resources, salt became an important source of royal revenue after Philip VI’s ordinance of
March 16, 1341, ordered seizure of salt throughout the kingdom. It was to be stored in
royal warehouses and then sold for a profit by royal officials called gabelliers. The king
established a more permanent administrative structure in 1343, but general hostility to the
new tax led Philip to cancel it in 1346–47 in return for grants of war subsidies. The
Estates General of December 1355 reimposed the gabelle as one of several indirect taxes
that soon were canceled because of opposition. It appeared again at Paris in 1358, and the
Estates of Languedoc began imposing a gabelle on salt after 1359.
The gabelle, along with other indirect taxes, became a permanent part of royal
finances in December 1360, when the ransom of King John II required heavy regular
taxes. Until 1367, it was a 20-percent ad valorem tax, but then the crown changed it to a
surcharge of twenty-four francs per muid of salt.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
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 Bell. Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Development of War
Financing, 1322–1356. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Meynial, Edmond. “Études sur la gabelle du sel avant le XVIIe siècle en France.” Tijdschrift voor
Rechtsgeschiedenis 3 (1922):119–62.
Pérousse, Gabriel. “Étude sur les origines de la gabelle et sur son organisation jusqu’en 1380.”
Positions de thèses. Paris: École Nationale des Chartes, 1898.
GACE BRULÉ
(fl. ca. 1185–1210). The most illustrious early trouvère, born into the lower nobility of
Champagne, Gace has been credited with the most extensive corpus of monophonic
compositions in Old French. The over eighty texts, the great majority surviving with their
melodies, are almost all courtly chansons in a style derived from the Provençal tradition.
Their usual theme, persistent but unrequited and despairing love for a socially superior
lady, is often interwoven with the theme of poetic and musical creation: loving and
singing express each other. Though almost nothing is known of Gace’s life, it is clear that
his circle included other major lyric poets and that his patrons—Marie de Champagne,
first of all—were among the most powerful feudal figures of his time. Textual and
melodic evidence shows that he was widely admired and emulated by both contemporary
and later trouvères, in Germany as well as France.
Samuel N.Rosenberg
[See also: TROUVÈRE POETRY]
Gace Brulé. Gace Brulé, trouvère champenois: édition des chansons et étude historique, ed. Holger
Petersen Dyggve. Helsinki, 1951.
——. The Lyrics and Melodies of Gace Brulé, ed. and trans. Samuel N.Rosenberg, Samuel Danon,
and Hendrik van der Werf. New York: Garland, 1985.
van der Werf, Hendrik, ed. Trouvères-Melodien I. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1977, pp. 315–554.
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