A Distant Mirror (66 page)

The rising of the men of Ghent had no connection with the workers’ insurrection that had seized control of Florence in the previous year. Although separate and spontaneous, the events in the two cloth cities initiated a whirlwind of class war over the next five years arising both from the accumulated miseries of the working class and from a new strength resulting from the disruptions of the Black Death. In Florence, Flanders, Languedoc, Paris, England, and back to Flanders and northern France, insurrections succeeded each other without visible link, except in the last phase. Some were urban, some rural; some arose from desperation, some from strength; but all were precipitated by one factor: oppressive taxes.

At Ghent, where the weavers were in greatest strength, the Count invited trouble when he levied a tax on the city to pay for a tournament. Led by the cry of an angry tradesman that tax money must not be squandered “on the follies of princes and the upkeep of actors and buffoons,” the citizens refused to pay. The Count, playing on the commercial rivalry of the cities, secured the support of Bruges by a promise to build a canal connecting it to the sea, to the advantage of its commerce and the detriment of Ghent. When 500 diggers began work on a channel to divert the river Lys, Ghent dispatched its militia to the attack, and from that point on, the conflict enlarged itself like a cell dividing. Of Flanders’ fierce tribulations that now began, Froissart wrote, “What shall they say that readeth this or heareth it read, but that it was the work of the Devil?”

At the opposite end of France at the same time, revolt erupted in Languedoc, where famine, oppression, war, and taxes had left a trail of misery under the harsh rule of the Duc d’Anjou. Impatient, bold, and habitually forcing events, Anjou exercised virtually sovereign power over a region amounting to a quarter of the realm. He swallowed its revenues whole, without distinguishing what was applied to his personal use from what was applied to the defense of Languedoc or the kingdom. To make up for fewer hearths as a result of the plague, the tax per hearth was raised each year, but the people obtained no benefit in better defense. Bandit companies still penetrated their valleys, still forced their villages to buy respite from pillage. In 1378, food taxes on consumption were added to those on sales, falling most heavily on the poor. When tax-collectors began the practice of house searches, like agents of the Inquisition, outrage was piled on misery.

“How can we live like this?” protesting groups cried as they gathered before the Virgin’s statue to implore her aid. “How can we feed ourselves and our children when already we cannot pay the heavy taxes laid on us by the rich for their own comfort?” Riots and disorders spread and reached revolt in July 1379 when Anjou’s Council levied a heavy new tax of twelve francs per hearth without convoking the Estates, merely asking the assent of the municipal councils. The Duke himself was absent at the time, conducting the war in Brittany. The wrath of his overburdened subjects burst with extraordinary violence against all in authority: royal officials, nobles, and the upper bourgeois of the town councils, whom the common people held responsible for the new tax. “Kill,
kill all the rich!” was the cry, as reported by a seigneur of Clermont afterward. “Seigneurs and other good men of the country and towns,” he said, “went in great fear of death” and in that other fear inspired by all revolts, “that if this infamous insolence of the common people was not rigorously suppressed, worse would follow.”

At Le Puy, Nîmes, Clermont, and other towns, the people formed armed mobs, looted rich households, murdered officials, and committed acts of savagery—even, it was reported, “cut open bodies with their knives and ate like animals the flesh of baptized men.” In October the commotion reached a climax in Montpellier when five of Anjou’s councillors were killed and eighty others reportedly massacred. The insurgents sent out emissaries in an effort to raise a general revolt, but lacking the solid industrial base and traditions of the Flemish struggle, the rising quickly flared and was soon suppressed. Clement VII, dependent on Anjou’s control of Languedoc for his support, instantly sent Cardinal Albano, a native of Languedoc, to calm the people and warn them of the terrible punishment for
lèse-majesté
. Already afraid of their rebellion, the leaders were persuaded to submit to the King’s mercy.

The fate of Montpellier was deliberately dramatized for punitive effect. On the day of the return of the Duc d’Anjou in January, a vast procession of citizens over the age of fourteen was led through the city gate by the Cardinal, along with surviving officials, ecclesiastics, monks, faculty, and students of the university. Lined up on both sides of the road, they fell on their knees crying “Mercy!” as the Duke and his men in armor rode by. Along the way were stationed magistrates in gowns of office without mantles, hats, or belts, women in unadorned dress, citizens with halters around their necks, and, finally, all the children under fourteen, each group falling to its knees in turn to cry “Mercy!” The keys to the city’s gates and the knocker of the great
bell were humbly submitted. During the next two days, at Anjou’s command, all arms were surrendered and the chief buildings turned over to his men-at-arms.

Then from a platform erected in the main square the Duke announced the ferocious sentence: 600 individuals condemned to death—one third to be hung, one third beheaded, one third burned, all their property to be confiscated, and their children sentenced to perpetual servitude. One half the property of all other citizens was to be confiscated and a fine levied of 6,000 francs plus the cost of the Duke’s expenses caused by the outbreak. The walls and gates of the city were to be razed, the university to lose all its rights, properties, and archives.

A great outcry greeted the sentence, the Cardinal and prelates pleaded “very lovingly” for pity on the people, the university wept, women and children knelt and wailed. On the following day a reduced sentence was announced, remitting most of the penalties. The whole performance had been for effect. A letter of Charles V to the Cardinal, dated two months earlier, had stated his intention to be merciful, but the power of the crown to punish required demonstration.

The events in Languedoc had one far-reaching result: in exhibiting the distress of his subjects, they left the King with a guilty conscience, which could have serious consequences at a medieval deathbed. For the time being, conscious of the avarice and oppressions of his brother and the unpopularity they reflected on the crown, Charles reduced the hearth tax and recalled Anjou as Governor of Languedoc. Unhappily, his replacement, after an interim under Du Guesclin, was the Duc de Berry, whose rule of pure acquisitiveness undiluted by any political sense proved, if anything, more rapacious than his brother’s.

In April 1379, Coucy and Rivière with several new colleagues went once more in quest of peace to a parley at Boulogne. They were empowered to make new concessions of territory and sovereignty and again to offer a marriage, in the person of Charles’s baby daughter, Catherine, to Richard II. Through six parleys in the last six years the mirage of peace had mocked its seekers. In the same period, except for French success in Normandy, continuance of war had brought no advantage to either side but rather, through increasing antagonism and suspicion, had made the war harder to end.

The English came to the parley in divided mind, partly to try what diplomacy could gain, partly to maintain a holding operation while they prepared another assault. Montfort’s rebellion had given them another opportunity to re-enter France and regain the territories they
thought of as theirs. Ever since Charles’s repudiation of the Treaty of Brétigny and the reverses that followed, they had hated the French for falsely and wrongfully, as they saw it, dispossessing them of their property. Defense of their own countrymen might be lackadaisical, but in combat overseas, where plunder offered, there was no lack of will to fight, only lack of money. Other means being exhausted, funds for an expedition to Brittany were raised in 1379 by a graduated poll (or head) tax, a new device designed to cover clergy and peasants at lower income levels than before. Calculated, with the usual vagueness about population figures, to bring in £50,000, it produced only £20,000, all of it invested in a fleet commanded by Sir John Arundel.

Delayed until winter by lack of wind and then by threat of a French raid, Arundel took part of his force to Southampton to guard against an enemy landing and, while there, to conduct himself indistinguishably from the enemy. Besides robbing the countryside, he quartered his men-at-arms and archers in a convent, allowing them to violate at will the nuns and a number of poor widows who lived there, and to carry them off to the ships when ready to sail. Arundel was the man who had demanded money in hand before he would defend the south-coast towns against earlier French raids. If Walsingham may be believed, he used it for ostentation as extreme as his brutality. He is said to have embarked with a wardrobe of 52 suits embroidered in gold, and horses and equipment to the value of £7,000.

Sailing in December, his convoy was caught by a violent storm during which he ordered the kidnapped women thrown overboard to lighten the ships, maltreated the crew, and having struck down the pilot, was fittingly wrecked on the rocks of the Irish coast. Twenty-five ships with all equipment and all but seven survivors were lost. Arundel’s body, rolling in the waves, was washed up three days later. Driven back by the storm, the remainder of the fleet never made the crossing and the tax money was accordingly wasted.

Already in 1378 the Commons had complained of the drain of money in a war in which they no longer perceived a national interest. Although war provided business and a living to many besides the nobles, the Commons protested that it was the King’s affair and that he had spent £46,000 for the maintenance of Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, and other places “for which the Commons ought in no way to be charged.” The government replied that the good-keeping of these “barbicans” overseas was the safeguard of the realm, “otherwise we should never find rest nor peace with our enemies for then they would push hot war to the thresholds of our houses which God forbid.” The argument was not likely to persuade the south-coast towns, which continued to suffer
hot war pushed to their thresholds by savage French and Castilian raids. In August 1380 even London was to tremble when an audacious Castilian force sailed fifteen miles up the Thames to sack Gravesend and leave it in flames.

In answer to the Commons, the Royal Council claimed that the footholds in France gave the King “convenient gates and entrances toward his enemies to grieve them when he is ready to act.” It was a revealing statement of the intentions of the war party headed by the new King’s youngest uncle, the Earl of Buckingham. A proud, fierce, intolerant young man of 25, he was a late version of the 12th century Bertrand de Born, who had once so feelingly exhorted his fellow knights, “Never give up war!”

In March 1380 the English renewed promises of aid to Montfort, but realization was postponed while the alternatives of peace were tested at Boulogne. At this parley Coucy and his fellow envoys offered new cessions and adjustments and the entire county of Angoulême as dowry for Catherine, but the English remained suspicious. They believed that the French offer was a ruse to prevent their coming to Montfort’s aid. But basically, English reluctance to make peace was simply a desire to go on fighting, now strongly reinforced by the fact of the schism.

Pope Urban, not yet in his mad stage, was exercising every pressure to prevent Richard’s marriage to a French princess and encourage a marriage to Wenceslas’ sister, Anne of Bohemia, which would weld England and the Empire in an Urbanist axis. When there was only one Pope, England was anti-papal, but the existence of two made it necessary to take sides. Richard’s advisers rejected the French marriage, negotiations were ruptured, and two years later the King of England married Anne of Bohemia. In the final irony for Charles, it was the schism, for which he was responsible, that frustrated his goal of peace. “
All the witte of this worlde,” Langland wrote in epitaph,

Nor could Charles find a settlement in Brittany. Coucy and others were sent on several missions, evidently in search of a formula, and a Breton Assembly of the Three Estates pleaded movingly for a pardon of their Duke, but Charles mistrusted Montfort too much to restore him. Montfort on his part would make no peace with the sovereign who had confiscated his dukedom. For others, particularly Du
Guesclin, the situation was a tangle of conflicting loyalties. Reluctant to fight his Breton compatriots, and subjected to a whispering campaign by his enemies at court, Du Guesclin left Brittany to lead a campaign against the Free Companies in Auvergne. Here, while besieging a castle, he suddenly fell ill and died in July 1380. While his burial was taking place in the royal mausoleum at St. Denis with honors “as though he had been the King’s son,” a new English expedition under Buckingham was already on its way. With the enemy at hand, and war or unrest in Brittany and Flanders, France was without a Constable.

At urgent councils held to decide Du Guesclin’s successor, Coucy and Clisson were the leading candidates. Because of the “great repute” he had won in Normandy and the “great favor” in which the King held him, Coucy was offered the appointment, the highest and most lucrative lay office of the realm.

As chief military officer, the Constable outranked the royal princes; an attack upon his person was considered a crime of
lèse-majesté
. He was responsible for cohesion of the armed forces, and for tactical command when the King did not take the field. With control of recruitment, enrollment, provisioning, and all other arrangements for war, his opportunities for enlarging his fortune were immense. If the King was not engaged, the Constable’s banner flew over captured towns; all booty theoretically belonged to him, except for money and prisoners reserved to the King and for artillery reserved to the Master of Crossbows. In addition to a fixed salary of 2,000 francs a month in peace as in war, he was paid upon the outbreak of hostilities a sum equal to one day’s pay for every man-at-arms under contract. Even if this was intended for military expenses, it offered the recipient considerable scope. And apart from its profits, the Constableship had become, with the widening of war, a post of real function.