wider class of property-holders), and the multitude tend to overlap, and
the whole is best represented by a middle class of administrators. In a
temporal kingdom Oresme thus seems to regard the ruler as being
restrained not by general assemblies but by the balance of estates in the
administration of the country. The king has sovereignty ‘but in many
great matters can do nothing’ without the concurrence of another
authority (princey), such as ‘the parlementin France’ or the old Roman
senate. Since the law has no superior, parlementis the highest of the
counterbalancing powers in the land, but the Chambre des Comptes
follows close behind.^56
On Aristotle’s dictum that princes should obey the unwritten custom
lying behind good laws, Oresme hangs a long gloss discussing the just
distribution of honours within the church. Aristotle had advised that
too gross inequality in the distribution of positions and wealth should
be avoided in a good policy, but it had not been sufficiently guarded
against in the church. Ambition, fraud, and pomp had debased the
morals of the clerical estate, and taken other estates down with them.
Elsewhere Oresme enters one of the great controversies of the previous
century, that surrounding the doctrine of apostolic poverty. Other
works of Aristotle are cited to the effect that various sorts of people are
necessary for religious worship, but they should be honourable in birth,
body, morals, and estate. It was a virtue to live simply by a little honest
labour and leave space for contemplation, but to beg and demand to live
from others’ goods was unworthy of a priest.^57
Oresme’s attention was engaged by one further issue of contempo-
rary government, to which he devoted a separate work, his Latin
treatise De Moneta(‘The Mint’). Ptolemy of Lucca had identified the
‘royal state’ and the interests of the people most closely in respect of the
production and circulation of money. Oresme continued a theoretical
widening of the concerns of government from justice and peace to the
management of the economy which was inspired as much by the
practical politics of contemporary France as by Aristotle’s Oeconomica.
The De Moneta, written during the great meetings of the estates-
general in the mid-1350s to grant and control war-taxation, insisted
that the coinage belonged to the whole community of citizens, which
could no more allow the prince to debase and alter it for revenue
The king in the French body politic 273(^56) Le Livre de Politiques, 128 (fo. 87c–d), 168–9 (fos. 130b–131b), 196–7 (fos.
157a–158c), 242, 258–9, 292, 309 (fo. 267b–c), 373 (for princey); cf. The Politics of Aristotle,
tr. Barker, 113–16 (book 3, caps. 7–8); Blythe, Ideal Government, 229–40; Krynen, L’Empire
du roi, 273.
(^57) Ordonnances des Roys de France, ii. 529, 557, iii. 675; Delachenal, ‘Journal des États
Généraux... d’octobre 1356’, 449; Le Livre de Politiques, 159–61 (fos. 119d–124d), 196 (fo.
157a), 306–8 (fos. 264d–266d), 318–20 (fos. 275d–277c); cf. The Politics of Aristotle, tr.
Barker, 86, 117–18, 147, 277, 303, 309–10; Babbitt, Oresme’s Livre de Politiques, 98–125;
Blythe, Ideal Government, 234–6.