Introduction

(For information on Godfrey of Fontaines' life and writings, see the introduction to Translation 6.)

Godfrey's discussion of obedience and resistance in 1295–96 deepens the analysis of two of the topics which had been broached by Henry of Ghent five years earlier (Translation 9). Henry's suspicion of rulers who simply appealed to ‘common benefit’ or ‘common utility’ as a justification for taxation was rooted in the connections which canonists and Roman law jurists had already established between taxation, utility, and consent. Just how utility should be judged and just what constituted consent, however, were open to very different constructions. Henry's own conception of tacit consent (that an individual's agreement can be assumed from his remaining physically present in a community) indicates that consent could be construed very widely indeed. When Godfrey of Fontaines came to discuss obedience and resistance, therefore, he made the assessment of utility and the exact nature of consent central to his argument.

Like Henry, Godfrey proceeds to outline the grounds on which disobedience can be morally legitimate. In the aftermath of Philip IV's levies for war in Aquitaine and Flanders this was hardly surprising, as Henry's earlier warning lest rulers abuse the appeal to evident utility appeared to have been all too prophetic. For Godfrey, customary appeals to ‘defense of the realm’ provided no guarantee that a particular tax was actually justified. Godfrey therefore insisted that proof of the utility of such a demand should be provided by the consent of the community.