ABSTRACT
One of the most compact and justly famous ideal visions of late-medieval government 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. 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'. By the first decade of the fourteenth century, when Joinville wrote, the administration of justice had long ceased to be the inspirational art of Solomon. It was for rulers to intervene and show clemency; it was for rulers' servants to keep the governance of the land in good order. The broad trend throughout the period is towards the professionalisation of such servants.
