Isabella of England, second child and eldest daughter of King Edward and Queen Philippa, was the favorite of her father, whose marriage diplomacy on her behalf had five times failed to produce results. Since the last failure, when she was nineteen, she had been allowed to live independently, an over-indulged, willful, and wildly extravagant princess who was 33 in 1365, eight years older than Enguerrand de Coucy.
As a baby she had lain in a state cradle, gilded and crested, lined with taffeta, and furnished with a coverlet made of 670 skins although she was born in June. A special dressmaker appointed to the infant made her a robe of Lucca silk with four rows of “garnitures” edged with fur to wear at her mother’s relevailles, or first reception after the birth. The Queen for the occasion wore a robe of red and purple velvet embroidered with pearls, and received the court reclining on a state bed equipped with a gigantic spread of green velvet measuring seven and one half by eight ells* and embroidered with an all-over pattern of merman and mermaid holding the shields of England and Hainault. All her ladies of the chamber and the whole of her household, from chancellor and treasurer down to kitchen maid, wore new clothes ordered for the occasion. Ostentation was the duty of princes.
The first three royal children—Edward, Isabella, and Joanna—had their own household together, with their own chaplains, musicians, a noble governor and governess, three waiting damsels for Isabella and two for Joanna, a staff of esquires, clerks of pantry and butlery, chief cook, valets of larder and kitchen, valets de chambre, water-carriers, candle-bearers, porters, grooms, and other attendants. They were served on silver, slept on silk-upholstered beds, and had fur-trimmed robes of scarlet and gray cloth with buttons of gold and silver thread. Their wardrobes were replenished for state festivities and at Christmas, Easter, and All Saints’ Day, when all who could afford to wore new clothes. When Isabella and Joanna rode their palfreys from London to Westminster, each led by a valet at the bridle, their almoners walked alongside, distributing alms to the poor and to the prisoners of Newgate. For their attendance at a tournament when they were aged ten and nine, eighteen workmen were employed for nine days to embroider their robes under the supervision of the King’s armor-bearer, using eleven ounces of gold leaf in the process. The material life of the 14th century survives in the diligent bookkeeping, itemized down to the minutest transaction on parchment rolls.
At the age of twelve Isabella’s favored position was marked by her having seven ladies-in-waiting compared to Joanna’s three. All seven, with Isabella, are reported arriving in Canterbury for a tournament in 1349 during the Black Death, wearing masks, presumably against contagion, although these did not help to prevent the death of her favorite attendant, Lady de Throxford. Curiously undeterred by the plague, the court held the elaborate ceremonial of the Order of the Garter as usual in 1349, with the Queen, Isabella, and 300 ladies present at the jousts and festivities. Ladies of the Garter wore the same robes as the men, embroidered with blue and silver garters and the Order’s motto, and furnished to them annually at royal expense.
When Isabella was three years old, the King had proposed her marriage to Pedro, son of the King of Castile, but negotiations fell through, perhaps fortunately because the prospective bridegroom was later to win unpleasant renown as Pedro the Cruel. Replacing her sister, Joanna was on her way to marry this prince when she died of the plague at Bordeaux in 1348. A second match for Isabella with the son of the Duke of Brabant was held up owing to consanguinity, and while the Pope was considering dispensation, she was betrothed instead to the reluctant Louis of Flanders and all but reached the altar before the celebrated jilting. Two years later King Edward failed to bring off a match with Charles IV of Bohemia, the elected but not yet consecrated Emperor, then a widower.
Then came the episode of Isabella’s retaliation. In 1351 when she was nineteen, the King announced her coming marriage to Bérard d’Albret, son of Bernard-Ezi, Sire d’Albret, a great lord of Gascony and Edward’s chief lieutenant there. Whether the choice was the King’s or his daughter’s is moot. Though not a ruling family, the d’Albrets were an extensive and powerful clan, straddling homage to both England and France, whom Edward was disposed to keep friendly. In the year of the betrothal he bestowed a pension of £1,000 on Bernard-Ezi, recalling his loyal service in resisting both “the threats and the blandishments” of the King of France.
While union with the d’Albrets for a king’s eldest daughter was no diplomatic triumph, it was advantageous at a time when Edward was doing everything to strengthen his hold on Guienne. He said as much in the marriage announcement, which spoke of his desire “to kindle in the lord of Albret and his posterity a closer attachment to our royal house, and to bind them more intimately to us”—exactly the motive that was to reappear in the case of Coucy. At the same time, the King seemed reluctant to let Isabella go, describing her as “our very dear eldest daughter whom we have loved with a special affection.” In settling on her a portion of 4,000 marks and an annual revenue of £1,000, he added the unusual provision—almost an inducement to her to change her mind—that in case anything prevented the marriage, the sums would revert not to the King, but to Isabella herself.
To carry the princess and her retinue of knights and ladies to Bordeaux, five ships were ordered by the direct method of furnishing a royal officer with a warrant to arrest five suitable vessels in “all ports and places” from the mouth of the Thames westward. The bride’s trousseau included robes of cloth of gold and Tripoli silk and a mantle of Indian silk lined in ermine and embroidered all over with leaves, doves, bears, and other devices worked in silver and gold. For another robe of crimson velvet, the elaborate embroidery fashionable at the time required thirteen days’ work by twenty men and nine women. For gifts, Isabella brought 119 chaplets made of silk entwined with pearls surmounted by a golden Agnus Dei standing on a green velvet band wrought with flowers and leaves. But these marvelous contrivances were never to be worn—or at least not as intended. At the water’s edge Isabella changed her mind and came home. Was it desire to jilt as she had been jilted? Or reluctance to assume a lower rank? Or perhaps memory of her sister’s death on an earlier marriage voyage to Bordeaux? Or was the whole affair a contrivance to acquire revenues and a new wardrobe?
Bérard d’Albret was said to be so wounded by the bride’s defection that he renounced his inheritance in favor of a younger brother and put on the corded robe of a Franciscan friar. According to other evidence, however, he married a Dame de St. Bazeille, received certain territories from the King of France in 1370, and adopted a shield with the strange device of a head of Midas supported by two lions—which suggests interests the reverse of Franciscan poverty.
Not at all put out by Isabella’s waywardness, her father continued to endow her with fiefs and revenues, manors, castles, priories, wardships, farms, and gifts of costly jewelry. Her expenditures continued to outrace his gifts. When she bought silver buckles on credit, let her servants’ wages fall into arrears, pawned her jewelry up to the value of 1,000 marks, the King complacently paid her debts, and in 1358, when she was 26, assigned her a regular income of another £1,000 a year, which was duly paid as long as he lived. Six years later he gave her the wardship of a rich minor, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, which Isabella sold back to the Earl’s mother for another £1,000 a year, with the stiff proviso that if quarterly payments were late by so much as a single day, the penalty would be double payment for that quarter.
At what point during Enguerrand de Coucy’s five-year sojourn in England Isabella first became interested in him is nowhere told, but concerning her choice of him the chronicler Ranulph Higden stated forthrightly that “only for love she wished to be betrothed.” It may be that after all her years of single independence she really did fall in love or, at her father’s suggestion, was willing enough, even pleased, to marry a young attractive rich French lord of ancient lineage and great estates. Edward was clearly pleased by the match and may have been its instigator. Holding a great foothold in France on the borders of Picardy, he would naturally wish to put the hinterland of Calais in allied hands and nullify, in case of renewed hostilities, a strong French opponent. He still thought in terms of wooing the allegiance of great French nobles, the more so because disputes continued to arise over the transfer of French territories. Whether to win over Enguerrand, or because he had taken a personal liking to him, Edward had already in 1363 restored him to full possession of the lands in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland inherited from his great-grandmother.
How Enguerrand felt about his marriage is a blank. Since his sovereign and his prospective father-in-law were now at peace, no conflict of loyalty was involved. The comradeship of chivalry still held nobles together in a trans-national bond that closed over as soon as the temporary enmity of war was terminated. The material advantages of the match, in freeing him from hostageship and bringing money and power too, were obvious. How he felt about the lady herself, who did not easily fit the role of virginal demoiselle merging into submissive wife, was another question.
Isabella’s life as an independent woman in a court of the usual amorous license could hardly have been sheltered or innocent. Ladies of the court were not reticent. Joan, widowed Countess of Holland, called the Fair Maid of Kent, whom the Black Prince married in 1361, was considered “the fairest lady in all the kingdom of England” and “the most amorous.” She wore daring and extravagant clothes copied from the dresses of the “bonnes amies of the brigands of Languedoc.” At tournaments, to the scandal of the people, there often came groups of questionable ladies, “the most costly and lovely but not the best of the kingdom,” dressed “in divers and wonderful male attire as if they were part of the tournay.” Wearing divided and parti-colored tunics, short capes, and daggers in pouches, riding fine coursers and palfreys, they exhibited a “scurrilous wantonness” that “neither feared God nor blushed at the scorn of the crowd.”
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead. For some reason a particular immorality was attached to it, perhaps because it altered God’s arrangements. Demons in purgatory were said to punish the practice by sticking “hot burning awls and needles” into every hole from which a hair had been plucked. When a hermit was frightened by a dream about a lady suffering this treatment, an angel comforted him saying, “She had well deserved the pain.”
As satirized by Jean de Meung through the mouth of the Duenna in the Roman de la Rose, the concerns of a 13th to 14th century lady were not peculiar to the Middle Ages. If her neck and bosom were lovely, she should wear a decolletage; to add color to her face she should use ointments daily, but in secret so that her lover does not know; if aware of bad breath, she should not talk with her mouth too close to others; she should laugh prettily and cry gracefully, eat and drink daintily, and take care not to get drunk or sleep at table. She should go to church, weddings, and parties in her best clothes to let herself be seen and gain renown, lifting her gown to show her fine foot and opening her mantle like a peacock’s tail to reveal the beautiful form beneath. She should spread her nets for all men in order to snare one, and if she hooks several, should take care they do not meet. She should never love a poor man because she will get nothing from him and might be tempted to give him something, nor love a stranger, for he may have a vagabond heart, unless of course he offers her money or jewels. While pretending to be won by love alone, she should accept all gifts and encourage presents to her servants, maid, sister, and mother, for many hands get more booty and they can press her lover to get her gowns or other pledges out of pawn.
The insistence on money may have been exaggerated by the author, but satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. Certainly in Isabella’s case money was of the essence. She was said to have always in her retinue two or three goldsmiths, seven or eight embroiderers, two or three cutlers, and two or three furriers who were kept busy filling her needs.
If Isabella had any love affairs by the age of 33, they did not reach recorded gossip, but, judging by example, they are not unimaginable. The high-born maiden of seventeen who seduced the elderly, gouty Guillaume de Machaut for the renown of having that celebrated poet and musician as her lover was said to have been Agnes of Navarre, sister of Charles the Bad. Whoever she was, she insisted that Machaut publicize their affair in songs and poems and in a long, lush, embarrassing verse narrative called Livre du Voir Dit (True Tale). She teased and kissed and gave the bemused poet the little gold key to the clavette or chastity belt that guarded her “precious treasure.” All the time, as he discovered later, she was regaling her young circle with accounts of the affair’s progress and mocking her lover, as Boccaccio was mocked by his mistress Fiammetta, bastard daughter of the King of Naples.
Medieval girls, like boys, became adults in their mid-teens. Marriage was generally consummated at fourteen or thereafter, although in the case of the highborn it might be legally concluded in infancy or childhood. Another young girl, the fifteen-year-old heroine of Deschamps’s poem“Suis-je belle?”, clearly inspired by Agnes of Navarre, also had control of the key to her “treasure,” although this probably represented a literary echo of Agnes rather than a common possession. Often spoken of as if it were familiar, the chastity belt rests on only the faintest factual support in the Middle Ages and was then probably more of a literary conceit than an item of customary use. Believed to have evolved from the Moslem practice of infibulation, which involved attaching a padlock to the labia, it is said to have been imported to Europe with other luxuries through the crusades. An occasional actual model exists, but non-literary evidence such as lawsuits does not appear until the Renaissance and later times. As a device of rabid male possessiveness, the chastity belt afflicted medieval women less than their successors.
Deschamps’s luscious damsel details her charms in each stanza-sweet red mouth, green eyes, dainty eyebrows, round chin, white throat, firm high breasts, well-made thighs and legs, fine loins and fine “cul de Paris”—following each with the refrain “Suis-je, suis-je, suis-je belle?” (Am I, am I, am I not fair?). She is a male vision of the amorous girl, but Agnes and the taunting Fiammetta were real enough, though both are known, as are virtually all medieval women, only through the pens of men. What is rare is a woman’s account of herself. The anguished Héloïse in the 12th century and the feminist Christine de Pisan in the later 14th speak out, and both are bitter, although that does not necessarily establish a rule. In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Given the non-privacy of medieval life, little about sexual habits was likely to be hidden from the unmarried girl, noble or otherwise. That the Chevalier de La Tour Landry really designed his tales of carnality for the moral edification of his motherless daughters need not be taken at face value, but it is interesting that this was his excuse. His book covers lechery, fornication, and rape, with examples drawn from Lot’s daughters, the incest of Tamar, and cases nearer home, such as the lady who loved a squire and contrived to be with him by telling her husband she had vowed divers pilgrimages so that he let her go where she list, or another lady who was told by a knight that if she were wise and good she would not “come to men’s chambers by nights darkly without candle nor to coll and kiss men in her bed alone as she did.” Life in the castle was evidently easy-going. Knights and ladies stayed up late, “singing, playing and japing and making such noise they could not have heard thunder,” and “when one of the men held his hand under one of the women’s clothes,” he had his arm broken by the angry husband.
Entertainment was not only the recital of lofty epics of chivalrous if tedious adultery. The coarse comic fabliaux in quick rhymed couplets, satiric, obscene, often cruel or grotesque, were told for laughs like dirty stories of any age, to noble as well as bourgeois audiences. Often written by court poets in parody of the romances, they treated sex more as pratfall than ennoblement, and their recital or reading aloud was as welcome in the castle as in town, tavern, and probably cloister.
Isabella could well have listened to the tales of Jean de Condé, poet in her lifetime at her mother’s native court in Hainault. His style is illustrated by a story about a game of truth-telling played at court before a tournament. A knight, asked by the Queen if he has fathered any children, is forced to admit he has not, and indeed he “did not have the look of a man who could please his mistress when he held her naked in his arms. For his beard was … little more than the kind of fuzz that ladies have in certain places.” The Queen tells him she does not doubt his word, “for it is easy to judge from the state of the hay whether the pitchfork is any good.” In his turn, the knight asks, “Lady, answer me without deceit. Is there hair between your legs?” When she replies, “None at all,” he comments, “Indeed I do believe you, for grass does not grow on a well-beaten path.”
Life’s basic situation in the fabliaux is cuckoldry, with variations in which an unpleasing lover is tricked or humiliated instead of the husband. While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once. Despite their more realistic characters, the fabliaux were no more true to life than the romances, but their antagonism to women reflected a common attitude which took its tone from the Church.
Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy. In the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvais, greatest of the 13th century encyclopedists and a favorite of St. Louis, woman is “the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest,” and—finally the key—“a hindrance to devotion.” Vincent was a Dominican of the severe order that bred the Inquisitors, which may account for his pyramid of overstatement, but preachers in general were not far behind. They denounced women on the one hand for being the slaves of vanity and fashion, for monstrous headdresses and the “lascivious and carnal provocation” of their garments, and on the other hand for being over-industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things.
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. Had not a woman’s counsel brought first woe by causing Adam to lose Paradise? Of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex with sin has left the greatest train of trouble. In Genesis, original sin was disobedience to God through choosing knowledge of good and evil, and as such the story of the Fall was an explanation of the toil and sorrow of the human condition. In Christian theology, via St. Paul, it conferred permanent guilt upon mankind from which Christ offered redemption. Its sexual context was largely formulated by St. Augustine, whose spiritual wrestlings set Christian dogma thereafter in opposition to man’s most powerful instinct. Paradoxically, denial became a source of attraction, giving the Church governance and superiority while embedding its followers in perpetual dilemma.
“Allas, alias, that ever love was sinne!” cried the Wife of Bath. What ages of anxiety and guilt are condensed into that succinct lament, even if the speaker herself does not seem to have been greatly incommoded by what she lamented. Indeed, through her, the century’s most forthright celebration of sex was given to a woman. More than in some later times, the sexuality of women was acknowledged in the Middle Ages and the marital debt considered mutual. Theologians bowed to St. Paul’s dictum, “Let the husband render to his wife what is due her, and likewise the wife to the husband,” but they insisted that the object must be procreation, not pleasure.
To divide the amative from the procreative, as if by laying a flaming sword between the two, was another daring command contrary to human habit. Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible. It embraced Augustine’s principle that God and Nature had put delight in copulation “to impel man to the act,” for preservation of the species and the greater worship of God. Using copulation for the delight that is in it and not for the end intended by nature was, Augustine ruled, a sin against nature and therefore against God, the ordainer of nature. Celibacy and virginity remained preferred states because they allowed total love of God, “the spouse of the soul.”
The struggle with carnality left many untouched; others were tortured by it all their lives. It did not inhibit Aucassin from preferring Hell to Paradise “if I may have with me Nicolette my sweet love.” Nor did it inhibit creation of the Roman de la Rose, the monumental bible of love written in two sections fifty years apart during the 13th century. Begun in the courtly tradition by one author, it was expanded in a cynical and worldly version and at inordinate length by another. When 21,780 lines of elaborate allegory finally wind to an end, the Lover wins his Rose in an explicit description of opening the bud, spreading the petals, spilling “a little seed just in the center,” and “searching the calyx to its inmost depths.”
Petrarch on the other hand, after twenty years of literary mooning over Laura while fathering elsewhere two illegitimate children, succeeded in his forties, “while my powers were unimpaired and my passions still strong,” in throwing off the bad habits of an ardent temperament which he “abhorred from the depths of my soul.” Though still subject to “severe and frequent temptations,” he learned to confess all his transgressions, pray seven times a day, and “fear more than death itself that association with women which I once thought I could not live without.” He had only to recollect, he wrote to his brother the monk, “what woman really is,” in order to dispel desire and retrieve his normal equanimity. “What woman really is” referred to the clerical doctrine that beauty in women was deceptive, masking falsehood and physical corruption. “Wheresoever Beauty shows upon the face,” warned the preachers, “there lurks much filth beneath the skin.”
The nastiness of women was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case was fading. Deschamps as a poet began in good humor and ended with a rancid tirade against women, the Miroir de Manage, in which marriage appears as a painful servitude of suffering, sorrow, and jealousy—for the husband. Through 12,000 verses, he ground out all the conventional clerical accusations of woman—as wanton, quarrelsome, capricious, spendthrift, contradictory, over-talkative, and so demanding that she exhausts her husband by her amorous desires. Since Deschamps elsewhere describes himself as a comfortably married man, this great pile of dead wood represented his atonement, as the end approached, for having enjoyed women and the pleasures of the flesh.
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex. If the sacrament of marriage was holy, how could sexual pleasure within marriage be sinful? If enjoyment was venial sin, at what point did it become concupiscence, or immoderate desire, which was mortal sin? Was bearing a child outside marriage, though procreative, more sinful than intercourse only for pleasure within marriage? Was a chaste or virgin marriage, though non-procreative, more holy than marital intercourse? What if a man slept with his wife when she was pregnant or after menopause when procreation could not be the purpose? Or, being tempted by another woman, slept with his wife to “cool off” illicit desire: that is, committed one sin to avoid another? Or departed on crusade without his wife’s consent or without taking her along, which was anti-procreative, yet in the interests of the Church? These were questions that concerned the dialecticians probably more than the average person.
Like usury, sex defied doctrinal certitude, except for the agreed-upon principle that any sexual practice contrary to the arrangements and ends “ordained by nature” was sinful. The covering term was sodomy, which meant not only homosexuality but any use, with the same or opposite sex, of the “unfit” orifice or the “unfit” position, or spilling the seed according to the sin of Onan, or auto-erotic emission, or intercourse with beasts. All were sodomy, which, by perverting nature, was rebellion against God and therefore counted as the “worst of sins” in the category of lechery.
Marriage was the relationship of the sexes that absorbed major interests. More than any other, it is the subject on the minds of the Canterbury pilgrims and its dominant theme is who, as between husband and wife, is boss? In real life too the question of obedience dominates the manual of conduct composed by the Ménagier of Paris for his fifteen-year-old wife. She should obey her husband’s commandments and act according to his pleasure rather than her own, because “his pleasure should come before yours.” She should not be arrogant or answer back or contradict him, especially in public, for “it is the command of God that women should be subject to men … and by good obedience a wise woman gains her husband’s love and at the end hath what she would of him.” She should subtly and cautiously counsel him against his follies, but never nag, “for the heart of a man findeth it hard to be corrected by the domination and lordship of a woman.”
Examples of the terrible fate that meets carping and critical wives are cited by the Ménagier and also by La Tour Landry, who tells how a husband, harshly criticized by his wife in public, “being angry with her governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth,” then kicked her in the face and broke her nose so that she was disfigured ever after and “might not for shame show her visage.” And this was her due “for her evil and great language she was wont to say to her husband.”
So much emphasis is repeatedly placed on compliance and obedience as to suggest that opposite qualities were more common. Anger in the Middle Ages was associated with women, and the sin of Ire often depicted as a woman on a wild boar, although the rest of the seven Vices were generally personified as men.* If the lay view of medieval woman was a scold and a shrew, it may be because scolding was her only recourse against subjection to man, a condition codified, like everything else, by Thomas Aquinas. For the good order of the human family, he argued, some have to be governed by others “wiser than themselves”; therefore, woman, who was more frail as regards “both vigor of soul and strength of body,” was “by nature subject to man, in whom reason predominates.” The father, he ruled, should be more loved than the mother and be owed a greater obligation because his share in conception was “active,” whereas the mother’s was merely “passive and material.” Out of his oracular celibacy St. Thomas conceded that a mother’s care and nourishment were necessary in the upbringing of the child, but much more so the father’s “as guide and guardian under whom the child progresses in goods both internal and external.” That women reacted shrewishly in the age of Aquinas was hardly surprising.
Honoré Bonet posed the question whether a queen might judge a knight when she was governing the kingdom in the king’s absence. No, he answered, because “it is clear that man is much nobler than woman, and of greater virtue,” so that a woman cannot judge a man, the more so since “a subject cannot judge his lord.” How, in these circumstances, the queen governed the kingdom is not explained.
The apotheosis of subjection was patient Griselda, whose tale of endurance under a husband’s cruel tests of her marital submission so appealed to male authors that it was retold four times in the mid-14th century, first by Boccaccio, then in Latin by Petrarch, in English by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and in French by the Ménagier. Without complaint, Griselda suffers each of her children to be taken away to be killed, as her husband informs her, and then her own repudiation and supposed divorce, before all is revealed as a test, and she willingly reunites herself with the odious author of her trials.
The Ménagier, a kindly man at heart, thought the story “telleth of cruelty too great (to my mind) and above reason” and felt sure “it never befel so.” Nevertheless, he thought his wife should be acquainted with the tale so that she will “know how to talk about all things like unto the others.” Medieval ladies depended on stories, verbal games, and riddles for their amusement, and a well-bred young married woman would need to be equipped to discuss the abject Griselda and her appalling husband. In the end, Chaucer too was ashamed of the story and in his envoy hastened to advise noble wives,
Let noon humilitee your tonge naille …
Ne suffreth nat that men yow doon offence …
Ne dreed hem nat, do hem no reverence …
Be ay of chere as light as leefe on linde,
And lat him care and wepe and wringe and waille!
Married love, despite the formula of courtly romance, was still a desired goal to be achieved after, rather than before, the tying of the knot. The task devolved upon the wife, whose duty was to earn her husband’s love and “gain in this world that peace which may be in marriage,” by constant attention, good care, amiability, docility, acquiescence, patience, and no nagging. All the Ménagier’s wise counsels on this matter can be rolled into one: “No man can be better bewitched than by giving him what pleaseth him.” If the Third Estate, which he represented, laid greater stress on married love than did the nobility, it was doubtless because the more continuous proximity of a bourgeois husband and wife made amiable relations desirable. In England connubial contentment could win the Dunmow Flitch—a side, or flitch, of bacon awarded to any couple who could come to Dunmow in Essex after a year of marriage and truthfully swear that they never quarreled and did not regret the marriage and would do it over again if given the chance.
While the cult of courtly love supposedly raised the standing of noble ladies, the fervid adoration of the Virgin, which developed as a cult at the same time, left little deposit on the status of women as a whole. Women were criticized for gossip and chatter, for craving sympathy, for being coquettish, sentimental, over-imaginative, and over-responsive to wandering students and other beggars. They were scolded for bustling in church, sprinkling themselves with holy water at every turn, saying prayers aloud, kneeling at every shrine, paying attention to anything but the sermon. Cloistered nuns were said to be melancholy and irritable, “like dogs who are chained up too much.” Nunneries were a refuge from the world for some, the fate of others whose families offered them as gifts to the Church, the choice of a few with a religious calling, but generally available only to those who came with ample endowment.
Evidence from poll and hearth taxes indicates that women’s death rate was higher than men’s between the ages of twenty and forty, presumably from childbearing and greater vulnerability to disease. After forty the death rate was reversed, and women, once widowed, were allowed to choose for themselves whether to remarry or not.
In everyday life women of noble as well as non-noble class found equality of function, if not of status, thrust on them by circumstance. Peasant women could hold tenancies and in that capacity rendered the same kinds of service for their holdings as men, although they earned less for the same work. Peasant households depended on their earnings. In the guilds, women had monopolies of certain trades, usually spinning and ale-making and some of the food and textile trades. Certain crafts excluded females except for a member’s wife or daughter; in others they worked equally with men. Management of a merchant’s household—of his town house, his country estate, his business when he was absent—in addition to maternal duties gave his wife anything but a leisured life. She supervised sewing, weaving, brewing, candle-making, marketing, alms-giving, directed the indoor and outdoor servants, exercised some skills in medicine and surgery, kept accounts, and might conduct a separate business as femme sole.
Some women practiced as professors or doctors even if unlicensed. In Paris in 1322 a certain Jacoba Felicie was prosecuted by the medical faculty of the University for practicing without their degree or the Chancellor’s license. A witness testified that “he had heard it said that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than the greatest master or doctor or surgeon in Paris.” At the University of Bologna in the 1360s the faculty included Novella d’Andrea, a woman so renowned for her beauty that she lectured behind a veil lest her students be distracted. Nothing is said, however, of her professional capacity.
The châtelaine of a castle more often than not had to manage alone when her husband was occupied elsewhere, as he generally was, for the sun never set on fighting in the 14th century. If not fighting, or attending the King, he was generally being held somewhere for ransom. In such case his wife had to take his place, reach decisions and assume direction, and there were many besides Jeanne de Montfort who did so. Marcia Ordelaffi, left to defend Cesena while her hot-tempered husband (he who had stabbed his son) held a second city against the papal forces, refused all offers to negotiate despite repeated assaults, mining of walls, bombardment day and night by stones cast from siege engines, and the pleas of her father to surrender. Suspecting her councillor of secretly arranging a surrender, she had him arrested and beheaded. Only when her knights told her that collapse of the citadel would allow no escape from death and that they proposed to yield with or without her consent did she agree to negotiate, on condition that she conduct the parley herself. This she did so effectively that she obtained safe-conduct for herself and her family and all servants, dependents, and soldiers who had supported her. She was said to fear only the wrath of her terrible husband—not without cause, for, despite all the talk of courtoisie, lords of chivalry, no less than the bourgeois, were known to beat their wives. In a case of particular brutality and high rank, the Count of Armagnac was accused of breaking his wife’s bones and keeping her locked up in an effort to extort property.
Woman’s status in the 14th century had one explicit female exponent in Christine de Pisan, the only medieval woman, as far as is known, to have earned a living by her pen. Born in 1364, she was the daughter of Thomas of Pisano, a physician-astrologer with a doctor’s degree from the University of Bologna who was summoned to Paris in 1365 by the new King, Charles V, and remained in his service. Christine was schooled by her father in Latin, philosophy, and various branches of science not usual in a woman’s education. At fifteen, she married Etienne Castel of Picardy, one of the royal secretaries. Ten years later, she was left alone with three children when her husband, “in the flower of his youth,” and her father died within a few years of each other. Without resources or relatives, she turned to writing to earn the patronage that must henceforth be her livelihood. She began with poetry, recalling in ballades and rondeaux her happiness as a wife and mourning her sorrows as a widow. Though the forms were conventional, the tone was personal.
No one knows the labor my poor heart endures
To dissimulate my grief when I find no pity.
The less sympathy in friendship, the more cause for tears.
So I make no plaint of my piteous mourning,
But laugh when I would rather weep,
And without rhyme or rhythm make my songs
To conceal my heart.
The plaintive note (or perhaps more sympathy than Christine pretended) loosened the purses of nobles and princes—whose status was reflected in patronage of the arts—and enabled Christine to undertake studies for a flow of didactic prose works, many of them adapted or translated from other authors, as was the common practice of the time. No subject deterred her: she wrote a large volume on the art of war based on the Roman classic De re militari by Vegetius; a mythological romance; a treatise on the education of women; and a life of Charles V which remains an important and original work. Her own voice and interest are strongest when she writes about her own sex, as in La Cité des dames on the lives of famous women of history. Though translated from Boccaccio’s De Claris mulieribus, Christine makes it her own in the prologue, where she sits weeping and ashamed, wondering why men “are so unanimous in attributing wickedness to women” and why “we should be worse than men since we were also created by God.” In a dazzling vision, three crowned female figures, Justice, Faith, and Charity, appear to tell her that these views of the philosophers are not articles of faith “but the mists of error and self-deception.” They name the women of history who have excelled—Ceres, donor of agriculture; Arachne, originator of spinning and weaving; and various heroines of Homeric legend, the Old Testament, and Christian martyrology.
In a passionate outcry at the close of the century in her Epistle to the God of Love, Christine again asks why women, formerly so esteemed and honored in France, are now attacked and insulted not only by the ignorant and base but also by nobles and clergy. The Epistle is a direct rejoinder to the malicious satire of women in Jean de Meung’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, the most popular book of the age. A professional writer with a master’s degree in Arts from the University of Paris, Jean de Meung was the Jonathan Swift of his time, a satirist of the artificial conventions in religion, philosophy, and especially chivalry and its central theme of courtly love. Nature and natural feeling are his heroes, False Seeming (hypocrisy) and Forced Abstinence (obligatory chastity) his villains, whom he personifies as mendicant friars. Like the clerics who blamed women for men’s desires, or like the policeman who arrests the prostitute but not the customer, Jean de Meung, as a male, blamed women for humanity’s departure from the ideal. Because courtly love was a false glorification of women, he made women personify its falsity and hypocrisy. Scheming, painted, mercenary, wanton, Meung’s version of woman was simply the male fantasy of courtly love in reverse. As Christine pointed out, it was men who wrote the books.
Her protest was to provoke a vociferous debate between antagonists and defenders of Jean de Meung in one of the great intellectual controversies at the turn of the century. Meanwhile her melancholy flute still sounded in poetry.
It is a month today
Since my lover went away.
My heart remains gloomy and silent;
It is a month today.
“Farewell,” he said, “I am leaving.”
Since then he speaks to me no more.
It is a month today.
As shown by the sumptuous bindings of surviving copies, her works were in large demand by wealthy nobles. At the age of 54 she retired to a convent in grief for the condition of France. She lived for another eleven years to write a poem in praise of the figure who, to posterity, stands out above all others of her time—another woman, Joan of Arc.
Fixed as they were in the pattern of female nature conceived for them by men, it was no accident that women often appeared among the hysterical mystics. In the uncontrollable weeping of English Margery Kempe there is a poignancy that speaks for many. She began to weep while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem when “she had such great compassion and such great pain at seeing the place of Our Lord’s pain.” Thereafter her fits of “crying and roaring” and falling on the ground continued for many years, once a month or a week, sometimes daily or many times a day, sometimes in church or in the street or in her chamber or in the fields. The sight of a crucifix might set her off, “or if she saw a man or beast with a wound, or if a man beat a child before her, or smote a horse or other beast with a whip, if she saw it or heard it, she thought she saw our Lord being beaten or wounded.” She would try to “keep it in as much as she could, that people might not hear it to their annoyance, for some said that a wicked spirit vexed her or that she had drunk too much wine. Some banned her, some wished her in the sea in a bottomless boat.” Margery Kempe was obviously an uncomfortable neighbor to have, like all those who cannot conceal the painfulness of life.
On July 27, 1365, at Windsor Castle, Isabella of England and Enguerrand de Coucy were married amid festivity and magnificence. The finest minstrels in the realm played for the occasion. The bride was resplendent in jewels received as her wedding present from her father, mother, and brothers, at a cost of £2,370 13s. 4d. Her dowry, considerably increased over the d’Albret marriage-portion, was an annual pension of £4,000. The King’s gift to Enguerrand was no less valuable: he was released from his role as hostage without payment of ransom.
Four months later, in November, the couple received the King’s leave to return to France, evidently given with some reluctance, for the letter refers to a repeated request “to go into France to visit your lands, possessions and estates.” Isabella being already pregnant, the King’s letter promised that all children male or female born to her abroad would be capable of inheriting lands in England and considered “as fully naturalized as though they were born in the realm.”
To the customary ringing of church bells vigorously pulled to induce the saints to ease labor, a daughter was born at Coucy in April 1366 and christened Marie. Before a month had passed, Isabella with husband and infant was hurrying back to England. A lady of rank and in delicate condition would travel in a four-wheeled covered wagon with cushioned seats, accompanied by her furniture, bed linen, vessels and plate, cooking pots, wine, and with servants going on ahead to prepare lodgings and hang tapestries and bed curtains. Even with such comforts, to brave the Channel crossing and the bumpy land journey with a newborn baby seems peculiar and reckless haste or a desperate affection for home. Throughout her married life, Isabella never put down roots at Coucy-le-Château, and instantly rushed back to her father’s court whenever her husband departed on some expedition. Perhaps she was unhappy in the great walled castle on the hill, or did not feel at home in France, or more likely could not live without the indulgence and royal surroundings of her youth.
Edward’s determination to attach Coucy as firmly as possible to England was acted on as soon as Enguerrand and his wife returned. On May 11, 1366, the Chancellor informed the nobles and commons in Parliament, in the presence of Edward, “how the King had married his daughter Isabella to the Lord de Coucy, who had handsome estates in England and elsewhere; and for the cause that he was so nearly allied to him, it were fitting that the King should enhance and increase him in honor and name, and make him an earl; and thereupon he requested that advice and assent.” Lords and Commons duly consented, leaving to the King the choice of what lands and title to confer. Enguerrand was named to the vacant earldom of Bedford with a revenue of 300 marks a year, and as Ingelram,* Earl of Bedford, he appears thereafter in English records. To complete the honors, he was inducted into the Order of the Garter.
At the same time Isabella received yet another £200 of annual revenues, which promptly disappeared down the bottomless drain of her expenditures. She seems to have been one of those people for whom spending is a neurosis, for within a few months of her return, the King paid £130 15s. 4d. to discharge her debts to merchants for silk and velvet, taffetas, gold cloth, ribands and linen, and another £60 to redeem a jeweled circlet she had pawned.
Sometime before Easter of 1367, which fell on April 18, the Coucys’ second daughter was born in England, within a year of the first. Named Philippa for her grandmother the Queen, the infant received from her royal grandparents an elaborate silver service of six bowls, gilded and chased, six cups, four water pitchers, four platters, and 24 each of dishes, salt cellars, and spoons costing a total of £239 18s. 3d.
In further enlargement of his fortune, Enguerrand now acquired the equivalent of an earldom in France, helped thereto by the not disinterested hand of his father-in-law. A fellow hostage, and neighbor in France, was Guy de Blois et de Châtillon, Count of Soissons, a nephew of both Philip VI and Charles de Blois of Brittany, who despite his great family and connections, had so far been unable to buy his liberty. As the price of his release, an arrangement was now reached by which, with the consent of King Charles of France, he ceded his county of Soissons to Edward, who in turn presented it to Coucy in lieu of the £4,000 provided by Isabella’s dowry. The great domains of Coucy and Soissons, constituting a sizable portion of Picardy, were now joined in the hands of a son-in-law of the King of England. With a territorial title diluting the once proud austerity of the Coucy motto, Enguerrand was now Count of Soissons, and as such returned with his wife and daughters to France in July 1367.
* If the unit was the Flemish ell of 27 inches, the coverlet would have measured 17 by 18 feet; if it was the English ell of 45 inches, the dimensions would have been 28 by 30 feet.
* In one 14th century illuminated manuscript, Pride was a knight on a lion, Envy a monk on a dog, Sloth a peasant on a donkey, Avarice a merchant on a badger, Gluttony a youth on a wolf, Ire a woman on a boar, and Luxury (instead of the standard Lechery) a woman on a goat.
* Judging by the diverse spelling of proper names on either side of the Channel, pronunciation of the common language must have been close to mutually unintelligible. Chaucer’s Prioresse spoke French
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe.