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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