On August 18, 1623, Nicolas Bergier died unexpectedly at Grignon, an estate belonging to Nicolas de Bellièvre, président à mortier (presiding judge) of the Parlement of Paris.1 A lawyer in the presidial court of Reims, procureur de l’échevinage, and once a professor of arts at the Collège des Bons-Enfants at Reims, Bergier was best known at his death for his recent publication of a work of classical erudition, the Histoire des grands chemins de l’Empire romain.2 Permitted to dedicate the work to the king, Bergier had also obtained the title and pension of royal historiographer, thanks to the intercession of Charles du Lys, avocat général of the Cour des Aides. The post rewarded the scholar for his past endeavors, and the pension would help support him in his future projects, including a history of the city of Reims.3 By the time of his death, Bergier had been at work on this urban history for a couple of decades, and he had already made considerable progress in collecting documents, laying out a prospectus, and drafting the first two books of a projected sixteen.4 His friends, both in Reims and in Paris, therefore thought it a shame for such efforts to go to waste. Could another respected historian not be found to complete the history of this city so important to the monarchical traditions and ecclesiastical history of France?
Du Lys, in consultation with Bellièvre, took it upon himself to find such a scholar, and by June 1624 he had decided to entrust the work to Duchesne.5 By the early 1620s, as described in the previous chapter, Duchesne had already developed expertise in local history and had obtained the position of royal geographer. Not only had he published works focused on the early histories of the provinces of Normandy and Burgundy but he had also assembled a compilation of the sources for local history writing and a highly successful version of the genre of geographical descriptions of French cities that dated back to the work of Corrozet and Belleforest in the sixteenth century. His recent publication of the Histoire de la maison de Chastillon svr Marne also meant that he had acquired familiarity with aspects of the history of Champagne. Duchesne proved willing to complete what Bergier had started, and by September 1624, word had reached Reims of his acquiescence. Du Lys accordingly passed Bergier’s collection of documents to the royal geographer, and Jean Bergier offered to send on to Paris any of his father’s papers that would help in the endeavor.6
Through Duchesne’s involvement with the history of Reims, the concerns of the Republic of Letters and of the civic community came together in a very literal way. From the previous chapter, we have already seen that some of the most prominent savants of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries not only were interested in local history themselves but also turned to less well-known erudite scholars and local officials, scattered throughout the provincial towns of the kingdom, to provide crucial documents and information to inform their views of the history of France. Nicolas Bergier had been one such contact, and his contributions had had the potential to be especially valuable, since the city of Reims was so intimately linked with the founding of the Merovingian dynasty, the subsequent succession of French kings, the monarchy’s claim to special religious status, and the general ecclesiastical history of the kingdom. For Duchesne, the prospect of gaining access to the rich documentation of the cathedral, with the light it could shed on the early French monarchy, the ceremonies surrounding the long series of royal coronations and sacres, and the nature of the peers of France, must have served as a considerable inducement to take on the project. Members of local communities, too, benefited from these exchanges with recognized scholars of the Republic of Letters, obtaining important advice and legitimation for their own projects and seeing local research enrich the narrative of the French past. Accordingly, many of the civic elites of Reims embraced Duchesne as a fitting expounder of their history. The town council voted him a monetary reward, should he complete the project as it wished, and the historian spent time in Reims in August 1626 collecting documents and specifying the information he would need.7 His presence sparked a round of research in many of the civil and ecclesiastical repositories of the city, and a stream of freshly copied documents and newly written historical memoranda flowed from Champagne to Paris in the succeeding months. Here was an intensification of the kinds of contacts and exchanges that could link erudite scholar and local community in the crafting of a history useful to each.
Despite such activity, however, Duchesne never did write the history of Reims. Because Cocquault, canon of the cathedral, was at work on his own local history, the cathedral chapter refused to cooperate and open its archives to Duchesne. The canons were also no doubt concerned about the story that the royal geographer would ultimately write. For, in the city of Reims, two main historical narratives competed to define the meaning of the urban past. While one focused on Reims’s crucial role in the legitimation of the French kings and thus on the prestige of the archbishops of Reims, who had since St. Rémi anointed the monarchs at their sacre, the other emphasized the tradition of independence of the bourgeois of Reims, extending back to Gallic times and bringing them in constant friction with the archbishops, who had since the twelfth century expected to exercise complete authority as dukes and first ecclesiastical peers of France. As we have already seen in chapter 5, debates about the civic past could prove essential to contemporary claims, and this view of the patrimonial rights of the bourgeois of Reims was elaborated and enlisted to defend the échevinage against challenges to its legal jurisdiction, rights of police, and independence from the archbishop’s officials. Rogier, prévôt de l’échevinage and close colleague of Bergier’s, moreover, was both the most determined advocate of this historical view and an enthusiastic correspondent of Duchesne. Yet, although Rogier clearly expected that Duchesne’s work would vindicate his point of view and uphold the rights of Reims’s municipal government, this story of archiepiscopal exactions and bourgeois freedoms was at odds with the history that Duchesne had no doubt intended to write. Thus, a tension existed not only among local interpretations of the history of Reims but between this erudite scholar who agreed to lend his authority to expounding the urban past and civic elites who hoped to enlist that authority for their own purposes. Research and erudition provided a powerful medium of exchange between the Republic of Letters and urban communities, but competing historical interpretations of the French past could also lead to miscommunications and failed projects.
It is this story of the enthusiasm surrounding Duchesne’s involvement with the history of Reims and the ultimate abandonment of a project fraught with competing expectations that this chapter seeks to tell. In exploring these efforts to lay out an authoritative urban history, it helps to illuminate the kinds of complex interactions that existed between local scholars, civic elites, and more well-known members of the Republic of Letters, their different understandings of the purposes of history and uses of sources, and the place that urban historical traditions could hold in debates about internal civic authority and the role that urban inhabitants had played in the shaping of the French kingdom.
1 Nicolas Bergier: A Man of Connections
Why, on the death of Bergier, was it so important for his work on the history of Reims to be completed? Numerous were the scholars, after all, who toiled away on historical projects, whose findings never saw the light of day. Bergier, however, had come to occupy a pivotal position connecting local gens de lettres with broader circles of French savants. By the last few years of his life, the Rémois lawyer had established a reputation for erudition and epistolary contacts with several important members of the early seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. Thanks to this acquaintance, not only did Bergier serve as a kind of clearing house for information and documentation on the history of Reims to the wider scholarly community but he also provided a point of contact between his colleagues in Reims and his correspondents throughout the kingdom. Thanks to Bergier, erudite scholars such as Peiresc and Duchesne could gain access to sources from Reims and advance their own historical projects. In doing so, they got a taste for the rich documentation that the city had to offer as well as the kinds of important issues that could be treated through its history. Colleagues in Reims, too, gained a measure of familiarity with these correspondents, just as their respect for Bergier’s intellectual worth must have been confirmed thereby. When Bergier died unexpectedly, therefore, friends at home and throughout France were equally convinced of the importance of his work and eager to see it brought to fruition.
From Reims, Bergier had indeed established contacts with wider circles of French erudite scholars, and at the end of his life these relationships were still expanding. It is probable that Du Lys, descendant of the brother of Jeanne d’Arc and best known for his genealogical expositions of the family history, was an important early acquaintance.8 Both Du Lys and Bergier had longstanding connections with the Bellièvre family. Du Lys had served as the bailli of the châtellenie of Grignon for Pomponne de Bellièvre and was certainly acquainted with the chancellor’s son, Nicolas.9 Bergier, of course, later died at the same estate, and Nicolas de Bellièvre marked his loss with an epitaph, only the last of his “bien-faicts” toward the lawyer, according to his son, Jean Bergier.10 Du Lys had certainly smoothed the way for Bergier’s introduction to both Pierre Dupuy and Peiresc. In an introductory letter to Dupuy of July 21, 1619, Bergier corrected the slightly inaccurate picture the Parisian savant had obtained of his current research on the roadways of the Roman Empire and took the liberty to send Dupuy the preface to the work. Not only had Bergier developed the idea for his project in discussion with Du Lys but he was dependent on Du Lys’s later conversation with Dupuy for his awareness of the latter’s interest in the work. It is true that in his letter, Bergier sought to confirm his reputation within erudite circles by mentioning his acquaintance with both Jean Descordes, canon at Limoges, and De Thou, to whom Descordes had introduced him and whose testament he had seen thanks to the canon.11 Du Lys, however, now clearly served as his principal guarantor with Dupuy. The attempt at contact was successful, moreover, since Peiresc and Dupuy later discussed Bergier’s death as that of a mutual acquaintance.12
Du Lys also had a longstanding relationship with Peiresc and was responsible for initiating Bergier’s own extensive contact with the erudite scholar and judge of the Parlement of Aix. Peiresc and Du Lys were certainly acquainted in 1612, when the descendant of the Arc family sought letters patent from Louis xiii permitting him to adopt the arms of his famous relative, and Peiresc may have even helped to formulate the request. Du Lys sent Peiresc a copy of the trial of Jeanne d’Arc, in which these arms were mentioned, and assured him of his admiration and affection.13 He later served as a conduit for manuscripts and information that Peiresc wished to consult.14 By the early 1620s, Bergier was also in regular contact with Peiresc and assured him that the aldermen of Reims were ready to honor Du Lys, “through whose intermediation [Bergier] had the happiness of [Peiresc’s] acquaintance.”15
Finally, Bergier had also developed a friendly scholarly relationship with Duchesne. Hearing from Du Lys that Duchesne was willing to continue his father’s history of Reims, Jean Bergier begged him “to be willing to continue with the son the friendship that [he] had always borne the father” and thanked him for taking on the history of Reims, “which [his father] had so frequently discussed with [Duchesne] during his lifetime.”16 Indeed, Bergier’s acquaintance with Duchesne went back at least to early 1618. In April, the lawyer sent a letter to Paris discussing a previous exchange of documents and a book between the two men, and in February, Bergier had copies of letters addressed to Guillaume de Chastillon from the early fifteenth century copied from the archives of the échevinage of Reims and attested by royal notaries of the bailliage of Vermandois. Duchesne then used two of these letters and other documents sent from Reims in his Histoire de la maison de Chastillon svr Marne.17 When Duchesne agreed to finish Bergier’s work, therefore, he had already known the original author for several years.
In addition to corresponding with these prominent scholars, Bergier served as an intermediary between them and acquaintances in Reims. In a letter to Peiresc of April 21, 1621, for example, Bergier alerted his correspondent that he was sending on two rare books lent to him by Claude L’Espaignol, procureur du roi of the presidial court, as well as two ancient manuscripts from the cathedral of Reims, where Bergier had contacts looking for the information that Peiresc had requested. Further, he relayed the thanks of the aldermen of Reims for the information on their rights of police jurisdiction that Peiresc had provided and conveyed their offers of future service.18 If by 1623, Peiresc was also corresponding with Bergier’s colleague, Rogier, prévôt de l’échevinage and author of an extensive set of memoranda on the history of Reims, this contact had almost certainly been forged through Bergier. In a letter of July 17, Rogier sent Peiresc a long and detailed answer to his question, posed in a letter of two weeks before, of when a great fire had occurred in Reims, using two methods to date it to the end of the reign of Philippe vi. He also mentioned that Peiresc had previously sent him an extract of a charter of the confraternity of St. Pierre aux Clercs.19
Based in Reims, Bergier was in a good position to provide important documents on his city’s history to his correspondents, but the exchange benefited both sides. Duchesne obtained letters and charters from the échevinage of Reims and abbey of Saint-Remi to help flesh out his genealogical history of the Chastillon family, several of whose members served as royal captains in Reims during tumultuous periods of the Hundred Years’ War. Thanks to copies of three letters that Gaucher vi de Chastillon had sent to the aldermen of Reims from 1358 to 1360, Duchesne could relate the actions that the captain had undertaken to preserve the city while Jean ii was being held captive in England.20 Guillaume de Chastillon, by contrast, had received orders from Charles vi (r.1380–1422) to examine Reims’s fortifications in 1419 but had subsequently adopted the English side. Duchesne could also describe the tomb of Guillaume de Chastillon’s wife, located at the Cordeliers convent in Reims, no doubt thanks to Bergier’s information.21 For his part, Bergier cited Duchesne’s theory of the founding of Reims as he expounded his own and had the opportunity to discuss the history of his native city with Duchesne.22
Bergier’s exchanges with Peiresc were also extensive, revolving around their mutual interests related to Reims. Among his many historical concerns, Peiresc was interested in the sacres of the French kings, especially for the light they could shed on the origins and order of precedence of the peers of France. This was certainly an area in which Bergier’s contacts and access to sources could prove useful. Bergier had sent Peiresc a notebook of documents he had collected relating to the subject, including the commentaries of Antoine Collard, canon of the cathedral of Reims, from which Peiresc had copied the most pertinent.23 Yet, Peiresc was still left with questions, particularly whether a royal decree mentioned by Collard indeed existed, qualifying the peers of France as dukes at the time that Guillaume, archbishop of Reims, had completed the sacre of Philippe ii in 1179. His sight debilitated, Peiresc thus dictated a detailed set of instructions explaining how Bergier could undertake research in Reims to find confirmation of this fact. He could check whether a martyrology at the cathedral contained comments on the sacre of Philippe ii or whether a cartulary of papal bulls mentioned the prerogatives of the archbishop of Reims at that time; Bergier should also be reminded of several manuscripts that Peiresc had mentioned before.24 Bergier went to some pains to provide the kind of information his correspondent sought. He drew in his own hand the way that the twelve peers of France were represented in a set of windows adorning a house in Reims and sent Peiresc various extracts he had personally copied.25
Bergier, however, was more than a research assistant for Peiresc. Planning to write chapters for his history of Reims on the archbishops of Reims and the coronations and sacres of the French kings, he would benefit from Peiresc’s suggestions about how to uncover evidence about the actions of Archbishop Guillaume and the sacre of Philippe ii. Although Peiresc asked for a considerable amount of material from Reims, he also promised to send Bergier his comments on the documents and authorized him to use any observations he found useful.26 Further, from his acquaintance with Peiresc, Bergier learned other helpful research strategies. In April 1623, for example, Bergier sent his correspondent a copy of a map showing the boundaries of the archdiocese of Reims that he had recently had drawn up, since it had been Peiresc who had explained to him how one could use registers of benefices to determine such diocesan boundaries in the first place.27 Since Bergier also planned a chapter on the archdiocese of Reims for his city history, he expected to use this “invention” for more than a nifty map. Although the evidence for these kinds of exchanges is lacking for Bergier’s other major contact, Du Lys, it is likely that the two men exchanged information on Jeanne d’Arc, who wrote to the city of Reims in 1429 to urge the inhabitants to admit Charles vii for his sacre, and we know that Bergier clarified his thoughts on his project on the roadways of the Roman Empire in conversation with his friend.28
Thus, given all the communication between Bergier and several major figures within the French Republic of Letters, it is understandable that these scholarly acquaintances would wish to see his work on the history of Reims continued after his death. With lengthy extracts of letters and documents relating to the city already in their collections, these men possessed a good idea of the historical possibilities the rich archives of the city afforded. Through Bergier, moreover, local scholars and bibliophiles such as Rogier and L’Espaignol had already entered into direct or indirect contact with these well-known savants and could feel confident that an authoritative historian would do honor to Bergier and to the town. The project would thus not only illuminate the history of an important city but would also help clarify the development of royal traditions and feudal structures in the medieval period. It is understandable, then, that Duchesne consented to take it on.
2 André Duchesne and the History of Reims
Although Duchesne agreed to complete Bergier’s history of Reims during the summer of 1624, it seems that he did not begin in earnest until 1626, when he made his research trip to Reims. Du Lys was fretting about the lack of progress by June 1625, but Peiresc’s promise to urge their mutual acquaintance to get started did not seem to have any effect.29 Once Duchesne had received Bergier’s notes and papers, he judged them to be “defective” and “without order and almost useless,” and this problem certainly could have caused delay.30 Further, from Paris he may have found it difficult to fill in the documentary gaps; Peiresc had suspected that this would pose a problem even before Duchesne had taken on the task.31 In January 1626, however, the town council of Reims added some incentive to Duchesne’s good intentions, “in order to prompt him to apply himself with more goodwill and diligence.” It voted that if Duchesne completed the work and submitted it to the council before publication, he would be rewarded with six hundred livres tournois, and that if he determined that a trip to Reims were needed, the council would pay his expenses up to seventy-five livres tournois.32 By August 6, Duchesne was in Reims.33
The sieur Duchesne traveled to this city of Reims, to make known what was lacking in the collection that Bergier had made of documents and written accounts for the completion of the history and that it was necessary for him to gain access to the charters and documents in the archives of the communities of this city, in order to make extracts regarding the facts relevant to the said history. This was granted, except for Messieurs of the chapter of the church of Notre-Dame, who excused themselves since one of their company was working on a history that made up a part of the history of Reims. Nevertheless, based on what was accorded him and on the promises made to him to send him all that could be found of the documents and memoranda relating to the history, Duchesne promised to work on it. After his departure, many people set themselves to [this] research.35
Duchesne’s projected history of Reims therefore garnered significant support within the city. If it was to be authored by the royal geographer, it was still to benefit from the work and involvement of a range of interested parties within the community.
Although the history of Reims never passed beyond the research stage, Duchesne nevertheless kept at least a portion of the notes and documents that he amassed for the project. From these notes and the remaining correspondence, we can piece together who were the most enthusiastic and diligent of the historian’s collaborators in finding and conveying the evidence necessary for the history of their city. When he was in Reims, Duchesne had clearly provided a sense of what documents he would need, and a group of individuals set to work to find them, have them copied, and send them on to Paris. Jean Bergier had early offered to send Duchesne whatever he required, and by November 1626, he had clearly made good his promise by providing documents confirming an important charter of Archbishop Guillaume from 1182.36 In March 1627, Bergier wrote Duchesne once more to provide three charters from the abbey of Saint-Denis that the historian had requested, as well as a written account of the church formerly belonging to the Knights Templar of Reims and an illustration of the tomb of St. Rémi. He regretted being unable to send more at that time but assured his correspondent that he had paid a visit to the copyists working on the project and had urged their diligence. Some of their copies had previously been sent to Duchesne by Hecart, another individual involved in the project, and Maître Bourgeois had promised to keep the copyists supplied with documents. As for Monsieur de la Chèze, he had promised to provide to Bergier immediately after Easter the documents that Duchesne had requested of him. Further, if Duchesne had finished with the book lent to him by Jean Rainssant, Bergier requested that he send it back.37 In addition to these documents mentioned by Bergier, Duchesne received a copy of the lives of St. Sixtus and St. Sinicius,38 and Dom Étienne Villequin, monk of Saint-Remi, copied out for him an inscription from the tomb of Gauchier de Charlemigne, monk of the abbey and a brother of the countess of Rethel, from 1329.39
In addition to copying documents, several religious communities within Reims took advantage of Duchesne’s requests for information to compose narrative histories of their institutions. In this way, they could hope to influence how their community would be represented in the final work and to ensure that their most valued historical traditions and attributes would be included. The historical account of the Commandery of the Temple that Jean Bergier sent to Duchesne, for example, emphasized the longstanding holiness of the spot on which the church was located. St. Rémi had first built a chapel on the site of the current church in order to mark a miracle in which the saint had expelled a demon that had set fire to the city of Reims. The chapel later fell into ruin until it was rebuilt by a canon of the cathedral in the eleventh century and dedicated to the Holy Trinity.40 For the Carmelites, by contrast, the beauty of their convent was more important than its age. A memorandum addressed to Duchesne recounted that the house was located on the two most beautiful streets of the city, that the church was very beautiful for its length, height, and clarity, that the beautiful cloister boasted four great trees constituting one of the most beautiful sights of the city, and that the friars possessed a beautiful refectory, beautiful library with many excellent manuscripts, and beautiful gardens!41
Duchesne’s request for information could also expose internal disagreements about the historical record. Grégoire de la Chèze, prior of the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Nicaise, sent Duchesne two historical accounts of the abbey’s founding and succession of abbots, as well as a significant collection of charters relating to that history. Yet the two narratives contradicted each other regarding the abbey’s early history and first abbots, and worse, comments in the margins as well as La Chèze’s accompanying letter explained that not all of the claims made in these two documents were true.42 The first history, “L’histoire exacte de la mai[s]on et abbaie de St. Nichaise de Reims,” was drawn up expressly to send to Duchesne and proved the more pious and less learned. This version asserted that the Roman prefect Jovien, who converted to Christianity in the fourth century and founded the original church dedicated to St. Agricole and St. Vital on the current site of the monastery, later became Roman emperor and ordered that a part of his body be buried in the church. For this reason, the church was not only the first in France and in the province but was also of imperial foundation. A second author and commentator, however, was aware that these assertions were disputed elsewhere and so marked in the margin that authentic manuscripts demonstrated that the first monetary gifts to the monastery were granted by this Jovien.43 Indeed, the second history, the “Memoire de l’antiquité de l’abaye de St. Nicaise de Reims,” went to some length to dispute the fable that the church of St. Agricole and St. Vital was founded by Emperor Jovian (r.363–64). It pointed out that the ancient epitaph for the Roman prefect still visible in the church confused the two men, who had different names and different dates of death. Emperor Jovian, moreover, had never set foot in Gaul. Such conclusions, of course, did not sit well with the authors of the “Histoire exacte,” leading its second author to insist in the margin of the second text that “it is verified elsewhere that this Jovin was emperor.”44
The “Memoire de l’antiquité” also offended in its representation of the early abbots of Saint-Nicaise. A more learned account than the “Histoire exacte,” it provided an extended list of abbots complete with citations to the cartularies and other documentation of the abbey in which information on each could be found. Such citations, though, did not convince the other monks of the accuracy of its information. Next to the article on Remi, the first abbot of Saint-Nicaise in this version, La Chèze responded, “note that we find the contrary in charters and documents,” and crossed out a good portion of the article.45 The second abbot, Alberic, whom the author of the “Memoire de l’antiquité” acknowledged had been removed from the catalog of abbots for having committed murder, fared no better. La Chèze crossed out the entire entry on Alberic and insisted that its account of how Alberic had dissipated the abbey’s goods and brought it to the point of ruin was entirely false.46 The question of who the first abbots of Saint-Nicaise had been was clearly contentious, and the authors of the “Histoire exacte” were in no better agreement with each other. Where the first author had listed Joran as the third abbot, the second author corrected this to the fifth. Such confusion further led the second author to comment: “There is great disagreement regarding these first abbots. For my part, i conclude that they were only agents, of whom the first was Remy, [and] the second Aubri [who] was deposed … Account for all this as well as you can.”47 Behind these disputed details, the main point of contention between the two histories of Saint-Nicaise involved the image of the abbey. While the author of the “Memoire de l’antiquité” did not hesitate to air the community’s early problems in the interests of historical completeness, the authors of the “Histoire exacte” sought to emphasize the longstanding importance and prestige of the abbey, insisting not only on its imperial foundation but also on its later royal re-founding by Philippe i (r.1060–1108) and attentive support from Philippe v (r.1316–22), Philippe vi, and Jean ii.48 Both accounts, moreover, were clearly drawn up in response to Duchesne’s request for information for his history of Reims. The first was completed on January 25, 1627, and the second a little earlier. Addressed to “Monsieur de la Chaize, prior of the abbey of Saint-Nicaise of Reims,” it accompanied the prior’s letter of December 10, 1626. La Chèze then later sent on the first account as well as other documents from the abbey, as Jean Bergier had promised.49
one of my friends having shown me a manuscript in which were transcribed a large number of charters, such as papal bulls, provincial councils, royal judgments, edicts, and orders, and agreements concerning the rights of the archbishopric and metropolitan church of Reims and having recognized through reading them that there were some that could contribute to the history of Reims, I extracted and transcribed them on a sheaf of nine pages of paper that I am now sending you.
Rogier modestly submitted his commentaries to Duchesne’s better judgment and apologized for the faulty Latinity in the transcriptions, but luckily L’Espaignol, procureur du roi, who was bringing the packet to Paris, had taken it upon himself to make some corrections.52 After this point, Rogier continued to send information to Duchesne and perhaps continued to work on his historical memoranda.53 In addition to the text that Rogier had provided in November 1626, Duchesne also received an alternate version of the chapters focusing on the reigns of Jean ii, Charles v (r.1364–80), and Charles vi and vii, as well as yet a third rendition of the portion on Jean ii.54 Certainly, while he was in correspondence with Duchesne, Rogier was working on his Discovrs de l’antiqvité de l’escheuinage de la ville de Reims, which Duchesne acknowledged having received by letter of December 28, 1628.55
Duchesne, for his part, seriously intended to complete the history of Reims and worked on the project himself. In February 1627, he assured Rogier that he was only awaiting some texts from the abbey of Saint-Remi before fully setting to work and that he expected to get started during Lent.56 Not only did he collect documents from others but he also made his own copies from manuscript and printed sources and began to work through the materials he had received. The historian thus made extracts from a cartulary of the archbishops of Reims, Dom Oudard Bourgeois’s Antiquitez remigianes, and saints’ lives located in a codex belonging to Rainssant.57 He copied out a charter granted by Louis ix in confirmation of an earlier one of Philippe ii regarding the military government of the city. The charters, Duchesne commented, demonstrated that the kings of France had given such absolute authority over the city to the archbishops that the kings no longer used their rights of sovereignty, except with the permission of the archbishops. He also specified further pages that should be copied on this topic.58 He made extracts of Rogier’s memoranda and took some notes on the text, as well as copying some of the charters and letters mentioned in the history, including the crucial charter accorded by Archbishop Guillaume in 1182 with its confirmations and the order of Jean ii of 1363 that Rogier’s copyist had indicated had been sent on before the rest of the history.59 It is not possible to assess exactly what materials were at Duchesne’s disposal to complete the history of Reims, given that most of Bergier’s collection is not included in the two manuscript volumes that survive from the royal geographer’s efforts.60 The significant number of remaining documents in Duchesne’s hand in the second volume does confirm, however, that he began to fill in the remaining gaps and to reflect on some of the issues.
Still, by the end of 1628, Duchesne had changed his mind. In the summer of 1627, Jean Bergier reported on the impatience of some “to see some beginning of the work,” and in December, Rogier sent off a worried letter asking his correspondent “to relieve him of a doubt that several people had put him in, saying that [Duchesne] was not willing to complete the history of this city of Reims.”61 Almost simultaneously, Duchesne wrote to Rogier to explain that his duties to the crown made it impossible for him to complete the history of Reims at the current time.62 The refusal of Cocquault, canon of the cathedral, to share any of his own transcriptions and historical writings with Duchesne and the resistance of the chapter to opening its archives clearly constituted a major obstacle. Rogier had heard that this failure was leading Duchesne to withdraw, and the royal geographer particularly pointed to it as a problem. If he should write an imperfect history without these materials, he explained, Cocquault could criticize him afterward, as the canon certainly seemed hopeful of doing.63 The cleric was certainly aware that his position gave him access to documents, especially regarding early church councils and provincial synods, that were unavailable to anyone else.64 Duchesne most likely regarded such materials, with the light they could shed on the early ecclesiastical government of Reims, as not only crucial for his project but also likely to produce the most historically significant results.
cannot be resolved by my expositions, considering that a historian must demonstrate neither passion nor partisanship. And if I were to do otherwise, there would be many, and no doubt your archbishop in the lead, who would know how to make me answer for my statements. The whole must be handled so that neither one side nor the other should have cause to complain.66
In Reims, the ongoing tensions between ecclesiastical and municipal authorities over legal jurisdiction, military control, and police rights in the city had led interpretations of the urban past to become equally contested. These disagreements likely prompted the cathedral chapter to reject any historical project supported by the town council. For Duchesne, these conflicts, with their implications for the history of Reims, ultimately proved unpalatable. Aware that he could not in fact satisfy both the archbishop and town council of Reims, he withdrew from a project that had such potential not only to produce a rich urban history but also to contribute to the ecclesiastical and royal history of France.
3 Competing Historical Visions
In Reims, competing historical narratives emphasized different aspects of the urban past and thus its meaning for contemporary affairs. If one approach highlighted Reims’s importance as the site of the coronation and sacre of most of the French kings since Clovis, another stressed its prestige and independence in Roman times. The first view naturally accorded the archbishops of Reims pride of place in the civic pantheon, since they performed the crucial ceremony that linked king and city in a sacred narrative. Dukes and first ecclesiastical peers of France, the archbishops invested Reims with their own prestige and power. The second view, however, could be enlisted to argue for civic rights and privileges as existing independently from both crown and church, since predating each. Given the long history of conflict between the archbishops’ officials and the bourgeois and aldermen over jurisdiction and authority within the town, the history of Reims could dwell on the long series of legal challenges and tensions that pitted municipal government and ecclesiastical authorities against each other. Here, the archbishops’ prestige could serve as a weapon against rather than as an advantage for the city, and the kings of France could stand either as the fount of justice or as collaborators in oppressing the people. Among the varied historical works of Rémois writers in the early seventeenth century, both visions of the urban past existed in constant tension.
Nicolas Bergier, in different contexts, had eloquently emphasized both aspects of Reims’s historical identity. In 1610, he was charged to design the triumphal arches and thematic program for the entry of Louis xiii into Reims, and here he appropriately stressed the historical, religious, and even genealogical ties of the city to the kings of France. Thanks to an explanation of the entry that Bergier drafted and that was published posthumously, we have a detailed description not only of what the king saw but of what the main author of the occasion intended.67 The first triumphal arch to greet the king conveyed the history of Reims, linking it both with the royal line and with the sacred nature of the French monarchy. Here, three great kings and founders of Reims welcomed Louis xiii: Samothes, son of Japhet, who had chosen the site, laid the first foundations of the city, and given it its ancient name of “Durencort”; Remus, twenty-third king of Gaul and grandson of Samothes, who fortified the city and lent his name to the people; and Francus, son of Hector of Troy and ancestor of the kings of France, who married the daughter of Remus and thus became ruler of Reims.68 The new monarch, the triumphal arch instructed, was thus intimately related to the founders of the city and namesake of its inhabitants, an idea already suggested when a young virgin woman dressed in antique garb and decorated with the arms of Reims introduced herself to Louis xiii and handed him the keys to the city, implicitly identifying him as a new Francus.69 The history of Reims was also intimately linked to the sacred authority and secular power of the French monarchy. Samothes, the first elder of Reims, held out two olive branches, simultaneously referring to the city’s arms and to the sacre, while Remus offered Louis an imperial crown, thus representing the coronation, and Francus proffered a laurel branch as a symbol of future victories.70 The second entry station then confirmed this historical connection of the French kings, the city, and God through the sacre and coronation, since it depicted St. Rémi surrounded by other prelates, preparing for the sacre of Clovis. Bergier chose to depict the saint at the moment when he had realized that the normal materials to anoint the king had disappeared and was praying to God to provide some other means to do so, thus emphasizing his role in the miracle of the sacred chrism descending from heaven.71 If any further connection were needed, Clovis accompanied Louis le Debonnaire and St. Louis as the three kings from the three royal lines of France to welcome the new monarch on the fourth triumphal arch, thanks to historical scholarship that Bergier cited holding that the name Clovis was a Frankish form for “Louis.”72 The entry program thus consistently linked Reims’s history and identity with the monarch’s, joined through their very origins as well as their shared experience of the sacred ceremony acknowledging the royal right to rule.
When Bergier was upholding the rights of the échevinage of Reims rather than welcoming the king, however, his account of the urban past referenced different values and circumstances. In a legal pleading of April 25, 1615, the procureur de l’échevinage defended that body’s rights of police jurisdiction by embedding them in a long historical narrative linking current municipal officials and their present authority with the autonomy and prestige of the Rémois senate as it had existed in Gallic times.73 In the time of Caesar, Bergier explained, Reims had been one of the most powerful cities of Gaul, ruled by no other authority than its own magistrates, whom the people elected annually. These liberties did not cease with Roman rule, since Caesar named the Remi as friends and allies of Rome.74 Retaining its freedoms and authority throughout the entire imperial period, the Gallic vergebreta was simply styled the Roman prefect, and when the empire fell, Reims was its “last stone.”75 These fundamental liberties survived the institution of the French monarchy, since when Clovis established his rule, the Rémois recognized him voluntarily, with the condition that they would retain their ancient laws and customs and their right to elect their own magistrates. It was only when the French kings accorded the archbishops temporal sovereignty over the city and the archbishops began to establish their own officials that the inhabitants found these liberties attacked.76 Since that time, Archbishop Henri le Grand had attempted to abolish the échevinage with all of its rights, but his successor, Archbishop Guillaume aux Blanches Mains restored it in 1182 in exactly the same form as had previously existed.77 Thus, the aldermen were identical to the urban magistrates recognized by both Caesar and Clovis, and any attempts of the archbishops or their officials to interfere with municipal jurisdiction trespassed against immemorial rights that predated their own authority. The judicial context was crucial to the elaboration of these arguments. Bergier’s rendition of the urban past borrowed from legal pleadings submitted during a long litany of contests with the archbishop and his officials throughout the sixteenth century, and it was within the context of a revival of this conflict in 1627 that Rogier copied out all the relevant documents in the suit, repeated much of this point of view in his Discovrs de l’antiqvité de l’escheuinage de la ville de Reims, and expanded on these concerns in his historical memoranda.78
However different in emphasis, the two historical narratives could nevertheless coexist in uneasy tension, and if Bergier had lived, his history of Reims would have included both. In the two books he did write, the historian firmly included the city of Reims within the French cultural sphere since ancient times and linked its foundation with the long line of French kings stretching back to the Flood. Although he disputed that the city of Reims derived its name directly from Remus, twenty-third king of Gaul according to Berosus, he upheld the idea that its ancient people, the Remi, owed their identity to him.79 Bergier’s prospectus further indicates that he planned not only to discuss at length the rights and ecclesiastical primacy of the archbishops of Reims but also to emphasize the importance of the ceremonies of the sacre and coronation to the city. Book 11 was to open with the conversion and sacre of Clovis and then to discuss why the sacre accorded the French kings the status of first son of the church. Later chapters were to lay out the special prerogatives of Reims due to the sacre, the reasons that the church of Reims was the head of the kingdom, and how the city of Reims was the “mother” of more kings than any other city.80 By contrast, the work was not to neglect the rights and liberties of the inhabitants. Book 5 was to treat the history of Reims from the time of King Remus to Caesar, emphasizing its free status and its ancient liberties. Book 14 would then continue the story by discussing the laws and customs of the city of Reims, the origins of the échevinage, its temporary abolishment under Archbishop Henri and reinstatement under Archbishop Guillaume, and the extent of the aldermen’s legal jurisdiction, police, and administrative rights.81 Bergier’s history would thus have precariously juxtaposed two different historical approaches that simultaneously associated the city’s importance with ecclesiastical prestige and posed the archbishops as continual aggressors against civic rights.
These competing narratives drew support from a circle of urban elites interested in the history of Reims and concerned to assure the publication of Bergier’s works. When Jean Bergier finally published his father’s Dessein de l’histoire de Reims in 1635, René de la Chèze contributed a poem in honor of the city, celebrating its foundation at the time of the fall of Troy and claiming the sacred chrism as a far greater possession than any of Rome’s antiquities.82 La Chèze was particularly enamored of the idea that the city had been founded by Remus, king of Gaul. When he was drafting verse to celebrate the entry of the duke of Rethelois, governor of Champagne, into Reims in 1618, he claimed that the Gallic king himself, who had founded the city and given it his name, had appeared to the author to dictate his words of welcome. In 1636, when the city of Reims dedicated an equestrian statue of Louis xiii, the same shade of Remus, founder of the city, appeared to the lieutenant des habitants and town council of Reims and assured them in equally poor verse that the senate of Reims outshined that of Rome.83 When Dom Guillaume Marlot came to write his own ecclesiastical history of Reims in the 1640s and 1650s, he threw doubt on the existence of Remus but nevertheless upheld the notion that Reims had been founded at the time of the fall of Troy, when the Gallic king was supposed to have ruled.84
For his part, La Salle, avocat du roi in the élection of Reims, both honored La Chèze with dedicatory poems for his works and spent considerable effort preparing Bergier’s account of the royal entry of Louis xiii for publication.85 Yet where Bergier’s text emphasized the symbolic and historic relation between the French kings and the city through the sacre, La Salle added an extended explanation of when the inhabitants of Reims had become officially responsible for paying for the occasion. Whereas Du Tillet had dated this requirement back to the coronation of Philippe i in 1059, La Salle insisted that the imposition had developed much later. When Archbishop Guillaume had presided at the sacre of Philippe ii, he had provided such a lavish feast to the court that in 1180 he had obtained voluntary contributions from the chapter and bourgeois of Reims. Afterward, royal officials had harassed the inhabitants of Reims to pay for the sacres, until they finally agreed to a ruling of Charles iv (1322–28) in 1322 to limit their liability.86 Thus, in a work dedicated to honoring the king and his relationship with the city of Reims, readers could also learn how the inhabitants had seen the requirement to pay for the honor unfairly imposed on them by rapacious royal officials. This was a theme upon which Rogier amply expanded in his own memoranda on the history of Reims.
4 Jean Rogier’s Historical Memoranda
Rogier went the farthest of all of his contemporaries to expound a consistent historical vision of the longstanding tensions between the rights of the bourgeois of Reims and the prerogatives of their archbishops. Serving as the prévôt de l’échevinage for an extended period, he had continual access to the rich documents of the hôtel de ville, and long before Duchesne had agreed to continue Bergier’s work, Rogier was hard at work researching and writing his memoranda on the history of Reims.87 In his memoranda, Rogier focused attention on the attempts of the archbishops and their officials to limit or extinguish the aldermen’s immemorial rights of legal jurisdiction, just as he explained how the inhabitants of the ban of the archbishop had been saddled with the expenses of the royal sacre. His exposition, too, was based on extensive reference to municipal documents, many of which he copied out in full. Yet the force of the work did not entirely come from its grounding in documentation, but rather from the overarching vision that Rogier had developed of the relations between the inhabitants of Reims, the archbishops, and the crown. For Rogier, the archbishops and the kings of France had essentially connived in imposing unwarranted “servitudes” on the people of Reims for their own benefit, requiring the inhabitants to pay taxes and perform services without any appreciable return. The French crown, however, also comprised the principle of royal justice, and Rogier repeatedly looked to the Parlement of Paris as a counterweight to rapacious officials to uphold the liberties of the people. Such a view of the municipal past also led Rogier to weave the city’s volatile history during the late Middle Ages into an interpretive whole. Repeatedly, when faced with war and uncertainty, the archbishops had placed their own concerns before the safety of the people, while the inhabitants of Reims had been instrumental in preserving the French kingdom from its enemies. While Rogier studiously ignored Reims’s actions in the sixteenth century, including the city’s strong adherence to the Catholic League, his view nevertheless linked past and present, when fiscal exactions and challenges to established rights unfortunately continued.88
Although Rogier’s memoranda were consulted by subsequent memorialists,89 copied numerous times, and collected by local gens de lettres,90 they were never published in their entirety and not at all during the Ancien Régime.91 Their controversial nature makes this fate explicable, but so does the complicated history of the text’s redaction. Not satisfied with his original version, Rogier continued to expand on his work, digging up more documents, incorporating further evidence into his overall narrative, and expanding on the analysis of the material he had already discussed. During the years of 1617–19, Rogier had researched what later came to be a first edition of the memoranda, and when Duchesne became involved in the history of Reims, he sent it to the royal geographer in Paris.92 Rogier also did considerable further research on the reigns of Jean ii, Charles v, and Charles vi and vii, based on the charters, registers, and other documents he had found in an office above the grenier à sel (salt repository and tribunal) and used these findings to help draft alternative versions of his chapters on Reims’s experiences during the Hundred Years’ War. It is not clear whether Rogier completed this work before or during Duchesne’s involvement, but since Duchesne was able to include copies of these versions in his collection of materials from Reims, it is certain that the writing was done by the end of 1628.93 Rogier’s focus on his memoranda, however, did not end with Duchesne’s interest in the history of Reims. Continuing his work after Duchesne had moved on to other things, the Rémois historian produced a “second edition” of his history, in which he developed further the ideas and material that had originally engaged him.94 It may be that his contact with Duchesne had motivated him to further research. The historian’s visit to Reims certainly prompted Rogier’s friends to share additional documents with him, and some of the material he discussed in the supplement to his memoranda he sent to Duchesne was later incorporated into his text.95 This second edition, moreover, was not the historian’s final word on his city’s history. Based on yet further research, he produced what must be called a third edition, in which he particularly focused on updating and rewriting the chapters dedicated to the legal jurisdiction of the échevinage, the evolution of military authority within the city, and Reims’s experiences during the reign of Jean ii.96 He also set out to write up a full account of all the documents and information that he had been able to unearth for Duchesne in a separate text from his memoranda.97 These multiple versions certainly make any definitive text of Rogier’s memoranda difficult to establish. Yet, however much the historian expanded his treatment of certain topics or altered his expression over the years, his overall narrative and guiding point of view remained constant.
Rogier took as his point of departure the patrimonial right of the bourgeois of Reims to elect their own magistrates and the continual attempts of the archbishops since Henri le Grand in the twelfth century to limit the aldermen’s judicial and administrative jurisdiction and to subject the inhabitants to their rule. A letter of John of Salisbury from 1180 amply laid out the violent response of the people of Reims to Archbishop Henri’s attempts to impose new obligations on them and to do away with the liberties they had enjoyed since the time of St. Rémi.98 By contrast, the bourgeois could not have obtained a more explicit confirmation of their rights than that accorded by Archbishop Guillaume aux Blanches Mains in a charter of 1182, in which the cleric recognized that the inhabitants’ rights of échevinage were of such antiquity that their origins were unknown and that they had been impeded by previous archbishops.99 Yet, such an explicit agreement did not prevent future archbishops from attempting to overcome the aldermen’s rights of justice, often through violence. As late as 1583, the cardinal of Guise, archbishop of Reims, had required the aldermen, as his officials, to uphold a judicial ordinance, leading to an extended suit in which both sides attempted to interpret Guillaume’s charter to their own benefit. In his first edition, Rogier already judged this case as crucial for confirming the historical rights of the people of Reims and therefore rehearsed the aldermen’s arguments at length.100 Yet, as he revised his memoranda over time, the historian’s outrage at the attempts of the archbishops and their officials to deprive the inhabitants of their rights and to impose their own authority only grew. Thus, by the second edition, Rogier carefully examined cases demonstrating that diocesan officials had subjected the bourgeois and aldermen of Reims to torture and considerably expanded his summary of the arguments on both sides produced for the suit of 1583.101 A police ordinance of 1379 further demonstrated that the archbishops of Reims had never held the aldermen to be their officials, demonstrating that “it is not without cause that the inhabitants of Reims living in the ban of the archbishop have always said that the justice of their échevinage is a patrimonial right and that the aldermen of Reims were not and are not the archbishop’s officers.”102 Despite these rights, however, the inhabitants had been subjected to repeated violence and harassment. By the third edition, Rogier could not help but exclaim “that it was very dangerous to suffer the ill-will of the archbishop’s officials, which caused infinity of ills in the town, since the officials kept the inhabitants in constant suits against the archbishop” and maintained “a perpetual disdain against them.”103
If these attacks against the patrimonial rights of the bourgeois of Reims elicited Rogier’s condemnation, they were by no means an isolated phenomenon. Rather, they fit within a pattern of historical development in which the archbishops and the kings of France had colluded to impose new and unwarranted obligations on the people of Reims. No subject demonstrated this process better than the way that the inhabitants had gradually been forced to pay the expenses of the royal sacre, a duty originally belonging to the archbishops but transferred to the inhabitants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Originally, asserted Rogier, when the French kings were anointed and crowned at Reims, their expenses were reimbursed by the archbishop, who then collected the sum he had advanced from the inhabitants of his châtellenie. The bourgeois resident in the ban of the archbishop, however, had always refused to pay, since as free people, they were not subject to this kind of servitude.104 Still, starting with the coronation of Philippe iii, the kings had sought to transfer the obligation to pay for the ceremony onto the inhabitants. Rulings of 1274 and 1287 had thus required them to contribute, demonstrating that “the kings wanted to impose the costs and expenses of their sacre and coronation onto the inhabitants of Reims and that they interposed their authority to do so.” This new imposition had occurred despite the archbishops’ inability to show any evidence of their right.105 In future reigns, not only did the inhabitants continue to protest these rulings but the sums involved escalated exponentially. In 1317, the archbishop of Reims imprisoned the aldermen and forty bourgeois to prevent them from opposing his attempts to have an unfavorable ruling overturned, and in examining the accounts for the sacre of Jean ii, Rogier exclaimed in disgust against such excessive practices as requisitioning 586 featherbeds from the surrounding area.106 Summing up the subject for a later edition, Rogier was struck that these contributions had been imposed without any justification or compensation. “Through all of this litigation,” he affirmed, “no reason was ever alleged why the inhabitants of Reims should be held to pay the costs and expenses that accrue at the kings’ sacre, nor that in exchange for this obligation any particular privilege was ever granted them on the part of the king or the archbishop.”107
The sacre may have been the most spectacular example of the process by which the kings of France and the archbishops of Reims had imposed exactions on the inhabitants without any foundation in right, but it was not the only one. Immersed in the large body of charters and rulings that had affected the municipal government of Reims since the twelfth century, Rogier had developed a consistent historical sense for how these authorities had managed to load unfair burdens on the people of Reims. In the case of the archbishops, Rogier slowly concluded that their acquiring the sales tax (droit de vente) over lands in their châtellenie was a usurpation gradually imposed by diocesan officials to augment their own profits.108 In the case of the crown, Rogier traced the means through which occasional, voluntary aids had slowly been transformed into a royal right cynically imposed on those least able to complain. The earliest evidence of the kings of France asking for a monetary aid from the inhabitants of Reims dated to 1258, when Louis ix acknowledged by charter that the archbishop of Reims had granted him permission for the request.109 Louis’s successors had then continued the practice, but by the time of Jean ii, the monetary burden had become so intense that the king specified by letters patent of 1354 that no foodstuffs or other supplies could be requisitioned from the inhabitants during the year that they had promised him an aid. Thereafter, the amounts that Reims was required to grant to the king doubled, but the inhabitants saw no relief in the requisitioning of goods as Jean ii had promised.110 By the fifteenth century, these aids had become perpetual to the point that the kings were counseled to include them in the royal domain. Further, since their collection caused continual trouble, nobles and clerics eventually received exemptions, as did civic authorities in order to make their receipt more assured.111 Rogier thus criticized the crown and the archiepiscopal administration directly for gradually augmenting their monetary exactions and converting a voluntary gift into a burdensome tax.
The narrative of Reims’s experiences during the troubled years of the Hundred Years’ War and civil wars of the fifteenth century only served to reinforce Rogier’s particular view of his city’s past. Reims, the historian affirmed, had been instrumental in preserving the French kingdom from its enemies, even if the inhabitants had sided with the English–Burgundian alliance against the pretentions of the dauphin in the years before 1429. Throughout the hostilities, however, the archbishops had failed to assert proper leadership, obstructed attempts to preserve the city, and blamed the inhabitants for their cooperation with royal representatives to enhance the fortifications and defend the town against attack. While the inhabitants of Reims had acted with bravery and determination to preserve themselves and the kingdom, the archbishops had abandoned their responsibilities and then insisted on compensation for their own losses. If Rogier’s narrative emphasized that the rights of the French monarchy were well worth defending, though, this did not mean that service to the crown was always properly rewarded.
One must believe that he [Edward] was wrong in the opinion that he might have conceived that someone would act in his favor to admit him to the city, but seeing the constant resolution of the lord Chastillon accompanied with the affection that the inhabitants had to demonstrate their perseverance in the fidelity that they owed to the king, he resolved to raise the siege, not wanting to risk anything.115
These actions, moreover, had done nothing less than to save France. “The inhabitants of Reims,” Rogier explained, “could then assuredly say that with God’s help they had guaranteed and saved France from a great shipwreck,” since their active defense had both prevented Edward iii from having himself crowned king of France and led him to conclude that peace would be necessary.116
Reims’s role in the coronation of the French kings led the city to be instrumental in the preservation of the monarchy on other occasions. Although in the early decades of the fifteenth century the inhabitants had supported the dukes of Burgundy and had even given their loyalty to the young Henry vi of England (r.1422–61, 1470–71) in preference to the dauphin, the city had nevertheless played an important role in Charles vii’s bid to regain control of the French kingdom. After the lifting of the siege of Orléans in 1429, Charles determined to come to Reims for his sacre and coronation. He would never have taken the decision to do so, however, had he not been assured by some of the inhabitants that the gates would be opened to him on his arrival. Although the people of Reims kept the duke of Burgundy informed of the movements of the dauphin and did not openly declare for Charles until he reached Troyes, these actions only testified to their prudence, since it was by no means certain that the dauphin could pass through so much hostile territory.117 Meanwhile, the behavior of Guillaume de Chastillon, captain of Reims, testified to his recognition of the inhabitants’ intention to admit the dauphin, which they did after sending deputies to offer Charles vii their obedience.118 The kings of France were fully aware of Reims’s importance, as Louis xi’s interactions with the city clearly testified. The king had desired that Reims be fully fortified and had appointed Raoul Cochinart as captain to carry out his intentions. When Louis xi received information in 1475 that the king of England intended to be crowned at Reims, he wrote urgently to insist that the fortifications be completed. Hearing of their excellent progress, he then promised the inhabitants that if the English and Burgundians should lay siege to the city, he would come personally to defend it.119
If the inhabitants of Reims had given material aid to the French crown, the archbishops, for their part, had offered little but neglect or outright obstruction of these efforts. During the reign of Jean ii, Jean de Craon, archbishop of Reims and a relative of Edward iii, had first refused to fortify the city according to the king’s instructions. He had then left his château de Porte-Mars inadequately defended, which endangered the city as well, and, after hearing of the Jacquerie revolts, he had “highly astonished” the inhabitants by departing Reims in such perilous times without providing for its defense.120 It is true that Craon participated in the siege of the château of Rouci, but his presence was due to the count of Rouci being his cousin, and when the inhabitants of Reims wished to confirm their gains with other sieges, he promptly abandoned them before the château with all of the artillery.121 He then refused to permit Gaucher de Chastillon to incorporate the château de Porte-Mars within the defense system of the city and was notable for his absence during its siege by English forces.
The archbishop during the reign of Louis xi was equally unreliable. After the king had appointed Pierre de Laval as his lieutenant general in 1477, the archbishop opposed the steps that Cochinart had undertaken to fortify the city and imprisoned the captain’s officials. Many of the archbishop’s officials were also suspect, since as natives of Brittany they were believed to support the English interest against the king.122
It is easy to see from the content of the edict and also from the commissioners’ report that the lawsuit that the archbishop of Reims prosecuted against the inhabitants was more to tarnish some of the glory that the inhabitants had acquired in the defense of the city against such a powerful enemy and for the good order that they had established there with the lord Chastillon, captain of the city, and for the fortifications that they had made in the presence of the archbishop, who rather than encourage them on, opposed them. And in this great disaster in which all of France found itself, they were the first to meet the enemy’s assault, and having rendered a thorough proof of their fidelity and courageous magnanimity in the defense of the city, in recompense the archbishop accused them of rebellion against the king and of attacks against his person.123
The archbishop’s actions clearly angered Rogier, since he reworked his narrative and account of the suit several times. By the time that he was revising the second edition of his memoranda, moreover, he had considerably expanded his analysis of the claims of both sides recited in the resulting ruling of Parlement of April 8, 1363 and had carefully disarmed the archbishop’s assertions by recounting events in detail from the point of view of the inhabitants before discussing the cleric’s objections. His passion on this issue may have later inspired Marlot, a subsequent historian of Reims, to ask rhetorically: “After these successful exploits and testimony to a truly sincere fidelity, did not the people of Reims have occasion to expect praise from individuals who were obliged to take an interest in their preservation?”124
from the above, it is evident that if the inhabitants of Reims had been charged with these imprisonments, they would have been chastised and punished, and that all that they had done so well before, with which the king had testified by all of his letters to be well pleased, had been forgotten.126
The city of Reims was crucial for the preservation of the French kingdom, but the kings of France were still unreliable partners in upholding the inhabitants’ rights and well-being.
Rogier’s vision of the history of Reims therefore resolutely opposed the pretentions of the archbishops to the interests of the civic community and occasionally identified the kings of France as party to unreasonable demands. Even St. Louis did not escape criticism, since Rogier pointed out that he had ordered the bourgeois of Reims to turn over the keys to the gates to the archbishop, because the king sought the cleric’s permission to ask the inhabitants for an aid.127 Further, the historian did not quarantine his judgment that the crown had imposed on the inhabitants uniquely to the past. In discussing the royal aids that had gradually become obligatory and focused on common people least able to pay or protest, Rogier mentioned that such exactions had led to remonstrances before the Estates General of 1614. At that time, the inhabitants of Reims complained against the excesses of tax farmers, who destroyed the property of peasants and sought to impose “servitudes” on Rémois merchants against their liberties.128 Likewise, in noting that Philippe iv had refused to moderate the sums that the inhabitants of Reims owed for the royal sacre, he commented that “then there were no ears whatsoever to hear the complaints of the people, no more than there are at present,” thus explicitly relating past and present injustice.129 Still, if individual kings could be self-interested, for Rogier royal justice stood as a crucial guarantor of civic rights. Before the establishment of the Parlement of Paris as a sedentary court, the aldermen had little choice but to try to preserve their rights through violence or negotiation with the archbishops who were reasonable.130 Since that time, the Parlement had frequently acted to limit the attempts of the archbishops to expand their authority at the expense of the inhabitants. In a factum meant to appeal to the Parlement, Rogier wrote that when the court considered the case at hand, he was confident that it would recognize all of the judgments it had issued in the aldermen’s favor and would conclude that there was no reason to contradict such an extensive collection of rulings.131
In the midst of his research and writing, Rogier could not but expect that Duchesne would adopt his point of view in drafting the history of Reims. The prévôt de l’échevinage was certainly eager to confirm his interpretation when he sent a portion of his memoranda and a supplement with new documents to the royal geographer in November 1626. Since the time that Louis vii had raised the archbishops to be dukes and peers of France, he explained, the archbishops had tried to assert sovereign authority and the inhabitants had been hard-pressed to preserve their liberties. As the documents concerning Henri de Brenne, archbishop during the reign of Louis ix, would show, flatterers had encouraged the archbishops to assert their rights, which had inevitably led to disagreement, violence, and excommunication.132 Further, the declaration of 1180, in which Archbishop Guillaume acknowledged receiving aid from the cathedral chapter for costs related to the sacre of Philippe ii, confirmed that before the reign of Philippe iv, the inhabitants were not responsible for this expense.133 Likewise, a treaty between the inhabitants of Reims and the counts of Flanders and Rethel during the captivity of Jean ii confirmed what Rogier had already written—that Archbishop Craon did little to defend the city, despite what Jean Froissart claimed.134 Thus, Rogier enthusiastically related how additional documents fit with the point of view he had already developed in his memoranda. Did his reiterations arise from an inability to imagine that the royal geographer might envision a radically different approach to the history of Reims or from his very awareness that this was a distinct possibility?
Since Duchesne ultimately failed to write the history of Reims, it is reasonable to ask just how significant the interactions between major erudite scholars and local historical enthusiasts really were and what urban history writing meant for each. Certainly, the ties that Nicolas Bergier had been able to form within the Republic of Letters and the city of Reims linked the two communities in an exchange of information and respect. Bergier’s project elicited such enthusiasm, too, because it managed to combine several strands of historical concern. The history of Reims could shed significant light on questions of royal ceremony, feudal institutions, and the sacred character of the monarchy. Yet it was also crucial and contested ground for civic notables who were attempting to define the particular characteristics of the urban community and to construct a history that would reflect their unique privileges and participation in the wider realm of the kingdom. Ultimately, it was the existence in Reims of such a lively debate about the urban past that made it so difficult for Duchesne to carry out his promise. In his view, such engaged history was the province of the lawyer, not the historian.135 For Rogier, though, each scrap of evidence should be put to work to demonstrate the rights and courage of past citizens, who had over the generations fought for urban liberties just as he and his colleagues were called upon to do. Both could agree that local history was a profoundly worthwhile endeavor, but they parted company in understanding the shape that history should take. This disagreement should help us understand why, by the 1630s, Jean Bergier was left to publish his father’s original efforts to draft a history of Reims and why Jean Rogier was still hoping that a worthy individual could be coaxed to finish the work.136
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, a3r.
Nicolas Bergier, Histoire des grands chemins de l’Empire romain, contenant l’origine, progrés, & estenduë quasi incroyable des chemins militaries, pauez depuis la ville de Rome iusques aux extremitez de son empire … (Paris: C. Morel, 1622). On Bergier’s tenure at the Collège des Bons-Enfants, see [Eugène Ernest] Cauly, Histoire du Collège des Bons-Enfants de l’Université de Reims depuis son origine jusqu’à ses récentes transformations (Reims: F. Michaud, 1885), 303.
Cauly, Histoire du Collège des Bons-Enfants, 304n1; Édouard de Barthélemy, Études biographiques sur les hommes gélèbres [sic] nés dans le département de la Marne (Châlons: Boniez-Lambert, 1853), 11.
The prospectus and first two books were eventually published through the efforts of Nicolas Bergier’s son, Jean, as Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims. Internal evidence indicates that Bergier was writing at least a portion of this work as early as 1608 (376).
Letter of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc to Charles du Lys, dated June 27, 1624 from Aix, bm Carpentras ms 1874, 101r–102r; bm Reims ms 1630, 1r–v, published in Henri Loriquet, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France: Départements, tome XXXIX, Reims; Tome II, deuxième partie (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1906), 802–3. The transcription in Pierre Varin, Archives administratives de la ville de Reims: Collection de pièces inédites pouvant servir à l’histoire des institutions dans l’intérieur de la cité, vol. 1 (Paris: Crapelet, 1839), cxx–cxxi is inexact.
Letter of [Jean] Bergier to André Duchesne, dated September 15, 1624 from Reims, BnF Duchesne 30, 265r.
BnF Duchesne 80, 127r; Letter of André Duchesne to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, dated September 20, 1626 from Paris, BnF ms fr. 9544, 267v.
Charles du Lys, Traitté sommaire tant dv nom et des armes, qve de la naissance et parenté de la Pucelle d’Orléans, & de ses frères … (Paris: Edme Martin, 1633). An earlier version, entitled the Discours sommaire, was published in 1612.
Olivier Poncet, Pomponne de Bellièvre (1529–1607): Un homme d’état au temps des guerres de religion (Paris: École des chartes, 1998), 295–96.
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, a3r, a4r (dedication to Nicolas de Bellièvre).
Letter of [Nicolas] Bergier to [Pierre] Dupuy, dated July 21, 1619 from Reims, BnF Dupuy 712, 82r–v.
Letter of [Nicolas-Claude Fabri de] Peiresc to [Pierre?] Dupuy, dated December 28, 1623 from Aix, in Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, ed., Lettres de Peiresc aux frères Dupuy: Tome premier; Décembre 1617–décembre 1628 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1888), 14–15.
Letters of Charles du Lys to [Nicolas-Claude Fabri de] Peiresc [n.d., n.p] and dated June 30, 1613 from Paris, bm Carpentras ms 1779, 368v, 424r. See also the draft of Louis xiii’s letters patent, with corrections by Peiresc, 404r.
For example, ibid., 58r.
Letter of [Nicolas] Bergier to Peiresc, dated April 15, 1621 from Reims, bm Carpentras ms 1794, 5r–v.
Letter of [Jean] Bergier to Duchesne, BnF Duchesne 30, 265r.
Letter of [Nicolas] Bergier to André Duchesne, dated April 5, 1618 from Reims, BnF Clairambault 1021, 97. The collation on the documents Bergier had copied is dated February 26, 1618, BnF Duchesne 53, 30r–32r; Duchesne, Histoire de la maison de Chastillon svr Marne, 430, 530, 545, 588, 724, “Prevves de l’histoire genealogiqve de la maison de Chastillon,” 215, 254. It is possible that Duchesne actually spent time in Reims in 1618, since a letter addressed to him begins, “since your departure.” See Bourgeois to [André Duchesne], dated May 25, 1618 from Reims, BnF Clairambault 1021, 98.
Letter of Bergier to Peiresc, bm Carpentras ms 1794, 5r–v.
Letter of Jean Rogier to Peiresc, dated July 17, 1623 from Reims, ibid., 29r–30v.
Duchesne, Histoire de la maison de Chastillon svr Marne, 430–34.
Ibid., 530, 537.
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, 373.
Letter of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc to Nicolas Bergier, dated December 31 [no year], bm Carpentras ms 1872, 323r. The copy of Collard’s commentaries follows the letter, 204r–257r.
“Memoires pour Rheins a Monsr Berger de la part de son seruiteur De Peiresc,” bm Carpentras ms 1779, 202r–203v. As Peter N. Miller makes clear, Peiresc was in the habit of dictating these kinds of detailed research instructions. See Peiresc’s “History of Provence”: Antiquarianism and the Discovery of a Medieval Mediterranean (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2011), 41–45.
“Ordre des xii. pairs de France ainse quilz sont es deux croisees de fenestres du logis de Mr Cocquillart a Reims,” bm Carpentras ms 1768, 217r; “Extraict d’vn accord esmologué par arrest entre le comte de Flandre d’vne part et Richard archeuesque de Reims du plaidoye dudict archeuesque,” bm Carpentras ms 1779, 327r.
Letter of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc to Nicolas Bergier, dated December 31 [no year], bm Carpentras ms 1872, 323r.
Letter of Nicolas Bergier to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, dated April 24, 1623 from Reims, BnF ms fr. 9539, 213r.
BnF ms fr. 8334, 216v–217r.
Letter of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc to Charles du Lys, dated June 26, 1625 from Aix, bm Carpentras ms 1874, 104r.
Letter of André Duchesne to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, dated September 20, 1626 from Paris, BnF ms fr. 9544, 276v; letter of Jean Rogier to André Duchesne, dated December 29, 1628 from Reims, BnF Duchesne 46, 116r.
Letter of Peiresc to Dupuy, dated December 28, 1623 from Aix, Tamizey de Larroque, Lettres de Peiresc aux frères Dupuy, 15. See also letter of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc to Charles du Lys, dated November 20, 1624 from Aix, bm Carpentras ms 1874, 102r.
ac Reims R 59, 463. Interestingly, the final version of the deliberation and conclusion is somewhat different from the version in the initial minutes, and a clean copy of what would be entered in the register of deliberations is written out in a hand that did not belong to the regular secretary. See ac Reims C 778, liasse 77, minutes of the deliberations of January 7, 1626. Charles du Lys later wrote Jean Bergier to request a copy of this conclusion, which he clearly passed on to Duchesne upon receipt. See ac Reims R 60, 18; BnF Duchesne 80, 127r. Jean Bergier also communicated all of this information to Duchesne by letter dated March 26, 1626 from Reims, BnF Clairambault 1022, 6.
ac Reims R 60, 84.
Ibid.
bm Reims ms 1630, 1r–v.
Letter of Jean Rogier to André Duchesne, dated November 22, 1626 from Reims, BnF ms fr. 8334, 1r.
Letter of Jean Bergier to André Duchesne, dated March 28, 1627 from Reims, BnF Duchesne 46, 134r.
“Incipit vita beatorum confessorum Sixti atq[ue] Sinicii quorum laudes enarrare atq[u]e actus magna credituo esse vtilitates,” BnF ms fr. 8335, 22r–28v, specifically addressed to Duchesne on 29v.
Ibid., 232r.
“Pour lantiquite de la maison et commanderie du Temple de Reims,” ibid., 334r–335r.
“Memoire pour le couuent des perres Carmes de Reims,” ibid., 336r–v.
Letter of Grégoire de la Chèze to André Duchesne, dated December 10, 1626 from Saint-Nicaise de Reims, BnF Clairambault 1022, 8.
BnF ms fr. 8335, 253r. The account indeed confused Flavius Jovin (d.370), a Roman general and consul, with Roman Emperor Flavius Jovianus, or Jovian (r.363–64).
Ibid., 260r–261r, quotation, 261r.
Ibid., 265r.
Ibid., 264r, 265r.
Ibid., 255v. Dom Guillaume Marlot, prior of Saint-Nicaise and author of a later history of Reims, provided yet a different version of the first abbots of the abbey. See his Histoire de la ville, cité et université de Reims, métropolitaine de la Gaule Belgique …, 4 vols. (Reims: L. Jacquet, 1843–46), 3:318–19, 346–47.
BnF ms fr. 8335, 253v, 254v.
Ibid., 259v, 322v.
Letter of Jean Rogier to André Duchesne, dated November 22, 1626 from Reims, BnF ms fr. 8334, 2r. This version of Rogier’s memoirs survives in ibid., 78r–270r. The first five sections (78r–133v) are in Rogier’s hand, with the rest having been copied out by someone else.
Ibid., 203r.
Ibid., 1r, 2r, quotation at 1r. The supplement, in Rogier’s hand, is located in the same manuscript, fols. 3r–19v.
In a letter of February 12, 1627, Duchesne acknowledged having received from Rogier a memorandum concerning the election of Cardinal Guillaume Briçonnet to the archbishopric of Reims as well as other letters. See Édouard de Barthélemy, ed., “Autographes rémois ou relatifs à Reims,” Travaux de l’Académie nationale de Reims 54 (1872–73): 1–10, at 2.
“Memoire de ce que Jay recogneu de lestat de la ville de Reims en recherchant les tiltres et chartres anciennes dicelle quy estoient en vne estude au dessus de la porte du grenier a sel par lesquelles Il se recognoist des grandes mutations et changemens en lordre et gouuernement dicelle co[mm]e aussy en ses closures de portes pontz tours et remparts,” BnF ms fr. 8334, 272r–314v; “Sommaire des gestes et faictz des habitans de la ville de Reims durant le regne du Roy Jehan quy commenca en aoust mil iiic cinquante et jusques a son deces quy fut le viii jour dapuril mil iiic Lxiiii,” 315r–350v.
Letter of André Duchesne to Jean Rogier, dated December 28, 1628 from Paris, BnF naf 1096, 15r. The anonymous Discovrs de l’antiqvité de l’escheuinage de la ville de Reims is universally accredited to Rogier.
Letter of André Duchesne to Jean Rogier, dated February 12, 1627 from Paris, in Barthélemy, “Autographes rémois,” 2.
BnF ms fr. 8335, 66r–67r, 69r–70r, 211r–217v, 227r–228v.
Ibid., 60r–61v.
Ibid., 337r–339r, 345r, 346r, 349r.
Documents that almost certainly belonged to Nicolas Bergier remain in BnF ms fr. 8335, the volume of materials on Reims that Duchesne put together, as well as in BnF Duchesne 82 and 95. However, these documents are not sufficient to serve as the basis of a history of Reims, suggesting that Duchesne did not keep the bulk of Bergier’s collection.
Letter of [Jean] Bergier to André Duchesne, dated August 15, 1627 from Reims, BnF Clairambault 1022, 11; letter of Jean Rogier to André Duchesne, dated December 29, 1628 from Reims, BnF Duchesne 46, 116r. See also letter of [Jean] Bergier to André Duchesne, dated July 17, 1627 from Reims, BnF Clairambault 1021, 106.
Letter of André Duchesne to Jean Rogier, dated December 28, 1628 from Paris, BnF naf 1096, 15r–v. Although Duchesne’s letter is dated one day earlier than Rogier’s, it is clearly a reply to his inquiry. Since Duchesne’s pension as royal geographer was likely doubled in 1627, his insinuation that he had received a new project of concern to the crown may have been accurate. See the compilation of mentions of royal historiographers in BnF ms fr. 14127, as transcribed in Fossier, “À propos du titre d’historiographe,” 380.
Letter of Rogier to Duchesne, dated December 29, 1628, BnF Duchesne 46, 116r; letter of Duchesne to Rogier, dated December 28, 1628, BnF naf 1096, 15r.
Letter of Rogier to Duchesne, dated November 22, 1626, BnF ms fr. 8334, 1r.
BnF Duchesne 80, 127r; Letter of Rogier to Duchesne, dated December 29, 1628. This work was the Discovrs de l’antiqvité de l’escheuinage de la ville de Reims.
Letter of Duchesne to Rogier, dated December 28, 1628, BnF naf 1096, 15r–v.
Nicolas Bergier and Pierre de La Salle, Le bovqvet royal, ov le parterre des riches inuentions qui ont seruy à l’entrée du Roy Lovis le Ivste en sa ville de Reims … (Reims: Simon de Foigny, 1637). Bergier explains that he was left in charge of the entry program (6v–7r).
Ibid., 26v–29r.
Ibid., 21v–24v.
Ibid., 27v–28r, 29r.
Ibid., 30v.
Ibid., 63r–64v, 66v, 68r.
Legal pleading dated April 25, 1615, signed Bergier, BnF ms fr. 8335, 188r–203v.
Ibid., 188v–189v.
Ibid., 189r, 191r.
Ibid., 191v–193r.
Ibid., 194r–196v. This assertion was highly contested, and when Pierre Cocquault drafted his own version of the history of Reims, he rather claimed that Archbishop Guillaume was the first to grant the inhabitants of Reims the right to assemble in community and maintain an échevinage. See Pierre Cocquault, “Histoire de l’église, ville et province de Reims …,” bm Reims ms 1608, 543r.
See ac Reims C 661, liasse 2, supplément 1, all copied out in Rogier’s hand. The Discovrs discusses many of the legal conflicts of the sixteenth century (20–27), and in his memoranda, Rogier fully laid out the arguments of the suit of 1583 over the legal jurisdiction of the aldermen. See BnF ms fr. 8334, 81r–82v; BnF Champagne 34, 9r–10v.
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, 360–69.
Ibid., 12–14.
Ibid., 7–8, 16.
The poem accompanied an illustration of Reims, entitled “Le povrtraict de la ville cite et vniversite de Reims,” in ibid., unnumbered folio after c2r.
La Chèze, Le Remvs gavlois, A2r–v; La Chèze, “L’ombre de Remus roy des anciens Gaulois, fondateur de la ville de Reims: A messieurs les lieutenant & gens du conseil de la mesme ville,” in Le roy triomphant, A1r–A4r.
Marlot, Histoire de la ville, cité et université de Reims, 1:91–93.
La Chèze, Le Remvs gavlois, B4v; La Chèze, Les oevvres de René de La Cheze remois: Contenant “Les larmes de Sion, ou paraphrase sur les lamentations de Ieremie”; “Les tableavx racovrcis de la vie humaine”; Ensemble, les “Lecons moralles du sage Theotime” (Reims: Nicolas Hecart, 1630), a4r–v; Bergier and La Salle, Le bovqvet royal, aii v–aiii r.
Bergier and La Salle, Le bovqvet royal, 79v–83r.
Rogier himself indicated that he did much of the research for the first edition of his memoirs in 1617–19. See bm Reims ms 1628, 1r.
For Reims’s loyalties during the Catholic League, see Mark W. Konnert, Local Politics in the French Wars of Religion: The Towns of Champagne, the Duc de Guise, and the Catholic League, 1560–95 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 186, 203–4, 214–18, 241–49.
Oudard Cocquault, Jean Rogier’s grandson by marriage, mentioned his memoranda in regard to the siege of Reims in 1360 and the political alliances at the end of the reign of Charles vi. See Oudard Cocquault, Mémoires de Oudard Cocquault bourgeois de Reims (1649–1668), ed. Charles Loriquet, 2 vols. (Reims: Imprimerie de l’Académie, 1875), 1:82n1; 111n2. Marlot also clearly relied on Rogier’s history in his discussion of the events of the Hundred Years’ War in his Histoire de la ville, cité et université de Reims, 4:80–93.
Numerous manuscript copies from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exist at bm Reims, and a copy once owned by Louis Fremyn (d.1773), avocat du roi in the presidial court of Reims, currently survives as bm Narbonne ms 34. The copy located in BnF Champagne 34 is a version copied by Jean Lacourt and La Ravalière in the early eighteenth century.
In the nineteenth century, local historian Édouard de Barthélemy published edited versions of the chapters on the reigns of Jean ii, Charles vii, and Louis xi as Mémoires de Jean Rogier, prévôt de l’échevinage de Reims: Vol. 1; Règne du Roi Jean, ed. Édouard de Barthélemy (Reims: Paul Giret, 1875); Mémoires de Jean Rogier, prévôt de l’échevinage de Reims: II; Règne du Roi Charles VII, ed. Édouard de B. [Barthélemy] (Reims: Paul Giret, 1875); and Mémoires de Jean Rogier, prévôt de l’échevinage de Reims: III; Règne des Rois Louis XI et Charles VIII, notes diverses, ed. Édouard de Barthélemy (Paris: H. Menu, 1876). According to Barthélemy, these texts were based on a version of the chapters existing in what is now BnF Champagne 33. However, sometime between 1875 and 1892, when Barthélemy published the guide to the holdings on Champagne, this version disappeared. See Édouard de Barthélemy and Étienne Héron de Villefosse, Catalogue des pièces manuscrites composant la collection dite: Topographie de Champagne à la Bibliothèque Nationale (Arcis-sur-Aube: Imprimerie Léon Frémont, 1892), 31.
The text sent to Duchesne exists in BnF ms fr. 8334, 78r–270r. Another copy of this version, also in Rogier’s hand and with some small editorial changes in the margins, survives as bm Reims ms 1628. In this copy, Rogier identifies the time in which he first did his research (1r). Since Rogier identifies a later version of his memoranda, existing as bm Reims ms 1629, as an “Edition seconde,” I conclude that BnF 8334, 78r–270r is a “first edition.”
This alternative version based on additional research exists in BnF ms fr. 8334, 272r–314v, entitled “Memoire de ce que Jay recogneu de lestat de la ville de Reims en recherchant les tiltres et chartres anciennes dicelle quy estoient en vne estude au dessus de la porte du grenier a sel par lesquelles il se recognoist des grandes mutations et changemens en lordre et gouuernement dicelle co[mm]e aussy en ses closures de portes pontz tours et remparts.” Although Pierre Varin claimed that this version was in the hand of Duchesne, this judgment is false. See his Archives administratives de la ville de Reims, cclxvii. However, the material on Charles vi and vii clearly served as the basis for the version that was subsequently published by Barthélemy in 1875. A separate chapter on the reign of Charles v does not exist in any other version of the memoranda. Duchesne also received a third version of the chapter on the reign of Jean ii, entitled, “Sommaire des gestes et faictz des habitans de la ville de Reims durant le regne du Roy Jehan quy commenca en aoust mil iiic cinquante et jusques a son deces quy fut le viii jour dapuril mil iiic Lxiiii,” BnF ms fr. 8334, 315r–350v.
This “second edition” exists as bm Reims ms 1629. Rogier identified it as such in the upper margin of the table of contents (Dr–v). The version of Rogier’s memoranda in BnF Champagne 34, copied out in the early eighteenth century by La Ravalière and Lacourt, is almost identical to the “second edition” of the manuscript in bm Reims ms 1629, except that it has additions that also exist in later versions, such as bm Reims ms 1627. It seems likely that the later scholars copied BnF Champagne 34 directly from bm Reims ms 1629, while adding additional text from the supplemental texts mentioned in the preface to bm Reims ms 1627. This preface was also copied out in the supplement to BnF Champagne 34, at 84r.
This initial supplement exists in BnF ms fr. 8334, 3r–19v. For example, Rogier incorporated Archbishop Guillaume’s acknowledgment of 1180 that the cathedral chapter had voluntarily contributed to the expenses of the sacre of Philippe ii into his discussion of the sacre in the second edition of his memoranda. Cf. BnF ms fr. 8334, 17v; bm Reims ms 1629, 53v.
bm Reims ms 1627 represents this “third edition,” which Rogier explicitly identified as such (Br).
bm Reims ms 1630.
BnF ms fr. 8334, 79r–v.
Ibid., 80r. Both Pierre Cocquault and Guillaume Marlot not surprisingly took a different point of view about these events, each placing them within the context of the communal violence of the late twelfth century. Marlot held that Archbishop Henri was not trying to assert new authority over the inhabitants but to resist the novel demands of a commune. See Marlot, Histoire de la ville, cité et université de Reims, 3:437–39, 466–67; Cocquault, Table chronologiqve, 246.
BnF ms fr. 8334, 80v–82v.
BnF Champagne 34, 5v–11r.
Ibid., 15v.
bm Reims ms 1627, 12r.
BnF ms fr. 8334, 92v–93r; BnF Champagne 34, 18v, 19v.
BnF ms fr. 8334, 93v–95v, quotation at 95v.
Ibid., 98v–100r, 110r.
BnF Champagne 34, 25v.
Ibid., 12r; BnF ms fr. 8334, 85r–86r.
BnF ms fr. 8334, 120r.
Ibid., 127r–128r.
Ibid., 132v–133r.
BnF Champagne 34, 74v; Mémoires de Jean Rogier … Règne du Roi Jean, 8.
BnF Champagne 34, 75r–76r; Mémoires de Jean Rogier … Règne du Roi Jean, 12.
BnF Champagne 34, 77r; Mémoires de Jean Rogier … Règne du Roi Jean, 13.
BnF Champagne 34, 78r–82r, quotation, 82r.
Mémoires de Jean Rogier… Règne du Roi Jean, 16. See also BnF ms fr. 8334, 189v–190r; BnF Champagne 34, 82r–v.
BnF Champagne 34, 116r.
Ibid., 118r–v, 119v.
Mémoires de Jean Rogier … Règne des Rois Louis xi et Charles viii, 10, 14–16.
BnF Champagne 34, 73r, 74v, quotation, 74v.
Ibid., 75r–v, 77r. Pierre Cocquault not surprisingly contradicts Rogier’s account by identifying Jean de Craon as the leader of the siege. See his Table chronologiqve, 387–88.
BnF Champagne 34, 133v; Mémoires de Jean Rogier … Règne des Rois Louis xi et Charles viii, 20–21, 26.
BnF Champagne 34, 109v.
Marlot, Histoire de la ville, cité et université de Reims, 4:88.
BnF Champagne 34, 139v.
Ibid., 134v.
Ibid., 10v; BnF ms fr. 8334, 315v.
BnF ms fr. 8334, 133r–v. This observation was omitted in future versions.
Ibid., 96r.
bm Reims ms 1629, 6r, 249r; BnF Champagne 34, 5r.
Rogier, Discovrs de l’antiqvité de l’escheuinage de la ville de Reims, 32.
Letter of Rogier to Duchesne, dated November 26, 1626 from Reims, BnF ms fr. 8334, 1v. Rogier sent Duchesne several documents with commentary regarding Henri de Brenne, 6r–7r, 18v.
Letter of Rogier to Duchesne, BnF ms fr. 8334, 1v; supplement, 17v.
Letter of Rogier to Duchesne, BnF ms fr. 8334, 1v–2r.
Letter of Duchesne to Rogier, dated December 28, 1628 from Paris, BnF naf 1096, 15r.
Bergier, Le dessein de l’histoire de Reims, a4v; bm Reims ms 1630, 1v.