Abstract
After the long period of demographic decline induced by the disasters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the later fifteenth century witnessed a dramatic resurgence of population that was obvious even to contemporaries. The Burgundian chronicler Jean de Clercq went to the heart of the matter in 1466: ‘From Easter until the middle of August there were more marriages in the towns and villages of Artois and Picardy than the older folk can recall ever having seen before, or having heard of from their forebears.’1 Other commentators remarked on the effects of this demographic blossoming, waxing lyrical over the reclamation of land for cultivation and the buoyancy of trade and industry. Claude de Seyssel, Louis XII’s official panegyrist, welcomed the rise in population as the engine of economic growth: ‘with the people increase also goods, revenue, and wealth’. Leaving aside his flattery, we should nevertheless recall that, if Louis himself was hardly the stuff of greatness, at least he presided over demographic and economic expansion.
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Notes
Michel Mollat, Genèse médiévale de la France moderne (Paris, 1977), p. 235.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, L’État royal: de Louis XI à Henri IV (Paris, 1987), p. 48.
Jean Lartigaut, Les campagnes du Quercy après la guerre de Cent Ans (vers 1440—vers 1550) (Toulouse, 1978), p. 83.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans du Languedoc (Paris, 1966), pp. 124–5 and 131.
Pierre Chaunu and Richard Gascon, L’État et la ville, 1450–1660 in Histoire économique et sociale de la France ed. Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse (Paris, 1977), vol. 1, p. 397.
Bernard Chevalier, Les bonnes villes de France du XIVeau XVIesiècle (Paris, 1982), p. 39.
Alain Croix, Nantes et le pays nantais au XVIesiècle: étude démographique (Paris, 1974);
Jean Jacquart, La crise rurale en Ile-de-France, 1550–1670 (Paris, 1974), p. 297.
Gilles Caster, Le commerce du pastel et de l’épicerie à Toulouse, 1450–1561 (Toulouse, 1962), pp. 41 and 53.
Louis Merle, La métairie et l’évolution agraire de la Gâtine poitevine de la fin du Moyen Age à la Révolution (Paris, 1958), p. 69.
Yvonne Bezard, La vie rurale dans le sud de la région parisienne de 1450 à 1560 (Paris, 1929), p. 84.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil 2 vols (Paris, 1983).
Claude Haton, Mémoires contenant le récit des événements accomplis de 1553 it 1587 ed. Félix Bourquelot, 2 vols (Paris, 1857)
Pierre de L’Estoile, Journal… pour le règne d’Henri III (1574–1589) ed. Louis-Raymon Lefèvre (Paris, 1943).
Madeleine Foisil, Le Sire de Gouberville: un gentilhomme normand au XVIesiècle (Paris, 1986).
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans, de la Chandeleur au mercredi des Cendres, 1579–1580 (Paris, 1979).
See also Jean Jacquart, ‘Immobilisme et catastrophes, 1560–1660’, in Histoire de la France rurale ed. Georges Duby and Armand Wallon (Paris, 1975), pp. 34–41.
Robert Muchembled, La sorcière au village ( Collection Archives, Paris, 1979 )
Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (Paris, 1978), chs 11–12.
French edition, H. Institoris and J. Sprenger, Le marteau des sorcières (Grenoble, 1990 ).
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© 1995 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Garrisson, J. (1995). Peasant Life. In: A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483–1598. European Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24020-3_2
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