‘Bon loyal et vray’: The praxis of legitimacy and loyalty in Normandy and northern France during the Lancastrian dual monarchy, 1417-1437

My thesis explores the relationship between legitimacy and loyalty in the context of the Lancastrian dual monarchy in Normandy and northern France from 1417-1437. It proposes a practice-centred approach to answer what legitimacy and loyalty did for those who ruled, those who submitted, and those who appealed to power. This research predominantly relies upon two chancery archives: the wartime Norman Rolls (The National Archives, C 64/8-17) and the French royal Trésor des Chartes (Archives Nationales, J and JJ series) based in Paris. In these records I explore the extensive evidence of the administration of Lancastrian governance and the ways in which dynastic, constitutionalist, judicial, and legal forms of legitimate authority were constructed according to shared values. Shared values and reciprocal duty also underpinned relationships of political loyalty, and these bonds were regularly registered into the archives in the written form of oaths or promises of oaths. I examine the terms and matrices of these oaths which were taken to retain offices, lands, and properties, to offer surrender, and for amnesty and mercy, imposing obligations on both the swearers to obey as ‘bon loyal et vray’ subjects and the recipients to protect those materially within their hands. In the last two chapters I focus especially on lettres de rémission and the loyal actions supplicants claimed before the crown. Their submission relied on the principle that they had thrown themselves before someone who had the authority to pardon them, and thus by appealing to power the subject contributed towards the construction of a jurisdiction. By analysing how the Lancastrian dual monarchy served as an effective form of alternative government to the Valois kings in their domaine royal my thesis challenges narratives of the centralisation of identity and loyalty around the singular nation in the late Middle Ages.