The She-Wolf

by Maurice Druon

  The only political power the French Parliament had was due to the fact that no royal act, ordinance, edict, pardon, etc., was valid unless it was registered and confirmed by Parliament, but it only began to use this power of veto towards the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, when the monarchy had grown much weaker.

  The English Parliament, on the other hand, was both a judicial assembly, since the great state trials were conducted before it, and a political assembly. No one sat in it by right; it was always a sort of enlarged council to which the sovereign summoned whom he wished, that is to say the members of his privy council, the great lords of the kingdom, both temporal and spiritual, and the representatives of counties and cities, generally chosen by the sheriffs.

  The political role of the English Parliament was originally limited to a two-way process of information, by which the king informed the representatives of his people, whom he had selected, of the general policy he intended pursuing, while the representatives informed the sovereign, by means of petitions and speeches, of the wishes of either the classes or the administrative districts to which they belonged.

  In theory, the King of England was sole master of his Parliament, which was in fact a sort of privileged audience from which he demanded no more than symbolic and passive adherence to his political policies. But as soon as the Kings of England found themselves in serious difficulty, or showed themselves weak or bad rulers, their Parliament tended to become more exacting, to adopt a frankly deliberative attitude and to impose their will on the sovereign at least to the extent that the sovereign had to take into account the wishes Parliament had expressed.

  The precedent of the Magna Carta of 1215, which was imposed on King John by his barons and contained the basis of English liberties, was always present to the minds of Parliaments. That held in 1311 forced Edward II to accept a charter which imposed on the King a committee of great barons elected by Parliament who drew up the Ordinances and really exercised power in the name of the sovereign.

  Edward II struggled all his life against this arrangement; refusing to accept it at first, he submitted after his defeat by the Scots in 1314. He succeeded in ridding himself of this tutelage, to his own ultimate disadvantage, only in 1322 when the struggle for influence divided the members of the Committee, and he was able to crush the Lancaster-Mortimer party, who had taken up arms against him, at the Battles of Shrewsbury and Boroughbridge.

  Finally, it must be remembered that the English Parliament had no fixed meeting-place, but that Parliament could be summoned by the sovereign, or could demand to be summoned, in any town in the kingdom where the King happened to be.

  7. In 1318, five years before, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, appointed Justiciar and Lieutenant of the King of England in Ireland, had defeated, at the head of an army consisting of the Barons of the Marches, Edward Bruce, King of Ireland and brother of Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland. The taking and executing of Edward Bruce marked the end of the kingdom of Ireland, though the authority of the King of England was far from established for a long time to come.

  8. The obscure and complicated affair of the county of Gloucester was born of the fantastic pretensions of Hugh Despenser the Younger to that county. His claim would have had no chance of success had he not been the King’s favourite.

  Hugh the Younger, not content with having acquired the whole of Glamorgan as his wife’s inheritance, demanded from all his brothers-in-law, and in particular from Maurice de Berkeley, the entire possessions of the late Earl, his father-in-law. All the nobility of the south and west of England had become alarmed at this and Thomas of Lancaster had headed the opposition. His determination had been all the greater because his worst enemy, the Earl of Warenne, who had stolen his wife, the fair Alice, was a member of the other party.

  The Despensers, who, for a time, had been exiled by a decree of Parliament, promulgated under the pressure of the Lancastrians in arms, had soon been recalled, for Edward found life intolerable without his lover and under the tutelage of his cousin Thomas.

  The return of the Despensers to power had been the signal for a renewal of the rebellion, but Thomas of Lancaster, as unfortunate in war as he was in his marriage, had led the coalition extremely badly. Having failed to go to the assistance of the Barons of the Welsh Marches in time, they had been defeated at Shrewsbury, in January 1332, where the two Mortimers had been taken prisoner, while he himself, waiting vainly for Scottish reinforcements in Yorkshire, had been defeated two months later at Boroughbridge and condemned to death immediately afterwards.

  9. The commission given the Bishop of Exeter, according to the Calendar of Close Rolls, is dated 6 August 1323. Further orders were dispatched concerning Mortimer, notably on August 10 to the sheriffs of Kent, and on the 26th to the Earl of Kent himself. It does not appear that King Edward knew of the fugitive’s destination before October 1.

  10. Marie of France, the earliest of all French poetesses, lived in the second half of the twelfth century at the Court of Henry II Plantagenet, to which she had been taken, or summoned, by Alienor of Aquitaine, an unfaithful princess, at least to her first husband, the King of France, but certainly extremely beautiful, and who, in England, had created about her a true centre of art and poetry. Alienor was the granddaughter of Duke William IX, himself a poet.

  The works of Marie of France were extremely popular, not only during the author’s lifetime, but also during the thirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth centuries.

  11. The Tolomei Company, together with the Buonsignori, one of the most important of the Sienese banks, had been both powerful and famous since the beginning of the thirteenth century. It had the papacy as principal client; its founder, Tolomeo Tolomei, had taken part in an embassy to Pope Alexander III. Under Alexander IV the Tolomei were the sole bankers to the Holy See. Urban IV excepted them by name from the general excommunication decreed against Siena between 1260 and 1273. It was at about this time (the end of the reign of Saint Louis and the beginning of the reign of Philippe III) that the Tolomei began to appear at the great fairs in Champagne and that Spinello founded the French branch of the company.

  There are still a Tolomei Square and Palace in Siena.

  12. Charles IV’s decree forbidding the export of French currency must certainly have given rise to trafficking, since another decree, promulgated four months later, forbade the buying of gold and silver at a higher price than that of the currency of the kingdom. A year later, the right of domicile was withdrawn from the Italian merchants, which did not mean that they had to leave France, but simply that they had to purchase once more the authorization to carry on business there.

  13. 19 November 1323. Jean de Cherchemont, Lord of Nemours in Poitou, Canon of Notre Dame in Paris, Treasurer of the Cathedral of Laon, had already been Chancellor at the end of the reign of Philippe V. Charles IV had replaced him by Pierre Rodier on his accession. But Charles of Valois, whose favour he had gained, restored him to his position on this date.

  The Chancellor, who had the royal seal in his keeping, prepared and drew up acts and appointments; he combined the functions of Minister of Justice, of Foreign Affairs and of Ecclesiastical Affairs. He sat in the Assembly of Peers and presided by right over all the judicial commissions. On appointment he had to take the following oath:

  ‘You swear to the King our Lord that you will serve and counsel him well and loyally to the honour and advantage of his Kingdom against all and sundry; that you will preserve his inheritance and the public weal of his said Kingdom to the best of your powers, that you will serve no other master or lord but him, that you will hereinafter take no estates, pensions, profits or gifts, nor other presents, from whatever lord or lady, without the permission and licence of our said Lord the King, and that you will not petition for them nor have them petitioned for by others without licence from him to this end; and if you have received from anyone, man or woman in the past, or still have, pensions, estates, or other presents and gifts, yo
u will renounce them all; and, similarly, that you will take from no one whomsoever any corrupt gift, and this you swear on God’s Holy Gospel, which you are now holding for the purpose.’

  14. The arrangement suggested to the Pope, after a royal council held at Gisors in July 1323, was that the King would receive 300,000 livres out of the 400,000 required for ancillary expenses. But it was also specified – and this was where Valois showed his cunning – that if the King of France, for whatever reason, did not lead the expedition, this role would fall by right to Charles of Valois, who would then benefit personally from the subsidy furnished by the Pope.

  15. It is generally forgotten that there were two wars of a hundred years between France and England.

  The first, which lasted from 1152 to 1259, was considered terminated by the Treaty of Paris concluded by Saint Louis, and mentioned here. In fact, between 1259 and 1338, the two countries were twice again at war, and each time over the question of Aquitaine, in 1294 and, as will be seen, again in 1324. The second Hundred Years War, which began in 1328, was not, in reality, so much concerned with the quarrel about Aquitaine as with the succession to the throne of France.

  16. This is an example of the inordinately complicated state reached at this period by the feudal system, a system which there is a general tendency to look on as extremely simple, and which was so indeed to begin with. It ended, however, by strangling itself with complications born of its own practice. But this is a vice, or rather a fatality, common to all political systems; and they die of it.

  It must be realized that the question of Saint-Sardos, and the affair of Aquitaine in general, were no exceptions, and that the same conditions were true of Artois, Flanders, the Welsh Marches, the kingdoms of Spain, that of Sicily, the German principalities, Hungary and, indeed, of the whole of Europe.

  17. These figures have been calculated by historians from fourteenth-century documents, and are based on the statistical returns of the number of parishes and the number of fires per parish at an average of four inhabitants a fire. The figures apply to the period round about 1328.

  During the course of the second Hundred Years War, fighting, famines and epidemics reduced the total of the population by more than a third; it was only four centuries later that France recovered the level of population and wealth which had been hers under Philip the Fair and his sons. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the average density of the population in five French departments had not yet reached the figures of 1328 once more. Even in our day, some towns, which were prosperous in the Middle Ages and were ruined by the Hundred Years War, have never recovered their former condition. This is a measure of what the English war cost the nation.

  18. The busines (derived from the buccina of the Romans) were long, straight, or slightly curved trumpets used for calling armies to battle. The short trumpet, which began to come into use in the thirteenth century, did not supplant the busine until the fourteenth.

  19. A game played with dice and counters which seems to have been the ancestor of tric-trac and backgammon.

  20. The use of bombards in the siege of La Réole in 1324 may surprise the reader, for the traditional date for the first appearance of gunpowder artillery is the battle of Crécy in 1346.

  In fact, Crécy was the first time the new artillery was employed in open warfare and in a battle of movement. The weapons used were of relatively small calibre; they did little damage and created no very great impression. Some French historians have exaggerated their effect to explain a defeat which was due much more to the impetuous folly of King Philippe VI and his barons than to the employment of new weapons by the enemy.

  But the light cannon used at Crécy were but a derivative of the ordnance employed at sieges for twenty years past, concurrently with the traditional artillery – one might say even the classical artillery, for it had altered little since Caesar, or indeed since Alexander the Great – which hurled at towns, by a system of levers, balances, counterweights or springs, stone balls or fire-raising materials. The first bombards threw nothing but stone balls similar to those of the ballisters, mangonels and other catapults. It was the method of projection that was new. It seems certain that gunpowder artillery came to birth in Italy, for the metal with which the bombards were hooped was called ‘Lombard iron’. The Pisans were using these engines in the years with which we are dealing.

  Charles of Valois seems in all likelihood to have been the first French commander to use this new artillery, which was still in its very early days. He had ordered it in the month of April 1324 and had made arrangements with the Seneschal of Languedoc for it to be assembled at Castelsarrasin. His son, Philippe VI, would not therefore have been particularly surprised by the much smaller balls fired at him at Crécy.

  21. It must be remembered that the King of France was not at this period suzerain of Avignon. Philip the Fair had, indeed, been careful to surrender his title as co-lord of Avignon to the King of Naples so as not to appear, in the eyes of the world, to be holding the Pope in direct tutelage. But by the garrison established at Villeneuve, and by the mere geographical position of the papal establishment, he held the Holy See and the Church entirely at his mercy.

  22. This actually happened in 1330, when the Romans elected the Antipope Nicolas V.

  23. The Palace of the Popes, as we know it, is very different from John XXII’s castle of which some small portions are still extant in the area known as ‘the old Palace’. The huge building which has made Avignon famous is largely the work of the Popes Benedict XXII, Clement VI, Innocent VI and Urban V. John XXII’s building was altered and absorbed almost to the extent of disappearing completely amid the new edifice. Nevertheless, John XXII was the real founder of the Palace of the Popes.

  24. Ten years later, Jacques Fournier was to become the next Pope, Benedict XII.

  25. John XXII had also a zoo in his palace, which contained among other inmates a lion, two ostriches and a camel.

  26. The question certainly required asking, for the princes of the Middle Ages often had six or eight godfathers and godmothers. But, in Canon Law, only those who had actually held the infant at the font were considered as such. The proceedings for the annulment of the marriage between Charles IV and Blanche of Burgundy, which had never been translated before the study we have had made of the documents, are one of the richest mines of information concerning royal religious ceremonies of the period. The congregation was numerous and very mixed; the lower classes crowded in as if to a play and the officiants were almost suffocated by the crowd. The throng and the curiosity were almost as great as at the marriages of film stars today, and reverence was equally absent.

  27. Blood-brotherhood by the exchange and mingling of blood, practised since earliest times and in so-called primitive societies, was still in use at the end of the Middle Ages. It existed in Islam; and it was in use among the nobility of Aquitaine, perhaps owing to a tradition inherited from the Moors. Traces of it can be found in certain depositions taken at the trials of the Templars. It appears still to exist, as an act of counter-magic, among certain tribes of gypsies. Blood-brotherhood could seal a pact of friendship or comradeship, as well as a pact of love, whether spiritual or not. The most famous blood-brotherhoods recorded in the medieval literature of chivalry were those contracted by Count Girart de Roussillon and the daughter of the Emperor of Byzantium (which took place in the presence of their respective spouses), by the Chevalier Gauvain, by the Countess de Die, and by the celebrated Perceval.

  28. This dispensation had been granted him by Clement V in 1313, when Charles of Valois was only forty-three.

  29. Wautier, or Wauter, or Vautier, are varying forms of Walter. This is a reference to Walter Stapledon, the Lord Treasurer. The originals of this and the subsequent letters are in French, as the English royal correspondence of this period usually was, when it was not in Latin.

  30. The six temporal peers at this time were the Dukes of Brittany, Burgundy and Aquitaine (the last being, therefore, th
e young Prince Edward), the Counts of Flanders and Valois, and the Countess of Artois. It may seem surprising that Jean de Marigny, who at the time of Philip the Fair had been Archbishop of Sens, from which depended the diocese of Paris and which was therefore the most important religious appointment in France, should now appear as Bishop of Beauvais. But it must not be thought that he had reverted to an inferior rank in the hierarchy. On the contrary, the bishopric of Beauvais conferred one of the six spiritual peerages, a dignity which was not attached to the Archbishopric of Sens.

  31. The traditional year began on January 1, but the administrative year at Easter. This divergence, one may suspect, had for object, in a period when communications were slow, the allowing of time in which to collate all the accounts of the royal officials, and incidentally the dispatch of the various decrees in suspense. The administrative year would then begin when the balance-sheet for the previous period had been presented to the King.

  32. This manner of carrying a child on a journey was not unusual, though it must have been far from comfortable. The travelling saddles, at the end of the thirteenth and at the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, though they had very high cantles, forming a back for the horseman to lean against, had no pommel and were comparatively flat over the horse’s withers.

  It was the war saddle which had a high pommel, so that the knight, heavily armoured and liable to have to withstand violent shocks, was, so to speak, wedged between cantle and pommel.

  33. This transaction had taken place, in August 1317, between Philippe V and Clémence. The latter possessed in addition, either by gift or legacy from Louis Hutin, the castles of Corbeil, Fontainebleau, Moret, Flagé, Lorrez-le-Bocage, Grez-en-Gâtinais, Nemours, and several estates in Normandy; the houses and manors of Manneville, Hébicourt, Saint-Denis-de-Fermeil, Wardes, Marigny and Dompierre; and the forests of Lyons and of Bray.