Les principales étapes du développement des foires de Champagne

 

Robert-Henri Bautier

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Bautier Robert-Henri. Les principales étapes du développement des foires de Champagne. In: Comptes rendus des séances

de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 96ᵉ année, N. 2, 1952. pp. 314-326;

doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/crai.1952.9945

https://www.persee.fr/doc/crai_0065-0536_1952_num_96_2_9945

Fichier pdf généré le 19/05/2018

April 22, 2025 Translation with the use of "Vertal.nu"

part 1:

Periodic meetings of large-scale trade, an international center of exchange and credit, a meeting point between the civilizations of the North and the South, a melting pot of new commercial techniques and a new law, the Champagne fairs constituted the basic economic fact of the Western world in the Middle Ages. Their general organization is well known to historians and jurists who have devoted a fine series of studies to them , since the classic volumes of Bourquelot in 1865.

 I would like to draw attention here to a notion that previous works seem to have poorly clarified, that of the historical evolution of the Champagne fairs.

The best and most recent studies on the economic history of the Middle Ages show us
these fairs emerging during the eleventh century and developing very rapidly: reading them, from the beginning or the middle of the twelfth century, their organization, their functioning, their influence would already be those that the texts of the time of Philip the Fair, if not that of Philip of Valois, make known to us.

The illusion of historians is due to a very strong temptation: they believed they could validly use the teaching of the only truly detailed text on fairs, the Customs, style and usage, a true Code of fairs, but which only dates from the last years of the fourteenth century; it can only be used to try to understand the preserved documents of commercial practice. We have another text, a summary of the Privileges and customs of fairs whose brevity is generally deplored ; it cannot be earlier than the last quarter of the 13th century.

Although it is contemporary with the height of the fairs, of which it is one of the best sources, it is not possible to transpose all of its elements to the period of origins.

H. Laurent attempted to avoid these difficulties by assembling a large collection of documents relating to the procedure at fairs; but the oldest document is from 1278 and here again it would be dangerous to extrapolate. The only scientific method consists of forming a corpus of documents relating to fairs and in particular documents of the guards and letters passed under the seal of the jurisdiction.

It is in light of the acts that I have collected in France and especially in the deposits Italian, acts printed or unpublished, that I would like to try to clarify the main lines of the development of the fairs : their origin and the causes of their success, the progress of their organization to their classical age, the date and the reasons for their decline and disappearance of the field of international economics.

The question of why the fairs were located in the four towns of Troyes, Provins, Bar-sur-Aube and Lagny has often been asked. According to some historians, this location was written in nature itself.

But at the time when these "classical" fairs appeared, many other towns in Champagne also had fairs, some of which persisted without achieving success; I will only mention one, Châlons-sur-Marne, at the crossroads of the German road and the Italian road in Flanders, a Roman city and industrial town.

Contrary to what has been said, the road network was far from imposing the choice of fair towns: if Troyes had a privileged location, the crossing of the Marne took place in the city of Meaux and not, at the ford of the monastic clearing of Lagny and the road from Sens to Soissons via Chailly cut the route from Paris to Troyes not at Provins, but around ten kilometers to the west of this locality.

We are therefore entitled to ask whether, instead of being the origin of the fairs, the road system was not formed as a function of them and to serve them.

The most commonly cited reason for the origin of the fairs is that the region was at the confluence of trade flows from the Netherlands and Lombardy, where Italian merchants had to come to seek the products of northern industry.

The success of fairs in cities like Lyon, Châlons, Metz, or Cologne could have been explained in the same way in retrospect. It is certainly undeniable that it was the gathering of merchants from Flanders and Italy at the Champagne fairs that ensured their success; but I am convinced that it had nothing to do with their origin.

We must not forget that until the end of the 12th century the profitable trade in cloth from Flanders and Artois was carried out in Italy itself by men from the North, who came in large numbers to Genoa.

Despite the relative wealth of Italian archives, there is no sufficient evidence of Italian merchants attending the Champagne fairs before the last quarter of the 12th century, although the fairs had already existed for a long time.

H. Pirenne and, after him, H. Laurent, believed that the junction of the two currents, Flemish and Lombard, took place well before the end of the 11th century "halfway along the natural route which runs from Bruges to Venice, in the Champagne plain".

This date must probably be pushed back by almost a century. Because the single text on which they relied is not at all convincing; it is the triple letter by which Pope Gregory, seen in 1074, violently condemns the conduct of King Philip I, guilty of having robbed merchants from Italy and other regions, going to a fair in France (quoddam mercatum in Francia). 

Now the letter is not addressed only to the Bishop of Reims, as has been said, but to the Bishops of Reims, Sens, Bourges and Chartres and another to the Count of Poitiers, Duke of Aquitaine and we cannot conclude from this that the fair was held in Champagn 

The term Francia would rather suggest locating the fair in the royal domain, in Ile de France, and it is probably the Lendit fair: otherwise it is difficult to see how merchants traveling from Italy to Champagne could have been intercepted by agents of the king. 

In fact, fairs existed well before the arrival of the Italians in Northern France. Those of Provins date back to at least the 10th century, since in 996-999, on the occasion of the transfer of the relics of Saint Ayoul, a lord who owned these fairs in half with the count donated them to the abbey.

 In Troyes, they perhaps went back to the end of the Roman period, since a letter from Sidonius Apollinaris preserved the memory of a man who gave legal recognition to contracts made at the Troyes fairs (nundinae) by people unknown in the country by affixing his subscription to them.

 In any case, whatever their previous character may have been, when they reappear in history, with the general tightening of the economy, they are, in the first years of the 13th century, only an agricultural market, a meeting place between peasants and townspeople.

In two documents from 1114 relating to the fairs of Troyes and Bar, only the sales of cattle, donkeys, leather and salt are mentioned as subject to taxation.

With the remarkable demographic development of the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century, these fairs must have taken on increasing importance.

The existence of a new and vast market, caused by the massive clearing of a Champagne region which had until then remained wild and by an initial urban concentration, was to tempt the merchants of the North in search of outlets.

 This is how the local fair saw its horizons broaden. In 1137, the count, regulating a fair in Provins (which was not one of the classic fairs of Champagne) excepted from the common rule the homines of Arras and Flandria who could stay outside the limits of a fair which had become too narrow.

 In 1164, the merchants of Hesdin, a secondary industrial center, had a permanent residence in Troyes. Between these two dates (1137-1164), the merchants of the North internationalized the fair: the Italians would only come later. 

Other cities could have similarly benefited from the expansion of the market and the arrival of foreign merchants. Why is this phenomenon only observed in these four cities?
I thought that the Count's will must be brought into play here.
Indeed, we see that from the last years of the 12th century, the Champagne fairs were organized in a cycle extending over the entire year, with the location of the fair moving regularly from one city to another according to a rigorously established calendar.

 Some have thought that this system could have been borrowed from the fairs of Flanders, which also had it. But for reasons that would take too long to explain here, the fairs of Champagne preceded those of Flanders by a long way, and since it is difficult to suppose that it was the merchants themselves who developed this cycle and chose the fairs that were to be part of it, it must have been the work of the Count.

 The interest the counts took in their fairs is undeniable. At the beginning of his reign, Thibaut removed the Saint-Martin fair in Provins from its former location, then in 1137 he replaced it there and enacted new regulations.

Before 1141 he regulated the May fair in Provins and we know that he established the franchise for the fair in Lagny.

Henry the Liberal twice modified the regime of this latter fair and he issued the great regulation of 1164 for the May fair. Both, through appropriate concessions of rents on tonlieux and rights on houses, interested the ecclesiastical establishments in the success of the fairs and pushed them, the only owners of significant capital in Champagne, to build entire districts to house the merchants, while around the towns important fortifications were built.

Two important measures contributed to ensuring the development of fairs: the conduct of fairs and the guarding of fairs; both were the responsibility of the count. The conduct is the protection granted by the lord to the merchant going to the fairs.
It seems that until then this protection had only been exercised on the very territory of which the lord was, directly or indirectly, the master.