mantle, ring, scepters, crown). The ceremony closed with a Mass and was followed by a
postcoronation banquet.
The constitutive aspect of the coronation ritual was extremely important in the high
Middle Ages, and no one fully possessed the royal title until he was anointed and
crowned. The early Capetians crowned their successors as co-kings to solve the problem
of succession and to establish the dynasty firmly upon the throne. The coronation ceased
to be juridically necessary, but the circumstances of Charles VII’s coronation in 1429
show that it remained indispensable. This, coupled with the requirement that the officiant
be an archbishop or bishop, inextricably bound the secular office of government to the
Christian religion and flavored the character of medieval French kingship.
Richard A.Jackson
[See also: ENTRIES, ROYAL]
Bouman, Cornelius A. Sacring and Crowning: The Development of the Latin Ritual for the
Anointing of Kings and the Coronation of an Emperor Before the Eleventh Century. Groningen:
Wolters, 1957.
David, Marcel. “Le serment du sacre du IXe au XVe siècle: contribution à l’étude des limites
juridiques de la souveraineté.” Revue du moyen âge latin 6(1950):5–272.
Folz, Robert. The Coronation of Charlemagne, 25 December 800, trans. J.E.Anderson. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
Jackson, Richard A. Vive le Roi: A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Schramm, Percy Ernst. Der König von Frankreich: Das Wesen der Monarchie vom 9. zum 16.
Jahrhundert. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Weimar: Böhlaus, 1960.
CORVÉE
. Forced labor service. From Late Latin corrogare ‘to requisition,’ corvées in effect had
already been institutionalized in the late Roman Empire. Often reluctant and inefficient
coloni had to perform a prescribed number of days’ work without pay for their landlords.
Due from certain categories of people to private proprietors, these services were
distinguished from the opera officialis that certain freemen had to perform for the state.
Frankish kings continued this system. Coruada was used in one of Charlemagne’s
capitularies for a day’s work without pay that a man performed for his lord. Feudal
nobles appropriated these Frankish usages, dividing them into fixed and exceptional,
requisitioned only when normal means proved insufficient. Whether real (attached to the
land) or personal, corvées forced labor from servile or free tenants but not from noble
vassals. They consisted of repairing roads, bridges, castles, levees, or dikes; felling trees;
threshing and carting grain and other materials; or even delivering letters—in return for
any of which tasks the lords may have supplied food and drink. When they covered field
work on the lord’s demesne, plowing and harvesting predominated. Especially in the later
Middle Ages, corvées were commuted to money payments, an act that removed any
question of stigmatization through an indication of the servility often attached to them,
after which inflation reduced them. Royal corvées, however, were instituted in the 17th
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