France in the Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, the Kingdom of France was a decentralised, feudal monarchy. In Brittany, Normandy, Lorraine, Provence, East Burgundy and Catalonia, as well as Aquitaine, the authority of the French king was barely felt.
France in the Middle Ages was marked by the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire and West Francia ; the expansion of royal control by the House of Capet, including their struggles with the virtually independent principalities, and the creation and extension of administrative and state control in the 13th century; and the rise of the House of Valois, including the protracted dynastic crisis against the House of Plantagenet and their Angevin Empire, culminating in the Hundred Years' War , which laid the seeds for a more centralised and expanded state in the early modern period and the creation of a sense of French identity.
Up to the 12th century, the territory experienced an elaboration and extension of the seigneurial economic system ; the extension of the feudal system of political rights and obligations between lords and vassals; the so-called "feudal revolution" of the 11th century during which ever smaller lords took control of local lands in many regions; and the appropriation by regional/local seigneurs of various administrative, fiscal and judicial rights for themselves. From the 13th century on, the state slowly regained control of a number of these lost powers. The crises of the 13th and 14th centuries led to the convening of an advisory assembly, the Estates General, and also to an effective end to serfdom. During the 70-year reign of Louis XIV, absolutist policies from Paris tightly constrained the regional nobility, centralising political power at Versailles.
From the 12th and 13th centuries on, France was at the centre of a vibrant cultural production that extended across much of western Europe, including the transition from Romanesque architecture to Gothic architecture and Gothic art; the foundation of medieval universities, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orleans ) and the so-called "Renaissance of the 12th century"; a growing body of secular vernacular literature and medieval music.
Geography
From the Middle Ages onward, French rulers believed their kingdoms had natural borders: the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine. This belief was used as a pretext for an aggressive policy and repeated invasions. However, not all of these territories were part of the kingdom, and the authority of the king within his kingdom was quite fluctuant. The lands that composed the Kingdom of France showed great geographical diversity; the northern and central parts enjoyed a temperate climate while the southern part was closer to the Mediterranean climate. While there were great differences between the northern and southern parts of the kingdom, there were equally important differences depending on the distance of mountains: mainly the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Massif Central. France had important rivers that were used as waterways: the Loire, the Rhône, the Seine as well as the Garonne. These rivers were settled earlier than the rest, and important cities were founded on their banks, but they were separated by large forests, marsh, and other rough terrains.Before the Romans conquered Gaul, the Gauls lived in villages organised in wider tribes. The Romans referred to the smallest of these groups as pagi and the widest ones as civitates. These pagi and civitates were often taken as a basis for the imperial administration and would survive up to the Middle Ages when their capitals became centres of bishoprics. These religious provinces would survive until the French Revolution. Southern Gaul was more heavily populated, and therefore more episcopal sees were present there at first while in northern France they shrank greatly in size because of the barbarian invasions and became heavily fortified to resist the invaders.
Discussion of the size of France in the Middle Ages is complicated by distinctions between lands personally held by the king and lands held in homage by another lord. The notion of res publica inherited from the Roman province of Gaul was not fully maintained by the Frankish kingdom and the Carolingian Empire; by the early years of the Direct Capetians, the French kingdom was more or less a fiction. The "domaine royal" of the Capetians was limited to the regions around Paris, Bourges and Sens. The great majority of French territory was part of Aquitaine, the Duchy of Normandy, the Duchy of Brittany, the Comté of Champagne, the Duchy of Burgundy, the County of Flanders and other territories. In principle, the lords of these lands owed homage to the French king for their possession, but in reality the king in Paris had little control over these lands, and this was to be confounded by the uniting of Normandy, Aquitaine and England under the Plantagenet dynasty in the 12th century.
Philip II Augustus undertook a massive French expansion in the 13th century, but most of these acquisitions were lost both by the royal system of "apanage" and through losses in the Hundred Years' War. Only in the 15th century would Charles VII and Louis XI gain control of most of modern-day France.
Demography
The weather in France and Europe in the Middle Ages was significantly milder than during the periods preceding or following it. Historians refer to this as the "Medieval Warm Period", lasting from about the 10th century to about the 14th century. Part of the French population growth in this period is directly linked to this temperate weather and its effect on crops and livestock. The vast majority of the population—between 80 and 90 percent—were peasants.In the early Middle Ages, France was a center of Jewish learning, but increasing persecution and a series of expulsions in the 14th century caused considerable suffering for French Jews. At the end of the Middle Ages, France was the most populous region in Europe—having overtaken Spain and Italy by 1340. In the 14th century, prior to the arrival of the Black Death, France had an estimated 16 to 17 million inhabitants within its historical borders, while the total population of the area covered by modern-day France has been estimated at 20 million. The population of Paris is controversial. Josiah Russell estimates about 80,000 in the early 14th century, although he notes that some other scholars suggest 200,000. The higher count would make it by far the largest city in western Europe; the lower count would put it behind Venice with 100,000 and Florence with 96,000. The Black Death killed an estimated one-third of the population from its appearance in 1348. The concurrent Hundred Years' War slowed recovery. By the mid-16th century the population recovered to mid-14th century levels.
Languages and literacy
was the primary medium of scholarly exchange as well as the liturgical language of the Catholic Church; it was also the language of science, literature, law, and administration. From the 13th century on, vernacular languages were used in administrative work and the law courts, but Latin remained an administrative and legal language until the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts prescribed the use of French in all judicial acts, notarized contracts, and official legislation. The vast majority of the population, however, spoke a variety of vernacular languages derived from vulgar Latin, the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire.The medieval Italian poet Dante, in his Latin De vulgari eloquentia, classified the Romance languages into three groups by their respective words for "yes": Nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil. The oïl languagesfrom Latin , "that is it"were spoken primarily in northern France, the oc languagesfrom Latin ', "that"in southern France, and the si languagesfrom Latin ', "thus"on the Italian and Iberian Peninsula. Modern linguists typically add a third group within France around Lyon, the "Arpitan" or "Franco-Provençal language", whose modern word for "yes" is ouè. The langue d'oc, consisting of the languages which use oc or òc for "yes", was the language group spoken in the south of France and northeastern Spain. These languages, such as Gascon and Provençal, have relatively little Frankish influence.
The Gallo-Romance group in the north of France, consisting of langues d'oïl such as Picard, Walloon, and Francien, were influenced by Germanic languages spoken by the earliest Frankish invaders. From the time of Clovis I on, the Franks expanded their rule over northern Gaul. Over time, the French language developed from either the Oïl languages found around Paris and Île-de-France or from a standard administrative language based on common characteristics found in all Oïl languages.
From the 4th to 7th centuries, Brythonic-speaking peoples from Cornwall, Devon, and Wales travelled across the English Channel, both for reasons of trade and of flight from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of England, and established themselves in Armorica in northwest France. Their dialect evolved into the Breton language, and they gave their name to the peninsula they inhabited: Brittany.
Attested since the time of Julius Caesar, a non-Celtic people who spoke a Basque-related language inhabited the Novempopulania in southwestern France, though the language gradually lost ground to the expanding Romance during a period spanning most of the Early Middle Ages. This Proto-Basque influenced the emerging Latin-based language spoken in the area between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, eventually resulting in the dialect of Occitan called Gascon.
Scandinavian Vikings invaded France from the 9th century onwards and established themselves mostly in what would come to be called Normandy. The Normans took up the langue d'oïl spoken there, although Norman French remained heavily influenced by Old Norse and its dialects. They also contributed many words to French related to sailing and farming. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the Normans' language developed into Anglo-Norman. Anglo-Norman served as the language of the ruling classes and commerce in England from the time of the conquest until the Hundred Years' War, by which time the use of French-influenced English had spread throughout English society.
Also around this time period, many words from the Arabic language entered French, mainly indirectly through Medieval Latin, Italian and Spanish. There are words for luxury goods, spices, trade goods, sciences, and mathematics.
While education and literacy had been important components of aristocratic service in the Carolingian period, by the 11th century and continuing into the 13th century, the lay public in France—both nobles and peasants—was largely illiterate, except for members of the great courts and, in the south, smaller noble families. This situation began to change in the 13th century, where there were literate members of the French nobility like Guillaume de Lorris, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, and Jean de Joinville. Similarly, with the outpouring of French vernacular literature from the 12th century on, French eventually became the "international language of the aristocracy".