A Distant Mirror (46 page)

Coucy’s charter of August 1368 took the form of a collective grant of freedom to 22 towns and villages of his barony in return for specific rents and revenues from each, “in perpetuity to us and our successors.” The sums ranged from 18 livres for Trosly down to 24 sous for Fresnes (still extant villages, as are most in the list), and 18 pence per hearth for Courson. The wording, though swollen by lawyers’ superfluity
in every line, is a clear and precise picture of medieval tenure, unlike the dense tangle that has been made of the subject ever since.

“By general custom and usage,” it states, all persons who live in the barony of Coucy “are our men and women by
morte-main
and
formariage”
except if they are clerics or nobles or others “who hold of us by oath and homage.” Because of the many who have departed, “our said land was left in great part uncultivated, unworked and reverted to wasteland, for which the said land is greatly reduced in value.” In the past the inhabitants had requested their freedom from his father, offering certain revenues in perpetuity, “of which thing our dear and well-beloved father whose soul is with God took counsel and found it would greatly profit him to destroy and render null the said custom, taking the profit offered to him”; but before he could accomplish the request, he died. Being fully informed of these things, and having come of age and in full control of his lands, and since the same request has been made of him and payments offered “more profitable and honorable than the said
morte-mains
and
formariages
are or could be in the future”; and since by ending their servitude “the people will be more abundant and the land cultivated and not allowed to revert to waste, and in consequence more valuable to us and to our successors”; therefore, let it be known that, having taken “great deliberation on these said matters and well ascertained our rights and profits, we do destroy and render null … and free of all
morte-mains
and
formariages
each of them in perpetuity and for always, whether clergy or any other estate, without retaining servitude or power to renew servitude to any of them now or in the future by us or our successors nor by any other persons whatsoever.” Rent and revenues to be received from the said places will be joined “to our heritage and fief and barony which we hold of the King,” who will be asked to approve and confirm the deed. Royal confirmation was duly received three months later.

Landowners in general, especially the less prosperous with holdings too small to allow a margin of revenue, had suffered economically more than the peasantry from the disasters of the past twenty years. Servile labor, lost through the plague, could not be replaced, since free men could not be turned back into serfs. Mills, granaries, breweries, barns, and other permanent equipment had to be rebuilt at the cost of the owner. Expenses of ransom and upkeep as a prisoner during two decades of largely lost battles, even if the cost was passed on to towns and peasants, were a drain on revenues, although Coucy, whom fortune always favored, did not suffer from this particular blight. Besides having been spared ransom, he received 1,000 francs from the King of France in June 1368 to reimburse him for his expenses as hostage and
repair damages caused by the war to his domain. Charles V, too, was wooing the lord of Coucy and Soissons.

If ties between lord and dependent were weakened by the transfer to a paid basis, the revenue from rents gave the wealthier nobles greater goods and comforts and freedom of residence. They were building great
hotels
in Paris and acquiring urban interests. The center of attraction was now the King’s new residence called St. Pol, a collection of houses which he had assembled and converted into a palace with seven gardens and a cherry orchard on the eastern edge of the city near the present Place de la Bastille. Twelve galleries connected its buildings and courtyards; topiary figures adorned the gardens, lions were kept in the menageries and nightingales and turtledoves in the aviary.

Charles reigned in a time of havoc, but in all such times there are unaffected places filled with beauty and games, music and dancing, love and work. While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighboring vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard in one place, bankers count their coins and peasants plow behind placid oxen somewhere else. Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.

At Coucy’s level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out—to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet hall. At the turret of the castle where the lord’s flag flew, a watchman was stationed with a horn to blow at the approach of strangers. He blew also for the hour of rising at sunup or cockcrow, after which matins were chanted by the chaplain, followed by mass in the chapel. In the evening minstrels played with lutes and harps, reed pipes, bagpipes, trumpets, kettle drums, and cymbals. In the blossoming of secular music as an art in the 14th century, as many as 36 different instruments had come into use. If no concert or performance was scheduled after the evening meal, the company entertained each other with song and conversation, tales of the day’s hunting, “graceful questions” on the conventions of love, and verbal games. In one game the players wrote verses, more or less impolite, on little rolls of parchment, which were passed around and, when read aloud, supposedly revealed the character of the reader.

At such evenings grand seigneurs liked to preserve the old custom of lighting rooms by means of torches held by servants, instead of wall sconces, because it satisfied a sense of grandeur. They built their “fol
lies,” of which the most elaborate were the mechanical practical jokes devised by Count Robert of Artois at the château of Hesdin. Statues in his garden squirted water on visitors when they walked past or squawked words at them like parrots; a trapdoor dropped the passerby onto a featherbed below; a room, on the opening of the door, produced rain or snow or thunder; conduits under certain pressures “wet the ladies from below.” When the château passed into the possession of Philip of Burgundy, the devices were kept in working order by a resident artist.

In Picardy, for more general enjoyment, the swan festival was held in July and August, when all three estates joined to chase the young swans raised in local ponds and canals and not yet able to fly. Led by the clergy, followed by nobles, bourgeois, and commoners in order, everyone went out in boats accompanied by music and illuminations. Participants were forbidden to kill what they caught. For sport only, the chase lasted several days interspersed with festivities.

Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct and clean fingernails. There was much washing of hands both before and after meals, even though knives and spoons were in use and
forks, though rare, were not unknown. An individual basin was brought to the lord and a washroom provided at the entrance to the banquet hall where several people at a time could wash their hands at a series of small water jets and dry them on a towel. For the lord’s and lady’s baths, which were frequent, hot water was brought to a wooden tub in the bedroom, in which the bather sat and soaked or, in the case of one illustrated gentleman, bathed in a tub in his garden looking ineffably smug under the loving attentions of three ladies. For lesser residents, a room for communal bathing was generally arranged near the kitchen.

Two meals a day were customary for all, with dinner at ten
A.M
. and supper at sundown. Breakfast was unknown except possibly for a piece of dry bread and glass of wine, and even that was a luxury. Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes. Even when stuffed at the toe to make them curl up or tied at the knee with chains of gold and silver, the
poulaines
produced a mincing walk that excited ridicule and charges of decadence. Yet the upper class remained wedded to this particular frivolity, which grew ever more elegant, made sometimes of velvet sewn with pearls or gold-stamped leather or worn with a different color on each foot. Ladies’ surcoats for the hunt were ornamented with bells, and bells hung too from belts, which were an important item of clothing because of all the
equipment they carried: purse, keys, prayer book, rosary, reliquary, gloves, pomander, scissors, and sewing kit. Undershirts and pants of fine linen were worn; furs for warmth were ubiquitous. In the trousseau of the unfortunate Blanche de Bourbon, who unwisely married Pedro the Cruel, 11,794 squirrel skins were used, most of which were imported from Scandinavia.

In church, nobles often left the moment mass was over, “scarcely saying a Paternoster within the Church walls.” Others more devout carried portable altars when they traveled and contributed alms set by their confessors for penance, although the alms amounted on the whole to far less than they spent on clothes or the hunt. Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble. Made to order with personal prayers inserted among the day’s devotions and penitential psalms, the books were marvelously illustrated, and not only with Bible stories and saints’ lives. In the margins brimming with burlesque, all the comic sense, fantasy, and satire of the Middle Ages let itself go. Buffoons and devils curl and twist through flowering vines, rabbits fight with soldiers, trained dogs show their tricks, sacred texts trail off into long-tailed fantastical creatures, bare-bottomed monks climb towers, tonsured heads appear on dragons’ bodies. Goat-footed priests, monkeys, minstrels, flowers, birds, castles, lusting demons, and imaginary beasts twine through the pages in bizarre companionship with the sanctity of prayer.

Often in religious observance the sacred mixed with the profane. When mass was celebrated for rulers, complained a bishop, they held audience at the same time, “
busying themselves with other things and paying no attention to the service nor saying their prayers.” The sacrament of the Eucharist celebrated in the mass, in which the communicant, by partaking of the body and blood of Christ, is supposed to share in the redeeming sacrifice of the cross and in God’s saving grace, was the central rite of Christianity and the prerequisite for salvation. Clouded by the metaphysics of transubstantiation, it was little understood by the ordinary layman, except for the magical powers believed to reside in the consecrated wafer. Placed on cabbage leaves in the garden, it kept off chewing insects, and placed in a beehive to control a swarm, it induced the pious bees, in one case, to build around it a complete chapel of wax with windows, arches, bell tower, and an altar on which the bees placed the sacred fragment.

Even so, communion and confession, which were supposed to be observed every Sunday and holy day, were on the average practiced hardly more than the obligatory once a year at Easter. A simple
knight, on being asked why he went not to mass, so important for the salvation of his soul, replied, “This I
knew not; nay, I thought that the priests performed their mass for the offerings’ sake.” For northern France it has been estimated that about 10 percent of the population were devout observers, 10 percent negligent, and the rest wavered between regular and irregular observance.

At the moment of death, however, people took no chances: they confessed, made restitutions, endowed perpetual prayers for their souls, and often deprived their families by bequests to shrines, chapels, convents, hermits, and payments for pilgrimages by proxy.

King Charles, according to his admiring biographer Christine de Pisan, daughter of Thomas the astrologer, was zealous in piety. He made the sign of the cross as soon as he awoke and spoke his first words of the day to God in his prayers. When combed and dressed, he was brought his breviary, recited the canonical hours with his chaplain, celebrated high mass in his chapel at eight
A.M
. with “melodious song” and low mass afterward in his private oratory. Then he held audience for “all manner of people, rich and poor, ladies and damsels, widows and others.” On fixed days he presided over matters of state at the Council. He lived consciously with “majestic regularity” to show that the dignity of the crown must be maintained by solemn order. After midday dinner he listened to the minstrels play sweetly “to rejoice the spirit,” and then for two hours received ambassadors, princes, and knights, often such a crowd that “in his great halls one could hardly turn around.” He listened to reports of battles and adventures and news of other countries, signed letters and documents, assigned duties, and distributed and received gifts. After an hour’s rest, he spent time with the Queen and his children—a son and heir was born in 1368 and afterward a second son and two daughters—visited his gardens in summer, read and studied in winter, talked with his intimates until supper, and after the evening’s entertainment, retired. He fasted one day a week and read the Bible through each year.

Whatever his true paternity, Charles possessed to the full the Valois passion for acquisitions and luxury. He was already reconstructing Vincennes for a summer palace and would soon build or acquire three or four more. He employed the famous chef Taillevent, who served up roasted swan and peacocks reconstructed in all their feathers with gilded beaks and feet and resting on appropriate landscape made of spun sugar and painted pastry. He collected precious objects and gem-studded reliquaries to house the piece of Moses’ rod, the top of John the Baptist’s head, the flask of Virgin’s milk, Christ’s swaddling clothes, and bits and pieces of various instruments of the crucifixion
including the crown of thorns and a fragment of the True Cross, all of which the royal chapel possessed. At his death he was to own 47 jeweled gold crowns and 63 complete sets of chapel furnishings including vestments, altarpieces, chalices, liturgical books, and gold crucifixes.