Charter to the Normans

It provided the province with guarantees in legal, fiscal, and judicial matters and will be regularly brandished during times of crisis, particularly when it came to opposing Norman's specificity to royal centralism.

When a royal ordinance violated any provision thereof, the express reservation added to it recalled the existence of this right, even when it was infringed upon: Notwithstanding the clameur de haro and the Norman charter.

[11] It specifies that it will be collected under custom, meaning for a fixed amount of twelve denarius per household, with numerous exemptions that the king now undertakes to respect.

[15] Article 9 concerns third parties and danger, a double right owed to the king on the harvest and sale of wood from his domain; it excludes deadwood — meaning lower quality green wood: willow, blackthorn, thorns, brambles, elder, alder, broom, juniper, and blackberry — as well as trees felled by the storm.

[22][25] At the end of the Hundred Years' War, the King of France, Charles VII the Victorious, takes possession of Normandy.

[26] However, the king delayed in keeping his promise, and on 25 June 1451, Rouen sent a new delegation to Tours to meet with him and obtain the charter confirmation.

[31] During the Estates-General of Tours in 1484, the charter is barely mentioned,[32] but the son and successor of Louis XI, King Charles VIII the Affable, confirmed it on 27 April 1485.

[33][34] Long respected, this charter ceased to be in force at the end of the sixteenth century and was only truly abolished under Louis XIV, but continued to appear in the ordinances and privileges of the king until 1789.

[35] Its oldest known copy is preserved in the departmental archives of Calvados in the collection of the Abbey Saint-Martin de Troarn.