ENTRIES, ROYAL
. During the 14th century, French towns instituted a unique ceremony for receiving kings
and particularly for celebrating the joyeux avènement of a new monarch. The ceremony
was a composite of ecclesiastical, courtly, guild, and legal-administrative gestures for
dealing with dignitaries. Because the clergy had always led visiting kings to the central
church of a town, the ecclesiastical rites of adventus regni supplied a ritual core that the
nonecclesiastical participants extended and embellished. From the 1350s, the clergy made
new kings confirm their coronation promises to preserve the church and clergy as part of
the welcoming ceremony. Secular corporations soon had the promises and privileges
given to them by previous kings reenacted and confirmed by the kings they received in
their midst. By the middle of the 15th century, the series of encounters between the king
and various corporations were considered a single event, the “happy” or “joyous” entry
ceremony. This ceremony consisted of extramural urban processions to greet the king, an
intramural royal procession with urban escorts, and the production of spectacles along the
processional route. In their entries, new kings carried the aura of the coronation
throughout the realm, but they also exited from ritual theaters choreographed by clergy
and nobility and entered one staged by inhabitants of the civic sphere.
Entry ceremonies were vehicles for urban-style politics of decorum. Various
privileged and social groups found a place to assert their identities and to propagate ideas:
youth groups greeted kings beyond the city’s gates with songs, mock battles, or morality
plays; guilds in livery met them to profess loyalty; magistrates in their robes of office
rendered obeisance and solicited the confirmation of local liberties. During the 15th
century, royal officials and—in cities where they resided—parlements exited the town
and joined the celebrations, to acknowledge the king as their head and to receive
promises of continuing royal favor. The entry procession grew to become the largest and
most frequent form of assembly with the king, and its ordonnance was overseen by the
parlements and royal chancery. Its performance was scripted to be a mirror for the prince
and a model for the community: a rehearsal for the accord and reciprocity between kings
and cities that should guide both of them in mundane political practices.
The ceremony appropriated forms of expression from many quarters. For example, the
addition of the canopy over the king in urban processions resulted from the interplay
between Corpus Christi celebrations and the occasion of an entry. The feudal droit de gîte
(hospitality) was one among many precedents for gift giving and hospitality at royal
entries. Liturgical and biblical plays augmented the culture of the entry. Poets and clergy
advanced the coronation ceremony and the notion of the royal cult in entry pageantry.
Communal and juridical corporations set forth their views with equal ardor. The
ceremony flourished both because it opened the public space to interplay among social,
political, and aesthetic practices and because its form corresponded to the actual social
practices and political roles of its participants. Only in the 17th century was the entry
confined to a celebration of royal power alone and only then consistently tagged “royal”
rather than a “joyous” or “happy” entry.
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