ABSTRACT
One of the most compact and justly famous ideal visions of late-medievalgovernment is owed to Jean, lord of Joinville, who, in his biography of his king, fellow-crusader, and friend, Louis IX, provides a veritable idyll of kingship. It begins in the chateau of Yeres, where, in 1254, Louis IX heard a sermon preached by a Franciscan friar, who drew the lesson from scripture that ‘no realm was ever lost, nor passed to the lordship of another, except by default of right’. Louis took the lesson to heart. Good and swift justice was what he owed his subjects, and delivered to them, in Joinville’s opinion: ‘which is why Our Lord suffered him to hold his kingdom in peace for all his life’. According to Joinville it was Louis’ wont after mass to sit beneath an oak in the Bois de Vincennes, surrounded by his entourage but unencumbered by ushers or stewards, and so to make himself available to all who sought redress for their grievances. In other words, Louis held court, and Joinville describes him assigning the various pleas of his subjects to his officers and courtiers, two of whom Joinville names: Pierre de Fontaines and Geoffroi de Villette, charging them to hear a case (Jean de Joinville 1871: 199)
A great deal of later medieval kingship is in this story, and a fair portion of what is not can nevertheless be inferred from it. To begin with the obvious: there was an indissoluble link between the exercise of rule and the administration of justice. To forget that elementary connection could result in the loss of a kingdom. The Franciscan who preached before Louis would not have found it hard to illustrate the point. Had not Saul, the first king of the Chosen People, been found wanting and consequently been delivered to the Philistines along with his sons? (1 Samuel 15, 26; 1 Samuel 31). Had not David, his successor, been driven from Jerusalem by his own son Absalom, that same Absalom who, having lamented at the gates of the city that there was none to do justice in the land, had softened the people to his planned revolt by insinuating himself into David’s neglected position as judge over them, innocently asking as he did so, ‘Who constitutes me over the land, that all who have a suit come to me, and that I judge justly?’ (2 Samuel 15). The vignette of his sylvan court is intended to show that Louis IX could never have been found wanting in the same way as David, and to warn the patroness of Joinville, Jeanne of Navarre, that her husband Philip IV might do better to show himself the king of his people and not merely of his bureaucrats.
