs de principauté et pairs de château: essai sur l’institution des pairies en
Flandre. Étude géographique et institutionelle.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire
(1953):973–1002.
——.“Essai sur l’institution des pairs entre Seine et Meuse.” Revue du Nord 36(1954):78–79.
Sautel-Boulet, Marguerite. “Le role juridictionnel de la cour des pairs au XIIIe et XIVe siècles.”
Recueil...Clovis Brunel. Paris: Société de l’École des Chartes, 1955, pp. 507–20.
Valon, François de. Les pairs de France et leur cour. Toulouse: Cléder, 1931.
PEIRE CARDENAL
(ca. 1180–ca. 1272). One of the most prolific troubadours and the longest-lived, Peire
Cardenal composed sirventes, or satires, on moral and religious subjects. He left some
ninety-six poems. Born in Le Puy, he was employed as a clerk by Raymond VI of
Toulouse and frequented the courts of Les Baux, Rodez, Auvergne, and (according to his
vida) of Aragon. He may have died in Montpellier.
As a satirist, Peire is distant from Marcabru but closer to Bertran de Born, whom he
imitated in a number of compositions, sometimes equaling the sting of Bertran’s
invective, on other occasions echoing his technique of martial description the better to
express his disapproval of Bertran’s eagerness for combat. Peire imitated the metrical and
musical form of preceding compositions in at least 80 percent of his own songs,
exploring the possibilities of an increasingly strict sense of contrafacture with impressive
technical inventiveness.
As a moralist, Peire praises good actions and blames the bad but laments that he is
understood by no one, as though he spoke a foreign language. He tells a fable, Una
ciutatz fo, in which rain falls on a city and drives everyone mad except one man who has
been sheltered; when he goes out into the street, he sees that everyone else is crazy, but
they think him mad and drive him away. Thus, worldly spirits reject the man who hears
the voice of God. In a few poems, Peire criticizes the worldly love sung by other
troubadours and anticipates the dolce stil nuovo with his claim that fin’amors is born in a
franc cor gentil, “a noble, gentle heart.”
During the extended period of the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29), Peire expressed
vigorous anticlericalism at the expense of Dominican inquisitors and severely criticized
the French army led by Simon de Montfort. He did not, however, defend the cause of the
Albigensians, regarded as heretics by the church, but rather championed the political
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