BENEFICE (NONECCLESIASTICAL)
. A beneficium (benefice in modern French and English) was originally, under the
Carolingians, a grant of land that the kings made to their counts to hold as long as the
counts held office. It referred to land that belonged to one lord but that was delegated to
someone else for a temporary period, in return for certain services. Monasteries, too,
might grant parts of their lands in beneficium to their secular neighbors, usually for a
specified period of time (say, the layman’s lifetime) and for an annual fee.
The benefice system by which kings and churches rewarded the services of their
friends became a common part of more private transactions during the 10th and 11th
centuries. By the mid-11th century, a benefice became in most cases indistinguishable
from a fief, which a noble or knight held permanently by hereditary right from a noble
lord, as long as he promised fidelity and performed homage for the land. The terms
beneficium and feudum (fief) began to be used interchangeably.
Constance B.Bouchard
Dunbabin, Jean. France in the Making, 843–1180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Poly, Jean-Pierre, and Eric Bournazel. La mutation féodale, Xe-XIIe siècles. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1980.
BENOÎT DE SAINTE-MAURE
(fl. 1160–70). Little is known about Benoît de Sainte-Maure that does not emerge directly
from his texts. The author of the Roman de Troie names himself in line 132 as Beneeit de
Sainte-More, and as Beneit in lines 2065, 5093, and 19,207. He praises Eleanor of
Aquitaine in the Roman de Troie and flatters Henry II in the other text of which he is
believed to be the author, the Chronique des ducs de Normandie. Here, the author is
identified simply as Beneit from Touraine (albeit in summary passages that may not be
by the author himself), who, it is presumed, took over for the aged Wace when the latter
abandoned his Roman de Rou, also a history of the dukes of Normandy. Benoît’s
Chronique has 44,542 lines in octosyllabic rhymed couplets. It begins with the creation
and division of the world and ends with the death of Henry I of England. The Latin
chronicles of Dudo de Saint-Quentin and Guillaume de Jumièges provided much of the
material. But Benoît also invented long discourses for his historical characters and
inserted countless proverbs into his narrative. As in the Romances of Antiquity,
anachronism and medievalization are rampant. The romance form of the Chronique
suggests that it was part of the repertoire of texts recited in a courtly milieu. The
Chronique, together with Wace’s Rou, is an excellent example of the desire of a new
dynasty (as the Angevins with Henry II were in England) to celebrate their roots and their
history in vernacular texts that would be accessible not only to a learned clerical audience
but also to the aristocracy.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
The Encyclopedia 207