for the size of the take from the taille appropriated by tax-farmers, see p. 308 (13 million out of 19 million livres in the mid 1620’s).
15. ‘Or to change the metaphor: if royal authority was a brilliant sun, there was another power which reflected, concentrated and tempered its light, a shade enclosing that source of energy on which no human eye could rest without being blinded. We refer to the Parlements, above all the Parlement of Paris.’ Ernst Kossmann, La Fronde, Leyden 1954, p. 23.
16. B. F. Porshnev, Les Soulèvements Populaires en France de 1623 à 1648, pp. 547–60.
17. Prestwich, ‘From Henri III to Louis XIV’, p. 203; Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, London 1971, p. 307.
18. This is Porshnev’s view in Les Soulèvements Populaires en France.
19. For this aspect, see Kossmann, La Fronde, pp. 117–38.
20. Kossmann, La Fronde, pp. 20, 24 250–2.
21. Pierre Goubert, ‘Les Problèmes de la Noblesse au XVIIe Siècle’, XIIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Moscow 1970, p. 5.
22. Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, pp. 164, 166.
23. Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, p. 72.
24. J. Stoye, Europe Unfolding 1648–1688, London 1969, p. 223; Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, p. 186.
25. Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, London 1971, p. 115, justly stresses this point, commenting that the rebellions of 1675 in Brittany and Bordeaux were the last serious social upheavals of the century.
26. Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, pp. 90–2.
27. Even in a certain sense its cultural ideals: ‘The newly acquired symmetry and order of the parade-ground provided, for Louis XIV and his contemporaries, the model to which life and art must alike conform; and the pas cadencé of Martinet – whose name is in itself a programme – echoed again in the majestic monotony of interminable alexandrines.’ Michael Roberts, ‘The Military Revolution 1560–1660’, Essays in Swedish History, London 1967, p. 206.
28. The Cardinals had sought to subject the aristocracy to disguised imposts, in the form of ‘commutations’ of the military ban owed on fiefs. These were much disliked by the gentry and were abandoned by Louis XIV. See Pierre Deyon, ‘A Propos des Rapports entre la Noblesse Francaise et la Monarchie Absolue pendant la Première Moitié du XVIIe Siècle’, Revue Historique, CCXXXI, 1964, pp. 355–6.
29. Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, pp. 158–62.
30. Louis XIV, of course, proved unable to appreciate this change – hence his constant diplomatic blunders. The temporary weakness of England in the 1660’s, when Charles II was a French pensioner, led him to underestimate the island ever afterwards, even when its central political importance in Western Europe was already obvious. Louis XIV’s failure to extend any preemptive aid to James II in 1688, before the landing of William III, was thus to be one of the most fatal errors of a career well supplied with them.
31. Albert Goodwin, ‘The Social Structure and Economic and Political Attitudes of the French Nobility in the 18th Century’, XIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Rapports, I, p. 361.
32. J. McManners, ‘France’, in Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the 18th Century, pp. 33–5.
33. For the attitudes of the Parlements of the last years of the Ancien Régime, see J. Egret, La Pré-Révolution Française, 1787–1788, Paris 1962, pp. 149–60.
34. A. Soboul, La Révolution Française, I, Paris 1964, p. 45.
35. J. Lough, An Introduction to 18th Century France, London 1960, pp. 71–3.
36. The naval budget never totalled more than half that of England: Dorn, Competition for Empire, p. 116. Dorn presents a telling account of the general deficiencies of the French fleets in this epoch.
In the Middle Ages, the feudal monarchy of England was generally far more powerful than that of France. The Norman and Angevin dynasties created a royal State unrivalled in its authority and efficacy throughout Western Europe. It was precisely the strength of the English mediaeval monarchy that permitted its ambitious territorial adventures on the continent, at the expense of France. The Hundred Years’ War, during which successive English kings and their aristocracy attempted to conquer and hold down huge areas of France, across a hazardous maritime barrier, represented a unique military undertaking in the Middle Ages: aggressive sign of the organizational superiority of the insular State. Yet the strongest mediaeval monarchy in the West eventually produced the weakest and shortest Absolutism. While France became the home ground of the most formidable Absolutist State in Western Europe, England experienced a peculiarly contracted variant of Absolutist rule, in every sense. The transition from the mediaeval to the early modern epochs thus corresponded in English history – despite all local legends of unbroken ‘continuity’ – to a deep and radical reversal of many of the most characteristic traits of prior feudal development. Naturally, certain mediaeval patterns of great importance were also preserved and inherited: it was precisely the contradictory fusion of traditional and novel forces that defined the particular political rupture that occurred in the island during the Renaissance.
The early administrative centralization of Norman feudalism, dictated both by the original military conquest and the modest size of the country, had generated – as we have seen – an unusually small and regionally unified noble class, without semi-independent territorial potentates comparable to those of the Continent. Towns, following Anglo-Saxon traditions, were part of the royal demesne from the outset, and hence enjoyed commercial privileges without the political autonomy of continental communes: they were never numerous or strong enough in the mediaeval epoch to challenge this subordinate status.1 Nor did ecclesiastical lords ever gain large, consolidated seigneurial enclaves. The mediaeval monarchy in England was thus spared the respective dangers to unitary government that confronted feudal rulers in France, Italy or Germany. The result was a concurrent centralization, both of royal power, and of noble representation, within the total mediaeval polity. These two processes were, in fact, not opposites but complements. Within the parcellized system of feudal sovereignty, extra-suzerain monarchical power could in general only be sustained by the assent of exceptional vassal assemblies, capable of voting extraordinary economic and political support, outside the mediatized hierarchy of personal dependences. Mediaeval Estates can therefore virtually never, as pointed out earlier, be directly counter-posed to monarchical authority: they were often the precise precondition of it. In England, Angevin royal authority and administration had no exact equivalent anywhere in 12th century Europe. But the personal power of the monarch was soon by the same token followed by precocious collective institutions of the feudal ruling class, of a uniquely unitary character – Parliaments. The existence of such mediaeval parliaments in England from the 13th century onwards was, of course, in no way a national peculiarity. What was distinctive about them was rather that they were both ‘singleton’ and ‘conglomerate’ institutions.2 In other words, there was only one such assembly, which coincided with the boundaries of the country itself, not a number
