All this time efforts in London to conclude a permanent peace treaty had not succeeded. When the French balked at the terms of a settlement reached in 1358, Edward responded by raising his demands. In March 1359 when the truce was about to expire, King Jean yielded, trading half his kingdom for his own release. By the Treaty of London he surrendered virtually all of western France from Calais to the Pyrenees, and agreed to an augmented and catastrophic ransom of 4 million gold écus, payable at fixed installments, to be guaranteed by the delivery of forty royal and noble hostages, of whom Enguerrand de Coucy was designated as one. In case of obstruction to the transfer of ceded territories, Edward retained the right to send armed forces back to France, whose cost was to be borne by the French King.
Desperate for peace though France was, shame and anger rose when the terms became known. Dragged to maturity in the grim years since Poitiers, the Dauphin had learned greater stewardship than his father. Neither he nor his Council was prepared to yield what the King of France had agreed to. Facing a fearful choice between accepting the treaty and renewal of the war, they summoned the Estates General with a request for “the most substantial notable and wise men” bearing full powers to represent the communes.
In this somber hour, one of the darkest in French history, the few delegates who braved the bandit-infested roads to come to Paris were in earnest. When the text of the Treaty of London was read to them on May 19, they deliberated briefly and made their response to the Dauphin without dispute. It was for once laconic. “They said the Treaty was displeasing to all the people of France and intolerable, and for this they ordered war to be made on England.”
Edward prepared to launch a supreme effort to consummate victory. He laid the cause to French “perfidy” in rejecting the treaty, thus establishing grounds for a “just war” and allowing bishops to offer indulgences in aid of recruitment. Determined to assemble an expeditionary force that should lack nothing to make it invincible, he spent all summer gathering the components. An immense convoy of 1,100 ships carrying 11,000 to 12,000 men and more than 3,000 horses (to be joined by as many more at Calais) was assembled, with 1,000 carts and some four-horse wagons for the baggage train, plus tents, forges, hand mills, horseshoes and nails, bows and arrows, arms and armor, cooking utensils, initial stocks of wine and food, leather boats for fishing in the rivers, not forgetting, for the hunt, thirty falconers with hawks, sixty couple of hounds, and sixty of harriers.
By the time the King embarked, taking with him his four eldest sons, it was the end of October, ensuring a winter campaign. All military experience, including his own, knew this to be ruinous to a force away from its home base, but the impetus of great preparations is hard to halt, and possession of many garrisons in France gave Edward confidence in a quick victory.
England’s fortunes were at the crest. A dynamic King had attracted the aid of an extraordinary group of able soldiers—Chandos, Knollys, Sir Walter Manny, Sir Hugh Calveley, the Captal de Buch, and not least the Prince of Wales—such a group “as the Starres have an influence to produce at one time more than another.” Success was tangible. “A woman who did not possess spoil from France,” wrote the chronicler Walsingham, “garments, furs, bed covers, silver vessels and cloth of linen, was of no account.” Ebullience had reached a perfect moment in 1350 when King Edward sailed forth to meet a Spanish challenge. On board the cog Thomas in August, as described by Froissart, the King, in a black velvet doublet and round beaver hat “which became him well,” sat in the forecastle enjoying talk and song with the Prince and a group of nobles. “The King was that day, as I was told by those present, as joyous as ever he was in his life and ordered the minstrels to play before him an Almaine dance which Sir John Chandos had lately introduced.” He commanded Sir John to dance and sing with the minstrels, “which delighted him greatly,” while from time to time he glanced up at the lookout on the mast who was watching for sight of the Spaniards. Needless to say, when sighted, they were met and conquered, confirming Edward’s boast to be “Lord of the Sea.”
From Calais in 1359 the English set our for Reims, where Edward intended to be crowned King of France. Trailing an enormous baggage train said to cover two leagues, they crossed Picardy in three separate lines of march in order to spread their foraging, and even so found scant provisions in a country already devastated by the companies Horses starved, pace slowed, rain fell daily, progress contracted to three leagues a day. Worst of all, Edward’s goal of decisive battle eluded him. The English marched through a deliberately created vacuum. No glittering armed force came out to meet them. The French concentrated their defense in fortified towns and castles that could withstand attack.
Avoidance of pitched battle—the strategy that was to save France—evolved, like most military innovations, from defeat, ignominy, and paucity of means. The person who perceived what the situation demanded was the Regent, a ruler who harkened to necessity, not glory.
In respect of his hostile brother-in-law of Navarre, the Regent’s position had improved, because in August Charles of Navarre had deserted his alliance with Edward and, in yet one more elaborate ceremony of reconciliation, promised to be “a good friend to the King of France, to the Regent and the kingdom.” Though his promise was widely thought to be inspired by God, the King of Navarre could not live without plotting, and within months was engaged in a new plan to dispose of the Dauphin.
Edward reached Reims in the first week of December, presumably expecting the city to admit him after what was to have been his victorious advance. Forewarned of his intention, Reims had been strengthening its walls during the long preparation and remained stubbornly closed, forcing the English into a siege. The French had emptied the countryside of everything that could serve the enemy and had destroyed buildings that could shelter him. At the gates of Reims, Edward saw the monastery of St. Thierry, which he had intended to use as his headquarters, burning before his eyes. Foiled of provisions as they had been of battle, and reduced by cold and hunger, the English were forced to lift the siege after forty days. They headed south for the rich land of Burgundy, looting and destroying for two months until Edward allowed himself to be bought off for 200,000 moutons d’or by the then Duke of Burgundy, Philip de Rouvre.
As he turned toward Paris in March, Edward learned with fury and vows of vengeance of a savage French raid carried out in that month on Winchelsea, on the south coast of England. Its ultimate object was the rescue of King Jean, which would have spared France his ruinous ransom. As originally planned, the raid was also intended, by “making a show of remaining there,” to frighten the English into withdrawing forces from France in self-defense. Costs were raised by the major towns. A bold ship captain named Enguerrand Ringois of Abbeville, renowned for his courage and indomitable character at the siege of Calais, was chosen as naval commander. The land forces, numbering 2,000 knights, archers, and foot soldiers from Picardy and Normandy, suffered from the usual absence of single command. They were led by a triumvirate of nobles who were at odds with each other. Pierre des Essars, the man who had disposed of Etienne Marcel, led a body of Parisian volunteers.
Rumor preceding the attack had caused Jean to be moved on March 1 from Lincolnshire to a castle nearer London and subsequently to the Tower of London itself. Despite reconnoitering of the coasts, the French, misled by false information, landed on the south coast on March 15. Seizing Winchelsea without difficulty, they made no effort to establish a foothold, but plunged into the usual frenzy of pillage, murder, and rape, including massacre of a group of citizens attending mass in the church. While alarm flew over the countryside, the French sacked the neighboring town of Rye, then met and repelled a hastily assembled force of 1,200 English who came against them. Fearing greater reinforcements, they decided against the “show of remaining there” and, returning to the beachhead after a 48 hours’ invasion, re-embarked in the light of the burning town.
England was thrown into a panic by news that the enemy were “riding over the country, slaying, burning, destroying and doing other mischief,” and that worse might be expected “unless they be speedily and manfully opposed.” While that proved unnecessary, the panic left a persistent fear of invasion that was to exert some restraint on future activities against France. Otherwise the raid, bravely planned and badly led, accomplished nothing except to provoke Edward’s wrath and reprisals on discovering that the French could act as viciously in his realm as the English did in France.
Surrounding Paris early in April, the English sent heralds to challenge the defenders to battle, but the Dauphin, relying on Marcel’s improved fortifications, forbade any response. After a week of burning and killing outside the walls failed to provoke a fight, Edward turned away, baffled as he had been at Reims, though not yet ready to give up. He took the road for Chartres, not for the coast. For the past two months papal legates had been shuttling between the Dauphin and the English, attempting to reopen negotiations, always blocked by Edward’s refusal to reduce his terms. The Dauphin himself had sent envoys with peace proposals. Seeing “how the realm could not long endure the great tribulation and poverty” the English were inflicting, “for the rents of the lords and churches were nigh lost in every part,” he and his Council offered to settle on the basis agreed to in 1358 before Edward had raised his demands. The Duke of Lancaster advised Edward to accept, for if he persisted he might have to make war “all the days of your life” and might “lose in one day what it has taken us twenty years to win.”
The anger of the heavens supported the Duke. On Monday, April 13, a “foul dark day” of mist and bitter cold, as the army camped on the approach to Chartres, a violent hailstorm struck with the force of a cyclone, followed by cloudbursts of freezing rain. Horses and men were killed by the prodigious hailstones, tents were torn up by the wind, the baggage train was dragged through mud and floods, and scores died of the fearful cold, “wherefor unto thys day manye men callen it Black Monday.” In half an hour Edward’s army took a beating that human hands could not have inflicted and that could hardly be taken as other than a celestial warning. Black Monday brought to a head all the faults of the six months’ campaign—the vulnerability of the English army, the foiling of decisive battle, the incapacity to take a major walled town or capital city, the vaguely perceived knowledge, of which Lancaster had a glimmer, that France could not be conquered by pillage, nor by siege, town by town, fortress by fortress. In the long run, this was what would condemn the war to drag on for a hundred years—the fact that, short of a fluke like the capture of a king at Poitiers, medieval armies had no means of achieving a decisive result, much less unconditional surrender.
Yielding to Heaven’s warning and Lancaster’s counsel, Edward appointed commissioners to treat with the French on revised peace terms. They met at the little village of Brétigny about a league’s distance from Chartres, where the twenty years’ war was at last brought to an end-as it then seemed.
Signed May 8, 1360, the Treaty of Brétigny covered a maze of legal and territorial details in 39 articles, five letters of confirmation, and multiple rhetoric as eternal as lawyers. Basically it was a return to the original settlement of 1358. King Jean’s ransom was put back to 3 million gold écus and Edward’s excess territorial demands were abandoned, to that extent marking his last campaign as a failure and a waste. But the basic cession of Guienne and Calais to the King of England free of homage was confirmed, plus the transfer of other territories, towns, ports, and castles between the Loire and the Pyrenees and in the region of Calais, representing in all about a third of France, the largest gain ever recorded in western Europe up to that time. Edward renounced the crown of France and all territorial claims not granted in the treaty.
To ensure fulfillment, the earlier provision for forty hostages representing the greatest in the realm was renewed, again including Enguerrand de Coucy. As lord of the greatest stronghold in northern France and a center of resistance to the English, he was deliberately selected in the belief that the peace would be better kept if such men were hostages.
The group was headed by the four “Fleurs-de-Lys” or royal princes—namely, the King’s two sons, Louis and Jean (future Ducs d’Anjou and de Berry); his brother, the Duc d’Orléans; and the Dauphin’s brother-in-law, Louis II, Duc de Bourbon. The Counts d’Artois, d’Eu, de Longueville, d’Alençon, de Blois, de St. Pol, d’Harcourt, de Grandpré, de Braisne, and other grands seigneurs and notable fighters including Matthieu de Roye, Coucy’s former guardian, made up the list. King Jean was to be returned as far as Calais, where he would remain until a first payment of 600,000 écus was made on his ransom and a preliminary transfer of territories had taken place. He would then be liberated with ten of his fellow prisoners from Poitiers and replaced by forty hostages of the Third Estate—the real source of money—four from Paris and two from each of eighteen other towns. Thereafter, sovereignty of towns and castles was to be transferred, and the remainder of the ransom paid, 400,000 at a time, in six installments at six-month intervals, with one fifth of the hostages released upon each delivery.
The Treaty of Brétigny was “too lightly given to the great grief and prejudice of the kingdom of France” in the judgment of the anonymous chronicler of the Quatre Valois, of whom nothing is known except that he was a citizen of Rouen. Fortresses and good towns were given up, he wrote, that “could not have easily been conquered,” which was true enough, but the treaty was excused on the ground that it was necessary to deliver the King.
Delivering France from the companies was even more urgent. In an appendix to the treaty, Edward forbade on pain of banishment any further acts against the peace by English men of war, but there was no firm intent behind the provision and it brought France no surcease. In fact the Treaty of Brétigny opened the period of the companies’ greatest flourishing, as a swarm of newly discharged soldiers in groups labeled the Tard-Venus (Late-Comers) scavenged on the heels of their predecessors and gradually swelled the ranks of the mercenary armies.
Efforts to raise the ransom were stretched to the extreme. Towns, counties, and noble domains assessed themselves, among them the house of Coucy, which contributed 27,500 francs. Sales taxes of twelve pence in the pound were levied on Paris and the surrounding country, to be paid by nobles and clergy and “all persons capable of paying.” When returns were meager, recourse was had to the Jews, who were invited back on a grant of twenty years’ residence for which they were to pay twenty florins each on re-entry and seven florins annually thereafter.
Jean himself sold his eleven-year-old daughter Isabelle in marriage to the nine-year-old son of the rich and rampant Visconti family of Milan for 600,000 gold florins. The alliance of the King of France with an upstart Italian tyrant was almost as great a wonder as the defeat of Poitiers. To obtain the princess, Galeazzo Visconti, the bridegroom’s father, offered half the money cash down and half in return for a territorial dowry. The marriage was to take place in July, immediately following betrothal as was customary, but had to be postponed when the princess fell ill of a fever. What anxiety must have hovered over a daughter’s sickbed, on which so much gold depended!
At that time the plague had re-appeared what was to be a major recurrence in the following year. After escaping to country villas for the summer months while thousands died in Milan and corpses rotted in sealed houses, the Visconti brothers returned as the plague abated, and sent throughout Italy for jewels, silks, and gorgeous raiment in preparation of the wedding. Guests were assured it “would be the greatest that Lombardy had ever seen.” The French princess, having recovered, was dispatched to Milan via Savoy regardless of risk, and duly married in mid-October in festivities of “imperial” luxury lasting three days. A thousand guests with all their retainers converged upon the city for the occasion. The opulent show put on by the Visconti—and paid for by their subjects—only underlined what was widely seen as a humiliation for France. “Who could imagine,” wrote Matteo Villani, considering the greatness of the crown of France, “that the wearer of that crown should be reduced to such straits as virtually to sell his own flesh at auction?” The fate of the King’s daughter seemed to him “truly an indication of the infelicity of human affairs.”
King Jean meanwhile had been waiting in English custody at Calais since July along with his youngest son, now called Philip the Bold. The surname of the future Duke of Burgundy was earned at a banquet given by King Edward for the prisoners of Poitiers, in the course of which the young prince jumped up from the table in a fury and struck the master butler, crying, “Where did you learn to serve the King of England before the King of France when they are at the same table?” “Verily, cousin,” commented Edward, “you are Philip the Bold.” In 1361, on the death of Philip de Rouvre, King Jean took over the duchy of Burgundy for his youngest son who was to make it a fateful inheritance.
On October 24, 1360, a first payment of 400,000 écus on Jean’s ransom, collected mostly in the north, was delivered to the English at Calais. The Visconti gold was so entangled in complex financial deals, dowries, and exchanges between Jean and Galeazzo that it seems not to have assisted the ransom. Though less than the stipulated sum, the 400,000 was accepted, and the peace treaty, with some modifications, thereupon formally ratified as the Treaty of Calais. The signature of Enguerrand de Coucy as one of the chief hostages was added to the document. After jointly swearing with Edward to keep the peace perpetually according to the terms of the treaty, the two Kings parted, and Jean after four years’ imprisonment returned at last to his ravaged country.
Four days after his liberation, on October 30, the party of French hostages in the custody of King Edward and his sons sailed for England. Some were to stay for ten years, some to return in two or three, some to die in exile. Among their varying fates, Enguerrand’s was unique: he was to become the son-in-law of the King of England.
Immortality traveled with him across the Channel. Whether on the same ship or another of the convoy, a young clerk of bourgeois family from Valenciennes in Hainault was journeying to England to present an account he had written of the Battle of Poitiers to Queen Philippa of England, his countrywoman, in hopes of obtaining her patronage. By name Jean Froissart, aged 22 or 23, he succeeded in pleasing the Queen and, with her encouragement, began collecting material for the chronicle that was to make him the Herodotus of his age. Consciously the celebrator of chivalry, he wrote with intent that “the honorable and noble adventures and feats of arms, done and achieved by the wars of France and England, should notably be inregistered and put in perpetual memory.” Within those confines, no more complete and vivid chronicle exists. Crystallized in the “perpetual memory” Froissart achieved for them, the nobles of his time forever ride, brilliant, avaricious, valiant, cruel. If, as Sir Walter Scott complained, Froissart had “marvelous little sympathy” for the “villain churls,” that was a condition of the context.
The convoy carrying the hostages contained an extraordinary concentration of the primary actors of the day. Among them was another observer who had immortality to bestow. Humanity was Geoffrey Chaucer’s subject, and all of 14th century society—except the lowest—his scope. Twenty years old at this time, born in the same year as Enguerrand de Coucy, he had accompanied the English army to France as a member of the household of the King’s second son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. While in a foraging party outside Reims, he had been captured by the French and ransomed by King Edward for £16, which compared favorably with the £6 13s. 4d. paid in compensation for Lord Andrew Lutterall’s dead horse and with the £2 paid to ransom the average archer. No documentary evidence attests to Chaucer’s presence on the return voyage to England, but since the Duke of Clarence sailed with the hostages, it is more than likely that Chaucer, as a member of his retinue, accompanied him.
In due time Coucy was to meet and know Chaucer and become a friend and patron of Froissart, although there is nothing to show whether the three young men made contact during the voyage. Some time afterward, however, while eagerly observing everyone who might be material for his history, Froissart took notice of his future patron. At a court festivity in England when elaborate dances and singing preceded the banquet, he observed how “the young lord de Coucy shined in dancing and caroling whenever it was his turn. He was in great favor with both the French and English, for whatever he chose to do he did well and with grace and all praised him for the agreeable manner in which he addressed everyone.” In the talents that a stylish young nobleman was supposed to show, Enguerrand was clearly an accomplished performer who, not surprisingly, attracted attention.
Pursuit of adventures under Mars and Venus was supposed to be the business of a young knight’s life. “If at arms you excel,” advises the God of Love in the Roman de la Rose, “you will be ten times loved. If you have a good voice, seek no excuse when asked to sing, for good singing gives pleasure.” Dancing and playing the flute and strings also aid the lover on his way to a lady’s heart. He should likewise keep his hands, nails, and teeth clean, lace his sleeves, comb his hair, but use no paint or rouge, which are not fitting even for women. He should dress handsomely and fashionably and wear fresh new shoes, taking care that they fit so well that “common folk will discuss how you got them on and where you entered them.” He should finish off with a garland of flowers, which costs little.
How far Enguerrand conformed to this ideal cannot be said, for no portrait exists, which is not exceptional since, except for royal personages, the art of portraiture was hardly yet practiced. The 14th century seems to have been interested in individual appearance and character traits only in the case of ruling figures or an occasional oddity like Bertrand Du Guesclin. Other people are undifferentiated by chronicles and illustrators and become personalities only through their deeds. For Enguerrand de Coucy two clues to appearance exist; one that he was tall and strong, as his figure was described under a rain of blows in his last battle; the other that he may have been dark and, in maturity, saturnine, as he appears in a portrait painted more than 200 years after his death. Since the portrait was commissioned by a Celestine monastery which Enguerrand had founded, some tradition of the founder’s looks may have survived to instruct the artist, but the face portrayed could just as well have been imaginary.
The most vivid description of all is non-specific; yet in his singing and dancing, elegant horsemanship, charm of manner, and lover’s talents, it is impossible not to see the young Enguerrand de Coucy in the Squire of the Canterbury Tales. Which is not to say that Chaucer, who saw knights and squires every day during his career at court, had Enguerrand particularly in mind when he drew the sparkling portrait in the Prologue. Nevertheless it fits.
A lovyere and a lusty bacheler
With lokkes crulled [curled] as they were leyd in presse,
Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.
Of his stature he was of evene lengthe,
And wonderly deliver, and great of strengthe.
And he had been sometime in chevachye,
In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Picardye,
And born him wel, as of so litel space,
In hope to stonden in his lady grace.
Embroudered was he as it were a mede
Al ful of fresshe floures whyte and rede.
Singing he was or floytinge [fluting] all the day;
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
Short was his goune, with sieves long and wyde.
Wel coude he sitte on hors and faire ryde.
He coude songes make and wel endyte,
Jouste and eek daunce, and wel purtreye and wryte.
So hote he lovede that by nightertale [nighttime]
He sleep namore than dooth a nightingale.
Headed by the four “Lilies,” Anjou, Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon, the hostages in their silks and parti-colors, “embroidered like a field of flowers,” brought no less splendor to England than the prisoners of Poitiers whom they replaced. They were required to live at their own expense—considerable in the case of the Duc d’Orléans, who had sixteen servants with him and a total retinue of over sixty. Handsomely entertained with banquets and minstrels and gifts of jewels, the hostages moved about freely and joined in hunting and hawking, dancing and flirting. French and English chivalry took pride in treating one another courteously as prisoners, however greedy the ransom—in contrast to Germans, who, according to Froissart’s scornful report, threw their prisoners “in chains and irons like thieves and murderers to extort a greater ransom.”
Coucy would not have felt alien in England. His family possessed lands there inherited from his great-grandmother Catherine de Baliol, although these had been confiscated during the war by King Edward and handed over as a munificent reward to the captor of the King of Scotland.
English and French, like English and Americans of a later day, shared a common culture and, among nobles, a common language, the legacy of the Norman Conquest. At about the time the hostages arrived, the use of French by the upper class was beginning to be replaced by the national speech of the commoners. Before the Black Death, French had been the language of the court, Parliament, and the lawcourts. King Edward himself probably did not speak English with any fluency. French was even taught in the schools, much to the resentment of the bourgeois, whose children, according to a complaint of 1340, “are Compelled to leave the use of their own language, a thing which is known in no other country.” When many clerics who could teach French were eliminated by the Black Death, children in the grammar schools began learning their lessons in English—with both profit and loss, in the opinion of John of Trevisa. They learned grammar more quickly than before, he wrote, but, lacking French, they were at a disadvantage when they “scholle passe the se and travayle in strange londes.”
Because of its island limits and earlier development of parliamentary power, England was more cohesive than France, with a greater national feeling, enhanced by growing antagonism to the papacy. Now with the ransoms of two kings, Jean of France and David of Scotland, the triumphs in battle and the territorial gains, England had turned the tables on William the Conqueror. Yet beneath the pride and glory and flow of cash, the effects of war were gnawing at the country.
The plunderers of France brought home the habit of brigandage. Many in the invasion forces had been outlaws and criminals to begin with who had joined up for a promised pardon. Others were made lawless and violent by the approved daily practice in France. Returning home, some formed companies in imitation of their fellows who had stayed in France. “Arrayed as for war,” they robbed and assaulted travelers, took captives, held villages for ransom, killed, mutilated, and spread terror. A statute of 1362 instructed justices to gather information “on all those who have been plunderers and robbers beyond the seas and are now returned to go wandering and will not work as they were used to do.”
In the spring of 1361, twelve years since the passing of the great plague, the dreaded black swellings reappeared in France and England, bringing “a very great mortality of hasty death.” An early victim was the Queen of France, Jean’s second wife, who died in September 1360 ahead of the main epidemic. The Pestis Secunda, sometimes called the “mortality of children,” took a particularly high toll of the young, who had no immunity from the earlier outbreak, and, according to John of Reading, “especially struck the masculine sex.” The deaths of the young in the Second Pest halted repopulation, haunting the age with a sense of decline. In the urge to procreate, women in England, according to Polychronicon, “took any kind of husbands, strangers, the feeble and imbeciles alike, and without shame mated with inferiors.”
Because the pneumonic form was absent or insignificant, the death rate as a whole was less than that of the first epidemic, although equally erratic. In Paris 70 to 80 died daily; at Argenteuil, a few miles away where the Oise joins the Seine, the number of hearths was reduced from 1,700 to 50. Flanders and Picardy suffered heavily, and Avignon spectacularly. Through its choked and unsanitary quarters the plague swept like flames through straw. Between March and July 1360 “17,000” were said to have died.
Though less lethal, the Second Pest carried a more terrible burden than the first in the very fact of its return. Thereafter people lived in fear, repeatedly justified, of another recurrence, just as they lived in fear of the brigands’ return. At any time either the phantom that “rises like black smoke in our midst” or the steel-capped horsemen could appear, with death and ruin at their heels. A sense of overhanging disaster weighed on the second half of the century, expressed in prophecies of doom and apocalypse.
The most celebrated of these was the “Tribulation” of Jean de la Roquetaillade, a Franciscan friar incarcerated at Avignon because of his preaching against corrupt prelates and princes. Like Jean de Venette, he sympathized with the oppressed against the mighty, lay and clerical. From his cell in 1356, the year of Poitiers, he prophesied that France would be brought low and all Christendom be vexed by troubles: tyranny and robbers would prevail; the lowly would rise against the great, who “shall be cruelly slain by the commons”; many women would be “defiled and widowed” and their “haughtiness and luxury shall wither”; Saracens and Tatars would invade the kingdoms of the Latins; rulers and peoples, outraged by the luxury and pride of the clergy, would combine to strip the Church of its property; nobles and princes would be cast down from their dignities and suffer unbelievable afflictions; Anti-Christ would appear to spread false doctrines; tempests, floods, and plagues would wipe out most of mankind and all hardened sinners, preparing the way for renewal.
These were the concerns and real currents of the time. Like most medieval doom-sayers, however, Roquetaillade predicted debacle as the prelude to a better world. In his vision, the Church, purified by suffering, chastisement, and true poverty, would be restored, a great reformer would become Pope, the King of France against all custom would be elected Holy Roman Emperor and rule as the holiest monarch since the beginning of time. He and the Pope together would expel the Saracens and Tatars from Europe, convert all Moslems, Jews, and other infidels, destroy heresy, conquer the world for the universal church, and, before they died, establish a reign of peace that would last a thousand years until the Day of Judgment and the End.
The hostages did not escape the plague. A high-ranking victim was Count Guy de St. Pol, a knight of great virtue, “very devout and merciful to the poor,” who abhorred the lusts and corruptions of the world, fasted unsparingly, and had maintained virginity until agreeing to marriage. The bourgeois hostages of Paris, Rouen, and several other towns were likewise victims. The great Duke of Lancaster, probably the richest man in the kingdom, was not proof; he too died of the plague, leaving his title and vast inheritance to his son-in-law, John of Gaunt, third son of King Edward. How and where the hostages were housed and whether chivalric courtesy allowed them escape to country retreats is not recorded. In 1357, eight years after the first plague, London was reported still one-third empty, but, though uncrowded, its sanitation was still careless enough to elicit repeated ordinances requiring citizens to clean their premises. Though it was against the law to empty chamber pots into the streets, their contents and kitchen garbage were often flung out of windows, more or less aimed at the gutters, which carried a steady current of water. Barns for keeping horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens were located inside the walls as well as outside, causing many complaints about accumulating piles of manure. At about this time London’s aldermen organized a system of hired “rakers” to carry the piles away in dump carts or in dung boats on the Thames.
For the hostages, prospects were not carefree. Their hope of return depended on regular payments of the King’s ransom, which already lagged. Collection of money was slowed by the plague and was anyway hard to come by in the ashes left by the companies. The case of Buxeaul, a town in Burgundy, was typical of many. According to a royal ordinance of 1361, plague and massacre had reduced its fifty or sixty hearths to ten and these “have been pillaged and ruined by our enemies so that little or nothing remains to them wherefore some of the inhabitants have left the place and are still leaving from day to day”; and because of these things, the survivors if required to pay customary taxes “would have to flee and leave the place and become poor beggars”; therefore it was ordained that the town should pay one tax a year instead of two and be freed of all heriot.
The desolation of churches sacked by the enemy was a subject of constant appeals to the bishops. Candles cannot be lit at mass because the winds blow through for lack of window glass; collapse threatens without funds for maintenance; roofs leak, rain falls on the altar. Abbots and abbesses wander in search of subsistence; prelates who would have blushed to appear in public without retinues of horsemen and servants “are now under the necessity of going on foot in humiliation followed by a single monk or valet and subsisting on the most frugal diet.” Universities suffered from lack of attendance and fees. Montpellier declared itself “destitute of lecturers and auditors because in the said Studium where formerly a thousand students used to dwell, scarcely 200 are to be found today.”
To the shocked eyes of Petrarch, sent by Galeazzo Visconti to congratulate King Jean on his liberation, France was “a heap of ruins.” Petrarch was an inveterate complainer who raised every complaint to an extremity, whether it was the iniquity of doctors, the smells of Avignon, or the decadence of the papacy. But even if exaggerated, his account of France as he saw it in January 1361 was tragic enough. “Everywhere was solitude, desolation and misery; fields are deserted, houses ruined and empty except in the walled towns; everywhere you see the fatal footprints of the English and the hateful scars still bleeding from their swords.” In royal Paris, “shamed by devastation up to her very gates … even the Seine flows sadly as if feeling the sorrow of it, and weeps, trembling for the fate of the whole land.”
Petrarch presented the King with two rings from Galeazzo, one a huge ruby as a gift, one torn from Jean’s hand at Poitiers which Galeazzo had somehow redeemed. Afterward he treated the court to a Latin oration on the Biblical text of Manasseh’s return from Babylon, with felicitous references to the mutability of Fortune as shown by Jean’s marvelous restoration out of captivity. The King and the Prince, Petrarch wrote in the voluminous correspondence of which he carefully kept copies, “fixed their eyes on me” with great interest, and he felt that his discussion of Fortune especially aroused the attention of the Dauphin, “a young man of ardent intelligence.”
Personal misfortunes, apart from those of his country, had afflicted the Dauphin. In October 1360 his three-year-old daughter, Jeanne, and her infant sister, Bonne, his only children, had died within two weeks of each other, though whether of the plague, like the Queen, is not stated. At the double burial the Dauphin was seen “so sorrowful as never before he had been.” He himself had been afflicted by an illness which caused his hair and nails to fall out and rendered him “dry as a stick.” Gossip attributed it to poison administered by Charles of Navarre, which it may well have been, for the symptoms are those of arsenic poisoning. The King of Navarre had once again turned inimical. In December 1359 when the English were at Reims, perhaps fearing that Edward might indeed gain the crown, he had plotted a coup of his own. Armed men were to enter Paris by several gates, combine forces to seize the Louvre, enter and kill the Dauphin and his Council, then spread through the city, seizing strong points before the Parisians could assemble. His ultimate purpose as usual remains mysterious. Betrayed to the Dauphin, the plot fractured relations between them and left Charles of Navarre prowling in hostility as before.
Not only payment of the ransom but fulfillment of the territorial terms controlled the hostages’ fate. Too lightly, as the chronicler said, sovereignties had been disposed of at Brétigny, with no account taken of the fact that territories on paper represented people on the ground. Something had happened to these people during two decades of war. The citizens of the seaport of La Rochelle implored the King not to give them up, saying they would rather be taxed up to half their property every year than be turned over to English rule. “We may submit to the English with our lips,” they said, “but with our hearts never.” Weeping, the inhabitants of Cahors lamented that the King had left them orphans. The little town of St. Romain de Tarn refused to admit the English commissioners within its gates, although it reluctantly sent envoys to take the oath of homage next day at a neighboring place.
For all his countrymen who equated the English with the brigands and hated them helplessly in their hearts, Enguerrand Ringois of Abbeville, the naval commander of the raid on Winchelsea, spoke through his acts. As citizen of a ceded town, he adamantly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England. Persisting against all threats, he was transferred to England, held in a dungeon without recourse to law or friends, and finally taken to the cliffs of Dover, where he was given the choice between taking the oath or death on the wave-washed rocks below. Ringois threw himself into the sea.
Like Pope Boniface’s claim to total papal supremacy, the terms of Brétigny were obsolete. It was too late to transfer provinces of France like simple fiefs; unnoticed, the inhabitants had come to feel themselves French. Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
The fate of the hostages was caught up in it. With the ransom in arrears and trouble arising over the ceded territories, their exile stretched ahead to no visible horizon. They were not being returned in fixed numbers every six months as planned, nor being replaced by substitutes, because few could be found willing to go and Edward made difficulties over the names proposed. In November 1362 the four impatient royal Dukes, who had expected to be released a year earlier, negotiated a treaty of their own with Edward by which they promised to deliver 200,000 florins due on the ransom and certain additional territories belonging to the Duc d’Orléans in return for their freedom and that of six other hostages. They were to stay in Calais on parole until delivery had been fulfilled. Never averse to taking a little extra, Edward was willing to let them go on these terms, but King Jean insistently refused his consent unless his cousin the Comte d’Alençon, the Comte d’Auvergne, and the Sire de Coucy were released in place of three of those named by the “Lilies.” Since Jean’s choices were greater nobles than the other three, Edward in his turn refused consent. Correspondence flowed, the royal Dukes dispatched urgent and angry appeals, finally King Jean, who had by now left his unhappy country for Avignon, lost interest and yielded. Coucy as a result remained in England. More than ever, after the departure of the royal Dukes, he was the object of Edward’s and his daughter’s interest.
Events took a startling turn when King Jean himself, for whose recovery his country had sacrificed so much, voluntarily returned to captivity in England. The motivations of this curious monarch are not readily understood 600 years later; only the train of circumstance is clear.
On regaining the throne, King Jean’s first effort to cope with his country’s tormentors proved to be another Poitiers in miniature. To stem the “Great Company” of Tard-Venus who were overrunning central France, he had hired one of their own kind, the “Archpriest,” Arnaut de Cervole, and, in addition, dispatched a small royal army of 200 knights and 400 archers under the Count of Tancarville, lieutenant of the region, and the renowned Jacques de Bourbon, Count de la Marche, a great-grandson of St. Louis, who had saved King Philip’s life at Crécy. Both had been wounded and captured at Poitiers without having their appetite for offensive warfare in the least diminished. On April 6, 1362, against the advice of Arnaut de Cervole, the two valorous knights ordered an attack at Brignais, a height held by the Tard-Venus near Lyon. The brigands let loose an avalanche of stones upon the royal host, cracking helmets and armor, felling horses, and shattering the attack as the English archers had done at Poitiers. Then on foot, with shortened lances, they finished off the business. Jacques de Bourbon and with him his eldest son and his nephew were killed, and the Count of Tancarville and many other rich nobles captured and held for ransom. Otherwise the brigands made no use of their victory other than to continue brigandage. Lyon purchased artillery, strengthened its walls, and maintained guards with lanterns at night; the countryside suffered as before.
The King’s response to Brignais was to leave for Avignon, where he was to stay for nearly a year. Amid military chaos and every other affliction of his realm, his purpose in going was to resume the crusade that had been broken off twenty years ago by the Anglo-French war. Though he could neither protect his own land, raise his ransom, nor redeem the fifty to sixty hostages who stood for him in exile, he felt concerned to redeem his father’s unfulfilled vow to take the cross. Froissart gives him the realistic motive of intending by the crusade to draw out of his realm the pillaging companies, but adds oddly that he “preserved this purpose and intent to himself.” Perhaps Jean genuinely considered crusade the proper role of the “Most Christian King”; perhaps he saw it compensating for his recent humiliations; perhaps France’s troubles were too much for him and he wanted an excuse to get away.
The King also had in mind a project of uniting to France the territory of Provence—which included Avignon—by marrying its Countess, Joanna, Queen of Naples, the most complicated heiress of the century. Halfway through an active connubial career, she was at this time twice a widow, once, as widely believed, by her own hand. Since Naples was a fief of the papacy, her marriage had to be approved by the Pope. As a Frenchman, Innocent VI was expected to be amenable.
Jean’s other project, crusade, was the supreme goal of this earnest and pious Pope who, for its sake, had tried so persistently to make peace between France and England. Worn out by ten years of discord and struggle to curb the worldliness of prelates, and finally by plague and brigands, Innocent died in September 1362, while Jean was on his way to Avignon. His successor, Urban V, though also a French native, saw the absorption of Provence by France as a threat to papal independence and disapproved the marriage. But he preached the crusade, actively supported by the titular King of Jerusalem, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who had arrived in Avignon to promote it.
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem by this time was no more than a memory; the last European settlers of Syria had retreated to Cyprus, and Europeans now came only to trade. When commerce with Moslems flourished, zeal for their massacre declined. Holy war had lost its thrust with the lessening of European unity, with too frequent use of crusade against internal heretics, and lately with loss of population in the plague. The infidel, like the heretic, was still feared by Christianity as a figure of genuine menace. Crusade still had its devout propagandists, but as a common impulse the zeal had faded. For the Church it had become largely a device for raising money; for nobles and kings the tradition survived as part of the chivalric code and had recently received a new impulse from the threat of the Turks on the shores of Europe. The difficulty was that crusade now suffered from the same necessity as the state: no longer composed of self-financed volunteers, it required paid armies and money to pay them.
The Kings of Cyprus and France spent all winter and spring at Avignon discussing possibilities with the Pope. On Good Friday the crusade was proclaimed. Jean was named Captain-General and took the cross along with the Count of Tancarville and other companions of the recent battering at Brignais. That marked the peak of the enterprise. King Edward, on being visited by the King of Cyprus, excused himself “graciously and right sagely,” and after arousing no greater response at other courts of Europe, the King of Cyprus was forced to let crusade lapse for the present.
Having failed in his projects at Avignon, Jean was obliged to face the unpleasantness of home. He rode through his distressed realm at a leisurely pace, reaching Paris in July 1363. Here he found that the Regent and Council had disallowed the private treaty between the royal hostages and Edward, on the grounds that it gave too much away. Worse, the Duc d’Anjou had absconded, breaking his parole. Newly married before going as a hostage, he had gone to Boulogne to meet his wife, with whom he was said to be much in love, and refused to return to Calais. Jean considered his son’s act a “felony” upon the honor of the crown. Combined with arrears in ransom, cancellation of the “hostages’ ” treaty, to which he had assented, and non-fulfillment of other cessions, it brought his own honor into disrepute and left him no way out, so he claimed, but to return to captivity.
Even for the 14th century, this reasoning, in the face of political realities, seemed extreme. Jean’s Council and the prelates and barons of France “conseled him sore to the contrary” and told him his plan was “a great folly,” but he insisted, saying that if “good faith and honor were to be banished from the rest of the world, they should still be found in the hearts and words of princes.” He departed a week after Christmas, crossing the Channel in midwinter.
His going was an amazement to his contemporaries. Jean de Venette, who loved neither kings nor nobles, suggested he went back for “causa joci” (reasons of pleasure). Historians have offered him every excuse: that he returned to avert war, or, counting on personal relations, to persuade Edward to reduce the ransom, or persuade him to call off the renewed hostilities of the King of Navarre. If these were his reasons, none was accomplished. If it was honor that took him back, what of kingship? What did he owe to the kingdom that needed its sovereign, to the citizens who were being squeezed of their last penny to pay his ransom, to the memory of Ringois of Abbeville? Who can say what made Jean return? Perhaps it was no medieval reason, but the human tragedy of a man who, knowing himself inadequate for the task he was born to, sought the enforced passivity of prison.
He arrived in London in January 1364, was greeted with lavish entertainments and processions, fell ill of an “unknown malady” in March, and died in April, aged 45. Edward gave him a magnificent funeral service at St. Paul’s during which 4,000 torches each twelve feet high and 3,000 candles each weighing ten pounds were consumed. Afterward his body was returned to France for burial in the royal basilica of St. Denis. King Jean had found the permanent passivity of the grave.
A million florins were still owed on his ransom, leaving the hostages unreleased. Some used the safe-conducts given them from time to time and did not return, despite repeated summonses. Some bought their freedom from Edward with shares of their own territories. Others simply disappeared, by one means or another. Anjou’s younger brother, Jean, Duc de Berry, managed so shrewdly and made so many excuses while on leave that he retained liberty and honor too. Matthieu de Roye, on the other hand, perhaps because his reputation as a fighter kept him well guarded, was still a hostage after twelve years. Enguerrand de Coucy was to be released under special circumstances in 1365.