A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  With the French King in their hands, the English were in a position to drive a crushing bargain. But though the French negotiators were prisoners themselves and the Dauphin at home was beleaguered by events in Paris, the French balked at the hard terms proposed. The winter passed with no agreement reached except for another truce to last two years. In May 1357, seven months after the battle, the Black Prince took King Jean with his son and other noble prisoners back to London, while in the aftermath of defeat the Third Estate grasped for control in Paris.

  * It was this deal, negotiated through England’s envoy in Avignon, that was supposed to have earned him the title of Charles the Bad, although this is disputed by others who say it had been conferred by his Spanish subjects from the time he was eighteen. In fact the title was not contemporary and does not appear in the chronicles until the 16th century.

  * His title derived from the Latin capitalis, meaning chieftain.

  Chapter 7

  Decapitated France: The Bourgeois Rising and the Jacquerie

  Long exasperated by the anarchy of royal finance and the venality of royal ministers, the Third Estate of Paris seized upon the decapitation of the monarchy to try to impose some form of constitutional control. The summoning of an Estates General to grant money for defense in the crisis provided their opportunity. As soon as the 800 delegates could meet in Paris in October, the inexperienced Dauphin, humiliated and frightened by the defeat at Poitiers, had to report the battle’s shameful outcome and ask the Estates for aids to deliver the King and defend the realm. The bourgeois, chief creditors of the state, made up half the delegates and listened coldly while King Jean’s Chancellor, Pierre de la Forêt, supported the request. After voting themselves into a standing Committee of Eighty, including nobles and clergy, and allowing the rest gratefully to go home, the Estates prepared to confront the Dauphin with their demands. They asked to speak to him privately, believing that without his councillors he would be more easily cowed.

  The major figure among them, who was to be the moving spirit of the coming eruption, was the Provost of Merchants, Etienne Marcel, a rich draper whose post was equivalent to that of Mayor of Paris. He had been the spokesman when the Estates of 1355 made manifest their mistrust of the royal government. Marcel represented the mercantile magnates of the Third Estate, the producers and businessmen of medieval society who over the last 200 years had achieved an influence, in practice if not in status, equal to that of the great prelates and nobles.

  His first demand on behalf of the Estates was dismissal of the seven most notoriously venal of the royal councillors whose property was to be confiscated and who were to be barred forever from holding public office. 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. A final condition, which they would have done better to avoid, was the release from prison of Charles of Navarre.

  They wanted him because his potential for trouble would put pressure on the Dauphin and because Navarre had an ally among them, a plotter like himself, who was the gray eminence of the reform movement. This was Robert le Coq, Bishop of Laon, a cleric of bourgeois origin and “dangerous” eloquence who through the avenue of the law had risen to favor and high office as King’s Advocate under Philip VI and to the Royal Council under Jean II. He owned a library, large for its time, of 76 books, of which 48 dealt with civil and canon law, reflecting his concern with problems of government, and seven were collections of sermons used for models of the oratorical art. Style and language were a medieval preoccupation of which Le Coq made himself a master. Appointed Bishop of Laon, he had stage-managed the exquisite reconciliations of Jean II and Charles of Navarre, whose ambitions he saw as the chariot of his own. He wanted to be Chancellor and hated both the King for not giving him the office and the existing Chancellor for having it.

  The Dauphin Charles, weakling though he seemed, possessed beneath his sickly exterior a hard core of resistance and a native intelligence, which came to his aid in adversity. Pale and thin, though not yet subject to the maladies that were later to be his portion, he had small, sharp eyes, thin lips, a long, thin nose, and an ill-proportioned body. He was anything but a libertine in appearance, although the two bastard sons credited to him by contemporaries must have been fathered, judging by their age, when he was fifteen or sixteen. Having neither taste nor capacity for military pursuits, he exercised his mind instead, which was useful for rulership, if not characteristic of the Valois. In fact there was gossip about his mother (who had been sixteen when she married Jean at thirteen) which suggested that her eldest son may not have been a Valois. He certainly resembled Jean in no way whatever.

  For the moment, left to defend a crown amid the wreckage, Charles on the advice of his father’s councillors rejected the Estates’ demands and ordered them to dismiss. At the same time he removed himself from Paris as a precaution. Refusing to disperse, the standing committee assembled the day after he left, in November 1356, and listened to an inflammatory address by Robert le Coq denouncing royal misrule and specifying enlarged demands for reform. “Shame to him who speaks not forth,” he cried, “for never was the time so good as now!”

  The bid to limit the monarchy was now in the open. It might have been the French Runnymede if the challengers had been as cohesive as the English barons of 1215, but they were soon to split into factions.

  The upper level of the Third Estate, made up of merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, office-holders, and purveyors to the crown, had nothing left in common with its working-class base except the fact of being non-noble. To overcome that barrier was every bourgeois magnate’s aim. While climbing toward ennoblement and a country estate, he emulated the clothes, customs, and values of the nobles and on arriving shared their tax exemption—no small benefit. Etienne Marcel had an uncle who had paid the highest tax in Paris in 1313 and whose son bought a patent of nobility for 500 livres. Marcel’s father- and brother-in-law, 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. As the crown’s agents, they and their kind provisioned the royal households, commissioned their tapestries and books, purchased their jewels, fabrics, and works of art, served as their confidants and moneylenders, and held lucrative office as treasurers and tax-collectors. Pierre was able to give his daughter Marguerite, when she married Marcel, a princely dowry of 3,000 écus.

  Nobles and clergy resented the royal favor shown and the opulence allowed to officials chosen from outside their ranks. Especially they hated the finance officers, “who travel in pomp and make fortunes greater than the dukes and marry their daughters to nobles and buy up the lands of poor knights whom they have cheated and impoverished … and appoint their own kind to offices whose numbers grow from day to day and whose salaries keep pace.”

  Between the official class and the mercantile bourgeois like Marcel, no love was lost, though they shared the enterprises of capitalism. When capitalism became feasible through the techniques of banking and credit, it became respectable. The theory of a non-acquisitive society faded, and accumulation of surplus wealth lost its odium—indeed, became enviable. In Renart le Contrefait, a satire of the time, the wealthy bourgeois enjoy the best estate of all: “They live in a noble manner, wear lordly garments, have falcons and sparrow hawks, fine palfreys and fine chargers. When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the river.”

  Chosen by the leading citizens, the Provost of Merchants and his fellow magistrates administered all the usual municipal functions and assigned daily duty to the police force, which was manned by the obligatory service of citizens in units of ten, forty, and fifty. Assisted by four deputies and a council of 24 clerics and laymen, the Provost was supposed to be on duty from seven A.M. every day except holy d
ays. His seat was the Châtelet, which was also the city prison and was located on the right bank at the entrance to the Grand Pont, the only bridge leading over to the Ile de la Cité. Nearby the Châtelet was the City Hall on a large open square called the Place de Grève, where the unemployed came to be hired.

  The city Marcel governed covered an area, by present landmarks, from approximately the Grands Boulevards on the right bank to the Luxembourg Gardens on the left, and east to west from the Bastille to the Tuileries. Everything beyond these boundaries was faubourg or countryside. The center of Paris was the Ile de la Cité in the middle of the Seine, on which stood the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Hôtel Dieu or public hospital, and the royal palace built by St. Louis. The right bank, which had expanded beyond the old walls, was the side of commerce, industry, public markets, luxury trades, and wealthy residences, while the left bank, much smaller in populated area, was dominated by the University. According to a tax survey of the year 1292, the city at that time had 352 streets, eleven crossroads, ten squares, fifteen churches, and 15,000 taxpayers. Fifty years later, in Marcel’s day, its total population after the Black Death was probably around 75,000.

  Main streets were paved and wide enough to accommodate two carts or carriages, while the rest of the streets were narrow, muddy, and malodorous with a gutter running down the middle. For the average citizen the rule for elimination was “all in the street,” and in lower-class quarters a pile of ordure usually lay at every doorway. Householders were supposed to carry the deposits to disposal pits and were reminded by repeated ordinances to pave and sweep their doorsteps.

  Traffic jams blocked the narrow streets when pack mules with baskets hanging on either side met street vendors with their trays or porters bent under loads of wood and charcoal. Tavern signs on long iron poles further crowded the streets. Shop signs were gargantuan, the better to overwhelm customers, since shopkeepers were forbidden to call to buyers until after they had left the neighboring shop. A tooth-puller was represented by a tooth the size of an armchair, a glover by a glove with each finger big enough to hold a baby.

  The noise of signs rattling in the wind competed with the cries of street vendors, the shouts of muleteers, the clatter of horses, and the announcements of public criers. Paris had six Master Criers appointed by the Provost, each with a number of assistants who were sent out to the crossroads and squares of the various quarters to announce official decrees, taxes, fairs and ceremonies, houses for sale, missing children, marriages, funerals, births, and baptisms. When the King’s vintage was ready for sale, all the taverns had to close while public criers twice a day cried the royal wine. When deaths were announced, the criers rang bells as they moved along, calling in solemn tones, “Wake, you sleepers, pray God to forgive your trespasses; the dead cannot cry; pray for their souls as the bell sounds in these streets.” Stray dogs howled to hear them.

  Each trade occupied its own quarter—butchers and tanners around the Châtelet, money-changers, goldsmiths, and drapers on the Grand Pont, scribes, illuminators, and parchment- and ink-sellers on the left bank around the University. In the open shops worked bakers, soap-makers, fishmongers, hatters, cabinet-makers, potters, embroiderers, launderers, furriers, blacksmiths, barbers, apothecaries, and the myriad sub-specialties of the clothing and metal trades. Below the artisan class were day laborers, porters, and domestics. Named for their job or place of origin or some personal trait, they might be called Robert le Gros (the Fat), Raoul le Picard (of Picardy), Isabeau d’Outre-mer (from overseas), and Gautier Hors-du-sens (Crazy Walter).

  In each quarter were public baths, providing either steam or hot water. A total of 26 were listed in the survey of 1292. Though considered dangerous to morality, especially of women, they were recognized as a contribution to cleanliness which the city took pains to keep from closing during a bad winter when fuel was costly. They were forbidden to admit prostitutes, vagabonds, lepers, or men of bad repute, or to open before dawn because of perils in the streets at night, but at daybreak the crier’s voice was heard,

  Calling to you to bathe, Messire,

  And steam yourself without delay.

  Our water’s hot and that’s no lie.

  As a capital city with a great university, Paris was host to a turbulent horde of students from all over Europe. They had privileged status not subject to local justice but only to the King, with the result that their crimes and disorders went largely unpunished. They lived miserably, overcharged for dirty rooms in dark neighborhoods. They sat on stools in cold lecture halls lit only by two candles and were perennially complained of for debauchery, rape, robbery, and “all other enormities hateful to God.”

  Though Oxford was growing as a center of intellectual interest, the University of Paris was still the theological arbiter of Europe, and the libraries of its separate faculties, some numbering up to a thousand volumes, augmented its glory. Added to these were the fine library of Notre Dame and no less than 28 booksellers, not counting open-air bookstalls. Here were “abundant orchards of all manner of books,” wrote an enraptured English visitor; “what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts when we visited Paris, the paradise of the world!”

  Water was supplied to the city at public fountains fed by aqueducts leading from the hills northeast of Paris. Windmills filled the faubourgs, where houses had room for gardens and vineyards, and abbeys stood amid cultivated fields. Produce entered the city mainly by riverboat to be laid out on market tables or sold from the trays of vendors. Beggars sat by church doors asking for alms, mendicant friars begged bread for their orders or for the poor in prison, jongleurs performed stunts and magic in the plazas and recited satiric tales and narrative ballads of adventure in Saracen lands. Streets were bright with colored clothes. Crimson, green, and particolored, being the most expensive, were reserved for nobles, prelates, and magnates. The clergy could wear color as long as their gowns were long and buttoned. At sundown the curfew bell rang for closing time, work ceased, shops were shuttered, silence succeeded bustle. At eight o’clock, when the Angelus bell signaled bedtime, the city was in darkness. Only the crossroads were lit by flickering candle or lamp placed in a niche holding a statue of Notre Dame or the patron saint of the quarter.

  On Sundays all business was closed, everyone went to church, and afterward working people gathered in the taverns while the bourgeois promenaded in the faubourgs. On holidays it was a Paris custom to dine at a table set outside the front door. Houses were the characteristic high narrow urban type built side by side, sometimes with a courtyard between the front half and the back. They were half-timbered, with the spaces filled by clay or stone and each story cantilevered over the one below. The hôtels of nobles and magnates kept some elements of the fortified castle with conical towers and high walls. As a concession to urban life they had large glass-paned windows opening onto courtyards, and belvederes with many ornamental pinnacles on the roofs from which a watch could be maintained on all sides. The owner was made known by his coat-of-arms sculpted over the doorway. Streets had no inscribed names, so that people had to search for hours to find the place they wanted.

  Indoors the noble residences were decorated with murals and tapestries, but furniture was meager. Beds, which served for sitting as well as sleeping, were the most important item. Chairs were few; even kings and popes received ambassadors sitting on beds furnished with elaborate curtains and spreads; otherwise, people sat on benches. Torches in wall sconces lit the rooms, and massive fireplaces were built into the walls. These wall chimneys “in the French fashion,” as they were called in Italy, were the greatest luxury of middle-class homes. The only other warmth came from the oven and cooking fire and warming pans in bed at night. Like sanitation, heating was an arrangement that the age seems technologically equipped to have handled better than it did, were it not that man is as irrational about his comfort as about other activities. Fur coverlets, fur-lined clothes, or separate fur linings worn under tunics and robes substituted for active sources o
f heat. The furs of otter, cat, miniver, squirrel, and fox were less expensive than heavy wool cloth; ermine and marten adorned the rich.

  Floors were strewn in summer with fragrant herbs and grasses and at other times by rushes or straw changed four times a year, or once a year in poorer homes, by which time it was filled with fleas and rank with dog droppings and refuse. A well-off merchant scattered violets and other flowers on his floor before a dinner party and decorated his walls and table with fresh greens bought in the market at early morning.

  Rooms were few, servants slept where they could, privacy was nonexistent, which may have increased irritability. Whether it hampered or facilitated seduction is an open question. The two Cambridge students in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale were conveniently enabled to enjoy the favors of the Miller’s wife and daughter because they were put to bed in the same room with the family. Even in greater homes guests slept in the same room with host and hostess.