Essay About Speed Of Road Travel And Langue D

France 1500
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France in 1500
At the beginning of the sixteenth century France was still only partially
developed as a nation. She still lacked well-defined borders, a common
language and a unified legal system. The eastern frontier, in so far as it
existed at all, followed roughly the rivers Scheldt, Meuse, SaoÐ? ne and RhoÐ? ne
from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. People living west of this line
were vassals of the French king; those to the east owed allegiance to the
Holy Roman Emperor. French suzerainty over Artois and Flanders was
purely nominal, effective control of these areas having passed to the house
of Burgundy. Further east, the frontier cut across the duchy of Bar whose
ruler, the duke of Lorraine, did homage for half the territory to the king
of France and for the other half to the emperor. In the south, DauphineÐÒ
and Provence, being east of the RhoÐ? ne, were still not regarded as integral
parts of the French kingdom: the king was obeyed as ÐDauphin in the one,
and as count in the other. The south-west border more or less followed the
Pyrenees, avoiding Roussillon, which belonged to the kingdom of Aragon,
and the small kingdom of Navarre, ruled by the house of Albret. Within
France, there were three foreign enclaves: Calais belonged to England, the
Comtat-Venaissin to the Holy See and the principality of Orange to the
house of Chalon. Some great fiefs also survived, including the duchies of
Brittany and Bourbon.
France also lacked a common language. Modern French is descended
from langue doıÐЁl, a dialect spoken in northern France during the medieval
period; in the south, langue doc or occitan was used. The linguistic frontier
ran from the Bec dAmbe`s in the west to the col du Lautaret in the east,
passing through Limoges, the Cantal and Annonay. South of this line, even
educated people used the local idiom or Latin; langue doıÐЁl was spoken by
feudal magnates when addressing the king. After 1450, as the French crown
asserted its authority following the expulsion of the English, langue doıÐЁl
2 france in 1500
began to make deep inroads in the south-west. The parlements of Toulouse,
Bordeaux and Aix used it, and noblemen from the south who took up
offices at court adopted it. They continued to speak it when they returned
home, passing the habit to their servants. By 1500 the southward expansion
of langue doıÐЁl was gathering pace, at least among the upper classes, but
the linguistic unity of France still lay far in the future. Nor was the divide
simply between north and south. Within each linguistic half there were
whole families of provincial patois, not to mention such peripheral
languages as Breton, Basque or Flemish.
The law was another area lacking national unity. Each province, each
pays and often each locality had its own set of customs. Broadly speaking,
Roman law prevailed in the south while customary law existed in the north,
but patches of customary law existed in the south, while Roman law penetrated
the north to a limited extent. For a long time customs were fixed
only by practice, which made for flexibility but also uncertainty; so from
the twelfth century onwards charters were drawn up listing the customs of
individual lordships or towns. The first serious attempt to codify customs
was made by Charles VII, but no real progress was made till Charles VIII
set up a commission in 1495. It was under Louis XII, however, that codifi-
cation really got under way.
The surface area of France in 1500 was far smaller than it is today:
459,000 square kilometres as against 550,986. Yet it must have seemed
enormous to people living at the time, given the slowness of their communications.
The speed of road travel may be assessed by consulting the guidebook
published by Charles Estienne in 1553. One could cover 15 or 16
leagues in a day where the terrain was flat, 14 where it rose gently and
only 11 to 13 where it rose steeply. Thus it took normally two days to
travel from Paris to Amiens, six from Paris to Limoges, seven and a half
from Paris to Bordeaux, six to eight from Paris to Lyon and ten to fourteen
from Paris to Marseille.
The social and political implications of distance were far-reaching.
Fernand Braudel has suggested that it made for a fragmented society in
which villages, towns, pays, even provinces Ðexisted in sheltered cocoons,
having almost no contact with one another. Yet the immobility of French
life