The Middle Ages

The English Centuries (1152–1453): What the Eleanor Story Leaves Out

Eleanor's 1152 wedding gets the credit, but Bordeaux's medieval wine boom was a 13th-century trade story: from the fall of La Rochelle to the 1308–09 record.

Bordeaux's medieval wine trade took off in the 13th century, about seventy years after the marriage that usually gets the credit for it. In 1152 Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet. Two years later he was crowned King of England, and her duchy, Bordeaux included, passed under the English crown. Popular histories run straight from that wedding to three centuries of claret. The dates are right; the causation is not. Roger Dion, Yves Renouard and Margery K. James, the three historians whose work founded the field, agree that the decisive growth of the Bordeaux vineyard was a 13th-century commercial phenomenon, not a 12th-century dynastic one. The marriage settled who ruled Bordeaux. The growth of the trade had other causes, and came later.

The marriage of 1152

The political consequences were large and immediate. Once Henry became Henry II of England in 1154, his continental lands were far larger than those of the French king. Aquitaine then stayed attached to the English crown for three hundred years, through inheritance, war and treaty. No serious account dismisses that.

It did not, by itself, create a market. In the first decades of the Plantagenet connection, the wine England bought from western France came mainly from further north. La Rochelle and the vineyards of Aunis and Saintonge were closer to the sea lanes, already organised for export, and served as the main Atlantic wine port before Bordeaux did. Roger Dion's Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France (1959), still the foundation of French wine historiography, insists on this order of events. In his account, Bordeaux in 1152 was not yet a vineyard of European importance. It became one because of what happened in the following century.

1224: the fall of La Rochelle

In 1224 Louis VIII of France took La Rochelle. England's main Atlantic wine port now belonged to its enemy. Bordeaux, which had stayed loyal to the Plantagenets, became the privileged port of the Anglo-Gascon trade.

For Dion, this is where the real history of medieval Bordeaux begins. He identifies two developments that reached the city together in the 13th century. The first was Atlantic navigation: regular bulk shipping made it practical to move wine, heavy and of low value per unit of weight, over long distances. The second was demand. England, Flanders and the northern towns were prosperous and lay beyond the climatic limit of reliable wine-growing, so they had to import. Bordeaux was a defensible river port with a large wine-producing hinterland behind it and an allied sovereign at the other end of the sea route. Its vineyard grew to supply that market. Dion concluded that Bordeaux's standing was a social and commercial fact before it was a geological one, and that thesis still organises the scholarly debate.

How the trade worked

Yves Renouard reconstructed the working of this commerce in his 1959 article on "le grand commerce des vins de Gascogne", which remains the standard account on the French side. The trade followed the seasons. After the harvest, the autumn wine fleet gathered in the Gironde. Merchant ships, many of them English, loaded the new vintage for Bristol, Southampton, London and the northern ports before winter made the crossing dangerous. Medieval wine did not keep. The new wine of the current year was what buyers paid for, so speed to market decided prices.

Gascon merchants and shipmasters worked the route in both directions. The city's burghers used their loyalty to the English crown to obtain privileges, and the most consequential was the privilège des vins. From 1241 Bordeaux's merchants claimed the right to sell their own wines before those of the interior. In 1373 Edward III formalised the arrangement: wines of the Haut-Pays, the upriver country along the Garonne and the Dordogne, could not be brought down to Bordeaux before Christmas. The fleet sailed in autumn. The rule therefore gave the Bordeaux vineyard an effective monopoly on the most valuable weeks of the English market. It stayed in force until the French Revolution.

The peak in the customs registers

From the early 14th century the trade can be counted. The registers of the Grande Coutume de Bordeaux, the export duty levied at the port, survive in series from 1305, and the English Exchequer accounts run alongside them. Margery K. James built her 1951 article in the Economic History Review on these records, and her series is still the statistical basis of the field.

In 1306–07, 93,452 tonneaux of wine passed through the port. In 1308–09 the registers record 102,724 tonneaux, the highest figure in the series and a volume not seen again for centuries. Sandrine Lavaud, the leading specialist on medieval Bordeaux, treats that year as the port's peak until the modern era.

Two caveats belong next to these numbers wherever they are quoted. The medieval tonneau was a cask of roughly 800–900 litres, so the record year comes to something like 850,000 hectolitres, a very large volume for any pre-industrial economy. And these are figures for port throughput, not vineyard production. They include wines of the Haut-Pays shipped through Bordeaux as well as the harvest of the Bordelais itself. What they measure is the size of the trade, which is the question here.

War and Castillon

The peak was short. James's series shows the 14th-century trade swinging violently from year to year, and the Hundred Years War, which broke out in 1337, brought the fighting into Gascony. Armies laid waste to the upriver vineyards and convoys needed escorts. Exports fell well below their early-century levels and never regained them under English rule.

English rule ended on 17 July 1453 at Castillon, east of Saint-Émilion. French artillery destroyed the Anglo-Gascon army there, and John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was killed. Bordeaux surrendered that October.

After 1453

The consequences were commercial as well as political. Bordeaux lost its privileged access to the customer that had dominated its trade for two hundred years. English merchants now dealt in foreign territory, and the regular sailings of the autumn fleet stopped. Most of what the English period had built stayed in place: the vineyard, the merchant city, and the privilège des vins, which the French kings confirmed and which lasted until the Revolution. What Bordeaux lacked was a new principal buyer. Over the following centuries it found one in the Dutch, whose demand reshaped the vineyard as thoroughly as England's had.