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On 4 August 1562, Gilles Picot, seigneur de Gouberville, met Thomas Noël and Jehan France walking in the fields of rural Normandy. As they walked that morning, they talked about “religion and the opinions that are in great controversy and contradiction among men today”. “We chatted until we reached the Argouges road”, Gouberville recorded in his journal. “And France said in his own words, ‘Believe me, we will make a new God who will be neither papist nor huguenot, so that we will no longer say such a one is a lutheran, such a one is a papist, such a one is a heretic, such a one is a huguenot’”. Gouberville wrote, “Then I said, Unus est Deus ab eterno et eternus. We could not make gods, because we are but men”. He further commented, “It seemed to me that Noël was very offended by France’s words”.Footnote 1

We know about this conversation because Gilles de Gouberville recorded it in his journal which is well known to historians thanks to nineteenth-century editions and now a splendid new 2020 edition.Footnote 2 Gouberville’s account raises several questions. Who were these three men who chewed over religious—and, let’s be clear, political—controversies out in the fields of Normandy during a civil war over religion? How did people talk with family, neighbours, and acquaintances about matters that were not only sensitive but potentially dangerous? And what can we make of the strange mixture of French and Latin in which one speaker voiced an eerie scepticism (“we will make a new God”), another appeared to take offence (but at what?), and the third—who, by recording it in his journal, had the last word—offered a lofty Latin maxim shutting down further irenic speculation?

Confronting the ambiguities that surface in this episode plunges us deep into the turmoil of Gouberville’s world. It is but one private conversation that took place in a corner of the French kingdom on an August morning a few months into the first civil war between Catholics and Protestants—wars that were to last nearly forty years, from 1562 to 1598. But it suggests how neighbours and acquaintances talked their way into and out of divisions over religion. Circling around that enigmatic conversation, I consider everyday talk as an engine of both bonding and discord. I begin with Gouberville, his social networks, and his journal in order to locate the conversation. I then explore the conversations that Gouberville recorded in his journal, including the August 1562 conversation. I conclude with comments about religion and talk.

Gouberville, His Social Worlds, and His Journal

Gilles de Gouberville was a rural lord living in Normandy’s Cotentin peninsula. The Cotentin was a region of extensive bocage, a mixture of woods, pastureland, rivers, and streams where hunting and fishing paid rich rewards. The Cotentin also boasted the port city of Cherbourg and a number of large towns such as Valognes. Lower Normandy—the larger region of which the Cotentin was a part—was primarily agricultural, but with cities like Bayeux, Coutances, and Caen where markets were held, law courts met, and administrative business was conducted. Further to the east of lower Normandy was the provincial capital of Rouen. Mesnil-au-Val, the estate where Gilles de Gouberville spent most of his time, was located south of Cherbourg. Gilles also had an estate at Gouberville (northwest of Barfleur) and, after his uncle’s death in 1560, another one at Russy (near Bayeux). Gouberville’s estates comprised a range of agricultural production: livestock, beehives, crops, vegetable gardens, and orchards. He lived in a large manor house at Mesnil with a household of about twenty relatives and servants. He never married, but he lived with half-brothers and half-sisters, the illegitimate children of his father. Gouberville worked his fields and orchards and cared for his animals alongside his half siblings, tenants, and hired workers. He also spent time at the grander manor houses at Gouberville and Russy where he enjoyed the more typically noble pursuits of hunting and fine dining.

Gilles de Gouberville was enmeshed in networks of lords and dependents, and he was very aware of his status in relation to others. He was born Gilles Picot, the oldest son of Guillaume Picot and Jeanne du Fou, inheriting lands from both parents. Gilles and his father, Guillaume, claimed that the family held noble status for generations. Guillaume Picot styled himself sieur or seigneur of Gouberville in order to signal that he was an écuyer during an era of increasing royal scrutiny over noble titles. Following his father’s practice, Gilles Picot called himself Gilles de Gouberville.

Gouberville was a lord, but he was also dependent on greater lords. As part of the lower ranks of the local nobility (families that would be called gentry in England), Gouberville depended on the favour of greater lords. These were patron-client ties as well as traditional seigneurial bonds. Gouberville needed the support and connections that his patrons could provide. Thus, he was exquisitely attentive to favours and slights they tossed his way. He was also painfully situated between Catholic and Protestant noblemen in the early 1560s, as religious allegiances hardened. Gouberville felt his dependency on more powerful people every time he paid homage to nobles of higher rank or was called to muster. Calls to muster arrived with increasing frequency in the late 1550s and early 1560s as religious tensions in Normandy and across the French kingdom deepened and fears of insurrection and invasion surged.

Just as Gilles de Gouberville was a dependent and client, so others also called him master or lord. Seigneurial justice has been called “a peculiarly ramshackle method of government”, with its mixture of neighbourhood, local, provincial, and royal authorities, not to mention the bewildering blend of formal with informal.Footnote 3 Gouberville was a paterfamilias —albeit one without a wife or legitimate children—who presided over a household of extended family and servants. His sphere of influence was local, extending to his household, his lands, the county and town of Valognes, and the Cotentin region. Local it may have been, but minor it was not. As seigneur de Gouberville, he exercised authority over his household, clan, tenants, and beyond that acted as a local mediator and peacekeeper. He sat on the local law court in Valognes. The office of lieutenant for waters and forests augmented Gouberville’s authority, tasked as he was with conserving the resources of woods, streams, and sea coasts.

Despite being a rural nobleman, Gouberville engaged in city life with relish. He was a gentleman of Valognes, the town near Mesnil where he often went to sit on the law court, carry out his official duties, conduct business, visit, and shop. He was a bourgeois of Cherbourg and maintained a residence there. Gouberville went to Caen and Bayeux so often that he regularly slept at the same inns and drank in the same taverns. Legal business took him to Rouen where he met with notaries and lawyers, dined with friends, attended mummeries and poetry competitions, and shopped.Footnote 4

Gilles de Gouberville was an ordinary rural nobleman and part-time urban gentleman. What makes him extraordinary is the written record that he left behind. His journals for the years 1549–1563 have survived.Footnote 5 Journals, mémoires, and livres de raison—also called ego-documents or life writing—vary in form, although most blend family or personal records with notes about events of wider importance.Footnote 6 Gilles de Gouberville kept his as an account book and a daily log of events.Footnote 7 Gouberville wrote for his own reference, noting down series of memoranda about meetings, business transacted, agreements made, accounts paid, and receipts. But he may also have intended the journal to be useful for his heirs in case they needed to document an agreement he had made or a debt he had incurred.Footnote 8 While the journal is surprisingly detailed in some respects, Gouberville was guarded about intimate matters. He wrote cryptically about sexual liaisons.Footnote 9 His journal was not introspective, although he often confided feeling worried, angry, and afraid.Footnote 10 He meant to keep his writing private, devising a code based on the Greek alphabet for some entries, mainly about debts and interpersonal conflicts.Footnote 11 This suggests that members of his households could read French and possibly Latin. Perhaps the journal was not secured in a locked box or cabinet. Even if it was secured, Gouberville may have wanted an additional level of protection for his journal.

Gouberville was a man of letters, after a fashion. We know little about his education. He probably attended a local school with a humanist curriculum, perhaps in Valognes or Cherbourg, where he would have studied what boys studied in such schools, in Latin.Footnote 12 Gouberville owned and borrowed books. He had medical books and law books.Footnote 13 He owned and consulted Nostradamus’ prognostications.Footnote 14 He bought Clément Marot’s French psalter on a trip to Rouen in 1551.Footnote 15 A priest from Cherbourg promised to lend him a French translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince.Footnote 16 What most captures our attention as we try to understand Gouberville as a reader are stories—those he read aloud to his household (chivalric tales from Amadis de Gaule), tales that he recalled from books (Rabelais’ Quart Livre), and stories that he heard from friends.Footnote 17 One day, Gouberville wrote that Symonnet came home and recounted how, following a day of hunting, he had heard at an inn the story of “Helquin’s hunt”, the tale of a ghostly army or hunting party sometimes called “the wild hunt”, “the wild army”, or “the furious horde”.Footnote 18 A folktale about an imminent invasion by a mysterious army might have sent a pleasurable chill down the spine of listeners who were residents of the Cotentin peninsula, accustomed as they were to watching for signs of armed invasion from England. Gouberville did not say whether Symonnet heard the story of Helquin’s hunt read aloud from a book or recited. But Symonnet’s night out illustrates perfectly how books were entangled with storytelling. Enmeshed as he was in writing and reading, Gouberville spent much of his time talking and listening.

Gouberville’s Conversations

Gouberville’s journal is full of talk. He spent a good part of each day conversing and doing business in person. He listed the names of many of the people he met, occasionally adding the topic of conversation. Sometimes he noted that “we chatted” (nous dévisames), a comment that I believe denoted a longer, informal exchange. Gouberville met neighbours and acquaintances after mass or vespers, often walking in the cemetery or a field while talking to them. When staying at inns, he recorded chatting after dinner with his hosts and fellow guests or with the people sharing his chamber or bed.Footnote 19 Gouberville often specified how long the conversation went on: “an hour”, “about a half hour”, “for a long time”, or “until we reached the Argouges road”.

To whom did Gilles de Gouberville talk and about what? That depends in part on who he spent time with. He was often with family, especially his half-sister Guillemette and his half-brothers Symonnet and Arnould. Two more half-brothers worked on the estate alongside them. Gilles sometimes saw his three legitimate brothers and three sisters. He often visited his uncle Jean Picot (d. 1560), seigneur de Russy, who was a priest, curé, local seigneur, and head of the Picot-Gouberville clan. Gouberville did family business with his uncle, and after his uncle’s death in 1560, he worked closely with his brother François Picot (d. 1573), seigneur de Sorteval, to settle the estate and divide the property. Gouberville reported quarrels with his uncle and his brother about debts, family property, and inheritance. One disagreement troubled Gouberville so much that he noted “I am angrier than I have ever been”.Footnote 20

The journal discloses little about how Gouberville talked with his siblings, neighbours, and servants about religion and politics. However, since he spent a lot of time with them, he must have spoken freely on these topics when necessary. He often reached out for support to Symonnet, his neighbour Thomas Drouet, and Thomas Langloys, seigneur de Cantepye, his friend, frequent companion, and Guillemette’s husband. Gouberville asked them to spend the night in his bedchamber when he was ill and implored them to talk to him to ease his worries.Footnote 21 Gouberville trusted these men and spent a lot of time in their company. He knew he could call on them, just as they could rely on him if they needed a loan or a more powerful man’s support in the midst of a quarrel. Gouberville probably did not consider these men his social equals as they were all dependent on him in some way. But they were united by a shared attraction to Protestantism. So they must have spoken about religion and the attendant social and political controversies.

Of all his relationships, Gouberville’s bond with his sister Renée stands out for its intimacy. He was close to both Renée and her husband Jacques du Moncel (1513–1584), seigneur de Saint-Nazer and lieutenant général of the bailliage of Cherbourg. The sibling bond was powerful and reciprocal. Renée sent for her brother when she was ill or her husband was away.Footnote 22 Saint-Nazer, a higher-ranking nobleman than Gouberville, was one of Gilles’ most trusted friends. It was Saint-Nazer who wrote to urge Gouberville to come to Valognes to take an oath of obedience to the king on 1 October 1562, as other local gentlemen had done a day earlier, while rumours circulated that Gouberville was a Protestant.Footnote 23

Gilles de Gouberville lived his life in a peculiar mixture of authority and subordination, formality and informality. Social rank defined life for everyone in the early modern world. But it had its subtleties. Gouberville was a gregarious man who enjoyed company. He was friendly with servants and retainers, artisans and innkeepers, priests, men in the legal profession, military officers, and nobles. Yet he spoke differently with different people. He gave orders to labourers on his lands, exchanged civilities and gifts with those he hoped to cultivate (higher-ranking nobles), and bribe (lower-ranking officials). Labouring alongside his subordinates at Mesnil tempered the obviously hierarchical relationship that Gouberville enjoyed with them. His education, level of culture, and intense entanglement in legal business and lawsuits put Gouberville at ease among men of the law. He often dined or drank with them and sought them out when he visited cities.Footnote 24 Gouberville was friendly with priests—everyone from the local curé to the curé of Valognes, the Cordeliers of Bayeux, and cathedral canons from Caen and Bayeux. He eagerly mixed with some of the higher-ranking nobility, recording with satisfaction their invitations to dine or visit.Footnote 25

Gouberville was a pragmatist, and his journal was a pragmatic document. We know who he met every day, but it is more difficult to know with whom he exchanged closely-held opinions, let alone intimate beliefs and doubts. He probably shared his views on controversial topics with his sister Renée and her husband Saint-Nazer. Gouberville’s August 1562 conversation with Jehan France and Thomas Noël, together with other episodes recorded in his journal, suggests that he may have talked most freely about politics and religion with men of the law. But possibly those conversations were more worthy of note because they were rarer than the ordinary talk he shared every day with his family and neighbours.

A few conversations stand out for the way that Gouberville recorded them in his journal. He sometimes quoted conversations verbatim, or at least wrote as if he did. This suggests that they held particular significance, either because they were about weighty matters like religion, or because they were with people on whose favour he depended. The August 1562 conversation is an example. But there are others. Gouberville recounted a heated argument with his uncle about the uncle’s refusal to repay a debt, which ended with the uncle shouting that his nephew Gilles was “bad” and “saying that I will be damned to all the devils and other terrible and lying words”.Footnote 26 Gouberville also recorded a quarrel with Thomas Laguette, vicomte de Valognes.Footnote 27 In the midst of a gathering at the château of Valognes with numerous local gentlemen and officials in attendance, the vicomte demanded to be allowed to cut wood in the royal forest for his private use. Gouberville said that the royal ordinances forbade it. The vicomte angrily repeated his demand a few days later, adding some sharp criticism of Gouberville, also in the presence of local gentlemen. The quarrel strained relations between Gouberville and the vicomte for a long time. This was potentially a grave matter. Gouberville depended on the good will of men of higher rank. If such good will was withheld, he might be left exposed during times of conflict.

The August 1562 conversation was rare but not unique in the way in which Gouberville framed it. As we shall see, Gouberville recorded other conversations about religion and politics in 1562 and 1563. Religious war created rifts in his social world and the fault lines wound their way through his journal.

Talking About Religion During Religious War, 1562–1563

Religion played a singular role in early modern life. A day in Gouberville’s life before the war shows how religion—and Catholicism specifically—was entangled in everyday life. The first day of September was the feast of Saint Giles, the feast day of Gouberville’s patron saint. On the eve of the feast in 1551, he had a sheep slaughtered for the next day’s meal and attended vespers in the chapel of the Mesnil manor along with some priests and his servants.Footnote 28 The feast day began with a mass said by a Franciscan friar in the local parish church. Then a dozen friends and neighbours dined at the manor house. More guests arrived for the evening meal. The easy mix of clerics with laypeople and of activities which we might call ‘religious’ with those we could call ‘secular’, plus the movement back and forth between religious spaces and secular spaces, reveal a world where religion could not be divorced from celebration, sociability, or the calendar without major disruption. Divisions over religion thus had a unique ability to erode social bonds and interrupt time-honoured customs.

Gilles de Gouberville’s experiences during the first year of the religious wars (spring 1562 to spring 1563) show the cost that such close ties between religion and community life could exact.

Historians have spilled much ink over Gouberville’s religious position.Footnote 29 Was he a Protestant or a Protestant sympathiser? Was he a religious moderate? A coward who retreated from conflict in 1562 and reluctantly swore obedience to the king? I do not claim new insight into Gouberville’s beliefs. But a close reading of the journal shows how much he struggled to maintain his balance as Normandy and the French kingdom descended into civil war. The journal documents Gouberville’s daily efforts to gather news about local conflicts and to learn how his friends and acquaintances were navigating them. Gouberville’s journal paints a picture of a man enmeshed in local religious life and—after 1560—a religious moderate or a Protestant sympathiser uneasily situated among increasingly polarised groups. Gouberville also recorded his often-paralysing fear and worry as religious war reshaped his world.

Normandy was a centre of Protestantism in the 1550s and 1560s. Protestant ideas entered the region in the 1520s.Footnote 30 Protestant preachers proclaimed the word from urban and outdoor pulpits. Noblemen joined the cause. Normandy became a centre of Protestant strength in the late 1550s as churches were established in Rouen, Caen, Saint-Lô, and Bayeux, attracting clerics, officers and lawyers, merchants, and artisans. There were more Protestants in upper Normandy than in Gilles de Gouberville’s region of lower Normandy. But many nobles in lower Normandy sympathised with the Protestants and there were Protestant churches in the Cotentin, including one in Valognes by at least 1559.Footnote 31 Gilles de Gouberville, his friends, family, and neighbours had abundant opportunities to attend sermons if they wished and to talk openly about Protestant ideas.

We can follow Gouberville’s growing entanglement in religious conflict in his journal. In January 1551, he bought a copy of the French Protestant psalter.Footnote 32 This book purchase stands out since it is one of only a very few that Gouberville recorded. In December 1554, he reported that iconoclasts damaged an image of Saint-Maur in Tourlaville.Footnote 33 He did not call the iconoclasts ‘heretics’ or ‘rebels’. His neutral language suggests some sympathy for the Protestants. After this, we have to wait more than five years for the next clear mention of Protestantism. In April 1561 (on Easter Monday), Gouberville was present at a sermon in the courtyard of the rectory of Saint-Clément-sur-le-Vey in Osmanville.Footnote 34 Many were there, he wrote, including gentlemen, ladies, his cousin Nicolas Aux-Épaules, seigneur de Sainte-Marie-du-Mont (a local Protestant leader), and “a hundred men on horseback”. Gouberville does not say if he went deliberately to attend the sermon or merely paused to hear it while passing by with his entourage.Footnote 35

But in 1562 Gouberville’s scattered gestures of curiosity about Protestantism bloomed into greater interest and even commitment. During the spring and summer, Gouberville and many of his circle were in the Protestant orbit. In January, the Crown had issued the Edict of Saint-Germain authorising Protestant worship with some limits. So Gouberville and his friends may have understood the edict as sanctioning worship that most authorities had earlier proscribed. Symonnet, Arnould, and Thomas Drouet attended sermons in Valognes, Bayeux, and elsewhere.Footnote 36 Gouberville’s brother François de Sorteval joined the army commanded by Henri-Robert de La Marck (1540–1574), duc de Bouillon, the royal governor of Normandy, a Protestant who was loyal to the Crown.Footnote 37 Eventually Symonnet joined too. Gouberville’s own position would eventually evolve in the same direction taken by his brothers—a man of Protestant convictions, loyal to the Crown.

Over the following months, Gouberville’s religious observance shifted. He did not record attending mass in May and June, but he did go to Protestant sermons. On 17 May 1562 (the Feast of Pentecost), he heard Pierre Loiseleur de Villiers, a minister from Rouen, preach in Bayeux. Later that afternoon, he attended another sermon at Étréham. Early the next morning, he heard Remon des Moulins preach in Carentan.Footnote 38 Gouberville was more purposeful in attending these sermons than he had been at Easter the year before. Staying away from mass was a significant step. Gouberville almost always attended mass on Sundays and feast days in his parish church. He usually brought friends and the priest home for dinner, making the weekly rite a household social occasion. So his new reticence about mass signals a notable change in his routine and possibly in his beliefs.

Gouberville travelled around upper Normandy and the Cotentin to hear Protestant preachers for a few months in 1562. But he did not need to go further than Valognes to find a Protestant community with its own space of worship. According to the Protestant historian Theodore Beza (1519–1605), a minister had been preaching in Valognes regularly “from the time of King Henry II” (r. 1547–1559).Footnote 39 Gouberville did not write about the Valognes church, but Beza described the small community of Protestants that included gentlemen, men of the law, an official, a physician, merchants, and their families.Footnote 40 Valognes was Gouberville’s neighbourhood. It was a town about an hour’s ride on horseback from his manor at Mesnil. He went there nearly every day. Although Gouberville did not record attending services in the little church set up in a town official’s house, it is impossible to believe that he did not know this small community so near his home. And knowing his attraction to Protestantism, and how often the men closest to him attended services, it is difficult to believe that Gouberville was not present at their gatherings.

The French kingdom gradually descended into civil war over the spring and summer of 1562. Although they were a minority nearly everywhere, Protestants displayed remarkable strength and determination not to be dominated by Catholic majorities and noble armies in 1562 and 1563. Protestant princes and noblemen raised armies. Many of the largest cities in the kingdom—including Normandy’s Rouen, Caen, Saint-Lô, and Bayeux—fell under Protestant control in the summer of 1562.

During the period from 1562 to 1563—the last year for which Gouberville’s journals survive—the nobility of lower Normandy was riven with conflict. Rivalries among noblemen predated the religious wars, of course. But increasing confessional polarisation and armed conflict led to an increasingly common inclination to resort to violence to defend one’s side. A pervasive fear that the Crown was too weak to keep the peace raised the stakes. Gilles de Gouberville lived in this dangerous world. A word misspoken or an opinion disclosed to the wrong person, a failure to show up for a muster of troops, a perceived lack of deference to a powerful nobleman—any of these steps could threaten his honour, his reputation, his social position, his property, and even his life.

These threats burst into the open in May and June and, closer to home, in Valognes. Gouberville and his friends attended sermons on Pentecost and the following Monday in apparent safety. But on Monday night, while staying at an inn in Valognes, they heard the tocsin ring.Footnote 41 An alarm to summon help in an emergency, the tocsin commonly initiated an episode of collective Catholic violence against Protestants during the religious wars. Gouberville wrote no more about the May 17 incident. But according to Beza, although no violence took place that night, the Catholics of Valognes had been preparing an attack on the Protestants.Footnote 42 Fearing a Protestant attack like those organised in Normandy’s larger cities, Catholic men of Valognes had been meeting for weeks at the château, gathering weapons and mustering troops. On May 18, they rang the tocsin, but the attack was thwarted by a few Catholic and Protestant leaders who together pleaded for peace.

The Valognes massacre took place three weeks later on June 7. We have accounts of the massacre from both Beza and the Catholic historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou.Footnote 43 Gouberville’s account largely matches theirs, although without the detail that Beza recounted, possibly because the incident was too horrific to dwell on.Footnote 44 Yet Gouberville wrote with the terror and panic of a man who surely knew both the Protestant victims and the Catholic perpetrators. He first heard of the massacre on June 8, the day after it happened. He immediately sent a messenger to Valognes to verify what he had been told, which a few hours later the messenger did. “I was told that last night at five o’clock there was a great popular riot at Valognes”, Gouberville wrote. “Killed were the seigneur de Hoesville, the seigneur de Cosqueville, master Gilles Louvet, a tailor, Robert de Verdun, and Jehan Giffart called Pont-l’Evesque, and several wounded”. The houses of some of the Protestants were pillaged and destroyed. Horrifically, “the bodies of the dead were still on the street” the following afternoon, “where the women of Valognes were still going to throw rocks and beat them with sticks”. “The people of Valognes are greatly angry”, Gouberville wrote. Gouberville anxiously sought out news and eyewitness reports. Visitors to Mesnil “who saw most of what was done” recounted the details. The massacre of Valognes conforms to a common scenario of a neighbourhood massacre during the religious wars: Catholic neighbours killed Protestant neighbours they knew well in a bloody series of attacks prepared in advance by local officials, often triggered by a Protestant worship service.Footnote 45 Gouberville surely grasped the full horror of the murders, pillage, and desecration of the victims’ bodies from hearing local reports. His messenger must have seen the bodies of Gouberville’s friends still lying in the street the following day. Gouberville was plagued with headaches and insomnia for weeks.

Gouberville was in danger after the Valognes massacre. Catholic and Protestant noblemen gathered their armies to respond to the bloodshed. Gouberville’s family heard artillery booming night and day. Later, word spread in the neighbourhood that Jacques II Goyon (1525–1598), seigneur de Matignon, lieutenant general of the royal troops in lower Normandy and a staunch Catholic in hot pursuit of ‘seditious’ Protestants, was nearby. “I am warned again this morning that the seigneur de Matignon was very angry at me, hence I spent all day hiding my coffers” and sending the horses into the forest to keep them from being stolen, Gouberville wrote.Footnote 46 Rumours could be false. But rumours that Gouberville was in danger from Catholic leaders intent on pursuing Protestants were probably true. Terrified, ill, and beside himself with anxiety, Gouberville fled to Russy, as always seeking news about troop movements and the safety of his friends and kin.

The August 1562 Conversation

Six weeks after the Valognes massacre, Gouberville had the conversation with Thomas Noël and Jehan France with which I opened this chapter. Now that we understand the maelstrom of religious conflict that engulfed Gouberville, the conversation is more legible. Gouberville normally met these friends either at Russy or in Bayeux where the lawyer and notary worked. But Bayeux was almost a war zone by then, with bloody attacks and reprisals between Catholics and Protestants. Surely a conversation about ‘controversies’ was safer in the fields rather than in a city where bystanders could overhear or in Gouberville’s Russy manor where servants might eavesdrop. Who were the two men to whom Gouberville spoke? Jehan France was a Bayeux notary. Gouberville probably first met him at his uncle’s residence at Russy in 1557.Footnote 47 After the uncle died in 1560, Jehan France helped Gouberville and his brother François to settle the estate. He also handled other legal matters for Gouberville. Noël, a lawyer (avocat) in Bayeux and a tax official (contrôleur d’élection de Bayeux), was one of Gouberville’s lawyers. Noël and France often worked together, the notary France assisting the lawyer Noël. Gouberville gravitated towards men of the law, often writing about meeting, dining, and talking with lawyers and notaries. Gouberville found men like Jehan France and Thomas Noël congenial companions. They were men of the city—literate and educated, steeped in politics, and aware of the news circulating from Bayeux to Rouen to Paris and back again. Gouberville would certainly have had much to chat about with them, either over dinner at an inn or while walking back and forth between the law courts and scribal shops, given that all three men were surely preoccupied by the religious divisions reshaping their world.

To return to the intriguing exchange on August 4 and its possible meanings, Jehan France struck an irenic note in saying “we will make a new God” and imagining a time when “we will no longer say such a one is a papist, such a one is a heretic”. Gouberville believed that Noël was “offended” by Jehan France’s words. By his own report, Gouberville shut down the conversation.

I propose two frameworks for understanding this enigmatic conversation: one about the three men and their religious and political convictions, and one about the ideas they expressed.

First, the men. I have no information about the notary Jehan France beyond what his friend Gouberville recorded. But Thomas Noël, the lawyer and Bayeux official, appears in the early histories of the religious wars in Normandy. Beza and De Thou number Noël among the zealous Catholic officials exacting reprisals against Protestants in Bayeux a few months after the August 1562 conversation. Beza called him “an apostate from the religion”, suggesting that he had once been in the Protestant camp, and named him as an advisor to Giulio Ravilio Rosso, an Italian captain serving in the Duke of Ferrara’s army in Catholic-occupied Bayeux in 1563.Footnote 48 De Thou described Noël as “the principal minister” of the horrific destruction perpetrated by Catholic armies and officials in Bayeux.Footnote 49 According to an eighteenth-century historian, Noël was killed in Bayeux in February or March 1563 when Protestant soldiers commanded by François de Bricqueville, baron de Colombières, invaded the city.Footnote 50 It is no surprise that he might have been a target of Protestant vengeance. According to De Thou, Noël conducted trials and punished many Protestants deemed guilty of “sedition”, “disorders”, and pillaging during the 1562 Protestant takeover of Bayeux.Footnote 51 Noël may once have been a Protestant sympathiser, but by early 1563 he was a Catholic opponent of the Protestants.

What of Jehan France? Here, we can turn to the ideas expressed in the conversation for some clues. France’s comment about “making a new god” has the air of popular religious tolerance familiar from Carlo Ginzburg’s and Stuart Schwartz’s studies of peasants, exiles, and conversos hauled before the Italian and Spanish Inquisitions, who defended the equality of religions.Footnote 52 The French kingdom had its own home-grown relativists or moderates who defended liberty of conscience on religious matters.Footnote 53 Jehan France may have been among them. Is this opinion the reason why Thomas Noël was offended?

Gouberville shut down the conversation with a Latin phrase: “Unus est Deus ab eterno et eternus” (God is one, eternally and forever). I have not been able to trace the provenance of the phrase. Is Gouberville’s turn to Latin a gesture of rising above contradictions or an effort to make a statement of undeniable truth, perhaps a refusal of the changeable? Gouberville may have been annoyed by Jehan France’s foolish words. Was it wise to joke about plural gods during a religious war, or to show one’s cards so openly to a staunch Catholic official, even one who was a colleague and friend? Perhaps the most we can say is that Gouberville appeared to call for an end to further irenic speculation without saying why—or so he indicated in his own account.

I would like to offer one more observation about Jehan France’s words “we will make a new god”. Could a comment about plural gods or inventing gods, voiced in even a mild or jesting way, have wandered into the conversation from contemporary ideas about ancient mythologies? For example, in De inventionibus rerum (1499), the Italian historian Polydore Vergil recounted how ancient gods originated in ancient peoples’ propensity to deify mortal heroes. French publishers issued Latin and French editions of Vergil’s book throughout the sixteenth century.Footnote 54 Did Jehan France or Gilles de Gouberville know those stories? Gouberville’s journal does not say. But Vergil’s work was widely available. And Gouberville and his friends enjoyed a good tale from a French book, either read aloud or recounted at taverns or the fireside. Gouberville heard or read stories from Rabelais and Amadis de Gaule. Symonnet heard the tale of Helquin’s hunt at an inn and went home to tell everyone. Gouberville seems to have enjoyed vernacular compilations of knowledge and stories. He wrote of borrowing from Jehan Bonnet, a Valognes notary, Pedro Mexía’s Diverses leçons (“various histories and other memorable things”).Footnote 55 Maybe Gouberville and his lawyer friends knew stories about the invention of gods from Polydore Vergil or other authors. We do not know if they did. But we do know that they enjoyed lowbrow vernacular compilations of the learned works that they may have studied as boys in their Latin schools.

A few weeks after the talk on the Argouges road, Gouberville recorded another notable conversation. On 30 August 1562, Gouberville went to Bayeux for a muster of gentlemen from his bailliage. After supper with Symonnet at his lodgings, he wrote that he walked around the great abbey in Bayeux for an hour with a few men, some mentioned by name as well as “some others from Bayeux that I don’t know, talking about the troubles and unhappiness that presently exist between the governors of this kingdom and the subjects”.Footnote 56 This odd phrasing—that the governors (the king? the queen mother? the royal governors?) were at odds with “the subjects”—is a bit puzzling. Does Gouberville mean that the men were unhappy with the Crown’s inability to keep the peace among its subjects or to maintain its own authority among its subjects? It is also notable that Gouberville talked with men he did not know about controversial topics like religion and governance. I surmise that the friends he named were truly trusted friends—possibly Protestants or religious moderates like himself. Or perhaps even better—men who would not betray their friends, men with whom one could safely air views on controversies. The unknown others were their friends, so they could also be trusted—or so Gouberville assumed. Seven months later, he sheltered three of his Bayeux friends, including two with whom he had walked at the Bayeux abbey, “who tell me they are fugitives from Bayeux because the Italian captain [Giulio Ravilio Rosso] threatened them” while Bayeux was occupied by Catholic troops.Footnote 57 They stayed for a few days at Mesnil and then proceeded to Cherbourg to stay with other friends.

The war injected rancour into Gouberville’s relationships with his neighbours. Although Gouberville swore loyalty to the king in October (at Saint-Nazer’s insistence), he felt uneasy. A few weeks later, he intervened in a heated argument between two local gentlemen and warned one man that if he did not hold his tongue he would fine him. The man “arrogantly” rejected Gouberville’s intervention. Alarmingly, he also accused Gouberville of being present at the Protestant sacking of Catholic homes and the church of Valognes a week after the June 7 massacre.Footnote 58 Gouberville immediately complained to a local nobleman (the uncle of the man who had insulted him) and appealed to him to remonstrate with his accuser. The uncle declined to do so, and this unnerved Gouberville. The way Gouberville sought support not only shows that he felt his authority among his neighbours had weakened, but also suggests that his safety may have been at risk, especially if local Catholic men thought he had participated in sacking Catholic homes in Valognes. Was disagreement with the man who insulted him a more generalised result of the local conflicts? Perhaps. Or perhaps Gouberville’s own ambiguous position was to blame. Differences over religion fractured people’s bonds with each other. A few years earlier, Gouberville had known how to maintain his position in the complex social hierarchy of the Cotentin. He knew how to talk, where to talk, and with whom to talk. He knew what he could safely talk about. Religious division interrupted his conversation and threw him off balance. It pushed him into new conversations with different people in places he hoped were safe.

Conclusion

Because Gilles de Gouberville wrote nearly every day, his journal traces one man’s entanglement in a rapidly changing welter of beliefs and allegiances. The journal allows us to piece together a picture of Gouberville’s conversations and his religious position.

Gilles de Gouberville was caught in a predicament in 1562. The kingdom of France was at war. Normandy was divided between Catholic noblemen and their armies, Protestant noblemen and their armies, and forces loyal to the Crown. Was taking an oath of loyalty to the Crown—as Gouberville did on 1 October 1562—a way out of the predicament? That gesture could have divergent meanings for Gouberville. It could be a refusal of militant Protestantism. It could be a refusal of militant Catholicism. It could signal genuine fidelity to the Crown—a value that Gouberville also exhibited as the local lieutenant of waters and forests. Stuart Carroll has argued convincingly that in the early 1560s, many French princes were religious moderates or Protestants who were also loyal to the Crown.Footnote 59 They defended royal authority over public religious worship while at the same time signalling their belief in freedom of conscience for noblemen. Gilles de Gouberville fits that profile, albeit on the scale of his smaller world. He was attracted to Protestantism while also (except for a two-month period) attending Catholic mass. Almost every man he was close to attended Protestant services. Two of his brothers served in Bouillon’s army. After taking the oath of loyalty, Gouberville did not again record attending Protestant worship. Much later, in his final testament written shortly before his death in 1578, Gouberville expressed a wish to be buried with his ancestors in their parish church while also professing faith in Christ’s intercession, precisely as a Protestant would.Footnote 60 For a gentleman enmeshed in networks of hierarchy and support so implicated in Catholicism, full withdrawal from Catholicism would be not only impossible to manage but difficult to imagine. Moreover, by the 1570s, Normandy’s Protestants were much reduced in numbers and strength. Before 1562, Gouberville could continue his ancestral religious practices while at the same time indulging his curiosity about Protestantism. He probably believed that the January 1562 royal edict gave him permission to attend sermons. Events of the summer and autumn of 1562 permanently changed the religious and political terrain. Gouberville’s life, property, and social position would be in danger if he threw in his lot with the Protestants who opposed the Crown. By October, he was back at mass while also harbouring his friends who were fleeing persecution by Catholics.

To turn to Gouberville’s conversations: did talking to family, neighbours, and friends drive him towards and away from beliefs, loyalties, and gestures of support for those fleeing division? The short answer is yes. Gouberville was born into a world of social hierarchy. He navigated his place amid dependents, equals, and lords. He built relationships through every form of conversation available to him. Gouberville navigated his world as a talker, not as an armed nobleman. He avoided mustering whenever he could. By early 1562, many of those closest to him—his brother, his half-brothers, his neighbours, his cousins, his Bayeux notary, many of his Valognes acquaintances—had gravitated towards Protestantism. Religious difference and confessional conflict reshaped Gouberville’s conversational practices, altering what he said, where, and to whom. But Gouberville was an active speaker: he spoke, and thus, he altered his world. His journal reveals precious fragments of information about how people talked to each other about religion during a war over religion.