Although doubtless precious to his parents as firstborn son and heir of a great dynasty, the infant Enguerrand VII was probably not the adored object of the coddling and tenderness that babies are by nature supposed to inspire. Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern, none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children. Emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature or documentary evidence. The Christ child is of course repeatedly pictured, usually in his mother’s arms, but prior to the mid-14th century he is generally held stiffly, away from her body, by a mother who is aloof even when nursing. Or else the holy infant lies alone on the ground, swaddled or sometimes quite naked and uncovered, while an unsmiling mother gazes at him abstractedly. Her separateness from the child was meant to indicate his divinity. If the ordinary mother felt a warmer, more intimate emotion, it found small expression in medieval art because the attitudes of motherhood were preempted by the Virgin Mary.
In literature the chief role of children was to die, usually drowned, smothered, or abandoned in a forest on the orders of some king fearing prophecy or mad husband testing a wife’s endurance. Women appear rarely as mothers. They are flirts, bawds, and deceiving wives in the popular tales, saints and martyrs in the drama, unattainable objects of passionate and illicit love in the romances. Occasionally motherhood may break through, as when an English preacher, to point a moral in a sermon, tells how a mother “that hath a childe in wynter when the childes hondes ben cold, the modur taketh hym a stree [straw] or a rusche and byddeth him warme itt, not for love of the stree to hete it … but for to hete the childes honds.” An occasional illustration or carving in stone shows parents teaching a child to walk, a peasant mother combing or delousing her child’s hair with his head in her lap, a more elegant mother of the 14th century knitting a child’s garment on four needles, an acknowledgment from a saint’s life of the “beauty of infancy,” and from the 12th century Ancren Riwle a description of a peasant mother playing hide-and-seek with her child and who, when he cries for her, “leapeth forth lightly with outspread arms and embraceth and kisseth him and wipeth his eyes.” These are isolated mentions which leave the empty spaces between more noticeable.
Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not?
Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place.
Well-off noble and bourgeois families bore more children than the poor because they married young and because, as a result of employing wet-nurses, the period of infertility was short. They also raised more, often as many as six to ten reaching adulthood. Guillaume de Coucy, grandfather of Enguerrand VII, raised five sons and five daughters; his son Raoul raised four of each. Nine out of the twelve children of Edward III and Queen Philippa of England reached maturity. The average woman of twenty, it has been estimated, could expect about twelve years of childbearing, with live births spaced out—owing to stillbirths, abortions, and nursing—at fairly long intervals of about thirty months. At this rate, the average of births per family was about five, of whom half survived.
Like everything else, childhood escapes a flat generalization. Love and lullabies and cradle-rocking did exist. God in his grace, wrote Philip of Novara in the 13th century, gave children three gifts: to love and recognize the person who nurses him at her breast; to show “joy and love” to those who play with him; to inspire love and tenderness in those who rear him, of which the last is the most important, for “without this, they will be so dirty and annoying in infancy and so naughty and capricious that it is hardly worth nurturing them through childhood.” Philip advocated, however, a strict upbringing, for “few children perish from excess of severity but many from being permitted too much.”
Books of advice on child-rearing were rare. There were books—that is, bound manuscripts—of etiquette, housewifery, deportment, home remedies, even phrase books of foreign vocabularies. A reader could find advice on washing hands and cleaning nails before a banquet, on eating fennel and anise in case of bad breath, on not spitting or picking teeth with a knife, not wiping hands on sleeves, or nose and eyes on the tablecloth. A woman could learn how to make ink, poison for rats, sand for hourglasses; how to make hippocras or spiced wine, the favorite medieval drink; how to care for pet birds in cages and get them to breed; how to obtain character references for servants and make sure they extinguished their bed candles with fingers or breath, “not with their shirts”; how to grow peas and graft roses; how to rid the house of flies; how to remove grease stains with chicken feathers steeped in hot water; how to keep a husband happy by ensuring him a smokeless fire in winter and a bed free of fleas in summer. A young married woman would be advised on fasting and alms-giving and saying prayers at the sound of the matins bell “before going to sleep again,” and on walking with dignity and modesty in public, not “in ribald wise with roving eyes and neck stretched forth like a stag in flight, looking this way and that like unto a runaway horse.” She could find books on estate management for times when her husband was away at war, with advice on making budgets and withstanding sieges and on tenure and feudal law so that her husband’s rights would not be invaded.
But she would find few books for mothers with advice on breastfeeding, swaddling, bathing, weaning, solid-feeding, and other complexities of infant care, although these might seem to have been of more moment for survival of the race than breeding birds in cages or even keeping husbands comfortable. When breast-feeding was mentioned, it was generally advocated—by one 13th century encyclopedist, Bartholomew of England in his Book on the Nature of Things—for its emotional value. In the process the mother “loves her own child most tenderly, embraces and kisses it, nurses and cares for it most solicitously.” A physician of the same period, Aldobrandino of Siena, who practiced in France, advised frequent cleaning and changing and two baths a day, weaning on porridge made of bread with honey and milk, ample playtime and unforced teaching at school, with time for sleep and diversion. But how widely his humane teaching was known or followed it is impossible to say.
On the whole, babies and young children appear to have been left to survive or die without great concern in the first five or six years. What psychological effect this may have had on character, and possibly on history, can only be conjectured. Possibly the relative emotional blankness of a medieval infancy may account for the casual attitude toward life and suffering of the medieval man.
Children did, however, have toys: dolls and doll carriages harnessed to mice, wooden knights and weapons, little animals of baked clay, windmills, balls, battledores and shuttlecocks, stilts and seesaws and merry-go-rounds. Little boys were like little boys of any time, “living without thought or care,” according to Bartholomew of England, “loving only to play, fearing no danger more than being beaten with a rod, always hungry and hence disposed to infirmities from being overfed, wanting everything they see, quick to laughter and as quick to tears, resisting their mothers’ efforts to wash and comb them, and no sooner clean but dirty again.” Girls were better behaved, according to Bartholomew, and dearer to their mothers. If children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. The childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years. About half the population, it has been estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under fourteen.
A boy of noble family was left for his first seven years in the charge of women, who schooled him in manners and to some extent in letters. Significantly, St. Anne, the patron saint of mothers, is usually portrayed teaching her child, the Virgin Mary, how to read from a book. From age eight to fourteen the noble’s son was sent as a page to the castle of a neighboring lord, in the same way that boys of lower orders went at seven or eight to another family as apprentices or servants. Personal service was not considered degrading: a page or even a squire as a grown man assisted his lord to bathe and dress, took care of his clothes, waited on him at table while sharing noble status. In return for free labor, the lord provided a free school for the sons of his peers. The boy would learn to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life, to play chess and backgammon, to sing and dance, play an instrument, and compose, and other romantic skills. The castle’s private chaplain or a local abbey would supply his religious education, and teach him the rudiments of reading and writing and possibly some elements of the grammar-school curriculum that non-noble boys studied.
At fourteen or fifteen, when he became a squire, the training for combat intensified. He learned to pierce the swinging dummy of the quintain with a lance, wield the sword and a variety of other murderous weapons, and know the rules of heraldry and jousting. As squire he led his lord’s war-horse to battle and held it when the fighting was on foot. He assisted the seneschal in the business of the castle, kept the keys, acted as confidential courier, carried the purse and valuables on a journey. Book learning had little place in this program, although a young noble, depending on his bent, could make some acquaintance of geometry, law, elocution, and, in a few cases, Latin.
Women of noble estate were frequently more accomplished in Latin and other school learning than the men, for though girls did not leave home at seven like boys, their education was encouraged by the Church so that they might be better instructed in the faith and more fitted for the religious life in a nunnery, should their parents wish to dedicate them, with suitable endowment, to the Church. Besides reading and writing in French and Latin, they were taught music, astronomy, and some medicine and first aid.
The last of the Coucys entered a world in which movement was limited to the speed of man or horse, news and public announcements were communicated by the human voice, and light ended for most people with the setting of the sun. At dusk, horns were blown or bells rung to sound curfew or “cover fires,” after which work was prohibited because a workman could not see to perform creditably. The rich could prolong time by torchlight and candles, but for others night was as dark as nature intended, and stillness surrounded a traveler after dark. “Birds, wild beasts and men without any noise did take their rest,” wrote Boccaccio. “The unfallen leaves did hang upon the trees and the moist air abode in mild peace. Only the stars did shine to light his way.”
Flowers covered the fields and forest floor and formed a cherished element of daily life. Wild flowers and garden flowers were woven into chaplets worn by noble men and women, strewn on floors and tables at banquets, and scattered in the streets before royal processions. Monkeys were common pets. Beggars were ubiquitous, most of them crippled, blind, diseased, deformed, or disguised as such. The legless dragged themselves along by means of wooden stumps strapped to their hands. Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration. Doctors were admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted. Steam was unharnessed, syphilis not yet introduced, leprosy still extant, gunpowder coming into use, though not yet effectively. Potatoes, tea, coffee, and tobacco were unknown; hot spiced wine was the favorite drink of those who could afford it; the common people drank beer, ale, and cider.
Men of the non-clerical classes had abandoned the gown for divided legs clad in tights. They were generally clean-shaven, although chin beards and mustaches came in and out of fashion. Knights and courtiers had adopted a fashion of excessively long pointed shoes called poulaines—which often had to be tied up around the calf to enable the wearer to walk—and excessively short tunics which, according to one chronicler’s complaint, revealed the buttocks and “other parts of the body that should be hidden,” exciting the mockery of the common people. Women used cosmetics, dyed their hair, plucked it to broaden their foreheads, and plucked their eyebrows too, although by these practices they committed the sin of vanity.
Fortune’s Wheel, plunging down the mighty and (more rarely) raising the lowly, was the prevailing image of the instability of life in an uncertain world. Progress, moral or material, in man or society, was not expected during this life on earth, of which the conditions were fixed. The individual might through his own efforts increase in virtue, but betterment of the whole would have to await the Second Coming and the beginning of a new age.
Time, calendar, and history were reckoned by the Christian scheme. Creation of the world was dated 4,484 years before the founding of Rome, and modern history from the birth of Christ. Historical events thereafter were chronicled by papal reigns beginning with St. Peter’s, which was fixed at A.D. 42–67. Current events were recorded in relation to religious holidays and saints’ days. The year began in March—the month, according to Chaucer, “in which the world began, when God first made man.” Officially it began at Easter, and because this was a movable feast falling anywhere within a period of thirty days, historical dating was imprecise. Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening; and compline at bedtime. The reckoning of time was based on the movements of sun and stars, nature’s timekeepers, which were familiar and carefully observed. About the time Enguerrand VII was born, the mechanical clock was coming into use on town-hall towers and in homes of the rich, bringing precision with all its possibilities for scientific observation.
People lived close to the inexplicable. The flickering lights of marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants. In the terrible trembling and fissures of an earthquake or the setting afire of a tree by lightning, the supernatural was close at hand. Storms were omens, death by heart attack or other seizures could be the work of demons. Magic was present in the world: demons, fairies, sorcerers, ghosts, and ghouls touched and manipulated human lives; heathen superstitions and rituals abided among the country folk, beneath and even alongside the priest and sacraments. The influence of the planets could explain anything otherwise unaccounted for. Astronomy was the noblest science, and astrology, after God, the greatest determinant of affairs.
Alchemy, or the search for the philosopher’s stone that would transmute base metals into gold, was the most popular applied science. At the end of that rainbow lay also the panacea for ills and the elixir of longevity. Inquiring minds investigated natural science through experiment and observation. A scholar of Oxford kept a seven-year record of the weather through the years 1337–44 and noted that the sound of bells heard more clearly or at a greater distance than usual was a sign of increased humidity and a prediction of rain. Mental depression and anxiety were recognized as an illness, although the symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth. Surveying by triangulation was practiced, and the height of walls and towers measured by a monk lying prone with the aid of a stick. Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and greatly extending the scholar’s life of study. The manufacture of paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of literary works.
Energy depended on human and animal muscle and on the gear shaft turned by wind or water. Their power drove mills for tanning and laundering, sawing wood, pressing olive oil, casting iron, mashing malt for beer and pulp for paper and pigment for paints, operating fullers’ vats for finishing woolen cloth, bellows for blast furnaces, hydraulic hammers for foundries, and wheels for grindstones used by armorers. The mills had so augmented the use of iron that timberland was already being deforested to supply fuel for the forge. They had so extended human capacity that Pope Celestine III in the 1190s ruled that windmills must pay tithes. Unpowered tools—the lathe, brace and bit, spinning wheel, and wheeled plow—had also in the last century increased skills and powers of production.
Travel, “the mother of tidings,” brought news of the world to castle and village, town and countryside. The rutted roads, always either too dusty or too muddy, carried an endless flow of pilgrims and peddlers, merchants with their packtrains, bishops making visitations, tax-collectors and royal officials, friars and pardoners, wandering scholars, jongleurs and preachers, messengers and couriers who wove the network of communications from city to city. Great nobles like the Coucys, bankers, prelates, abbeys, courts of justice, town governments, kings and their councils employed their own messengers. The King of England at mid-century kept twelve on hand who accompanied him at all times, ready to start, and were paid 3d. a day when on the road and 4s. 8d. a year for shoes. Befitting the greater majesty of France, the French King employed up to one hundred, and a grand seigneur two or three.
An average day’s journey on horseback was about 30 to 40 miles, though it varied widely, depending on circumstance. A messenger on horseback, without riding at night, could cover 40 to 50 miles a day and about half as much on foot. In an emergency, given a good horse and good road (which was rare) and no load, he could make 15 miles an hour and, with changes of horse awaiting him, cover 100 miles a day. The great merchant cities of Venice and Bruges maintained a regular postal service between them so highly organized that it covered the 700 miles in seven days. Packtrains made about 15 to 20 miles a day; armies, when slowed by baggage wagons and retainers on foot, sometimes covered no more than 8 miles a day.
The length of France from Flanders to Navarre was generally reckoned a journey of 20 to 22 days, and the width, from the coast of Brittany to Lyon on the Rhône, 16 days. Travelers to Italy across the Alps usually went by way of the Mont Cenis pass from Chambéry in the territory of Savoy to Turin. Snowbound from November through May, the pass took 5 to 7 days to traverse. Traveling from Paris to Naples via this route took five weeks. The voyage from London to Lyon took about 18 days and from Canterbury to Rome about 30 days depending on the Channel crossing, which was unpredictable, often dangerous, sometimes fatal, and could take anywhere from three days to a month. One knight, Sir Hervé de Léon, was kept 15 days at sea by a storm and, besides having lost his horse overboard, arrived so battered and weakened “that he never had health thereafter.” It was no wonder that, according to a ballad, when pilgrims took to sea for the voyage to Compostella or beyond, “Theyr hertes begin to fayle.”
Except for galleys powered by oarsmen, ships were at the mercy of the weather, although rigging had been improved and the swinging stern rudder gave greater control. Maps and harbor charts were in use and the compass was allowing navigation to leave the coastline and merchant cargo to take the risk of crossing the open sea. As a result, larger ships capable of carrying 500 tons or more of cargo were being used for these voyages. Barge transportation by river and canal was much cheaper than packtrain, even given the tolls imposed by local lords at every convenient point. Along the busy Seine and Garonne, tolls succeeded each other every six or seven miles.
Wagons and peasants’ two-wheeled carts were used for short hauls, but since roads were usually impassable by wheeled vehicles in winter and there was no connected system of roads and bridges, the mule train remained the essential carrier. Four-wheeled covered wagons drawn by three or four horses in tandem were available for ladies and the sick. Ladies who rode sat astride under flowing skirts, but the sidesaddle was to appear before the end of the century. For a knight to ride in a carriage was against the principles of chivalry and he never under any circumstances rode a mare.
Travelers stopped before nightfall, those of the nobility taking shelter in some nearby castle or monastery where they would be admitted indoors, while the mass of ordinary travelers on foot, including pilgrims, were housed and fed in a guest house outside the gate. They were entitled to one night’s lodging at any monastery and could not be turned away unless they asked for a second night. Inns were available to merchants and others, though they were likely to be crowded, squalid, and flea-ridden, with several beds to a room and two travelers to a bed—or three to a bed in Germany, according to the disgusted report of the poet Deschamps, who was sent there on a mission for the French King. Moreover, he complained, neither bed nor table had clean linen, the innkeeper offered no choice of foods, a traveler in the Empire could find nothing to drink but beer; fleas, rats, and mice were unavoidable, and the people of Bohemia lived like pigs.
Given the hardships and the length of time consumed, people journeyed over long distances to an astonishing degree—from Paris to Florence, from Flanders to Hungary, London to Prague, Bohemia to Castile, crossing seas, alps, and rivers, walking to China like Marco Polo or three times to Jerusalem like the Wife of Bath.
What was the mental furniture of Enguerrand’s class, the upper level of lay society? Long before Columbus, they knew the world was a globe, a knowledge proceeding from familiarity with the movement of the stars, which could be made comprehensible only in terms of a spherical earth. In a vivid image, it was said by the cleric Gautier de Metz in his Image du Monde, the most widely read encyclopedia of the time, that a man could go around the world as a fly makes the tour of an apple. So far was the earth from the stars, according to him, that if a stone were dropped from there it would take more than 100 years to reach our globe, while a man traveling 25 leagues a day without stopping would take 7,157½ years to reach the stars.
Visually, people pictured the universe held in God’s arms with man at its center. It was understood that the moon was the nearest planet, with no light of its own; that an eclipse was the passage of the moon between the earth and the sun; that rain was moisture drawn by the sun from the earth which condensed into clouds and fell back as rain; that the shorter the time between thunder and lightning, the nearer the source.
Faraway lands, however—India, Persia, and beyond—were seen through a gauze of fabulous fairy tales revealing an occasional nugget of reality: forests so high they touch the clouds, horned pygmies who move in herds and grow old in seven years, brahmins who kill themselves on funeral pyres, men with dogs’ heads and six toes, “cyclopeans” with only one eye and one foot who move as fast as the wind, the “monoceros” which can be caught only when it sleeps in the lap of a virgin, Amazons whose tears are of silver, panthers who practice the caesarean operation with their own claws, trees whose leaves supply wool, snakes 300 feet long, snakes with precious stones for eyes, snakes who so love music that for prudence they stop up one ear with their tail.
The Garden of Eden too had an earthly existence which often appeared on maps, located far to the east, where it was believed cut off from the rest of the world by a great mountain or ocean barrier or fiery wall. In the earthly Paradise grow every kind of tree and flowers of surpassing colors and a thousand scents which never fade and have healing qualities. Birds’ songs harmonize with the rustling of forest leaves and the rippling of streams flowing over jeweled rocks or over sands brighter than silver. A palace with columns of crystal and jasper sheds marvelous light. No wind or rain, heat or cold mars Paradise; no sickness, decay, death, or sorrow enters there. The mountain peak on which it is situated is so high it touches the sphere of the moon—but here the scientific mind intervened: that would be impossible, pronounced the 14th century author ofPolychronicon, because it would cause an eclipse.
For all the explanations, the earth and its phenomena were full of mysteries: What happens to fire when it goes out? Why are there different colors of skin among men? Why do the sun’s rays darken a man’s skin but bleach white linen? How can the earth, which is weighty, be suspended in air? How do souls make their way to the next world? Where lies the soul? What causes madness? Medieval people felt surrounded by puzzles, yet because God was there they were willing to acknowledge that causes are hidden, that man cannot know why all things are as they are; “they are as God pleases.”
That did not silence the one unending question: Why does God allow evil, illness, and poverty? Why did He not make man incapable of sin? Why did He not assure him of Paradise? The answer, never wholly satisfying, was that God owed the Devil his scope. According to St. Augustine, the fount of authority, all men were under the Devil’s power by virtue of original sin; hence the necessity of the Church and salvation.
Questions of human behavior found answers in the book of Sidrach, supposedly a descendant of Noah to whom God gave the gift of universal knowledge, eventually compiled into a book by several masters of Toledo. What language does a deaf-mute hear in his heart? Answer: that of Adam, namely Hebrew. Which is worst: murder, robbery, or assault? None of these; sodomy is the worst. Will wars ever end? Never, until the earth becomes Paradise. The origin of war, according to its 14th century codifier Honoré Bonet, lay in Lucifer’s war against God, “hence it is no great marvel if in this world there arise wars and battles since these existed first in heaven.”
Education, so far as it would have reached Enguerrand, was based on the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. Medicine, though not one of the liberal arts, was analogous to Music because its object was the harmony of the human body.
History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God.
The average layman acquired knowledge mainly by ear, through public sermons, mystery plays, and the recital of narrative poems, ballads, and tales, but during Enguerrand’s lifetime, reading by educated nobles and upper bourgeois increased with the increased availability of manuscripts. Books of universal knowledge, mostly dating from the 13th century and written in (or translated from the Latin into) French and other vernaculars for the use of the layman, were literary staples familiar in every country over several centuries. A 14th century man drew also on the Bible, romances, bestiaries, satires, books of astronomy, geography, universal history, church history, rhetoric, law, medicine, alchemy, falconry, hunting, fighting, music, and any number of special subjects. Allegory was the guiding concept. Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New. Everything in nature concealed an allegorical meaning relating to some aspect of Christian doctrine. Allegorical figures—Greed, Reason, Courtesy, Love, False-Seeming, Do-Well, Fair Welcome, Evil Rumor—peopled the tales and political treatises.
Epics of great heroes, of Brutus and King Arthur, of the “strong stryfe” of Greece and Troy, of Alexander and Julius Caesar, of how Charlemagne and Roland fought the Saracens and how Tristan and Iseult loved and sinned, were the favorites of noble households, though not to the exclusion of coarser stuff. The fabliaux or tales of common life, bawdy and scatological, were told in noble halls as well as taverns. The Ménagier of Paris, a wealthy bourgeois contemporary of Enguerrand VII, who at the age of sixty in 1392 wrote a book of domestic and moral instruction for his young wife, had read or possessed the Bible, The Golden Legend, St. Jerome’s Lives of the Fathers, the works of St. Augustine, St. Gregory, Livy, Cicero, the Roman de la Rose, Petrarch’s Tale of Griselda, and other less familiar titles. The Chevalier Geoffroy de La Tour Landry, a slightly older contemporary of Enguerrand, who in 1371 wrote a book of cautionary tales for his daughters, was as well acquainted with Sarah, Bathsheba, and Delilah as with Helen of Troy, Hippolyta, and Dido. If the Ménagier was too respectable to read Ovid, the Roman poet was well known to others. Aristotle was the basis of political philosophy, Ptolemy of “natural” philosophy, Hippocrates and Galen of medicine.
Contemporary writers rapidly found an audience. In Dante’s lifetime his verse was chanted by blacksmiths and mule-drivers; fifty years later in 1373 the growth of reading caused the Signoria of Florence, at the petition of citizens, to offer a year’s course of public lectures on Dante’s work for which the sum of 100 gold florins was raised to pay the lecturer, who was to speak every day except holy days. The person appointed was Boccaccio, who had written the first biography of Dante and copied out the entire Divine Comedy himself as a gift for Petrarch.
In an Italian biographical dictionary at the end of the century, the longest articles were given to Julius Caesar and Hannibal, two pages to Dante, one page each to Archimedes, Aristotle, King Arthur, and Attila the Hun, two and a half columns to Petrarch, one column to Boccaccio, shorter mentions to Cimabue and Giotto, and three lines to Marco Polo.
For Enguerrand at age seven, the usual pattern was abruptly interrupted when his father was killed in the war against the English at about the time of the fatal Battle of Crécy in 1346, but whether in that or another engagement is uncertain.
When a fief owing an important number of fighting men to the King was left in the hands of a widow or minor heir, the question of control became crucial, the more so now when the kingdom was already at war. As governors of the barony of Coucy during Enguerrand’s minority, the King appointed the chief of his Council, Jean de Nesles, Sire d’Offémont, a member of the old nobility, and another of the royal inner circle, Matthieu de Roye, Sire d’Aunoy, Master of the Crossbowmen of France, an office exercising command over all archers and infantry. Both were seigneurs of Picardy with lands not far from Coucy. Enguerrand’s uncle, Jean de Coucy, Sire d’Havraincourt, was named his guardian and tutor or adviser. His mother, Catherine of Austria, left in a situation vulnerable to predatory ambitions, quickly concluded an agreement with the numerous brothers and sisters of her late husband who during his lifetime had held the property in common. They were confirmed in possession of various castles and manors, and Enguerrand VII, who had no brothers or sisters, was confirmed as successor to the major portion of the domain, including the territories of Coucy, Marie, La Fère, Boissy-en-Brie, Oisy-en-Cambrésis, and their towns and dependencies.
In 1348 or ’49 Enguerrand’s mother remarried, presumably by her own or her own family’s choice, a fellow Austrian or German named Conrad de Magdebourg (also called Hardeck). Catherine bore no children of this marriage; within a year she and her husband were dead, victims of the great holocaust that was about to overtake Europe and leave Enguerrand an orphan.
During her lifetime Catherine was said to have taken great care of her son’s education, wishing him to distinguish himself in “the arts, letters and sciences pertaining to his rank” and frequently reminding him of the “virtue and high reputation of his ancestors.” Coming from a 16th century account of Enguerrand de Coucy, this statement may have been the kind of tribute routinely paid at that time to noble personages: equally well it could have had some basis in fact. Like other medieval childhoods, however, Enguerrand’s is a blank. Nothing is known of him until his sudden emergence onto the pages of history in 1358 at the age of eighteen.
Of chivalry, the culture that nurtured him, much is known. More than a code of manners in war and love, chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life. That it was about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that. It developed at the same time as the great crusades of the 12th century as a code intended to fuse the religious and martial spirits and somehow bring the fighting man into accord with Christian theory. Since a knight’s usual activities were as much at odds with Christian theory as a merchant’s, a moral gloss was needed that would allow the Church to tolerate the warriors in good conscience and the warriors to pursue their own values in spiritual comfort. With the help of Benedictine thinkers, a code evolved that put the knight’s sword arm in the service, theoretically, of justice, right, piety, the Church, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Knighthood was received in the name of the Trinity after a ceremony of purification, confession, communion. A saint’s relic was usually embedded in the hilt of the knight’s sword so that upon clasping it as he took his oath, he caused the vow to be registered in Heaven. Chivalry’s famous celebrator Ramon Lull, a contemporary of St. Louis, could now state as his thesis that “God and chivalry are in concord.”
But, like business enterprise, chivalry could not be contained by the Church, and bursting through the pious veils, it developed its own principles. Prowess, that combination of courage, strength, and skill that made a chevalier preux, was the prime essential. Honor and loyalty, together with courtesy—meaning the kind of behavior that has since come to be called “chivalrous”—were the ideals, and so-called courtly love the presiding genius. Designed to make the knight more polite and to lift the tone of society, courtly love required its disciple to be in a chronically amorous condition, on the theory that he would thus be rendered more courteous, gay, and gallant, and society in consequence more joyous. Largesse was the necessary accompaniment. An open-handed generosity in gifts and hospitality was the mark of a gentleman and had its practical value in attracting other knights to fight under the banner and bounty of the grand seigneur. Over-celebrated by troubadours and chroniclers who depended on its flow, largesse led to reckless extravagance and careless bankruptcies.
Prowess was not mere talk, for the function of physical violence required real stamina. To fight on horseback or foot wearing 55 pounds of plate armor, to crash in collision with an opponent at full gallop while holding horizontal an eighteen-foot lance half the length of an average telephone pole, to give and receive blows with sword or battle-ax that could cleave a skull or slice off a limb at a stroke, to spend half of life in the saddle through all weathers and for days at a time, was not a weakling’s work. Hardship and fear were part of it. “Knights who are at the wars … are forever swallowing their fear,” wrote the companion and biographer of Don Pero Niño, the “Unconquered Knight” of the late 14th century. “They expose themselves to every peril; they give up their bodies to the adventure of life in death. Moldy bread or biscuit, meat cooked or uncooked; today enough to eat and tomorrow nothing, little or no wine, water from a pond or a butt, bad quarters, the shelter of a tent or branches, a bad bed, poor sleep with their armor still on their backs, burdened with iron, the enemy an arrow-shot off. ‘Ware! Who goes there? To arms! To arms!’ With the first drowsiness, an alarm; at dawn, the trumpet. ‘To horse! To horse! Muster! Muster!’ As lookouts, as sentinels, keeping watch by day and by night, fighting without cover, as foragers, as scouts, guard after guard, duty after duty. ‘Here they come! Here! They are so many—No, not as many as that—This way—that—Come this side—Press them there—News! News! They come back hurt, they have prisoners—no, they bring none back. Let us go! Let us go! Give no ground! On!’ Such is their calling.”
Horrid wounds were part of the calling. In one combat Don Pero Niño was struck by an arrow that “knit together his gorget and his neck,” but he fought on against the enemy on the. bridge. “Several lance stumps were still in his shield and it was that which hindered him most.” A bolt from a crossbow “pierced his nostrils most painfully whereat he was dazed, but his daze lasted but a little time.” He pressed forward, receiving many sword blows on head and shoulders which “sometimes hit the bolt embedded in his nose making him suffer great pain.” When weariness on both sides brought the battle to an end, Pero Nino’s shield “was tattered and all in pieces; his sword blade was toothed like a saw and dyed with blood … his armor was broken in several places by lance-heads of which some had entered the flesh and drawn blood, although the coat was of great strength.” Prowess was not easily bought.
Loyalty, meaning the pledged word, was chivalry’s fulcrum. The extreme emphasis given to it derived from the time when a pledge between lord and vassal was the only form of government. A knight who broke his oath was charged with “treason” for betraying the order of knighthood. The concept of loyalty did not preclude treachery or the most egregious trickery as long as no knightly oath was broken. When a party of armed knights gained entrance to a walled town by declaring themselves allies and then proceeded to slaughter the defenders, chivalry was evidently not violated, no oath having been made to the burghers.
Chivalry was regarded as a universal order of all Christian knights, a trans-national class moved by a single ideal, much as Marxism later regarded all workers of the world. It was a military guild in which all knights were theoretically brothers, although Froissart excepted the Germans and Spaniards, who, he said, were too uncultivated to understand chivalry.
In the performance of his function, the knight must be prepared, as John of Salisbury wrote, “to shed your blood for your brethren”—he meant brethren in the universal sense—“and, if needs must, to lay down your life.” Many were thus prepared, though perhaps more from sheer love of battle than concern for a cause. Blind King John of Bohemia met death in that way. He loved fighting for its own sake, not caring whether the conflict was important. He missed hardly a quarrel in Europe and entered tournaments in between, allegedly receiving in one of them the wound that blinded him. His subjects, on the other hand, said the cause was Divine punishment—not because he dug up the old synagogue of Prague, which he did, but because, on finding money concealed beneath the pavement, he was moved by greed and the advice of German knights to dig up the tomb of St. Adelbert in the Prague cathedral and was stricken blind by the desecrated saint.
As an ally of Philip VI, at the head of 500 knights, the sightless King fought the English through Picardy, always rash and in the avant-garde. At Crécy he asked his knights to lead him deeper into the battle so that he might strike further blows with his sword. Twelve of them tied their horses’ reins together and, with the King at their head, advanced into the thick of the fight, “so far as never to return.” His body was found next day among his knights, all slain with their horses still tied together.
Fighting filled the noble’s need of something to do, a way to exert himself. It was his substitute for work. His leisure time was spent chiefly in hunting, otherwise in games of chess, backgammon, and dice, in songs, dances, pageants, and other entertainments. Long winter evenings were occupied listening to the recital of interminable verse epics. The sword offered the workless noble an activity with a purpose, one that could bring him honor, status, and, if he was lucky, gain. If no real conflict was at hand, he sought tournaments, the most exciting, expensive, ruinous, and delightful activity of the noble class, and paradoxically the most harmful to his true military function. Fighting in tournaments concentrated his skills and absorbed his interest in an increasingly formalized clash, leaving little thought for the tactics and strategy of real battle.
Originating in France and referred to by others as “French combat” (conflictus Gallicus), tournaments started without rules or lists as an agreed-upon clash of opposing units. Though justified as training exercises, the impulse was the love of fighting. Becoming more regulated and mannered, they took two forms: jousts by individuals, and melees by groups of up to forty on a side, either à plaisance with blunted weapons or à outrance with no restraints, in which case participants might be severely wounded and not infrequently killed. Tournaments proliferated as the noble’s primary occupation dwindled. Under the extended rule of monarchy, he had less need to protect his own fief, while a class of professional ministers was gradually taking his place around the crown. The less he had to do, the more energy he spent in tournaments artificially re-enacting his role.
A tournament might last as long as a week and on great occasions two. Opening day was spent matching and seeding the players, followed by days set apart for jousts, for melees, for a rest day before the final tourney, all interspersed with feasting and parties. These occasions were the great sporting events of the time, attracting crowds of bourgeois spectators from rich merchants to common artisans, mountebanks, food vendors, prostitutes, and pickpockets. About a hundred knights usually participated, each accompanied by two mounted squires, an armorer, and six servants in livery. The knight had of course to equip himself with painted and gilded armor and crested helmet costing from 25 to 50 livres, with a war-horse costing from 25 to 100 livres in addition to his traveling palfrey, and with banners and trappings and fine clothes. Though the expense could easily bankrupt him, he might also come away richer, for the loser in combat had to pay a ransom and the winner was awarded his opponent’s horse and armor, which he could sell back to him or to anyone. Gain was not recognized by chivalry, but it was present at tournaments.
Because of their extravagance, violence, and vainglory, tournaments were continually being denounced by popes and kings, from whom they drained money. In vain. When the Dominicans denounced them as a pagan circus, no one listened. When the formidable St. Bernard thundered that anyone killed in a tournament would go to Hell, he spoke for once to deaf ears. Death in a tournament was officially considered the sin of suicide by the Church, besides jeopardizing family and tenantry without cause, but even threats of excommunication had no effect. Although St. Louis condemned tournaments and Philip the Fair prohibited them during his wars, nothing could stop them permanently or dim the enthusiasm for them.
With brilliantly dressed spectators in the stands, flags and ribbons fluttering, the music of trumpets, the parade of combatants making their draped horses prance and champ on golden bridles, the glitter of harness and shields, the throwing of ladies’ scarves and sleeves to their favorites, the bow of the heralds to the presiding prince who proclaimed the rules, the cry of poursuivants announcing their champions, the tournament was the peak of nobility’s pride and delight in its own valor and beauty.
If tournaments were an acting-out of chivalry, courtly love was its dreamland. Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on another man’s wife, since only such an illicit liaison could have no other aim but love alone. (Love of a maiden was virtually ruled out since this would have raised dangerous problems, and besides, maidens of noble estate usually jumped from childhood to marriage with hardly an interval for romance.) The fact that courtly love idealized guilty love added one more complication to the maze through which medieval people threaded their lives. As formulated by chivalry, romance was pictured as extra-marital because love was considered irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements.
As its justification, courtly love was considered to ennoble a man, to improve him in every way. It would make him concerned to show an example of goodness, to do his utmost to preserve honor, never letting dishonor touch himself or the lady he loved. On a lower scale, it would lead him to keep his teeth and nails clean, his clothes rich and well groomed, his conversation witty and amusing, his manners courteous to all, curbing arrogance and coarseness, never brawling in a lady’s presence. Above all, it would make him more valiant, more preux; that was the basic premise. He would be inspired to greater prowess, would win more victories in tournaments, rise above himself in courage and daring, become, as Froissart said, “worth two men.” Guided by this theory, woman’s status improved, less for her own sake than as the inspirer of male glory, a higher function than being merely a sexual object, a breeder of children, or a conveyor of property.
The chivalric love affair moved from worship through declaration of passionate devotion, virtuous rejection by the lady, renewed wooing with oaths of eternal fealty, moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire, heroic deeds of valor which won the lady’s heart by prowess, consummation of the secret love, followed by endless adventures and subterfuges to a tragic denouement. The most widely known of all such romances and the last of its kind was the Châtelain de Coucy, written about the time of Enguerrand VII’s birth when the chanson de geste was dying out. Its hero was not a Seigneur de Coucy but a châtelain of the castle named Renault, modeled on a real individual and poet of the 12th century.
In the legend he falls madly in love with the Dame de Fayel and through an enormous series of maneuvers occupying 8,266 lines of verse is decoyed into the Third Crusade by the jealous husband, covers himself with glory, and when fatally wounded by a poisoned arrow, composes a last song and farewell letter to be dispatched after his death in a box with his embalmed heart and a lock of the lady’s hair. Carried by a faithful servant, the box is intercepted by the husband, who has the heart cooked and served to his wife. On being informed what she has eaten, she swears that after such a noble food she will never eat again and dies, while the husband exiles himself in a lifelong pilgrimage to obtain pardon for his deed.
“Melancholy, amorous and barbaric,” these tales exalted adulterous love as the only true kind, while in the real life of the same society adultery was a crime, not to mention a sin. If found out, it dishonored the lady and shamed the husband, a fellow knight. It was understood that he had the right to kill both unfaithful wife and lover.
Nothing fits in this canon. The gay, the elevating, the ennobling pursuit is founded upon sin and invites the dishonor it is supposed to avert. Courtly love was a greater tangle of irreconcilables even than usury. It remained artificial, a literary convention, a fantasy (like modern pornography) more for purposes of discussion than for everyday practice.
The realities were more normal. As described by La Tour Landry, his amorous fellow knights were not overly concerned with loyalty and courtoisie. He tells how, when he used to ride abroad with his friends as a young man, they would beg ladies for their love and if this one did not accept they would try another, deceiving the ladies with fair words of blandishment and swearing false oaths, “for in every place they would have their sport if they could.” Many a gentlewoman was taken in by the “foul and great false oaths that false men use to swear to women.” He tells how three ladies who were exchanging opinions of their lovers discovered that the senior Jean le Maingre, Sire de Boucicaut, was the favorite of each, he having made love to all, telling each he loved her best. When they taxed him with his falsity, he was in no way abashed, saying, “For at that time I spake with each of you, I loved her best that I spake with and thought truly the same.”
La Tour Landry himself, a seigneur of substance who fought in many campaigns, emerges as a domestic gentleman who liked to sit in his garden and enjoy the song of the thrush in April, and loved his books. Contrary to chivalry, he had also loved his wife, “the bell and flower of all that was fair and good,” and “I delighted me so much in her that I made for her love songs, ballads, roundels, verelays and divers new things in the best wise that I could.” He does not think much of chivalry’s favorite theme, that courtly love inspires knights to greater prowess, for though they say they do it for the ladies, “in faith they do it for themselves to win praise and honor.” Nor does he approve of love for its own sake, par amours, either before or after marriage, for it can cause all kinds of crime, of which he cites the Châtelain de Coucy as an example.
As suggested by a spectacular scandal of the time, Edward III’s rape of the Countess of Salisbury, courtly love was the ideal of chivalry least realized in everyday behavior. Froissart, who believed in chivalry as St. Louis believed in the Trinity, expurgated the story, supposedly after careful inquiries, but more probably out of respect for his beloved first patron, Philippa of Hainault, Edward’s Queen. He reports only that the King, on visiting Salisbury Castle after a battle in Scotland in 1342, was “stricken to the heart with a sparkle of fine love” for the beautiful Countess. After she repulsed his advances, Edward is reported (with some historic license) debating with himself about pursuing his guilty passion in words that are a supreme statement of the chivalric theory of love’s role: “And if he should be more amorous it would be entirely good for him, for his realm and for all his knights and squires for he would be more content, more gay and more martial; he would hold more jousts, more tourneys, more feasts and more revels than he had before; and he would be more able and more vigorous in his wars, more amiable and more trusting toward his friends and harsher toward his foes.”
According to another contemporary, Jean le Bel, who had himself been a knight with few illusions before he took orders as a canon and became a chronicler, matters went rather differently. After sending the Earl of Salisbury to Brittany like Uriah, the King revisited the Countess and, on being again rejected, he villainously raped her, “stopping her mouth with such force that she could only cry two or three cries … and left her lying in a swoon bleeding from the nose and mouth and other parts.” Edward returned to London greatly disturbed at what he had done, and the good lady “had no more joy or happiness again, so heavy was her heart.” Upon her husband’s return she would not lie with him and, being asked why, she told him what had happened, “sitting on the bed next to him crying.” The Earl, reflecting on the great friendship and honor between him and the King, now so dishonored, told his wife he could live in England no more. He went to court and before his peers divested himself of his lands in such a manner that his wife should have her dowry for life, and then went before the King, saying to his face, “You have villainously dishonored me and thrown me in the dung,” and afterward left the country, to the sorrow and wonder of the nobility, and the “King was blamed by all.”
If the fiction of chivalry molded outward behavior to some extent, it did not, any more than other models that man has made for himself, transform human nature. Joinville’s account of the crusaders at Damietta in 1249 shows the knights under St. Louis plunged in brutality, blasphemy, and debauchery. Teutonic knights in their annual forays against the unconverted natives of Lithuania conducted manhunts of the peasants for sport. Yet, if the code was but a veneer over violence, greed, and sensuality, it was nevertheless an ideal, as Christianity was an ideal, toward which man’s reach, as usual, exceeded his grasp.