Gilles Picot, Seigneur de Gouberville

1521–1578

French nobleman

Sources

Rare Insight. Though the nobility was the elite of the early modern era and much is known about the various kings, queens, and dukes, it is surprisingly difficult to know much about the lives of minor noblemen. For every great noble there were hundreds of lesser nobles, living on and running their own estates. Because their activities were so mundane, such country gentlemen rarely left extensive records that have survived through the generations. One ordinary nobleman whose life story survives is Gilles Picot, Seigneur de Gouberville. His journal recounts the daily life of a nobleman in the Normandy countryside in the 1540s and 1550s.

Estate Management. Gilles de Gouberville did not keep his journal to record his hopes, dreams, feelings, and emotions, but instead as an aid to other records in running his estate, centered on a manor house equidistant from three villages. The two-story manor house was de Gouberville’s living quarters, which included several bedrooms, a sepa-rate kitchen and outbuildings, and a private chapel. More important, it acted as the growing and processing center for agricultural resources, including sheep, cattle, and apple orchards, as well as the implements for sheepshearing, butchering, and pressing apples into cider. Made of local stone, the manor house required constant repair, from the kitchen chimney to the outer walls. The roads extending within the seigneurie also needed regular maintenance. The point of “living nobly” was to live without having to work, but Sire de Gouberville’s journal makes clear just how much work was involved in the life of nobility in the country. The routine agricultural labor was carried out by his peasant tenants, outside his immediate purview, but anything more complex, from repairs to the estate buildings, to constructions of new roads, was carefully supervised. De Gouberville’s special care was his fruit trees and nursery garden, though again he left routine care to his most trusted workmen. De Gouberville also held the royal appointment of Lieutenant of Waters and Forests for the region, requiring him to carry out periodic inspections, see to the removal of fallen trees and other potential hazards, and guard against poachers—in its way, another kind of estate management.

Demeanor. However active Gilles de Gouberville was, though, he lacked military experience. De Gouberville never held a commission in the king’s army, and he was not even particularly martial in temperament, preferring com-promise to aggression even in legal disputes. His closest contact to chivalric ideals of knighthood was his enthusiastic reading ofAmadisde Gaul, a popular novel of the period.

Lineage. His life also demonstrates the vulnerability and anxiety caused by the need to live nobly. In 1555 he was part of an investigation into patents of nobility carried out by royal officials. Nobility was a distinct legal category, which carried with it definite legal privileges, among them exemption from certain kinds of taxation to be paid to the king. Since the Crown was always strapped for money, royal officials were authorized from time to time to investi-gate claims to noble status. On the day before the hearing, de Gouberville was up until midnight preparing documents demonstrating his legal claim to being a noble, documents in which the nobility of his ancestors was duly certified. The decision was in his favor: though he was not, apparently, judged to be of truly ancient—and most prestigious—noble lineage, the nobility of his family was at least traced back more than a hundred years to 1463. That information was enough to confirm his privileges, and five years later he was given the additional privilege of legal right to use the surname “de Gouberville,” from the title of his estate, rather than his original surname “Picot.” Yet, the lineage “de Gouberville” ended with Gilles’s death, for though he had three illegitimate daughters, he had no legitimate son to carry on his noble name.

Sources

Jonathan Dewald, Ponf-Sf-Pierre, 1398–1789: Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Madeleine Foisil, LeSire de Gouberville: Un Gentilhomme Normand au XVIe Siecle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1981).

Kristen B. Neuschel, Wordof Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).