The Experience of War According to Late Medieval Petitions in France, England and the Low Countries
(2019) XXVth Annual Forum of Young Legal Historians — Location: Brussels (5.June.2019)
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- Abstract
- War, as a “total social fact”, impacted many aspects of the life of population in the late Middle Ages. From the beginning of the Hundred Years War, the problems caused by the extension of military conflicts became a recurrent motive for grievance, especially in the petitions submitted to the monarchs. People suffering from damages or losses during the war asked for compensations, whereas the violence caused by soldiers were repeatedly denounced. The military service itself became a good motive to catch the monarch’s sympathy, and therefore soldiers who petitioned for a favor frequently detailed their military careers and the suffering they endured during their services. This paper examines the descriptions of war in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century individual petitions submitted to the monarchs in France, England, and the Low Countries. It focuses more particularly on the motives used by the petitioners to narrate their experiences and perceptions of the military conflict, and their impact on their lives. Strong emphasis will be placed on how these descriptions were articulated with the presentation of the identity of the petitioners. Yet, if petitions can be interpreted as “ego-documents” offering a testimony on the supplicants’ experiences of war, their contents were also a legal and rhetorical construct elaborated to support the petitioners’ demands, following the recommendations of the royal or princely administration. In that sense, it will be finally argued that the evocations of war in individual petitions cannot be analyzed without paying attention to the strategies used by the petitioners.
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Verreycken, Q. (2019). The Experience of War According to Late Medieval Petitions in France, England and the Low Countries. XXVth Annual Forum of Young Legal Historians, Brussels. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/169823