A Distant Mirror (6 page)

In consequence, the heraldic coat-of-arms—outward sign of ancestry signifying the right to bear arms, which, once granted to a family, could be worn by no other—came to be an object almost of cult worship. At tournaments its display was required as evidence of noble ancestry; at some tournaments four were required. As penetration by outsiders increased, so did snobbery until a day in the mid-15th century when a knight rode into the lists followed by a parade of pennants bearing no less than 32 coats-of-arms.

Through disappearance by failure to produce a male heir or by sinking over the edge into the lower classes, and through inflow of the ennobled, the personnel of the nobility was in flux, even though the status was fixed as an order of society. The
disappearance rate of noble families has been estimated at 50 percent a century, and the average duration of a dynasty at three to six generations over a period from 100 to 200 years. An example of the sinking process occurred in a family called Clusel with a small fief in the Loire valley. In 1276 it was headed by a knight evidently of too small resources to maintain himself in arms, who was reduced to the non-noble necessity of tilling his fields and operating his mill with his own hands. Of three grandsons appearing in local records, one was still a squire, one had become a parish priest, and the third a rent-collector for the lord of the county. After a passage of 85 years no member of the lineage was any longer referred to as a noble. In the case of another squire named Guichard Vert, who died as a young man in 1287, the family hovered on the edge. Guichard left two beds, three blankets, four bedsheets, two small rugs, one table, three benches, five coffers, two hams and a haunch of bacon in the larder, five empty barrels in the cellar, a chessboard, and a helmet and lance but no sword. Though without cash, he willed 200 livres to his wife to be paid in ten installments from his revenues of about 60 livres a year, and other income to found a chantry for his soul. He bequeathed gifts of cloth to friends and to the poor, and remitted two years’ tax to his tenants, most of whom were already in
arrears. Such a family,
in physical conditions hardly distinguishable from a commoner’s, would strain to keep its ties to the nobility, sending sons to take service as squires so that they might have access to gifts and pensions, or to enter the clergy in the hope of taking one of its many paths to riches.

A knight on the way down might pass an enterprising peasant on his way up. Having bought or inherited his freedom, a rent-paying peasant who prospered would add fields and tenants of his own, gradually leave manual labor to servants, acquire a fief from lord or Church, learn the practice of arms, marry the daughter of a needy squire, and slowly assimilate upward until he appeared in the records as
domicellus
, or squire, himself. The bailiff in the lord’s service had greater opportunities to make himself rich and, if he had also made himself useful, was often rewarded by a fief with vassals and rents, perhaps also a fortified manor. He would begin to dress like a noble, wear a sword, keep hunting dogs and falcons, and ride a war-horse carrying shield and lance. Nothing was more resented by the hereditary nobles than the imitation of their clothes and manners by the upstarts, thus obscuring the lines between the eternal orders of society. Magnificence in clothes was considered a prerogative of the nobles, who should be identifiable by modes of dress forbidden to others. In the effort to establish this principle as law and prevent “outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people against their estate and degree,”
sumptuary laws were repeatedly announced, attempting to fix what kinds of clothes people might wear and how much they might spend.

Proclaimed by criers in the county courts and public assemblies, exact gradations of fabric, color, fur trimming, ornaments, and jewels were laid down for every rank and income level. Bourgeois might be forbidden to own a carriage or wear ermine, and peasants to wear any color but black or brown. Florence allowed doctors and magistrates to share the nobles’ privilege of ermine, but ruled out for merchants’ wives multicolored, striped, and checked gowns, brocades, figured velvets, and fabrics embroidered in silver and gold. In France territorial lords and their ladies with incomes of 6,000 livres or more could order four costumes a year; knights and bannerets with incomes of 3,000 could have three a year, one of which had to be for summer. Boys could have only one a year, and no
demoiselle
who was not the
châtelaine
of a castle or did not have an income of 2,000 livres could order more than one costume a year. In England, according to a law of 1363, a merchant worth £1,000 was entitled to the same dress and meals as a knight worth £500, and a merchant worth £200 the same as
a knight worth £100. Double wealth in this case equaled nobility. Efforts were also made to regulate how many dishes could be served at meals, what garments and linens could be accumulated for a trousseau, how many minstrels at a wedding party. In the passion for fixing and stabilizing identity, prostitutes were required to wear stripes, or garments turned inside out.

Servants who imitated the long pointed shoes and hanging sleeves of their betters were severely disapproved, more because of their pretensions than because their sleeves slopped into the broth when they waited on table and their fur-trimmed hems trailed in the dirt. “There was so much pride amongst the common people,” wrote the English chronicler Henry Knighton, “in vying with one another in dress and ornaments that it was scarce possible to distinguish the poor from the rich, the servant from the master, or a priest from other men.”

Expenditure of money by commoners pained the nobles not least because they saw it benefiting the merchant class rather than themselves. The clergy considered that this expenditure drained money from the Church, and so condemned it on the moral ground that extravagance and luxury were in themselves wicked and harmful to virtue. In general, the sumptuary laws were favored as a means of curbing extravagance and promoting thrift, in the belief that if people could be made to save money, the King could obtain it when necessary. Economic thinking did not embrace the idea of spending as a stimulus to the economy.

The sumptuary laws proved unenforceable; the prerogative of adornment, like the drinking of liquor in a later century, defied prohibition. When Florentine city officials pursued women in the streets to examine their gowns, and entered houses to search their wardrobes, their findings were often spectacular: cloth of white marbled silk embroidered with vine leaves and red grapes, a coat with white and red roses on a pale yellow ground, another coat of “blue cloth with white lilies and white and red stars and compasses and white and yellow stripes across it, lined with red striped cloth,” which almost seemed as if the owner were trying to see how far defiance could go.

To the
grands seigneurs
of multiple fiefs and castles, identity was no problem. In their gold-embossed surcoats and velvet mantles lined in ermine, their slashed and parti-colored tunics embroidered with family crest or verses or a lady-love’s initials, their hanging scalloped sleeves with colored linings, their long pointed shoes of red leather from Cordova, their rings and chamois gloves and belts hung with bells and trinkets, their infinity of hats—puffed tam-o’shanters and furred caps, hoods and brims, chaplets of flowers, coiled turbans, coverings of
every shape, puffed, pleated, scalloped, or curled into a long tailed pocket called a liripipe—they were beyond imitation.

When the 14th century opened, France was supreme. Her superiority in chivalry, learning, and Christian devotion was taken for granted, and as traditional champion of the Church, her monarch was accorded the formula of “Most Christian King.” The people of his realm considered themselves the chosen objects of divine favor through whom God expressed his will on earth. The classic French account of the First Crusade was entitled
Gesta Dei per Francos (God’s Deeds Done by the French)
. Divine favor was confirmed in 1297 when, a bare quarter-century after his death, France’s twice-crusading King, Louis IX, was canonized as a saint.

“The fame of French knights,” acknowledged Giraldus Cambrensis in the 12th century, “dominates the world.” France was the land of “well-conducted chivalry” where uncouth German nobles came to learn good manners and taste at the courts of French princes, and knights and sovereigns from all over Europe assembled at the royal court to enjoy jousts and festivals and amorous gallantries. Residence there, according to blind King John of Bohemia, who preferred the French court to his own, offered “the most chivalrous sojourn in the world.” The French, as described by the renowned Spanish knight Don Pero Niño, “are generous and great givers of presents.” They know how to treat strangers honorably, they praise fair deeds, they are courteous and gracious in speech and “very gay, giving themselves up to pleasure and seeking it. They are very amorous, women as well as men, and proud of it.”

As a result of Norman conquests and the crusades, French was spoken as a second mother tongue by the noble estate in England, Flanders, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. It was used as the language of business by Flemish magnates, by law courts in the remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by scholars and poets of other lands. Marco Polo dictated his
Travels
in French, St. Francis sang French songs, foreign troubadours modeled their tales of adventure on the French
chansons de geste
. When a Venetian scholar translated a Latin chronicle of his city into French rather than Italian, he explained his choice on the ground that “the French language is current throughout the world and more delightful to hear and read than any other.”

The architecture of Gothic cathedrals was called the “French style”; a French architect was invited to design London Bridge; Venice imported dolls from France dressed in the latest mode in order to keep
up with French fashions; exquisitely carved French ivories, easily transportable, penetrated to the limits of the Christian world. Above all, the University of Paris elevated the name of the French capital, surpassing all others in the fame of its masters and the prestige of its studies in theology and philosophy, though these were already petrifying in the rigid doctrines of Scholasticism. Its faculty at the opening of the 14th century numbered over 500, its students, attracted from all countries, were too numerous to count. It was a magnet for the greatest minds: Thomas Aquinas of Italy taught there in the 13th century, as did his own teacher Albertus Magnus of Germany, his philosophical opponent Duns Scotus of Scotland, and in the next century, the two great political thinkers, Marsilius of Padua and the English Franciscan William of Ockham. By virtue of the university, Paris was the “Athens of Europe”; the Goddess of Wisdom, it was said, after leaving Greece and then Rome, had made it her home.

The University’s charter of privileges, dating from 1200, was its greatest pride. Exempted from civil control, the University was equally haughty in regard to ecclesiastical authority, and always in conflict with Bishop and Pope. “
You Paris masters at your desks seem to think the world should be ruled by your reasonings,” stormed the papal legate Benedict Caetani, soon to be Pope Boniface VIII. “It is to us,” he reminded them, “that the world is entrusted, not to you.” Unconvinced, the University considered itself as authoritative in theology as the Pope, although conceding to Christ’s Vicar equal status with itself as “the two lights of the world.”

In this favored land of the Western world, the Coucy inheritance in 1335 was as rich as it was ancient. Watered by the Ailette, the Coucys’ land was called the
vallée d’or
(golden valley) because of its resources in timber, vineyards, grain crops, and a profusion of fish in the streams. The magnificent forest of St. Gobain covered more than 7,000 acres of primeval oak and beech, ash and birch, willow, alder and quivering aspen, wild cherry and pine. The home of deer, wolves, wild boar, heron, and every other bird, it was a paradise for the hunt. From taxes and land rents and feudal dues of various kinds increasingly converted to money, from tolls on bridges and fees for use of the lord’s flour mill, wine press, and bread ovens, the annual revenue of an estate the size of Coucy would have been in the range of 5,000 to 6,000 livres.

Everything that had formed the fief since the tree trunks at Codiciacum was symbolized in the great lion platform of stone in front of
the castle gate where vassals came to present rents and homage. The platform rested on three lions,
couchant
, one devouring a child, one a dog, and in between them, a third, quiescent. On top was a fourth lion seated in all the majesty the sculptor could evoke. Three times a year—at Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas—the Abbot of Nogent or his agent came to pay homage for the land originally granted to the monks by Aubry de Coucy. The rituals of the ceremony were as elaborate and abstruse as any in the royal crowning at Reims.

Mounted on a bay horse (or, according to some accounts, a palomino) with clipped tail and ears and a plow-horse’s harness, the abbot’s representative carried a whip, a seed bag of wheat, and a basket filled with 120
rissoles
. These were crescent-shaped pastries made of rye flour, stuffed with minced veal cooked in oil. A dog followed, also with clipped ears and tail, and with a
rissole
tied around his neck. The agent circled a stone cross at the entrance to the court three times, cracking his whip on each tour, dismounted and knelt at the lion platform, and, if each detail of equipment and performance was exactly right so far, was allowed to proceed. He then mounted the platform, kissed the lion, and deposited the
rissoles
plus twelve loaves of bread and three portions of wine as his homage. The Sire de Coucy took a third of the offerings, distributed the rest among the assembled bailiffs and town magistrates, and stamped the document of homage with a seal representing a mitered abbot with the feet of a goat.

Pagan, barbarian, feudal, Christian, accumulated out of the shrouded past, here was medieval society—and the many-layered elements of Western man.