When asked to grant taxes, the Estates usually avoided a binding commitment. In
1333, 1343, and 1346, the Estates convened, each time to deal with a crisis and with
related financial issues. They gave their endorsement to financial arrangements that
required subsequent local ratification. At the end of 1347, the Estates General bargained
at length over measures to reform the government and agreed in principle to a large tax
that, again, would be paid according to the arrangements made at regional Estates.
The Black Death frustrated the work of the Estates of 1347, and the disastrous Battle
of Poitiers would do the same to the Estates that met eight years later. The Estates
General met frequently during the years of the king’s captivity (1356–60) but the efforts
of their leaders to intimidate the royal government, and their failure to deliver the taxes
they promised, persuaded the crown that they were more troublesome than useful.
Meetings in 1363, 1367, and 1369 proved far more helpful to the king, but in the troubled
reign of Charles VI the meetings of the Estates (1381 and 1413) led to large uprisings.
Charles VII had frequent recourse to the Estates (generally of Languedoil only) in the
years 1422–39 but still found them reluctant to rise above regional differences and make
binding commitments to a royal tax. When they finally did make such a grant, he kept
collecting the taxes without recourse to future assemblies. The last two medieval
meetings of the Estates General were in 1468, when Louis XI used the meeting as an old-
style propaganda forum, and 1484, when his daughter and son-in-law, who had custody
of the young Charles VIII, used it to defuse opposition.
The Estates General could prove useful to the king, especially in time of crisis, but it
could also prove troublesome. It never acquired a role that made it indispensable and
therefore never became a regular institution of the French government.
John Bell Henneman, Jr
[See also: ASSEMBLIES; CONSEIL; ESTATES (PROVINCIAL)]
Henneman, John Bell. Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Captivity and Ransom of
John, 1356–1370. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976.
Major, J.Russell. Representative Institutions in Renaissance France 1421–1559. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1960.
Strayer, Joseph R., and Charles H.Taylor. Studies in Early French Taxation. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1939.
ESTATES (PROVINCIAL)
. Representative assemblies of many types and composition flourished in medieval
France, becoming more active in the 13th century. In the following two centuries,
membership in these meetings was frequently drawn from three social orders, or estates:
the clergy, the nobility, and the townspeople. Such assemblies were held at various
jurisdictional levels. Those at the provincial level were known as provincial Estates.
The chief importance of French provincial Estates from the royal point of view was
that they provided a medium through which the consent of the influential inhabitants of
the province could be obtained for extrafeudal taxes so urgently needed during the
Hundred Years’ War and the turbulent period following. They were important to the
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