Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France by Dewald Jonathan

Author:Dewald, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

The Elements of Lordship and the Mercantile Economy

So closely connected to urban social and political life, the Rohan estates were also closely connected to Brittany’s urban economy; trade, manufacturing, and administration provided the bulk of estate revenues, agriculture only a small share.31 That distribution was especially visible in the principality of Léon, the westernmost of the Rohan’s properties. At the end of the seventeenth century, the intendant Béchameil de Nointel noted that western Brittany had to import even the most basic foodstuffs, so poor was its arable land. But (he added) the region’s numerous ports had always permitted a wide array of mercantile and manufacturing activities: cloth and paper were manufactured for export to England, the Low Countries, and Spain; wine and iron were imported through the region’s ports, for distribution to the rest of the province; there was fishing and a lively trade in horses and leather.32 Drawn by all this activity, as many as six hundred English merchants resided in the Rohan town of Morlaix.33 Trade on this scale meant that market dues supplied a crucial component of what the principality brought in each year. At the port towns of Landernau and nearby Daoulas, the Rohan taxed wine, iron, herring, butter, salt, charcoal, and leather,34 and the family was intent on expanding such possibilities. When Marguerite de Rohan gained the status of a marquisate for her estate at Blain, she also secured from the king the right to hold there a yearly trade fair and to build a market that would attract merchants to it.35

The Rohan properties even included one large-scale manufacturing operation, the iron forges of Les Salles. Set within the forest of Quénécan, near Pontivy, this was a genuine industrial complex, which included two forges and two furnaces, a series of secondary buildings, a mill and the hydraulic system needed for its operation, and the tools needed in the production process. The Rohan rented the site, buildings, tools, and access to the forest to a series of substantial businessmen, drawn from outside the province, and these arrangements generated large revenues: in 1641, the rent was set at 3,400 l. yearly, in itself more than half the rent for the estate of Blain.36

Only the estates of Pontivy and Rohan, the principal components of the duchy of Rohan itself, allow more precise evaluation of just how important mercantile activities were to Rohan finances. Table 1 sets out the revenues that these two properties generated at Henri de Rohan’s death, in 1638. The table has important gaps. It leaves out altogether sales of offices, provisions of clerical benefices, and forest revenues, all of which might be very high in some years, insignificant in others (these revenues will be discussed below). The table also omits the yearly ground rents and more occasional transfer taxes that villagers paid; in most years these probably constituted about 11 percent to the estates’ total revenue. For all its limitations, table 1 nonetheless provides useful insights into how these estates were structured.37

Table 1 establishes a central fact about the Rohan’s estate ownership.

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