A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Berne, city of the Bear, took fire from the news. Within six days a force of Bernese and citizens of nearby towns, including Nidau and Laupen, was assembled under the leadership of Berne’s chief magistrate. On Christmas night the troop surprised a company of Bretons at Jens fifteen miles away and left another 300 Güglers dead, evidently with minor loss to themselves, for they were ready to march out again the next night.

  Their objective this time was the Abbey of Fraubrunnen, where no less an enemy than Owen of Wales was quartered with a large company. Carrying the banner of the Bear, the citizens marched through the night of the 26th in intense cold, and surrounded the abbey before dawn. With loud yells and flaming torches they fired the buildings and fell upon the sleeping “English,” killing many before they woke. The rest sprang to their weapons in a desperate defense: cloisters once accustomed to ceremonial silence rang with the shouts and clang of battle, the contenders fought “stab for stab and blow for blow,” smoke and flames filled every building of the abbey, Owen swung his sword with “savage rage,” the Bernese leader, Hannes Rieder, was killed, but his men forced the Güglers to flight. “And those who fled were slain and those stayed were burned up.” Owen escaped, leaving 800 of his men dead. The Swiss too suffered heavy losses, but the survivors carried glory back to Berne. Among the captured banners still displayed in the city is a red-and-white one, stained and torn, said to be Coucy’s.* Was he at Fraubrunnen in person? His presence is nowhere mentioned but is not impossible.

  Berne decreed an annual distribution of alms in thanksgiving; songs and chronicles celebrated the victory over the dreaded companies which had so long harassed Christendom. Ballads told how the “Knight of Cussin set out to seize castle and town,” with “forty thousand lances in their pointed hats”; how he “thought the land was all his and brought his kinsmen of England to help him with body and goods”; how “Duke Yfo of Wales came with his golden helm”; how the Bishop of Basle treacherously promised to serve the Gügler, and how at last when Duke Yfo came to Fraubrunnen,

  The Bear roared “You shall not escape me!

  I will slay, stab and burn you”;

  In England and France the widows all cried,

  “Alas and woe!

  Against Berne no one shall march evermore!”

  For posterity, Coucy’s role was recorded more soberly, if inexactly, in Latin on a stone pillar erected at Fraubrunnen:

  Seeking again the dowry of the beloved wife

  Which the Austrian brother gave, Coucy, the English leader,

  Led across the sea the standards of strong cohorts—

  A knight attacking foreign fields far and wide.

  In this place, on this ridge, the people of Berne

  Destroyed the enemy camp and slaughtered many men

  In this unjust war. Thus may Omnipotent God

  Protect the Bear from the open [attacks] and secret stratagems

  Of the enemy.

  The voice of an aroused pride and confidence sounds in these war songs and memorials. The fights at Buttisholz, Jens, and Fraubrunnen in Christmas week of 1375, although they did not destroy the Güglers, were greater in significance than in size. They re-energized the Swiss struggle against the Hapsburgs and propelled it toward the decisive battle at Sempach in Schwyz eleven years later in which Leopold was to be killed and the Hapsburg hold over the cantons all but broken, although it took another century before independence of the Confederation was definitely won. As catalyst, Coucy’s expedition played an unhappy role in the growth of a nation, not unlike the Black Prince’s massacre at Limoges. But if the clashes he generated confirmed the fighting capacity of commoners when engaged in their own cause, the lesson did not apply beyond the Swiss and, to some extent, the Flemish. Other attempts like the Jacquerie in the recurring civil struggles of the 14th century were smashed.

  After Fraubrunnen, Coucy was forced to turn back to France. Against Leopold’s refusal to fight he could not regain his inheritance, nor could he hold the companies any longer in a scorched and empty country in freezing weather and in the sunken morale left by defeats at the hands of the populace. Like Edward, like Lancaster, like every invader of his time, he had set out to live off the country with no chain of supply, and he met no different result. The gloomy repetitions of history were never more apparent than in the Gügler War. Habit has an especially tenacious grip when, as in the Middle Ages, the pace of change is slow.

  The exit through Alsace in January was dogged by hunger and cold. Men dropped by the way or deserted, starving horses were left to die, harness and armor abandoned. The strong continued to pillage. Cities closed their gates against the ravagers and in one case, with the aid of the Virgin Mary, added the humiliation of another defeat. The citizens of Altkirch, resolved to do battle against a Gügler company which was preparing an assault, were waiting on the walls for the signal to begin combat when the night sky was suddenly illuminated by colored lights like an aurora borealis. Convinced that their patron, the Holy Virgin, was manifesting her aid, the emboldened citizens charged to the offensive. With equal but opposite effect on the enemy, the heavenly intervention spread consternation and put the Güglers to flight.

  Further on, at Wattwiller, within a day’s ride of Leopold’s castle at Breisach, a treaty was signed on January 13 between Coucy and the Dukes of Austria by which they ceded to him the fief of the deceased Count of Nidau, including the town of Büren, in return for his renouncing his other claims. Whether Coucy on his way out still represented a sufficient threat to extract this settlement, or whether it had been negotiated earlier as the price of his departure, is unrecorded. In any event, he did not go home empty-handed.* The companies straggled back through January and February. Coucy had succeeded in keeping them out of France for almost six months, longer than Du Guesclin had removed them to Spain in 1365.

  King Charles in February promptly commissioned him, together with Marshal Sancerre and Olivier de Clisson and several knights who had served with the Güglers, to command operations against their former associates who had resumed pillage in Champagne. The Sire du Coucy, “knight banneret with two knights bachelor and seven squires of his house,” and Marshal Sancerre were each to have 200 men-at-arms, and Clisson 100, in the pay of the King, to lead “against several companies just returned from the borders of Germany.” Evidently they applied successful pressure. By March the Breton companies reappeared along the Rhône and in May were hired by the Pope for renewed war in Italy.

  The Anglo-French peace conference in Bruges, reconvened in December 1375 in the presence of dukes, cardinals, Constable Du Guesclin, and other grand personages, spent itself in more legalities, more displays, jousts, fetes, and banquets, and attracted even more people than the previous parley, until an epidemic of some kind subdued its pleasures. The dispute over territories and sovereignty became further complicated by Charles’s demand that Edward pay reparations for damages caused by the war. No agreement was reached except to extend the truce for another year. Again Charles, now anxious for a “good peace,” bethought him of the Sire de Coucy, whose connections in England “well fitted him to treat of peace between the two Kings.”

  At the time of Coucy’s expedition against Austria, the restless Isabella had gone home as usual to England, leaving France several months before her husband’s departure. Judging by various gifts, grants, and subsidies showered on her by King Edward, she still exercised a spell upon her father. Now in his dotage, Edward was equally subject to the spell of a beautiful and vulgar mistress, Alice Perrers, to whom he gave the late Queen’s robes and jewels and who paraded through London on her way to a tournament in a triumphal chariot under the title of “Lady of the Sun.” Isabella on her previous visit had not shared residence at court with the supplanter of her mother, but on this occasion her scruples were vanquished by filial affection, or possibly expectation of largesse. The King paid her debts and expenses and servants’ wages and granted pardons to three separate criminals for whom she interceded, in
cluding one for “breach of the peace” in killing the servant of another man. The record does not tell why she was interested. She was presented “by the King’s own hand” with a hooded robe of scarlet cloth cut in the style of the robes of the Garter “with hood and sleeves furred and turned up with ermine”; a second of the same for St. George’s Day; and at Christmas an ermine-trimmed velvet robe each for herself and her daughter Philippa. (Marie, as heiress to the Coucy domain, remained in France.)

  As King Edward’s granddaughter, eight-year-old Philippa was a distinct personage who had been betrothed since the age of four to Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford, then aged ten. In consequence of this alliance she bore the title of Countess of Oxford and shared with her mother in the bounty of the autumnal monarch. As the year turned, Edward gave Isabella a complete set of chapel furnishings and two saddles, one of red velvet embroidered with gold violets and one ornamented with suns of gold and copper. She hunted at Windsor, joined in archery with twelve ladies, each presented by the King with an ornamental bow, and doubtless with some reluctance returned to France in January 1376 when Coucy came back from the Aargau. By April she was quite ready to go home again. In that month Coucy asked the King of France for permission to visit England with his wife.

  Since his return from the Aargau, Coucy’s friends had been urging him to become wholly French. They argued, according to Froissart, that he need not necessarily lose his English lands if it came to a choice, because the King of England could not expect him to give up his far greater French domain, especially since he was French “by name, blood, arms and extraction.” Since he knew himself esteemed by the French King and felt grateful to him for financing the Austrian expedition, and doubtless too because he had no wish, in case of renewed war, to be left again in an enforced and difficult neutrality, Coucy was drawing close to a decision. But first he clearly hoped to resolve the matter of his English lands and revenues on the forthcoming visit. His English wife, in view of her unfading attachment to home, would surely have energetically opposed a renunciation of her country. Nevertheless, that choice was clearly in her husband’s mind upon accepting his new assignment.

  “And seeing that he was regarded as one of the wisest and most prudent of nobles … in whom one could not want more of all good and all loyalty, it was said to him, ‘Sire de Coucy, it is the intention of the King and his Council that you belong with us in France and that you can aid and counsel us in treating with the English. Therefore we ask you that you make this voyage covertly and wisely, as you know how to do, and that you discover from the King of England and his Council on what terms peace can be made between them and us.’ And so he hastened upon the voyage.”

  * The Historical Museum of Berne describes the banner as a 15th century reproduction of the original. Bernard Aucien suggests that it may have been captured in 1388 when the Swiss regained Nidau which had been ceded to Coucy at the close of the Aargau campaign.

  * According to Swiss sources, the cession was not made until ten years later when Leopold wanted Coucy’s support against the Swiss in the struggle that led to Sempach.

  Chapter 14

  England’s Turmoil

  Coucy arrived in England in April 1376 just at the moment when English discontent came to a head in the first impeachment by Parliament of ministers of the crown. In the historic session called the Good Parliament the monarchy discovered that it had drained the cup of public confidence in a government that could neither win the war nor end it.

  The failure to conclude peace at Bruges had brought to a climax public resentment of corrupt royal officials, a profitless war, military mismanagement, and waste or embezzlement of the people’s tax money. These were the same ills that twenty years earlier had generated the French Third Estate’s challenge to the monarchy. They found the same opportunity to make themselves felt when the English crown needed a new subsidy to prepare for the prospective end of the truce a year hence. Parliament was summoned for April, and as members gathered, London reverberated with “a great murmur of the people.”

  The Sire and Dame de Coucy, who had been welcomed “joyously” at court on their arrival, found themselves in the midst of wrath and crisis surrounding the royal family and focusing on Isabella’s brother, John of Gaunt, otherwise known as the Duke of Lancaster. In place of the sick Prince and senile King, he was the key figure in the royal government who was now held to blame for all that had gone wrong.

  Seventy-four knights of the shire and sixty town burgesses made up the Commons of the Good Parliament. Acting with some support from the Lords, they demanded redress of 146 grievances before they would consent to a new subsidy. Their primary demand was the dismissal of venal ministers together with the King’s mistress, who was generally credited with being both venal and a witch. In addition they wanted annual Parliaments, election rather than appointment of members, and a long list of restraints upon arbitrary practices and bad government. Two of their strongest discontents were directed not against the government, but against abuses of a foreign Church hierarchy and the demands of a laboring class grown disobedient and disorderly. These issues, too, were great with significance: one was to lead to the ultimate break with Rome and the other, much sooner, to the Peasants’ Revolt.

  The strenuous and jubilant England Coucy had known in the aftermath of Poitiers had grown sadly disgruntled. Pride of conquest and wealth of ransoms had thinned like smoke, buoyant energy and confidence were sunk in quarrels and frivolity, the widened empire had shriveled, English fleets were swept ignominiously from the Channel, bellicose Scots on the border—whom Edward had been fighting even longer than he had the French—were as unsubdued as ever. England’s heroes—Henry of Lancaster, Chandos, the Prince of Wales—were dead or dying; the good Queen was replaced by a strumpet who was believed to have established her dominion over the King by restoring his sexual potency through the enchantments of a friar skilled in the black arts. The once exuberant Edward who had looked down on victory from the windmill at Crécy was now a foolish infatuated old man “not stronger in mind than a boy of eight.” The high tide of success had turned to loss, with every loss paid for by disrupted trade and renewed taxes. A fifty-year reign of incessant warring was coming to a close in a rising sense of wasted effort and misrule.

  England by now had caught the contagion of lawlessness which the war had spread upon the continent. Soldiers, returning with the habit but no longer the fruits of pillage, formed small bands to live by robbery, or as retainers of lords and knights who returned to find their demesnes impoverished as a result of the Black Death. A whole generation, from the sack of Caen at Edward’s first landing to the raid in the Aargau, had accustomed itself to brigandage and resorted to it easily at home. According to a complaint in Parliament, companies of men and archers, sometimes under a knight, “do ride in great routs in divers parts of England,” and take possession of manors and lands, ravish women and damsels and bring them into strange counties, “beat and maim and slay the people for to have their wives and their goods,” hold them prisoner for ransom, and “sometimes come before the justices in their sessions in such guise with great force whereby the justices be afraid and not hardy to do the law.” They commit riots and “horrible offenses” whereby the realm is in great trouble, “to the great mischief and grievance of the people.” Royal justice made no serious effort to restrain them because the King was dependent for military forces on the same nobles who were responsible for the disorders.

  The resulting breakdown of justice was a major cause of the Commons’ anger. In the Vision of Piers Plowman, which first appeared in 1377, the figure of Peace petitioning against Wrong, in the person of a King’s officer who has carried off his horses and grain and left a tally on the King’s Exchequer in payment, complains that he cannot bring him to law because “he maintaineth his men to murder mine own.” Private lawlessness equally was on the rise. “Tell me,” asked the Bishop of Rochester, a sympathizer of the Commons, “why, in England, so many robberie
s remain unpunished when in other countries murderers and thieves are commonly hanged? In England the land is inundated by homicides and the feet of men are swift to the shedding of blood.”

  Outlawry among free peasants had increased because their command of higher wages, as a result of depopulation, brought them in constant conflict with the law. The Statute of Laborers, in a world that believed in fixed conditions, still held grimly to pre-plague wage levels, blind to the realities of supply and demand. Because the provisions against leaving one employment for a better were impossible to enforce, penalties were constantly augmented. Violators who could not be caught were declared outlaws—and made lawless by the verdict. Free peasants took to the nomadic life, leaving a fixed abode so that the statute could not be executed against them, roaming from place to place, seeking day work for good wages where they could get it, resorting to thievery or beggary where they could not, breaking the social bond, living in the classic enmity to authority of Robin Hood for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

  It was now that Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid merchants of the Commons. They complained bitterly how “out of great malice” laborers and servants leave at will, and how “if their masters reprove them for bad service or offer to pay them according to the said statutes, they fly and run suddenly away out of their service and out of their country … and live wicked lives and rob the poor in simple villages in bodies of two and three together.”

  To keep them on the land, the lords offered many concessions, and towns welcomed the wanderers to fill the shortage of artisans, so that they grew aggressive and independent. They were most angry and seditious, and haughty about food, according to Langland, when their fortunes prospered. “They deign not to dine on day-old vegetables … penny ale will not do, nor a piece of bacon,” but rather fresh-cooked meat and fried fish, “hot-and-hot for the chill of their maw.” Joining with villeins and artisans, they learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against employers, subscribed money for “mutual defense,” and “gather together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand.” A generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.