Untitled - Monoskop

THE ROYAL CHANCERY: LETTERS PATENT
The drawing up of the draft, and the transcription, would each take about an
hour. The document, with other letters for which that secretary was responsible,
would then be brought to the next audience to be sealed. At the
audience, the chancellor sat in state at a table, with the Great Seal in front of
him. The documents were brought to him one by one, and, if approved, were
duly sealed by the chauffe-cire. Lettres simples like book privileges, conferring a
grant of limited duration, were sealed in yellow wax on a single tape or thread.
Very careful privilege-holders sometimes mentioned this when printing the
Letters Patent, 1
though it was standard practice. The document, once sealed,
was taken to the next meeting held by the audiencier, which was a purely
financial meeting, at which the fee due on each document was determined and
recorded in the accounts. The recipient could than pay the fee, and claim his
Letters Patent.
The chancellor presiding at the sealing of documents is depicted in a
bas-relief on the monument which Chancellor Duprat ordered for himself to
be erected in the cathedral of Sens, now in the Palais Synodal. 2 This shows, in
a slightly stylised manner, the ceremony as it would have taken place with the
maximum solemnity, in Paris or at one of the great royal residences like
Amboise. About twenty people are present as well as the chancellor: officials,
guards, petitioners and other onlookers. The bustle of coming and going must
have been considerable, remote from the rooms occupied by the king in a large
palace but more insistent when the accommodation available was more
restricted. Thus there are traces, at some royal chateaux where Francis I made
relatively long stays, of a special building having been provided
for the
chancery outside the walls. At Loches (Indre-et-Loire) La Chancellerie can still
3
be seen in the street leading up to the castle gates, the present building dating
partly from 1534 and partly from 1551. There is also a small house known as
La Chancellerie in the grounds of Chenonceaux, the chateau of which Francis
gained possession in 1524 from Thomas Bohier, and which was later to be
enlarged and transformed for Diane de Poitiers by Philibert de Lorme: it was
at Chenonceaux that Geofroy Tory obtained his privilege in 1526 for
Champfleury (CH 1526, 2). The chancery was none the less quite prepared to
do business in much less convenient surroundings than these. When the king
was travelling, the staff would often have to unpack their belongings and their
records, their stocks of paper and parchment and ink and sealing wax and
tools in some makeshift room. There they assembled what tables and chairs
they could, hung the chancellor's official tapestry with its fleurs de lys, posted
the guards,, and opened up. If the chancellor himself received the best
available accommodation after the king, his office must often have functioned
1 CH
2
1516, 2; 1517, 3; 1518, i; 1520, 8; 1520, 10; 1524, 2; 1525, 3; 1526, 2.
Photograph in C. Terrasse, Francois i" Le roi et le i
', regne, (1945), p. 176 (planche vm).
:<
Photograph in L. Hautecoeur, Histoire de I'architecture classique en France, nouvelle edition (1965), i,
ii, p. 320 (Fig. 101).
65