purposes than they could authorize him to misuse their wives. The
prince as ‘the most public person’ minted money for the community and
put his stamp upon it, but it was tyranny for him to manipulate it with-
out explaining to ‘the community or the better part of it’ what and how
great a necessity demanded such action. But the needs of l’estat du roi,
in the narrow sense of the state of his treasury, were always liable to
prevail.^58
It was in France that Aristotelian philosophy was first brought to
focus in this way on the structure of an actual kingdom, so that after
Oresme the French polity could be treated as a thing in itself by writers
with a variety of backgrounds outside the university. Philippe de
Mézières dressed the old argument for peace and reform in France to
make way for a crusade in a vast and complicated allegory which yet
contains a rich vein of his practical experience as a pilgrim to the Holy
Land, a traveller in Prussia and Spain, a servant of the king of Cyprus,
and finally a member of the entourage of Charles V, to whose son,
Charles VI, he became tutor. The first of the three books of Le Songe du
Vieil Pèlerin (‘The Dream of the Old Pilgrim’, said to have been
dreamed in 1389, the ninth year of the reign of Charles VI), follows
Queen Truth and her sisters, Peace, Mercy, and Justice, on a world tour,
where they are shown symbolically testing the Christian virtue of the
various principalities and powers by assays, made before parlementsof
nobles and people, of the purity of their coinages. Asia and North Africa
are visited as well as the countries of eastern Europe and Scandinavia.
The great Italian cities get particular attention, the visit to Rome pro-
viding the opportunity for a disquisition on the history of the Roman
empire and papacy and the sins of contemporary Romans and church-
men. After Rome and Avignon (the seat of an antipope, where the com-
mission decides it can do nothing), Truth and her companions continue
this earliest of surveys of the polities of Europe with visits to the Spanish
kingdoms, Gascony, and Brittany, and from this ‘Petite Bretaygne’ they
cross to ‘Grant Bretaigne’, where they find no coinage of the good alloy
that there was in the time of Saint Anselm, the Venerable Bede, and their
good kings. In a consistory of the barons, townsmen, and commons in
London, Peace arraigns this people as her particular enemies. We are
told that the ravaging of France by the old Black Boar [Edward III] has
twice in the Pilgrim’s lifetime thwarted crusades to recover the Holy
City, but the young White Boar now reigning [Richard II] wants peace,
for ‘despite the capture of the King of Scotland and the two horrible
274 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^58) The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, with facing trans-
lation by C. Johnson (London, 1956), 10, 35–42; Ordonnances des Roys de France, iii. 520–2;
Cazelles, Société politique... sous Jean le Bon et Charles V, 102, 389–99, 418–19, 491,
510–11, 531–8; Babbitt, Oresme’s Livre de Politiques, 86 ff.; Krynen, L’Empire du roi,
219–20, 268, 420.