著者

浜田 道夫

出版者

社会経済史学会

雑誌

社會經濟史學 (ISSN:00380113)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.68, no.4, pp.381-400, 2002-11-25

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In the France the Old Regime, the monarchy gave the nobility the exclusive privilege of hunting and bearing arms; the commoners, especially the peasants, opposed thid monopoly by poaching. The object of this paper is to examine the nature of seigneurial authority through investigating the repression of poaching in several jurisdictions. The poachers who appear in the criminal records tend to be fairly rich peasants (or their sons and young servants) using guns, which circulated among peasants in the countryside through both purchase and loans. This shows that hunting was rather commonplace as a leisure pursuit, although only a few records of proceedings against poaching can be found (only twenty-five in five jurisdictions throughout the eighteenth century). But why are there so few records of proceedings? First, it was because le garde de chasse (the rural police) were recruited from among the peasants and often chose not to pursue poachers; and second, because the seigneurial prosecutor proceeded principally against habitual poachers. There was certainly a threshold of tolerance in the seigneurial justice system. Thus the system served to mediate between the monarch, who needed to maintain order, and the peasants, who had been accustomed to hunting since the middle ages.