While ceremonial progresses and civic entries have been understood primarily through the lens of urban–royal relationships, they were also occasions for the political engagement of the rural elite. A case study of the homages performed by southern French lords to King Charles VI shows that the landed aristocracy was integral to the royal agenda. It also offers an innovative spatial approach to analysing their agency in this process, which reinforced their own authority and social interests. The reciprocity of this interaction attests the deliberate incorporation of local lordship into the co-operative structures of late medieval government.

This article surveys the extensive registers of homages and dénombrements from the voyage of King Charles VI to Languedoc in 1389–90 as evidence of the reinforcement of seigneurial power through interaction with the royal government. These records established a consensus view of aristocratic power in the seneschalsies of Toulouse and Carcassonne but differentiated those who owed homage or fealty to the king. This distinction revealed a consistent gap within the stratification of social status and judicial rights of the men and women in these groups, even as references to lordship across this corpus remained stable. Lordship and nobility were thus malleable but separate concepts, and lordship cut across the divide between the categories of high and low justice often prioritized by normative models of power. The negotiations surrounding seigneurial authority suggest a decentralized and dynamic alternative to top-down models of the political development of the late medieval French kingdom. Cet article aborde les registres d'hommages et de dénombrements faits au roi Charles VI en Languedoc en 1389–90 en les traitant comme signes du renforcement du pouvoir seigneurial à travers des interactions avec la monarchie. Ces registres établissent une vision consensuelle du pouvoir aristocratique dans les sénéchaussées de Toulouse et de Carcassonne, tout en distinguant ceux qui doivent hommage ou fidélité au roi. Cette distinction révèle un écart dans la stratification du statut social et des droits judiciaires de ces hommes et femmes, alors même que les références à la seigneurie restent stables dans l'ensemble du corpus. La seigneurie et la noblesse sont donc des concepts malléables mais distincts, et la seigneurie recoupe la distinction entre les catégories de haute et de basse justice privilégiées par les modèles normatifs du pouvoir. Ces négociations autour de l'autorité seigneuriale suggèrent une alternative décentralisée et dynamique aux modèles top down du développement politique du royaume français à la fin du Moyen Age.

Mary of Burgundy inherited the extensive domains of her father, Duke Charles the Bold, upon his death in 1477; then in 1482, at only twenty-five years of age, she met her own death in a hunting accident. During these five short years, she faced off against the French King Louis xi, married Archduke Maximilian of Austria, and bore three children. Historians have been left with