A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  A million florins were still owed on his ransom, leaving the hostages unreleased. Some used the safe-conducts given them from time to time and did not return, despite repeated summonses. Some bought their freedom from Edward with shares of their own territories. Others simply disappeared, by one means or another. Anjou’s younger brother, Jean, Duc de Berry, managed so shrewdly and made so many excuses while on leave that he retained liberty and honor too. Matthieu de Roye, on the other hand, perhaps because his reputation as a fighter kept him well guarded, was still a hostage after twelve years. Enguerrand de Coucy was to be released under special circumstances in 1365.

  Chapter 9

  Enguerrand and Isabella

  Isabella of England, second child and eldest daughter of King Edward and Queen Philippa, was the favorite of her father, whose marriage diplomacy on her behalf had five times failed to produce results. Since the last failure, when she was nineteen, she had been allowed to live independently, an over-indulged, willful, and wildly extravagant princess who was 33 in 1365, eight years older than Enguerrand de Coucy.

  As a baby she had lain in a state cradle, gilded and crested, lined with taffeta, and furnished with a coverlet made of 670 skins although she was born in June. A special dressmaker appointed to the infant made her a robe of Lucca silk with four rows of “garnitures” edged with fur to wear at her mother’s relevailles, or first reception after the birth. The Queen for the occasion wore a robe of red and purple velvet embroidered with pearls, and received the court reclining on a state bed equipped with a gigantic spread of green velvet measuring seven and one half by eight ells* and embroidered with an all-over pattern of merman and mermaid holding the shields of England and Hainault. All her ladies of the chamber and the whole of her household, from chancellor and treasurer down to kitchen maid, wore new clothes ordered for the occasion. Ostentation was the duty of princes.

  The first three royal children—Edward, Isabella, and Joanna—had their own household together, with their own chaplains, musicians, a noble governor and governess, three waiting damsels for Isabella and two for Joanna, a staff of esquires, clerks of pantry and butlery, chief cook, valets of larder and kitchen, valets de chambre, water-carriers, candle-bearers, porters, grooms, and other attendants. They were served on silver, slept on silk-upholstered beds, and had fur-trimmed robes of scarlet and gray cloth with buttons of gold and silver thread. Their wardrobes were replenished for state festivities and at Christmas, Easter, and All Saints’ Day, when all who could afford to wore new clothes. When Isabella and Joanna rode their palfreys from London to Westminster, each led by a valet at the bridle, their almoners walked alongside, distributing alms to the poor and to the prisoners of Newgate. For their attendance at a tournament when they were aged ten and nine, eighteen workmen were employed for nine days to embroider their robes under the supervision of the King’s armor-bearer, using eleven ounces of gold leaf in the process. The material life of the 14th century survives in the diligent bookkeeping, itemized down to the minutest transaction on parchment rolls.

  At the age of twelve Isabella’s favored position was marked by her having seven ladies-in-waiting compared to Joanna’s three. All seven, with Isabella, are reported arriving in Canterbury for a tournament in 1349 during the Black Death, wearing masks, presumably against contagion, although these did not help to prevent the death of her favorite attendant, Lady de Throxford. Curiously undeterred by the plague, the court held the elaborate ceremonial of the Order of the Garter as usual in 1349, with the Queen, Isabella, and 300 ladies present at the jousts and festivities. Ladies of the Garter wore the same robes as the men, embroidered with blue and silver garters and the Order’s motto, and furnished to them annually at royal expense.

  When Isabella was three years old, the King had proposed her marriage to Pedro, son of the King of Castile, but negotiations fell through, perhaps fortunately because the prospective bridegroom was later to win unpleasant renown as Pedro the Cruel. Replacing her sister, Joanna was on her way to marry this prince when she died of the plague at Bordeaux in 1348. A second match for Isabella with the son of the Duke of Brabant was held up owing to consanguinity, and while the Pope was considering dispensation, she was betrothed instead to the reluctant Louis of Flanders and all but reached the altar before the celebrated jilting. Two years later King Edward failed to bring off a match with Charles IV of Bohemia, the elected but not yet consecrated Emperor, then a widower.

  Then came the episode of Isabella’s retaliation. In 1351 when she was nineteen, the King announced her coming marriage to Bérard d’Albret, son of Bernard-Ezi, Sire d’Albret, a great lord of Gascony and Edward’s chief lieutenant there. Whether the choice was the King’s or his daughter’s is moot. Though not a ruling family, the d’Albrets were an extensive and powerful clan, straddling homage to both England and France, whom Edward was disposed to keep friendly. In the year of the betrothal he bestowed a pension of £1,000 on Bernard-Ezi, recalling his loyal service in resisting both “the threats and the blandishments” of the King of France.

  While union with the d’Albrets for a king’s eldest daughter was no diplomatic triumph, it was advantageous at a time when Edward was doing everything to strengthen his hold on Guienne. He said as much in the marriage announcement, which spoke of his desire “to kindle in the lord of Albret and his posterity a closer attachment to our royal house, and to bind them more intimately to us”—exactly the motive that was to reappear in the case of Coucy. At the same time, the King seemed reluctant to let Isabella go, describing her as “our very dear eldest daughter whom we have loved with a special affection.” In settling on her a portion of 4,000 marks and an annual revenue of £1,000, he added the unusual provision—almost an inducement to her to change her mind—that in case anything prevented the marriage, the sums would revert not to the King, but to Isabella herself.

  To carry the princess and her retinue of knights and ladies to Bordeaux, five ships were ordered by the direct method of furnishing a royal officer with a warrant to arrest five suitable vessels in “all ports and places” from the mouth of the Thames westward. The bride’s trousseau included robes of cloth of gold and Tripoli silk and a mantle of Indian silk lined in ermine and embroidered all over with leaves, doves, bears, and other devices worked in silver and gold. For another robe of crimson velvet, the elaborate embroidery fashionable at the time required thirteen days’ work by twenty men and nine women. For gifts, Isabella brought 119 chaplets made of silk entwined with pearls surmounted by a golden Agnus Dei standing on a green velvet band wrought with flowers and leaves. But these marvelous contrivances were never to be worn—or at least not as intended. At the water’s edge Isabella changed her mind and came home. Was it desire to jilt as she had been jilted? Or reluctance to assume a lower rank? Or perhaps memory of her sister’s death on an earlier marriage voyage to Bordeaux? Or was the whole affair a contrivance to acquire revenues and a new wardrobe?

  Bérard d’Albret was said to be so wounded by the bride’s defection that he renounced his inheritance in favor of a younger brother and put on the corded robe of a Franciscan friar. According to other evidence, however, he married a Dame de St. Bazeille, received certain territories from the King of France in 1370, and adopted a shield with the strange device of a head of Midas supported by two lions—which suggests interests the reverse of Franciscan poverty.

  Not at all put out by Isabella’s waywardness, her father continued to endow her with fiefs and revenues, manors, castles, priories, wardships, farms, and gifts of costly jewelry. Her expenditures continued to outrace his gifts. When she bought silver buckles on credit, let her servants’ wages fall into arrears, pawned her jewelry up to the value of 1,000 marks, the King complacently paid her debts, and in 1358, when she was 26, assigned her a regular income of another £1,000 a year, which was duly paid as long as he lived. Six years later he gave her the wardship of a rich minor, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, which Isabella sold back to the Earl’s mother for another �
�1,000 a year, with the stiff proviso that if quarterly payments were late by so much as a single day, the penalty would be double payment for that quarter.

  At what point during Enguerrand de Coucy’s five-year sojourn in England Isabella first became interested in him is nowhere told, but concerning her choice of him the chronicler Ranulph Higden stated forthrightly that “only for love she wished to be betrothed.” It may be that after all her years of single independence she really did fall in love or, at her father’s suggestion, was willing enough, even pleased, to marry a young attractive rich French lord of ancient lineage and great estates. Edward was clearly pleased by the match and may have been its instigator. Holding a great foothold in France on the borders of Picardy, he would naturally wish to put the hinterland of Calais in allied hands and nullify, in case of renewed hostilities, a strong French opponent. He still thought in terms of wooing the allegiance of great French nobles, the more so because disputes continued to arise over the transfer of French territories. Whether to win over Enguerrand, or because he had taken a personal liking to him, Edward had already in 1363 restored him to full possession of the lands in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland inherited from his great-grandmother.

  How Enguerrand felt about his marriage is a blank. Since his sovereign and his prospective father-in-law were now at peace, no conflict of loyalty was involved. The comradeship of chivalry still held nobles together in a trans-national bond that closed over as soon as the temporary enmity of war was terminated. The material advantages of the match, in freeing him from hostageship and bringing money and power too, were obvious. How he felt about the lady herself, who did not easily fit the role of virginal demoiselle merging into submissive wife, was another question.

  Isabella’s life as an independent woman in a court of the usual amorous license could hardly have been sheltered or innocent. Ladies of the court were not reticent. Joan, widowed Countess of Holland, called the Fair Maid of Kent, whom the Black Prince married in 1361, was considered “the fairest lady in all the kingdom of England” and “the most amorous.” She wore daring and extravagant clothes copied from the dresses of the “bonnes amies of the brigands of Languedoc.” At tournaments, to the scandal of the people, there often came groups of questionable ladies, “the most costly and lovely but not the best of the kingdom,” dressed “in divers and wonderful male attire as if they were part of the tournay.” Wearing divided and parti-colored tunics, short capes, and daggers in pouches, riding fine coursers and palfreys, they exhibited a “scurrilous wantonness” that “neither feared God nor blushed at the scorn of the crowd.”

  No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead. For some reason a particular immorality was attached to it, perhaps because it altered God’s arrangements. Demons in purgatory were said to punish the practice by sticking “hot burning awls and needles” into every hole from which a hair had been plucked. When a hermit was frightened by a dream about a lady suffering this treatment, an angel comforted him saying, “She had well deserved the pain.”

  As satirized by Jean de Meung through the mouth of the Duenna in the Roman de la Rose, the concerns of a 13th to 14th century lady were not peculiar to the Middle Ages. If her neck and bosom were lovely, she should wear a decolletage; to add color to her face she should use ointments daily, but in secret so that her lover does not know; if aware of bad breath, she should not talk with her mouth too close to others; she should laugh prettily and cry gracefully, eat and drink daintily, and take care not to get drunk or sleep at table. She should go to church, weddings, and parties in her best clothes to let herself be seen and gain renown, lifting her gown to show her fine foot and opening her mantle like a peacock’s tail to reveal the beautiful form beneath. She should spread her nets for all men in order to snare one, and if she hooks several, should take care they do not meet. She should never love a poor man because she will get nothing from him and might be tempted to give him something, nor love a stranger, for he may have a vagabond heart, unless of course he offers her money or jewels. While pretending to be won by love alone, she should accept all gifts and encourage presents to her servants, maid, sister, and mother, for many hands get more booty and they can press her lover to get her gowns or other pledges out of pawn.

  The insistence on money may have been exaggerated by the author, but satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. Certainly in Isabella’s case money was of the essence. She was said to have always in her retinue two or three goldsmiths, seven or eight embroiderers, two or three cutlers, and two or three furriers who were kept busy filling her needs.

  If Isabella had any love affairs by the age of 33, they did not reach recorded gossip, but, judging by example, they are not unimaginable. The high-born maiden of seventeen who seduced the elderly, gouty Guillaume de Machaut for the renown of having that celebrated poet and musician as her lover was said to have been Agnes of Navarre, sister of Charles the Bad. Whoever she was, she insisted that Machaut publicize their affair in songs and poems and in a long, lush, embarrassing verse narrative called Livre du Voir Dit (True Tale). She teased and kissed and gave the bemused poet the little gold key to the clavette or chastity belt that guarded her “precious treasure.” All the time, as he discovered later, she was regaling her young circle with accounts of the affair’s progress and mocking her lover, as Boccaccio was mocked by his mistress Fiammetta, bastard daughter of the King of Naples.

  Medieval girls, like boys, became adults in their mid-teens. Marriage was generally consummated at fourteen or thereafter, although in the case of the highborn it might be legally concluded in infancy or childhood. Another young girl, the fifteen-year-old heroine of Deschamps’s poem “Suis-je belle?”, clearly inspired by Agnes of Navarre, also had control of the key to her “treasure,” although this probably represented a literary echo of Agnes rather than a common possession. Often spoken of as if it were familiar, the chastity belt rests on only the faintest factual support in the Middle Ages and was then probably more of a literary conceit than an item of customary use. Believed to have evolved from the Moslem practice of infibulation, which involved attaching a padlock to the labia, it is said to have been imported to Europe with other luxuries through the crusades. An occasional actual model exists, but non-literary evidence such as lawsuits does not appear until the Renaissance and later times. As a device of rabid male possessiveness, the chastity belt afflicted medieval women less than their successors.

  Deschamps’s luscious damsel details her charms in each stanza-sweet red mouth, green eyes, dainty eyebrows, round chin, white throat, firm high breasts, well-made thighs and legs, fine loins and fine “cul de Paris”—following each with the refrain “Suis-je, suis-je, suis-je belle?” (Am I, am I, am I not fair?). She is a male vision of the amorous girl, but Agnes and the taunting Fiammetta were real enough, though both are known, as are virtually all medieval women, only through the pens of men. What is rare is a woman’s account of herself. The anguished Héloïse in the 12th century and the feminist Christine de Pisan in the later 14th speak out, and both are bitter, although that does not necessarily establish a rule. In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

  Given the non-privacy of medieval life, little about sexual habits was likely to be hidden from the unmarried girl, noble or otherwise. That the Chevalier de La Tour Landry really designed his tales of carnality for the moral edification of his motherless daughters need not be taken at face value, but it is interesting that this was his excuse. His book covers lechery, fornication, and rape, with examples drawn from Lot’s daughters, the incest of Tamar, and cases nearer home, such as the lady who loved a squire and contrived to be with him by telling her husband she had vowed divers pilgrimages so that he let her go where she list, or another lady who was told by a knight that if she were wise and good she would not “come to men’s chambers by nights darkly wit
hout candle nor to coll and kiss men in her bed alone as she did.” Life in the castle was evidently easy-going. Knights and ladies stayed up late, “singing, playing and japing and making such noise they could not have heard thunder,” and “when one of the men held his hand under one of the women’s clothes,” he had his arm broken by the angry husband.

  Entertainment was not only the recital of lofty epics of chivalrous if tedious adultery. The coarse comic fabliaux in quick rhymed couplets, satiric, obscene, often cruel or grotesque, were told for laughs like dirty stories of any age, to noble as well as bourgeois audiences. Often written by court poets in parody of the romances, they treated sex more as pratfall than ennoblement, and their recital or reading aloud was as welcome in the castle as in town, tavern, and probably cloister.

  Isabella could well have listened to the tales of Jean de Condé, poet in her lifetime at her mother’s native court in Hainault. His style is illustrated by a story about a game of truth-telling played at court before a tournament. A knight, asked by the Queen if he has fathered any children, is forced to admit he has not, and indeed he “did not have the look of a man who could please his mistress when he held her naked in his arms. For his beard was … little more than the kind of fuzz that ladies have in certain places.” The Queen tells him she does not doubt his word, “for it is easy to judge from the state of the hay whether the pitchfork is any good.” In his turn, the knight asks, “Lady, answer me without deceit. Is there hair between your legs?” When she replies, “None at all,” he comments, “Indeed I do believe you, for grass does not grow on a well-beaten path.”