The Splendid Century by W. H. Lewis

Author:W. H. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: INscribe Digital
Published: 2016-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

Much has been made of the severity with which the seigneur extorted from the villager the uttermost farthing of his feudal dues; but what was the unfortunate man to do? His elder son in the county regiment was bombarding him with appeals for help; the younger, being intended for the Church, must have a college education; and his daughter, whether he intended to marry her or put her into religion, must have a dowry. For to make a religious of a girl was not the cheap way out of a financial difficulty which it is often assumed to have been; all convents insisted on a dowry as a sine qua non, and many of them demanded a sum for which the girl could have had a country squire for her husband. Three thousand livres is not a high figure for the country convent to ask. But it would be an exceptional seigneur who found himself with only three children to provide for; many, perhaps most, had a dozen or more, to say nothing of those born on the wrong side of the blanket for whom some sort of modest provision must be made. The philoprogenitive habits of the French seigneur of the seventeenth century are not without a certain significance in underlining the inherent monotony of his existence; rather than ponder upon the financial implications of the Chinese proverb that “he who goes to bed to save candles, begets twins,” he preferred to concentrate his energies on qualifying at the earliest moment for the gratuity of 2,000 livres which the King paid to those of his nobles who had more than ten children.

How did he live, this rustic nobleman, what was his income, from what sources was it drawn? In general, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and his income was made up of an odd collection of miscellaneous receipts. Firstly, there was his land, and that might be managed in a variety of ways: rarely by the ordinary landlord and tenant method of modem times, which in the seventeenth century was virtually confined to the big estates of the wealthy nobility. One of the chief causes of the small estate’s poverty was the type of cultivation known as baux à cens, a system dating back to the thirteenth century. At that time there had been an acute shortage of agricultural labour, and many landowners, as the only alternative to letting their fields go out of cultivation, had been compelled to let the land to peasants in perpetuity, at a fixed rent; it is perhaps hardly worth pointing out that what had been a fair rent in 1460 had become an absurd one in 1660, and that the inheritors of such unprofitable contracts started out heavily handicapped in their struggle to wrest a living from the family estate. The seigneur would perhaps farm some of his land himself, but much the most usual arrangement was a métayerie; under this system the seigneur entered into partnership with a peasant farmer, called a métayer.

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