Middle-class

Usage examples of bourgeois.

From time to time, in mention of the pay of men-at-arms, the wages of laborers, the price of a horse or a plow, the living expenses of a bourgeois family, the amounts of hearth taxes and sales taxes, I have tried to relate monetary figures to actual values.

The Menagier of Paris, a wealthy bourgeois contemporary of Enguerrand VII, who at the age of sixty in 1392 wrote a book of domestic and moral instruction for his young wife, had read or possessed the Bible, The Golden Legend, St.

These occasions were the great sporting events of the time, attracting crowds of bourgeois spectators from rich merchants to common artisans, mountebanks, food vendors, prostitutes, and pickpockets.

The loss of so much French nobility caused royal commissioners afterward to scour the provinces for bourgeois and rich peasants prepared to pay for ennoblement.

Against this effort the industrial towns, led by Ghent, rose in revolt under Jacob van Artevelde, one of the most dynamic bourgeois figures of the 14th century.

His taste for luxury extended to everything but ministers, for he inherited from his father and kept in office a shady group, neither capable nor honest, who were despised by the nobles because they were of common birth and hated by the bourgeois for their avarice and venality.

The battalion also included the bourgeois of Paris, Rouen, and Amiens.

Owing to a quarrel over renewed taxation, bourgeois support was disaffected, causing the towns to with draw their contingents.

In their place a Council of Twenty-eight, consisting of twelve nobles, twelve bourgeois, and four clerics, was to be appointed by the Estates, and on that understanding the Estates agreed to grant certain taxes in aid of the war.

Pierre and Martin des Essars, starting from bourgeois origins in Rouen, had become enriched and ennobled in the service of Philip the Fair and Philip VI.

Sundays all business was closed, everyone went to church, and afterward working people gathered in the taverns while the bourgeois promenaded in the faubourgs.

Languedoc sent a delegation of nobles and bourgeois with a gift of 10,000 florins and the assurance that their lives, goods, and fortunes were dedicated to his delivery.

Lesser bourgeois, however, saw the peasant rising as a common war of non-nobles against nobles and clergy.

Breaking into the castle of Ermenonville, one of the many benefits of royal favor bestowed on Robert de Lorris, a combined force of bourgeois and Jacques cornered the owner inside.

Antoine, where he again demanded the keys and met the same response, which was led by a certain Pierre des Essars, a knighted bourgeois and cousin by marriage of both Maillart and Marcel.