JOINTURE, in law, a provision for a wife after the death of her husband. As defined by Sir E. Coke, it is “a competent livelihood of freehold for the wife, of lands or tenements, to take effect presently in possession or profit after the death of her husband, for the life of the wife at least, if she herself be not the cause of determination or forfeiture of it” (Co. Litt. 36b). A jointure is of two kinds, legal and equitable. A legal jointure was first authorized by the Statute of Uses. Before this statute a husband had no legal seisin in such lands as were vested in another to his “use,” but merely an equitable estate. Consequently it was usual to make settlements on marriage, the most general form being the settlement by deed of an estate to the use of the husband and wife for their lives in joint tenancy (or “jointure”), so that the whole would go to the survivor. Although, strictly speaking, a jointure is a joint estate limited to both husband and wife, in common acceptation the word extends also to a sole estate limited to the wife only. The requisites of a legal jointure are: (1) the jointure must take effect immediately after the husband’s death; (2) it must be for the wife’s life or for a greater estate, or be determinable by her own act; (3) it must be made before marriage—if after, it is voidable at the wife’s election, on the death of the husband; (4) it must be expressed to be in satisfaction of dower and not of part of it. In equity, any provision made for a wife before marriage and accepted by her (not being an infant) in lieu of dower was a bar to such. If the provision was made after marriage, the wife was not barred by such provision, though expressly stated to be in lieu of dower; she was put to her election between jointure and dower (see [Dower]).
JOINVILLE, the name of a French noble family of Champagne, which traced its descent from Étienne de Vaux, who lived at the beginning of the 11th century. Geoffroi III. (d. 1184), sire de Joinville, who accompanied Henry the Liberal, count of Champagne, to the Holy Land in 1147, received from him the office of seneschal, and this office became hereditary in the house of Joinville. In 1203 Geoffroi V., sire de Joinville, died while on a crusade, leaving no children. He was succeeded by his brother Simon, who married Beatrice of Burgundy, daughter of the count of Auxonne, and had as his son Jean (q.v.), the historian and friend of St Louis. Henri (d. 1374), sire de Joinville, the grandson of Jean, became count of Vaudémont, through his mother, Marguerite de Vaudémont. His daughter, Marguerite de Joinville, married in 1393 Ferry of Lorraine (d. 1415), to whom she brought the lands of Joinville. In 1552, Joinville was made into a principality for the house of Lorraine. Mlle de Montpensier, the heiress of Mlle de Guise, bequeathed the principality of Joinville to Philip, duke of Orleans (1693). The castle, which overhung the Marne, was sold in 1791 to be demolished. The title of prince de Joinville (q.v.) was given later to the third son of King Louis Philippe. Two branches of the house of Joinville have settled in other countries: one in England, descended from Geoffroi de Joinville, sire de Vaucouleurs, and brother of the historian, who served under Henry III. and Edward I.; the other, descended from Geoffroi de Joinville, sire de Briquenay, and son of Jean, settled in the kingdom of Naples.
See J. Simonnet, Essai sur l’histoire et la généalogie des seigneurs de Joinville (1875); H. F. Delaborde, Jean de Joinville et les seigneurs de Joinville (1894).
(M. P.*)
JOINVILLE, FRANÇOIS FERDINAND PHILIPPE LOUIS MARIE, Prince de (1818-1900), third son of Louis Phllippe, duc d’Orléans, afterwards king of the French, was born at Neuilly on the 14th of August 1818. He was educated for the navy, and became lieutenant in 1836. His first conspicuous service was at the bombardment of San Juan de Ulloa, in November 1838, when he headed a landing party and took the Mexican general Arista prisoner with his own hand at Vera Cruz. He was promoted captain, and in 1840 was entrusted with the charge of bringing the remains of Napoleon from St Helena to France. In 1844 he conducted naval operations on the coast of Morocco, bombarding Tangier and occupying Mogador, and was recompensed with the grade of vice-admiral. In the following year he published in the Revue des deux mondes an article on the deficiencies of the French navy which attracted considerable attention, and by his hostility to the Guizot ministry, as well as by an affectation of ill-will towards Great Britain, he gained considerable popularity. The revolution of 1848 nevertheless swept him away with the other Orleans princes. He hastened to quit Algeria, where he was then serving, and took refuge at Claremont, in Surrey, with the rest of his family. In 1861, upon the breaking out of the American Civil War, he proceeded to Washington, and placed the services of his son and two of his nephews at the disposal of the United States government. Otherwise, he was little heard of until the overthrow of the Empire in 1870, when he re-entered France, only to be promptly expelled by the government of national defence. Returning incognito, he joined the army of General d’Aurelle de Paladines, under the assumed name of Colonel Lutherod, fought bravely before Orleans, and afterwards, divulging his identity, formally sought permission to serve. Gambretta, however, arrested him and sent him back to England. In the National Assembly, elected in February 1871, the prince was returned by two departments and elected to sit for the Haute Marne, but, by an arrangement with Thiers, did not take his seat until the latter had been chosen president of the provincial republic. His deafness prevented him from making any figure in the assembly, and he resigned his seat in 1876. In 1886 the provisions of the law against pretenders to the throne deprived him of his rank as vice-admiral, but he continued to live in France, and died in Paris on the 16th of June 1900. He had married in 1843 the princess Francisca, sister of Pedro II., emperor of Brazil, and had a son, the duc de Penthièvre (born in 1845), also brought up to the navy, and a daughter Françoise (1844- ) who married the duc de Chartres in 1863.
The prince de Joinville was the author of several essays and pamphlets on naval affairs and other matters of public interest, which were originally published for the most part either unsigned or pseudonymously, and subsequently republished under his own name after the fall of the Empire. They include Essais sur la marine française (1853); Études sur la marine (1859 and 1870); La Guerre d’Amérique, campagne du Potomac (1862 and 1872); Encore un mot sur Sadowa (Brussels, 1868); and Vieux souvenirs (1894).
JOINVILLE, JEAN, Sire de (1224-1319), was the second great writer of history in Old French, and in a manner occupies the interval between Villehardouin and Froissart. Numerous minor chroniclers fill up the gaps, but no one of them has the idiosyncrasy which distinguishes these three writers, who illustrate the three periods of the middle ages—adolescence, complete manhood, and decadence. Joinville was the head of a noble family of the province of Champagne (see [Joinville], above). The provincial court of the counts of Champagne had long been a distinguished one, and the action of Thibaut the poet, together with the proximity of the district to Paris, made the province less rebellious than most of the great feudal divisions of France to the royal authority. Joinville’s first appearance at the king’s court was in 1241, on the occasion of the knighting of Louis IX.’s younger brother Alphonse. Seven years afterwards he took the cross, thereby giving St Louis a valuable follower, and supplying himself with the occasion of an eternal memory. The crusade, in which he distinguished himself equally by wisdom and prowess, taught his practical spirit several lessons. He returned with the king in 1254. But, though his reverence for the personal character of his prince seems to have known no bounds, he had probably gauged the strategic faculties of the saintly king, and he certainly had imbibed the spirit of the dictum that a man’s first duties are those to his own house. He was in the intervals of residence on his own fief a constant attendant on the court, but he declined to accompany the king on his last and fatal expedition. In 1282 he was one of the witnesses whose testimony was formally given at St Denis in the matter of the canonization of Louis, and in 1298 he was present at the exhumation of the saint’s body. It was not till even later that he began his literary work, the occasion being a request from Jeanne of Navarre, the wife of Philippe le Bel and the mother of Louis le Hutin. The great interval between his experiences and the period of the composition of his history is important for the due comprehension of the latter. Some years passed before the task was completed, on its own showing, in October 1309. Jeanne was by this time dead, and Joinville presented his book to her son Louis the Quarreller. This original manuscript is now lost, whereby hangs a tale. Great as was his age, Joinville had not ceased to be actively loyal, and in 1315 he complied with the royal summons to bear arms against the Flemings. He was at Joinville again in 1317, and on the 11th of July 1319 he died at the age of ninety-five, leaving his possessions and his position as seneschal of Champagne to his second son Anselm. He was buried in the neighbouring church of St Laurent, where during the Revolution his bones underwent profanation. Besides his Histoire de Saint Louis and his Credo or “Confession of Faith” written much earlier, a considerable number, relatively speaking, of letters and business documents concerning the fief of Joinville and so forth are extant. These have an importance which we shall consider further on; but Joinville owes his place in general estimation only to his history of his crusading experiences and of the subsequent fate of St Louis.