Treaty of Paris (1259)

The Treaty of Paris (1259) was the peace agreement between Henry III of England and Louis IX of France concluded at Paris on 4 December 1259, under which Henry renounced his claims to Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, and Poitou and in return held Gascony as a fief of the French crown.^{1 • 2} It ended the war with the Plantagenets that had begun with the confiscation of Normandy from King John in 1204, and historians generally agree that it lay behind many of the problems from which subsequent Anglo-French tensions, including the Hundred Years War, stemmed.¹

Background

When King John of England was driven out of Normandy, Maine, and Anjou in 1204, the kings of England refused to acknowledge the loss of the duchy or of the other Angevin possessions conquered by the French kings.⁷ John's successors continued to style themselves dukes of Normandy and counts of Anjou, and every generation tried to recover the lands.⁸ Henry III sent or led expeditions in 1225, 1230–31, 1244–45, and through the 1250s.⁹ No serious attempt to recover the duchy was made by an English king between 1204 and 1259 apart from John's attempt of 1214.⁷

The road to peace. Between 1243 and 1259 England and France were engaged in a series of truces that culminated in the Treaty of Paris.¹⁰ On 8 May 1258 Henry empowered his representatives to treat of peace with France and to conclude truces with five possible terms, since the articles of peace could not be activated at once; the negotiators renewed the truces of 1255 on 29 May, extending them to Easter 1259.¹¹ At the Westminster parliament of April 1258, Henry accepted the peace terms offered by Louis IX.²

The immediate pressure on Henry came from England itself. From 1254 on, the king had pursued a ruinous effort, in both political and financial terms, to win the kingdom of Sicily for Edmund, his second son; this venture helped spark the baronial uprising of 1258 and gravely undermined his position, so he was prepared to concede a great deal concerning the Plantagenet standing in France in order to obtain a lasting peace and restore his authority at home.¹² Louis, for his part, wanted peace with Henry following his peace treaty with Alfonso X of Castile.¹⁰

Negotiation and ratification

The conditions of the treaty were settled between the representatives of the two kings and recorded for the first time in an authentic act at Paris on 28 May 1258; they were not modified thereafter, though a number of details remained for later negotiation.³ Louis invited Henry to a congress at Cambrai in November 1258, but the English barons prevented their king from attending.³ Three negotiators went to France instead: Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester (Henry's brother-in-law), Richard de Gravesend, bishop of Lincoln, and Richard, earl of Cornwall, king of the Romans, Henry's brother.^{3 • 13} Montfort was the most active of the three; when he attended the parliament of 9 February 1259 in London, he was followed by the dean of Bourges, a member of the French king's secret council, and the parliament approved everything that had been decided in France.³ The earl of Cornwall and his son Henry ratified the treaty on 10 February, and the earls of Aumale and Hereford ratified it at London in Henry III's name on 17 February.³

The treaty is often called the Treaty of Abbeville, but Charles Bémont showed that this name is wrong: it was not negotiated at Abbeville and none of the charters reproducing the treaty was delivered there.³ An older account states that it was negotiated at Paris with Simon de Montfort and signed by the two kings at Abbeville during Henry's visit to France in 1259–60, but dated back to 20 May 1259.¹³

In the event, Henry went to France himself. Louis came as far as Saint-Denis to meet him, and on 4 December 1259, at Paris, Henry III solemnly swore the oath of homage and fealty into the hands of Louis IX.³ An exceptionally large number of nobles are said to have accompanied the king of England to Paris.⁴

Terms

Malcolm Vale, a fellow-librarian emeritus of All Souls College, Oxford, whose study of the Angevin legacy appeared in the Oxford volume The Origins of the Hundred Years War, divides the treaty into four main parts and singles out the first as a step Henry took against the wishes of many of his most powerful subjects: he renounced his fiefs in Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, and the two kings in effect concluded a private treaty of peace.¹ Henry surrendered Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou forever, the heart of his dynasty's old continental empire, while retaining Gascony, for which he and his heirs would do liege homage to the king of France.²

In compensation, Henry was promised all of Louis's rights and possessions, or an appropriate exchange, in the Three Dioceses of Limoges, Cahors, and Périgueux, and the Saintonge if it escheated to the French crown.² The treaty provided that the Agenais would remain provisionally in French hands while Henry received its revenues as an annual rent, and that Henry's restored rights together with his existing possessions in Gascony were to be held as fiefs from the French crown.¹⁴ The French king also returned territories in Périgord, Limousin, Quercy, Agenais, and Saintonge that he had occupied without incontestable title.⁸

The feudal settlement. For Louis IX, a key feature of the treaty was the English king's acceptance of the conversion of his allod into a fief through the act of homage, together with Henry's elevation to the status of a peer of France.⁵ Until 1259 the dukes of Guienne had held Gascony in full freedom, allodially; by the accord Henry expressly ratified the French annexations and accepted his last continental possession as a fief.¹⁵ The treaty also provided that any islands the king of England should hold would be retained by him as a peer of France and duke of Aquitaine.¹⁶

Louis's generosity drew criticism from his own advisers, who characterized his position as excessive; for the king, lasting peace was worth territorial concessions.¹⁷ The seneschal Jean de Joinville reports Louis's own reply to the barons who reproached him for returning lands that no one disputed his right to keep: he had done it so that there would be love between his children and those of Henry III, who were first cousins.⁸

The aristocracy and the confiscated lands

The peace of 1258–59 was concluded not only between Louis IX and Henry III but also between their barons.⁴ Like the kings, many landowners after 1204 had aspired to bring England and Normandy once more under a single ruler, and that hope shaped Anglo-French relations until 1259.⁴

Daniel Power, professor of medieval history at Swansea University, treats the confiscated estates of the cross-Channel aristocracy as a distinct context for the negotiations: the terre Normannorum, seized in England from landowners who opted to remain in France, and the less well-known French estates taken by the Capetian kings from landowners who remained in England.⁴ On both sides of the Channel these seized possessions played an important role in royal patronage, influenced legal developments concerning the rights of 'aliens' and inheritance, and contributed to the development of English and French national identity.⁴ The treaty did not occasion a final rupture and in fact eased some cross-Channel management of family lands, though the futures of English and French dynasties were frequently quite discrete by the later thirteenth century.¹⁸ Under the treaty some Norman estates were seized and granted to French vassals of the Capetians, yet several families, such as the Estoutevilles, managed to retain possessions on both sides of the Channel into the fourteenth century.¹⁹

Aftermath

The Paris peace opened only about a third of a century of relative peace between two houses that had quarreled since the twelfth century.²⁰ Implementation, however, was slow. At Henry III's death only the question of the five hundred knights had been settled; the Agenais was not settled until 1279, Quercy and the Saintonge in 1286, and the king of England received only part of the three bishoprics of Limoges, Cahors, and Périgueux, because of the difficulties raised by the privilegiati.¹⁵

From harmony to war. The general harmony between the houses of Plantagenet and Capet after 1259 gave way to a series of significant military conflicts in 1294–1303, 1324–7, and 1337–60.⁶ The clause making the English king a vassal of the king of France for Aquitaine proved, in the view of one French account, incompatible with the rise of the states a century later; the position of the English lands in Aquitaine and Gascony remained the central point of contention, and this impossibility, more than the ambition of Edward III, is held to have made the Hundred Years War.⁸ The English goal during that war was nonetheless shaped by the settlement's memory: in the treaties of Paris (1259) and Brétigny (1360) the English sought the maintenance and expansion of their continental empire.²¹

The 2009 Thirteenth-Century England conference, the first held outside the British Isles, met in Paris to mark the 750th anniversary of the treaty, which it described as inaugurating a period of relative, though temporary, largely unparalleled calm in dealings between the rulers of England and France.¹⁸

References

1. Malcolm Vale, "Anglo-French Tensions", in The Origins of the Hundred Years War: The Angevin Legacy 1250–1340 (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 48–79. https://academic.oup.com/book/12153/chapter-abstract/161569854
2. David Carpenter, Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement, 1258–1272, chapter "The Treaty of Paris 1258–1259", JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.3610947
3. Charles Bémont, "Du nom de Traité d'Abbeville (28 mai 1258 – 4 décembre 1259)", Bibliothèque de l'École des chartes 37 (1876), pp. 253–256. https://www.persee.fr/doc/bec_0373-6237_1876_num_37_1_446702
4. Daniel Power, "The Treaty of Paris (1259) and the Aristocracy of England and Normandy", in Thirteenth Century England XIII (Boydell & Brewer, 2011), pp. 141–158. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/thirteenth-century-england-xiii/treaty-of-paris-1259-and-the-aristocracy-of-england-and-normandy/C3AE0A37BD3B1968966F8815AF96B640
5. "The most notable example is Gascony", Medieval History Journal 20.2. https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstreams/804b96d2-1128-4d93-87b6-09799d474566/download
6. "A matter of trust: the royal regulation of England's French residents during wartime, 1294–1377", Historical Research 89 (2016). https://academic.oup.com/histres/article/89/244/208/5602995
7. J. B. Stevenson, England and Normandy, 1204–1259, PhD thesis, University of Leeds. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/8888/
8. "Le traité de Paris de 1259", Royaume de France. https://royaumedefrance.fr/traites/paris-1259/
9. Scotland, England and France after the Loss of Normandy, 1204–1296, Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/scotland-england-and-france-after-the-loss-of-normandy-12041296/18099B12615B6FD48DC52FFE8B305402/listing
10. P. Mesiano, The Treaty of Paris (1259), PhD thesis, University of Kent. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/81473/1/247Whole_thesis_-_P._Mesiano_with_corrections_.pdf
11. Amicie Pélissié du Rausas, "La paix bricolée: les années de trêve (1243–1258)", in Guerres, trêves et paix, Presses universitaires de Rennes. https://doi.org/10.4000/157bs
12. John Kelleher, "'The King's Other Islands of the Sea': The Channel Islands in the Plantagenet Realm, 1254–1341", History (2022). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-229X.13269
13. "Abbeville Treaties", The Encyclopedia Americana (1920). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Encyclopedia_Americana_%281920%29/Abbeville_Treaties
14. "England: Henry III", The Cambridge Medieval History, Volume VI. https://www.cristoraul.org/ENGLISH/READINGHALL/THIRDMILLENNIUMLIBRARY/VICTORY-OF-THE-PAPACY/8_THE-CAMBRIDGE-MEDIEVAL-HISTORY_VOLUME-VI_VICTORY-OF-THE-PAPACY_CHAPTER-VIII_ENGLAND_HENRY-III.html
15. "Le duché-pairie de Guyenne: l'hommage et les services féodaux de 1259 à 1303", Annales du Midi 69 (1957). https://www.persee.fr/doc/anami_0003-4398_1957_num_69_37_6142
16. "The Separation of England and France 1204–1259", Swansea University. https://www.swansea.ac.uk/arts-and-humanities/arts-and-humanities-research/our-recent-research-projects/the-separation-of-england-and-france-1204-1259/
17. "1259: Treaty of Paris, Capetian Peace and Henry III's Homage", FranceHistories. https://france-histories.com/en/zoom/p5ch9z11-1259-treaty-of-paris-capetian-peace-and-henry-iiis-homage
18. Janet Burton, Frédérique Lachaud, and Phillipp Schofield (eds.), Thirteenth Century England XIII (Boydell & Brewer, 2011). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/thirteenth-century-england-xiii/CE9AF7EA24FA3746179D394FBE17C04A/listing
19. "The Nobility of Normandy and the English Campaign of 1346", in The Battle of Crécy, 1346 (Boydell & Brewer, 2005), pp. 253–264. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/battle-of-crecy-1346/nobility-of-normandy-and-the-english-campaign-of-1346/6E21A12E4245F2F83849C187F01A805F
20. Amicie Pélissié du Rausas, Guerres, trêves et paix. La diplomatie franco-anglaise au siècle de Saint Louis (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2025). https://cour-de-france.fr/actualites/parutions/article/guerres-treves-et-paix-la-diplomatie-franco-anglaise-au?lang=de
21. "'La querelle Anglaise': diplomatic and legal debate", Oxford Research Archive. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A39d8aa2a-182a-44ec-afb4-cc922b6b8305/files/m80cd033d2ea1050fe30f04c84396ceae

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