Portrait of Rollo, founder of Normandy, whose descendants interwove Scandinavian custom and Frankish law to create a legal code that lasted for 700 years. British Library
Chère amie, cher ami,
Sur nos n'a prince ne baron.
Tuit sommes d'un seignorement,
tuit vivum par e igaument ;
chascuns i est sire de sei,
e chascuns porte a l'autre fei.
Thus the chronicler Benoît de Saint-Maure, writing in the mid-12th century, describes the independent Norman character.
“Over us is neither prince nor baron,” wrote the poet in 1175, in his Chronicle des ducs de Normandie.
All are lords,
All live in equality;
Each is master of his own self,
And each pledge fidelity to each.”
The first seigneurs of Courtomer had been installed on their fief for at least a century when the chronicleur sketched out the Norman personality.
Pitiless raiders, relentless conquerors and, starting in the 900s, enthusiastic settlers, the hommes du Nord created one of the most powerful duchies in Western Europe. Within a couple of centuries, the Norman dynasty founded by Rollo in 911 had conquered the fertile lands of England and Ireland. Norman cousins conquered Southern Italy and Sicily. Norman knights helped conquer the Holy Land, found kingdoms in North Africa, and sack Constantinople. By the time Henry II, duke of Normandy and king of England, commissioned the Chronicle, he personally controlled more land in France than the French king and his other powerful vassals combined.
Normans were not just conquerors. They had overwhelmed a cultivated society in 911. The new seigneurs found a literate, record-keeping cadre of administrators to help manage their new domains.
“Je ne te léguerai aucun bien : tu n’auras que ce que tu peux te procurer avec cette arme,” pronounced the Norse father, throwing down a sword beside his newborn son. “Nothing but that which you gain with this arm shall be yours.” But such a notion, well adapted to a restless band of pillaging warriors, was less appealing when there were substantial lands with agricultural and commercial revenue to pass on to the next generation.
Faithful to their old warrior traditions, eager to benefit from the settled way of life, the Normans developed their own particular rules for inheritance. Land associated with a seigneur’s title could not be divided. Sons alone had a right to inherit. And the eldest son took the lion’s share.
Although Norman coutume favored males, it was considered radically egalitarian by later commentators. Notably for its epoch, it applied to all without regard to social distinction or wealth.
These rules carried the force of law for the next 900 years. When François Le Beauvoisien, baron of Courtomer, died in 1558, Norman custom dictated how his property would be divided among his three surviving children. All of his offspring, it must be noted, were girls.
There was a logic to these Norman coutumes. Power flowed from land; the local baron sat in justice in his local courts, collected fees, sponsored markets, chose the priest for the local church. He had the ear of the great lords. And a seigneur was required to furnish military aid to his suzerain, the lord to whom he owed allegiance. Landed wealth was required to support a military entourage. At the lower end of the social spectrum, even the humble seigneur needed pastures to keep his warhorse fit.
The duchy of Normandy was not alone in having its own legal regime. Until the French Revolution, Burgundy, Brittany, Champagne, Anjou, Maine, Auvergne, Aquitaine and even Paris among other other areas in the north of France were “pays du droit coutumier.” The south of France was the “pays du droit écrit,” the land of “written” law based on the legal system inherited from Ancient Rome. The tradition of customary law was oral. It built on accepted precedent rather than edicts from a central authority.
Normandy, however, was the first region of France to write its customs into a law code. The Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie was created in a scriptorium at the cathedral of Evreux, about 50 miles from Courtomer, just a few years after the Chronicle of the great deeds of Rollo and his descendants were made into poetry. The impetus was war.
Over the last century and half, the king of England, also duke of Normandy, had directly ruled Normandy despite being a vassal of the king of France. By the 1190s, thanks to the marriage of England’s Henry II with Alienor d’Aquitaine, English lands skirted Paris to extend west to Brittany and as far south as the Spanish border. This was insupportable. When Henry’s son King John abducted the fiancée of a great French vassal, the king of France declared war.
The extent of Norman holdings in France and England in 1155. From Norman Connections.
Much to the shock of Norman nobles and King John, le roi Philippe Auguste promptly stomped through Normandy. Even the stoutest Norman castle, the great Chateau Gaillard built by John’s brother, Richard the Lion-hearted, was breached. Resistance was futile. One after another, towns opened their gates, desperate to save their inhabitants and commercial privileges from royal wrath. Argentan, Falaise – birthplace of the Conqueror himself, Caen, Verneuil, Evreux, even proud Rouen, where the Norman sénéchal had taken refuge, gave up. Norman seigneurs who hadn’t declared for the king of France feared to lose their fiefs.
Normandy was now Crown land, part of the king’s personal domain. The Norman baillis, royal officers charged with administering justice and carrying out royal orders in the duchy, were replaced with loyal subjects from the Île-de-France, the primary royal domain surrounding Paris.
A written version of Norman customary law was not just helpful for these new magistrates. It was the best way to preserve the particularities of the Norman way of life. At first written in Latin, the Summa de legibus Normannie was quickly translated into French. Probably because Norman political reach across Europe was so great in the 1200s, manuscript copies of the Très Ancien Coutumier are found as far afield as the Vatican Library. It was a monument,considered one of the foundational law texts.
A richly illuminated manuscript of the Grand Coutumier, showing the copyist at his work, suggests the high repute enjoyed by the Norman law code. BNF
As the centuries rolled on, Norman coutume resisted interference. It remained a documentprivé, a code of law that had come about “privately.” Its legitimacy was upheld, not by edict or official decree, but by the force of respect and time. As needed, new judicial decisions pronounced in Norman courts added to its volume. It was renamed the “Grand Coutumier.” Retaining its curious medieval language, its obscurities were the subject of commentaries and gloses. The question of daughters and the doweries was developed and explained.
Two hundred and fifty years after a clerk in Evreux had written down the 65 articles that form the basis of the coutume, Charles VII attempted to enact a new and unified system of justice for the kingdom of France. The Edit de Montils-lès-Tours, promulgated in 1454, announced a new beginning for France. The Guerre de Cent Ans had officially come to an end the year before. The English had finally and officially renounced their lands in France. The civil and dynastic wars were – for a time -- over.
In its “grande affliction et désolation,” declared the edict’s prologue, the country needed clear, fair and rapid justice. This would be overseen and guaranteed by royal authority and the Parlement in Paris. All the coutumes of France were to be written down. They would be reviewed, changed and clarified as necessary, and confirmed by lettres patentes emanating from the Parlement de Paris.
Although most regions of France complied, Normandy proceeded with caution.
In 1558, when François Le Beauvoisien died, matters were resolved using the Grand Coutumier of 1270. The eldest son would have taken all of the fiefs – land associated with noble title -- and would have shared the rest with his brothers. Their only obligation toward sisters was “nourriture, entrètenement, et mariage” – food, maintenance and, if requested, a husband. They had a year and a day to find an acceptable parti. And in practical terms, since a sister could not be “déparagée” – married off to someone of lower estate -- this also meant a dowery. But whatever a sister was given could not deprive a brother of his proper share of the inheritance. She could take no more than a third of the available partables, the non-noble land and goods.
Since the baron’s marriage to Marguerite du Bois had produced only daughters, a different set of rules prevailed. Each of the three had the right to a third of his property. Perhaps none of the daughters had reached the age of majority, which in Normandy was 20, in 1558. The partagewas effected in 1563, a year after Léonore had married Artus de Cymont and her younger sister Claude had married François de Molitard. The third sister, Louise, had joined a convent.
Neither of the sisters was déparagée. Artus was seigneur of Beuzeville, Sainte-Mère-Eglise and various other fiefs in the Cotentin peninsula, baron of Fresnes, and châtelain of Chennebrun and Garennes. The seigneur of Molitard was a cavalry officer and gentilhomme of the Chambre du Roi. Louise was installed at Sainte-Claire in Argentan, the convent founded by Marguerite de Lorraine, duchess of Alençon and great-grandmother of Henri IV. In her widowhood, the bienheureuse Marguerite had joined the Sisters, and after her death, miracles were observed at her tomb there. By the time Louise arrived, Sister Marguerite was venerated as a saint.
True to another Norman custom, the puissance du mari, the absolute authority of a husband over his wife’s affairs, Artus rather than his wife decided her third of the inheritance. As husband of the eldest daughter, he chose en préciput, with the right of the firstborn. And naturally, he chose the land and title with the greatest dignité and revenue, the fief and baronnie of Courtomer. François de Molitard chose the second lot on behalf of Claude. We are not told what lot was awarded to Louise, but the convent would have expected a dowery.
“Dès que la femme est en poosté de son mary, il peut faire à sa volonté de elle, de ses choses, et son heritage,” stated the Coutumier. “Once the woman is in the possession of her husband, he can do his will with her, with her things, and with her heritage.”
This somber view was, fortunately, softened by another: “Le bien de femme ne doit jamais se perdre.”
“A wife’s property must never be lost.”
A widow regained control over the property she had brought to the marriage. She could not be held liable for debts and contracts her husband had signed in her name. And if she thought her bien had been mismanaged, she could sue the estate for restitution.
The record does not provide details on Marguerite du Bois’ activities as a widow, nor her experiences as a wife. We prefer to think of her as a capable dame, who raised her children and ran her husband’s fief during his long absences at court and at war. We imagine she was proud, like any noble lady of the time, of the proper husbands chosen for her daughters. And perhaps, like many a pious widow in those days, she sometimes sought respite in the quiet cloisters of her daughter’s convent.
Not many years after the partage at Courtomer, the Normans undertook the required rédactionof their Coutumier. At a meeting of the Etats in 1576, they requested an “ordonnance” from Henri III to define the project. By then, most of the other coutumes in France were already undergoing a second réforme.
Norman commissaires would oversee the work. This would take place in Rouen, seat of the Echiquier, the Norman parliament founded by Rollo himself. Most important, it would proceed “sans toutefois changer le sens de ladite coustume et ce qui y est observé.” Only the language, not the coutume itself, would be changed. In 1583, the Echiquier of Normandy finally published the official “Coutumes du pays de Normandie, anciens ressorts et enclaves d’icelui.”And that was that, until the Code Napoléon swept all before it in 1804.
With hopes that you have enjoyed this glimpse into the history of Courtomer and its family,
Merci! What language did you translate to?
Very interesting read. So glad for google translator. Thank you.