A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Halfway through the Normandy campaign Coucy had been sent to strengthen the defense of the frontier with Flanders, where new dangers threatened. The Count of Flanders, whose boyhood loyalty had been so strongly French when he ran away from Isabella, had long since been brought by economic interests to favor the English. He appeared as a threat when he gave asylum to the Duke of Brittany, who had repudiated French vassalage and rejoined the English. King Charles now decided to rid himself of the problem of Brittany once and for all by confiscating the dukedom from Montfort on grounds of “felony” toward his sovereign. In the belief that most Breton nobles were pro-French, he planned to unite the dukedom with the crown of France under Montfort’s rival Jeanne de Penthièvre, but instead of suppressing the Breton nest of hornets, he succeeded only in arousing it.

  In December 1378, at a ceremonial Court of Justice with the King seated in “royal majesty,” Montfort was tried before the peers of the realm—in absentia, since he ignored the summons. The twelve lay and twelve ecclesiastical peers of France were an elastic body in which successive barons of Coucy sometimes figured and sometimes did not. Froissart specifically refers to Enguerrand VII as a “peer of France,” and on this occasion he was one of four barons seated “on the fleur de lys” along with the peers of royal blood and a superabundance of eighteen prelates including four “mitred” abbots. The royal usher, after summoning Montfort aloud three times—at the entrance to the chamber, at the Marble Table in the courtyard, and at the gate of the palace—duly reported back that “he is not there.” The Procurator then read the indictment, citing the Duke’s treasons, crimes, “injuries and vexations,” including the murder of the priest sent to summon him. (After the Visconti fashion, Montfort had the messenger drowned in the river with the summons tied around his neck.) Following a juridical argument at enormous length of the rights and claims to the dukedom, Montfort’s title was declared null, and the King announced Brittany’s union with the crown.

  Charles’s error was at once made clear by a rebellious outburst in the independent-minded duchy, even among the pro-French party. The endless quarrel came alive again, and since Montfort was conniving with the Count of Flanders and both of them with England, Charles feared the possibility of a new invasion across the northern frontier. In this situation, the domain of Coucy guarding the northern gateway came into focus.

  In February 1379 the King sent his Treasurer, Jean le Mercier, and an official with the title of Visitor General of Royal Property to survey the barony of Coucy with instructions “to look and advise and report the estate of the said seigneur.” In March, after receiving Mercier’s report, Charles went himself on a week’s tour of Coucy-le-Château and other castles and towns of the domain. Evidently ailing, the King watched from his litter the “joyous chase of deer” in hunts organized in his honor. Whether Enguerrand was present to welcome his sovereign is nowhere recorded, and the absence of mention suggests he may have been in the north assembling forces for defense, or in Normandy at the siege of Cherbourg.

  The King was, however, accompanied by the court poet Eustache Deschamps, who immediately produced a ballade extolling the marvels of the barony. A master of the verbal acrobatics of the French verse of his time, yet a realist and satirist at heart, Deschamps described himself as the “King of Ugliness” with the skin of a boar and the face of a monkey. He had entered royal service from humble birth as a simple messenger, advancing to usher-at-arms, bailiff, and châtelain of royal properties and, in the next reign, Steward of Water and Forests and ultimately Général des finances. Ready to turn out poetry for any occasion—a total of 1,675 ballades, 661 rondeaux, 80 virelais, 14 lays, and miscellaneous pieces—he now described in verse the “strongholds for men of valor” in Coucy’s many castles of St. Gobain, St. Lambert and La Fère, the parks of Folembray, the lovely manor St. Aubin, the falcons’ chase of herons, the famous donjon:

  Who would know a land of great delight

  Where lies the heart of the realm of France,

  With fortress strong of marvelous might,

  Tall forests and lakes of sweet plaisance,

  Songs of birds, parks orderly as a dance,

  Must to Coucy turn his steps.

  There he will find the nonpareille

  Whence comes the cry, “Coucy à la merveille!”

  It has been surmised that Charles had in mind the eventual purchase of Coucy, placing the crown in control of the greatest stronghold of the north. Purchase of great fiefs was not unprecedented; Coucy himself had thus indirectly acquired Soissons. Yet how he might have been adequately compensated for so great an estate or why he would be expected to comply with the King’s desire remains obscure. The fact that he had no son and only a single female heir, the other being irrevocably English, may have been a consideration.

  The marriage of Marie, sole heiress to the barony, was then being negotiated. At thirteen she was one of three candidates, along with Yolande de Bar, a niece of the King, and Catherine of Geneva, a sister of Pope Clement, who were prospects for the recently widowed son of the King of Aragon. Such places were not left empty for long. Eight days after the death of his wife, the Spanish prince dispatched envoys to Coucy, to the Duc d’Anjou as Yolande’s uncle, and to the Count of Geneva, with instructions to arrange matters as soon as possible with any one of the three. When Yolande was chosen, Marie afterward married Yolande’s brother Henri de Bar, eldest son of the Duc de Bar and of Marie de France, sister of Charles V. Alliance with the heir to a great duchy on the borders of Lorraine maintained the high level of the Coucys’ marital connections.

  Whether Enguerrand was influenced by this new royal connection or by pride in his success in Normandy, he created at this time his own Order of Chivalry called, in the grand manner of the Coucys, the Order of the Crown. As indicated by Deschamps, who celebrated the order in a poem, the Crown was meant to symbolize not only grandeur and power but the dignity, virtue, and high conduct that surround a king. The points of its circle were the “twelve flowers of authority”: Faith, Virtue, Moderation, Love of God, Prudence, Truth, Honor, Strength, Mercy, Charity, Loyalty, and Largesse “shining on all below.” After 1379, Coucy’s seals display a patterned background of tiny crowns and a standing figure holding a crown—with some now uncertain significance—upside down. However elevated in name, the Order was democratic in spirit: it admitted ladies, demoiselles, and squires to membership.

  In 1379 Isabella de Coucy died in England leaving Enguerrand free to remarry. Less precipitate than the Prince of Aragon, or too occupied in urgent affairs, he did not fill her place for seven years. Nothing came of the King’s visit to his barony at the time, but the crown’s interest remained active.

  A new reign in England brought the English no better fortunes in the war. The easy mastery of the Channel that Edward III had once enjoyed was lost, thanks to Charles’s steady alliance with the sea power of Castile and his own program of shipbuilding. When a force led bythe Duke of Lancaster finally succeeded in landing near St. Malo in Brittany, the situation of Cherbourg was reversed. Held by the French, St. Malo defied siege and wore out the Duke until he went home in a cloud of failure. “And the commons of England began to murmur against the noblemen, saying how they had done all that season but little good.” Unsuccessful war stimulated more than murmur. While Lancaster was bogged down in Brittany, English merchant ships were harassed and captured with impunity by French and Scottish pirates. When the merchants complained, the nobles and prelates of the King’s Council replied only that defensive action was up to Lancaster and his fleet.

  At this, a rich alderman and future Mayor of London, John Philpot, Master of the Grocers’ Company, assembled a private force of ships with a thousand sailors and men-at-arms and went forth to battle the pirates, several of whom he captured together with their prize ships. When, after a triumphant welcome in London, he was summoned by the Council to answer for acting without the King’s leave, his hot reply summed up the growing exasperation of the Third
Estate with the less than adequate performance by the Second. He had spent his money and risked his men, Philpot said, not to shame the nobles or win knightly fame, but “in pity for the misery of the people and country which, from being a noble realm and dominion over other nations, has through your supineness been exposed to the ravages of the vilest race. Since you would not lift a hand in its defense, I exposed myself and my property for the safety and deliverance of our country.” Even if Philpot and his fellow merchants were primarily concerned with the safety and deliverance of their trade, his complaint of the country’s defenders was none the less valid.

  With ill-success on both sides in the war, both desired peace. Reopening of hostilities in Brittany had counterbalanced for France her success in Normandy, and the schism raised the temperature of hostility everywhere. Aware of failing health, Charles V did not want to leave the quarrels with Brittany and England a burden upon his son. The parleys after King Edward’s passing had closed without result and evidently in bad feeling. To avoid mutually irritating debates, it was proposed to convene separately the next time: the English at Calais and the French twenty miles away at St. Omer, with the Archbishop of Rouen acting as go-between. Postponed by the schism, this plan was adopted for a renewed effort in September 1379.

  Coucy, Rivière, and Mercier with one or two others were the French plenipotentiaries at this parley, and they were also delegated to meet with the Count of Flanders at Arras in the hope of inducing him to mediate a settlement with the Duke of Brittany. Before they could accomplish anything, the Count was caught up by a local revolt that, surmounting every repression and involving every faction, was to plunge Flanders into ruinous civil war.

  The rising of the men of Ghent had no connection with the workers’ insurrection that had seized control of Florence in the previous year. Although separate and spontaneous, the events in the two cloth cities initiated a whirlwind of class war over the next five years arising both from the accumulated miseries of the working class and from a new strength resulting from the disruptions of the Black Death. In Florence, Flanders, Languedoc, Paris, England, and back to Flanders and northern France, insurrections succeeded each other without visible link, except in the last phase. Some were urban, some rural; some arose from desperation, some from strength; but all were precipitated by one factor: oppressive taxes.

  At Ghent, where the weavers were in greatest strength, the Count invited trouble when he levied a tax on the city to pay for a tournament. Led by the cry of an angry tradesman that tax money must not be squandered “on the follies of princes and the upkeep of actors and buffoons,” the citizens refused to pay. The Count, playing on the commercial rivalry of the cities, secured the support of Bruges by a promise to build a canal connecting it to the sea, to the advantage of its commerce and the detriment of Ghent. When 500 diggers began work on a channel to divert the river Lys, Ghent dispatched its militia to the attack, and from that point on, the conflict enlarged itself like a cell dividing. Of Flanders’ fierce tribulations that now began, Froissart wrote, “What shall they say that readeth this or heareth it read, but that it was the work of the Devil?”

  At the opposite end of France at the same time, revolt erupted in Languedoc, where famine, oppression, war, and taxes had left a trail of misery under the harsh rule of the Duc d’Anjou. Impatient, bold, and habitually forcing events, Anjou exercised virtually sovereign power over a region amounting to a quarter of the realm. He swallowed its revenues whole, without distinguishing what was applied to his personal use from what was applied to the defense of Languedoc or the kingdom. To make up for fewer hearths as a result of the plague, the tax per hearth was raised each year, but the people obtained no benefit in better defense. Bandit companies still penetrated their valleys, still forced their villages to buy respite from pillage. In 1378, food taxes on consumption were added to those on sales, falling most heavily on the poor. When tax-collectors began the practice of house searches, like agents of the Inquisition, outrage was piled on misery.

  “How can we live like this?” protesting groups cried as they gathered before the Virgin’s statue to implore her aid. “How can we feed ourselves and our children when already we cannot pay the heavy taxes laid on us by the rich for their own comfort?” Riots and disorders spread and reached revolt in July 1379 when Anjou’s Council levied a heavy new tax of twelve francs per hearth without convoking the Estates, merely asking the assent of the municipal councils. The Duke himself was absent at the time, conducting the war in Brittany. The wrath of his overburdened subjects burst with extraordinary violence against all in authority: royal officials, nobles, and the upper bourgeois of the town councils, whom the common people held responsible for the new tax. “Kill, kill all the rich!” was the cry, as reported by a seigneur of Clermont afterward. “Seigneurs and other good men of the country and towns,” he said, “went in great fear of death” and in that other fear inspired by all revolts, “that if this infamous insolence of the common people was not rigorously suppressed, worse would follow.”

  At Le Puy, Nîmes, Clermont, and other towns, the people formed armed mobs, looted rich households, murdered officials, and committed acts of savagery—even, it was reported, “cut open bodies with their knives and ate like animals the flesh of baptized men.” In October the commotion reached a climax in Montpellier when five of Anjou’s councillors were killed and eighty others reportedly massacred. The insurgents sent out emissaries in an effort to raise a general revolt, but lacking the solid industrial base and traditions of the Flemish struggle, the rising quickly flared and was soon suppressed. Clement VII, dependent on Anjou’s control of Languedoc for his support, instantly sent Cardinal Albano, a native of Languedoc, to calm the people and warn them of the terrible punishment for lèse-majesté. Already afraid of their rebellion, the leaders were persuaded to submit to the King’s mercy.

  The fate of Montpellier was deliberately dramatized for punitive effect. On the day of the return of the Duc d’Anjou in January, a vast procession of citizens over the age of fourteen was led through the city gate by the Cardinal, along with surviving officials, ecclesiastics, monks, faculty, and students of the university. Lined up on both sides of the road, they fell on their knees crying “Mercy!” as the Duke and his men in armor rode by. Along the way were stationed magistrates in gowns of office without mantles, hats, or belts, women in unadorned dress, citizens with halters around their necks, and, finally, all the children under fourteen, each group falling to its knees in turn to cry “Mercy!” The keys to the city’s gates and the knocker of the great bell were humbly submitted. During the next two days, at Anjou’s command, all arms were surrendered and the chief buildings turned over to his men-at-arms.

  Then from a platform erected in the main square the Duke announced the ferocious sentence: 600 individuals condemned to death—one third to be hung, one third beheaded, one third burned, all their property to be confiscated, and their children sentenced to perpetual servitude. One half the property of all other citizens was to be confiscated and a fine levied of 6,000 francs plus the cost of the Duke’s expenses caused by the outbreak. The walls and gates of the city were to be razed, the university to lose all its rights, properties, and archives.

  A great outcry greeted the sentence, the Cardinal and prelates pleaded “very lovingly” for pity on the people, the university wept, women and children knelt and wailed. On the following day a reduced sentence was announced, remitting most of the penalties. The whole performance had been for effect. A letter of Charles V to the Cardinal, dated two months earlier, had stated his intention to be merciful, but the power of the crown to punish required demonstration.

  The events in Languedoc had one far-reaching result: in exhibiting the distress of his subjects, they left the King with a guilty conscience, which could have serious consequences at a medieval deathbed. For the time being, conscious of the avarice and oppressions of his brother and the unpopularity they reflected on the crown, Charles reduced the hearth tax a
nd recalled Anjou as Governor of Languedoc. Unhappily, his replacement, after an interim under Du Guesclin, was the Duc de Berry, whose rule of pure acquisitiveness undiluted by any political sense proved, if anything, more rapacious than his brother’s.

  In April 1379, Coucy and Rivière with several new colleagues went once more in quest of peace to a parley at Boulogne. They were empowered to make new concessions of territory and sovereignty and again to offer a marriage, in the person of Charles’s baby daughter, Catherine, to Richard II. Through six parleys in the last six years the mirage of peace had mocked its seekers. In the same period, except for French success in Normandy, continuance of war had brought no advantage to either side but rather, through increasing antagonism and suspicion, had made the war harder to end.

  The English came to the parley in divided mind, partly to try what diplomacy could gain, partly to maintain a holding operation while they prepared another assault. Montfort’s rebellion had given them another opportunity to re-enter France and regain the territories theythought of as theirs. Ever since Charles’s repudiation of the Treaty of Brétigny and the reverses that followed, they had hated the French for falsely and wrongfully, as they saw it, dispossessing them of their property. Defense of their own countrymen might be lackadaisical, but in combat overseas, where plunder offered, there was no lack of will to fight, only lack of money. Other means being exhausted, funds for an expedition to Brittany were raised in 1379 by a graduated poll (or head) tax, a new device designed to cover clergy and peasants at lower income levels than before. Calculated, with the usual vagueness about population figures, to bring in £50,000, it produced only £20,000, all of it invested in a fleet commanded by Sir John Arundel.