GACE DE LA BUIGNE
(1305?–1384?). First chaplain of John II the Good, whom he followed into captivity in
England, Gace composed the Roman des deduis between 1359 and 1377 as an instruction
book for John’s youngest son, the future Philip the Bold of Burgundy. Its 12,210
octosyllabic lines can be divided into two parts: a battle of personified virtues and vices,
enlivened by occasional hunting scenes, and a debate over the merits of hunting with
dogs as opposed to falconry. The second part is particularly vivid, with frequent
digressions from Barthélemy l’Anglais’s Encyclopedia and Henri de Ferrière’s Livres du
roy Modus et de la royne Ratio. The great popularity of this amalgam of hunting advice
and ethical instruction is reflected in twenty-one manuscripts and three early 16th-century
printed editions.
William W.Kibler
[See also: FERRIÈRES, HENRI DE; GASTON PHOEBUS]
Gace de la Buigne. Le roman des deduis, ed. Ake Blomqvist. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell;
Paris: Thiebaud, 1951.
Van den Abeele, Baudouin. La fauconnerie dans les lettres françaises due XIIe au XIVe siècle.
Louvain: Presses Universitaires, 1990.
GAGE
. In credit operations of the Middle Ages, the gage was surety given in return for a loan
(although occasionally a gage over property might be given as a pious gift without a loan
being made); it was sometimes used as a means of temporarily raising cash and
transferring property to the church’s safekeeping, especially by pilgrims and crusaders,
often with reversion of all rights over a property to that religious house if the pilgrim died
en route. In general, there were two types of medieval gages—the mort-gage (not to be
confused with our modern mortgage) and the vif-gage. The interest-bearing and onerous
mortgage was condemned by 12th-century church councils, which allowed use only of
the vif-gage. In both transactions, the borrower granted land or other property to the
lender in gage (Lat. dono in pignus), as surety for a loan of a specified amount of cash.
By the terms of written contracts for either type of gage, the lender enjoyed the fruits of
the land or property that had been granted as surety until the loan was redeemed; the term
of the loan was usually unlimited and redemption was limited to a certain date or season
annually, frequently All Saints’ Day. In the vif-gage, however, the fruits of the land, or at
least a set part of them, served to reduce the amount of the loan so that it was
automatically repaid and the land or other property reverted to the original owner after a
term of years. In the mort-gage, the fruits did not reduce the principal but in effect served
as the lender’s interest, making the contract usurious and therefore illegal according to
ecclesiastics. In northern France, another type of contract, called the constituted rent, in
which an individual purchased a set annual income in return for paying an initial sum,
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