meaningful occupations of life. The nobles of Picardy and Burgundy insisted on writing
their right to private war into the charters they secured from Louis X in the movement of
1314–15.
So important was private war to the demonstration of privileged status and the
securing of its material advan tages that collectivities of townsmen claimed and exercised
the right whenever possible. Their wars were as frequent, lasting, and legal as those
between lords of fiefs. Feudal lords indeed often treated towns as collective lord-ships,
formally defied them, and fought them in the most accepted style of private war.
The later Capetian kings, however, busily moving their power in the direction of
sovereignty, looked on control of lordly violence, and its bourgeois imitation, within their
realms as an essential attribute of royal authority. They could scarcely abolish by fiat a
custom so old and deeply rooted, but they tried by a wide range of measures to bring it
under royal regulation. Royal ordonnances periodically prohibited private wars during
the king’s war and in general portrayed private wars as regulated affairs. Royal
asseurements forced peace upon quarrelsome parties. Royal panonceaux, batons
embellished with the fleur-de-lis, theoretically spread the king’s protection wherever they
were placed, on homes, ships, and so on. Royal charges of port d’armes (illegal use of
weapons) brought hundreds of cases into the king’s jurisdiction.
Yet private war survived throughout the Middle Ages. The efforts of emerging royal
sovereignty were significant, but the privileged very slowly yielded the right to violence
within the realm of France.
Richard W.Kaeuper
[See also: CAS ROYAUX; PEACE OF GOD; SAUVEGARDE; WARFARE]
Dubois, P. Les asseurements au XIIIe siècle dans nos villes du nord. Paris: Rousseau, 1900.
Ducoudray, Gustave. Les origines du Parlement de Paris et la justice aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles.
Paris: Hachette, 1902.
Kaeuper, Richard W. War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle
Ages. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Keen, Maurice. The Laws of War in the Later Middle Ages. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1965.
Perrot, Ernest. Les cas royaux. Paris: Rousseau, 1910.
PRIVILEGE
. When applied to medieval France, “privilege” is difficult to separate from such terms as
“liberties” or “franchises,” which implied protection against arbitrary, capricious, or
exploitative treatment. “Privilege” could have the same connotation, but it usually tended
to confer on someone a special or superior position in society.
Liberties that afforded protection could evolve into what we would recognize as
privilege. A document protecting a church and its lands from arbitrary treatment by royal
officials might be cited, much later, to justify oppressive treatment of its tenants or
exemption from obligations to which the population as a whole was subject. Privileges or
liberties might be defined in documents or claimed as part of the customary law of the
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