By studying the letters of forgiveness granted by the French and English sovereigns to “war criminals”, Quentin Verreycken shows how war professionalized at the end of the Middle Ages.
Cruel and violent, thief and rapist, such is the image of the medieval war man in the collective imagination. The roots of this representation are deep and are found in medieval sources after the Hundred Years War. However, without denying the violence of the people of war of the second half of the XVe Century, the study of the letters of forgiveness issued by the kings of France and England and by the Dukes of Burgundy suggests a more complex and nuanced painting revealed to us by the book of Q. Verreycken, revamped version of his thesis of history sustained in 2018 at the Catholic University of Louvain.
In this book, the author offers us a study on the crime of a disparate social group: the “ warfare ». This expression, present in medieval sources (p. 23), designates combatants – from the simple archer to the man in arms – united by the same honor and the same ethos In a context of increasing professionalization of the armies at the end of the Middle Ages.
A comparative story of sovereign grace
The study of the crime of people of war by Q. Verreycken is based on well -known sources of historians of the end of the Middle Ages: the letters of forgiveness granted by the sovereign. Whether in the form of letters of remission or abolition among the kings of France and the Dukes Valois de Bourgogne or in the form of letters of individual or general forgiveness among the kings of England, the sovereign is capable of suspending the course of justice, or even throwing the veil of oblivion on a crime. To do this, the accused’s litigant must request the prince’s grace by writing or by writing a petition in order to justify his actions and thus obtain forgiveness.
The author has collected letters of forgiveness that all concern wars, whether they are the authors of a crime for whom they seek to obtain forgiveness (this is the majority of cases) or victims of a crime. The letters identified form a corpus with just under a thousand acts, 76% of which come from France, 16% of Burgundian principalities and 8% of England (p. 10). This “ asymmetry “(P. 17) of the documentation which reflects specificities of the conservation and production of these acts is detailed in chapter 3. This imbalance of archival funds does not prevent a real comparative approach which is at the heart of the analysis.
The originality of this book lies in the systematic crossing of letters of forgiveness granted in England, France and in Burgundian territories. The relative concomitance of the reign of Édouard Iv and Louis XI (1461-1483), and the end of the principal of Philippe Le Bon (1419-1467), Charles Le Bold (1467-1477) and Marie de Bourgogne (1477-1482) offers a certain consistency to the analysis which thus falls under a real approach of comparative history. The period studied, which begins at the end of the Hundred Years War, makes it possible to observe territories confronted with a multifaceted warrior fact, whether through the civil wars of Deux-Roses in England (1455-1485) and the public good in France (which begins in 1465), or through the armed conflicts between the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy between 1468 and 1482.
By avoiding falling into a story that would be that of the birth of the modern state through the process of increasing discipling of the armies, the author manages to show that “ the fight against military crime at XVe century is far from being a uniform and continuous process (P. 13). The political sets studied each have their legal and institutional particularities that the author takes care to detail over the pages.
“” Thick and malicious brutes »» ?
The letters of forgiveness are not so much studied by the author as sources on the real crime of wars of war as as a speech on this same crime.
Whether in narrative sources, in political literature or in the legal sources of XIVe And XVe centuries, the representation of the man of war is often limited to that of the soldier “ tyrant (P. 26). The imagination of the time often reduces the man of war to his criminal behavior: incendiary, thief, murderer and rapist. This “ stigma “(P. 38), which is based on a part of reality, makes it possible to valorize the figure of the good soldier – a loyal officer who serves the sovereign, not devoid of chivalrous values - which are found in military regulations developed by princes in the context of increasing professionalization of the profession of arms.
This double portrait of the man of war is found in the letters of French and Burgundian remission, which detail the identity of those who require the grace of the monarch. In his support, the soldier who committed a crime presents himself as good and loyal, rather of modest origin and well anchored in society. Conversely, when the applicant seeks to be forgiven a crime committed on a man of war, the support tends to blacken the portrait of the soldier-victime by drawing from the negative stereotypes which surround the profession of arms (chap. 1).
What is ultimately the nature of the crime of wars as it is contained in letters of grace ? Chapter 2 answers this question, there too from the French and Burgundian sources, the English documentation showing itself not very logging with the description of forgiven crimes. The author warns us here against the effects of sources which watch the historian working on the letters of remission and which are essentially based on a “ real effect », To quote Natalie Zemon Davis (p. 94). The story of the supplicant has all the appearance of the likely, it is nonetheless constructed for a specific purpose: obtaining forgiveness.
Based on an abundant historiography which has long grabbed letters of remission, the author manages to circumscribe the field of crime of warfare people. In the second half of the XVe century, the excesses of war – looting, fire, massacres – gradually left room for crime “ relatively standardized (P. 141). War people are mainly forgiven for homicides who are to be located after an escalation of violence where blood is shed under anger, to repair the soldier’s injured honor following an attack on his reputation. For princely chancelleries, this violence appears to be acceptable and worthy of being forgiven. It responds to a method of regulating conflicts which does not distinguish the soldier from the rest of the population for whom the harm to honor requires repair. The man of war remains nevertheless a singular being in society and the questions of the supply and housing of the troops are all subjects of friction which can give birth to the conflict and the crime.
War people “ are far from all thick and malicious brutes, just as their forgiven crimes are not summed up with bloody war (P. 200). This does not mean that these bloody facts disappear at the turn of XVe century, but that the monarch forgives the warrior abuses less and less.
Sold-adjustable strategies
Obtaining a remission therefore reveals “ writing strategies (P. 61) that must be linked to the strategies of the litigants. To reveal these, the author endeavors to reconstruct the whole complexity of the procedure allowing to obtain grace.
The comparative approach is then particularly fruitful, because it makes it possible to fill the gaps of each of the archive funds, an enlightening the shadows of the other. This preciously completes our understanding of the grace system for the end of the Middle Ages. The existence of surveys and opinions, the place of the intermediaries, the cost of forgiveness and the endorsement procedures are thus detailed and make it possible to show that the people of war are not “ ordinary litigants (P. 144). Certainly the soldiers do not escape the regulated procedure to obtain forgiveness, but they can play with the latter by putting forward their armed service or by relying on relations which are all assets to obtain the grace of the sovereign, within the framework of a merciful policy.
Grace and government of the armies
The case of England is particularly characteristic of this reasoned use of grace by the prince. From the end of XIIIe A century, the king used forgiveness for recruitment purposes, showing his grace in exchange for an armed service. This practice declines during the XIVe century, because the forgiveness thus granted to criminals raised the question of the return of these fighters to ordinary life. In addition, with a recruitment of the armies which is becoming more and more professional, the lifting of such troops is less necessary. The forgiveness of the man of war becomes more rare and responds to strategic interests, as shown by the case of forgiveness granted to the garrison of Calais which had lifted against Édouard Iv During the Deux-Roses War. The king, after having submitted Calais, uses forgiveness to attach the fidelity of a rich city whose geographical position on the continent is decisive (p. 229).
Fighters are in the minority in the letters of English for the second half of the XVe century (about 0.7%), “ English society is indeed relatively well preserved from the excesses of soldiers during the civil war (P. 222). Conversely, they are overrepresented in French and Burgundian remission letters (between 13 and 18% of funds, p. 52).
In France and in the Burgundian space, the merciful policy of the monarchs is distinguished from that of the King of England. Grace is the expression of a sovereign majesty which makes it possible to build the portrait of the faithful subject whose antithesis is the rebel. The fight against disobedience and rebellion increases in the second half of the XVe century – as evidenced by the great trials of the reign of Louis XI as well as the repression of urban revolts. Q. Verreycken also observes it through “ A disciplinary turning point “(P. 212) with regard to war people who also reveal a desire for increasing control of the armies by the suffering of the fighter to sovereign authority.
Q. Verreycken’s book therefore offers a stimulating reflection on the graceful policies of the sovereigns of the end of the Middle Ages focusing on a category subject to grace: people of war. In doing so, he reveals how the construction of war crime accompanies the strengthening of disciplinary control of the armies. Far from being a period of crisis, the end of the Middle Ages appears to be “ A pivotal moment in the construction of a public authority “(P. 249) which, not without knowing limits and failures, accompanies a deep mutation of the armies in Europe of the first modernity.