Daily Life in Medieval Paris, 1250s: The City of Saint Louis
Lives Before Ours
29,530 views
The first sound of a Paris morning in 1256 was a man walking the streets shouting that the baths were hot.
Three hours inside the largest city in Christendom — and very little of it looks the way we picture it.
This is a slow, sourced walk through the everyday life of one city in one decade: Paris in the 1250s, under Louis IX. Not a single day, but the whole era — the houses and the streets, the trades and the guilds, the students and their riots, the courts and the prison, marriage and the law, bread and wine and the tavern, the river that fed everything, the cathedral rising, the half of the city that was poor, birth and burial, the cold months, and the chained-up dark of a medieval capital at night. Everything here comes from the record: street cries set down in verse around 1265, guild statutes, royal ordinances, the university's own archive, and testimony from poor Parisians taken down a generation later. Where the record runs out, we say so.
Narrated quietly and unhurried, with no sudden changes in volume. For anyone who wants to see that world clearly, and for anyone who would like to fall asleep inside it.
CHAPTERS
0:00 — The Water Is Hot
6:48 — Half an Hour Across
17:47 — Above the Shop
28:00 — The Reckoning
39:35 — Nothing Made After Dark
50:37 — Bought and Paid For
1:01:28 — A Sentence in the Present Tense
1:12:55 — The King's Price
1:24:03 — Soldiers at the Door
1:35:28 — Who Owned the River
1:45:10 — Six Years
1:56:19 — The Mason's Name
2:07:11 — Half the City
2:18:53 — Three Hundred Beds
2:29:40 — The Words the Midwife Knew
2:40:03 — Eight Hours of Light
2:49:05 — Cover the Fire
SOURCES
Primary
• Guillaume de la Villeneuve, Les Crieries de Paris, c. 1265 — Paris, BnF fr. 837
• Étienne Boileau, Le Livre des métiers, c. 1268
• Rutebeuf, complete works — ed. Faral & Bastin
• Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, 1305–09
• Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, vol. I — Denifle & Chatelain
• Ordinances of Louis IX, including the Grande Ordonnance of December 1254
• Gauthier Cornut, Historia susceptionis coronae spineae
• Henri d'Andeli, La Bataille des vins, 1224
• Jacques de Vitry on the students of Paris
Scholarship
• Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris (Cornell UP, 2002); The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris (Penn Press)
• Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis
• John Baldwin, Paris, 1200
• Simone Roux, Paris in the Middle Ages
• Caroline Bourlet and Boris Bove, on the Paris tax rolls and urban density
18 Comments
I love these videos, even if we cannot always verify every single piece of information.
Those from the past wrote many things, but who knows if all they wrote is 100% legit and true.
Nonetheless, awesome content and really addictive.
PARIS...Je t'aime ❤
It is still to this day and not by mere coincidence or chance...the most visited European city.
And I can see why it holds this position.
How sad that few ever comment, when the word...PARIS is mentioned, and if they do, they write about ANYTHING but the topic at hand...PARIS.
Hmmm 🤔🤔
My problem...although I am European, I do NOT trust at all, European history books.
Europeans (specifically the English and the French) had a way of rewriting the narrative, to suit their own needs and to benefit themselves/their own people.
Daily Life in Medieval Paris, 1250s: The City of Saint Louis
Lives Before Ours
29,530 views
The first sound of a Paris morning in 1256 was a man walking the streets shouting that the baths were hot.
Three hours inside the largest city in Christendom — and very little of it looks the way we picture it.
This is a slow, sourced walk through the everyday life of one city in one decade: Paris in the 1250s, under Louis IX. Not a single day, but the whole era — the houses and the streets, the trades and the guilds, the students and their riots, the courts and the prison, marriage and the law, bread and wine and the tavern, the river that fed everything, the cathedral rising, the half of the city that was poor, birth and burial, the cold months, and the chained-up dark of a medieval capital at night. Everything here comes from the record: street cries set down in verse around 1265, guild statutes, royal ordinances, the university's own archive, and testimony from poor Parisians taken down a generation later. Where the record runs out, we say so.
Narrated quietly and unhurried, with no sudden changes in volume. For anyone who wants to see that world clearly, and for anyone who would like to fall asleep inside it.
CHAPTERS
0:00 — The Water Is Hot
6:48 — Half an Hour Across
17:47 — Above the Shop
28:00 — The Reckoning
39:35 — Nothing Made After Dark
50:37 — Bought and Paid For
1:01:28 — A Sentence in the Present Tense
1:12:55 — The King's Price
1:24:03 — Soldiers at the Door
1:35:28 — Who Owned the River
1:45:10 — Six Years
1:56:19 — The Mason's Name
2:07:11 — Half the City
2:18:53 — Three Hundred Beds
2:29:40 — The Words the Midwife Knew
2:40:03 — Eight Hours of Light
2:49:05 — Cover the Fire
SOURCES
Primary
• Guillaume de la Villeneuve, Les Crieries de Paris, c. 1265 — Paris, BnF fr. 837
• Étienne Boileau, Le Livre des métiers, c. 1268
• Rutebeuf, complete works — ed. Faral & Bastin
• Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, 1305–09
• Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, vol. I — Denifle & Chatelain
• Ordinances of Louis IX, including the Grande Ordonnance of December 1254
• Gauthier Cornut, Historia susceptionis coronae spineae
• Henri d'Andeli, La Bataille des vins, 1224
• Jacques de Vitry on the students of Paris
Scholarship
• Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris (Cornell UP, 2002); The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris (Penn Press)
• Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis
• John Baldwin, Paris, 1200
• Simone Roux, Paris in the Middle Ages
• Caroline Bourlet and Boris Bove, on the Paris tax rolls and urban density