The double collapse of the French invasion of England and, on the English side, the successive fiascos of the Buckingham and Norwich raids revealed the hollowness of knightly pretensions. Adding to the indignity, Austrian knights were slaughtered in 1385 by Swiss commoners at Sempach in a battle that reversed the verdict of Roosebeke.
The Austrians, expecting to duplicate the French massacre of “miscreants” of the non-warrior class, had dismounted to fight on foot as the French had in Flanders. But the Swiss had been trained in flexibility and rapid movement, just the opposite of the impacted line that had caused the Flemings’ defeat. When the tide turned against the Austrians, their mounted reserves fled from the field without engaging, as Orléans’ battalion had fled at Poitiers. Out of 900 in the Austrian vanguard, almost 700 corpses, including Duke Leopold’s, lay on the field at the end.
What knights lacked in the fading 14th century was innovation. Holding to traditional forms, they gave little thought or professional study to tactics. When everyone of noble estate was a fighter by function, professionalism was not greater but less.
Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people.
Deschamps openly mocked the adventure in Scotland in a long ballad with the refrain, “You are not now on the Grand Pont in Paris.”
You who are arrayed like bridegrooms,
You who talk so well when you are in France
Of the great deeds you will do,
You go to conquer what you have lost:
What is it? Renown that for so long
Honored your country.
If you seek to recover it in battle,
Display your hearts, not your fancy clothes.…
You are not now on the Grand Pont in Paris.
Mézières, too, writing his Songe du Vieil Pélérin in 1388, did not restrain his scorn as Honoré Bonet had not restrained his reproaches. Because the knights had won a victory “by the hand of God at Roosebeke against a crowd of fullers and weavers, they take on vainglory and think themselves the peers of their ancestors, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godefrey of Bouillon. Of all the rules of war written by Assyrians, Jews, Romans, Greeks, and all Christians, this French chivalry does not keep one tenth, yet thinks there is no chivalry in the world of valor equal to theirs.”
The nobles’ fashionable clothes and habits of luxury, their private bedrooms where they shut themselves up till noon, their soft beds and perfumed baths and comforts on campaign were cited as evidence that knighthood had gone soft. The ancient Romans, as Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University, remarked sarcastically some years later, “did not drag after them three or four pack horses and wagons laden with robes, jewels, carpets, boots and hose and double tents. They did not carry with them iron or brass stoves to make little pies.”
More than soft beds and foppery, the moral failure of chivalry spread dismay. Instead of troubadours glorifying the ideal knight and ideal love in romantic epics, moralists now deplored in satire and allegory and didactic treatise what the knight had become—predator and aggressor rather than champion of justice. Chansons de gestes were no longer composed in the second half of the century, although, since the lusty fabliaux disappeared at the same time, the cause cannot be said to have been failure of the ideal so much as some mysterious failing of the literary spirit. The vices and follies and strange disorders of the time demanded moralizing, yet, ironically, it is Froissart’s celebration of chivalry in its own image that endures.
In Italy, the complaint had a different source: knighthood was detached from nobility. “A few years ago,” lamented Franco Sacchetti at the end of the century, “bakers, wool-carders, usurers, money-changers, and blackguards became knights. Why does an official need knighthood when he goes to preside over some provincial town?… How art thou sunken, unhappy dignity! Of all the long list of knightly duties, what single one do these knights of ours discharge? I wish to speak of these things that the reader might see that knighthood is dead.”
If Sacchetti’s tone was morose, it was widely shared. With the courts of France and England ruled by minors and prey to factions, with the new Emperor Wenceslas proving a drunkard and a brute, with the Church split between two popes, each as remote from holiness as it was possible to be, no brilliance of the ruling class could cover its tarnish. Coucy was right in his perception of diminishing prestige, even if his suggested remedy was only to make matters worse.
The Guelders campaign of September–October 1388 proved that snafu was a military condition long before the word was coined. The expedition was mobilized on a scale out of all proportion to its petty issue or possible gain. Because of his relationships in Bar and Lorraine, which lay on the way, and his knowledge of the terrrain, Coucy was designated to recruit the lords of the area and plan the campaign. The preferable route lay through Brabant, but the towns and nobles of that duchy warned that they would never allow passage of a French army because it would cause more damage to their lands “than if the enemy were in the country.”
A decision was perforce taken to march straight through the dark, forbidding forest of the Ardennes, where, Froissart remarks with awed inaccuracy, “no traveler had ever before passed.” This necessitated sending surveyors to find a way through, followed by a force of 2,500 men to cut a road, an engineering task hardly less challenging than the portable town. The cost was paid for by a triple tax on salt and sales, for a purpose difficult to represent as defense of the realm. Perhaps for that reason, Coucy had been required to recruit in his own name as if for another expedition against the Hapsburgs, rather than in the name of the King.
Led by Coucy, a vanguard of 1,000 lances began the march, followed by the King and main body with “12,000” baggage carts, not counting pack animals. While en route, Coucy was suddenly detached for a mission to Avignon of unrecorded purpose but probably concerned with the plan that continued to obsess the French of conquering Rome for Clement. He returned—“to the great joy of the whole army”—within about a month, which, considering a journey of almost 500 miles each way, was energetic traveling.
Little combat and no glory were found at Guelders. The campaign bogged down in negotiations. Tents were wet after a summer of heavy rains, provisions rotted in the humidity, food was scarce despite a rich country. The return after honor had been satisfied by a negotiated apology from the Duke of Guelders, was wretched under more heavy rains. Roads were mud, horses stumbled over slippery logs and rocks, men were drowned in fording flooded rivers, and wagons of booty floated away. Knights, squires, and grand seigneurs came home without pride or profit, many of them sick or exhausted and blaming the Duke of Burgundy whose ambitions in Brabant they correctly held responsible. Coucy seems to have incurred no blame as he had incurred none in the insurrection of Paris. Since the start of the reign, the government of the uncles had dragged the country into ruinous expense for a series of grandiose projects ending in futility. At Guelders their credit ran out.
Awareness of bad government speaks through the omens and incidents inserted in the record by a censorious chronicler like the Monk of St. Denis. While the army for Guelders was being assembled, he reports, a hermit journeyed all the way from Provence to tell the King and his uncles that he had been instructed by an angel to warn them to treat their subjects more gently and lessen the burden of taxes and subsidies. The nobles at court scorned the hermit for his poverty and were deaf to his counsel, and though the young King treated him kindly and was disposed to listen, the uncles sent him away and levied the triple tax.
Deschamps’ satire grew more caustic after the Guelders campaign, in which he had personally participated and fallen ill like others of an “intestinal flux.” The military do not find their best friend in a war correspondent suffering from dysentery. Through many ballads, Deschamps’ theme is unfavorable comparison with knights of the past. They had gained hardiness through long apprenticeship and training, ridden long journeys, practiced wrestling and throwing the stone, scaling forts, and combat with shield and sword. Now the younger men scorn training and call those who wish to instruct them cowards. They spend their youth eating and drinking, spending and borrowing, “polishing themselves white as ivory … each one a paladin.” They sleep late between white sheets, call for wine on waking, eat partridges and fat capons, comb their hair to perfection, know nothing about the management of estates, and care for nothing but making money. They are arrogant, irreligious, weakened by gluttony and debauchery, and unfit for the profession of arms, “the heaviest in the world.”
Denouncing them on the one hand for softness and indolence, Deschamps castigates them on the other for recklessness, improvidence, and bad judgment. In his Lay de Vaillance, they keep no order, no night watch or scouts or advance guard, give no protection to foragers, allow carts and provisions to be captured. “When bread lacked for a day or it rained in the morning, they cried, ‘The army will starve!’ ” and “when they let provisions spoil on the ground, they wanted to turn back.” They start out in winter, attack recklessly and in the wrong season, never ask the advice of the older men until after danger threatens, complain loudly when in trouble, and open themselves to defeat. “Because of mad recklessness, such armies are to be despised.”
Deschamps is a scold but not an advocate of fundamental change or infusion of new blood into the nobility. He is bourgeois in sympathy, deplores injustice to the peasant, and writes ballads in praise of rural Robin and Margot for their love of France, but he denounces peasants who attempt to become squires and remove themselves from labor on the land. “Such rogues should be brought to justice and made to keep their class.”
All of society is found corrupt in Mézières’ Dream of the Old Pilgrim. Like Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, it is an allegorical guidebook to the troubles of the age and, in addition, a plea for “reformation of all the world, all Christianity and especially the Kingdom of France.” The pilgrim Ardent Desire and his sister Good Hope journey through the world to test the fitness of mankind for the return of the Queen of Truth and her attendants Peace, Mercy, and Justice, long absent from the earth. Mézières’ message was urgent, his sense of wrongdoing profound, his prognosis somber.
As if in response, Charles VI at age twenty dismissed his uncles and assumed full sovereignty himself immediately upon returning from Guelders in 1388. The Cardinal of Laon, ranking prelate, proposed the motion at a meeting of the Council. A few days later he fell ill and died, “delivered from the fury and hate of the uncles of the King,” and widely believed to have been poisoned by them.
Clisson later boasted to an English envoy that it was he who had made Charles VI “king and lord of his realm and put the government out of the hands of his uncles.” Apart from Clisson’s personal enmity, Coucy and others in the Council at the time were anxious to lift from the crown and themselves the further burden of the Dukes’ unpopularity. The person most closely concerned, however, was the King’s younger, cleverer, more dynamic brother and, for the time being, heir apparent, Louis, Duc de Touraine, soon to be known by his more familiar title, Duc d’Orléans.
Beginning in 1389, Louis of Orléans replaced the Duke of Burgundy in the Royal Council and for the rest of his brief, eventful life, already nearly half over, was to play a major role in French affairs, with a particular link to Coucy. A handsome pleasure-seeker and “devoted servant of Venus” who enjoyed the company of “dancers, flatterers, and people of loose life,” he was also devoutly religious and used to retreat for two or three days at a time to the Celestine monastery, whose quarters in Paris (on the present Quai des Célestins) had been established by his father in 1363. A penitential order favored too by Philippe de Mézières, who had been the royal princes’ tutor, the Celestins observed extreme rules of abstinence designed to promote concentration on eternity and disappearance of the body. Louis was much influenced by Mézières, whom he named his executor. He had evidently learned more from him than had his brother, for he was said to be the only member of the royal family who could understand diplomatic Latin. Something of a scholar for one of his station, he was also a compulsive gambler at chess and tennis as well as dice and cards. He played with his butler, his cup-bearer, and his carver, and at tennis with fellow nobles lost sums up to 2,000 gold francs.
Louis was as rapacious and ambitious for power as the uncles whom he ousted to make way for his ambition. The feud he thereby started was to end nineteen years later in his murder by his cousin Jean, son and successor of the Duke of Burgundy, tear France and Burgundy apart, and re-open the way to the English. Toward the end of his life he adopted a device of strange significance, the camal, a clerical hood or knight’s mantle, which was said at the time to represent Ca-mal or Combien de mal, meaning how much evil is done in these days. Born to the century’s last generation, Louis, for all his indulgences in pleasure, saw his world somberly. A verse of the time describes him as
Sorrowing, even sad, yet beautiful;
He seemed too melancholy for one
Whose heart was hard as steel.
Coucy, though clearly associated with the ousting of the Dukes, nevertheless entertained Philip the Bold and his son the Count of Nevers immediately afterward. The Duke’s accounts show that he and his son dined and slept at the castle on December 8 “at the expense of Monseigneur de Coucy,” and that during the visit he presented a diamond ring to the Dame de Coucy and a brooch of sapphires and pearls to her baby daughter. Coucy was always worth cultivating.
The reorganized Council made a serious effort to end the Dukes’ personal autocracy and restore the administrative system of Charles V. The Marmosets—Rivière, Mercier, and others—regained authority, bureaucracy was purged of the uncles’ men, five commissioners of reform were appointed to seek out the worst abuses, remove corrupt officials, and replace them by “good men.” As a step toward reconciliation with the bourgeois of Paris, the office of Provost of Paris and some, though not all, former municipal offices and privileges were restored. Measures were taken, or at least formulated, to improve sewage collection and restrict professional beggars, whose crutches and eye-patches and gruesome sores and stumps were stripped off each night in the district known by virtue of the transformations that took place there, as the Cour des Miracles.
The central problem of financing government was recognized in a series of ordinances dealing with financial and judicial reforms. Cancellation of the University’s tax-exemption was one measure attempted by Rivière and Mercier with no good result, for it earned them the powerful enmity of the University to add to that of the Dukes.
At the same time in England, a more lethal drama of King against uncles and other opponents was taking place. The central figure was Philippa de Coucy’s husband, Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford, King Richard’s closest adviser and friend. Brought to court as a boy by virtue of his marriage to Philippa, Oxford gained a dominant influence over Richard, who was five years his junior and fatherless. He “managed the King as he pleased,” and “if he had said black was white, Richard would not have contradicted him.… By him everything was done and without him nothing done.”
The King at 21, slender, yellow-haired, pale-faced, with a skin that flushed easily, was “abrupt and stammering in his speech,” over-splendid in dress, averse to war, ill-tempered with his domestics, arrogant and capricious. His Plantagenet pride, combined with Oxford’s influence, shaped an erratic and willful sovereign who levied extortionate taxes to pay for his luxuries. Before his downfall, which finished off the Plantagenets, he invented the handkerchief, recorded in his household rolls as “little pieces [of cloth] made for giving to the lord King for carrying in his hand to wipe and clean his nose.”
Government by favorite leans toward the arbitrary exercise of power, which in any case was Richard’s natural tendency. He had made Oxford a Knight of the Garter and, at 21, a member of the Privy Council, and showered on him a stream of endowments—lands, castles, wardships, lordships, revenues—and a hereditary sheriffdom belonging to Buckingham’s wife’s family. This was unwise, but if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons. The ruthless Buckingham, now Duke of Gloucester, did not need extra provocation to hate his nephew, whom he despised for his reluctance to pursue the war. Attracting the enemies of Oxford, Gloucester became the focus of the oppositionist party bent on curbing the power of the King’s favorite.
The struggle reached a peak when Richard, on the occasion of a rebellion in Ireland, created for Oxford the unprecedented title of Marquis of Dublin and subsequently Duke of Ireland with precedence over all the earls. He was given regal powers to crush the rebellion, but instead of going to Ireland, which would at least have given the nobles the satisfaction of removing him from the scene, Oxford was smitten by love for a Bohemian lady-in-waiting of Richard’s Queen. Such was his passion that he determined to divorce Philippa in order to marry the Bohemian lady, thus infuriating Philippa’s royal uncles, the Dukes of Lancaster, Gloucester, and York. Despite the insult to the royal family, Richard was too hypnotized by Oxford to do other than “improperly and sinfully consent” to, and even assist in, his own cousin’s repudiation. Oxford submitted to Rome an appeal for divorce based on “false testimony,” Richard entreated Pope Urban for favorable consideration, and the Pope felt no compunction in complying since Philippa was of Clementist lineage.
Oxford’s treatment of his wife was said by Froissart to be “the principal thing that took away his honor.” Even his mother joined in the general condemnation and showed it by taking Philippa to live with her. Probably it was the fact of Philippa’s royal blood and Oxford’s personal unpopularity rather than moral indignation that excited all the disapproval. Although marriage was a sacrament, divorce was frequent and, given the right strings to pull, easily obtained. In Piers Plowman all lawyers are said to “make and unmake matrimony for money,” and preachers complained that a man might get rid of his wife by giving the judge a fur cloak. In theory, divorce did not exist, yet marriage litigation filled the courts of the Middle Ages. Regardless of theory, divorce was a fact of life, a permanent element in the great disharmony between medieval theory and practice.
A formal appeal against Oxford and four other councillors of the King’s party was presented in November 1387 by a group of lords known by virtue of their action as the Lords Appellant. When they appointed a Commission of Government headed by Gloucester with powers as Regent, Richard and Oxford gathered an army to assert the King’s sovereignty by force of arms. The conflict came to a head in the so-called Battle of Radcot Bridge: facing superior forces, Oxford escaped by leaping into the river on horseback, after discarding part of his armor, and galloping away on the far side into the dusk. He took ship for Flanders, where he had taken the precaution to deposit large sums with Lombard bankers at Bruges.
A month later, in February 1388, the lords in a session known as the Merciless Parliament brought charges of treason against Oxford and the Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who had also escaped. They were charged with conspiring to control the King, exclude his proper councillors, murder the Duke of Gloucester, impoverish the crown by grants to themselves and their relatives, override Parliament, and return Calais to the French King in exchange for aid against their domestic opponents. The Parliament sentenced Oxford and Suffolk in absentia to be hanged as traitors. Three others who had not escaped—the Chief Justice, the Mayor of London, and Richard’s former tutor, Sir Simon Burley—were executed. Richard remained, humiliated and robbed of the friend he was never to see again. To abase a King and leave him on the throne has its dangers. Richard was to have his revenge.
Against Coucy’s fierce opposition, Oxford was invited to France in 1388 on the grounds that it would be advantageous to obtain information from him about the quarrels in England. It may be, too, that Oxford had indeed made overtures about Calais. Although Coucy “hated him with all his heart,” he was forced to acquiesce. Oxford came, was received at court and well entertained, but Coucy did not rest until, with the support of Clisson, Rivière, and Mercier, he prevailed upon the King to expel the dishonorer of his daughter from France. A residence was found for Oxford in Brabant, where, in 1392, he was killed in a boar hunt at the age of thirty. King Richard had his body brought back for reburial in England, and in an ornate if lonely ceremony, gazed mournfully upon the embalmed face and placed a ring on the dead finger of the great troublemaker. Meanwhile, the divorce having been annulled, Philippa remained the legal Countess of Oxford.
A royal grant made to Coucy at this time testified to the scars left by plague and war over the last decades. In November 1388 he was appointed Grand Bouteiller (Grand Butler) of France, the equivalent of chief seneschal or domestic steward to the crown. At the same time he was granted the privilege of holding two annual fairs of three days each, with the sale of all merchandise exempted from taxes. The language of the grant states that the town of Coucy had three times suffered “the fires of mischief, which occurred in the said town because of lack of laborers who died during the great mortality. And also owing to preceding wars, the inhabitants and community of the said town, castle and lands of Coucy were so impoverished, diminished and reduced in people, houses, manors, rents, revenues and all other goods and chattels, that the said town was in danger of becoming deserted and uninhabitable, and the vines, fields and other husbandries going to waste.”
The intent of the grant, which followed a survey of the barony at the time of the King’s visit to Coucy the year before, was clearly designed, in the royal interest as much as in Coucy’s, to restore the health of a crucial domain. The barony is described by the grant as the “key and frontier” of the kingdom with borders reaching to Flanders and the Empire, and the castle as “one of the most notable and beautiful of the realm.” By the “deserting and uninhabiting of the said town and castle, if that should happen, many great perils, damages and irreparable inconveniences could issue.” The fact that the grant followed immediately upon the transfer of power to the group dominated by the Marmosets, Clisson, and Coucy himself, was certainly no coincidence.
From this time on, Coucy served as first Lay President of the Chambre des Comptes, a post associated with the office of Bouteiller, which originally had charge of the royal revenues and accounts. While he does not seem to have collected wages for the office, he continued to receive an annual pension from the crown. His domain, greatly enlarged by his many acquisitions, and now comprising 150 towns and villages, was apparently extensive enough to surmount the declining fortunes of lesser landowners.
Picardy, his native region, so often in the path of invasion, was “beaten and chastised,” wrote Mézières, himself a Picard, “and today no longer flourishes.” From places reduced to misery, the last peasants fled to other regions so that “at present,” according to a complaint of 1388, “laborers cannot be found to work or cultivate the land.” The marks of a century of woe—lowered population, dwindling commerce, deserted villages, ruined abbeys—were everywhere in France, and cause enough for the climate of pessimism. Certain communes in Normandy were reduced to two or three hearths; in the diocese of Bayeux several towns had been abandoned since 1370, likewise several parishes of Brittany. The commerce of Châlons on the Marne was reduced from 30,000 pieces of cloth a year to 800. In the region of Paris, according to an ordinance of 1388, “many notable and ancient highways, bridges, lanes, and roads” had been left to decay—gutted by streams, overgrown by hedges, brambles, and trees, and some, having become impassable, abandoned altogether. The same examples could be multiplied for the south.
The schism had caused physical as well as spiritual damage, as when a Benedictine abbey, already twice burned by the companies, was cut off from the revenue of its estates in Flanders and spent so much money on lawyers in various disputes that the Pope was obliged to reduce its tax from 200 livres to 40 for a period of 25 years. Other abbeys, robbed by the companies or depopulated by the plague, fell into indiscipline and disorder, and in some cases into disuse, their lands reverting to waste. Decreased revenue and rising costs impoverished many landowners, causing them to exact new fees and invent new kinds of taxes to impose on their tenants. When this hastened flight from the land, the nobles tried to prevent it by confiscating goods and by other penalties that increased the peasants’ hostility.
Gathered together, the facts of decay convey too solid an impression. In real life every age is a checkerboard of light and dark. At the turn of the century the renowned Spanish knight Don Pero Niño, on a visit to France, left a picture of noble life as enchanted and bucolic in reality as it was often represented to be in tapestries and Books of Hours. The castle of Serifontaine, which he visited, was situated on the banks of a river in Normandy and furnished as richly “as if it had been in the city of Paris.” Around it were orchards and gracious gardens, and a walled fishpond from which each day, by opening the conduits, enough fish could be taken to serve 300 people. The elderly and ailing but complaisant host, Reynaud de Trie, Vienne’s successor as Admiral of France, possessed forty or fifty hounds, twenty horses of all kinds for his personal use, forests full of game great and small, falcons for hunting by the river, and for a wife, “the most beautiful lady then in France.” She appears to have been remarkably privileged.
This lady “had her own noble dwelling apart from that of the Admiral,” though connected by a drawbridge, and was attended by ten noble and richly dressed damsels who had no duties but to entertain themselves and their lady, for she had many serving maids as well. In the morning she and her damsels went to a grove, each with her Book of Hours and rosary, and said their prayers seated apart from each other and not conversing until they had finished. Returning to the castle, picking violets and other flowers as they went, they heard low mass in the chapel, after which they ate roasted larks and chicken from a silver plate accompanied by wine. Then, on finely saddled horses, together with knights and squires they rode in the country, where they made chaplets of flowers and sang “lays, virelays, roundelays, complaints, ballads and songs of all kinds which the French compose,” harmonizing in voices “diverse and well-attuned.”
At the elaborate main meal of the day in the castle hall, each gentleman sat beside a lady, and “any man who with due measure and courtesy could speak of arms and love was sure … that he would be heard and answered as his desire would have it.” Minstrels played during the meal and for dancing by the knights and ladies afterward, which lasted for an hour and ended with a kiss. Spices and wine were served followed by a siesta, after which the company rose for heron-hunting with falcons by the river. There “you would have seen great sport, dogs swimming, drums beating, lures waving, and ladies and gentlemen enjoying delight beyond description.” Dismounting in a meadow, they were served cold partridges and fruits and, while they ate and drank, made chaplets of greenery and returned to the castle singing.
At nightfall they had supper, played bowls or danced by torchlight “far into the night,” or sometimes the Dame, perhaps bored by the cycle of pleasure, “went to seek distraction afoot in the country.” After more fruits and wine, the company went to bed. In the decline of Rome, too, there must have been pockets of wealth and delight and serene days where trouble never penetrated.
Paris was another matter. Deschamps describes a raucous evening’s entertainment, at an unspecified date, which began with dinner at Berry’s residence, the Hôtel de Nesle, and moved on to a dice game in a tavern. The guests were Coucy and the three Dukes—Berry, Burgundy, and Bourbon—as well as “several good Lombards,” and knights and squires, whose drinking and gaming in low-class surroundings inspired the poet to a lengthy if torpid tract against gambling.
Unhappily, Coucy figures also in a more spirited lament on the subject of baldness, in which Deschamps pleads for the return of head-coverings at court to spare the feelings of the bald, among whom he names himself and twelve great lords, including the Sire de Coucy. That baldness should be the only specific detail of his physical appearance to reach posterity is a sad trick of history, even if he was in good company. The Count de St. Pol, the Sire de Hangest, Guillaume de Bordes, bearer of the Oriflamme at Bourbourg, and other great knights and distinguished servitors of the late King were among the “skinheads.” Less fortunate were the cheveux reboursés—that is, those with little hair who carried combs and mirrors to keep their few strands combed over the bald spot. What is puzzling is that uncovered heads, a sign of shame, could have at any time become a fad—unless they were adopted as a kind of anti-chic by the dandies of the time in their craving, complained of by the preacher John Bromyard, “to devise some new piece of foppery to make men gaze at them in wonderment anew.”
Deschamps was concerned with men as they are, not as they should be. Pimps, sorcerers, monks, scolds, lawyers, tax-collectors, prostitutes, prelates, rascals, female procurers, and a variety of repugnant hags populate his verses. As he grew older, his vision grew sourer, perhaps owing to the number of his ailments, including toothache, “the cruellest of sufferings.” For a regimen of good health he advised drinking light red wine mixed with running water, abstaining from spiced drinks, cabbage, strong meats, fruits, chestnuts, butter and cream, and sauces of onion and garlic, dressing warmly in winter and lightly in summer, taking exercise, and never sleeping on the stomach.
Though he never lost his indignation at social injustice, Deschamps looked with a satiric eye on the human species, which though endowed with reason, prefers folly. The sins of the age he most condemned were impiety causing disobedience to God, pride that generates all other vices, sodomy the “unnatural” sin, sorcery, and love of money. In the new reign, though he held a post as maître d’hôtel to Louis d’Orléans, he felt himself displaced at court by frivolous and over-dressed young men of doubtful courage, equivocal habits, and uncertain faith. His complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.
After fifty years, the purpose of the war had faded and men could hardly remember its cause. Although the Duke of Gloucester and the “boars” of England were as bellicose as ever, they could not raise the funds for another expedition. In France, the aborted invasion of England had drained desire for aggression. Anti-war sentiment was growing, even if, in the case of Mézières, it was in the interest of turning hostility against the infidel. “All Christendom has been disturbed for fifty years by your ambition to gain a little ground. The rights and wrongs of the matter have long been obscured and all Christians must now be held responsible for the shedding of so much Christian blood.” To bring Christians together for a crusade was not seen by a man like Mézières as war but as the use of the sword for the glory of God.
After six months’ parley, a three years’ truce, but still no definitive settlement, was concluded in June 1389, with intricate provisions for negotiating each transfer of territory or sovereignty in case of dispute. With communication restored, Coucy was now able to send a messenger to Philippa in England “from his great desire to know certainly of her welfare.” He was appointed Captain of Guienne to supervise the truce in the south and to guard and defend the country from Dordogne to the sea, including Auvergne and Limousin.
The news of peace was received by the common people, in at least one case, with skepticism and a curious revival of the prophecy once attributed to Coucy about the King and his spade. The citizens of Bois-Gribaut in the Limousin fell to discussing the news of the truce brought by a bourgeois of their village on his return from Paris. Some were unimpressed, saying they would soon be assembling against England again. A poor witless shepherd named Marcial le Vérit, who was said to have been held in prison by the English in great misery, expressed a more subversive opinion for which he was later arrested: “Don’t you believe it. You will never see peace. As for me, I don’t believe it, because the King has destroyed and pillaged Flanders as he did Paris. And what’s more, the Seigneur de Coucy brought him a spade and told him that when he had destroyed his country, he would have to use that.” The saying had evidently struck a responsive chord.
Coucy appeared as a symbol of another kind in a challenge addressed to him before the truce was signed by Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham and future Duke of Norfolk, one of the Lords Appellant whom Richard was courting and had appointed Earl Marshal of England for life. To this young man of 23, Coucy represented the epitome of chivalry; to encounter him in combat was to learn prowess and gain honor. When piety and virtue, the supposed springs of knightly conduct, were conspicuous by their absence, the cloak of honor and valor was all the more anxiously sought. Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.
As “a man of approved honor, valor, chivalry and great renown, as is known in many honorable places,” Coucy was challenged by Nottingham to name a day and place for a joust of three points of the lance, three of the sword, three of the dagger, and three blows of the ax on foot. He was to send, sealed with his seal, “a good and loyal safe-conduct” from his King, and if Calais were chosen as the site, Nottingham would in turn supply a safe-conduct from his King. He suggested that the combat take place in front of “as many persons as you and I shall be prepared to supply with safe-conduct and lodging.” No record exists of a reply or of any such joust taking place. Coucy was either uninterested or unwilling to engage while the truce was still pending.
Foiled of glory, Nottingham took up the famous challenge of St. Ingelbert in the following year when the dashing Boucicaut and two companions, angered by English boasting after the truce, offered to hold the lists against all comers in any form of combat for thirty days. Prudent counsel advised against re-opening a quarrel so soon after the truce for the whims of “wild young knights,” and friends advised the three that it would be beyond their powers. Boucicaut was not one to be moved by prudence. At sixteen he had fought his first battle at Roosebeke where a huge Fleming, mocking his youth and small size, told him to go back to his mother’s arms. Drawing his dagger, Boucicaut had plunged it into the man’s side with the words, “Do the children of your country play games like these?” He and his companions maintained the lists of St. Ingelbert with great courage and he went on to become Marshal of France and share in Coucy’s last adventure.
Nottingham’s craving for combat was to have a darker conclusion. Ten years later it led him as Duke of Norfolk to the historic duel with Bolingbroke which was to precipitate the downfall of Richard II. Banished together with his opponent at the time of the duel, Nottingham was to die in exile within a year.
Moving from place to place, visiting, investigating, asking questions, Jean Froissart came to Paris in the month when the truce was signed to visit “the gentil Sire de Coucy … one of my seigneurs and patrons.” In the twenty years since the death of his first patron, Queen Philippa of England, Froissart had enjoyed some support from the Emperor Wenceslas and had obtained a clerical living through the patronage of Guy de Châtillon, Count of Blois, with no duties but to continue his history. When Guy de Blois went bankrupt, Coucy had proposed Froissart for a canonry of Lille which had so far not materialized. Meantime,
The good seigneur de Couci
Often stuffed my fist
With [a bag of] red-sealed florins.*
While the recipient of patronage is likely in turn to be generous with compliments, Froissart’s for Coucy seem more than merely conventional; they add up to a distinct individual. “Gentil” was a word routinely applied to any important and well-considered noble, meaning no more than that he or she was nobly born; Coucy, in addition, is “subtle,” “prudent,” and especially “imaginatif” or “fort-imaginatif,” meaning intelligent, thoughtful, or far-seeing, and the all-inclusive “sage” or “très-sage,” which could mean wise, sensible, wary, rational, discreet, judicious, cool, sober, staid, well-behaved, steady, virtuous, or presumably any or all of these. He is also described as “cointe,” meaning elegant in manner and dress, gracious, courteous, valiant—a compendium of the attributes of chivalry.
Book One of Froissart’s Chronicles, in which chivalry immediately recognized a celebrator, had appeared in 1370, at once creating a wide demand. The oldest extant manuscript copy of Book One, now in the Royal Library of Belgium, bears the Coucy coat-of-arms.
Multiple copying of manuscripts was no longer the monopoly of lonely monks in their cells but the occupation of professional scribes who had their own guilds. Licensed in Paris by the University, supposedly to ensure accurate texts, the scribes were the agony of living authors, who complained bitterly of the copyists’ delays and errors. The “trouble and discouragement” a writer suffers, wailed Petrarch, was indescribable. Such was the “ignorance, laziness, and arrogance of these fellows” that when a writer has given them his work, he never knows what changes he will find in it when he gets it back.
The rise of a bourgeois audience in the 14th century and the increased manufacture of paper created a reading public wider than the nobles who had known literature from recitation or reading aloud in their castle halls. The mercantile class, familiar by reason of its occupation with reading and writing, was ready to read books of all sorts: verse, history, romance, travel, bawdy tales, allegories, and religious works. Possession of books had become the mark of a cultivated man. Since the magnates and newly rich imitated the manners, ideals, and dress of the nobility, the chronicles of chivalry had a great vogue.
What books Enguerrand VII may have owned in addition to Froissart’s Chronicles are not known except for those listed in the royal archives as gifts to him from the King. In addition to the French Bible from Genesis to Psalms, which he was given for his services in subduing the Duke of Brittany, he received in 1390 the romance of King Peppin and His Wife Bertha Bigfoot and the rhymed Gestes de Charlemagne, “well-inscribed on three columns to the page in a very large volume,” which had belonged to the Queen and which “the King took from her and gave to Monsieur de Coucy.”
Froissart arrived in Paris from the south, where he had visited another patron, the Count of Foix, and had been received by the Pope in Avignon. He had also attended the wedding of the Duc de Berry to a twelve-year-old bride, the occasion of much ribald comment. Eager for first-hand reports of these affairs, Coucy invited Froissart to accompany him on a journey to his fief at Mortagne. Riding together, they exchanged news, Coucy telling the chronicler what he knew of the truce parleys, and Froissart full of tales about his effulgent host at Foix. It appeared that the Count of Foix, who had the wardship of Berry’s bride, had taken cool advantage of the Duke’s ardor; he had strung out the marriage negotiations until Berry, in his impatience, agreed to pay 30,000 francs to cover the maiden’s expenses while she had been Foix’s ward.
In the course of persistent questioning, Froissart had drawn from the Count of Foix a contemporary view of the 14th century, seen from a position of privilege. The history of his own lifetime, Gaston Phoebus said, would be more sought after than any other because “in these fifty years there have been more feats of arms and more marvels in the world than in 300 years before.” To him the ferment of the times was exciting; he had no misgivings. In the midst of events there is no perspective.
No misgivings about knighthood played a part in a frenzied celebration of that dignity on the occasion of the knighting of twelve-year-old Louis II of Anjou and his younger brother aged ten. In the ceremony’s four days of all-too secular festivities staged in the royal Abbey of St. Denis, 14th century France relived the decadence of Rome, and indeed the knighting of little boys was not so far removed from the emperor who made a Consul of his horse. The surpassing pomp of the occasion and the selection of St. Denis as the site were intended to promote enthusiasm for the Angevin recovery of the Kingdom of Naples. Radical alterations were made in the abbey’s precincts to accommodate tournaments, dances, and banquets. Religious services gave way to the hammering of carpenters and the coming and going of laborers and their materials. At the ceremony, after ritual baths and prayers, the two princelings, robed in floor-length furred mantles of double red silk, were escorted to the altar by squires holding naked swords by their points with golden spurs hanging from the hilts. In his enthusiasm for chivalric forms, Charles VI resurrected antique rituals which had fallen into disuse in his father’s time and were already so faded that spectators “thought it all strange and extraordinary” and inquired what the rites signified.
The same nostalgia was enacted in the next day’s tournament, when knights in polished armor were conducted to the lists by noble ladies “to imitate the gallantry of ancient worthies.” Each of the ladies in turn drew from her bosom a ribbon of colored silk to bestow graciously upon her knight. After each day’s jousts and tourneys, the celebrants “turned night into day” with dances, masquerades, feasting, drunkenness, and, according to the indignant Monk of St. Denis, “libertinage and adultery.” Knighthood, represented by the two half-forgotten little principals, was not noticeably enhanced.
Government expenditure continued to mount through the year 1389 to an excess as extravagant as the uncles’, although its purpose was civil rather than military. Its climax was the ceremonial entry into Paris of Isabeau of Bavaria, for her coronation as Queen, an event of spectacular splendor and unparalleled marvels of public entertainment. Though its cost contradicted the good intentions of the new government, the performance was in itself a form of government in the same sense as a Roman circus. What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few? Circuses and ceremonies are meant to encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too much, accomplish the opposite.
Some of the Queen’s thunder was stolen by Valentina Visconti, the new wife of Louis d’Orléans, who arrived just in time for the occasion. Since her marriage by proxy to Louis in 1387, the two intervening years had been required by her father, Gian Galeazzo, to amass her unprecedented dowry of half a million gold francs, plus Asti and other territories of Piedmont. Valentina was his only remaining child, to whom he was so attached that he left Pavia rather than be present at her departure, “and this was because he could not take leave of her without bursting into tears.” As the daughter of his dead wife, Isabelle of France—and thus Louis of Orléans’ first cousin—Valentina had grown up in a household which her father had made “a harbor for the famous, for men skilled in all learning and art whom he held in high honor.” She spoke Latin, French, and German fluently, and brought her own books and harp with her to France. Thirteen hundred knights escorted her across the Alps, her trousseau may be extrapolated from a robe embroidered with 2,500 pearls and sprinkled with diamonds, her future household with Louis was carpeted in Aragon leather and hung with vermilion velvet embroidered with roses and crossbows. The household accounts show silk sheets costing 400 francs as New Year’s gifts, but all the luxuries could not keep melancholy from pervading the marriage.
On the great day of the Queen’s entry, the procession advanced along the Rue St. Denis, the main boulevard leading to the Châtelet and to the Grand Pont over the Seine. It was a ladies’ day, with the duchesses and great ladies riding in richly ornamented litters escorted on either side by noble lords. Coucy escorted his daughter Marie and her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Bar, while his wife rode in another litter. The robes and jewels of the ladies were masterpieces of the embroiderers’ and goldsmiths’ arts, for the King wanted every previous ceremonial to be outdone. He had ordered the archives of St. Denis consulted for details of the coronations of ancient queens. The Duke of Burgundy, always a gorgeous dresser, needed no help; he wore a doublet of velvet embroidered with forty sheep and forty swans, each with a pearl bell around its neck.
Twelve hundred bourgeois led by the Provost lined the avenue, in gowns of green on one side of the street and gowns of crimson on the other. Such crowds of people had gathered to watch “as seemed that all the world had been there.” Houses and windows the length of the Rue St. Denis were hung with silks and tapestries, and the street itself covered with fine fabrics “in such plenty as if they cost nothing.”
Entering Paris through the Porte St. Denis, the procession passed under a heavenly sky of cloth stretched over the gate, filled with stars, beneath which children dressed as angels sang sweetly. Next on the way was a fountain spouting red and white wines, served by melodiously singing maidens with golden cups; then a stage erected in front of the Church of Ste. Trinité, on which was performed the Pas Saladin, a drama of the Third Crusade; then another firmament full of stars “with the figure of God seated in majesty”; then “a gate of Paradise” from which descended two angels with a crown of gold and jewels which they placed on the head of the Queen with appropriate song; then a curtained enclosure in front of St. Jacques within which men played organ music. At the Châtelet a marvelous mock castle and field of trees had been erected as the scene of a play dramatizing the “Bed of Justice.” Its theme was the favorite popular belief that the King was invested with royalty in order to maintain justice in favor of the small against the great. Amid a flurry of birds and beasts, twelve maidens with naked swords defended the White Hart from the Lion and the Eagle.
So many wonders were to be seen and admired that it was evening before the procession crossed the bridge leading to Notre Dame and the climactic display. High on a tightrope slanting down from the tower of Notre Dame to the roof of the tallest house on the Pont St. Michel, an acrobat was poised with two lighted candles in his hands. “Singing, he went upon the cord all along the great street so that all who saw him had marvel how it might be.” With his candles still burning, he was seen all over Paris and for two miles outside. The return of the procession from the cathedral at night was lighted by 500 torches.
The coronation and other festivities were thick with cloth of gold, ermine, velvets, silks, crowns, jewels, and all the gorgeous glitter that might dazzle the onlookers. A grand banquet was held in the same hall in which Charles V had entertained the Emperor, followed by a similar pageant (using what may have been the same props) showing the Fall of Troy with castles and ships moving about on wheels. At the high table with the King and Queen were seated only prelates and eight ladies, including the Dame de Coucy and the Duchess of Bar. The King wore his golden crown and a surcoat of scarlet furred with ermine which, considering that it was August, gave point to Deschamps’ advice about light clothing in summer. Such was the crowding and heat of the hall that the Queen, who was seven months pregnant when she went through these five days of continuous ceremony in mid-August, nearly fainted and the Dame de Coucy did faint, and one table of ladies was overthrown by the press of people. Windows were broken open to let in the air, but the Queen and many ladies retired to their chambers.
The hot weather affected the tournaments too; so much dust was raised by the horses’ feet that the knights complained, but the Sire de Coucy as usual “shone brilliantly.” The King ordered 200 barrels of water to lay the dust, “yet next day they had dust enough and too much.”
Forty of the leading bourgeois of Paris presented the King and Queen with gifts of jewels and vessels of gold in the hope of remittance of taxes. Carried by two men dressed as ancient sages, the gifts were enclosed in a litter covered by a fine silk gauze through which the sparkle of jewels and gleam of gold could be seen. This imaginative presentation was less persuasive than it deserved to be. Two months later, when the King left for a tour of the south to display his newfound sovereignty to the people and seek to relieve their oppressions, taxes were raised in Paris as soon as he left to pay for the cost of the Queen’s entry and for the new journey, which in turn proved so sumptuous that it resulted not in lowered but in increased taxes. In a manipulation of the currency to aid the cost, the circulation of small silver coins of four pence and twelve pence, which were the common cash of the people, was forbidden in Paris, depriving the poor for two weeks of the means to purchase food in the market place. Who can say whether two weeks of hunger and anger weighed heavier in the balance than the miraculous vision of the acrobat on his tightrope and the fountains of running wine?
* The original—“M’a souvent le poing fouci/De beaux florins a rouge escaille”—is obscure, but may refer to the fact that coins of good value, not worn or clipped, were often put in a bag tied at the top and sealed with colored wax, in this case a “red seal.”