equally distributed through the mystical body. On one occasion Gerson
tells the king that the knights (here called the first estate) are the strong
arms which defend ‘your mystical body’ which is ‘the royal polity
[regalis policia]’; on another, that we may talk of ‘the royal estate or
dignity’ as the king’s second life, a ‘civil or political’ one, which is
‘worth so much more than his physical life as, transmitted by legitimate
succession, it is more permanent, and as the common good is more
valuable than the particular or personal’. When it did more than give
expression to an ideal unity of the different estates in French society, the
notion of the body politic emphasized the dominance of the head from
which all civil life flowed.^71
The legitimate succession to the French crown after the expiry of the
Capetian dynasty was of course the issue which started the Hundred
Years War, and Charles VI’s madness and Henry V’s triumph at Agin-
court in 1415 brought it to the forefront again. It was an issue to be
settled, if not by force of arms, then by the arguments of lawyers rather
than political theorists. In order to counter the Plantagenet claim
through Edward III’s French mother, the Salic law had been discovered
which supposedly excluded succession to the Crown not just by females
but also by descent through females, and this was proclaimed a funda-
mental law of the French polity in an ordonnanceof 1374.^72 When in
1418 Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy seized control of Paris and the
government of France, Jean de Terre Rouge (or ‘de Terrevermeille’), a
doctor of law and avocatfrom Nîmes, wrote a Latin treatise to con-
found the Burgundians ‘as rebels against their kings’ and to assert the
rights of the dauphin, the future Charles VII. Kingship, he argued, was
different from ordinary lordship, and succession to a kingdom different
from hereditary succession to ‘private things’, which might be changed
by the will of a testator. In the king’s incapacity, the ‘administration of
the kingdom’ should go to the eldest surviving son of the king, even
though he was a minor, like the kingdom itself on his father’s death:
that was the custom in force in France ‘as it was introduced by the
consent of the three estates and the whole civil or mystical body of the
realm’.^73
France as l’état monarchique 281(^71) Jean Gerson, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Mgr Glorieux, vii: L’Oeuvre Française, Sermons et
Discours, 1137–9, 1144–7, 1149–51, 1178–9; Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 218–19;
Lewis, Late Medieval France, 84–90.
(^72) J. Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la Fin du moyen âge, 1380–1440
(Paris, 1981), 281 ff.; Cazelles, Société politique... sous Jean le Bon et Charles V, 555–6,
579–81.
(^73) For Terre Rouge see: R. E. Giesey, ‘The French Estates and the Corpus Mysticum Regni’,
in Album Helen Maud Cam, Studies Presented to the International Commission for the
History of Representation and Parliamentary Institutions, 23 (Pouvain, 1960), 157–71;
J. H. Burns, The Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 40–58. The
first two of the three tractates of Jean de Terre Rouge’s Contra rebelles suorum regumare