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Jews, Regalian Rights, And The Constitution In Medieval France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

William Chester Jordan
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Extract

It is fashionable to imagine a great dichotomy between the feudal monarchies in the West and the brittle, particularistic entity of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. To Voltaire's mean-spirited gibe that the latter was neither holy, Roman, nor an Empire might be added that it was also not really German, since millions of Netherlanders, Italians, and Slavs, as well as Provencals and Savoyards, lived within its territorial limits. France and England, the stereotype goes, had achieved a precocious unity, at least in the thirteenth century. Nothing could be clearer, one might conclude, than the contrast between the great kingdoms of the West and the so-called Empire. The fashionable cliche even affects our understanding of Jewish life in the Middle Ages. Fritz Backhaus put the commonplace this way: “The territorial division (Zersplitterung) of Germany prevented a comprehensive expulsion [of the Jews] as could be carried out in England, France, and Spain.” This neat dichotomy is inadequate. At best it makes sense in a comparison between England and Germany. Only in England, a few exceptions aside, were the claims of a paramount lord, the king, to the control and exploitation of the Jews more or less uncontested by other secular authorities or by ecclesiastics in the role of secular lords.

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Articles
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AJS Review , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , April 1998 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1998

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References

1. A very early version of this paper was presented at the Twenty-fourth Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies (December 14, 1992) under the title, “The Supremacy of the Crown and the Public Good: The Expulsion of the Jews from France (1306) as an Episode in Constitutional History.” At the kind invitation of Professor John Moore, I gave a lecture at Hofstra University, October 26, 1994, based on a revised version of that paper.

2. Backhaus, Fritz, “Judenfeindschaft und Judenvertreibungen im Mittelalter: Zur Ausweisung der Juden aus dem Mittelelbraum im 15. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuchjur die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 36 (1987): 275–332.Google Scholar

3. The best survey of the English situation, from which the information to be summarized comes, is Richardson's, H.G. English Jewry under the Angevin Kings (London, 1960). A new synthesis, by Robert Stacey, is on the horizon.Google Scholar

4. The summary of the situation in France is abstracted from my French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989).

5. In a paper presented at Cornell University, November 4,1990, entitled, “Jews in Medieval England and France: The Jurisdictional Contrast.”;

6. Jean-Luc, Fray, “Communautés juives et princes territoriaux dans l'espace lorrain au bas moyen age (vers 1200–1500),” Annales del' Est 44 (1992): 95–96.Google Scholar

7. Ibid, pp. 95–96.

8. I am not concerned here with the juridical analogy made at the time between Jews and serfs (judei tanquam servi, judei servi camere sunt, etc.), on which see Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 133, 243–244. Cf. Shahar, Shulamith, “Some Observations on the Use of the Term Servi in Relation to the Jews of France” (in Hebrew), Michael 12 (1991).Google Scholar

9. Pollock, Frederick and Frederic Maitland, William, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1898), 1:428–429Google Scholar

10. Cf. Brissaud, Jean, A History of French Public Law, trans. James Garner (Boston, 1915), pp. 325–326.Google Scholar

11. Ganshof, F.L., The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy: Studies in Carolingian History, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), p. 97Google Scholar

12. Layettes du Trésor des chartes, ed. Alexandra Teulet et al, 5 vols. (Paris, 1863–1909), II, no. 2083. Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 131–133

13. This terminology was developed in Chazan's, RobertMedieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore, 1973).Google Scholar

14. Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 69, 98–102; Fray, “Communautes juives,” p. 97. For a later invocation of the principle underlying these treaties, see Jordan, French Monarchy, p. 323 n.24.

15. Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 66–70.

16. For a full discussion of all the issues surrounding the ordinances and negotiations of 1223, see Ibid., pp. 93–104.

17. This does not mean that the status that the Ordinance of Melun defines for the Jews was as radical a departure as the constitutional aspects of the Ordinance; cf. Dahan, Gilbert, Les Intellectuels Chretiens et lesjuifs au moyen age (Paris, 1990), p. 67Google Scholar

18. Les Etablissements de saint Louis, ed. Paul, Viollet, 4 vols. (Paris, 1881–86),Google Scholar II, 446, “Nuns vavasors, ne gentis hom ne peut franchir son home de cors en nule meniere, sanz l'asentement dou baron ou dou chief seignor, selonc l'usage de la cort laie.” For an alternative translation, see The “Etablissements de Saint Louis “: Thirteenth-Century Law Texts from Tours, Orleans, and Paris, ed. FRP, Akehurst (Philadelphia, 1996), p. 154Google Scholar

19. The Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir, trans. F.R.P., Akehurst (Philadelphia, 1992), p.515.Google Scholar

20. For a more elaborate discussion of coinage, with full references, see Jordan, William, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton, 1979), pp. 206–213.Google Scholar

21. Pierre Michaud-Quantin, “La Politique monetaire royale en 1265 à la Faculté de théologie de Paris en 1265,” Le Moyen âge (1962), pp. 149–51.

22. “Chronique ou histoire abrégée des évêques et des comtes de Nevers,” Bulletin de la Société nivernaise 8 (1872): 62 (also 23).

23. See now Denton, Jeffrey, Philip the Fair and the Ecclesiastical Assemblies of 1294–1295, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 81 (Philadelphia, 1991).Google Scholar

24. The best discussion of these incidents and their profound political implications may be found in Strayer, Joseph, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton, 1980), pp. 260–279Google Scholar

25. The works of Elizabeth Brown continuously propound this message. See, for example, Customary Aids and Royal Finance in Capetian France (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 223–224; and “Royal Commissioners and Grants of Privilege in Philip the Fair's France: Pierre de Latilli, Raoul de Breuilli, and the Ordonnance for the Senelschalsy of Toulouse and Albi of 1299,”; Francia 13(1985): 151–190.

26. Benedictow, Ole, “Konge, bird og retterboten av 17. juni 1308,” Historisk Tidssbift 51 (1972): 233–284.Google Scholar

27. For a lucid summary of the points made in this paragraph, see Strayer, Reign of Philip the Fair, pp. 394–396

28. Bois, Gui, The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy, c. 1300–1550(Cambridge, 1984), p. 270Google Scholar

29. Strayer, Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 396

30. Again, for the details and references to sources for what follows on the expulsion of the Jews, see Jordan, French Monarchy, pp. 200–213.

31. For the broader context of the development of royal ideology, see Strayer, Joseph, “France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King,” in Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History: Essays by Joseph R. Strayer (Princeton, 1971), pp. 300–314.Google Scholar

32. Strayer, Reign of Philip the Fair, pp. 285–295

33. For these charges and the folkloric milieu out of which they may have arisen, see Barber, Malcolm, “Propaganda in the Middle Ages: The Charges against the Templars,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 17 (1973): 42–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Menache, Sophia, “Rewriting the History of the Templars According to Matthew Paris,” in Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael, Goodich et al. (New York, 1995), p. 212Google Scholar

35. Strayer, Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 396

36. Sophia Menache places the attack on the Templars in the context of the aggrandizing political ideology of Philip's circle; “The Templar Order: A Failed Ideal?,” Catholic Historical Review 79 (1993): 14–15.

37. Strayer, Reign of Philip the Fair, pp. 396–397

38. Ibid. p. 396.

39. The readmission and the conditions surrounding readmission are treated at length in Jordan, William, “Aliens, Sojourners, Enemies: The Jews in the Kingdom of France,” in The Stranger in Medieval Society (Minneapolis, 1998).Google Scholar

40. The classic study is that of Marc Bloch, Rois et serfs (Paris, 1920).