The Long Robe

There was a traditionally close association between the professions of the law and the catholic church. Judges and clerics shared a common educational background, a similar official dress (the professional classes were recognised by their long black or red robes) and a series of shared assumptions about professional conduct. As the Chancellor Bellievre remarked, justice was a 'Holy thing'i ' To Francois Ie Breton, the lawyer and League martyr: 'Religion and Justice are bound up so closely with each other that they are inseparable; the same zeal guides and inspires us and strengthens our courage,.2 In courtrooms, large missals or paintings of the Crucifixion were used as objects of veneration on which witnesses swore to tell the truth.3 Some clerics were members of the parlements and some magistrates were canons of cathedral chapters. Some lawyers trained to become clerics (or to faire la profession, as the taking of Holy Orders was commonly called) before turning to the study of civil law. Many of the qualities commonly regarded as most edifying in a cleric were, with the exception of chastity, also taken to be most becoming in a judge. Modesty in dress, gravity of gesture, propriety in conduct and association were qualities regularly alluded to in the speeches made to the assembled barristers at the beginning of each new legal session by the royal attorney. Eulogies and biographies turned judges like Achille de Harlay (the first president of the parlement of Paris) into something approaching counter-reformed

saints. 4 La Roche Flavin, the lawyer from Toulouse, wrote an extensive account of the sovereign law-courts of France in which he devoted a chapter to the question ofjudicial proprieties and included a number of malicious stories of judges who had failed to live up to their calling. This resulted in an effort to have the book suppressed. 5

Professions have conservative tendencies, and the legal and clerical world of sixteenth-century France rested heavily on history and precedent to prove the importance of tradition as the basis for legitimacy and consent to the law and the catholic church.6 Lawyers used 'the old authors' and studied ancient chronicles in order to cite them in courtrooms in the same way as theologians and clerics consulted the biblical canon and church fathers. To contemporaries, the conservatism of the Latin language used by clerics and the fossilised legal jargon of the courtrooms were very striking. The professions shared a number of common interests and concerns where their conservative instincts were noticeable. The judges, for instance, punished offences against the moral order most severely. These included homicide, perjury, blasphemy, brigandage, infanticide (which Jean Bodin thought was a crime resulting from a pact with the devil) and parricide.I The law and the church were inevitably drawn close together in certain other public affairs. Cases of sorcery and witchcraft were judged by royal courts but frequently required clerical testimony. To judge from the number of cases being presented on appeal to the parlement of Paris and from the contemporary alarm, fear of witchcraft had grown considerably during the civil wars. Both clerics and lawyers were perturbed that 'the practices of sorcerers are in such profusion that a majority of people and families are in continual peril and apprehension, both on their own account and also on the account of the fruits of the earth and their cattle,.8 Jean Bodin, among others, urged judges to relax their standards of evidence and testimony in order to close the legal loopholes through which, he claimed, many sorcerers escaped conviction.f Administration of poor relief and the operation of hospitals as well as the problems of education were also matters of mutual concern. The church had responsibilities towards the poor and the sick and the judges wanted to prevent civil disobedience. In the civil wars, charitable institutions and hospitals did little to

in the Age IV alleviate poverty and private charity was often uncoordinated. Royal legislation demanded that both parlements and clerical administrators cooperated in the management of what resources there were. 10 The universities were in a somewhat analogous position to hospitals in respect of their relationship to the professions, both of the robe and the cloth.r '

There were also common differences of opinion within the professions. One debate concerned the position of the Jesuit colleges in France, which had been set up especially in the first decade of the civil wars. 12 On the one hand, these were opposed because they appeared to challenge the rights of established universities to issue degrees and they were felt to expropriate the education of youth - frequently to foreign-born teachers. On the other hand, some prelates were anxious to encourage the Company ofJesus in their diocese and some judges wanted a cheaper education for their sons. The Jesuit issue was but one part of a wider debate about the Gallican rights of the French church. These rights had been articulated from the early fifteenth century when the schism in the papacy permitted the French church to express certain aspirations to independence both from the papacy and from French kings. The Pragmatic Sanction of 1438 represented clerical aspirations at their fullest but this was revoked by Francois I in all but its purely internal disciplinary decrees by a Concordat reached with the papacy in 1516. The Concordat removed the French church's claims to elect its senior clergy, denied it the right to hold councils of the church without royal permission and restored papal taxation. The Concordat was bitterly disliked by the judges of the parlement of Paris and by the theologians of the Sorbonne. 13 In 1560, there was an attempt to re-establish the Pragmatic Sanction through the estates general and in 1579 the clergy asked for internal elections of senior clergy to be instituted, but all without success. In 1586, an assembly of the French church vigorously resisted a further alienation of church wealth which had been proposed by the king and supported by the papacy, and appealed to the Gallican rights of the French church. Although judges were naturally prudent in their treatment of the Gallican question, barristers, scholars and

constitutional lawyers were more straightforward in their support for the clerw's rights to a freedom from interference from royal or papal power.' Jacques Faye d'Espesse expressed them trenchantly at the estates general of Blois in 1588. The primacy of the papacy within the universal church was not an absolute authority but limited by the canons and councils of the church and local customs. In addition, the papacy had no rights to intervene in the temporal jurisdiction of the French crown. These freedoms were as essential a professional requirement for the ecclesia as for the parlementum.