Coquillards

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As Coquillards ( German : Coquillarden , often with "Shell brothers" translated) designated in the 15th century , members of a criminal gang in northern France , in 1455 Dijon was put on trial.

On the history of words in Old and Middle French

The old French word coquillard is derived from coquille (from Latin conchyila ), which means "shell (shell)" or "snail shell". In Old French, coquillard denotes the "betrayed husband" or, on the contrary, the "lover of a married woman", in the female form coquillarde the "woman who betrays her husband", according to the sexually transmitted meanings of old French coquille , "male or female genitalia" .

In the development of meanings in Old French and Middle French, crossovers are possible with coquin (" tramp ", "beggar"), coquinaille ("gang of coquins "), coquinerie ("vagabond", "begging", " cheating "), coquelarder ("parasite") , “ To get through as a parasite”), coquellerie (“unrestrained way of life”, “libertinage”), coquelier (“to work as a womanizer ”).

In the 17th century, Cotgrave (1611) mentions vendre ses coquilles (literally "selling his shells", in the figurative sense "cheating", "selling for stupid", "selling worthless"), and Chereau (1628) finally coquillard as " Jacob pilgrims "Or" Beggar pretending to be a pilgrim to St. James "(see below).

The Coquillarden of Dijon

The surviving documents from the trial of 1455 were edited by Lazare Sainéan (1912) and essentially form the entire historical record on the Coquillarden of Dijon. Afterwards, the members maintained a secret language among themselves , which was called jargon ( certain langaige de jargon ), and which outsiders could not understand ( un langaige exquiz que aultres gens ne scevent entendre ). They also had secret identification marks. They referred to themselves in their language as coquillards or compagnons de la coquille and their head as the "King of the Coquille" ( roy de la coquille ), which probably corresponds to the late medieval corporate-class organizational forms of traveling merchants and beggars ( gueux , "Geusards ") you can see. Their headquarters in Dijon, where they had made their presence felt for about two years, is said to have been the brothel of a certain Jacquot de la Mer, where their goings-on is described as follows:

“All they do is drink, eat and spend a lot of money, play dice,
cards, board games and other games; they hold
meetings all the time, especially at night, in the brothel, where they lead a filthy, contemptuous, and unrestrained life
of clutches and libertines, and lose and spend all their money; and
this they do until there is no penny or copper coin left.
And then, after they
have taken everything they can get from the poor girl they entertain in the brothel in question ,
some of them
leave and no one knows where to go, and sometimes stay away two weeks and another time one Month or six weeks. And some come back on
horseback, others on foot, well dressed and well dressed, finely adorned with gold
and silver, and then they begin
their usual games and debauchery with some of the others who have been waiting for them or with newcomers. "

In their criminal activities, they are called burglars ( crocheteurs , so named after the hooks used to break open doors and boxes), fraudsters (counterfeiters, bill fraudsters, fraudsters with false valuable items), tricksters (who own their own things in the inn and those of the landlord carry away secretly and then pretend to be robbed), highwaymen, robbers and murderers are described. 27 people, including several Gaskogner, a Spaniard, an Italian, a Savoyard and a Scot, were named in the process and several of them were sentenced to death or other severe sentences. Although the Coquillarden evidently not only operated in the Dijon area and had connections at least to Paris (see below), it was only among modern writers that they became the most feared band of robbers in France, with an alleged headquarters in Paris, for which the historical sources that have been preserved but give nothing.

François Villon and the Coquillarden

The most important poet of the French late Middle Ages, François Villon , also had a relationship with the Coquillarden . Villon is assigned a total of eleven ballads in the jargon. The second of these ballads expressly addresses its audience as coquillars and also alludes to the execution of two people, Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayleux, of whom the name of the first is mentioned in the sources on the Dijon trial and the second to the crocheteurs , with whom Villon himself was put on record as a burglar.

Regnier de Montigny is already mentioned by Villon in the so-called Small Testament (around 1456) and apostrophized there as a nobleman or "noble man" ( noble homme ), to whom Villon bequeathed three hunting dogs as a fictitious legacy. He was born in Bourges around 1429 and came from a respected noble family with high-ranking representatives in the Parisian judiciary, among others. His father, Jean de Montigny, royal bread master and member of the Paris city parliament, had lost a large part of his fortune when the Burgundians moved into Paris and had died early. Regnier graduated and received minor orders. He will not have been penniless, but saw himself disadvantaged by the loss of family property and high dowry payments to two daughters of his father from his second marriage and joined, as it is said, "different societies of young people" ( plusieurs compaignies de jeunes gens , jeunes gens par lesquelx s'est gouverné autrement qu'à point ), with which he committed a number of crimes including church robbery , burglary, fraud and cardsharps. After various arrests in Tours , Bordeaux and Paris as well as a conviction for murder that was revoked by pardon, he was arrested again for church robbery and other offenses in Paris in 1457 and sentenced to death for the second time, but on a pardon from his relatives, the verdict was in September In 1457 converted into a one-year prison sentence by a royal pardon, with the stipulation that he should then undertake a pilgrimage to the grave of St. Jacob and prove this by a certificate from the local church. The pardon was challenged by the plaintiff of the city because the facts on which it was based were incomplete, and it can be assumed that the trial ultimately led to the execution on the gallows, to which the second jargon ballad alludes.

Colin de Cayeux, son of a locksmith and, like Regnier and Villon themselves, a studied and unmarried clerc , had brought a series of arrests in Paris, Bayeux and Rouen behind him since the 1450s and his technical skills as a crocheteur etc. a. also evidenced by an escape from the prison of the Archbishop of Rouen. Together with Villon, Guy Tabarie and a Dom Nicolas, he had broken into the Collège de Navarre on Christmas Eve 1456 , where 500 gold francs were stolen. His stake and the Villons came out in 1458 when Guy Tabarie was arrested and made a confession. In the summer of 1460 Colin de Cayeux was captured in the diocese of Beauvais and transferred to Paris. The outcome of the trial, in which he was to be held accountable for various offenses, including the break-in of 1456, is not documented, but Villon's allusion to Colin in the "Great Testament" (around 1461) suggests that Colin was at that time had already been executed.

The Coquillarden at Ollivier Chereau

Satirical copper engraving of the St. James pilgrims by Jacques Lagniet 1657

Ollivier Chereau, cloth merchant from Tours, gives an outline of the history, language and organizational form of the begging kingdom of the Geusards in his pamphlet "Le jargon ou langage de l'argot reformé", which appeared anonymously in 1628 and has been reprinted several times since then, and explains it as one of the various subgroups Also the Coquillards : they are the pilgrims of St. Jacob and in most cases honest people, but there are also those who deceitfully claim to be pilgrims to St. James, homeless people who have never been at the apostle's grave or for a long time in their home parish and paid their tribute to the Grand Coesre , king of the Geusards. In relation to pilgrims or St. James pilgrims, which is explained by the fact that such pilgrims wore the scallop shell on their hat or robe and brought and sold mussels as souvenirs from their trip, the expression coquillards does not seem to have been common before Chereau, however it is questionable whether one can already refer to his explanation for the interpretation of the coquillaries of the 15th century and their names.

literature

  • Louis-Jean Calvet: Les coquillards . In: Ders .: L'argot . PUF, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-13-055983-2 .
  • Patrick Mathieu: Le jargon usuel, sociolecte des coquillards . In Ders .: La double tradition de l'argot. Vocabulaire des marges et patrimoine linguistique . L'Harmattan, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-296-06334-1 .
  • Lazare Sainéan : Les sources de l'argot ancien . Slatkine, Geneva 1973 (unaltered reprint of the Paris 1912 edition; EA Geneva 1850).
  • Marcel Schwob : Études sur l'argot français et le jargon de la coquille . Éditions Allia, Paris 1989, ISBN 2-90-4235-16-7 .

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