Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250–1400

This book provides a narrative of the rise of the French state, showing that the crown's centralising judicial administration co-existed with large-scale aristocratic violence. Royal power grew as much through efforts to negotiate and settle these conflicts as it did through efforts to suppress them.

Although it is often assumed that resurgent royal government eliminated so-called ''private warfare'', the French judicial archives reveal nearly one hundred such wars waged in Languedoc and the Auvergne between the mid-thirteenth and the end of the fourteenth century. Royal administrators often intervened in these wars, but not always in order to suppress ''private violence'' in favour of ''public justice''. They frequently recognised elites'' own power and legitimate prerogatives, and elites were often fully complicit with royal intervention. Much of the engagement between royal officers and local elites came through informal processes of negotiation and settlement, rather than through the imposition of official justice. The expansion of royal authority was due as much to local cooperation as to conflict, a fact that ensured its survival during the fourteenth-century crises. This book thus provides a narrative of the rise of the French state and a fresh perspective on aristocratic violence.