A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Coucy’s charter of August 1368 took the form of a collective grant of freedom to 22 towns and villages of his barony in return for specific rents and revenues from each, “in perpetuity to us and our successors.” The sums ranged from 18 livres for Trosly down to 24 sous for Fresnes (still extant villages, as are most in the list), and 18 pence per hearth for Courson. The wording, though swollen by lawyers’ superfluity in every line, is a clear and precise picture of medieval tenure, unlike the dense tangle that has been made of the subject ever since.

  “By general custom and usage,” it states, all persons who live in the barony of Coucy “are our men and women by morte-main and formariage” except if they are clerics or nobles or others “who hold of us by oath and homage.” Because of the many who have departed, “our said land was left in great part uncultivated, unworked and reverted to wasteland, for which the said land is greatly reduced in value.” In the past the inhabitants had requested their freedom from his father, offering certain revenues in perpetuity, “of which thing our dear and well-beloved father whose soul is with God took counsel and found it would greatly profit him to destroy and render null the said custom, taking the profit offered to him”; but before he could accomplish the request, he died. Being fully informed of these things, and having come of age and in full control of his lands, and since the same request has been made of him and payments offered “more profitable and honorable than the said morte-mains and formariages are or could be in the future”; and since by ending their servitude “the people will be more abundant and the land cultivated and not allowed to revert to waste, and in consequence more valuable to us and to our successors”; therefore, let it be known that, having taken “great deliberation on these said matters and well ascertained our rights and profits, we do destroy and render null … and free of all morte-mains and formariages each of them in perpetuity and for always, whether clergy or any other estate, without retaining servitude or power to renew servitude to any of them now or in the future by us or our successors nor by any other persons whatsoever.” Rent and revenues to be received from the said places will be joined “to our heritage and fief and barony which we hold of the King,” who will be asked to approve and confirm the deed. Royal confirmation was duly received three months later.

  Landowners in general, especially the less prosperous with holdings too small to allow a margin of revenue, had suffered economically more than the peasantry from the disasters of the past twenty years. Servile labor, lost through the plague, could not be replaced, since free men could not be turned back into serfs. Mills, granaries, breweries, barns, and other permanent equipment had to be rebuilt at the cost of the owner. Expenses of ransom and upkeep as a prisoner during two decades of largely lost battles, even if the cost was passed on to towns and peasants, were a drain on revenues, although Coucy, whom fortune always favored, did not suffer from this particular blight. Besides having been spared ransom, he received 1,000 francs from the King of France in June 1368 to reimburse him for his expenses as hostage and repair damages caused by the war to his domain. Charles V, too, was wooing the lord of Coucy and Soissons.

  If ties between lord and dependent were weakened by the transfer to a paid basis, the revenue from rents gave the wealthier nobles greater goods and comforts and freedom of residence. They were building great hotels in Paris and acquiring urban interests. The center of attraction was now the King’s new residence called St. Pol, a collection of houses which he had assembled and converted into a palace with seven gardens and a cherry orchard on the eastern edge of the city near the present Place de la Bastille. Twelve galleries connected its buildings and courtyards; topiary figures adorned the gardens, lions were kept in the menageries and nightingales and turtledoves in the aviary.

  Charles reigned in a time of havoc, but in all such times there are unaffected places filled with beauty and games, music and dancing, love and work. While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighboring vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard in one place, bankers count their coins and peasants plow behind placid oxen somewhere else. Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.

  At Coucy’s level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out—to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet hall. At the turret of the castle where the lord’s flag flew, a watchman was stationed with a horn to blow at the approach of strangers. He blew also for the hour of rising at sunup or cockcrow, after which matins were chanted by the chaplain, followed by mass in the chapel. In the evening minstrels played with lutes and harps, reed pipes, bagpipes, trumpets, kettle drums, and cymbals. In the blossoming of secular music as an art in the 14th century, as many as 36 different instruments had come into use. If no concert or performance was scheduled after the evening meal, the company entertained each other with song and conversation, tales of the day’s hunting, “graceful questions” on the conventions of love, and verbal games. In one game the players wrote verses, more or less impolite, on little rolls of parchment, which were passed around and, when read aloud, supposedly revealed the character of the reader.

  At such evenings grand seigneurs liked to preserve the old custom of lighting rooms by means of torches held by servants, instead of wall sconces, because it satisfied a sense of grandeur. They built their “follies,” of which the most elaborate were the mechanical practical jokes devised by Count Robert of Artois at the château of Hesdin. Statues in his garden squirted water on visitors when they walked past or squawked words at them like parrots; a trapdoor dropped the passerby onto a featherbed below; a room, on the opening of the door, produced rain or snow or thunder; conduits under certain pressures “wet the ladies from below.” When the château passed into the possession of Philip of Burgundy, the devices were kept in working order by a resident artist.

  In Picardy, for more general enjoyment, the swan festival was held in July and August, when all three estates joined to chase the young swans raised in local ponds and canals and not yet able to fly. Led by the clergy, followed by nobles, bourgeois, and commoners in order, everyone went out in boats accompanied by music and illuminations. Participants were forbidden to kill what they caught. For sport only, the chase lasted several days interspersed with festivities.

  Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct and clean fingernails. There was much washing of hands both before and after meals, even though knives and spoons were in use and forks, though rare, were not unknown. An individual basin was brought to the lord and a washroom provided at the entrance to the banquet hall where several people at a time could wash their hands at a series of small water jets and dry them on a towel. For the lord’s and lady’s baths, which were frequent, hot water was brought to a wooden tub in the bedroom, in which the bather sat and soaked or, in the case of one illustrated gentleman, bathed in a tub in his garden looking ineffably smug under the loving attentions of three ladies. For lesser residents, a room for communal bathing was generally arranged near the kitchen.

  Two meals a day were customary for all, with dinner at ten A.M. and supper at sundown. Breakfast was unknown except possibly for a piece of dry bread and glass of wine, and even that was a luxury. Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes. Even when stuffed at the toe to make them curl up or tied at the knee with chains of gold and silver, the poulaines produced a mincing walk that excited ridicule and charges of decadence. Yet the upper class remained wedded to this particular frivolity, which grew ever more elegant, made sometimes of velvet sewn with pearls or gold-stamped leather or worn
with a different color on each foot. Ladies’ surcoats for the hunt were ornamented with bells, and bells hung too from belts, which were an important item of clothing because of all the equipment they carried: purse, keys, prayer book, rosary, reliquary, gloves, pomander, scissors, and sewing kit. Undershirts and pants of fine linen were worn; furs for warmth were ubiquitous. In the trousseau of the unfortunate Blanche de Bourbon, who unwisely married Pedro the Cruel, 11,794 squirrel skins were used, most of which were imported from Scandinavia.

  In church, nobles often left the moment mass was over, “scarcely saying a Paternoster within the Church walls.” Others more devout carried portable altars when they traveled and contributed alms set by their confessors for penance, although the alms amounted on the whole to far less than they spent on clothes or the hunt. Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble. Made to order with personal prayers inserted among the day’s devotions and penitential psalms, the books were marvelously illustrated, and not only with Bible stories and saints’ lives. In the margins brimming with burlesque, all the comic sense, fantasy, and satire of the Middle Ages let itself go. Buffoons and devils curl and twist through flowering vines, rabbits fight with soldiers, trained dogs show their tricks, sacred texts trail off into long-tailed fantastical creatures, bare-bottomed monks climb towers, tonsured heads appear on dragons’ bodies. Goat-footed priests, monkeys, minstrels, flowers, birds, castles, lusting demons, and imaginary beasts twine through the pages in bizarre companionship with the sanctity of prayer.

  Often in religious observance the sacred mixed with the profane. When mass was celebrated for rulers, complained a bishop, they held audience at the same time, “busying themselves with other things and paying no attention to the service nor saying their prayers.” The sacrament of the Eucharist celebrated in the mass, in which the communicant, by partaking of the body and blood of Christ, is supposed to share in the redeeming sacrifice of the cross and in God’s saving grace, was the central rite of Christianity and the prerequisite for salvation. Clouded by the metaphysics of transubstantiation, it was little understood by the ordinary layman, except for the magical powers believed to reside in the consecrated wafer. Placed on cabbage leaves in the garden, it kept off chewing insects, and placed in a beehive to control a swarm, it induced the pious bees, in one case, to build around it a complete chapel of wax with windows, arches, bell tower, and an altar on which the bees placed the sacred fragment.

  Even so, communion and confession, which were supposed to be observed every Sunday and holy day, were on the average practiced hardly more than the obligatory once a year at Easter. A simple knight, on being asked why he went not to mass, so important for the salvation of his soul, replied, “This I knew not; nay, I thought that the priests performed their mass for the offerings’ sake.” For northern France it has been estimated that about 10 percent of the population were devout observers, 10 percent negligent, and the rest wavered between regular and irregular observance.

  At the moment of death, however, people took no chances: they confessed, made restitutions, endowed perpetual prayers for their souls, and often deprived their families by bequests to shrines, chapels, convents, hermits, and payments for pilgrimages by proxy.

  King Charles, according to his admiring biographer Christine de Pisan, daughter of Thomas the astrologer, was zealous in piety. He made the sign of the cross as soon as he awoke and spoke his first words of the day to God in his prayers. When combed and dressed, he was brought his breviary, recited the canonical hours with his chaplain, celebrated high mass in his chapel at eight A.M. with “melodious song” and low mass afterward in his private oratory. Then he held audience for “all manner of people, rich and poor, ladies and damsels, widows and others.” On fixed days he presided over matters of state at the Council. He lived consciously with “majestic regularity” to show that the dignity of the crown must be maintained by solemn order. After midday dinner he listened to the minstrels play sweetly “to rejoice the spirit,” and then for two hours received ambassadors, princes, and knights, often such a crowd that “in his great halls one could hardly turn around.” He listened to reports of battles and adventures and news of other countries, signed letters and documents, assigned duties, and distributed and received gifts. After an hour’s rest, he spent time with the Queen and his children—a son and heir was born in 1368 and afterward a second son and two daughters—visited his gardens in summer, read and studied in winter, talked with his intimates until supper, and after the evening’s entertainment, retired. He fasted one day a week and read the Bible through each year.

  Whatever his true paternity, Charles possessed to the full the Valois passion for acquisitions and luxury. He was already reconstructing Vincennes for a summer palace and would soon build or acquire three or four more. He employed the famous chef Taillevent, who served up roasted swan and peacocks reconstructed in all their feathers with gilded beaks and feet and resting on appropriate landscape made of spun sugar and painted pastry. He collected precious objects and gem-studded reliquaries to house the piece of Moses’ rod, the top of John the Baptist’s head, the flask of Virgin’s milk, Christ’s swaddling clothes, and bits and pieces of various instruments of the crucifixion including the crown of thorns and a fragment of the True Cross, all of which the royal chapel possessed. At his death he was to own 47 jeweled gold crowns and 63 complete sets of chapel furnishings including vestments, altarpieces, chalices, liturgical books, and gold crucifixes.

  Thirty years old in 1368, two years older than Enguerrand de Coucy, the King was pale, thin, and grave, with a long sinuous prominent nose, sharp eyes, thin closed lips, sandy hair, and carefully controlled feelings. Through a hard school, he had learned to keep his thoughts to himself, so that he was accused of being subtle and secret. He had recovered from the severe headaches, toothaches, dyspepsia, and other ailments which afflicted him during his regency, but still suffered from a malady—perhaps gout—of the right hand or arm and a mysterious fistula and abscess of the left arm, probably from tuberculosis, but supposed to be the result of the attempt by Charles of Navarre to poison him in 1358. A learned physician from Prague, sent to him by his uncle the Emperor, treated the poison, but told him that if ever the abscess should cease oozing, Charles would die after fifteen days in which he would have time to settle his affairs and attend to his soul. Not surprisingly, the King lived under a sense of urgency.

  As a man of inquiring mind, interested in cause and effect, and in philosophy, science, and literature, he formed one of the great libraries of his age, which was installed in the Louvre, where he maintained a second residence. The library’s rooms were paneled in carved and decorated cypress, stained-glass windows were screened by iron wire against “birds and other beasts,” and a silver lamp was kept burning all night so that the King could read at any time. Not knowledge only but the spread of knowledge concerned him. He commissioned Nicolas Oresme, a learned councillor of advanced and scientific mind, to explain the theory of stable currency in simple language; it was this kind of statecraft that earned him the title of Charles le Sage (the Wise). He commissioned translations into French of Livy, Aristotle, and Augustine’s City of God “for the public utility of the realm and all Christendom,” and owned many other classics, works of the church fathers, and Arab scientific treatises in French translation. The library was eclectic, ranging from Euclid, Ovid, Seneca, and Josephus to John of Salisbury, the Roman de la Rose, and a then current best seller, Sir John Mandeville’s Travels. It contained the various 13th century encyclopedias of universal knowledge, a collection of works on the crusades and on astrology and astronomy, 47 Arthurian and other romances, codes, commentaries and grammars, works of philosophy, theology, contemporary poetry, and satire—in all, according to an inventory of 1373, over 1,000 volumes, ultimately the nucleus of the national library of France. When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answe
red, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”

  His three brothers were all compulsively acquisitive: Louis d’Anjou, eldest of the three, for money and a kingdom; Jean de Berry for art; Philip of Burgundy for power. Tall, robust, and blond like his father, Anjou was headstrong, vain, and driven by insatiable ambition. Berry, sensual and pleasure-loving, was the supreme collector, whose square common pug-nosed face and thick body consorted oddly with his love of art. Philip of Burgundy had Berry’s coarse heavy features but greater intelligence and an overweening pride. Each put his own interests above the kingdom’s, each was given to conspicuous consumption to enhance and display his prestige, and each was to produce through his patronage works of art unsurpassed of their kind: the Apocalypse series of tapestries made for Anjou, the Très Riches Heures and Belles Heures illuminated for Berry by the brothers Limbourg, and the statues of the Well of Moses and the Mourners sculpted by Claus Sluter for Burgundy.

  Never did princely magnificence display itself more noticeably than on two occasions in 1368–69 in which Coucy shared. His brother-in-law, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a widower and father at 29, came to Paris in April 1368 on his way to Milan to marry Violante Visconti, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Galeazzo.* Accompanied by a retinue of 457 persons and 1,280 horses (perhaps the extras were for gifts), he was lodged in a suite especially decorated for him at the Louvre. His sister, the Dame de Coucy, and Enguerrand came to Paris to meet him and to join in the feasts and honors with which the King and his brothers during the next two days overwhelmed their late enemy.