#the aristocracy in the county of champagne 1100 1300

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Mother and daughter

Mothers and daughters, too, could have fundamentally different life courses despite nominal similarities. Helvide of Dampierre (ca. 1172-ca. 1225) and her daughter Marie of Montmirail (ca. 1205-72) , for example, both were third daughters who were married in their mid-teens to distinguished castle lords (Montmirail, Coucy) . Both had lengthy marriages (twenty-five and twenty-three years), several children (six and five), and were widowed at about thirty-seven. But their marriages were quite different. Helvide, who was no more than five or six years younger than her husband Jean of Montmirail, shared his lordship during marriage (1185-1210), jointly sealing letters with him for a decade before he abandoned her for the cloister. She continued to exercise lordship over his lands, over her own dowry, and over her dower lands until their eldest surviving son succeeded. Her second career as lordly widow was simply an extension of her first career as lordly wife. As her children came of age, she gave up the various Montmirail properties and withdrew to her dower castle at Montmirail, which she held for more than a decade (1212-ca.1225), exercising lordship just as she had shared it with Jean I during their marriage. In fact, Helvide had exercised lordship during her entire adult life. Her daughter Marie, by contrast, did not. As the third wife of the considerably older Enguerran III of Coucy, she did not share lordship with him during their twenty-three-year marriage (1219-42), nor did she assume the lordship of his lands after his death, since her two sons inherited immediately. Marie's thirty-year widowhood (1242-72), twice as long as her mother's, would have proved entirely uneventful had she not outlived all five of her siblings, none of whom left heirs. As it turned out Marie, at fifty-eight, became sole heiress of the entire collection of her parents' castle lordships and titles. Whereas her mother Helvide had overseen the division of the Montmirail properties among her children, Marie, the youngest of six children, purely by chance reconstituted her father's entire collection of properties. There was one further difference. Helvide, having been much aggrieved by Jean I's taking the religious habit and leaving her with underaged children, chose to be buried at Vaucelles in Picardy. Marie, who had a strong tie to her father, commissioned a great tomb for him and obtained permission from the monks of Longpont to be buried next to him; the tomb was inscribed: "daughter of a most worthy knight and most devoted monk Jean, former lord of Montmirail, and mother of Enguerran [IV] of Coucy."

Theodore Evergates- The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne - 1100-1300

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Favorite History Books || The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300 by Theodore Evergates ★★★★☆

The medieval county of Champagne is well known for its court under Count Henry the Liberal and Countess Marie and for its trade fairs, which made Champagne the crossroads of international commerce and finance through most of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the county’s achievements in fact were much broader than that. In recent decades intense scholarly study has revealed Champagne’s contributions in the domains of art and architecture, monasticism (especially Cistercian) , and intellectual life as well as literature. At the same time, a steady stream of critical editions (ecclesiastical cartularies, chancery registers, the customary) and meticulous genealogical studies of the region's important families continues to enlarge our understanding of the county and its medieval society. Still lacking, however, is a broad study of the county's aristocracy. This book attempts to fill that void.

This study is primarily a sociological analysis of a regional elite, its formation and evolution, and its practices. It does not attempt to provide a detailed political history of the county over two centuries or a comprehensive catalog of all the important families. Nor does it view the aristocracy primarily through its military activities. It seeks rather to understand the critical relationships within the aristocracy: between the barons and the counts, fiefholders and their lords, husbands and wives, parents and children, and between siblings. It seeks also to track the life courses of individuals, both men and women, as well as the fates of lineages. Since women are pervasively present in the sources and involved in numerous domains too often assumed to have been restricted to men, the approach here is to examine men and women together within a single social fabric. In the process, we encounter a cast of characters as captivating as the Arthurian characters invented by Chrétien de Troyes, who surely knew some of the individuals mentioned here.

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The dower

If Church law required mutual consent for a legitimate marriage, and if the husband expected his wife to bring a dowry to the marriage, she and her family, for their part, needed comparable assurances that her husband would treat her as his legitimate wife. The dower (donatio propter nuptias, dos, dotalicium, douaire) assigned by the husband to his bride at the time of their marriage, in the presence of witnesses, established her new right to share in his material possessions, especially after his death. The dower was linked to legitimate marriage long before the twelth-century canonists formalized the canon law of marriage. Under early Germanic law, the dower was defined as one-third of the property a couple acquired during marriage, but by the late ninth century it generally consisted of one-third of the husband's own property, a formula that persisted in Normandy and western France through the thirteenth century. In most of northern and Eastern France, including Champagne, it was the half-dower that took root: that is, a wife could expect the lifetime enjoyment of her conjugal residence and one-half of her husband's properties and revenues after his death.

The written dower letter (libellum dotis, carta dotis, carta de dotalicio) describing a wife's dower rights is known from the tenth-century in Burgundy. In northern France, dowers are mentioned from the early decades of the twelth century, and dower letters survive from the 1150s. Thereafter the dower letter was recognized as a distinct type of sealed letter. The earliest extant example in Champagne was drawn up in 1176 for the marriage of the well-to-do knight Stephen of Pringy and his bride Comitissa. The bishop of Châlons who performed the ceremony reminded Stephen and his guests, including his lord and several knights, that "a man leaves his father and mother to cling to his wife so that the two will become one in flesh, and what God has joined, no man may sunder." Stephen then repeated from the prepared text:

I, Stephen, with the approval and consent of my friends, receive you, my dearest Comitissa, as my wife. And with the advice of my friends, I give you in dower one-half of Pringy and its fortress. Should I ever leave that fortress to build another, I will give you the latter in dower. I also give you one-half of all that I possess elsewhere and one-half of all that I am able to acquire.

After the ceremony the bishop's chancellor presented the document to the bride, who apparently deposited it at the episcopal chancery for safe-keeping.

Stephen gave what the High Court later called the "customary" dower of Champagne that obtained in the absence of a specified dower, that is, life use of the couple's primary residence and half of the husband's current and future possessions:

It is the custom in Champagne that, if a noble woman remains a widow and she does not have a defined dower (douaire devis), she will take in dower whichever residence she wishes from her husband's property...as well as half of his property in dower, which she may take by customary right (par droit commun).

The half-dower was so widespread in Champagne that some marriage contracts simply required a dower "according to the custom of Champagne". The jurist Beaumanoir claimed in the 1280s that Philip II had decreed the half-dower in 1214 as the "general custom" of France, ostensibly to replace the traditional negotiated dower. Before Philip's ordinance, according to Beaumanoir, women took in dower only what had been negotiated for them before the marriage, and it was customary for the priest to instruct the husband to say to his wife: "I give you the dower agreed to by my family and yours." The king had become familiar with the half-dower through his confirmations and suits brought to his court and may well have intended to extend it to the entire realm. But that was to formalize a practice already widespread in Champagne, northern and eastern France, and Flanders. Chrétien de Troyes referred to it in his first Arthurian romance, Erec and Enide (1170s), when the count of Lomors promised Enide, apparently just widowed, half of all his lands in dower if she would marry him. The importance of the king's act, as Beaumanoir explained, was that it guaranteed dowers to women who did not receive them at marriage. In that respect, Philip was continuing his grandfather Louis VI's policy of protecting women's dower rights.

[..]

Given the consequences of a long-lived dowager, whose children might see half of their inheritances held in trust for many years, some barons, like the counts, assigned their wives "defined" or negotiated dowers worth less than half of their assets and excluding their main castles, which remained unencumbered and therefore free to pass immediately to an heir. Thibaut III dowered Blanche of Navarre with seven castellanies (about one-third of his revenues) but not the main comital residences of Troyes and Provins [..] According to Beaumanoir, Philip II's ordinance of 1214 excluded "baronies" from the half-dower provision in order to preserve castle lordships intact and to facilitate successions; nevertheless, the barons had to assign compensatory dowers. In effect, the king was enacting practices already well established in Champagne, where a dower of some kind, customary or defined, was deemed essential for a legitimate marriage.

Theodore Evergates- The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300

[histoireettralala]

The Life Course of Women- Aristocratic Women of Champagne and Marriage.

It is difficult to determine when most well-born girls left the parental household. A few marriage contracts of girls betrothed at very young ages required them to he raised in the households of their prospective husbands in anticipation of marriage. Alix of Grandpré was about two when placed in the Joinville household, where she spent ten years before marrying fifteen-year-old Jean of Joinville in 1240. Jeanne of Champagne was the same age when betrothed to one of Philip III's sons and deposited at the royal court until, nine years later, she married the future Philip IV, then fifteen. Both couples were raised virtually as brother and sister, both appeared to have delayed cohabitation after marriage until the wives reached their late teens, and both had very close marriages. Jean of Joinville remembered Alix* after their twenty-seven-year marriage as " my dear companion Alix " and endowed eternally burning candles next to her tomb. Philip IV, similarly affected byJeanne 's death after twenty-one years of marriage, commemorated her in numerous benefactions.

The surrender of young girls in anticipation of marriage was known to carry risk. Alix of Grandpré's mother tried to protect her by inserting a clause in the marriage contract requiring Alix 's return to her or her brother if the marriage did not occur. Thibaut IV refused to hand over his two-year old daugther Blanche until her prospective husband, the son of Odo II of Burgundy, turned fourteen and was capable of giving a canonically valid consent to marriage; at that time, said the count, he would deliver his daughter. The count's caution was justified, for the young man later refused his consent. Thibaut had contracted to deliver his daughter for a certain marriage, not a possible one, and so young Blanche remained at home until, at twelve, she married Jean, the future count of Brittany (1239-1305). Even then, Thibaut took the precaution of depositing with the monks at Preuilly the two key documents pertaining to Blanche's marriage: the papal bull of dispensation for consanguinity, and the dower letter sealed by the groom's father. Margaret of Dampierre, too, refused to hand over her daughter for marriage until a dower had been assigned, in effect, until her daughter had been made a legitimate wife by dower. The absence of clauses in marriage contracts specifying the early delivery of betrothed girls suggests that most well-born girls remained with their natal families until marriage or entry into a convent. That is why so many daughters appear with their parents in the records of property transactions, first as silent witnesses, then as formal consenters to the acts of their parents.

It is not known how many girls entered convents or at what ages, although it appears that they generally did so in their teens, at about the age of marriage. For girls to be married, marriage contracts often tied the date of marriage to their nubility, without however explaining whether nubility was defined as a physical state or as the age of a canonically valid marriage. Gislebert of Mons reports that the proposed marriage between Henry I's daughter Marie and the young Baldwin of Hainaut would occur when both reached "a marriageable age" (ad annos nubile), without further explanation. Other contracts speak of etas in the sense of either physical state or chronological age. Jeanne of Champagne's marriage contract with the future Philippe IV uses etas in both senses: the couple will give their consent "when they reach the minimum age (in etate sufficienti) for contracting a betrothal" and will marry "when Jeanne attains a marriageable state (ad nubilem etatem)". Whether Jeanne was nubile when she married nine years later, in the middle of her eleventh year, is uncertain, for she had her first child five years later at sixteen. Ultimately, the date of her marriage had less to do with her physical state than with Philippe III's need for his son's marriage as soon as possible.

Of the seven countesses of Champagne who married between 1164 and 1270, one married at thirteen, two at fifteen or sixteen, two at eighteen or nineteen, and two at twenty, for a median age of about eighteen at first marriage. The best documented cases of aristocratic women yield a similar pattern: a few married as early as twelve, but most married in their mid-teens. Marie of Montmirail, Emeline of Broyes, Jeanne of Dampierre, and Alix of Grandpré were married by fourteen or fifteen. Simon of Joinville's eldest daughter Elisabeth married in her late teens, while Agnès of Choiseul and Agnès of Bar-le-Duc married in their early twenties. Even desirable heiresses were not necessarily married off at the minimum age. Petronilla of Bar-sur-Seine was eighteen when her guardian uncle married her to Hugh of Le Puiset and surrendered custody of her inheritance. Agathe of Pierrefonds, heiress after her brother's death, married Conon, count of Soissons, at about nineteen while still under her mother's custody. That was the same age that Marie of France married Henry the Liberal, after spending ten years in the Benedictine convent of Avenay being educated and acculturated under the tutelage of a magistra, Alix of Mareuil. Henry, at thirty-seven, had waited more than twelve years after betrothing Marie. These examples suggest that it was not the minimum canonical age of marriage that determined when a well-born woman first married but rather her family's sense of her readiness for marriage and the availability of a suitable husband.

Indirect evidence suggests that the girls who married at a very young age often delayed cohabitation after marriage. The butler Anselm II of Traînel apparently left his bride in her father's custody out of respect for her tender age, a deferral that cost him both his wife and her dowry. Alix of Grandpré, who was betrothed as an infant and spent ten years in the Joinville household before marrying Jean of Joinville at about twelve, apparently did not begin to cohabit with him until she was seventeen, after five years of marriage; that was the year that Jean turned twenty-one and was knighted, and his widowed mother Béatrice left Joinville castle. Alix had her first child two years later at about nineteen and her second at twenty. Even Countess Jeanne seems to have delayed cohabiting with Philip IV after their marriage in 1284; she had resided at the royal court since infancy, married at eleven, but had her first child at sixteen.

Theodore Evergates- The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300

* I think Joinville said "my dear companion Alix" about his second wife Alix de Reynel, as reported by Evergates earlier in the book.

(Seal of Jeanne de Navarre, Countess of Champagne and of Brie, Queen of Navarre, and Queen consort of France.)

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The transformation of the county of Champagne.

Between the accession of Henry I in January 1152 and the death of Marie in March 1198, Champagne was transformed from a loose assortment of counties and quasi-independent lordships into a cohesive territorial state. Although the counts in their letters continued to identify themselves as "count of Troyes," they and their officials came to view their lands and fiefholders through the prism of the new castellany grid embodied in the rolls of fiefs. The count's castellanies, the new administrative districts centered on his towns and fortresses, encompassed all his fiefholders, from ordinary knights to barons with inherited castle lordships.In effect, a single polity consisting of the count's castellanies had subsumed Thibaut II' s collection of old counties and lordships. Geoffroy of Villehardouin, who surveyed the military disposition of the county through the rolls of fiefs, was the first to adapt his title to reflect the new political reality. Initially known as "marshal "and "marshal of the count," Geoffroy began to style himself "marshal of Champagne" after returning from the Third Crusade in 1194. Count Henry II, too, had begun to understand his title, "count of Troyes", in that expansive sense of all Champagne when he spoke of the lands "in my county", meaning not the old county of Troyes but rather all the lands under his authority, no matter their location or ancient title. Gislebert of Mons, the chancellor of Hainaut who was exceptionally well ­informed about Champagne , wrote in his chronicle (1195-96) that the "count of Troyes" was commonly ( vulgariter) called " count of Champagne." That sense of Champagne as a distinct polity, soon to become the "county of Champagne and Brie," was unimaginable before 1152.

Henry the Liberal's achievement, and Marie's in preserving it, was to construct the institutions of a new principality while retaining the loyalty of the barons through a traditional style of collegial governance. By recruiting his high officers from the old baronial lines- Chappes, Châtillon, Dampierre, Joinville, Plancy, Pougy, and Traînel- and by not overtly intruding into their inherited castle lordships, Henry co-opted the baronial class in the construction of his new state. The chapters of secular canons he founded in Troyes, Provins, Bar-sur-Aube and Sézanne, each with twenty to sixty or seventy prebends, furnished careers for well-born young men without a military or monastic calling, and served as a pool of literate personnel for the count's administrative needs. Even those without formal office, like Garnier of Traînel, served the count in a quasi-official capacity. Garnier and his brother Anselm III of Traînel, the count's butler, had been very close since the Second Crusade as co-lords of their inherited lands, and they often sat together at the count's court. In 1174 the count asked Garnier to arbitrate a complicated dispute between Larrivour and Montiéramey, two powerful monasteries not far from Troyes. In his sealed report to the count, Garnier related "what I saw and heard and what was done through my hand." Satisfied with Garnier's disposition of the matter, the count had Garnier's letter copied verbatim and sealed with his own seal; the chancellor presented the monks of Larrivour with both Garnier's original report and the count's sealed confirmation of the settlement. That symbiotic relationship between the counts and the region's wealthiest and most powerful barons assured their continuing support during Marie's regencies. Ultimately, the count's new administrative apparatus rested lightly on the barons, who continued to act as virtually independent lords within their own lands where they held court, oversaw their fiefholders, and conducted their own familial affairs without interference from the count.

Coincident with the rise of the comital state under Henry and Marie, and indeed fostered by it, were two related developments with far-reaching implications for the aristocracy. The first was the diminishing role of baronial castles within the county. The count's burgeoning towns, especially Troyes, Provins, and Bar-sur-Aube, whose regulated trade fairs made them vibrant commercial centers, marginalized the private castles. The prominence of the count's new principal residence in Troyes, with its attached chapel serving as his chancery, treasury, and mausoleum, was particularly dramatic. None of the baronial castle towns, not even Brienne, Joigny, or Bar-sur-Seine, which were located on the trade routes, could rival the count's towns in either size or economic or cultural importance. At the same time, the construction of fortified residences (domus, domus fortis) in the open countryside ended the dominance of the old castles. The new walled residential compounds, quadrangular moated sites with stout stone walls often reinforced by perimeter towers, began to dot the countryside from the 1170s. Whether they were built with the count's license, or were renderable to him, is not entirely clear, although many of the fortified residences in the castellanies of Meaux and Coulommiers facing the royal domain appear to have been licensed, perhaps even subsidized, by Henry I to strengthen the county's border in a region of few old baronial castles [...] Within a generation those walled compounds transformed the landscape, just as the construction of new villages and reformed monasteries earlier in the century had filled in the open spaces between the old towns, castles, and Benedictine monasteries.

The second development promoted by the rise of the comital state was the chancery's validation of women as fiefholders. Certainly women had held and disposed of fiefs much earlier in the century, as they had elsewhere. It was not fiefholding per se that was new but rather chancery conventions: whereas the scribes of Henry I's rolls of fiefs named only men and their male heirs as fiefholders (only 12 women appear among the 1899 fiefholders in 1178), a decade later the scribes of Henry II's rolls routinely included among the count's current fiefholders the wives and widows who held their dower fiefs and acted as custodians for their children's fiefs (in 1190, women held about 13,4 percent of recently transferred fiefs). In every subsequent inquest through the thirteenth century, women held between 17 percent and 20 percent of the count's fiefs- as their own inheritances, as dowers, or in custody for their husbands and heirs. Unlike the monastic scribes, who often represented wives as only consenters to the disposition of their own properties, the count's scribes recognized the actual role of women as fiefholders by right of inheritance, dower, or custody. What is particularly remarkable about the chancery's referencing of women fiefholders in the last decades of the century is that it coincides with the use of personal seals by highborn women, who had begun to seal letters patent, both jointly with their husbands and independently for their personal transactions.

Theodore Evergates- The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300