one deputy (or in populous Vermandois and the prévôtéof Paris, two
deputies) from each estate, who should carry to the estates general the
corporate doléancesof their pays. The three orders are known in some
cases to have elected the three deputies together, while in the bailliage
of Senlis they elected just one—from the ‘third or common estate’.
Probably it was the reluctance of the churchmen and nobles to be
merged with l’estat communthat allowed the council of the town of
Tours to elect three bourgeoisas the deputies for Touraine—but that
election was ordered to be held again in accordance with the summons.
Masselin’s journal reveals the heated debate and procedural improvisa-
tion produced at Tours by the requirement that the three estates
produce a common set of articles on what was needed for ‘the good,
utility and profit of the realm and the chose publique’. The drawing up
of the first chapter on the clergy provoked a protest from some bishops
that the other estates had no right to speak for the Gallican church
and the equally forceful response that meetings of the estates were not
ecclesiastical synods but held on the authority of the secular power to
discuss the needs of the commonwealth (reipublicae utilitas): any
bishops present should be there as deputies elected by the people of the
bailliages. In March, as the meeting approached its end, the question as
to whom the deputies represented was brought to a head by the demand
that they be paid the expenses of their two-month stay at Tours. An
advocate from Troyes argued that the poor people of the land should
not have to pay for the rich deputies whom clergy and nobility exempt
from taillesent to the estates general to transact their business, and it
was now a noble who pointed out that no deputy was supposed to
represent his order alone, and claimed that his estate along with the
clergy had done more than grasping lawyer-deputies to keep down taxes
and defend the interests of the poor.^80
The understanding that the members of the estates general were
elected to work together for the advantage of the one commonwealth
(unius reipublicae) contributed to the territorial solidarity of France
only at the provincial level, if at all. Certainly printing now allowed the
cahier des doléances presented to the king and government by the
assembly of 1484 to be ‘published and disseminated everywhere’; and
the chapter of the cahierput forward ‘for the third and common estate’
complained of the way the whole body of the realm had been drained
of its life-blood by papal and royal taxes, by payment of the expenses of
France as l’état monarchique 285(^80) Masselin, Journal, 393, 407–10, 498–518, 643 (for the debate on the chapter on the
church), 661–713 (appendices 1–2: the cahierof the three estates and the government’s
response); P. Viollet, ‘Élection des députés aux États Généraux réunis à Tours en 1468 et en
1484’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 27 (1866), 31–2, 52–5; W. Blockmanns,
‘Representation’, in New Cambridge Medieval History, vii. 51, 62–3; Lewis, Later Medieval
France, 366, for the argument over expenses.