A Distant Mirror (5 page)

In 1242 Enguerrand III was killed at the age of about sixty when in a violent fall from his horse the point of his sword was thrust through his body. His eldest son and successor, Raoul II, was soon afterward killed in battle in Egypt while on St. Louis’ unhappy crusade of 1248–50. He was succeeded by his brother Enguerrand IV, a kind of medieval Caligula, one of whose crimes became the catalyst of a major advance in social justice.

On apprehending in his forest three young squires of Laon, equipped with bows and arrows but no hunting dogs for taking important game, Enguerrand IV had them executed by hanging, without trial or process of any kind. Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. He had Enguerrand IV arrested, not by his peers but by
sergents
of the court, like any criminal, and imprisoned in the Louvre, although, in deference to his rank, not in chains.

Summoned to trial in 1256,
Enguerrand IV was accompanied by the greatest peers of the realm—the King of Navarre, the Duke of Burgundy, the Counts of Bar and Soissons among others, grimly sensing a test of their prerogatives. Refusing to submit to investigation of the case as touching his person, honor, rank, and noble heritage, Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and trial by combat. Louis IX firmly refused, saying that as regards the poor, the clergy, “and persons who deserve our pity,” it would be unjust to allow trial by combat. Customarily, non-nobles could engage a champion in such cases, but King Louis saw the method as obsolete. In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death sentence, he was persuaded by the peers to forgo it. Enguerrand was sentenced to pay a fine of 12,000 livres, to be used partly to endow masses in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged, and partly to be sent to Acre to aid in the defense of the Holy Land. Legal history was made and later cited as a factor in the canonization of the King.

The Coucy riches restored Enguerrand IV to royal favor when he lent King Louis 15,000 livres in 1265 to buy what was supposed to be the True Cross. Otherwise he continued a career of outrages into the 14th century and died at the ripe age of 75 in 1311, without issue though not without a bequest. He left 20 sous (equal to one livre) a year in perpetuity to the leprosarium of Coucy-la-Ville so that its inmates “will pray for us each year in the Chapel for our sins.” Twenty sous at this time was equal to a day’s pay of one knight or four archers, or the hire of a cart and two horses for twenty days, or, theoretically, the pay of a hired peasant for two years, so it may be presumed to have underwritten a reasonable number of prayers, though perhaps not adequate for the soul of Enguerrand IV.

When that unlamented lord, though twice married, died without heirs, the dynasty passed to the descendants of his sister Alix, who was married to the Count of Guînes. Her eldest son inherited the Guînes lands and title, while her second son, Enguerrand V, became the lord of Coucy. Raised at the court of Alexander of Scotland, his uncle by marriage, he married Catherine Lindsay of Baliol, the King’s niece, and held the seigneury only ten years. He was followed in rapid succession by his son Guillaume and his grandson Enguerrand VI, who inherited the domain in 1335 and five years later was to father Enguerrand VII, last of the Coucys and the subject of this book. Through further marriages with powerful families of northern France and Flanders, the Coucys had continued to weave alliances of strength and influence and
acquire lands, revenues, and a galaxy of armorial bearings in the process. They could display as many as twelve coats-of-arms: Boisgency, Hainault, Dreux, Saxony, Montmirail, Roucy, Baliol, Ponthieu, Châtillon, St. Pol, Gueldres, and Flanders.

The Coucys maintained a sense of eminence second to none, and conducted their affairs after the usage of sovereign princes. They held courts of justice in the royal style and organized their household under the same officers as the King’s: a constable, a grand butler, a master of falconry and the hunt, a master of the stables, a master of forests and waters, and masters or grand stewards of kitchen, bakery, cellar, fruit (which included spices, and torches and candles for lighting), and furnishings (including tapestry and lodgings during travel). A grand seigneur of this rank also usually employed one or more resident physicians, barbers, priests, painters, musicians, minstrels, secretaries and copyists, an astrologer, a jester, and a dwarf, besides pages and squires. A principal vassal acting as
châtelain
or
garde du château
managed the estate. At Coucy fifty knights, together with their own squires, attendants, and servants, made up a permanent garrison of 500.

Outward magnificence was important as a statement of status, requiring huge retinues dressed in the lord’s livery, spectacular feasts, tournaments, hunts, entertainments, and above all an open-handed liberality in gifts and expenditure which, since his followers lived off it, was extolled as the most admired attribute of a noble.

The status of nobility derived from birth and ancestry, but had to be confirmed by “living nobly”—that is, by the sword. A person was noble if born of noble parents and grandparents and so on back to the first armed horseman. In practice the rule was porous and the status fluid and inexact. The one certain criterion was function—namely, the practice of arms. This was the function assigned to the second of the three estates established by God, each with a given task for the good of the whole. The clergy were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat.

As being nearest to God, the clergy came first. They were divided between two hierarchies, the cloistered and secular, meaning in the latter case those whose mission was among the laity. Presiding over both hierarchies were the prelates—abbots, bishops, and archbishops, who were the equivalent of the secular
grands seigneurs
. Between the prelacy and the poor half-educated priest living on a crumb and a pittance there was little in common. The Third Estate was even less homogeneous, being divided between employers and workers and covering the whole range of great urban magnates, lawyers and
doctors, skilled craftsmen, day laborers, and peasants. Nevertheless, the nobility insisted on lumping all non-nobles together as a common breed. “
Of the good towns, merchants and working men,” wrote a noble at the court of the last Duke of Burgundy, “no long description is necessary, for, among other things, this estate is not capable of great attributes because it is of servile degree.”

The object of the noble’s function, in theory, was not fighting for fighting’s sake, but defense of the two other estates and the maintenance of justice and order. He was supposed to protect the people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue—that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in Christianity, if not by its founder.

In his capacity as protector, the noble earned exemption from direct taxation by poll or hearth-tax, although not from the aids or sales taxes. These, however, took proportionately more from the poor than from the rich. The assumption was that taxpaying was ignoble; the knight’s sword arm provided his service to the state, as prayers provided the clergy’s and exempted them too from the hearth-tax. Justification for the nobles lay in the “exposure of their bodies and property in war,” but in practice the rules were as changeable and diffuse as clouds in a windy sky. The tax status of the clergy, too, when it came to money for the defense of the realm, was the subject of chronic and fierce dispute.

Taxation like usury rested on principles that were anything but clearly defined and so muddled by ad hoc additions, exemptions, and arrangements that it was impossible to count on a definite amount of returns. The basic principle was that the King should “live of his own” under ordinary circumstances, but since his own revenues might not suffice for defense of the realm or other governmental purposes, his subjects could be taxed to enable him, as Thomas Aquinas neatly phrased it, “to provide for the common good from the common goods.” This obligation derived from the deeper principle that “princes are instituted by God not to seek their own gain but the common good of the people.”

A man born to the noble estate clung to the sword as the sign of his identity, not only for the sake of tax-exemption but for self-image. “
Not one of us had a father who died at home,” insisted a knight in a 13th century
chanson de geste;
“all have died in the battle of cold steel.”

The horse was the seat of the noble, the mount that lifted him above other men. In every language except English, the word for
knight—
chevalier
in French—meant the man on horseback. “A brave man mounted on a good horse,” it was acknowledged, “can do more in an hour of fighting than ten or maybe one hundred could do afoot.” The
destrier
or war-horse was bred to be “strong, fiery, swift, and faithful” and ridden only in combat. En route the knight rode his palfrey, high-bred but of quieter disposition, while his squire led the
destrier
at his right hand—hence its name, from
dexter
. In fulfilling military service, horse and knight were considered inseparable; without a mount the knight was a mere man.

Battle was his exaltation. “If I had one foot already in Paradise,” exclaimed
Garin li Loherains, the hero of a
chanson de geste
, “I would withdraw it to go and fight!” The troubadour Bertrand de Born, himself a noble, was more explicit.

Dante pictured Bertrand in Hell, carrying his severed head before him as a lantern.

From ownership of land and revenues the noble derived the right to exercise authority over all non-nobles of his territory except the clergy and except merchants who were citizens of a free town. The
grand seigneur’
s authority extended to “high justice,” meaning the power of life or death, while the lesser knight’s was limited to prison, flogging, and other punishments of “low justice.” Its basis and justification remained the duty to protect, as embodied in the lord’s oath to his vassals, which was as binding in theory as theirs to him—and theirs was binding “only so long as the lord keeps his oath.” Medieval political structure was ideally a contract exchanging service and loyalty in return for protection, justice, and order. As the peasant owed produce and
labor, the lord in turn owed ministerial service to his overlord or sovereign, and counsel in peace as well as military service in war. Land in all cases was the consideration, and the oath of homage, made and accepted, was the seal binding both sides, including kings.

Not all nobles were
grands seigneurs
like the Coucys. A bachelor knight, possessor of one manor and a bony nag, shared the same cult but not the interests of a territorial lord. The total ranks of the nobility in France numbered about 200,000 persons in 40,000 to 50,000 families who represented something over one percent of the population. They ranged from the great dukedoms with revenues of more than 10,000 livres, down through the lord of a minor castle with one or two knights as vassals and an income under 500 livres, to the poor knight at the bottom of the scale who was lord of no one except those of servile birth and whose only fief was a house and a few fields equivalent to a peasant’s holding. He might have an income from a few rents of 25 livres or less, which had to support family and servants and the knight’s equipment that was his livelihood. He lived by horse and arms, dependent for maintenance on his overlord or whoever needed his services.

A squire belonged to the nobility by birth whether or not he obtained the belt and spurs of a knight, but legal process was often required to determine what other functions a gentleman might undertake without losing noble status. Could he sell wine from his vineyard, for instance?—a delicate question because the kings regularly sold theirs. In a case brought in 1393 to determine this question, a royal ordinance stated rather ambiguously, “It is
not proper for a noble to be an innkeeper.” According to another judgment, a noble could acquire license to trade without losing his status. Sons of noble fathers were known “who live and have long lived as merchants selling cloth, grain, wine and all other things of merchandise, or as tradesmen, furriers, shoemakers or tailors,” but such activities would doubtless have lost them the privileges of a noble.

The rationale of the problem was made plain by Honoré Bonet, a 14th century cleric who made the brave attempt in his
Tree of Battles
to set forth existing codes of military conduct. The reason for the prohibition of commercial activity, he wrote, was to ensure that the knight “
shall have no cause to leave the practice of arms for the desire of acquiring worldly riches.”

Definition increasingly concerned the born nobles in proportion as their status was diluted by the ennoblement of outsiders. Like the grant of charters to towns, the grant of fiefs to commoners, who paid handsomely for the honor, was found by the crown to be a lucrative source
of funds. The ennobled were men of fortune who procured the king’s needs, or they were lawyers and notaries who had started by assisting the king at various levels in the administration of finance and justice and gradually, as the business of government grew more complex, created a group of professional civil servants and ministers of the crown. Called
noblesse de la robe
when elevated, as distinguished from nobility of the sword, they were scorned as parvenus by the ancestral nobles, who resented the usurping of their right of counsel, lost more or less by default.