A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [16]
Not all nobles were grands seigneurs like the Coucys. A bachelor knight, possessor of one manor and a bony nag, shared the same cult but not the interests of a territorial lord. The total ranks of the nobility in France numbered about 200,000 persons in 40,000 to 50,000 families who represented something over one percent of the population. They ranged from the great dukedoms with revenues of more than 10,000 livres, down through the lord of a minor castle with one or two knights as vassals and an income under 500 livres, to the poor knight at the bottom of the scale who was lord of no one except those of servile birth and whose only fief was a house and a few fields equivalent to a peasant’s holding. He might have an income from a few rents of 25 livres or less, which had to support family and servants and the knight’s equipment that was his livelihood. He lived by horse and arms, dependent for maintenance on his overlord or whoever needed his services.
A squire belonged to the nobility by birth whether or not he obtained the belt and spurs of a knight, but legal process was often required to determine what other functions a gentleman might undertake without losing noble status. Could he sell wine from his vineyard, for instance?—a delicate question because the kings regularly sold theirs. In a case brought in 1393 to determine this question, a royal ordinance stated rather ambiguously, “It is not proper for a noble to be an innkeeper.” According to another judgment, a noble could acquire license to trade without losing his status. Sons of noble fathers were known “who live and have long lived as merchants selling cloth, grain, wine and all other things of merchandise, or as tradesmen, furriers, shoemakers or tailors,” but such activities would doubtless have lost them the privileges of a noble.
The rationale of the problem was made plain by Honoré Bonet, a 14th century cleric who made the brave attempt in his Tree of Battles to set forth existing codes of military conduct. The reason for the prohibition of commercial activity, he wrote, was to ensure that the knight “shall have no cause to leave the practice of arms for the desire of acquiring worldly riches.”
Definition increasingly concerned the born nobles in proportion as their status was diluted by the ennoblement of outsiders. Like the grant of charters to towns, the grant of fiefs to commoners, who paid handsomely for the honor, was found by the crown to be a lucrative source of funds. The ennobled were men of fortune who procured the king’s needs, or they were lawyers and notaries who had started by assisting the king at various levels in the administration of finance and justice and gradually, as the business of government grew more complex, created a group of professional civil servants and ministers of the crown. Called noblesse de la robe when elevated, as distinguished from nobility of the sword, they were scorned as parvenus by the ancestral nobles, who resented the usurping of their right of counsel, lost more or less by default.
In consequence, the heraldic coat-of-arms—outward sign of ancestry signifying the right to bear arms, which, once granted to a family, could be worn by no other—came to be an object almost of cult worship. At tournaments its display was required as evidence of noble ancestry; at some tournaments four were required. As penetration by outsiders increased, so did snobbery until a day in the mid-15th century when a knight rode into the lists followed by a parade of pennants bearing no less than 32 coats-of-arms.
Through disappearance by failure to produce a male heir or by sinking over the edge into the lower classes, and through inflow of the ennobled, the personnel of the nobility was in flux, even though the status was fixed as an order of society. The disappearance rate of noble families has been estimated at 50 percent a century, and the average duration of a dynasty at three to six generations over a period from 100 to 200 years.