coinage. In this case, the hearth clearly referred to households, as it tended to throughout
northern France. Towns sometimes raised municipal taxes through a fouage, often in
response to demands from reformers who considered it more equitable than indirect taxes
that bore on poor consumers.
As royal taxation developed in the 14th century, the fouage became the preferred
method of payment in Languedoc, especially between 1340 and 1380. Generally, the
towns of a district would agree to pay a lump sum assessed among them on the basis of
households. Within these towns, the actual tax might take any form. When it was a direct
tax, it tended to be assessed on the value of real property (exclusive of rural fiefs or
church lands, which rarely lay within a town’s jurisdiction anyway). After the mid-14th
century, when war and plague had reduced the number of households, hearth counts in
Languedoc lost their connection with actual households and became an administrative
device for apportioning taxes among the towns.
The fouage best known as a royal tax was that enacted by the Estates General of
Languedoil in December 1363 and canceled by Charles V in September 1380. Averaging
three francs per household (but graduated from one to nine) and affecting rural lordships
as well as towns, this levy paid for the army that scored important victories in the reign of
Charles V. It was the ancestor of the royal taille.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: CHARLES V THE WISE; CURRENCY; TAILLE]
Borelli de Serres, Léon. Recherches sur divers services publiques du XIIIe au XVIIe siècle. 3 vols.
Paris: Picard, 1895–1905.
Brown, Elizabeth A.R. “Taxation and Morality in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries:
Conscience and Political Power and the Kings of France.” French Historical Studies 8(1973):
1–28.
Dupont-Ferrier, Gustave. Études sur les institutions financières de la France a la fin du moyen âge.
2 vols. Paris: Didot, 1930–32.
Henneman, John B. Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Captivity and Ransom of
John II. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976.
FOUCHER DE CHARTRES
(ca. 1059-ca. 1127). The author of one of the principal accounts of the First Crusade and
the history of the Latin kingdoms in the Near East, Foucher may have been at the Council
of Clermont in 1095 when Pope Urban II announced the crusade and soon thereafter
accompanied Étienne, count of Blois and Chartres, as his chaplain on the journey to the
Holy Land. In 1097, Foucher’s fortunes became linked to those of Baudouin I, who
became king of Jerusalem in 1100. Foucher began to compose his magnum opus, the
Historia Hierosolymitana, toward the end of 1101; and it is likely that the end of the
chronicle in 1127 marks his death.
Mark Zier
[See also: CRUSADES; HISTORIOGRAPHY]
Foucher de Chartres. Historia Hierosolymitana (1095–1127), ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer.
Heidelberg: Winter, 1913.
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