The story begins with a committee of bishops meeting at Beaugency in March 1152 to announce the nullity of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage to King Louis VII of France. They had been married for fifteen years – seven as king and queen – and had two daughters. She thought she had married a monk. He thought she was too feisty and there were rumours about her and her uncle Raymond at Antioch on their ill-fated crusade. They were separated by the churchmen on grounds of consanguinity since they were both descended from King Robert II of France, she in five degrees of it and he in four.
Eleanor had met Henry Plantagenet before, and he held lands bordering on hers in Poitou. She was nine years older than he. Whether there was love kindled between them or not, it would be a very suitable match. He would protect her from the marriage-market predators and she would unite her southern lands with his. It only took two months for them to be married in Poitiers. They visited Aquitaine together, and saw how independent-minded the indigenous nobility was. Two years later, he would inherit England by his treaty with Stephen of Blois. They would have the sons that Eleanor did not have with Louis. Louis was reluctant to give Aquitaine up, but by 1153 he had, and Henry was Duke of Aquitaine before he became king of England.1
Their son John, early on as a joke called ‘Lack-land’ by his father, lost everything except Aquitaine by the battle of Bouvines in 1204 to Philip Augustus, King of France. Aquitaine was presumed to be an allod, that is, independent as a duchy, and Philip’s claim stopped short at the mouth of the Gironde. At the same time, Alfonso VIII of Castille wanted to expand his kingdom northwards, at first by diplomatic effort and then by siege. He started by demanding Bayonne but the Bayonnais said they would only surrender to him if the Bordelais did and they didn’t.
Duke John thanked the citizens (prud’hommes) of Bordeaux, Bazas and Saint-Emilion in a letter of 29 April 1205 for their resistance to French and Castillian diplomatic intrigues. Bordeaux was besieged by the Castillians in either 1205 or 1206. The Bordelais successfully organized resistance by their own efforts, there being no one else to turn to. They seem, on the basis of ‘liberties’ offered them in 1199 by Eleanor and John, to have had a municipal assembly of some kind. John wrote to ‘the jurats and the bourgeoisie of Bordeaux’ on 4 February 1200, recognizing the existence of such a political entity. Faced with the Castillians’ siege, this body seems to have transformed itself, so that by 30 April 1206, when he wrote again, John refers to ‘the mayor, jurats and loyal subjects of Bordeaux’ over the appointment of a seneschal, and the need for foreigners in the town to take an oath of fidelity to the king and to the commune. He sent another letter to the mayor, the commune, the seneschal of Gascony and the royal bailiff. So the town (using the French term rather than calling it a city) had at the time of the siege some kind of autonomous municipal organisation. The town had no royal charter, but necessity and danger were the cause of its coming onto being. It was to this de facto government that John wrote his letter but added the royal seneschal to the structure of government.
After Richard I’s death, John and Eleanor had given charters to several towns in Poitou-Aquitaine based upon the twenty-eight clauses of a document called the Etablissements de Rouen, a sort of model for civic charters. Because the substantial people of Bordeaux had drawn up their own system in response to the crisis of a siege, and it was already in being, no charter was issued to them, nor does one appear in the Bordeaux Livre des Coutumes, while every other document they possessed does. The rapid expansion of the town during the thirteenth century puts any doubt about its institution beyond dispute.2 The tacit recognition by the king of the status of Bordeaux, even without a charter, encouraged the townspeople to enlarge their terrain with another area enclosed by a new rampart to the south of the original one.3
In 1224 several Gascon towns around Bordeaux, Bazas, Langon, Saint-Macaire, as well as several landowners, surrendered to Louis VIII and it was reported to Henry III that Saint-Macaire and La Réole would not have let in the enemy if they had had enough troops to defend themselves. It was evident that Bordeaux was defended well enough, because the count of La Marche did not follow up his conquests of the other towns and soon left Gascony altogether. Bordeaux had saved Gascony for the king/duke and given ample proof of loyalty to the king of England.
Henry III appointed Henry of Thouberville as seneschal and requested the Bordelais to maintain their extraordinary tax for two more years. The seneschal’s task was complicated by factional disputes between bourgeois families which led to an insurrection in 1228. This appears to have been suppressed by the time Henry III in person crossed Poitou without hindrance and laid siege to Mirambeau in the Saintonge in 1430 requesting assistance from the mayor of Bordeaux. It was given, but the expedition was not in any sense successful in reducing a French threat to the Bordelais. Nevertheless, when Bordeaux renewed a defence pact with La Réole in the same year, the two towns re-affirmed their loyalty to Henry III.
A spirit of independence was self-evident in Gascony. The Gascons at this time of commercial expansion were loyal to the king of England as the best way of resisting the king of France. They put up with English authority while rejecting the French sort. There was an attempt at greater autonomy in 1246 in an interregnum between two royal seneschals when the mayor wanted to assume the Entre-deux-Mers into the orbit of Bordeaux, keeping back taxes that should have been paid to the king/duke in order to do so. Henry III responded quickly by appointing a new seneschal, putting an end to what the Bordelais had taken to be a concession. In 1235, the position was made clear by the charter which the king issued on 14 July. This confirmed the Bordelais in the right to have a mayor and commune with all the liberties and free custom they already had.
This seems to have been done in reaction to the seneschal at the time having been too severe, and there was a redressment of grievance from England. When a truce of three years had been concluded with France in 1435, the seneschal held court at Langon in order to promulgate it. The archbishop of Bordeaux, several other ecclesiastics, barons and town councils, including that of Bordeaux, were at this meeting in August and demanded the setting free of certain residents of La Réole who had sided with the king of France in 1224. The seneschal refused. The Bordelais protested ‘with shameful words … not to be uttered in a royal presence,’ even to the extent of threatening to kill him. Back in Bordeaux, they went to the Ombrière Palace, seized the king’s revenues, and sent the sergeants packing, inviting other towns to do the same.
The residents of Saint-Bazeille did not co-operate, and denounced the mayor of Bordeaux to the king, adding that the best part of the prud’hommes of Bordeaux did not agree with the mayor, and that the seneschal was only doing his job. Certain among the Bordelais themselves wrote to the king to say that ‘the bourgeois of Bordeaux have usurped, and do usurp, the king’s rights every day.’ The factions were clearly divided between those who wanted direct royal control and those who wanted more autonomy, with the taxes raised in the Bordelais remaining in their hands to implement policy in the king’s name but not by the king direct. The 1235 royal charter was intended to settle this situation, and the king affirmed his supremacy while confirming the privileges.
With the fall of La Rochelle to Louis VIII, Bordeaux had become the sole producer of wines for the king of England and the wines were no longer to be from further afield than Gascony itself. That brought the Gascons an increase in prosperity enduring for two centuries until the actions on the part of the Valois monarchy that form the central interest of this book.
Henry III saw the prosperity of Bordeaux and the importance of its customs for himself when he came to Bordeaux after his defeat by Louis IX at the battle of Taillebourg in 1442 and stayed for several months. The English crown was to make systematic use of the customs to maintain its power in Gascony and to share in the new-found prosperity, even to the extent of financing a crusade in 1470. Often, the income from these taxes was farmed out to the king’s preferred creditors to repay the sums that he had borrowed from them.4
As time went on, Bordeaux under English domination extended control of the wine trade to the hinterland, what is called the Haut-Pays, and the wines produced there: Cahors on the Lot, the higher valley of the Garonne, and the valley of the Tarn. The county of Toulouse became incorporated into France in 1271 and there were subsequent negotiations between the Bordelais, led by the seneschal Jean de Grailly, and the merchants of Toulouse and its dependencies leading to a commercial treaty made at Perigueux at the end of 1284 which incorporated them into the system of customs payable in Bordeaux. Other towns associated themselves in this tendency: Agen, Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Bayonne, Nérac, Condom.
When they crossed to England the Gascon traders had a privileged position. They were not foreigners, they were subjects of the king of England and, when they were in London, they were considered as Londoners. Even when the London vintners in a xenophobic moment wanted to limit the time they could stay in any one visit to twelve weeks, Edward I had protected the Gascons by an act of Parliament in 1302. The preamble to it relates that it was the king’s response to requests made by the traders of the duchy of Gascony, with a view to maintaining the prosperity of their commerce. They were to accept the king’s regulation of their trade but they were allowed to stay in the kingdom as long as they liked. The right on the king’s part to take two units of wine from each cargo that arrived in England was abolished, and payment was to be henceforth immediate: the price was fixed according to market forces, not by royal officials. There was to be a tax of two pence on each unit of merchandise brought ashore, but once it was paid, the wine could be transported anywhere in the kingdom.5
Reciprocally, English traders settled in Bordeaux, and not only traders but artisans of all sorts, who, after three generations, were thoroughly integrated and had adopted Occitan versions of their surnames. There were some who had successfully climbed the social and economic ladders, and some who had slid down a few snakes since their grandfathers arrived. Pockets of English residents were found in two places: in the shadow of the ducal Palace of Ombrière if they felt they needed protection, and in the Sainte-Colombe quarter, within the new ramparts to the south of the town centre where the trading was done. Others were dispersed generally around several quarters as the evidence in the Departmental Archives of the Gironde makes clear.
Semequin Sportaly can be mentioned as a bourgeois resident of the Saint-Pierre quarter, the best known Englishman of his time because he was deputy controller of the Ombrière and close to the king/duke’s seneschal. As such, he was sent to Cadillac in 1408 in a delegation to arrange a truce with the count of Armagnac. He provided wine for the use of the jurade and was part-owner of a ship, the Margarida. When the ship was taken by Breton privateers (a constant risk), its cargo was valued at three thousand livres for forty-two tuns of wine destined for Rouen. In reprisal, the jurade impounded two Breton ships in the harbour and proposed that they be exchanged for the Margarida. There are plenty of other examples of integrated Angles like him.
The inventory of trades is all-inclusive: shoemakers, at least one carpenter, a coach builder, a pastry-cook, soldiers, notaries, minor clergy, and office clerks: a complete social mix. People left money in their wills to help poor Englishmen. Only temporary residents and their servants who came and went with the wine fleets were regarded as foreigners and they remained under the jurisdiction of the Ombrière while their stay lasted. If any of these stayed longer than a year and a day, they were given status of residents, and foreigner status over time became obsolete when a common bond grew between English and Gascons fighting against Frenchmen in periods of active conflict during the Hundred Years War.
The English bourgeoisie co-operated with ardour with the jurade, whose apogee was in the most dangerous period after Charles VII had begun his intervention southwards in the 1440s. The commune of Bordeaux was dominated by a plutocracy of thirty or so families who shared the principal offices among themselves, with the exception of the mayor who was nominated for a period by the king/duke. This was the body which, whenever no king’s lieutenant had been appointed, organized defence. Gascons seem not to have been very concerned to speak English, so English settlers were on significant occasions used to convey communications to the government in England about conditions in the town: men like Johan Beterdeyna, in 1406, and Janequin Brixtona in 1420. Other English residents provided goods and services, like Arnaud de Feulias, who provided firewood, Janequin, an English carpenter, Johan Folc, an English cutler, who also ran a ferry. The payments made to people like these are all meticulously recorded in the town’s registers.
Doubtless, consciousness of an interest in common, of belonging to the same political and economic entity, explains the Engish settlers’ involvement in the affairs of the Gascon capital, they were known for taking the side of Bordeaux when the failing power of the king/duke let them down and so upheld the Anglo-Gascon alliance in their own way.6
When it finally came, the French conquest of Gascony was a heart-rending matter for English and Gascon families alike. Coming, as it did, in 1453, the same year as Christendom lost Constantinople, it takes its place as one of the turning-points in European history. On the eve of the discovery of new worlds in west and east, the old world was rearranging its political affinities. Kingdoms began the long development into defining themselves in terms of territorial boundaries. No wonder that history and geography are taught by the same people in French secondary schools.