A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Among other additions were a fireplace and chimney for the lady’s boudoir, now tucked into an angle between the new wing and the old; an indoor tennis court with carved wooden ceiling; a new stable in the lower court; parapets extended the length of the terraces; a double-arched space beneath the terrace to keep wood for fuel; a kennel with latrines “to make room for Bonniface and Guedon to lie”; a water tank six feet by eight and sixteen feet deep to supply water by four large stone conduits to the kitchens. New wooden ceilings were installed in the donjon, roofs throughout the castle were re-covered, gargoyles and gutters cleaned, and the windows of the upper chamber “which the Dame de Coucy’s monkey had damaged” repaired.

  Craftsmen of every specialty were hired—a carriage-maker to cut down the carriage brought from Lorraine by the new Dame de Coucy, which was too wide for the gates and had to be reduced by a foot; wood-carvers to panel the ceilings of the Eagle Chamber and the oratory and dressing room of the Sire de Coucy, and to make two extension leaves for the banquet table for the new hall; iron-workers to replace old keys, locks, bolts, and hinges, in particular to make a new lock for the casket in the oratory of the Seigneur; plumbers to weld the kitchen sinks and drainage pipes; painters from Paris to decorate the walls and “to redress the white-and-red hoods of the Coucy livery with new quilting.”

  Much of the non-rented land, it appears from the accounts, was in vineyards, requiring considerable expense in planting, cultivating, and harvesting, and producing considerable income for the Seigneur. Other expenses went for the wages of bailiffs and tax-collectors, offerings to the chaplains of two chapels, charges for curing fish, replenishing livestock, cutting wood, mowing and haying the fields, providing the clothes and equipment of the Seigneur and his retinue. Coucy’s journeys to Soissons and other places show him generally accompanied by about eighty mounted knights, squires, and servants, and an astronomer, Maître Guillaume de Verdun, to carry out “certain necessities for him.”

  The second marriage like the first was not very prolific, which may reflect something about Enguerrand’s marital relations or merely his prolonged absences. No son to carry on the dynasty and maintain the great barony was born, and only one daughter. Named Isabelle for her mother, she ultimately married the second son of the Duke of Burgundy. At an unknown date, probably some years later, the much desired son was finally born to Enguerrand—out of wedlock. Named Perceval and known as the Bastard of Coucy, he married in 1419 which suggests that he was the product of a late liaison. The identity of his mother is a blank. She may have been a rival of Coucy’s wife or a substitute during his later tenure in the south as Lieutenant-General of Guienne. Evidently she was of some importance in Coucy’s life, or he felt pride in a son, or both, because he acknowledged paternity and endowed Perceval with the seigneurie of Aubermont, a fief of the lordship of La Fère. The Bastard could thereafter call himself Sieur de Coucy and Seigneur d’Aubermont.

  In the year of marriages, 1385–86, Coucy attended the wedding at Dijon of his Hapsburg relative and recent enemy, Duke Albert III, to a daughter of Philip the Bold. This was the year of the historic victory at Sempach when Swiss pikemen defeated the Hapsburgs, and it maybe that Coucy’s presence at Dijon for the wedding was connected with the Hapsburgs’ desire for his support. In any event, his quarrel with his mother’s family was apparently made up. “They ended always by accommodating,” in the words of the discoverer of the document.

  The Scottish fiasco failed to discourage French designs for the offensive. On the contrary, the design was now enlarged to a full-scale invasion of England, a true penetration, perhaps a second Norman Conquest. There was a strong body of sentiment which held that only a military victory by the French could finish off the war and assure the supremacy of the French Pope. Besides, England was known to be in great discord, and the nobility no longer united in support of the King but deeply disaffected. The Duke of Burgundy was initially the sponsor of the invasion plan, but when the decision was taken in April 1386, the Royal Council voted for it unanimously. Many were the same men who had served Charles V, but his controlling sense of the art of the possible was gone. Out of the “heap of ruins” after Poitiers, Charles had learned the discipline of adjusting ambitions to possibilities; his son’s reign was to be spent unlearning it as fast as possible. A folie de grandeur, or just such “fantasies of omnipotence” as define megalomania, overtook the French as a distraught century was drawing to its close.

  “You are the greatest King living with the greatest number of subjects,” Burgundy told his nephew, “and it has occurred to me many times why we do not make this passage to England to crush the great pride of these English … and make this great enterprise one of eternal memory.” When shortly after Easter the Duke of Lancaster left England with a large force in 200 ships to conquer the throne of Castile, the French opportunity was at hand. Information about each other’s movements was known through French and English fishermen, who, ignoring hostilities, came to each other’s aid at sea and exchanged catches, keeping trans-Channel communication open.

  The French invasion fleet was planned to be the greatest “since God created the world.” The original army that Clisson and Coucy were to have led to Scotland was to be the invasion force, swollen to awesome proportions. Chroniclers write in terms of 40,000 knights and squires, 50,000 horses, 60,000 foot soldiers, figures which were meant to be more impressive than precise. Preparations for Scotland had been well under way before the Flemish interruption and were now renewed in a colossal burst of activity. Money, as always, came first. A sales tax of 5 percent plus 25 percent on beverages had already been levied throughout the kingdom for the Scottish campaign, bringing in 202,000 livres. It was now renewed, as it was to be repeatedly, never bringing in enough.

  Ships were hired or purchased from every part of Europe from Prussia to Castile, while French shipyards worked day and night. The 600 ships assembled in the previous year were more than doubled and the sight they made in the mouth of the Scheldt was “the greatest of its kind ever seen.” Buonaccorso Pitti, the ubiquitous Florentine, saw 1,200 ships of which 600 were combat vessels mounted with the “castle” for archers. The French nobles, counting on recouping expenses from booty and ransoms in England, spared nothing in competitive splendor of gilded prows and silvered masts and sails striped with cloth of gold and silk. Admiral de Vienne commissioned a Flemish artist, Pierre de Lis, to paint his flagship red, adorned with his arms. Philip of Burgundy’s black ship was decorated with the coats of arms of all his possessions, and flew silken banners bearing his bold device “Il me tarde,” meaning approximately “I don’t wait,” repeated in gold on the mainsail. Coucy’s ship, “one of the most sumptuous of the fleet … very large and richly decorated,” met an unfortunate fate in the Seine, where it was moored. It was seized with two other ships in a daring raid up the river by a Portuguese admiral acting as an ally of the Duke of Lancaster.

  Coucy was not immune to the hubris of the hour. His seal, attached to a receipt of October 1386 for payments connected with the invasion fleet, bears his arms combined with the royal leopard of England. Evidently he felt endowed with some permanent claim, perhaps in relation to his daughter Philippa, first cousin of the King of England. Coucy’s personal contingent in the invasion army numbered 5 knights, 64 squires, and 30 archers.

  The wide bays and estuaries of the Scheldt provided a huge, sheltered gathering place for the armada, with communication by land and sea and by inland canals to Bruges. Day after day the parade of supplies came in—2,000 barrels to hold biscuit, timber to make carts, portable handmills to grind wheat, cannonballs of iron and stone from Reims, ropes, candles, lanterns, mattresses and straw pallets, urinals, shaving basins, laundry tubs, gangplanks for horses, shovels, pickaxes, and hammers. Clerks wrote a ceaseless stream of orders, purchasing agents scoured Normandy and Picardy, Holland and Zeeland, and as far as Germany and Spain for provisions—for wheat to make 2,000 tons of biscuit, for salt pork and bacon, smoked m
ackerel, salmon, eels, and dried herring, dried peas and beans, onions, salt, 1,000 barrels (or four million liters) of French wine, and 857 barrels of wine from Greece, Portugal, Lepanto, and Rumania. The Duke of Burgundy ordered 101 beef cattle, 447 sheep, 224 hams, 500 fat hens, capons, and geese, containers of ginger, pepper, saffron, cinnamon, and cloves, 900 pounds of almonds, 200 of sugar, 400 of rice, 300 of barley, 94 casks of olive oil, 400 cheeses from Brie and 144 from Chauny.

  Swords, lances, halberds, suits of armor, helmets “visored in the new fashion,” shields, banners, pennants, 200,000 arrows, 1,000 pounds of gunpowder, 138 stone cannonballs, 500 ramming prows for the ships, catapults, and flame-throwers were collected. Armorers hammered and polished, embroiderers worked on banners, bakers made ship’s biscuit, supplies were counted on delivery, packed, stored, and loaded into the holds. The roadsteads filled with cargo vessels, car-racks, barges, galleys, and galleons.

  Of all the preparations, the most stupendous was the portable wooden town to protect and house the invaders upon landing. A huge camp enclosing a place for each captain and his company, it was virtually an artificial Calais to be towed across the Channel. Its dimensions epitomized the fantasy of omnipotence. It was to have a circumference of nine miles and an area of 1,000 acres surrounded by a wooden wall 20 feet high reinforced by towers at intervals of 12 and 22 yards. Houses, barracks, stables, and markets where the companies would come for their provisions were to be laid out along prearranged streets and squares. William the Conqueror had brought a dismountable wooden fort to England in aid of his landing 300 years before, and similar devices had been used many times since, but nothing so daring in concept and size as this had ever before been attempted. Pre-fabricated in Normandy by the work of 5,000 wood-cutters and carpenters, supervised by a team of architects, it was to be packed and shipped in numbered sections, so designed that assembly at the beachhead could allegedly be accomplished in an unbelievable three hours. For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

  At the Scheldt the port overflowed with nobles, functionaries, craftsmen, and servants of every degree, all of whom had to be housed and paid. The missing brilliance of the Count of Savoy was made up by his son Amadeus VII, called the Red Count, who entertained everyone, whether humble, middle, or great, and turned away no one from his table without a meal. Eustache Deschamps, too, was on hand as laureate for the occasion, writing confidently,

  Yours will be the land of England;

  Where once there was a Norman Conquest,

  Valiant heart will make war once more.

  All the notable lords of France were present except the Duc de Berry, whose delayed arrival caused misgiving.

  Impatience for embarkation was rising. The nobles stayed at Bruges “to be more at their ease,” and every few days rode over to Sluys, where the King stayed, to learn if the day of departure had been decided. The answer was always tomorrow or next week or when the fog lifts or when the Duc de Berry comes. The mass of men crowded into the area was growing restless and disorderly. Many, including the poorer knights and squires, could not be paid, and the cost of living was going up as the local people raised prices. Knights complained that four francs could barely buy what formerly was worth one. The Flemings were sullen and quarrelsome, “for the common people bore a grudge in their minds for the battle of Roosebeke.” They said to each other, “Why the Devil does not the King of France pass over into England? Are we not in poverty enough?”—although they admitted that “the Frenchmen make us no poorer.”

  All excuses for postponement now came to one—waiting for the Duc de Berry. His non-arrival was a sign that the invading spirit was not in fact unanimous, that doubts and conflicting interests were struggling behind the scenes, that a peace party represented by Berry was opposing itself to the war party.

  Berry was too absorbed in acquisition and art to be interested in war. He lived for possessions, not glory. He owned two residences in Paris, the Hôtel de Nesle and another near the Temple, and built or acquired a total of seventeen castles in his duchies of Berry and Auvergne. He filled them with clocks, coins, enamels, mosaics, marquetry, illuminated books, musical instruments, tapestries, statues, triptychs painted in bright scenes on dazzling gold ground bordered with gems, gold vessels and spoons, jeweled crosses and reliquaries, relics, and curios. He owned one of Charlemagne’s teeth, a piece of Elijah’s mantle, Christ’s cup from the Last Supper, drops of the Virgin’s milk, enough of her hairs and teeth to distribute as gifts, soil from various Biblical sites, a narwhal’s teeth, porcupine’s quills, the molar tooth of a giant, and enough gold-fringed vestments to robe all the canons of three cathedrals at one time. Agents kept him apprised of curiosities, and when one reported a “giant’s bones” dug up near Lyon in 1378, he at once authorized purchase. He kept live swans and bears representing his chosen device, a menagerie with apes and dromedaries, and rare fruit trees in his garden. He ate strawberries with crystal picks mounted in silver and gold, and read by candlelight from six carved ivory candle-holders.

  Like most affluent lords, he had a good library of classics and contemporary works; he commissioned translations from the Latin, bought romances from booksellers in Paris, and bound his books in precious bindings, some in red velvet with gold clasps. He commissioned from renowned illuminators at least twenty Books of Hours, among them two exquisite masterpieces, the Grandes Heures and Très Riches Heures. His pleasure was to see illustrated his favorite scenes and portraits, including his own. Delicate multiple-towered cities and castles, rural occupations, knights and ladies in garden, hunt, and banquet hall, clad in garments of surpassing elegance, ornamented the prayerbooks. The Duke himself usually appears robed in the pure sky blue, whose pigment was so precious that two pots of it were listed in an inventory of Berry’s “treasures.”

  Berry introduced the newly invented pedal organ into his churches and bought a new jacket for four livres so that his cornettist who played so beautifully might perform a solo before Charles V. He had gold and pearls ground together for a laxative, and during enforced idleness when he was bled to relieve the effects of gluttony and an apoplectic tendency, he played at dice, his favorite pastime. In one game with knightly companions, he wagered his coral prayer beads for forty francs. Accompanied by his swans, bears, and tapestries, he moved continually from one of his castles to another, carrying half-finished works of art by artists at one place to be completed by those at another, taking part in local processions and pilgrimages, visiting monasteries, enjoying wine harvests in autumn, and sending home to the Duchess on one occasion in June new peas, cherries, and 78 ripe pears. He collected dogs, always searching for more, no matter how many he had, and when he heard of an unusual variety of greyhound in Scotland, obtained a safe-conduct from Richard II to allow four couriers on horseback to make the round trip to bring him back a pair.

  The funds to gratify his tastes were wrung from the people of Auvergne, and of Languedoc when he was its governor, by the heaviest taxation in France of his time, sowing the hatred and misery that resulted in the insurrection of Montpellier and his own recall. Punishment of the Tuchin rising in 1383, when he was again governor in place of Anjou, was his most lucrative opportunity. Instead of death sentences on the leaders, he sold pardons and imposed on the communes an enormous fine of 800,000 gold francs, four times as much as the whole of Languedoc had been able to collect for the ransom of Jean II. It was to be paid for by an unprecedented tax of 24 francs per hearth. Unchastened and unchanged, Berry was to go on spending for thirty more years until he had ruined his lands to pay his expenses and died insolvent in 1416 at the age of 76.

  At the time when he was waited for at the Scheldt, he was 46, vain, pleasure-loving, obstinate, a prey to parasites, mediocre in mind and spirit, redeemed from vulgarity only by his love and fostering of beauty. Perhaps that lifelong passion was a reaction to his own ugly, coarse-grained feat
ures, which he perversely emphasized; the pug-nosed face appears on plates, seals, cameos, tapestries, altar panels, stained-glass windows, Books of Hours. According to a popular verse, the Duke wished to surround himself “only with snub-noses at his court.”

  Berry did not appear at the Scheldt until October 14. By that time the days were growing shorter and colder, the Channel rougher. Meantime in mid-September, disaster smote the portable town. Loaded aboard 72 ships, it was on the way from Rouen to the Scheldt when the convoy was attacked by an English squadron out of Calais and three of the French ships were captured, along with the master carpenter in charge of construction. Too big to enter Calais, two of the ships were towed to England and their sections of the town exhibited in London to the awe and rejoicing of the English. For the French the loss was a portent.

  The Monk of St. Denis, never at a loss for omens, reported clouds of crows carrying lighted coals which they deposited on thatched barns, as well as one of the terrible storms which appear regularly at all dark moments of his chronicle and, in this case, tore up the tallest trees by their roots and destroyed a church by a thunderbolt. On the day after Berry finally arrived, the elements, “seemingly angered by the delay,” flung the sea into an uproar and raised waves “like mountains” that shattered the ships and were followed by such rains as seemed that God was sending a new Flood. Many supplies, not yet loaded, were ruined.

  Three weeks of indecision passed without action. In November the captains of 150 of the invasion ships submitted a list of reasons why embarkation was by now impossible: “Truthfully, the sea is cursed: item, the nights are too long; item, too dark [and through a long string of “items”], too cold, too rainy, too fresques. Item, we need a full moon; item, we need wind. Item, the lands of England are perilous, the ports are perilous; we have too many old ships, too many small ships, we fear the small ships may be swamped by the great ships.…” The unrelieved negatives hint at justification for a decision already taken.