A Distant Mirror (32 page)

Grief and wrath pervade too a Latin polemic called “
Tragic Account of the Miserable State of the Realm of France” by an obscure Benedictine monk. Ashamed for once-proud France which let her King be captured “in the heart of the kingdom” and led without interference to captivity on foreign soil, he raised the crucial question of military discipline. “Where did you study [the art of war]? Who were your teachers? In what was your apprenticeship?” he asks the knights. “Was it while fighting under the banners of Venus, sucking sweetness like milk, abandoned to delights …” and so on in this vein until he suddenly concludes with the practical question, “Can the military art be learned in the games and hunts in which you pass your youth?”

The friar has censure left over for the common people, “whose belly is their God and who are the slaves of their women,” and for the clergy, who receive the worst scolding of all. They are sunk in luxury, gluttony, pomp, ambition, anger, discord, envy, greed, litigation, usury, and sacks of silver and gold. Virtues die, vices triumph, honesty
perishes, pity is stifled, avarice pervades, confusion overwhelms, order vanishes.

Was this merely the traditional monastic tirade upon the world, or a deeper pessimism that begins to darken the second half of the century?

King Jean’s release was still unsettled. While treating the royal captive with elaborate honor, Edward was determined to squeeze from his triumph every last inch of territory and ounce of money that France could be made to yield. The great King of France, snatched from the field of Poitiers, was an extraordinary prize.
Jean’s entry into London as the Black Prince’s prisoner in May 1357 occasioned one of the greatest celebrations ever seen in England and “great solemnities in all churches marvelous to think of.” Such was the curiosity to see the French King that the procession took several hours to cross the town to the palace of Westminster. As the center of attention among the thirteen other noble prisoners, Jean was dressed in black “like an archdeacon or a secular clerk,” and rode a tall white horse alongside the Prince on a smaller black palfrey. Past houses hung with captured shields and tapestries, over cobblestones strewn with rose petals, the procession moved through fantasies of pageantry that were the favorite art of the 14th century. In twelve gilded cages along the route, the goldsmiths of London had stationed twelve beautiful maidens, who scattered flowers of gold and silver filigree over the riders.

The éclat of the noble prisoners added chivalric distinction to the English court. Christmas and New Year’s of the first winter were celebrated with extra pomp, including a splendid tournament held at night under torchlight. Housed in the Savoy, the new palace of the Duke of Lancaster, Jean was at liberty to receive visitors from France and enjoy all the pleasures of court life, although assigned a guard to prevent his escape or attempted rescue. Languedoc sent a delegation of nobles and bourgeois with a gift of 10,000 florins and the assurance that their lives, goods, and fortunes were dedicated to his delivery. Even Laon and Amiens sent money. The mystique of kingship possessed his subjects more than its responsibilities concerned the King.

In France’s miserable hour, his accounts show expenses for horses, dogs, and falcons, a chess set, an organ, a harp, a clock, a fawn-colored palfrey, venison and whale meat from Bruges, and elaborate wardrobes for his son Philip and for his favorite jester, who received several ermine-trimmed hats ornamented with gold and pearls. Jean maintained
an astrologer and a “king of minstrels” with orchestra, held a cockfight, commissioned books with fine bindings, and sold horses and wine he had received as gifts from Languedoc. The success of this venture led him to import more of both from Toulouse for sale as a profitable business. Reading through Jean’s accounts in the archives 500 years later, Jules Michelet, France’s most vivid if not most objective historian, said they made him sick.

Negotiations of terms for the ransom of the King and the conditions of a permanent peace treaty were obstructed by Edward’s exorbitant demands. He wanted outright cession of Guienne, Calais, and all the former Plantagenet holdings in France, plus an enormous ransom of three million écus for Jean, in return for which he would give up his claim to the French crown. Under pressure of the papal delegates, the parleys dragged on while the French commissioners twisted and turned in agony. The one solution they never considered was to leave the King unransomed and go home. For one thing, this would have meant no peace treaty, and battered France had to have peace. More fundamentally, the King was a principle of order. Since the reign of St. Louis, who had used the royal authority to eliminate private wars, impose justice, and systematize taxes, the crown had come to be equated in the public mind with greater protection and law. All the back-sliding of his successors could not soil the kingship, and Jean, its careless representative, was yearned for as if he had been St. Louis.

The French provinces, believing royal power to be their last resource for defense against the companies, did not want to see the monarchy enfeebled. In August 1357 the Dauphin was emboldened to reinstate the dismissed councillors and defiantly to inform Marcel and the Council of Thirty-six that he intended to govern alone without their interference. Made an extremist by his frustrations, Marcel accepted an ally utterly incompatible with his purpose.

Into the turmoil of November 1357 stepped Charles of Navarre out of his prison near Cambrai in Picardy. Although a plot of his partisans was credited with effecting his escape or release, behind it the hand of Marcel and the mind of Robert le Coq were at work. Charles of Navarre was to be used as an alternative King against the Valois. He entered the capital “grandly accompanied” by nobles of Picardy and Normandy, among them “Monseigneur de Coussi.” At seventeen, Enguerrand had been receiving the homage of vassals as their acknowledged lord. Probably sharing the anti-Valois sentiments of many
nobles of the north, he would have been swept into the following of Charles of Navarre, although, with the remarkable political sense he was to display throughout his life, he did not stay there long.

With wonderful eloquence “seasoned by much venom,” Charles of Navarre harangued a great assembly of Parisians, mentioning without actually pressing his claim to the crown, which he said was at least better than King Edward’s. His challenge forced the Dauphin to reenter Paris and recall the Estates, and within a month, when he had assembled “2,000” men-at-arms in the fortress of the Louvre, he too took to the people. Sending couriers through the city to assemble them, he spoke on horseback before a crowd gathered at the Halles on January 11, 1358, turning sentiment at once in his favor. Marcel’s deputy, who tried to make himself heard in opposition, was drowned out in the shouting and turbulence. Intensely susceptible to the spoken word, people of the time responded to any Mark Antony and would listen for hours to the outdoor sermons of great preachers, which they regarded as a form of public entertainment.

Alarmed by the Dauphin’s success, Marcel resorted to an act of violence in the unmistakable style of Charles of Navarre, and generally believed, after the event, to have been instigated by him. The pretext was the death of a citizen named Perrin Marc, who had murdered the Dauphin’s treasurer and in turn had been forcefully taken from sanctuary in a church by the Dauphin’s Marshal and hung. Assembling 3,000 artisans and tradesmen, armed and wearing the red-and-blue hoods of the popular party, Marcel marched at their head to the royal palace. Regnaut d’Acy, one of the Dauphin’s councillors, encountered in the street, was recognized and greeted by shouts of “Death!” Before he could flee, he was struck down by so many blows that he died without uttering a sound.

On reaching the palace, Marcel mounted with part of his company to the Dauphin’s chamber, where, while he made a show of protecting the prince, his men fell upon the Dauphin’s two Marshals and slew them before his eyes. One was Jean de Clermont, son of the Marshal killed at Poitiers; it was he who had broken the church sanctuary. The other was Jean de Conflans, Sire de Dampierre, a former delegate to the Estates who had abandoned the reform party for the Dauphin. Every illuminated chronicle pictures the scene: the upraised swords of fiercely frowning men, the terrified Dauphin cowering on his bed, the bloodied bodies of the Marshals at his feet.

Their corpses were dragged to the courtyard of the palace and left there for all to see while Marcel hurried to the Place de Grève, where he addressed the crowd from a window of the city hall, asking their endorsement of his deed. It had been done, he said, for the good of the kingdom and the removal of “false, wicked, and traitorous” knights. With one voice the mob shouted its approval and its adherence to the Provost “through life and death.” Marcel promptly returned to the palace to present the Dauphin with that ever-justifying formula: the deed had been done “by the will of the people.” The prince, he said, must show himself at one with the people by ratifying the act and pardoning everyone concerned.

“Grieving and dumbfounded,” the Dauphin could read the warning of the sprawled bodies on the pavement. He prayed to the Provost that the people of Paris might be his good friends as he was theirs, and accepted from Marcel two lengths of red-and-blue cloth to make hoods for himself and his officers.

The terrible assault virtually upon his person had been designed to intimidate the Dauphin into accepting rule by the Council of the Estates. Instead it hardened the will beneath his deceptively feeble exterior. All he could do for the moment was to send his family for safety to the nearby fortress of Meaux on the Marne and remove himself to Senlis outside the capital. Once violence had been used against the monarchy, and against the nobility in the person of the Marshals, the conflict was to turn from political struggle to open strife with a decisive shift in the balance of forces. The murder of the Marshals cost Marcel what remained of support among the nobles for reform. It convinced them that their interests lay with the crown.

In May 1358 an act of the Dauphin-Regent precipitated the ferocious uprising of the peasantry called the Jacquerie, in which Enguerrand de Coucy at eighteen was swept into an active and visible role. Intending to undercut Marcel by blockading Paris, the Regent ordered the nobles along the valleys of waterborne commerce to fortify and provision their castles. According to one version, they seized the goods of their peasants for this purpose, provoking the uprising. According to another chronicler, the Jacques rose at the instigation of Marcel, who stirred them to believe that the Regent’s order was directed against them as a prelude to new oppressions and confiscations. But the Jacques had reason enough of their own.

What was this peasant who supported the three estates on his back, this bent Atlas of the medieval world who now struck terror through the seigneurial class? Snub-nosed and rough in belted tunic and long hose, he can be seen in carved stone medallions and illuminated pages representing the twelve months, sowing from a canvas seed bag around
his neck, scything hay bare-legged in summer’s heat in loose blouse and straw hat, trampling grapes in a wooden vat, shearing sheep held between his knees, herding swine in the forest, tramping through the snow in hood and sheepskin mantle with a load of firewood on his back, warming himself before a fire in a low hut in February. Alongside him in the fields the peasant woman binds sheaves wearing a skirt caught up at the belt to free her legs and a cloth head-covering instead of a hat.

Like every other group, peasants were diverse, ranging in economic level from half-savage pauper to the proprietor of fields and featherbeds who could hoard money to send his son to the university. The general term for peasant was villein or
vilain
, which had acquired a pejorative tone, though harmlessly derived from the Latin
villa
. Neither exactly slave nor entirely free, the villein belonged to the estate of his lord, under obligation to pay rent or work services for use of the land, and in turn to enjoy the right of protection and justice. A serf was someone in personal bondage who belonged by birth to a particular lord, and, so that his children should follow him, was forbidden under a rule called
formariage
from marrying outside the domain. If he died childless, his house, tools, and any possessions reverted to the lord under the right of
morte-main
, on the theory that they had only been lent to the serf for his labor in life. Originally he owed, in addition to agriculture, every kind of labor service needed on an estate—repair of roads, bridges, and moats, supply of firewood, care of stables and kennels, blacksmithing, laundering, spinning, weaving, and other crafts for the castle. By the 14th century much of this was done by hired hands and the castle’s needs were supplied by purchase from towns and peddlers, leaving a large part of the peasantry on a rent-paying basis with a certain number of days’ work owed on the lord’s fields.

Besides paying the hearth tax and clerical tithe and aids for the lord’s ransom and knighting of his son and marriage of his daughter, the peasant owed fees for everything he used: for grinding his grain in the lord’s mill, baking his bread in the lord’s oven, pressing apples in the lord’s cider press, settlement of disputes in the lord’s court. At death he owed the heriot, or forfeit of his best possession to the lord.

His agricultural labor was supplied under rules that favored the seigneur, whose fields were plowed and seed sowed and hay cut and crops harvested and, in case of storm or pests, his harvest saved before the peasant could attend to his own. He had to drive his beasts to pasture and bring them home across the lord’s fields rather than his own so that the lord should have the benefit of the manure. By these
fees and arrangements, economic surplus was produced for the proprietors.

The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek. The Church taught that failure to do the seigneur’s work and obey his laws would be punished by eternity in Hell, and that non-payment of tithes would imperil the soul. The priest exerted constant pressure for tithes in kind—grain, eggs, a hen or a pig—and told the peasant these were a tax “owed to God.” Everyday life was administered by the lord’s bailiff, whose abuses and extortions were a constant source of complaint. The bailiff could levy an augmented tax, keeping a percentage for himself, or accuse a peasant of theft and accept a fee for letting him off.