Feudal Dues

Honorific or useful rights attached to the medieval and early modern seigneurie, known loosely throughout the ancien régime as droits féodaux, and abolished during the Revolution. Honorific seigneurial rights included the privilege of a pew in church, keeping pigeons, hunting, and fishing. Useful, profitable rights were in the form of quitrents; labour services (corvées); the champart, a levy in kind of a small proportion of the crop; the cens, originally a money equivalent to labour but which soon became a nominal sum because of inflation; and banalités, the monopoly of the mill, oven, and press for flour, bread, and grapes in the fief.

The incidence of these dues varied considerably from region to region and is now impossible to calculate precisely. In the south, where the principle was ‘nul seigneur sans titre’, the system weighed very lightly, if at all. In the north, the customary assumption was ‘nulle terre sans seigneur’ and the burden was much heavier. Even so, it has sometimes been exaggerated, for it rarely amounted to as much as one-twelfth of the peasant's income. However, in provinces like Brittany and Burgundy heavy payments were often exacted by the lords. Beaumarchais's droit du seigneur was, of course, an amusing invention, but many historians have contended, arguably, that in the last decades of the ancien régime dues were exacted more systematically and with a keener sense of profit. It is certain that dues were increasingly resented by the peasantry in the pre-Revolutionary decades.

[Peter Campbell]