A Distant Mirror (39 page)

Pursuit of adventures under Mars and Venus was supposed to be the business of a young knight’s life. “If at arms you excel,” advises the
God of Love in the
Roman de la Rose
, “you will be ten times loved. If you have a good voice, seek no excuse when asked to sing, for good singing gives pleasure.” Dancing and playing the flute and strings also aid the lover on his way to a lady’s heart. He should likewise keep his hands, nails, and teeth clean, lace his sleeves, comb his hair, but use no paint or rouge, which are not fitting even for women. He should dress handsomely and fashionably and wear fresh new shoes, taking care that they fit so well that “common folk will discuss how you got them on and where you entered them.” He should finish off with a garland of flowers, which costs little.

How far Enguerrand conformed to this ideal cannot be said, for no portrait exists, which is not exceptional since, except for royal personages, the art of portraiture was hardly yet practiced. The 14th century seems to have been interested in individual appearance and character traits only in the case of ruling figures or an occasional oddity like Bertrand Du Guesclin. Other people are undifferentiated by chronicles and illustrators and become personalities only through their deeds. For Enguerrand de Coucy two clues to appearance exist; one that he was tall and strong, as his figure was described under a rain of blows in his
last battle; the other that he may have been dark and, in maturity, saturnine, as he appears in a portrait painted more than 200 years after his death. Since the portrait was commissioned by a Celestine monastery which Enguerrand had founded, some tradition of the founder’s looks may have survived to instruct the artist, but the face portrayed could just as well have been imaginary.

The most vivid description of all is non-specific; yet in his singing and dancing, elegant horsemanship, charm of manner, and lover’s talents, it is impossible not to see the
young
Enguerrand de Coucy in the Squire of the
Canterbury Tales
. Which is not to say that Chaucer, who saw knights and squires every day during his career at court, had Enguerrand particularly in mind when he drew the sparkling portrait in the Prologue. Nevertheless it fits.

Headed by the four “Lilies,” Anjou, Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon, the hostages in their silks and parti-colors, “embroidered like a field of flowers,” brought no less splendor to England than the prisoners of Poitiers whom they replaced. They were required to live at their own expense—considerable in the case of the Duc d’Orléans, who had sixteen servants with him and a total retinue of over sixty. Handsomely entertained with banquets and minstrels and gifts of jewels, the hostages moved about freely and joined in hunting and hawking, dancing and flirting. French and English chivalry took pride in treating one
another courteously as prisoners, however greedy the ransom—in contrast to Germans, who, according to Froissart’s scornful report, threw their prisoners “in chains and irons like thieves and murderers to extort a greater ransom.”

Coucy would not have felt alien in England. His family possessed lands there inherited from his great-grandmother Catherine de Baliol, although these had been confiscated during the war by King Edward and handed over as a munificent reward to the captor of the King of Scotland.

English and French, like English and Americans of a later day, shared a common culture and, among nobles, a common language, the legacy of the Norman Conquest. At about the time the hostages arrived, the use of French by the upper class was beginning to be replaced by the national speech of the commoners. Before the Black Death, French had been the language of the court, Parliament, and the lawcourts. King Edward himself probably did not speak English with any fluency. French was even taught in the schools, much to the resentment of the bourgeois, whose children, according to a complaint of 1340, “are Compelled to leave the use of their own language, a thing which is known in no other country.” When many clerics who could teach French were eliminated by the Black Death, children in the grammar schools began learning their lessons in English—with both profit and loss, in the opinion of John of Trevisa. They learned grammar more quickly than before, he wrote, but, lacking French, they were at a disadvantage when they “scholle passe the se and travayle in strange londes.”

Because of its island limits and earlier development of parliamentary power, England was more cohesive than France, with a greater national feeling, enhanced by growing antagonism to the papacy. Now with the ransoms of two kings, Jean of France and David of Scotland, the triumphs in battle and the territorial gains, England had turned the tables on William the Conqueror. Yet beneath the pride and glory and flow of cash, the effects of war were gnawing at the country.

The plunderers of France brought home the habit of brigandage. Many in the invasion forces had been outlaws and criminals to begin with who had joined up for a promised pardon. Others were made lawless and violent by the approved daily practice in France. Returning home, some formed companies in imitation of their fellows who had stayed in France. “
Arrayed as for war,” they robbed and assaulted travelers, took captives, held villages for ransom, killed, mutilated, and spread terror. A statute of 1362 instructed justices to gather information “on all those who have been plunderers and robbers beyond the
seas and are now returned to go wandering and will not work as they were used to do.”

In the spring of 1361, twelve years since the passing of the great plague, the dreaded black swellings reappeared in France and England, bringing “a very great mortality of hasty death.” An early victim was the Queen of France, Jean’s second wife, who died in September 1360 ahead of the main epidemic. The
Pestis Secunda
, sometimes called the “mortality of children,” took a particularly high toll of the young, who had no immunity from the earlier outbreak, and, according to John of Reading, “especially struck the masculine sex.” The deaths of the young in the Second Pest halted repopulation, haunting the age with a sense of decline. In the urge to procreate, women in England, according to
Polychronicon
, “took any kind of husbands, strangers, the feeble and imbeciles alike, and without shame mated with inferiors.”

Because the pneumonic form was absent or insignificant, the death rate as a whole was less than that of the first epidemic, although equally erratic. In Paris 70 to 80 died daily; at Argenteuil, a few miles away where the Oise joins the Seine, the number of hearths was reduced from 1,700 to 50. Flanders and Picardy suffered heavily, and Avignon spectacularly. Through its choked and unsanitary quarters the plague swept like flames through straw. Between March and July 1360 “17,000” were said to have died.

Though less lethal, the Second Pest carried a more terrible burden than the first in the very fact of its return. Thereafter people lived in fear, repeatedly justified, of another recurrence, just as they lived in fear of the brigands’ return. At any time either the phantom that “rises like black smoke in our midst” or the steel-capped horsemen could appear, with death and ruin at their heels. A sense of overhanging disaster weighed on the second half of the century, expressed in prophecies of doom and apocalypse.

The most celebrated of these was the “Tribulation” of Jean de la Roquetaillade, a Franciscan friar incarcerated at Avignon because of his preaching against corrupt prelates and princes. Like Jean de Venette, he sympathized with the oppressed against the mighty, lay and clerical. From his cell in 1356, the year of Poitiers, he prophesied that France would be brought low and all Christendom be vexed by troubles: tyranny and robbers would prevail; the lowly would rise against the great, who “shall be cruelly slain by the commons”; many women would be “defiled and widowed” and their “haughtiness and luxury shall wither”; Saracens and Tatars would invade the kingdoms of the Latins; rulers and peoples, outraged by the luxury and pride of
the clergy, would combine to strip the Church of its property; nobles and princes would be cast down from their dignities and suffer unbelievable afflictions; Anti-Christ would appear to spread false doctrines; tempests, floods, and plagues would wipe out most of mankind and all hardened sinners, preparing the way for renewal.

These were the concerns and real currents of the time. Like most medieval doom-sayers, however, Roquetaillade predicted debacle as the prelude to a better world. In his vision, the Church, purified by suffering, chastisement, and true poverty, would be restored, a great reformer would become Pope, the King of France against all custom would be elected Holy Roman Emperor and rule as the holiest monarch since the beginning of time. He and the Pope together would expel the Saracens and Tatars from Europe, convert all Moslems, Jews, and other infidels, destroy heresy, conquer the world for the universal church, and, before they died, establish a reign of peace that would last a thousand years until the Day of Judgment and the End.

The hostages did not escape the plague. A high-ranking victim was Count Guy de St. Pol, a knight of great virtue, “very devout and merciful to the poor,” who abhorred the lusts and corruptions of the world, fasted unsparingly, and had maintained virginity until agreeing to marriage. The bourgeois hostages of Paris, Rouen, and several other towns were likewise victims. The great Duke of Lancaster, probably the richest man in the kingdom, was not proof; he too died of the plague, leaving his title and vast inheritance to his son-in-law, John of Gaunt, third son of King Edward. How and where the hostages were housed and whether chivalric courtesy allowed them escape to country retreats is not recorded. In 1357, eight years after the first plague, London was reported still one-third empty, but, though uncrowded, its sanitation was still careless enough to elicit repeated ordinances requiring citizens to clean their premises. Though it was against the law to empty chamber pots into the streets, their contents and kitchen garbage were often flung out of windows, more or less aimed at the gutters, which carried a steady current of water. Barns for keeping horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens were located inside the walls as well as outside, causing many complaints about accumulating piles of manure. At about this time London’s aldermen organized a system of hired “rakers” to carry the piles away in dump carts or in dung boats on the Thames.

For the hostages, prospects were not carefree. Their hope of return depended on regular payments of the King’s ransom, which already lagged. Collection of money was slowed by the plague and was anyway
hard to come by in the ashes left by the companies. The case of
Buxeaul, a town in Burgundy, was typical of many. According to a royal ordinance of 1361, plague and massacre had reduced its fifty or sixty hearths to ten and these “have been pillaged and ruined by our enemies so that little or nothing remains to them wherefore some of the inhabitants have left the place and are still leaving from day to day”; and because of these things, the survivors if required to pay customary taxes “would have to flee and leave the place and become poor beggars”; therefore it was ordained that the town should pay one tax a year instead of two and be freed of all heriot.

The
desolation of churches sacked by the enemy was a subject of constant appeals to the bishops. Candles cannot be lit at mass because the winds blow through for lack of window glass; collapse threatens without funds for maintenance; roofs leak, rain falls on the altar. Abbots and abbesses wander in search of subsistence; prelates who would have blushed to appear in public without retinues of horsemen and servants “are now under the necessity of going on foot in humiliation followed by a single monk or valet and subsisting on the most frugal diet.” Universities suffered from lack of attendance and fees. Montpellier declared itself “destitute of lecturers and auditors because in the said
Studium
where formerly a thousand students used to dwell, scarcely 200 are to be found today.”

To the shocked eyes of Petrarch, sent by Galeazzo Visconti to congratulate King Jean on his liberation, France was “a heap of ruins.” Petrarch was an inveterate complainer who raised every complaint to an extremity, whether it was the iniquity of doctors, the smells of Avignon, or the decadence of the papacy. But even if exaggerated, his account of France as he saw it in January 1361 was tragic enough. “Everywhere was solitude, desolation and misery; fields are deserted, houses ruined and empty except in the walled towns; everywhere you see the fatal footprints of the English and the hateful scars still bleeding from their swords.” In royal Paris, “shamed by devastation up to her very gates … even the Seine flows sadly as if feeling the sorrow of it, and weeps, trembling for the fate of the whole land.”

Petrarch presented the King with two rings from Galeazzo, one a huge ruby as a gift, one torn from Jean’s hand at Poitiers which Galeazzo had somehow redeemed. Afterward he treated the court to a Latin oration on the Biblical text of Manasseh’s return from Babylon, with felicitous references to the mutability of Fortune as shown by Jean’s marvelous restoration out of captivity. The King and the Prince, Petrarch wrote in the voluminous correspondence of which he carefully
kept copies, “fixed their eyes on me” with great interest, and he felt that his discussion
of Fortune especially aroused the attention of the Dauphin, “a young man of ardent intelligence.”