After Castillon, reprisals and royal revenge set in. In Charles VII’s eyes, the Bordelais had broken the solemn oath they had taken in June 1451 to be his loyal subjects. They deserved to be punished, either for having welcomed Talbot and his expeditionary force, or having acquiesced in his assumption of power. Whatever their attitude had been, they were traitors to their king, and the generous terms of the 1451 treaty were null and void. It was in this spirit that French military action was undertaken for the second time.
Gaillard de Durfort managed to escape from his pursuers after the battle of Castillon and made his way around Bordeaux to his substantial fortress at Blanquefort to prepare to resist a siege. The fortress is still to be seen among fields outside the suburban town behind the bends of the little River Jalle which serves it as a moat. He provided himself with adequate manpower, artillery pieces and provisions in this secure position. Clermont arrived soon after him, intending to reduce the place as quickly as possible, but found himself thwarted. He laid his siege straight away, and remained in person to supervise the action, sending his subordinates, Foix, Lautrec, Xaintrailles and Albret off towards the Dordogne to attack other castles. Xaintrailles took Saint-Macaire. Villandraut and Langon soon fell to Albret’s siege. Cadillac, Benauge and Rions held out against Foix and Lautrec for a good while.1
Charles VII reserved his personal anger against traitors for Bordeaux itself. Under his own command, the reserve army began to move only a few days after Castillon. He reached Libourne, which had not been enthusiastic for Talbot on 8 August 1453, and besieged the great fortress of Fronsac once again which offered little resistance. He went into the Entre-Deux-Mers country, to establish himself and his council in Montferrand Castle, property of Bernard de Montferrand, on 13 August. He directed the siege of Bordeaux from there for upwards of eight weeks.
The capital of his province of Guyenne had the appearance of impregnability: there were three fortified enclosures within a circumference of close on six kilometres with ramparts recently strengthened on the initiative of Pey Berland.2 Its walls were protected by twenty towers, and the River Garonne is 600 metres wide along the city’s waterfront. A substantial fleet had been assembled beforehand to prevent direct approach to the port.3
Charles VII had been assembling his own fleet too over recent weeks with ships brought from Brittany, La Rochelle and Spain, anchoring them at the mouth of the Gironde Estuary ready to be moved south against the city. On the right bank of the Garonne, he set about constructing his bastille at Lormont to serve as a platform for Jean Bureau’s artillery pieces under the overall command of Admiral de Bueil, count of Sancerre.4 The defenders matched this with a huge bastille of their own to protect their fleet anchored behind it.5
The defence of the city was directed by Roger, Baron Camoys. His earlier career was not distinguished in any conventional sense but he had gained prominence of a certain kind in Normandy. He had been captured by the French at Le Mans in 1438, and had been in captivity for nine years because he did not have the resources, as a banneret or a younger son, to pay his ransom. Once he was released, the truce was in operation so he lived off the land with other unwaged soldiers gathered round him. He turned the fortified Abbey of Savigny into his stronghold from which he attacked French and English villages alike. English commanders defended themselves against Camoys and his men. At the end of summer in 1447, he was ordered to leave the Exmes region and his people were threatened by the commander there with hanging. He moved then to another ruined fortress which he repaired to be his base. Thomas Hoo was then chancellor of Normandy and he paid other unemployed troops to act against him. He seems to have crossed to England after the final defeat in Normandy at Formigny on 15 April 1450.6 Then he reappears in regular service as part of Talbot’s reinforcements. He fought in Talbot’s army at Castillon as a captain in Viscount Lisle’s company, and his appointment as the last English seneschal was dated 4 July 1453.7 His subordinate commanders included several Gascon nobles, the new English mayor, Henry Retford, at his post since 4 December 1452, and members of the jurade.8
Camoys was styled as Governor of Bordeaux for the King of England in a ‘Treaty’ between himself and the Three Estates of the town on the subject of the expenses necessary for defence measures against the besiegers.9 Those who promised to reimburse him for his expenses are named in a roll-call of Bordeaux society: Archbishop Pey Berland, Pierre de Montferrand, Gaillard de Durfort, François de Montferrand, Bernard Angevin, the Dean of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, the Canon Treasurer of Saint-Seurin (Pey de Tasta, the Dean, was a permanent member of the English royal council now), and several lawyers and individual jurats. The Three Estates met in the cathedral and Camoys declared to them
the inconveniences which could arise, as much in the town as in all Guyenne… and that they were in danger of becoming under the subjection of the king of France, at which they all responded in loud voices, crying piteously that they regarded death as dearer than coming under the said subjection to the king.
The document records the decision to renew the town’s defences, and the English captains and their troops took on the work ‘for otherwise it was not possible to offer any resistance’. The Estates agreed to raise a tax to pay for these works. The king’s procurator of Bordeaux was to be sent to England to seek financial aid from the government, and Gervase Clifton was to detach two of the ships he had at his disposal to take him there. Details are given of the pay for Camoys’s own lances and archers, and for those of other named commanders, and of moneys sent to help maintain Gaillardet at Cadillac. Sums were set aside for the construction of the bastille in the river which would protect the ships in the port and provide a useful springboard for attacks on the similar French construction at Lormont, and for all the required war materiel. Specific locations, like the archbishop’s palace and the Sainte-Croix mill were to be defended with detachments of troops (though the French soon set fire to the mill with cannon to prevent its use). The total sum agreed for all this was 17,600 francs in money of Bordeaux, and Lady Camoys claimed it from the Bordelais in April 1455.10
The French troops occupied the right bank of the Garonne, and from the Lormont bastille they had a clear view of everything within the range of their cannon. Clermont’s tactic was to ravage the countryside at the same time as maintaining his siege against Blanquefort, preventing supplies of foodstuffs reaching Bordeaux from the suburbs, from the territory of Buch or from the Landes. He knew that starvation was his most powerful weapon. Disease would be added later but, of course, that would affect attackers and defenders alike. The blockade of the estuary facilitated his policy since ships carrying the usual supplies of wheat from England could not approach.11 Up to 1,600 lances were positioned in and around the bastille at Lormont, with six fighting men in each lance.12 But their bastille was a mixed blessing to the king’s army because the archers were exposed to attack in their turn. Such a fortification was never as strong as a walled town, as the English had found to their cost in their constructions around Orleans in 1429, or at Mont Saint-Michel.
There were several indecisive skirmishes. The Lormont fort had to fend off many a spirited attack by hit-and-run Gascon soldiers and sailors from behind their own bastille in the river, and they understood the tricky tides on the Garonne. So ‘the besieged became the besiegers and showed more than once that they counted for something.’13 Perhaps they were motivated by the hope of ransoms that conspicuous captives might eventually bring them, or by having hostages as bargaining counters if they were defeated in the end. They certainly took as many French prisoners as they could during these forays across the river.
Charles VII himself was enormously active: visiting operations at Saint-Macaire, Cadillac and elsewhere in Entre-Deux-Mers. He was often at Lormont and sent Bureau and his artillerymen all over the place. At the end of September, he was at Cadillac when the English defenders offered him 10,000 silver écus to be let free, but the king replied that he did not need the money and had them all arrested. The garrison captain, the Gascon Gaillardet, had held out for six weeks. He was beheaded as a traitor.14
What happened at Cadillac caused despair in besieged Bordeaux, especially when it was known that Rions and Benauge were surrendering as well. Only Blanquefort was holding out. There would be no help for Bordeaux from higher up the Garonne. Scottish allies of Charles VII, under Robin Petit-Loup would see to that. Scarcity began to take hold. Several of the English in the city thought seriously of leaving and finding a way of returning home if possible. Camoys needed all the manpower he could keep, so he had all the sails and rigging taken off the ships in which they had arrived in April 1452, then moored them behind the bastille. There was tension between the English who wanted to leave and the Gascons who feared the worst if they were to surrender. Morale deteriorated until the Gascons came to agree with the Englishmen.15
At the same time, Gaillard de Durfort made overtures for the surrender of Blanquefort to Clermont, asking for a safe-conduct from Charles VII. When it was refused, Durfort escaped across the marshes to Bordeaux so as to avoid Gaillardet’s fate and to offer his services to Camoys.16 It was this, together with increasing artillery bombardment from Lormont, that persuaded Camoys to look for an opportunity to negotiate with the king and his council at Montferrand. Safe-conducts were issued, and, in early October, a hundred representatives from Bordeaux churchmen, nobles and ‘others of the community’ were ‘before the king’s presence’ offering surrender in return for their property and their lives.
The chronicler d’Éscouchy gave the king’s reply in full. He pointed out ‘the great faults’ that he found in them, and said that ‘with the aid of our Creator’ he was determined to take Bordeaux, ‘all who are in it, and their property at our will and pleasure; that their bodies shall be punished according to their offences for having gone against their oath and disregarded our deeds before this time in such a way as to be an example to others and a memorial in times to come’.
The effect of this cold shower was increased by Bureau’s arrival in the council chamber to tell the king – while the Bordeaux deputation was still there – that his reconnaissance had shown that, in a short time, he could make life impossible in the city by precisely targetted artillery and offer the king whatever might be left. The king replied that his intention was not to leave Guyenne without having united the province with France under his power.17 Bordeaux’s recovered autonomy under its English king/duke was to be at an end.
The representatives returned. The hostilities continued. Ships attacked each other in front of Lormont where the Garonne was wide enough for manoeuvres. The Gascons’ bastille changed hands from one day to the next. The king’s intentions were still seen as unacceptable to the townspeople but, realizing that a solution had to be found, they prevailed upon Camoys to make approaches to Joachim Rouault who had been the constable after the conquest of 1451 and whose moderation had been compared at the time with Coëtivy’s intransigence. Camoys agreed, and Rouault obtained permission from the king to come into the city under safe-conduct to discuss what might eventually be decided.
The outcome was that thirty prominent citizens would go to Lormont to meet for talks with Charles VII’s delegates. The principal negotiators for the king were to be Louis de Beaumont, seneschal of Poitou, and a diplomat who had served in Venice called Jean de Jambes. Camoys, as Henry VI’s lieutenant-general, made a plea for clemency, realizing that Charles VII was overhearing everything that was said. The king’s response was as uncompromisingly harsh as last time: the citizens were guilty of great faults and offences against him: punishment was unavoidable. Wrangling went on all day, and the delegates went back home with nothing agreed except that their safe-conducts were extended until the next day.
In the morning, surrender terms crystallized after several false starts. The king would be ready to grant ‘abolition’ (amnesty) to the citizens in return for their renunciation of all their long-established privileges, a one-off payment of 100,000 silver marks and the handing over to him of twenty named leaders of the 1452 conspiracy to re-admit the English (including Pey de Tasta who was safe in London and Pierre de Montferrand who wasn’t). Even if the money payment were to be acceptable to them, the Bordeaux negotiators realized that the twenty men would face certain execution. They refused. They left.18
The decisive day was 9 October, when a third meeting took place. Roger de Camoys and ten others went to the lion’s den in Montferrand to speak to the king in person. Surrounded by his nobles, princes and counsellors, Charles VII received them in a theatrical display of pomp in contrast to their own bedraggled appearance out from under the bombardment. Camoys again asked for amnesty of persons and property, while agreeing to the 100,000 écus and any other financial exactions the king might see fit to make, and to the renunciation of the former privileges.19 The king responded by dismissing the Englishmen and Gascons in order to consult his council.
The background to these discussions was the outbreak of a fever epidemic in the French army.20 This naturally became a prior consideration for the king’s council, and their advice was to confirm what Camoys had accepted so long as justice was seen to be done to the leading traitors. The Bordeaux delegation was called in again. They resisted any agreement that would result in the execution of such men as Pierre de Montferrand or Gaillard de Durfort among the twenty hostages to be handed over. Agreement was reached in the end and the king gave his word: they would be banished from the kingdom in perpetuity instead.21
The treaty was signed immediately: Bordeaux was obliged to find the 100,000 écus, and French prisoners taken during the siege had to be released without paying ransoms despite any agreement that had been made with them previously.22 The treaty of 9 October took away all Bordeaux’s particular privileges: the right to mint its own currency, to vote its own taxes, to have a sovereign court of justice (Parlement) according to the 1451 treaty, freedom from billeting of soldiers and from military service outside the Bordelais. The number of citizens who would be allowed to leave Bordeaux and live elsewhere (that meant in England) and retain their moveable possessions or bequeath them to their kinsfolk was now limited to forty.23
All this was drawn up into letters patent issued from Montferrand – only ninety-nine lines in length as opposed to the 321 in the letter of June 1451 dated from Saint-Jean d’Angély. It is made clear that military action had been carried out
for the aid of our good and loyal vassals and subjects, having reduced by force the places which our enemies had taken, and brought them back into our obedience; and we have sent and placed our said army in great power as much by water as by land close to our city of Bordeaux in which the churchmen, the nobles, the bourgeois traders and the inhabitants have knowingly wrongly acted towards us. Since ‘the greater part of the inhabitants of our town are not the principal cause of the said rebellion and disobedience’, and they have asked to be pardoned, they are received back into the king’s good grace and mercy. They have now acknowledged the king as their sovereign and natural lord.
All the terms for the punishment of the rebels follow in the document.24
Three days later, six Englishman and six Gascons were given as hostages and, two days after that, the city’s bastille (in the area nowadays called the Bastide, where the Archives Métropole building is located) was demolished.25 The actual opening of the gates to the French – the Reddition – was delayed until 19 October. Rions and Benauge had not surrendered at the same time as Cadillac as expected, and French forces soon made short work of taking them.26
Just before the capitulation of Bordeaux became effective, a convention was agreed between ‘Jean de Bueil, Count of Sancerre, Admiral of France in the king’s name, and Roger de Camoys, Knight, having charge over other people of the English nation at Bordeaux’. The document is dated 5 October 1453 at Lormont. It allowed all ships to sail freely from the port during the course of the following day. They were permitted to take all their large and small cannon, gunpowder and ‘all other war material of whatever kind and all things necessary for the navigation of each vessel’. A general safe-conduct was issued to the fleet under the royal seal and one each for the named captains of particular ships in case they should become separated from the convoy by bad weather or any other cause. The safe-conducts were valid for three months and the ships could be laden with wine or any other merchandise that it seemed appropriate to take to England or anywhere else during the three months allowed. Other safe-conducts were issued for those going home by the land route, that is, by way of Calais. The English did not have to pay the usual charge for these sealed documents, except reasonable fees for the clerks and secretaries who drew them up. It was emphatically repeated that the people leaving with Camoys could take away all their movable property and that Camoys could take away all his artillery pieces. All French prisoners were to be set free that same day.27 The implication of all this was that the English were not to be held to blame for having been invited in by the treason of the conspirators in Bordeaux. The English soldiers embarked, each one receiving an écu from King Charles and with the honours of war. Presumably, their transport ships had been re-rigged in the ten days between the signing of the treaty and the raising of the fleurs de lys to replace the leopards on the public buildings.
In the royal mausoleum in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, Charles VII is called ‘The Victorious’. There were celebrations all over France. Charles, Duke of Orleans, wrote a celebratory ballad to glorify the king who had recovered Normandy and Guyenne. Gold, silver and bronze medals were struck in the Paris mint. There were morality plays on the theme of victory in Troyes to efface the memory of the perfidious treaty of 1420 that gave away the crown. In Compiègne there was a spectacle entitled ‘The Discomfiture of Talbot’.28
From the English point of view the events of 1453 were once more bleakly summarized in John Benet’s Chronicle:
Immediately after Easter the king sent 1,000 men to Gascony, with three barons, namely Lord Moleyns, Lord [Roger] Camoys and Lord Lisle, who besieged the town of Fronsac, and took it. And about the feast of St. Laurence there were killed in Gascony the Earl of Shrewsbury and his son, Lord Lisle, and Sir Edward Hull, and Lord Moleyns was captured by the French. And about Michaelmas the city of Bordeaux was lost again.29
* * *
What was the effect of the second French conquest on the inhabitants of Bordeaux? The fine to be exacted was severe, but the new taxes to be imposed upon the production and export of wine was to be a worse blow to a region where everyone, from the labourer to the bourgeois trader and the noble landowner, gained his livelihood from the vines.30 Those who had taken advantage of the conqueror’s permission to leave for England with their families and domestic support continued to regard the French monarchy as foreign. They met together in London and formed a colony that followed with great interest what was going on back home. They were desperate enough to see their exile as rectifiable – sooner or later – by their return. Letters in Henry VI’s name to several of these refugees set a limit to the time that pensions offered to them would continue to be paid.
An entry in the Gascon Rolls for 21 April 1454 is one of many that illustrates what was done by the king’s council in respect of economic migrants who were also refugees after the second conquest. It concerns
a grant to Gaillard IV of Durfort, knight, lord of Duras and Blanquefort, for his good services, by the advice and with the consent of the king’s council, of a hundred pounds a year to be taken at the receipt of the Exchequer, from the treasurer or the chamberlains of England, at Easter and Michaelmas by equal portions until Durfort is restored to his lordships in the duchy of Aquitaine or receives some other compensation.
A term is set to the council’s willingness (or ability) to help Durfort, but the entry records the conditions in which the grant was made as follows:
Durfort has expounded lamentingly to the king and his council that in the present year, when the French adversary occupied the duchy of Aquitaine against God and justice, he wished to remain loyal to the king, and stocked his castles and fortalices with men and victuals, and was besieged in Blanquefort by the counts of Clermont and Foix, the lords of Albret, of Orval, Poton de Xaintrailles, and many other captains and a great army, but was able to make such resistance as that they were unable to take the places. Durfort was able to hold both places (sic) and his other lands and lordships until Bordeaux was captured by the enemy, and compelled Durfort by force to hand the same over in return for a safe-conduct whereby he is destroyed and totally disinherited and has come to England to seek remedy.31
This entry gives, at least, a version of events, and there has been special pleading to make Durfort appear more successful than we have seen him to be. There are other entries, also from the 32nd regnal year of Henry VI that deal with poor Durfort’s troubles, but the king’s government’s supportive, even if limited, attitude towards him is clearly stated in this one. He did settle for an English career and is later seen as active in Calais.
However, men-at-arms even if they were born English, left unemployed at the end of 1453, looked towards Gascony for a recovery of their livelihood. All exiles received letters from friends and family still in Bordeaux and many looked forward to a moment that would enable them to return. They even developed plans for further military action and presented it for the English government’s approval.
Pierre de Morlanes had been the captain of a company raised in Gascony (Morlanes is in the Béarn) in Talbot’s army. In exile, he offered his services to the English crown for the recovery of Aquitaine a second time.32 His proposal was acknowledged but he had no part in the expedition that actually did take place, commanded by another, more conspicuous Gascon, Pierre de Montferrand, who, as we have seen, was active in the defence of Blaye in 1451 and, once defeated, took the oath to Charles VII. He is regarded as having taken part in the conspiracy the parish of Saint-Michel that admitted Talbot into Bordeaux in October 1452.33
On 24 July 1453, a week after Castillon, Montferrand was pardoned by Henry VI for having taken that oath.34 The wording in the document which pardons him is precise. He is given a pardon
by the king’s special grace … notwithstanding whatever oath or oaths he has sworn to the king’s adversary of France, provided that he had dispensation from those in authority over him and imposing silence in these matters on the king’s proctor, provided that he swore an oath of fealty to the king’s lieutenant-general or the seneschal of Aquitaine, or to the lieutenant of either of them.
It is impossible to establish which one of these he chose to receive his oath in the turmoil after Castillon, but it is evident that he was in England after Roger de Camoys and his troops left the Gironde. In any case, he had been exiled from France.
The document recounts Montferrand’s activity during the last two years. It identifies Montferrand as one who had ‘strived with all his might to preserve the king’s domains and remain loyal to him’. As we have seen, he went to the defence of Blaye, the taking of which Charles VII recognized as essential for the safety of Bordeaux. Montferrand, personally targetted for revenge after Bordeaux had been retaken and fearing for his life while ‘searching for a way to save his lands and lordships, made an agreement with the king’s adversary … was compelled to remain obedient to him against his intention up until the previous October, when the Earl of Shrewsbury … came, and he hastened to join him, and advised his friends and neighbours to follow him. Nonetheless, Montferrand fears that … as long as the king’s adversaries are strong in the duchy, his interests are at risk without support from the king.’35
He kept faith with Henry VI but broke his oath to Charles VII for a second time by returning to Guyenne in June 1454. His landing party was deliberately kept small to avoid arousing suspicion when he arrived, presumably in the Médoc since he had been lord of Lesparre.36 Hatred for the oppressive French regime, says the Gascon Ribadieu during the Second Empire, guaranteed him a welcome from the locals. He claimed to have a safe-conduct from the French king and had arrived under the pretext of completing certain unfinished business. He had hopes of overcoming the mistrust of the French, but he trusted, says Ribadieu who relies for his information upon Jean Chartier, too much to his good fortune. He could not avoid being discovered in breach of his banishment order, nor the punishment that followed. He and two companions were arrested.
To avoid a popular rising in his support in Bordeaux, the three men were taken to Poitiers and handed over to a special commission, the members of which were notorious for their severity and self-interest. Luis de Beaumont was known as avaricious in amassing more than a fair share of the booty after Castillon, being required to give the excess back to the common purse and Robin Petit-Loup, the Scottish captain who had been active in the Landes during the siege of Bordeaux and was now seneschal there, administering his territory with extremes of brutality. Montferrand’s sentence was a foregone conclusion, very likely after torture, despite his noble status. The commission condemned him to death ‘lawfully and in good right’ says the official historian Jean Chartier, cited by Ribadieu who quotes also from another chronicler to add that Montferrand’s body was hacked into six pieces which were hung up over the different gates of Poitiers.37
Marie, natural daughter of the Duke of Bedford, Pierre Montferrand’s widow, remained in England, living on a meagre royal pension of twenty pounds a year from Edward IV, although she was Henry IV’s granddaughter. Her children were kept as hostages in France.
All this was in contrast to what happened in the case of Bertrand de Montferrand, who was Pierre’s elder brother. He had inherited the lordship of Montferrand from their father and this made him a leading member of the Bordelais nobility, while Pierre, eventually, after losing his claim to the barony of Lesparre by the decision of Henry VI in council, had to be content with the undistinguished lordship of Trau in the Landes, inherited from their mother.
Bertrand had been the defender of Bourg during the 1451 invasion. He was discouraged by the defeat of his brother at Blaye and did not push for a spirited resistance. He negotiated a surrender after only six days of siege and was given a safe-conduct to go to Bordeaux with a company of men-at-arms. His letters of abolition – the form of words of his pardon, restitution in the French king’s favour and restoration of his property – were dated 7 July 1451 from Queen Marie’s residence at Montils-lès-Tours.38
* * *
There was an extra sting in the already poisonous tail of the settlement imposed upon Bordeaux after the 1453 conquest in the form of Charles VII’s order that two entirely new fortresses were to be constructed within the perimeter of the existing ramparts. One was called the Hâ – so-called from the quarter it dominated at the north-west, with five towers, the largest of which defended the eastern approach to the town, and the other the Tropeyte facing towards the north – named after a stream no longer visible and soon corrupted to Trompette – at the north end on the Garonne waterfront, defended by three towers and a barbican.39
These forts were to be erected at the expense of the inhabitants, including those of the god-daughter towns, with the people themselves providing finance or labour according to social status and involving the destruction of houses and business premises to make room for the enormous structures. They were intended to be constant reminders of the recent defeat and loss of the autonomy that they used to have under the English king/dukes. It would be well into Louis XI’s reign before they were completed (Louis XIV added a state of the military art glacis on the typical Vaubanesque star pattern, completed in 1691, and the fortress remained in place until demolished by the intendant Tournon in 1818 to make way for the spacious allées of our time).40
The old palace of the Ombrière was no longer suitable for the purposes of a citadel in the paranoid political climate of Charles VII’s last years and the greater part of Louis XI’s reign, being surrounded by other buildings and without a platform for the now essential artillery pieces. A return by the English was greatly feared, so these new structures faced both the Gironde and the hinterland, so that from whichever direction ‘the former enemy’ might return, they could be repulsed.41
The same fear of an English renewal of the war that would never be officially over can be seen in the elevation of the new châtelet on the highest point above the town of Jonzac in around 1470, which replaced an older fortress (held on and off by the English) demolished in conflict further down the slope on the escarpment above the river Seugne.42 Louis XI granted permission to Olivier de Coëtivy to repair his bastion beside the Gironde at Didonne, near Royan, that had been damaged by the Black Prince in a fourteenth century chevauchée.43 Coëtivy also issued an order to Jean Isle, lord of Matassière, in 1475, to have his castle at Saint-Savinien sur Charente repaired to be ready to resist the English should they invade.44
With the defence organized in terms of military installations, Charles VII also asserted himself in terms of the appointment of personnel to control his newly-acquired province of Guyenne. Those who had supported him throughout the conquest needed to have grounds for continued loyalty. As for the conquered, there were no mass dispossessions and the lordships of indigenous nobles were confirmed by the victorious king. This was his basic policy. He regarded as traitors those who had broken their oath of fidelity to him made after the 1451 submission. In April 1454, even those who had been in England at the time of the second submission were to be allowed to return if they took the oath.45
Monarchy depended upon personal rule little short of divine right absolutism. And this kind of rule depended upon personal favours. The obvious choice of administrators and other officials was from among people who depended on the king for what they possessed. It was feudalism, but not as the great lords had known it before the ordinances for taxation and the organization of the army, which were the preludes to the unification of France from the English Channel to the Pyrenees. Former free-booting captains with military experience had carried out the conquest, so they were the most likely candidates to be trusted with maintaining the monarchy where it had not existed before.
Poton de Xaintrailles (Saint-Trails) himself a Gascon, was regarded by the king as greatly deserving of reward. He had been a freebooting captain (écorcheur) after the signing of peace between the Duke of Burgundy and Charles VII in 1435, and had then been a subordinate commander under Dunois and Clermont. He now received the rank of marshal, and command of the new Tropeyte fortress in the initial stages of its being built. Antoine de Chabannes had acted against the king in the Praguerie rebellion of 1440 but, like his fellow rebels, had been reconciled to the king. He had taken Blanquefort from Gaillard de Durfort in 1453, and then received a lordship of his own, being ennobled as Count of Dammartin. He had also taken part in the king’s resumption of Jean IV of Armagnac’s lands and received a part of them for himself.
However, Charles VII was not prepared – Olivier de Coëtivy, as we shall see, was an exception – to allow the men he appointed to office to put down roots in the places which they had received from him. This aspect of royal control was not something they resented because, if they were deprived eventually of lands or administrations in Guyenne, they were as like as not compensated with lordships in other French provinces, particularly under Louis XI. An example is one of Charles d’Albret’s officers, Estévot de Taluresse, who was deprived of his offices when he took part in the War of the Public Weal but was later appointed as seneschal of Carcassonne.46
Charles VII’s generals imitated the king in making appointments from among their trusted subordinates. Estévot de Taluresse was closely associated with Charles II d’Albret who put him in charge of Montferrand castle and then made him mayor and captain-general of Bayonne, Saint-Jean de Luz, and Capbreton, while his uncle governed the now famous Tartas.
Because of the rebellion against him, the king withdrew his offer of a Parlement in Bordeaux that he had promised in the 1451 treaty for the purpose of regulating judicial appeals without them having to be heard in Paris or Toulouse. Certainly, for a time, there remained a punitive aspect to the king’s personal control of Guyenne. For instance, in his commissioners’ ordinances concerning the reform of justice in the province issued on 28 January 1455, there is talk of ‘frivolous appeals’ being made, for which fines were to be imposed. Correctives against deliberately caused delays and fines not being paid were also issued. Specific reference was made to the registers kept in the Chateau de l’Ombrière ‘during the time that the said duchy was under jurisdiction of the kings of England’, when there had been ‘frauds and malpractices’. In 192 separate clauses, the commissioners’ report gives details about officials to be appointed, from judges to clerks, porters and ushers, the terms of their holding office, the fines to be paid for malpractice, the frequency of assizes, how prisoners in the cells were to be treated severely. The signatories to this report are national office holders, not regional ones.47
Nowhere was this spirit of punitive regulation more visible after the conquest than in the wine trade with England. Wine was the staple of Bordeaux’s commerce left, before the great humiliation of 1453, to the fluctuations of productivity of the Gascon vineyards and the availability of transport ships in English ports all the way round the coast from Hull to Fowey, but with emphasis on those from London, Southampton and Bristol. The king/duke of Aquitaine was the principal buyer of the product, that in the Middle Ages did not keep, but was sold and consumed in the same year before the next vintage. New supplies were always needed and were usually provided on the quaysides of the Gascon ports by established traders.
* * *
An essential element in opinion forming in any medieval European city was always the higher clergy. The stance taken by the influential canons of Saint Andrew’s Cathedral and of the Collegiate church of Saint-Seurin was crucial during and after the second conquest. They expressed solidarity with their revered Archbishop Pey Berland and they knew what he thought of the incorporation of Gascony into the French kingdom. He had been a signatory to the ‘treaty’ made with Lord Camoys in his cathedral church at the beginning of the siege.
Since his election in 1430, Pey Berland had shown himself opposed to the policies of the Valois king and his encroachments into Gascon territory. The members of the two Bordeaux chapters willingly accepted his leadership while he remained in office and continued to be loyal to him when he had withdrawn from it, replaced by a despised royal toady whom they considered – in ecclesiastical terms – to be a jumped-up parvenu and unacceptable to them since he was a Frenchman.
By the time of Berland’s forced resignation, the seneschal of Guyenne was once more Olivier de Coëtivy, the king’s right-hand man, whom we last saw being packed off to England as a prisoner of war before the battle of Castillon. We see him back in power, the king’s agent and instrument, whose entire loyalty to the monarch – this time backed up by sufficient police powers – turned the screw on any Gascon resistance that remained.
Archbishop Berland, born into a family of free graziers in the Médoc in about 1375, whose career we have followed in earlier chapters, entered his office in 1430, the year after Charles VII’s coronation at Reims by the good offices of Joan of Arc. Berland resisted Charles VII’s claim to authority over the church in the duchy of Aquitaine because of the homage he expected – but never received – from the King of England. In the early years of divisive nationalism in Europe, Pey Berland was an Anglo-Gascon. Another disaffected Gascon, four hundred years later, said of him:
He was not only a powerful personality, he was also a great patriot and a holy bishop. He consecrated himself to the defence of his country … he had the envied privilege of heroic souls to represent the national cause after the conquest, and to be persecuted for it. He had lasting popularity because of his virtue and his ordeals.48
The Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, decreed by Charles VII in 1438 to give himself power over the appointment of French bishops in disregard of papal authority, making use of the tendancy of some churchmen to favour conciliar government in the Church, was abhorrent to Berland. As his predecessor’s secretary, Berland had become known – and even liked – in Rome and was loyal to successive popes as well as to Henry VI and his council. As the Gascon archbishop and not a French functionary, Berland did not consider himself bound by Charles VII’s pragmatic sanction. However, once Gascony had become part of France, the king intended sooner or later to appoint his own archbishop.
So we find Pey Berland on 7 July 1452 on his knees before the high altar in his cathedral of Saint-André, witnessed by Dean Johan de Lostade, the Archdeacons of Médoc and Cernes and the eight canons, taking an oath on holy relics never on any pretext to give up his archbishopric of Bordeaux but, on the contrary, to live and die in office. A deed was drawn up by a notary to make this oath public and it was inscribed in the cathedral registers.49
The Dean of the Collegiate Church of Saint-Seurin, Pey de Tasta, as we have seen, was able to live in England in a style appropriate for a member of Henry VI’s royal council by being granted the revenues of rich church benefices there in plurality. He continued to represent the interests of Bordeaux at the English court in his quality as the Dean of Saint-Seurin, and his canons accepted that he would remain an absentee without any need to replace him.
Henry VI gave members of Tasta’s household what would have been lucrative concessions in Bordeaux had the city not been in French hands, as rewards for his loyal service. Guilhem Pineau, a Gascon, referred to in the Gascon Rolls as the dean’s servant as well as a faithful subject, received a grant for his lifetime of houses, lands and property in certain named villages such as Brissac, with all their rents, dues and appurtenances, which had been forfeited to the king/duke. Everything depended upon a successful English re-conquest, but it was the thought that counted. He was also given an official post which gave him a wage out of the profits from affixing seals on the houses of people under arrest and of the guardianship of all rivers and fisheries in the Bordelais that were in the king’s gift. Furthermore, he was given the right to collect the tax on new cooking pots formerly gathered by the king’s messengers. This, if the duchy were still in English hands, would have given him an income of fifty pounds.50 The main point of all that was to maintain Pey Tasta in a position to keep the English government informed about conditions in Bordeaux with a view an eventual re-conquest.
Tasta had some part in Talbot’s expedition, more likely in its preparation beforehand than in actually taking part in it as is asserted in the anonymous récit in the Gironde Historical Archives where it is said that he came with the English army (and presumably went back again afterwards!).51 He never took up the exercise of his deanery again. After Castillon, he signed ‘tragic’ letters asking the mayors of southern English ports to provide a fleet to re-take Bordeaux and, among other actions, to sell all the tin that had been seized in Southampton to help equip this phantom fleet.52
Apart from these meagre and mistaken assertions, there are no further references extant of the two ecclesiastical chapters’ attitudes during Talbot’s occupation of the Bordelais, nor during the first full year of Valois domination.53 However, on 31 January 1456, the town’s complaint to the king that the men of the Church were not paying tax on the sale of their wines as everyone else did, resulted in Seneschal Coëtivy being instructed by the king to draw up a dossier to be used against them. The king was aware of the exemption maintained for the chapters by the king/duke Edward I’s successors, and the fact that he took the town’s complaint seriously, suggests that he was turning a hostile eye on the canons of Saint-André and Saint-Seurin.54
Meanwhile, there had been constant pressure on Pey Berland to resign and it had its outcome on 24 September 1456 when he accepted his nomination by Pope Callixtus III (who was hand in glove with Charles VII) to the Archbishopric of Madia (no one seems to have known where it was, but it had revenues attached to it) despite the solemn oath he had taken four years before. The pope advised him personally to hand over the administration of the archdiocese to his legate, who just happened to be the seneschal’s brother, Cardinal Alain de Coëtivy. Pey Berland complied in obedience to the pope, and retired, hermit-like, to Saint-Raphaël’s College, his own foundation situated where the Hôtel de Ville now is, named after his birthplace in the Médoc.55
Blaise de Gréele was nominated by the king under the terms of his own pragmatic sanction as the next archbishop. At the time he was no more than a sub-deacon in the diocese of Clermont but, politically, he was a counsellor to the king and trusted by him. From the first day he set foot in the Gascon archdiocese, he was automatically disliked as the foreign king’s creature, representing Bordeaux’s recent humiliation. He had been ordained priest in haste, and then consecrated bishop by Juvenal des Ursins, Archbishop of Reims and Chancellor of France, Jean de Mailly, Bishop of Noyon in Picardy, and Guillaume Chartier, bishop of Paris, in the basilica of Saint-Denis.56
Despite his apparent generosity towards Pey Berland, represented by the revenues of Madia, the pope agreed to Charles VII’s request that he should instruct Blaise, in a letter dated 15 February 1457, to threaten any churchman of Bordeaux with excommunication and imprisonment if he had taken part in any conspiracy in favour of the English enemy at any time since June 1451. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Callixtus was trying to rally the crowned heads of Europe for another crusade. The chapters did all they could to frustrate Blaise as he tried to embark upon his new primacy in the province of Guyenne.
Pey Berland’s death on 17 January 1458, changed the character of the conflict between the chapters and the king. They were in no mood to accept the authority of Blaise de Gréele any more than to acquiesce in the new regime. On 5 November 1456, the canons of Saint-Seurin, in order to maintain Pey de Tasta in office as their dean despite his continued absence in England, revived a statute of 1324 which permitted such absence in time of war, or if the dean were to be chosen as an ambassador as, indeed, he had been. He was not named in the document they issued but they accepted that their canon treasurer had the right to issue it.57 They must have found it difficult not to show their satisfaction when Coëtivy announced that they did not have to pay tax on the sale of their wines at present, merely to provide caution money until such time as their case should be decided, as it was on 8 May 1458.58 The profits from the sales were the patrimony of the poor in Bordeaux, and Berland’s charitable instincts were still active. They eventually won their case before the same seneschal.59
After that, the chapters’ conflicts became more ecclesiastical than political because their intransigent opponent was Blaise de Gréele rather then Olivier de Coëtivy. There was a new pope, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius II, who deplored Charles VII’s Pragmatic Sanction and wanted to be able to direct the rulers of Christendom towards unified action against the Ottomans and stem their advance westwards. The canons of the two Bordelais chapters looked to him for support in their opposition to Archbishop Blaise, who was launching new offensives against them.60 He was soon behaving like the wolverine in a Canadian forest who is not satisfied until he has killed and eaten all the other animals in his territory, using all the facilities for litigation that the tribunals in Bordeaux, particularly the Grands Jours of 1459, could provide.
But if, like the head teacher after a playground fight, we ask who started this rumpus, we shall have to admit that it was the Chapter of Saint-André. On 7 June 1458, according to their registers, they appealed against abuses perpetrated by Gréele before seneschal Coëtivy who set a date for a hearing a week later. The archbishop’s lawyer lost the case over the possession of rights which remained to the Dean and Chapter, even though the judge ordered the whole dossier to be handed over to the Parlement of Paris for scrutiny. The archbishop persisted in demanding the rights that he had claimed before the judge of appeal in Guyenne. The judgement went against him in October.61 The archbishop then began a series of interrogations about the way the canons carried out their ecclesiastical duties. In his visitations, he raised all sorts of footling questions about, for example, the seals they used on their documents, the vestments the canons wore for the offices, the arrangement of their stalls in the quire and then about the money that Pey Berland had left them in his will.
Faced with these irritations, the canons went for a definitive solution in the form of a directive from Pope Pius II. He replied with his papal bull of 25 February 1459, by which he freed both chapters from the archbishop’s control. Saint-Raphaël’s College, where priests in the archdiocese received their training, was included in this exemption. The pope took the three institutions under his immediate protection, forbidding the archbishop to act against this judgement.
The chapters had power over their own internal jurisdiction with the possibility of appeal only to the pope himself. Moreover, the Archbishop of Toulouse, and the Bishops of Aire and Bazas were ordered to ensure that these rules were properly obeyed. The chapters and the college had to pay for their new privileges to the papal treasury, but the charge was to be no more than six gold florins in any one year. This rosy situation for the chapters did not last. Archbishop Blaise, still confident in having been chosen by the king, denounced the papal interference to the seneschal (not that he was competent to do anything against it) and by issuing a wholesale excommunication against the Chapters and the Dean of Saint-André. Charles VII stuck his oar in now, issuing a simple order that the pope was not to be obeyed.62
The autumn of 1459 saw the second of the series of Grands Jours offered by Charles VII after he had withdrawn the prospect of a Parlement in Bordeaux. Blaise de Gréele made an appeal on 8 October against the decision of the judge who maintained the chapters’ rights, but the judgement once more went against him. On 24 October, the Archbishop of Toulouse officially published the pope’s bull of exemption which the court discussed in full. The king intervened once more to maintain the suspension of the chapters’ privileges. On 3 November, the case was referred to the Paris Parlement for a hearing to be held three months in the future, and meanwhile the chapters were to retain their privileges and enjoy their liberty.63 The affair would drag on for another two years: an ecclesiastical football.64
Archbishop Blaise now resorted to the tactic of inserting his own nominee whenever a vacancy in one of the chapters occurred. His candidate for a stall in the cathedral was Guillaume Dornac. The chapter refused to accept him and maintained in the Grands Jours that the archbishop had no power to nominate without violating the terms of Charles VII’s pragmatic sanctions. We even see the judge threatening the archbishop and his nominee themselves with excommunication!65
Yet Dornac was successful at Saint-Seurin. Despite Pey de Tasta still being alive in England, Dornac was elected dean on 28 November. The administrator (syndic) of the chapter forbade him nevertheless to seek confirmation from the archbishop or to take an oath to him, since he would contravene the pragmatic sanction if he did. The deeds issued by the chapter of Saint-Seurin continued to bear de Tasta’s name. The canons did not dare to say that he was in England, but simply said that he was ‘away from Bordeaux’. The last such document was issued on 6 April 1461 after eighteen months. On 27 April, Guillaume Dornac acted officially as dean. Pey de Tasta was now fully integrated into the English diplomatic service: he was put in charge of negotiations with Burgundy in 1461 and in 1466 and, in 1467 between Edward IV, Yorkist king of England, and Louis XI. His will was dated 1468, but it is not known precisely when he died.66
The affair of Pius II’s papal bull finally came before the Paris Parlement in January 1462 – after Charles VII’s death. Blaise de Gréele made a plea that the bull made it impossible for him to function as archbishop and deprived him of necessary revenue. He could not supervise the worship carried on in the churches if he could not make visitations, and standards in the archdiocese were slipping. He claimed that the bull was issued by a pope who was ill-informed of the situation in Bordeaux.67 He also maintained that to pay fees to the pope, as the chapters had done, was in contravention of the pragmatic sanction. Ever since it had been in operation, this pragmatic sanction had been a stick with which to beat both sides in church disputes. No wonder that Louis XI, in accordance with his general policy of overturning his father’s decisions, would soon revoke it.
The canons responded in a spirited manner by saying little more than that the archbishop had acted ‘with intolerable crudity and with an undisciplined purpose of avenging himself on the chapters’. The Parlement judged in favour of the chapters on 20 March. Blaise raised further objections in May when the seneschal’s lieutenant issued the letters patent that made the judgement against him binding in Bordeaux. It was only then that he gave in.
Blaise de Gréele’s megalomania as Primate of Bordeaux extended outside his archdiocese into the ecclesiastical province, where at least one of his tentatives, his claim to have power to confirm or reject elections to the bishopric of Saintes, was opposed by the Dean and Chapter there, and by the Archbishop of Bourges who claimed the primacy of Aquitaine for himself.68 At the time of his death in 1463, Blaise was known to have been fighting twenty-six cases in court concerning his judicial rights.69
* * *
The integration of Bordeaux and the towns around, the ‘god-daughters,’ was a lengthy process in all its commercial, judicial and ecclesiastical aspects. The Valois king was now in possession of all his national territory except for Calais and its pale. The preoccupations and uncertainties caused by the Wars of the Roses in England prevented any serious initiatives for a return to Gascony, though, as we have noticed in passing, the Gascon Rolls contain plenty of parchment transactions that anticipated eventual re-conquest. In the end, both crowned heads, the Valois and the triumphant Yorkist produced the common-sense expedient of the French paying the English not to invade France (or at least to go away again, having done so). Edward IV accepted the principle involved, calling the pensions he received ‘tribute,’ and used some of the profit to embellish St George’s Chapel at Windsor for the Knights of the Garter to celebrate their occasions. Neither side took much notice of the fleurs-de-lys on the English royal coat of arms until the peace of Amiens in 1802, when rulers of France had abandoned them for a while and they no longer meant anything in England.
* * *
There was a postscript to Charles VII’s victorious extension of Valois rule over all the territory of France except Calais and its pale which took the form of the reinstatement of Joan of Arc, and the discrediting, after a meticulous re-examination, of the 1431 trial presided over by Bishop Cauchon of Beauvais in Rouen, as well as the examination of the memories of those who were still alive at the time of Joan’s claim to bring God’s message to Dauphin Charles, her liberation of Orleans, her victories at Patay and Jargeau, the coronation she made possible at Reims, the subsequent failure to take Paris, her capture by the Burgundians, her transfer to the English, her trial and execution at Rouen.70
As soon as Rouen had been taken from the English in 1450, there was a serious attempt to re-examine all the documentation but it was not brought to a conclusion. Then there was the visit to France and England in 1452 by Pope Nicolas V’s legate, himself a Frenchman, Cardinal d’Estouteville, to try and reconcile the two countries in order to send an expedition to try and recover Constantinople from the Ottomans, which also examined some of the material of the trial. D’Estouteville became Archbishop of Rouen himself, but the procès did not make any further progress for another four years.
Then in 1456, with Charles VII’s consent, in response to a petition from Joan’s mother Isabelle and other surviving members of the family from Domrémy, the major re-examination of the whole phenomenon of Joan was opened at Notre Dame de Paris with them present. The event attracted such crowds that the hearings had to be transferred to the cathedral sacristy to allow them to be carried on with any semblance of order. Evidence was taken from survivors everywhere that Joan had been active, and nothing was left unexamined about the trial and execution. It was a kind of retrial for Joan, and the final decision was that the Rouen trial under the aegis of the English had set out to declare her a heretic and therefore to discredit her, which included many legal irregularities and downright prejudicial conclusions which made Joan’s execution unavoidable. The fact the the theologians of the University of Paris had accepted the decision was the cause of Charles VII’s non-intervention, since their advice to him was that he should not be associated with her heretical opinions which orthodox belief could not have accepted. That ‘she was all innocence’ – words from one of the witness of this new examination – was accepted, and the judgement made twenty-five years before was reversed.71
As in the months of Joan’s successful activity, the outcome of Charles VII’s campaigns had justified her claims for the legitimacy of his kingship: a pragmatic rejection of all that had been involved in the 1420 treaty of Troyes. The military victories of 1450 to 1453 which booted out the English were justified in this moral victory of 1456.