As early as 1419, while he was Dauphin and before his attempted exclusion from the throne, Charles VII was making use of contacts with Scotland to reinforce his military capability. An army of 6,000 Scots came to France then, and another contingent early in 1421, along with troops from Lombardy to aid him against the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. Scottish archers had been formed, even before that, into an elite bodyguard for the Dauphin as regent for the ailing Charles VI.1 John Stuart of Darnley had been involved in this from the first and, in 1427, he was created Count of Evreux as a reward for conquering the town from the English. The following year, he was back in Scotland on a diplomatic mission in company with the Archbishop of Reims and Alain Chartier to renew the Franco-Scottish alliance in the form of a marriage treaty for the Dauphin Louis and Margaret of Scotland linked to further military assistance. Despite his recently improved relations with the English, James I gave authority to his ambassadors to arrange the marriage. He renewed the antiques alliances at Perth on 17 July 1428, and two days later he announced the betrothal of Margaret and Louis, the wedding to be solemnized at Candlemas (2 February 1429), along with the proposed arrival of another army of 6,000 men.2
Over twenty years later, Charles VII was still relying on his Scottish companies. They participated in both conquests of Bordeaux and in the taking of Bayonne, as we have seen. They were now deployed to enforce control in the Landes and the valley of the Adour because they could be relied on more than the indigenous Gascon nobles. Scottish garrisons were established in Bayonne, Dax, Saint-Sever and Grenade-sur-Adour, where they held the ring between conquered lordships. The leading figure among their commanders was Robin Petit-Loup, a native of Dundee (where his name was Petit-Loch), who would soon establish his position by his marriage with the seigneur de Gramont’s daughter which turned him into a grand seigneur. He was granted a substantial royal pension in 1451, and then reimbursed for his losses during his campaigns. The king appointed him Seneschal of the Landes, Captain of Dax and Saint-Sever, and gave him charge over Manciet and Lectoure in Armagnac territory. He also received the lordship of Sauveterre.3 All this did not represent any real integration into the Gascon nobility, however: he was solely to be the instrument of royal control, which was extended beyond Guyenne into the county of Comminges. He left no male heir for Sauveterre.4
The consolidation of French power in the Landes was carried out by Petit-Loup’s Scottish troops who acquired a reputation for brutal violence which complemented royal policy. Charles VII publicly reasserted that he would maintain the ancient customs of the places he had conquered, but his officials asserted his power in a very uncompromising manner. Petit-Loup’s recorded actions against opponents labelled ‘brigands’ were carried out to restrain the many Gascons in the Landes who maintained their loyalty to the English king/duke. They were rebels in the sense that the Bordelais had been rebels in 1452, but for Petit-Loup they were also common criminals for whom he provided public gallows. The evidence for the success of this policy lies in the increasing tendency of the French authorities to issue pardons for the rebels between 1451 and 1463.5
That the Scottish companies were an indispensable element in the campaigns undertaken by Charles VII is perfectly illustrated by Jean Fouquet’s painting of the Adoration of the Magi done in about 1452.6 The king offering gold to the infant Jesus is recognizably portrayed as Charles VII, and the gold represents his triumph in Gascony. Behind him stand his bodyguards who had accompanied him on his progress, and they are dressed in the red, white and green uniforms that they wore when the king entered Rouen having conquered Normandy in 1450. Pierre Prétou suggests that the fleur-de-lys banner being carried towards a town represents the conquest of Bayonne, and he takes Herod’s massacre of the innocents also shown in the picture, to be ‘an impertinent analogy’ for English domination. In all this, ‘the Scottish soldiers, separating a country at war from the king’s household, hold a key position.’7
This may well be a representation of the taking of Bayonne, but Petit-Loup’s company played a significant part in the subjection of Bordeaux as well. During the rebellion of 1452, Talbot had no help from anywhere to the south of the Garonne because the Scots were already stationed in the Landes and, while avoiding pitched battles, intervened to prevent any musters of pro-English troops there, based on the reports of his efficient spy network. As Charles VII’s seneschal, his determined activity outside the city walls prevented the effectiveness of Roger de Camoys’s defence of Bordeaux during the siege. By the time the second conquest of the capital of Guyenne was complete, Petit-Loup was well on the way to consolidating his position in the Landes, based on his captaincies of the fortified towns there: Dax and Saint-Sever.8
In 1457, Charles VII had a long letter sent to James II of Scotland, reviewing his policy under several headings, one of which was his border security in south-western France. He mentions the provinces of Poitou and Saintonge as being ‘continually in a state of fear in respect to the enemy because they lie upon the sea-coast where the enemy can make a descent any day’.9 The seneschal he appointed for the Saintonge was a Scot, Patrick Folcart, who profited from a pension of 1,000 livres tournois.10 However, the situation in Gascony required not so much defence as policing. Since the duchy had been English for ‘three hundred years or more and the inhabitants of the land are all in favour of the English party,’ the measures needed to be taken there by the king in ‘his lands’ had to be more severe than elsewhere, implying the need for special measures to win over the nobility of the region.11 By the time of Petit-Loup’s death, it seems that the Gascons had accepted the conquest, and Louis XI’s royal progress in the Landes in 1462–1463 bore this out – especially as he had removed the ‘malicious’ Scots.12
* * *
How did Charles VII control Guyenne now that it was part of France? The answer boils down to whom he chose as its governors. Those who had taken the oath to him needed to have grounds for their sustained loyalty. There were no mass dispossessions and the lordships of indigenous nobles were confirmed by the victorious king. This was his basic policy. Those whom he regarded as having committed treason were the ones who had broken their oath to him made after the first submission in 1451.
The king’s rule was personal, only one step short of the kind of absolutism that caused Louis XIV to build the Palace of Versailles to deprive the great lords of their autonomy 200 years later. This kind of rule depended upon mutual favours. The obvious choice of administrators was from among people who depended upon the king for what they held. It was feudalism, but not as the great lords had known it before the ordinances that were the preludes to the unification of France. Former freebooting captains with military experience had carried out the conquest of Guyenne, so they were the most likely candidates to be trusted with maintaining the monarchy where it had not existed before.
The Scottish captains were of vital importance to the king, but they were not the only ones suitable to rule the new territories. While Olivier de Coëtivy was held as the guest of the Talbot family in the Welsh marches, he was replaced in his absence by Théude de Valpergue, who, with his brother Boniface, had fought for the king against the freebooters of the Praguerie and then in the conquest. They were Italians. Boniface was appointed captain of Bayonne, and Théude took over from him in 1459, holding the captaincy of Lectoure as well.13
It is worth concentrating on the career of Olivier de Coëtivy after he was released from captivity in January 1455. He had a safe-conduct to return to France granted at the request of the second Earl of Shrewsbury14 so that he could raise the ransom required of 12,000 écus, a dozen pieces of silver plate worth 100 marks and a racehorse (coursier). Charles VII wanted Coëtivy back in the Ombrière Palace to enforce the settlement being imposed on the new French province. He arranged for a portion of the total sum of 44,000 écus required for the release of the Earl of Kendal, captured at Castillon, to be put towards Coëtivy’s ransom.15 Even so, Coëtivy took more than a year to raise the whole sum and send it to the Countess of Shrewsbury from Bordeaux after a year’s delay.
He resumed his responsibilities as seneschal of Guyenne immediately after his return to Taillebourg.16 Jehan Augier, treasurer of France in Guyenne and accountant in Bordeaux, was instructed by the king to make Olivier’s expenses of office available to him in letters dated between January and May 1455. There was, however, a delay of nearly a year before Coëtivy issued confirmation of the king’s letters patent which reduced the penalties to which the citizens of Bordeaux were collectively liable because of their rebellion (later registered by the Parlement of Paris on 24 January 1457) together with the king’s order to his deputy in his absence for their reinstatement as Frenchmen (the process known as abolition) and the re-granting of their privileges. From then on, he was fully active in his office of Grand Seneschal. On 14 July 1456, he issued an order for all those interested in the refusal of the clergy to pay certain local taxes on wines known as yssac and cartonnage to appear before the sub-mayor and the jurats in accordance with the king’s edict published in April.17 Twelve days later, he issued other instructions about the trade in wines with the Haut-Pays and about other commercial transactions,18 so he was exercising the full extent of his powers from the Ombrière Palace.
Coëtivy was not best pleased with Robin Petit-Loup’s activity as seneschal of the Landes. During the first Grands Jours held in Bordeaux in October 1456, when judges were sent from Paris to hear pleas brought in the absence of the Parlement promised in 1451 but denied after the rebellion, Coëtivy, in his capacity of Grand Seneschal, brought an action against Petit-Loup ‘for excess and abuse of his powers’. A judge of appeal named Vidal du Palais, Jean Baudry, the king’s procurator-general in Guyenne and a junior, Pierre Brager, represented Coëtivy before Judge Torbetas, who presided, against Jehan Lefilz, assistant seneschal of the Landes, and Arnault-Guillaume de Lacoste ‘so-called’ king’s procurator of the Landes.
Maître Brager opened with an appeal to precedent: there had always been a grand seneschal of Guyenne, from whom resort was had to the Parlement of Paris since appeals could legally have been made to the Parlement of Paris even in the times of English domination. This grand seneschal could appoint deputies for the Landes and beyond. All who appealed against these deputy-seneschals did so to the judge of Gascony at Bordeaux. This was not simply a matter of usage, but of law. For the last two years, it had pleased the king to empower officials, one of whom was Jean Bureau, treasurer of France, to decide in cases of abuse, put matters back in good order and to do justice. These officials had ordered the grand seneschal of Guyenne to hold his assizes in the Landes and beyond, and that cases be judged by him. This order was made public. The deputy seneschal before Petit-Loup, Messire Richart, was nominated by the grand seneschal. The excesses of which Petit-Loup was charged included the imprisonment of certain persons who were under the protection of the grand seneschal and keeping them under guard for a long time. The Dame of Urtebize, for example, and several others who were entitled to be released according to the ordinance were treated in this way. Their appeals had been quashed. They had been kept in prison without even a candle. It was also claimed that Petit-Loup had obstructed the election of a mayor for Dax, whose appointment was also the responsibility of the grand seneschal, for an entire year. He should be required to make amends for all this.
Lefilz, for the defence, claimed that Petit-Loup was seneschal-in-chief of the Landes by order of the king himself. Enquiry would be made to the king’s procurator as to the rights and prerogatives of this sénéchaussée. Lefilz himself had administered justice as Petit-Loup’s deputy. A year and a half before, people could not travel safely in the Landes, and the plaintiffs themselves well knew that, at the present time, by means of the diligent care taken by the defendants to restore justice, travellers could go in complete safety.
In the end, it was ruled that no decision could be made in this court, and that the matter had to be referred to the king’s procurator and the Parlement, either of Paris or Toulouse, for a definitive judgement. Meanwhile, neither party was to be allowed to act further in the matter.19
* * *
Charles VII had three natural daughters from his long association with Agnès Sorel, La Dame de Beauté. Prégent de Coëtivy had been appointed their guardian after he had received the lordship and castle of Taillebourg on the Charente as his reward for helping to overcome the Praguerie. Prégent’s death during the siege of Cherbourg in 1450 meant that Olivier, his younger brother, after a dispute with Prégent’s mother-in-law, the widow of Gilles de Raïs, inherited the lordship and castle. The king had already declared the trust he had in Olivier when he had left him in charge of the royal garrison at La Réole. When the king came to Taillebourg to supervise the advance into Gascony he put Olivier in charge of the three young girls’ upbringing as well, apportioning large sums of money to be spent on them. When Olivier returned from captivity in early 1455, he and the second daughter, Marie, found themselves attracted to each other, and eventually Olivier wrote from Bordeaux to ask the king for her hand in marriage.
The king’s reply dated 28 May 1458 was as warm as any official document was capable of being: it encouraged Olivier to arrange for the wedding to take place at Taillebourg in August if not sooner. It took until 28 October, nevertheless, for these arrangements to be finalized in another letter which said: ‘Having in consideration the great, praiseworthy and continual services rendered by the late Tanguy du Châtel, Olivier’s uncle, and by the Admiral of France, his brother; having also regard to what the late Prégent de Coëtivy … had done for him in taking Marie as a child to his castle at Taillebourg, where, as much during the admiral’s life as since, she has been fed and nourished’, the king declared his consent to the marriage and gave Marie a dowry of twelve thousand gold écus, payable over six years, as well as endowing Olivier, Marie and their heirs with the lordships of Royan and Mornac in the Saintonge, both in the crown’s possession since Jacques de Pons had been banished for his part in the Praguerie and further rebellion afterwards. Then, while at Vendôme in November he legitimized Marie, giving her the right to call herself ‘de Valois’ and have her own coat of arms based on his own. He added another gift of 1,450 livres tournois ‘for dresses and other clothing as she pleases for her wedding day’. That day at last arrived on 25 November 1458, and they were married in the presence of Pierre Doriole, a royal counsellor who represented the king. ‘La dame de Taillebourg’ showed herself to be an exemplary fifteenth-century wife in her letters to Olivier, to which, sadly, his replies have not survived to be included in the collection published by the Vendéan archivist, Paul Marchegay.20
It seems that the couple were content together, in spite of (or because of) Olivier’s necessary and frequent absences. The same could not be said of her sister Charlotte, who married Jacques de Brézé in 1462 and gave him five children. One day after the hunt, her husband discovered her in flagrante dilectu with his huntsman, and ran them both through with his dagger, giving rise to a long lawsuit. The other sister, Jeanne, married Antoine de Bueil, the admiral’s son, and their life and death was to all appearances uneventful.21
All was well for Olivier and Marie for as long as Charles VII lived. When Marie’s half-brother Louis XI came to the throne in 1461, he reversed pretty well all their father’s policies. Olivier was no longer seneschal of Guyenne, and Royan and Mornac were taken away from him to give them back to Jacques de Pons the new king’s fellow Praguois from 1440. Olivier de Coëtivy was perhaps the most important contributor in the growing stability of Guyenne as war with England (but not the fear of it) receded in people’s memories. Louis XI realized this for himself and, after a while, offered the Coëtivys compensation for the lordships of which he had deprived them with that of Rochefort.
Further down the pecking order of administrators, it was rare that officials from before the conquest remained in their posts, and there was a tendency for these appointments to be seen as property to be inherited. This led to a certain stagnation in public affairs because the conquest provided the only real opportunity for a widespread replacement of personnel. Once it had happened, there was no real need to repeat it.
The punitive aspect of administration is more fully expressed in a document printed in Barkhausen’s collection, which is to do with taxation. In the time of English domination, the regulation of the Bordeaux trade and export of wines was certainly strict, and, on the whole, efficient.22 But now, the vintners of Bordeaux no longer had the right to sell their wines for immediate export immediately after the grape-harvest before those of the hinterland (Haut-Pays) who, beforehand, could only sell theirs after Martinmas (11 November).23 (The wine that was sold was always from the new vintage, intended to be consumed in the same year, so there was a constant need for fresh supplies, year after year.) The receiver-general was to be responsible for the collection of the tax of 25 sols tournois on each barrel, paid either by the seller or the buyer. The sellers were to pay an additional 4 deniers for each barrel. The receiver or his agents were to keep a register of all payments, under pain of having to pay quadruple for all entries which they left out or of being dismissed. The receiver and the controllers oversaw all transactions and lived ‘where they exercise their offices’. There was also a visitor of ships who went on board, either when they arrived or when they left. Agents were to be established at Blaye, Bourg and Libourne to provide reports to the receiver-general of cargoes leaving those ports. If duties had not been paid, the cargoes were to be confiscated for the king’s profit. More reasonable were the charges to be levied for the maintenance of the Cordouan lighthouse at the mouth of the Gironde Estuary. People who denounced fraudsters would have the right to receive a quarter of the sums recovered. The taxation of twenty-five sous a barrel would be farmed out by auction every year with a starting price of 20,000 livres; each auctioneer would receive twelve deniers for each livre paid, and there would be an adjudicator who would regulate the payment of these sums into the king’s treasury.to be offered for sale:
Other taxes were to be paid on produce and merchandise entering Bordeaux to be offered for sale: poultry, birds, fruit, fresh herbs, eggs, cheese, lettuce, ‘and all other small things to be eaten … and which do not keep for very long.’ ‘And if it happened that anyone, of whatever estate he may be, caused produce from the Haut-Pays, outside the region of conquest, to be brought into the town of Bordeaux or elsewhere in the pays de conquête, he would pay twelve deniers in the livre on the said produce and merchandise on entering and leaving. Each barrel of wine sold in this manner would attract a tax of twenty-five sols tournois. To avoid fraud, the receiver had to give receipts for all this, signed by controllers in designated places and fines would be paid for not having or not issuing these receipts or, in the case of officials, for not keeping proper registers of them. The officials concerned were to live at these collection points on pain of dismissal.24
So nothing is overlooked, no breach of the ordinances is possible, and all this under the menacing shadow of the Tropeyte fortress being built beside the quay on the site of destroyed warehouses and dwellings by what amounted to forced labour from the whole of the Bordelais coming in daily to carry out the construction work. Even when the price to be paid by the town for rebellion had been reduced from 100,000 to 30,000 gold écus, it was still a deliberately oppressive sum. Furthermore, Bordeaux’s right to mint its own coinage had been suppressed. It could have been said that Seneschal Coëtivy before his capture or le roi Talbot before his defeat had shown the same inclinations before the re-conquest. Nevertheless, these tight controls were now being used in the interest of the conquerors and nobody else.
Charles VII’s hostile and punitive reaction to the members of the Bordeaux jurade who had welcomed Talbot within their walls in October 1452 invites comparison with the rewards he gave to the ecclesiastics and bourgeoisie of Saint-Maixent who had resisted the military onslaughts of his opponents of the Praguerie revolt twelve years before. This upfront style of kingship was nothing if not personal rule, represented by these rewards and punishments. The Abbot of Saint-Maixent and his successors became members in perpetuity of the king’s Great Council, whereas Pey Berland was soon replaced with papal connivance by Blaise de Gréele, a creature from the royal coterie. Bordeaux and its jurade were fined a huge sum – huge even after it was reduced – and the townsmen had to build and maintain the two new royal-strongholds within their walls. Another obvious comparison is with contemporary events in England, where personal kingship was in abeyance in the person of Henry VI while potentates like Suffolk made ‘a determined attempt to find a substitute for a non-operational king’.25
* * *
From the point of view of all the inhabitants of the Bordelais, the importance of the consolidation of French power over them was its effect upon the wine trade with England. English wine imports, mostly from Gascony, have been estimated at towards 12,000 barrels in the single year 1447–1478, and 13,000 in the year after. These were the last two years of the truce that began in 1445 at the time of Henry VI’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou. Good seasons had followed the end of the destruction of vines in time of open warfare, the truce had reduced the danger from privateers at sea and ships were not then being commandeered by the English crown for military purposes. When fighting began again, the taking of Guiche (the port next in importance in Gascony to Bordeaux) near Bayonne, together with fifteen other towns, caused exports to England to plummet. Less than 6,000 barrels were exported in 1449–1450. In autumn 1450, when Charles VII’s armies were approaching Bordeaux, English ships were collected for a relieving force and kept idle off-shore for months. French ships from Brittany and La Rochelle blockaded the Gironde in the spring of 1451. ‘War was more catastrophic for the wine trade than actual surrender.’26
Even so, the surrender of Bordeaux in June did not put a stop to the wine trade with England. Its continuance was written into the peace treaty. Ten English ships received safe-conducts at Saint-Jean d’Angély – the port on the River Boutonne, a tributary of the Charente near its estuary, inland from Rochefort – for passage to Bordeaux on the day the treaty was signed. Twenty more ships were licensed in England, with the traders still confident of a good reception. They received safe-conducts when they arrived and unloaded their wheat cargoes. At least twenty-six English ships were in port at Bordeaux in January 1452, with over 1,000 men on board, forty of whom were traders. The names of the ships, their masters and their home ports are given in a document drawn up to record their presence by Guillaume de Rouille, the visitor acting on the orders of the seneschal of Guyenne (whose name is not given in the document, but who must have been de Coëtivy at that time).27 Moreover, English traders were still loading wine they bought on foreign ships at Bayonne. 7,000 barrels left Gascony for English ports in 1451–1452. During Talbot’s occupation, neither licences nor safe-conducts were needed and nearly 10,000 barrels were imported.28 Even after the second conquest of October 1453, trade was not too much disrupted from an English point of view at first. The terms of trade were ‘much less favourable’ and ‘some dislocation of trade was inevitable’, but imports of wines from Gascony in 1453–1454 was again estimated at 6,000 barrels. The next year, there was a recovery to 9,500 barrels, and the bulk of this was still carried in English ships as a detailed account from Southampton confirms. There were no convoys as in the past, and arrivals in English ports were ‘scattered,’ but the four ships that put into Southampton during that season had nothing but wine in their holds, confirmed by their bills of lading. Fifty-eight licences to trade were issued in 1454 and thirty-two in 1455, some to English denizen traders, but also to Gascons who had decided to settle in London, Bristol or Southampton.29
This did not stop the regulations issued by Charles VII’s commissioners in January 1455 being punitive for the exporters, and in the next season – 1455–1456 – they began to bite ‘and the whole direct trade was threatened with extinction’. Charles VII had taken additional action to forbid his officials to grant safe-conducts to ‘the former enemy’. Again, a punitive intention; but the outcry against it was so great that he relented to allow the issue of eighty passes a year. These were to be granted directly by the king in person or by his admiral, not as a matter of bureaucratic routine. The amount of wine transported fell to less than 5,000 barrels, and in the following year to 3,000. General uncertainty and the difficulty of securing licences or safe-conducts, the predations of Breton ships and French attacks on English ports were all inhibiting factors for English traders and mariners.30 Even if they reached the Gironde, they had to put in at Soulac to collect a permit and pay the fee, then again at Blaye to unload their armament, with payment of another fee, and, on arrival at Bordeaux, they had to have a permit from the mayor to stay at designated lodgings and submit to what amounted to a curfew between 5 pm and 7 am.31
When Louis XI succeeded his father as King of France in 1461, the situation did not immediately improve for the English. The new king had a pact with Queen Margaret, his cousin, and forbade wine exports to Edward IV’s now Yorkist England. This only lasted for one season, however. Under Louis XI, the punitive action was against English traders, not the Gascons. He made a royal progress among them in 146232 and was mending fences there following the sensible advice he had received from his counsellor, Regnault Girard. ‘The English should therefore be allowed to trade once again as freely as they would.’33
But this is to anticipate the outcome. At the same conference under the auspices of the Comité Internationale des Sciences Historiques in Paris in 1946 as Professor Carus-Wilson of the London School of Economics gave her paper, Dr. Yves Renouard, Head of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Bordeaux and later a Professor at the Sorbonne, presented another in parallel, covering similar ground, but different enough to provide a complementary point of view.34
The political union between England and Aquitaine had seemed before the French conquest to be intertwined with the prosperity of economic relations. The new conditions after the surrender of 1451 were briskly established. English traders and mariners were from now on the enemies of the dominant power in Bordeaux. Charles VII established this clearly in a series of ordinances and in the preamble to the treaty.35 The English traders and Gascon proprietors could still have active commercial relations so as to export the wine harvest of 1451, provided it was completed before the expiry of the date fixed for it: 20 December. The document affirms that the wine exported to England in 1451 exceeded by a third the quantity taken the year before. After the cut-off date, it seemed that this commerce, traditional since the establishment of the English mercantile marine, seemed interrupted for as long as French occupation would last. In addition, the treaty offered safety and fiscal advantages to any traders from any nation who came to Bordeaux down rivers or by land routes (‘par eau douce ou par terre’).36 Charles VII intended to turn the export of wine towards his own country in order, more or less, to break all ties between England and Aquitaine.
There had been no notices telling the English traders and shipowners not to come, which accounts for there being twenty-six English ships on the Garonne in January 1452 already referred to. They had obtained their safe-conducts from the Admiral of France and the seneschal of Guyenne had ordered an exceptional inspection at that time. The ‘brutal interruption of trade’ which could have been expected did not happen after the expiry of the delay of six months fixed by the treaty of capitulation.37
After Talbot’s reception into the town, the situation returned to what it had been before June 1451.The English ships were unhindered while loading and exporting the wines from the 1452 harvest. In spite of the precarious state of affairs, the amount of wine carried to England in 1452–1453 returned to five-sixths of what it had been in 1446–1448.38
After the second capitulation the new taxes already noted were imposed for the French crown’s benefit as a punishment for the city’s treason, but there was nothing to say that Charles VII had forbidden trade with the English in any formal way. Yet commerce in wine was open to all nations’ traders. A state of war with England continued, and English traders had to leave Bordeaux under safe-conduct.
The convention agreed between Admiral Jean de Bueil and Roger de Camoys dated 5 October 1453 allowed all English ships to sail freely from the port during the next day, laden with wine or any other merchandise that seemed appropriate, to be taken to England or anywhere else during the time allowed by the safe-conducts that were issued. This has the appearance of a desire on the part of Charles VII to rid himself of the English as soon as possible. Even so, John d’Ormont sent wine to England in April 1454 under a safe-conduct issued by Bueil and Dunois.
Then, suddenly, on 27 October 1455, Charles VII utterly forbade his lieutenants-general, military governors, constables, the Admiral of France and all other officials to provide English traders or ships’ captains with safe-conducts in order to prevent any trade at all between them and the producers of Bordeaux. The king’s intention to put an end to all English influence in his new province of Guyenne was made plain. Nevertheless, the king’s Great Council intervened on Christmas Eve 1455 to permit the Duke of Bourbon, recently appointed governor of Guyenne, to grant licences and securities for Englishmen to come to Bordeaux to take on cargoes of wine.39
The minutes of the Grands Jours of 1456 and 1459 present disputes about the trade, giving the names of the ships involved: the Ghost of London, the Warry of Sandwich, the Anne of Southampton, the Marguerite of Orwell, and the Antoine of Hull.40 In 1458, some English sailors escaped from imprisonment in the Ombrière and caused disturbances in the city: a decree issued during the Grands Jours on 3 November 1459 shows that such disturbances were frequent.41
The text Renouard refers to is especially interesting for what it suggests about conditions towards the end of Charles VII’s reign, and a section of it is worth quoting in full:
Item, and because it is said that Englishmen are allowed to come into this town without guides or guards at night without lanterns, and go about as well in the Médoc and Entre-Deux-Mers buying wines from house to house, communicating with and talking to people in town and country in secret, and hearing what the military are doing, which is too dangerous a thing, and to which another remedy needs to be found because, whenever such a great number of Englishmen are present – and still more could arrive – who are not controlled, irreparable damage could result; the Court enjoins on the mayor and jurats that they must diligently take steps to police the town of Bordeaux in respect of the matters mentioned above.
Renouard concludes simply that there was no interruption in the export of Gascon wines after the conquest of Guyenne in 1453, but that the amount carried was much less than in the preceding decade.42 Because of the difficulty in obtaining safe-conducts and the harassment of English traders and mariners once arrived in Bordeaux, it took a great deal of determination for anyone to fit out a ship for the enterprise. It is ‘very likely’ (vraiment semblable), says Renouard, that wines were exported in ships from Brittany and Flanders since their mariners did not face the same inconveniences, but they had not replaced the English entirely, as Girard’s memorandum to Louis XI bore out. Charles VII’s regulations and the lessening of production made the prices for Gascon wines higher, and this in turn diminished the number of Englishmen prepared to face the risks involved. Then, from 1459 onwards, the Wars of the Roses reached an active phase. Hostilities on land and sea made economic life increasingly difficult. Between 1456 and 1462 the average annual wine imports to England from Gascony was reduced to ‘about a third’ of the 1449 figure.43
There was something else that contributed to the material decline of trade in Bordeaux from the norm of 1449, and that was the desire of a good number of Gascon nobles and traders to live elsewhere. Some went to live in Brittany, others in English ports like Bristol, while those who stayed in Bordeaux suffered under conditions of diminished trade and from the heavy charges imposed by the new regime.44 Their discontent was expressed in the preambles to royal ordinances in the next reign, such as this from a letter patent issued at Amboise on 12 July 1462:45 ‘merchandise had no movement in our town of Bordeaux or in its suburbs’, quoted by Renouard. But it is worth quoting more from the document to enable us to see more through the eyes of people who were there and had expressed their grievances to be reported to the new king.
The jurats and councillors of our said town of Bordeaux have demonstrated to us the great harm that they have to put up with because the aforementioned English merchants no longer come and trade in the said town nor in the region, under safe-conduct. [They have also told us] what great profit could return there and in the surrounding countryside if we were pleased to consent to the return of the said English merchants …46
Renouard draws our attention to historians active before the publication of the customs accounts who went beyond the complaints of the mayor and the jurats to affirm directly (and erroneously) that the port of Bordeaux was closed for trade with England and that the vines were abandoned.47
Louis XI inherited the throne of France on 22 July 1461 but was not particularly concerned with the province of Guyenne for the first six months of his reign. However, when he made a progress there in the following year, he saw the reality of things for himself. His attitude was complicated by the civil war in England at the same time. He was hoping to support a king of England who would abandon the claim to territories in France and to the French throne itself in return for his own support. The measures he took corresponded to the way the internecine conflict in England was going. He envisaged at first the prospect of Bordeaux without the English, issuing ordinances in March 1462 to welcome traders from the Hanseatic League, the Spanish kingdoms, Flanders, and the Low Countries, creating two open markets every year at Bordeaux, one at the beginning of Lent and the other in August, each to last eight days, with considerably reduced tariffs.48 He forbade access to the English who were still ‘his enemies’, even if they had managed to obtain safe-conducts. Renouard points out that this was the only actual interdiction of their docking in the port since Charles VII’s angry spat seven years earlier.49
This situation too was short-lived because three months later, on 28 June, Louis signed a truce for a hundred years with Queen Margaret who was then a refugee at Tours, allowing Lancastrian supporters to live in Bordeaux in consideration of special licences issued from his court.50 Edward IV forbade the export of Gascon wines in the holds of English ships at the same time as a political riposte. A few Lancastrian supporters did profit from this, but Breton shipmasters were quick to make up some of the deficiency in supplies to England.
Louis XI, in spite of his support in principle of the Lancastrian queen, sensed that the Yorkists would be the winners and signed the truce of Hesdin with Edward IV which, on the pretext of stopping piracy, forbade the issue of safe-conducts to any Englishmen. But then, on 12 July 1463, he issued the ordinance of Amboise which did allow safe-conducts to be issued again. If the English were to arrive once more to pay for their purchases in gold, this would save the Gascon monoculture of wine. But there was to be even stricter control of English shipping arriving at the port, to which Edward IV replied by similar restrictions upon French traders arriving in English ports. Nevertheless, with increased stability once Yorkist rule had been established, the wine trade grew again. In the five years between 1463 and 1468, the amount of wine exported to England reached half the amount of what it had been before 1449.51
All this happened despite there being no safe-conducts granted by Edward IV recorded in the final Gascon Roll, which covers the first two and the seventh years of his reign, after the two granted in sequence to Thomas de Contis of Bayonne. As the roll’s editor, Stuart J. Harris, points out, there were only three safe-conducts altogether recorded in this roll dated 1461 – all five recipients were from Bordeaux (smaller traders attached themselves to larger ones for safe-conducts to save expense) and they were allowed to use them only to come to England, not to go home again afterwards. The other entries in this short roll are about rewards given for loyal service to the English crown by other Gascons, who could not hope to profit from the offices to which they were appointed, such as responsibility for the writing office in the Chateau d’Ombrière granted to Phélipe de Laplace.52
The ordinance of July 1463 continued in operation until war broke out again between France and England in March 1468 and lasted until the restoration of Henry VI in October 1470. Then it was restored and remained in force while Charles de Bourbon was governor of Guyenne from 1470 to 1472 and until the truce of Brussels expired and Edward IV landed his army in Picardy hoping for Burgundian support. Nevertheless, while the Yorkist regime lasted in England, the import of Gascon wine never exceeded two-thirds of the pre-1449 figure.53
The commerce in Gascon wines and English trade goods had become an English monopoly in the past because the English were mariners, and the Gascons had a tendency to be what used to be called landlubbers. If Gascon ships were involved at all, it was from Bayonne that they came – until the estuary of the Adour silted up. The fear on the part of the French government that the English would return in force one day was not entirely groundless. While Louis XI was making his progress in Gascony in 1462, English privateers in the Gironde nearly captured the ship he happened to be on.54 In 1467, the king convinced himself that the unusually large fleet of English ships that came into Bordeaux for the wines must be the advance guard for an invasion.55 But in May 1469, at the same time as Edward IV was making his appeal for help to Jean V d’Armagnac and Charles d’Albret via a secret agent called John Boon56 to assist him in re-conquering Gascony, thirty English ships arrived in Bordeaux and Bayonne; several hundred men had been brought over masquerading as traders. The suspicions of the Admiral of Guyenne were aroused and, when he had impounded the ships, the men on board confessed that they were an invasion force.57
Louis XI, like his father (for once!) feared that this English trade with Gascony would turn into a Trojan horse. Charles VII had had the experience of Pierre de Montferrand’s return in 1454, and there had been a conspiracy of certain nobles and churchmen in favour of expelling the French from Bordeaux in 1456, but both of these occurred at a time when the English were incapable of giving them support, and Charles VII had had no difficulty in suppressing them by means of the garrison he maintained in the town.
There was ‘a rapid and astonishing rallying’58 to the King of France at the time of the treaty of Picquigny by those who had been Anglophiles twenty years previously. At first, so many Gascons chose to transfer their businesses to England in the years 1451–1453 that they caused a certain de-population of Bordeaux and the area around it by all the elements most loyal to the English king/duke.59 There were many empty houses. These emigrants were replaced by newcomers from the Midi, tradespeople who had followed the French armies as they had invaded. They are listed in the king’s instructions to Seneschal Coëtivy on 25 July 1457 as ‘drapers, tailors, cutters, shoemakers, barbers and other mechanical people’. They had the idea that, since they had provided services to military personnel on the march, they would be exempt from taxation if they set up shop in Bordeaux when the conquest was complete. The seneschal was ordered to inform them that they must pay the same as everyone else.60 These people were French nationals (as we would say, and they were beginning to) and they had no regard for Bordeaux’s former status as an English duchy. By their presence in considerable numbers, they gradually changed the sentiments of the townspeople.
Furthermore, Charles VII’s brutal repression of the Bordelais in 1453, with military occupation, the clearances for the Hâ and Tropeyte fortresses and the forced labour to construct them, together with the control exercised by his officials, particularly of his son-in-law Coëtivy, prevented any chance of a popular rising in support of an English return being successful. Louis XI carried on with this policy, at least for the first years of his reign, with guard posts at Soulac on the northern point of the Médoc, where Talbot had landed his force in 1452, and at Royan with a courier service ready to give early warning of any English presence off the coast. Each and every English ship arriving in the Gironde still had to unload its guns and other armament at Blaye and submit to an inspection by a crown official. Tickets were issued to the traders for their lodgings ashore by the Mayor of Bordeaux, and they were required to wear a cross of St. George on their clothing and to remain indoors from five in the evening till seven in the morning. They were not supposed to leave the town to taste or buy wines in other places without an escort of archers. Although this regulation was not always maintained, as we have seen, the measures were effective in restricting the influence of such Englishmen who did come to Bordeaux and, in spite of them, there was a general return to prosperity among the Gascon winegrowers and traders.
Moreover, in order to attract more foreign settlers, Louis XI suppressed a law which said that the property of foreigners who died on French soil should be appropriated by the state. The Guyennais of 1475, when the Hundred Years’ War (though nobody at the time called it that) was halted by the truce made at Picquigny, were part of a new generation who had no direct memory of the years before the invasions. They accepted French rule because they had not known anything different.
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Another prominent English economic historian, M.K. James, gave further information about the stabilization of Bordeaux under Charles VII and Louis XI. The Gascon migration to England of the 1450s was composed of men from Bordeaux with their families and a number of people from Bayonne ‘whose proved loyalty to the English no longer stood them in good stead’ at home.61 The nobles among them were welcomed by the King of England and his government, and we have already noted some of their names, but the bulk of them were traders looking for privileges comparable to the ones they had lost in Gascony. This had happened already in 1451 after the first French conquest, and immigrants obtained licences to bring their wine and other trade goods to England. Members of the Makanam family were English by origin and they rediscovered their roots at that time. During 1452–1453, the migrants were less numerous, but more came in the wake of the final capitulation of Bordeaux in October 1453 and this tendency continued for the next two years.62 Licences were granted only to the more prominent among them such as were recorded in the Gascon rolls of those years,63 but the lesser traders were allowed to add their goods to those of the licence-holders in the same ships. Some had licences for more than one ship, as in the case of Richard Lancastel who brought eight ships to England in 1451. Gascons became an important presence in English ports.64 As they settled for trade, they also sought participation in the civic life of the towns where they settled.
Many of them settled in London where opportunities for trading were good, but considerable settlement certainly took place also in Bristol and other great cities and may well have spread all over England. Most of them continued in the wine trade, where their specialized knowledge and their contacts with Bordeaux stood them in good stead but whether they dealt in wine or not, they almost certainly engaged in trade of some kind. Amaneu Gallet, John Dorta, John Fawne, Arnold Makanam, Philip de la Place, and John Gaucem all became very prominent vintners of London; Amaneu Bertet became a draper of London … Elias Hugon was sometimes called a merchant and sometimes a hosier in Exeter, a vintner in Coventry or a taverner or vintner in Westminster, etc., etc.
The important thing was that these Gascon settlers brought their commercial competence to their new home and played a prominent part in English trade. The Chancery Rolls for the next twenty years are full of licences for them to trade in Bordeaux, Bayonne, Brittany or elsewhere in France, and to bring the wine they bought to England. ‘There seems little doubt that many of them managed to repair their fortunes’ in their country of adoption.65
Nevertheless, Margery James argued that in all probability this advantageous situation did not last very long. Two important factors were in operation. Firstly, with the changed politics after the accession of Louis XI, the return of the migrants was being encouraged to revitalize the economy of Bordeaux and to re-populate the place. If the emigrants were to return with their commercial skills intact, prosperity would return with them.
The Gascon immigrants were becoming increasingly resented in England, and soon decided to return without any external stimulus. There were two examples of this happening in Southampton in the decade 1475 to 1485. A Gascon called Pascau Parent had got on the wrong side of a London vintner called Robert John who had connections in Southampton, who decided to accuse him, falsely, of incurring a debt of fifty shillings in the port. John had influence there and saw to it that the foreigner Parent was found guilty. Another Gascon, Matthew Gascoyn (what else?), brought his Bordeaux wine to Southampton, and Giles Palmer and John Bolles tried to undercut his prices. Other traders bought his wine at the asking price, and then Palmer and Bolles had him accused of breaking a covenant. When this did not work, they brought another action against Gascoyn in the court of Piepowder where, because he was not franchised in the town, he did not stand a chance of winning his case.
Other cases can be cited, and Miss James emphasised the hostility between denizen traders and Gascons being a problem that had already existed for 150 years. A vigorous group of English merchants wanted to monopolize wholesale distribution of wine in their own country, as their compatriots had monopolized the carrying trade for so long before, and they resented the business acumen that the Gascons had acquired in long years of salesmanship at home on the banks of the Garonne. However, in the 1460s and 1470s, the Gascons in England were fewer in number, and no longer presented serious competition. Besides, the Gascons were no longer loyal subjects of the English crown but had become French aliens.66